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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

grocery delivery

Amazon Prime has More Than 100M Members, Set to Devour… Everything?

For the first time, Amazon has provided specific numbers around its Prime Membership business, and in the immortal words of Velma, Scooby-Doo’s smartest sidekick — “JINKIES!” In its letter to shareholders, the retail giant disclosed that it has amassed more than 100 million Prime subscribers worldwide since launching the service 13 years ago.

Geekwire did the math and on it’s face, this means that Amazon is pulling in at minimum $9.9 billion a year (5.5 percent of total 2017 revenue) just from membership fees. What started as a way to get faster shipping of your ordered items has transmogrified into a multi-headed beast that includes streaming video, music, and same day grocery and restaurant delivery (in select cities).

The company is also increasing Prime synergies at Whole Foods, which it purchased last year. It’s expanding free two-hour grocery delivery from select Whole Foods, and is using those real world locations to sell more Echo and Alexa devices (which begets more voice shopping), as well as pick up spots for Amazon Lockers.

Additionally, Marketwatch reports that Amazon is folding the Whole Foods loyalty program into Prime, and if all that weren’t enough, the same shareholder letter says that “[Amazon has] also begun the technical work needed to recognize Prime members at the point of sale and look forward to offering more Prime benefits to Whole Foods shoppers once that work is completed.”

This suggests, as industry watchers have predicted, that the company is looking at implementing Amazon Go-like functionality at Whole Foods — perhaps a TSA-like pre-check for fast lane service. In the shareholder letter Amazon seems pretty high on the early results of Go and its cashier-less, “just walk out” shopping. Amazon said top sellers at the Seattle Go location are things like caffeinated beverages and water but went on to add that customers “love” the Chicken Bahn Mi sandwich and Amazon Meal Kits.

Now, this could just be Bezos putting some heavy self-promoting spin on customer reactions to the Go store. However, one of the things we’ve written about here at The Spoon is the power of Amazon’s same day delivery and meal kits. The ability to order prepared ingredients and have it delivered before you get home (perhaps delivered inside your home) has the potential to fundamentally change how we shop and cook.

While we don’t know Prime’s specific U.S. numbers, with 100 million around the world, a good chunk of that is here domestically. Amazon has the audience and all the pieces in place to own the way we discover, buy, and eat all of our meals.

Jinkies.

Walmart, Amazon and Target Make Same-Day Delivery Moves (on the Same Day)

Walmart announced yesterday that it was partnering with Postmates to expand the retailer’s online grocery delivery ambitions. This new delivery option started in Charlotte, NC, as of yesterday, and will expand to more markets “in the coming months.”

The news comes less than a month after Walmart announced plans to expand its online grocery delivery service to more than 100 U.S. metro areas by the end of the year. Walmart has existing delivery partnerships with Uber and Deliv, which have been delivering groceries already in select markets. Same day grocery delivery from Walmart carries a $9.95 delivery fee and requires a $30 minimum purchase.

Not to be outdone, Amazon announced yesterday that its Prime customers in Los Angeles can now get free, two-hour delivery from Whole Food stores there. That the two announcements happened on the same day illustrates how fierce that battle is between Amazon and Walmart to bag your grocery business. The two have been locked in a tit-for-tat arms race (in-home delivery, anyone?) ratcheting up features and services to become your grocer of choice. Perhaps feeling left out, Target too announced yesterday its plans to expand its Shipt same day delivery service across Arizona and New Mexico later this month.

The added twist to the Walmart/Postmates announcement is that Postmates had reportedly discussed the idea of merging with restaurant delivery service DoorDash, according to Recode. Though nothing came of any such discussions, and Postmates denied the report, that move was supposedly motivated in part by Postmates and DoorDash wanting to fend off the ever-growing, all-consuming Amazon.

And if all that weren’t enough, last week Instacart confirmed that it had expanded its Series E with an additional $150 million to expand its same day grocery delivery ambitions. Instacart has partnerships with grocery retailers such as Albertsons, Kroger, Costco, and even Whole Foods.

