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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

future of grocery

Drive-Thru Grocer JackBe Opens First Location in Oklahoma City

JackBe, which claims to be the country’s first curbside drive-thru grocer, opened its first location this week in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The store will allow customers to place orders via the JackBe app and pick up their groceries at a drive-thru bay, where a JackBe employee will deliver the groceries right to their car.

The new 17,000-square-foot location carries in-demand products across a number of categories, including produce, meat, bakery, deli, and consumables. JackBe is also planning to roll out prepared meals and local brands in the future.

While JackBe claims to be the first drive-thru grocery, another startup named Opie actually beat them to it when it launched its first location in South Caroline in 2021. To be fair to JackBe, at three thousand square feet, Opie’s is something more akin to a drive-thru convenience store than a grocery store. Before Opie, Amazon opened a drive-thru pickup location in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle for customers who ordered groceries through its website. Interestingly, Amazon announced this week they are closing that location (the e-commerce giant only has one other drive-thru location).

According to Supermarket News, JackBe closed a $3.5 million seed round in April of last year and plans to raise an additional $3.5 million in pre-Series A funding to fund the building of two more stores in the Oklahoma City area in early 2023.

Grocery Apps Remain Popular with VCs as Everli, Nice Tuan and Zapp Raise Money

Given the frothy state of funding, it feels like there is a giant online supermarket stocked full of grocery-related startups and VCs are just wandering the aisles, filling up their baskets with companies promising to revolutionize the way we get our food.

At the beginning of March, we wrote about a single 12-hour period in which four grocery startups got funding (Instacart, Crisp, Rohlik and Flink). And it seems that VCs were just getting warmed up. Since that day, we’ve seen a number of grocery startups raise money including Stor.AI, Fridge No More, Jiffy, Shelf Engine, Weee!, Gorillas, Getir and GoPuff.

That list has grown once again this week as three more grocery startups have raised rounds of funding:

Everli, which is kind of like a European Instacart facilitating grocery pickup and delivery from local stores, raised a $100 million Series C round of funding led by Verlinvest (hat tip: TechCrunch).

Nice Tuan, a Chinese app that focuses on community grocery shopping received a $750 million investment round led by Alibaba Group Holding and DST Global (hat tip: Deal Street Asia).

Zapp, a London-based operator of delivery-only stores has received an undisclosed round of funding, TechCrunch reports from multiple sources.

There are couple things of note from this round of news. First is that European speedy delivery startups remain popular with investors right now, especially London-based ones. Zapp faces competition from the likes of Weezy, Jiffy, Getir and Gorillas.

Second is that these funding rounds are no joke. Nice Tuan’s $750 million haul follows fellow Chinese grocery app Xingsheng Youxuan’s $2 billion funding round in February. In the U.S., goPuff raised $1.5 billion, In Europe Gorillas raised $290 million and Getir raised $300 million (evidently startups starting with the letter “G” are also popular).

How long with this frothiness continue? That’s unclear. Will startups like Weezy or Fridge No More, whose funding is only in the double digit millions feel pressure to raise more to compete? And what about the overall grocery delivery space? The pandemic forced record amounts of grocery e-commerce, but a market correction is predicted for this year bringing those numbers back down to earth. But many of these startups are looking to change the way we grocery shop altogether by turning it into more of an always-on utility. Will people adopt speedy delivery as their new norm?

We don’t have a particular crystal ball for that, but we at The Spoon will chronicle it all as the market unfolds.

How Could Amazon Licensing its Go Technology Impact Other Cashierless Startups?

Bloomberg has a story out today saying that Amazon’s cashierless checkout ambitions are much bigger in both size and scope than its current bodega-sized Go stores. A source told Bloomberg that Amazon is looking to outfit its own larger-sized grocery stores with its checkout tech and also license it out to other retailers.

Bloomberg’s story complements an earlier CNBC report saying that Amazon was looking to license out its cashierless checkout technology, though the licensees listed then were airports and movie theaters. But if we know that Amazon is opening its own larger format grocery stores, developing new Go-like systems that work in larger format stores and is now actively seeking to license out its cashierless technology, what does that mean for all the other startups now in the cashierless checkout space?

