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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Google and Albertsons Partner for Shoppable Maps, Predictive Grocery Lists and More

Google and Albertsons announced a wide-ranging, multi-year partnership today that will see a range of high-tech features added to consumer grocery shopping across more than 2,200 Albertsons stores.

According to the press release, Albertsons has been working with a number of different teams across Google over the past year. In a corporate blog post, also released today, Google outlined new grocery delivery and pickup features that have been integrated into Google Search and will be coming to Google Maps later this year:

Delivery and curbside pickup have grown in popularity during the pandemic — they’re convenient and minimize contact. To make this process easier, we’re bringing helpful shopping information to stores’ Business Profiles on Maps and Search, like delivery providers, pickup and delivery windows, fees, and order minimums. We’re rolling this out on mobile Search starting with Instacart and Albertsons Cos. stores in the U.S., with plans to expand to Maps and other partners.

Other fruits of this partnership weren’t specified, but the companies said forthcoming innovations include: Shoppable maps with dynamic hyperlocal features, AI-powered conversational commerce, and predictive grocery list building.

That Albertsons has hopped into the virtual shopping cart with Google actually makes a lot of sense. The pandemic pushed record numbers of people into online grocery shopping last year, and while those online sales figures have cooled recently, grocery e-commerce is predicted to hit $250 billion by 2025. So integrating high-tech features from a trusted and ubiquitous brand like Google to grab more of those online dollars is a no brainer.

As a result of all this money flowing into grocery e-commerce, retailers are locked in a fierce battle to be your grocer of choice. A partnership with Google isn’t a nice to have — at this point it’s a need to have for Albertsons. Albertsons is up against deep-pocketed giants like Amazon, which is building out its own chain of physical supermarket stores, and Walmart, which is expanding its delivery options and adding more automated fulfillment. Albertsons could also find it is getting squeezed on the smaller end by a cohort of new, urban grocery startups that promise delivery in 10 minutes.

But Albertsons isn’t being caught flat-footed. It has proved itself to be a very tech-forward retailer, and its innovation has only accelerated since the pandemic. The grocer is expanding the use of automated micro-fulfillment, piloting smart lockers and robotic curbside pickup kiosks, and is even testing out remote controlled grocery delivery robots.

For its part, Google continues to be a bit of a sleeper in the foodtech world. Over the past few years, the company has been rolling out a number of features that transform the way we find, order and get our food delivered.

While we don’t know the full extent of what its partnership with Google will bring, these first steps are a smart play by Albertsons. By getting inserted into Google Search and Maps results, Albertsons can more seamlessly integrate with consumers’ everyday routine, and create a more frictionless shopping experience for customers.

Google Cloud Team Uses AI to Develop Hybrid “Cakie” and “Breakie” Recipes

I remember at some point last year after the pandemic had started, I called three different grocery stores to check if they had yeast in stock. Of course, I had no luck at any location because our country had entered a baking extravaganza; ovens were fired up non-stop across the country to bake sourdough, banana bread, and chocolate chip cookies. Due to this baking frenzy that overtook our country in 2020, the Google Cloud team analyzed the ingredients and specific ratios used in favorite baked goods like cookies, bread, and cakes through the use of a machine learning program. The goal was to essentially determine what defined something as a cookie, cake, bread, and how each of these categories differ from each other. As a result, the team also used its AI to produced two new hybrid baked goods called a “Cakie” and a “Breakie”.

The team collected hundreds of different recipes for bread, cookies, and cakes to create a dataset and then used Google Cloud’s AutoML Tables tool to build a machine learning model. The model analyzed the amounts of key ingredients such as yeast, butter, eggs, and sugar, in the different recipes and was able to determine if the recipe was for bread, cake, or cookies. Bread recipes were accurately labeled about 90 percent of the time, but sometimes the model mislabeled cookie recipes for cake recipes.