All of this activity points to just how hot and important the same day grocery delivery space is for everyone involved. It’s hits the sweet spot where human laziness and hunger intersect. We’re always going to buy food, and if one of these players becomes our go-to grocer, they’ll reap a recurring weekly revenue source.

One-Stop Shop Wine App Vivino Snags $20M in Funding

It’s a good day for wine lovers (and wannabe lovers) everywhere. Vivino, the world’s most downloaded wine app and largest online wine marketplace, just raised $20 million in series C funding.

The latest funding round was led by SCP Neptune International, the investment arm of former Moet Hennessy CEO and Chairman of VinExpo Christophe Navarre. This comes about two years after Vivino’s series B funding round which raised $25 million, also led by SCP Neptune International. Put ’em together and that puts Vivino’s total aggregated funding at $56.3 million.

Vivino plans to use the new investment capital to expand its wine marketplace and add key team members. They’re aiming to reach $1 billion in wine sales by 2020 and have plans to expand into Hong Kong

The Denmark-based company launched in 2010 with the goal of easing consumer’s wine purchasing experiences. After downloading the app, users can take a photo of their wine label and proprietary image recognition technology will promptly deliver pricing, ratings, and provide them with an option to purchase. And, with an annual subscription of $47, users can get their curated wine selections delivered to their door at no added cost.

According to Vivino, since its series B funding round closed, their user base has skyrocketed from 13 million to almost 29 million. They haven’t cornered the wine delivery market yet, though: companies like Winc, Blue Apron Wine, and retail behemoth Amazon also offer vino delivery.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this announcement is what it could mean for the specialty foods purchasing experience in general. Vivino brands themselves as “an online wine community, database and mobile application” aimed at easing the user’s wine-buying experience. Which, let’s face it, can be pretty confusing and inconvenient: Do you prefer Bordeaux or Zinfandel? What’s a good bottle to go with fish? And once you’ve found a grape you want to try, you’ve got to track it down and find the best price. (Delectable is an app that offers wine label scanning, recommendations, and pairings, but you have to download a companion app for delivery.)

We’ve already written about direct-to-consumer wine delivery and Ai-powered sommeliers, but the interesting thing about Vivino’s is its abililty to combine these into one neat app. They provide a trusted review platform, suggesting new bottles for their users, then deliver them to their door, creating a seamless purchasing experience across multiple channels. Plus it would really come in handy for those times your party ran out of rosé but you don’t want to go to the store to get more.

Vivino’s move to combine mobile commerce and an online marketplace with their personalized wine recommendation system is an exciting example of vertical integration in the grocery-delivery sphere. It’s a model that I could see expanding into other specialty consumable goods, such as artisan coffee or even marijuana; areas where delivery apps may already exist but not with such a heavy emphasis on customer guidance and handholding.

I could also envision a future where Vivino (or similar apps) link up with food delivery services like UberEats, delivering you a bottle of wine paired perfectly with your tofu pad thai. I’d be hyped to try this combo, just as long as it doesn’t involve my wine nemesis: Pinot Noir.

You can hear about Vivino in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Announcements Include Cooking Automation And Yummly 2.0

Whirlpool is kicking off CES with a slew of smart kitchen announcements, including an update to the Yummly personalized recipe app, voice integration with Google Assistant and scan-to-cook guided cooking technology.

Whirlpool made a huge effort at CES 2017 to move further into the smart kitchen space, showing off a suite of connected appliances. Then, in May of last year, the company acquired recipe app startup Yummly and gained an entire community of users and a host of food content.

Whirlpool spent the rest of 2017 working on taking full advantage of the Yummly acquisition and is introducing the results of its work today at CES 2018. Among the brand’s many kitchen-related announcements, Whirlpool is launching Yummly 2.0, a new version of the recipe and cooking resources app that includes image recognition, meal scheduling features and an enhanced guided cooking experience when using Whirlpool connected appliances to cook.

Ingredient Recognition 

The next-gen Yummly app will include built-in image recognition software powered by machine learning to recognize multiple foods in one picture and dole out recipe recommendations based on what foods are shown. With a large database of food images, Yummly will continue to get better at identifying the food that users have on hand, using machine learning to evolve and grow its knowledge base.