As a quick refresher, Amazon Go stores are grab-and-go retail experiences. Shoppers scan their phone as they walk into the store where banks of cameras and sensors keep track of what people grab and what they keep, and charge them automatically upon exiting.

Amazon isn’t the only company working on this cashierless checkout technology, and we cover a number of the other players in the space. Trigo, Grabango, Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin are all startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with cashierless checkout tech.

Many of these startups have even already announced retailer relationships: Trigo is being used by Shufersal in Israel and Tesco in the U.K., Grabango has Giant Eagle, Caper has Sobeys in Canada and Zippin has Lojas Americanos in Brazil.

There are a lot of grocery retailers in the world, so there’s plenty of opportunity to go around, but one has to wonder how Amazon’s 800 lb. gorilla will alter the current playing field.

To be sure, I don’t imagine large, nationwide retailers like Albertsons or Kroger, who are already scared of Amazon’s grocery growth and working overtime to fight them off, would want to then turn around and license Amazon technology. And Amazon’s largest rival, Walmart, has already built out its own Intelligent Retail Lab, which currently uses cameras and sensors to monitor inventory, but seems primed for expansion into cashierless checkout at some point.

However, smaller, regional chains might be interested in adding Go-like capabilities to their stores. And they might be more willing to license Amazon tech, which comes with a brand recognition, world-class technology and a sense of permanence (i.e. they won’t run out of money and shut down).

Amazon would surely be keen to license its Go tech to smaller chains, perhaps even at a discounted rate because it would give the company something just as valuable as money: all that shopping data. By licensing out the means for purchasing, Amazon would still get all that data about what is bought and when, without having to build out stores everywhere in the U.S. This data could then be used to feed the algorithms to make the stores they do build out physical spaces more efficient.

All this is to say that 2019 was a transitional year for cashierless checkout startups with lots of partnerships announced publicly. But with Amazon looking like it’s getting into the game, those startups will need to scale up and lock down even more retailer agreements before it’s too late.

Walmart Broadens Robotic Workforce with More Autonomous Shelf-Scanners and Floor Scrubbers

Walmart appears to be going all-in on robots, as The Wall Street Journal reports today that the retail giant is adding a host of robots to the front and back of more than a thousand of its stores.

A big beneficiary of Walmart’s automation push is Bossa Nova, makers of the shelf-scanning robot, which roams up and down aisles checking inventory levels. The company first launched in roughly 50 Walmart stores back in October of 2017, and that number will now scale up to 300 locations.

Walmart is also deploying autonomous floor scrubbers made by Brain Corp. at 1,500 locations and will double the use of automated systems to scan and sort products coming off of trucks to 600 stores.

When Walmart first started using the shelf-scanning robot, it said that it was interested in using robots for tasks that are “repeatable, predictable, and manual.” The company also added that the shelf-scanning robots were “50 percent more productive than humans” at the job. Walmart told The Journal that this new robot implementation will reduce the amount of time it takes to do those tasks (shelf inventory management, cleaning) and will also cut down on the number of people needed to do them. However, Walmart went on to say that these additional robots will free up the workforce to do other (presumably higher-skilled) tasks, and that the company is hiring on its e-commerce side as it wages a grocery battle with Amazon.

In the coming years, you’ll be just as likely to find a robot in your grocery aisle as you will a radishes. All the major grocery chains are getting into the robot game: Ahold Delhaize just ordered 500 floor roaming robots to spot spills, Albertsons is building out a robotic micro-fulfillment center, and Kroger is expanding its delivery by self-driving car.

For Walmart, this massive robot rollout could be just the tip of the iceberg; the retail giant is also eyeing Flippy as robotic fry cook for its deli, and has received a patent for a robot shopping cart.

While this type of news from Walmart and other grocers will reinforce fears over robots taking all the human jobs, it’s actually more complicated than that. There are some jobs robots are better suited for, and I was speaking with a major grocery retailer earlier this month who said that it’s actually hard to find human workers who want a job in grocery stores these days.

The subject of automation is a tricky one, which is why we are holding our ArticulATE food robot summit next week, on April 16 in San Francisco. We will be chatting about how robots are transforming grocery both in-store and for delivery, and how robots will work alongside with, and yes, even replace some humans. It promises to be a great day of discussion, but tickets are almost gone, so grab yours today!