Using this model, the team used ingredients and measurements that the algorithm determined were key for cookie, bread, and cake recipes to create two new hybrid recipes. The “Breakie” is half cookie and half bread, which turned out to be a fluffy, airy cookie with a texture similar to that of a muffin. The “Cakie” maintained a cake shape and sponginess but has a buttery flavor and crispy outside like a cookie.

Google Cloud’s project is just one neat example of how machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence) can be applied in food technology. Spoonshot recently launched a free version of its AI flavor-pairing tool that offers the user both novel and unique pairings for different ingredients. Brightseed created an AI platform called Forager, which detects hidden phytonutrients in different plants. Even companies like Starbucks, Sweetgreen, KFC, and McDonald’s use AI to some degree in order to streamline day to day operations.

As we still find ourselves in the pandemic early 2021, you may be looking for some new recipes to bake. You’re in luck; the Google Cloud team provided the two recipes created through the use of AI, the “Cakie” and the “Breakie”.

Google Takes on Food Waste With Food Tech Innovations Built by X

X, the “moonshot factory” of Google parent company Alphabet, announced today that two prototypes developed as part of a project called Project Delta have graduated and are now being transferred to Google for scaling and commercialization.

Project Delta, which has been incubating within X for the past two and a half years, was led by Emily Ma, who announced the transition to Google today in a blog post.

From the post:

Our team’s mission was to create a smarter food system — one that knows where the food is, what state it’s in, and where best to direct it to ensure it doesn’t end up in a landfill and instead goes to the people who need it most. After two and a half years of prototyping and testing a range of technologies to help reduce food waste and food insecurity, I’m pleased to share that some of our prototypes and team are moving to Google so we can scale up our work.

In her post, Ma highlights two prototypes developed as part of Project Delta. The first is an “intelligent food distribution network” nicknamed “dana-bot.” To build dana-bot, the X team took a dataset donated by the Southwest Produce Cooperative, categorized and standardized each entry, and then used it to match food in food banks and pantries based on “real-time needs in the Feeding America network.” Grocery chain Kroger also leveraged dana-bot to manage excess deli products, which allowed it to open up “millions more meals to communities that need it.”

Above: Project Delta’s prototype food identification and categorization system uses machine learning to automatically identify different types of food.

The second prototype utilized computer vision and machine learning to capture images of food thrown out in Alphabet kitchens. After running it in 20 different units across Alphabet cafes over a period of six months, the system was “able to automatically collect two times as much information about the kitchen’s food waste as the manual system.”

And now these two systems are graduating to Google proper, where Ma says her team hopes to “start tackling food waste and food insecurity on a larger scale.” The team plans to roll out its computer vision system to more Alphabet kitchens and utilize Google’s resources to expand the food distribution network and eventually offer it to other organizations.

As more and more venture funding pours into the future of food, it looks like big tech is starting to also wake up to the possibilities of applying their technology innovation to creating a new food system. Google is no exception. This news is just the latest development from Google and its parent company Alphabet that could have larger-scale implications on the broader food system.

Last week Alphabet announced that its DeepMind group had used AI to help solve a grand challenge around protein structure prediction that the scientific community had been working on for half a century. In August, Google Lookout added food label reading to help the visually impaired, and back in 2017 the company unveiled that its Lens visual discovery technology could serve up recipe suggestions based on images of food.

How Alphabet’s AI-Powered Leap in Protein Structure Prediction Could Accelerate New Food Development

This past week Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced that its DeepMind group has solved a long-standing grand challenge in the scientific community around protein structure prediction.

In 1972, scientist Christian Anfinsen predicted that a protein’s structure could be determined by its amino acid sequence. However, figuring out that sequence is immensely difficult since there are near-infinite ways in which a protein can fold. This led Cyrus Levinthal to postulate that calculating all the known configurations would take longer than the age of the known universe if our only way there was brute force calculation (a problem often referred to as Levinthal’s Paradox).