The Spoon Newsletter: European FoodTech Investment, Future of Grocery, SKS Vids

This is the post version of our weekly (twice-weekly, actually) newsletter. If you’d like to get the weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

Catherine here! Pleasantly full from sampling Pizzametry’s pizza-making robot/vending machine, ready for a weeklong sojourn to Copenhagen to eat as many cinnamon rolls and fermented things as humanly possible.

Speaking of Europe, this week I spent a good chunk of time sifting through piles of data on the state of European food tech. Now, I’m not complaining — we at the Spoon love a good data sift, the nerdier the better. And we uncovered some interesting trends emerging across the Atlantic. Check out our distilled report to find out which companies, investors, and countries are forging the way in European food innovation.

There’s plenty of action right here in our own backyard, too. Take food delivery: a whopping $3.5 billion has been invested in startups in the space this year alone — and it’s only October.

We’re also seeing a lot of companies experimenting with delivery methods. Chris wrote about how Kiwi’s food delivery robots are rolling out in Los Angeles, which he thinks is a smarter play than Uber’s goal to start delivering your pad thai or chicken burrito via drone.

Outside of delivery, robots are also continuing their march into the restaurant space. Chinese hot pot chain Haidilao has teamed up with Panasonic to launch a Berlin location with a completely robot-run kitchen. Maybe good news for consumers, but bad news for people looking for entry-level restaurant jobs.

In the front of house, Jenn wrote about the partnership between Ordrslip, a company which powers mobile apps for restaurants, and payment software Square. Together, they can help smaller mom-and-pop eateries enter the age of mobile ordering and payments — something that’s becoming less of a nicety and more of a necessity.

Jenn also has the story about an epic Twitter thread from the founder of CircleUp about the future of grocery. Ryan Caldbeck’s seventeen-tweet thread told the story of a three hour conversation he had recently with an unnamed CEO of a large grocery chain. He provided a few key takeaways from the conversation, including how low-pricing is a losing strategy and how the old axiom “location is everything” holds less relevancy in an era of delivery-everywhere. What does matter? Product selection optimized by “non-commoditized data”. You can read Jenn’s post about Caldbeck’s thread here.

Also from this week: Chris wonders if 2019 could be the year that we move beyond traditional meat, as plant-based meat continues to gain popularity with vegetarians and flexitarians alike. It’ll be a while longer before the average person can sink their teeth into cell-based (also called cultured or clean) meat, however. In anticipation of its market launch, the USDA and FDA hosted a joint meeting earlier this week to discuss how they would label this emerging technology.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Our photos and video page from Smart Kitchen Summit 2018 is in. We have all our photos up and a bunch of videos (with most being up by next week), so check it out!

That’s all from me! Farvel (Danish for see ya later.)

Catherine

In the 10/26 edition:

Video: Richard Blais Wants to Make a Drone Delivery Service for Donuts
During his fireside chat at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, Richard Blais talks about his thoughts on the future of food technology in the restaurant and home kitchen: food delivery, robotics, and drone-delivered donuts.

Product Selection Will Drive Future Growth for Grocery, Says CircleUp’s CEO
Whether it’s about personalizing the shopping experience, changing the way stores are set up or shoppable recipes, most folks in the food industry have an opinion about what will drive future growth for grocery retailers. This week, another voice joined the conversation and offered a new take on where retailers should be looking in terms of future of grocery.

Haidilao and Panasonic Team Up for Robotic Hotpot Restaurant
Haidilao, which operates a hotpot restaurant chain, has partnered with Panasonic to open up a robot-run kitchen in Beijing on October 28. The new automated kitchen will reportedly be used to help Haidilao expand to up to 5,000 locations around the world.

Trendwatch: Is 2019 the Year We Move Beyond Traditional Meat?
Consumption of beef and chicken was estimated to hit a record high this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But traditional meat’s time at the top of the proverbial food chain may be nearing an end, if two new 2019 prediction pieces are to be believed. But how close is that to the truth?

Allergy Fears and Transparency Among Issues at latest USDA/FDA Meat-ing
Earlier this week, scientists, entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the public got together to discuss the future of cell-based (also called “cultured” and “lab-grown”) meat during a joint meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A big issue on the table: labeling.

Video: To Survive, the Future Kitchen Must be Personalized, Flexible, and Emotional
The first panel of the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) North America tackled the disrupted meal journey. Just after Jon Jenkins, Director of Engineering at Hestan Smart Cooking, Dana Cowin, former Editor in Chief of Food & Wine, and Michael Wolf kicked off SKS by discussing how the kitchen has to adjust if it will survive in the future.

Bee Vectoring Technology Uses Bees to Apply Pesticide on Crops
Bees are pretty remarkable creatures (once you get past all that stinging). They pollinate crops, make delicious honey, and if a Toronto-based agtech company, Bee Vectoring Technology, has its way, bees will be used to apply pesticides to crops to help ward off disease and increase yields.

$3.5 Billion Invested in Food Delivery Startups This Year
Investors have a big appetite for food delivery companies this year. The Wall Street Journal reports on Pitchbook data revealing that $3.5 billion has been invested in food and grocery delivery startups so far in 2018.

Kiwi Delivery Robots Expand into Los Angeles
If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens. According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month.

Cookitoo Brings Rental Kitchen Marketplace from Down Under to the Bay Area
Australian startup Cookitoo is bringing their online marketplace for underutilized kitchen space to the Bay Area, with hopes to expand into other U.S. cities over the next year and a half.

With its own Grocery Delivery Service, Walmart Grabs More Data

Walmart is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to getting you your groceries. As of today, that includes testing out its own delivery service (h/t Food Dive). The retailing giant announced a pilot program for its new last-mile delivery service, dubbed Spark Delivery, which will deliver groceries directly to customers’ front door.

From a blog post announcing the service:

Spark Delivery is a crowd-sourced delivery platform that allows Walmart to learn even more about the full last-mile delivery process. The pilot uses an in-house platform that provides drivers with the ability to sign up for windows of time that work best for their schedule as well as Grocery Delivery order details, navigation assistance and more. Components of Spark are powered by Bringg, a leading delivery logistics technology platform. Walmart’s team of personal shoppers are an important component of the overall process as they meticulously shop for customers’ orders. Spark Delivery engages the services of independent drivers who partner with Delivery Drivers, Inc, a nationwide firm who specializes in last-mile contractor management, to complete deliveries.

There’s quite a bit to unpack there. First, the drivers are not Walmart employees; instead, they are contracted out through Delivery Drivers, Inc. (DDI), which does all the recruiting, screening and management of the drivers. Later on the post outlines how DDI can help drivers establish their own delivery business through the Contractor Entrepreneurial Program. This is similar to what Amazon offers through its Flex delivery program.

Second, the company is working with delivery logistics company Bringg, which also counts Coca-Cola and Panera as customers. The Bringg infrastructure includes live tracking of deliveries by the customer which, according to Food Dive, is rare in grocery delivery — this could give Walmart an edge.

What intrigues me most from the company’s post is Walmart’s desire to “learn even more about the full last-mile delivery process.” Once again we see how important data is. Right now, Walmart is contracting grocery delivery out to third parties like DoorDash and Deliv. This gets the retailer some insight into what people are buying and where, but inserting itself further up the logistics stack will provide the company more minute details about delivery routes, times, etc.. This, in turn, can be used to better understand and hyper-target specific neighborhoods and customers.

DoorDash, Deliv and any other delivery service contracting with Walmart might want to be concerned about their long-term prospects with the company. If its own delivery pilot works out, why hand off that customer understanding to a third party?

This move means more tumult in an already tumultuous time in the grocery biz. Ever since Amazon acquired Whole Foods last year, the grocery business has had a fire lit under its collective butt to up its technology and logistics game. Throughout 2018 we’ve seen retailers like Kroger, Albertsons, Target and Amazon all roll out expanded delivery options.

As mentioned at the top of this story, Walmart has been busy covering all of its grocery bases. It currently offers delivery in roughly 50 markets and is expanding that number to 100 metro areas, which will cover 40 percent of U.S. households. It’s also piloting a new robot-powered micro-fulfillment center for expedited and expanded grocery pickup. And it’s even testing out self-driving cars to chauffeur people to and from grocery pickups.