Thankfully, now we won’t have to wait forever (literally) since DeepMind’s DeepFold AI can predict protein structure to the width of an atom within days. My former Gigaom colleague, Darrell Etherington, explained the feat in a post on Techcrunch:

The test that AlphaFold passed essentially shows that the AI can correctly figure out, to a very high degree of accuracy (accurate to within the width of an atom, in fact), the structure of proteins in just days — a very complex task that is crucial to figuring out how diseases can be best treated, as well as solving other big problems like working out how best to break down ecologically dangerous material like toxic waste.

As many in the world of future food development know, AI is becoming an increasingly important tool to accelerate the development of new proteins and other food-building blocks. Companies like Climax Foods are embracing machine learning to help them develop new approaches to making food like plant-based cheese. And now, with DeepMind’s advances in protein folding prediction paths, we can expect AI to become an even more important tool in new food development.

To get a feel for what the impact of this milestone might be, I asked Sudeep Agarwala, a synthetic microbiologist for Gingko, what he thought DeepMind’s work could possibly mean for food:

“There’s so much that can happen with this,” Agarwala told me. “Think about different textures or mouth feels with food proteins that the AI can design. Or even different amino acid contents for the proteins. And that’s just for the end proteins (if you want the protein as the end product).”

“If we’re engineering proteins inside the cell to produce a small molecule (a flavor, a fragrance, a fat) we can think about making completely new enzymes with multiple functionalities. So something like a 5-step process might be condensed. This has the potential to simplify so much of the metabolic engineering we do to produce these products.”

Agarwala also believes that using technology like that of DeepMind’s will also be way more effecient in terms of resources and have a much smaller ecological footprint:

“Even if the proteins aren’t ultimately going to be consumed, being able to rationally design enzymes that are involved in producing small molecules (think fats, fragrances, or flavors) is really exciting to think about,” said Agarwala. “This isn’t small potatoes: think about how much energy and resources goes into making vanilla or saffron, for example. Being able to do this more efficiently will provide a less ecologically expensive way to produce these materials.”

Just as disease and virology experts are buzzing about what this new milestone could mean for their work, it’s clear food scientists like Agarwala are equally as excited.

“It’s such an exciting time to be a biologist!” said Agarwala.

Yes, it is.

Sevenrooms Integrates Its Digital Waitlist With Google Reserve

Restaurant management platform Sevenrooms announced today it has integrated its waitlist feature with Google’s reservation tool, Reserve With Google. Sevenrooms has also integrated its waitlist Google Search, Maps, and Assistant, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The Reserve With Google integration means guests can add themselves to a restaurant’s waitlist digitally, while they are still at home, and receive real-time estimates and updates on their wait time. 

Guests are notified via text message when they are close to the top of the waitlist and can then check in virtually when they arrive at the restaurants. Remember the pre-digital process where the restaurant called your name over a loudspeaker then crossed it off a piece of paper when you arrived at the host station? The Sevenrooms-Google integration is basically a digital version of that.

It also comes at a time when most dining rooms are still operating at reduced capacity and restaurants that might not have previously used reservations now require them. This is in part to manage that reduced capacity, but it’s also a way to keep waiting areas less crowded and customers more socially distanced.

For Google, the Sevenrooms partnership is just the latest step in the search giant’s march into the restaurant industry. In August, Google announced a partnership with Panera that lets guests order and pickup meals directly via Search, Maps, and Assistant. Last year, it partnered with delivery integrator Olo to offer more pickup and delivery through Google features and added several new innovations around restaurant menus.

Sevenrooms, meanwhile, has expanded its own arsenal of features in recent months to include contactless ordering and payments and a direct delivery tool that lets restaurants (partly) bypass third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash. The company raised $50 million in Series B funding in June of this year.

Google Continues Its Quiet March Into the Restaurant Biz With Panera Integration

Fast-casual chain Panera today announced a new integration with Google that lets customers order pickup and delivery meals directly via Google’s Search, Maps, and Assistant apps.

It’s a pretty simple setup. Search “Panera” and, if nearby locations of the chain are participating, you’ll see “order pickup” and “order delivery” buttons right beneath the map on the page. You then simply scroll through the menu selecting the items you want to purchase and checkout using your mobile wallet. Those using voice can ask Google Assistant to find the nearest Panera and place your order directly via the device.