Walmart grocery delivery has a $9.95 fee and a $30 minimum order. Walmart Spark Delivery is currently being piloted in Nashville and New Orleans.

In 2018, Seaweed Is The New Plastic

It’s no secret that the world produces—and wastes—mass amounts of plastic. But when you actually take a look at the numbers, it’s downright shocking.

National Geographic says that of the whopping 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic the world has produced, 6.3 billion metric tons have become plastic waste. And of those 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste, only nine percent has been recycled. That means 79 percent of all the world’s plastic ends up in landfills and ultimately, the oceans.

Fortunately, this is one problem that some foodtech startups are tackling by searching for sustainable materials to replace plastic packaging. A major contender in the running? Seaweed.

For the past eight years, seaweed’s place as the alternative raw material of choice has grown, and there are already several startups developing a wide range of applications for seaweed, from biofuel to cosmetics and food to pharmaceuticals. An early innovator, Loliware launched its first range of cups made from agar that are safe to consume; agar is extracted from red seaweed. Since then, startups have come out with edible water bottles made from brown seaweed and one group won a prestigious design award for their use of seaweed in commercial packaging for perfume and other goods.

Wondering how seaweed can possibly become the new plastic? It’s not as outlandish as it sounds.

First, seaweed is cheap, easy to harvest and extract, and readily accessible—it is available on every coastline. And, when compared to other potential sustainable materials, seaweed is the clear winner. For example, bioplastics, which are made from starches such as polylactic acid, require fresh water and fertilizer to grow—seaweed doesn’t. In fact, seaweed can grow up to three meters per day.

Because it is so abundant, just 0.03% of the brown seaweed in the world could replace all the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles used every year.

Seaweed’s biggest potential lies in disposable packaging. Inspired by peelable fruits (such as bananas and oranges), the idea is to use seaweed as a biodegradable container. By replacing unsustainable plastic containers, seaweed packaging would solve the problem of the shelf-life gap—the difference between the biodegradability of the container and that of what’s in the container.

Milk is a great example of this. Pasteurized cow’s milk has a shelf life of about one week – but the plastic jugs they are sold in? Each container could take up to 500 years to decompose. Seaweed packaging can decompose in around 4-6 weeks

Replace that plastic bottle with seaweed packaging, and you have a far more comparable shelf-life ratio; seaweed packaging biodegrades in soil in only four to six weeks. Plus, unlike plastic, seaweed doesn’t break down into micro-particles that are impossible to collect.

The problem has been getting more attention lately – two years ago the Ellen McArthur Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit put out a report and launched a new initiative called the New Plastics Economy, calls on major manufacturers to adopt circular modes or production and consumption for plastics where reuse and recycling becomes the responsibility of the makers of plastic containers (instead of hoping consumers do it) as opposed to a linear one which exists now.

Statistics in the report are sobering; according to the foundation “95% of the value of plastic packaging material, worth $80-120 billion annually, is lost to the economy” and they predict by 2050 (just 32 years from now), the world’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish.

Speaking of oceans, there’s another reason seaweed trumps plastic – it actually reduces global warming. Besides being cheaper, more accessible, and more sustainable, seaweed absorbs CO2 and mitigates ocean acidity. Some startups have started to pop up around seaweed farming and maintenance – like New York’s GreenWave, who are building autonomous seaweed farms to both reduce costs and reduce global warming.

2018 might be the year of seaweed and generally more innovation around sustainable packaging and circular life cycle strategies to steer the world away from its intense reliance on plastic.

Peapod Hopes Its Chat-to-Cart Feature Boosts Its Bottom Line

The grocery delivery space is moving far beyond the task of bringing fresh kale and imported cheese to your doorstep. Merely offering the luxury and convenience of avoiding crowded grocery aisles is no longer enough to woo time-starved consumer, who now has myriad choices when it comes to selecting a personal supermarket shopper.

If it’s tech inspired bells and whistles you want, Peapod, a 28-year veteran of the grocery delivery wars, is attempting to boost its sagging growth by adding a new text-to-order tool. Dubbed “Chat to Cart,” consumers can create lists on their phone via text (not to mention voice-to-text or emojis) and send them over to Peapod for fulfillment. The new feature was developed by Chicago-based online shopping tools developer, StorePower.

To use the service, customers text the toll-free number, 1-833-TXT-PPOD and provide a list of products by name or by emoji symbol. The service includes an option to share the shopping list among family members who can add products to the order. After an initial order, or once the number is saved, orders can be placed via Siri or Google Assistant.

“At Peapod, we have always been committed to being the ultimate convenience for our customers,” said Cat De Merode, Peapod’s VP of product in a company release. “The Chat-to-Cart platform was designed for the busy shopper that relies on their mobile device whether at home or on the go. Now, instead of texting a family member to pick up an extra gallon of milk, you can text Peapod and let us do the work. The texting functionality complements the Peapod mobile app and desktop website for one seamless ordering process.”

While digitally based grocery shopping makes up only 3.8% of the grocery retailing market, researchers see a bright future.  Packaged Facts, based in Rockville, MD., believes online grocery sales will go grow from a CAGR of more than 27% over the next five years. By 2022, the company says online sales of grocery items may be worth as much as $42 billion annually.

Peapod’s owner, Dutch-based Ahold Delhaize would like the digital delivery service to contribute more to its overall bottom line. In its most recent quarter, Ahold’s ecommerce revenue was up 20% but Peapod grew in the single digits. Company officials claim its various supermarkets, such as Food Lion, have not successfully integrated Peapod into their services.

Putting aside specialty delivery services such as Farmstead, players in the online grocery/delivery market are running low on competitive factors. Advances such as Walmart’s partnering with Google Home to gain access to their voice-enabled assistants does precious little to create any distinction among the Peapods, Instacarts and Shipts of the world (not to mention store-branded delivery services). Blurring the lines even further is the growing overlap between grocery and restaurant delivery with such all-purpose digitally powered, food-to-home services as Postmates promising speedy grocery services in New York.

That $42 billion revenue figure for grocery delivery sounds like a hefty prize, but the question remains—how much will go to the one-two punch of Amazon/Whole Foods and how many remaining companies will be spending millions to grab minor slivers of market share.

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Amazon Looks At Food Tech To Make Packaged Food Better

Amazon continues to explore ways to dominate the $700 billion grocery market, and this time the commerce giant is turning to military-grade food tech to gain an edge on competitors. Reuters is reporting on Amazon’s interest in a partnership with 915 Labs, a startup based in Denver that’s commercializing a technology known as MATS – or microwave assisted thermal sterilization. MATS is a process that takes prepared food and using a specific heating technique, eliminates food pathogens and microorganisms that cause spoilage.

According to Reuters, the process involves taking “sealed packages of food in pressurized water and heating them with microwaves for several minutes.” A sort of sous vide on steroids, the technique was developed at the University of Washington and received FDA approval in 2012 as a safe way to preserve fresh foods.

MATS replaces traditional preservation techniques which often entail heating foods at high temperatures for up to an hour, significantly damaging the quality and taste of the food. 915 Labs, the startup that’s trademarked MATS, says to solve the problem of damaged foods, companies add things like “salt, flavor, texture and color enhancers, and other unnatural ingredients” to make the foods edible again.

MATS-Made Foods and Beverages

Packaged food has to have a long shelf life in order for dry goods companies to make money – but the game changing element is taste. With MATS, companies could potentially make packaged food appealing again, in an era where the heavy consumer focus is on healthier, fresher options. Which brings us to Amazon.

With Amazon Pantry, Dash replenishment services, the purchase of Whole Foods and the use of machine learning and AI to run next-gen stores, Amazon is all in on the grocery game. And while the company is still working on ways to compete in the fresh foods game, Amazon is taking prime real estate in the middle of the grocery store with dry goods.

And besides boxed snack foods and household items, what lives in the middle of the grocery store? Prepared and packaged foods. From frozen dinners to soups, pasta mixes and “just add water” foods, the center aisles are generally filled with sodium-laden offerings that can be bought and sit in pantries for months.