It’s no surprise that the Google integration is available for off-premises-only orders. Curbside pickup and delivery remain two of the biggest sales channels for restaurants right now as dining rooms remain either shuttered or operating at reduced capacity. In response, those restaurant chains that have the money to do so are pouring more resources into speeding up the off-premises experience with more digital tools.

Google itself is no stranger to the restaurant business. In fact, the search giant has been something of a sleeping giant the last couple years when it comes to restaurants. In 2019, it added menu recognition to Google Lens, which lets you point a camera at a menu to see popular items, and integrated third-party delivery services directly into Search, Maps, and Assistant. It also partnered with third-party delivery integrator Olo to let restaurants offer delivery via Google.

And with the fate of the restaurant dining room still very uncertain, words like “speed” and “efficiency” are top of the list for many restaurant chains when it comes to their off-premises strategies these days. Panera is no exception. The chain has already inked hybrid delivery partnerships with many of the major services, and recently launched its own geofence-enabled curbside pickup program. 

The Google partnership is available for select Panera stores around the U.S. In all likelihood, it will also press forward the trend of major restaurant chains partnering with Google for off-premises orders.

Google Lookout Adds Food Label Reading for the Visually Impaired

Lookout, Google’s Android app that helps visually impaired users identify their surroundings, announced some new features yesterday, including the ability to read food labels.

From Google’s corporate blog, The Keyword:

With Food Label, you can quickly identify packaged foods by pointing your phone’s camera at the label. Lookout will guide you to position the food product so that it can be properly identified through its packaging or barcode. This can be particularly helpful if you’re putting away groceries and want to make sure you’re handling the right items that might feel the same to your touch. For example, Food Label would be able to distinguish between a can of corn and a can of green beans.

According the the Center for Disease Control, “Vision disability is one of the top 10 disabilities among adults 18 years and older and one of the most prevalent disabling conditions among children.”

While there is still much more to be done to bring digital equity to those with disabilities, Lookout’s new features seem like a definite step in the right direction for the blind or those with low vision. Last year, Domino’s was sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act by a blind customer who was unable to complete an order through the pizza chain’s site. Domino’s fought the suit all the way up to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

As we’ve written before, Google is almost a sleeping giant when it comes to food. Last year the Google Lens app launched a menu reader that showed pictures of food items as well as reviews. And Google Maps has added features over the past year to help with meal discovery and delivery.

Food Label mode for Google Lookout is now, though only in some countries.

Google Adds Hungr to its Roster of Third-party Delivery Partners

Google continues to connect your search for food with the ability to get it quickly, as the company has now integrated third-party restaurant ordering and delivery service Hungr to Google Search, Maps and Assistant.

Hungr announced the partnership today. With it, restaurants using Hungr’s ordering and fulfillment platform can now offer those services directly from a user’s Google search.

For Hungr, the move opens up a new sales channel for restaurants using its services by shortening the gap between a user’s search for food and their ability to order it.

For Google, Hungr is the latest third-party delivery service that it has baked into its search results. In May of this year, the company integrated DoorDash, Postmates, Delivery.com, Slice, and ChowNow into its Search, Maps and Assistant products.

Google is quietly becoming a sleeping giant in the world of restaurants and food delivery. In addition to adding delivery into search results, the company has also added features to surface popular dishes at restaurants, point out nearby restaurant discounts, and a virtual assistant that can make reservations for you. As we wrote earlier this year:

In the age of the attention economy, it’s not that hard to understand why Google busily adding more food related features to its roster. Everyone, everywhere eats. If it can make that eating more “frictionless,” to borrow a Silicon valley phrase, then you are more likely to stay in Google’s ecosystem. The more you use Google, the more data they collect from you to make more apps that, in the company’s mind, will make eating out, or order in, better (and make Google more money).

It looks like the Hungr/Google partnership isn’t quite live yet. In today’s announcement, Hungr said that it will happen “soon.”