As Amazon looks at building its own meal kit delivery service(see Mike’s Amazon meal kit review), there’s a clear interest in developing its own line of foods that take advantage of Amazon’s massive e-commerce infrastructure but also don’t require the large investment that fresh food transportation and storage often do, particularly in the form of refrigeration.

And without additives and sodium, MATS produced packaged foods could still stay on the shelf just as long but taste much better and be comparatively healthier than their traditionally preserved counterparts.

The research that led to the development of MATS was funded by several large food companies, including Nestle, General Mills, Delmonte and Pepsi, all of whom also play a big role in dry goods and groceries. But now 915 Labs owns the exclusive rights to MATS and its sister process, MAPS or microwave assisted pasteurization sterilization which is a faster way to pasteurize foods like dairy and baby food.

Reuters reports that consumers are unlikely to see MATS-created packaged foods from Amazon until 2018 – and maybe even later depending on how the company decides to integrate the technology with its current offerings. It’s clear that the omnichannel retailer has big plans for food domination in the future.

Next Gen Grocery: The Future Market Looks At The Future Of Food

Mike Lee spent time as a kid marveling at concept cars at auto shows in Detroit. “This huge auto industry institutionalized the tradition of creating a non-production model concept whose sole purpose was to show the world what that company was dreaming about for the future.” Lee grew up and went searching for that kind of tangible look at innovation in the food world – and couldn’t find it. So he founded The Future Market, a futurist food project that looks at the ways food might be produced and consumers might shop for food in the future. Through concept products, specialized events, working shops and live engagements, the Future Market aims to be at the center of conversations around what our food systems will look like many years from now.

The Future Market focuses on two core areas of work – one is helping big food companies partner with startups and embed innovation into their own companies to act more like startups. Their innovation food platform, Alpha Food Labs, is a project designed to work with large corporations and food producers to help them maneuver faster through rapid prototyping projects.

If you were in NYC this past June, you might have seen a live demonstration of Future Market’s other big area of work: a conceptual grocery store of the future. The Future Market’s grocery store of 2042 looks like this: you walk into a market, filled with foods of the future – synthetic food, nontraditional forms of protein, sustainable and local produce – and a food ID system that knows your food preferences and nutritional needs through real-time biometrics matches you with products that are perfect for your health profile and palate but also meet your budget and are sustainable.

A little intrusive? Maybe – but food is core to life and what we put in our bodies, whether healthy or unhealthy, impacts not just how we feel today but our future health and well-being. People are bombarded with what’s considered healthy and what’s not and are often confused about what choices to make. And we’re seeing more companies come to the table to try and provide personalized nutrition options based on our own DNA. The Future Market is analyzing these trends and working to show consumers how these technologies might actually make eating and shopping more straightforward.

But Lee isn’t just interested in showing consumers what the future of food looks like, he wants to enable more cooperation across industries working in the smart kitchen to drive innovation.

“There is no open-source, uniform data standard whereby every food manufacturer can record the nutritional info, ingredient lists, processing methods, and ingredient provenance information into. That may sound like a really unsexy thing, but it prevents so much innovation from happening in the smart kitchen space,” comments Lee. “Imagine the web without HTML—every site used a different, proprietary coding language to create web pages. The internet would be a mess of incompatibility. It’s the same challenge if you want to create a smart fridge that understands all the ingredients within every item inside of it. If we had a uniform data standard that all food companies shared, smart fridges would be so much smarter.”

Don’t miss Mike Lee, at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit. Check out the full list of speakers and to register for the Summit, use code FUTUREMARKET to get 25% off ticket prices.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is the first event to tackle the future of food, cooking and the kitchen with leaders across food, tech, commerce, design, delivery and appliances. This series will highlight panelists and partners for the 2017 event, being held on October 10-11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. 

Embracing Chaos: How Some Are Turning To Tech To Reinvent The Supermarket

The grocery store landscape is changing fast. Retail food palaces are simultaneously going big, small, mobile and even virtual to please millennial consumers who want it now, want it digital and want it delivered. At the same time, this rapidly growing audience wants it fresh and healthy. Add in technology, which has become a weapon for giant grocery chains, start-ups and food-tech visionaries who see such tools as AI, virtual reality, predictive algorithms and mobile apps as paths to new models of buying food, and the result is a market hurtling towards chaos.