Restaurant Software Company Popmenu Raises $4.5M in Series A Funding

Atlanta, GA-based Popmenu, which makes guest engagement software for restaurants, just announced a $4.5 million Series A round led by Base10 Partners’ Rexhi Dollaku and with participation from Felicis Ventures’ Niki Pezeshki. To date, Popmenu has raised a total of $6 million.

Popmenu positions its SaaS platform specifically as a way for restaurants to regain more control over their branding online. That’s something food businesses in particular struggle with in an age when Yelp, Google, and third-party delivery sites double as discovery engines but are also known for posting mediocre photos, biased reviews, and other material that doesn’t always accurately represent a restaurant.

Popmenu is trying to change that by moving the digital conversation about any given restaurant back to the restaurant’s own website. Its cloud-based software provides a dynamic menu experience for customers, who can also upload photos, leave reviews, and interact with one another without leaving the restaurant’s own branded area online. They can also receive special offers and promotions. On the back end, restaurants get the advantage of real-time menu management and data analytics tools that can tell them more about customers and their preferences.

It remains to be seen if those features will be enough to entice restaurants to sign up with the service, and for customers to actually leave Yelp, Google, Grubhub, and other third-party sites, whose streamlined user experiences make them easy to use and therefore convenient.

“Restaurateurs are passionate and personally invested in their business, and to be able to help them feel a greater sense of control over their digital presence means everything to us,” Tony Roy, President and Co-Founder of Popmenu, said in a statement.

Restaurant review tools aside, he has a point. As off-premises restaurant orders proliferate and more businesses try their hand at the virtual restaurant concept, online branding is becoming as important as the food itself. Already, some chains are taking back control on parts of the delivery process, and discovery and recommendations are definitely a part of that.

According to the press release, the new funding will go towards further R&D for Popmenu’s platform. 

Google and Olo Partner to Give Restaurants More Control of Their Data

This week, Google announced a partnership with digital ordering platform Olo that will let restaurants offer pickup orders through Google Search and Maps, and Google Assistant without incurring high commission fees from third-party services or losing valuable customer data.

Restaurants use Olo to simplify the process of taking delivery and pickup orders from multiple third-party channels. Via Olo’s Rails technology, a restaurant can consolidate all those orders into a single ticket stream that goes directly through the business’ main POS system, eliminating the need for a human to manually input that information.

Previously, restaurants integrating with Google had to go through third-party services like Postmates, DoorDash, and Delivery.com. Users ordering food through Google would select meals via Maps, Search or Assistant, then be redirected to one of those third-party services to complete the transaction. While convenient for the user, restaurants still had to pay the high commission fees third-party services charge per order.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the new Google/Olo partnership directly integrates Rails into Google Search, Maps, and Assistant. That means Olo’s network of restaurants, which numbers over 70,000 at this point, can process orders via these channels without having to go through a third-party site. Restaurants not only get to keep the money they would have otherwise spent on commission fees, they also get to keep their customers’ data, which is one of the most valuable assets in the restaurant industry these days.

Currently, the deal applies only to pickup orders. Olo clients Checker’s and Portillo’s Hot Dogs are two chains working initially involved in this new partnership.

The deal is also one more push from Google towards becoming a major player in the food tech world, particularly in restaurants. Besides integrations with Olo and third-party delivery services, the search giant has also added menu recognition features to Google Lens, so a user can point their phone at a menu to highlight popular dishes, and offers a “popular dishes” feature to Maps. In May, Google created a virtual phone agent for small businesses like restaurants and gotten approval to make public drone deliveries. Google also has a delivery program in place with Olo’s rival platform, ChowNow.

For now, Google’s expansion across the restaurant business remains purely digital. Even so, one can’t help but wonder if the company would eventually explore brick-and-mortar initiatives, as well. For example, Google already runs and partners with coworking spaces; it could start doing a similar program for shared kitchens.

Regardless of whether something like that actually happens, Google is sure to keep pushing to become a vital player of the restaurant network.

Correction: An earlier version of this post stated the Google/Olo deal applied to restaurant delivery orders.