One person embracing the chaos is Tomas Mazetti. Mazetti is the person behind Moby, a grocery store of the future concept that the Swedish inventor/activist created in partnership with China’s Hefei University.

One crucial part of this project is Himalayafy, a spinoff of Mazetti’s bicycle-powered coffee cart business Wheelys.  Himalayafy is the brains and infrastructure for the Moby store—an autonomous, staff less store that is open 24 hours a day. Portable and self-contained, the future for the concept is to economically offer fresh groceries to people who live in remote and rural areas where a large-scale retail supermarket is difficult to sustain. One Moby store can handle a number of underserved areas because it can easily move from one location to another.

“The biggest costs to have a store are the place itself to rent in a central city–it’s ultra-expensive–and the staff is really expensive, and we’re removing both of these at the same time,” Mazetti told Fast Company.

When customers enter the Moby structure, they are met by an AI-powered hologram with purchases scanned and track during the shopping process. Much like Amazon’s proposed grocery store experiment, shoppers need not wait in a checkout line at the end of the process.

247 STORE WHEELYS

Software and AI power Moby to manage its inventory and drive to a local warehouse for restocking when needed. In an area with more than one Moby, the stores can replenish one another when products run out. The delivery process for sharing goods could be handled by drones.

“It’s common in stores that one store has run out of milk, another has run out of eggs, but both of them need to have a truck go back and forth to a warehouse,” added Mazetti. “We can ship these products in between, so we don’t need to go back and forth these long distances to rural areas to do this.”

As one of the global hotspots for mobile payments, Shanghai was chosen for the beta test of Moby. That location also is prime because it’s the site of the manufacturing facility that builds Wheelys coffee carts. One issue to overcome is the restriction of fully autonomous cars on Chinese roads. Mazetti hopes to roll out Moby stores on a large scale in 2018 with many of the purchases made by communities where residents band together to purchase this grocery store of the future.

It’s not just upstarts like Matettiz who are using tech to reimagine the supermarket.

Tesco, the giant British grocery chain, took its retailing expertise, knowledge of the South Korean market and emerging digital prowess and built its virtual supermarket in 2011 at a popular subway station. After downloading the Homeplus app, users can scan the CR codes on strategically placed posters that resemble the aisles of a grocery store. Orders are generally delivered the same day.

Just four years later, there were 22 Homeplus virtual stores in South Korea, and today the brand is the country’s No. 1 online retailer.

Vine to Cart: Grocery Stores Use New Tech To Create In Store Farms

While the demand for organic and sustainable agriculture is growing across the globe, the future of fresher produce might be picking it right at the supermarket.

A startup out of Berlin called Infarm is currently working on an “indoor vertical farming” system with the capacity to grow any kind of fruit, vegetable or herb.  Multiple sensors monitor the plants’ health and connected data lets the system know when to irrigate and feed the crops, creating individual ecosystems. In addition to creating idyllic growing environments for each plant, the system is smart, providing the opportunity for experts to analyze and collect data to optimize growth and flavor and potentially predict problems in the future.

“We are able to develop growing recipes that tailor the light spectrums, temperature, pH, and nutrients to ensure the maximum natural expression of each plant in terms of flavor, colour, and nutritional quality,” Osnat Michaeli, co-founder of Infarm, explained in an interview with TechCrunch.

Although vertical farming is already a familiar concept to agriculture, what makes Infarm so unique is their ability to do small-scale vertical farming in customer-facing situations. The company has already found major success after placing systems in Metro Group locations, one of the biggest wholesalers in Europe, and are now being approached by other grocers that want to do the same. Instead of growing produce outside on traditional farms and dealing with the supply chain to deliver it to each store, grocers could invest in InFarm and allow customers to harvest food right from the vine. In an era where grocery stores are trying to remain more relevant to consumers who often shop online for dry goods, InFarm helps grocers turn into a next gen farmers market with fresh from the plant produce.

Investors have also noticed the potential within Infarm as the company recently closed a €4 million funding round which included Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, Impact investor Quadia, London’s LocalGlobe, Atlantic Food Labs, design consultant Ideo, Demand Analytics and others.