Amazon May Grab Food Tech Headlines, but You Should Be Paying More Attention to Google

Amazon grabs a lot of attention when it comes to food tech. And rightly so, as the company bought Whole Foods, offers grocery delivery, is revolutionizing convenience stores, and so much more. But perhaps it should be its rival, Google, that we pay more attention to.

Google may not immediately spring to mind when you think of food, but the tech giant has been steadily adding features to its apps throughout the first half of this year. When you lay them out on the page, it becomes pretty apparent that Google has quietly becoming a food tech giant with a growing power that’s shaping where and how we eat.

Let’s take a look at the more recent food-related features Google has launched. So far in 2019, it has:

This doesn’t even take into consideration the work Google researchers are doing with robotics in the kitchen!

In the age of the attention economy, it’s not that hard to understand why Google busily adding more food related features to its roster. Everyone, everywhere eats. If it can make that eating more “frictionless,” to borrow a Silicon valley phrase, then you are more likely to stay in Google’s ecosystem. The more you use Google, the more data they collect from you to make more apps that, in the company’s mind, will make eating out, or order in, better (and make Google more money).

A lot of these features are just natural extensions of tasks we are already doing. Google Assistant is an assistant, having an AI act like one to make reservations (even with its ethical complications) on your behalf is the logical evolution of that product. If you’re searching for a restaurant online then it’s a pretty good bet that you want to either eat there or get food delivered from there, so why not surface popular dishes and provide a delivery option.

Amazon may dominate our online shopping and most headlines, but a lot of what they are doing is vertically integrated: they own the grocery store, the online shopping all the way down to the delivery. (Though businesses like AWS certainly help food tech startups operate and it has recently invested in Deliveroo .)

Google is embedding itself further up the stack closer to our actual decision making. This gives it a much bigger and more direct influence over how we will eat. If you’re searching for the next big player in Food Tech, you don’t have to Google it.

Google Maps Adds Popular Dish Feature to Surface Favorite Meals at Restaurants

Google Maps has always helped navigate you to a nearby restaurant, but with a new feature launched today, Maps will help you navigate that restaurant’s menu by surfacing its most popular dishes.

The popular dishes feature uses machine learning to parse through photos and reviews of dishes posted by Google Maps users and identify a restaurant’s most popular meals. The new feature is available now on Android with an iOS version to follow later. From a Google blog post announcing the service:

Simply pull up a restaurant on Google Maps to find its popular dishes in the overview tab. Feeling extra peckish? Dive into the menu tab to scroll through all the most-talked about meals, and tap on a popular dish to explore reviews and photos. In a country where you can’t read the language? Maps will also translate the reviews for you too.

Google has certainly been interested in feeding you lately. Last week, the company announced a feature that allows Google Maps, Search and Assistant users to order food for delivery directly through those apps. Earlier this month, the company revealed a new Google Lens feature that let users point their phone cameras at a menu to bring up pictures of popular meals. And there’s also, Google Duplex the human-sounding AI assistant that can make restaurant reservations for you.

It’s not hard to connect the dots to see where all this is going. Knowing what restaurants are nearby, what type of cuisine they serve and what their most popular dishes are creates the foundation for an even more powerful AI assistant. Why should Duplex stop at making restaurant reservations when it could also order your food for home delivery? While this is useful on your phone, having this kind of functionality on a Google Smart Hub smart screen would be equally powerful for families ordering dinner. Google can recommend the restaurant, suggest dishes and then automatically have it delivered to your door.

Getting your purchase history and surrounding data (when you ordered, etc.) would provide Google even more data to power its algorithms, and the company is pretty upfront about wanting that data. From the Popular Dishes blog post today:

At the end of the day, this feature is made possible because of contributions from people around the world who want to help others using Google Maps. So if you want to pay it forward to the next dinner, simply take a photo of your meal (before you’ve scarfed it down!) and add a dish name so others can know what’s good on the menu.

Of course, in a world where we freely hand over so much information about ourselves, at some point you have to ask: who, exactly, is being served?