In the Whirlpool mobile app, the company is launching the new Scan-to-Cook technology, a feature that allows users to scan a UPC barcode on frozen food packages and an existing set of instructions including temperature and cooking time for that particular food will be sent to the appliance. Scan-to-Cook setting can be customized to individual preferences if a food is preferred more or less cooked than the standard settings.

Guided Cooking Gets Better

For home chefs that have Whirlpool’s connected range or microwave, Yummly is now able to identify recipes that will work with those appliances and send cooking instructions to the device while following an interactive step-by-step tutorial in the app with images and video. While the user is instructed on what to chop, wash and prepare, the participating oven can be heating up and preparing a timer so it’s ready to go when they are. 

Starting in the spring of 2018, users will also be able to control their connected appliances straight through the Yummly app – a good sign that the brand plans to continue to invest in the platform as the center of their smart kitchen strategy in 2018.

Same Day Grocery Ordering 

Many smart appliances offer grocery list integrations, but Whirlpool takes it a step further in the Yummly app. The ingredients are categorized automatically in an attempt to make shopping easier (better than my Amazon Alexa grocery list which is just one giant list of things I may or may not have already bought) but even better – a new integration with Instacart means you can get the ingredients you need, delivered in about an hour.

Scheduling, Voice, Remote Start

The Yummly app lets users schedule their meals out for the week and let them know when it’s time to start cooking based on the scheduled desired eating time. And, like almost every other company at CES, Whirlpool is announcing integration with Google Assistant to be able to control connected appliances through voice command. Details on the integration weren’t provided but with Google pushing back at Amazon’s domination in voice assistants, it’s not surprising that they’re pursuing the kitchen as a space to gain mindshare. Additional features in the app lets families remotely start their appliances from outside the house to warm up the oven and get the kitchen ready for dinner.

For more #smartkitchen news at CES, follow @TheSpoonTech, @SmartKitchenCon and @michaelwolf for updates.

Target Jumps into Same Day Delivery Battle with Shipt Acquisition

Retail giant Target announced today that it has acquired same day delivery service Shipt for $550 milliion. It’s a keeping up with the Joneses move for Target as competitors like Amazon, Walmart ramp up the race to get you your groceries fastest.

With the Shipt acquisition, Target says it will start offering same-day delivery to roughly half of its stores by early 2018, and will be offered in all major markets before the 2018 holiday season. The service will start off with groceries, essentials, home and electronics and will expand to include all major product categories by the end of 2019.

As Recode notes, Shipt currently operates in 72 U.S. cities, customers pay $99 a year (just like Amazon Prime!) for unlimited deliveries from a number of grocery chains. Target customers will have to pay for a Shipt membership in order to get their groceries.

The Shipt acquisition follows Target’s August purchase of Grand Junction, which provides technology infrastructure for local deliveries.

Target most likely feels the, ahem, target on their backs as retailers continue to up the stakes for consumer delivery expectations. The competition is fierce:

For retailers like Target et. al., who sell everything, food and recipes and same day delivery will also become a gateway for people to purchase hard goods. This is at the heart of Walmart’s deal with Tasty. Be inspired by a recipe, buy the ingredients and any device you need to make that meal.

Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Shipt has raised roughly $65 milliion in funding and will be run as a wholly owned subsidiary of Target and will continue to sign partnership deals with other retailers.

The Albertsons Instacart Deal isn’t Just About Amazon

Albertsons announced a deal today that will have Instacart providing same day grocery delivery for more than 1,800 of its stores by the middle of next year.

Upon news of the deal breaking, many were quick to call this a defensive move to better compete with Amazon/Whole Foods. Tactically speaking, yes, that was certainly a motivating factor. But there is a far more fundamental change happening to our relationship with food — and delivery plays a big part in it.

Food is almost becoming a utility. And while it’s not quite like turning on a spigot, Amazon and Instacart already offer same day delivery of the food you want (in major metropolitan areas). It’s only a matter of time as they refine and optimize their logistics to winnow that delivery window down to the smallest time unit possible between ordering online and a knock at your door.

Suddenly, the meals we want to make at home are not constrained by the food we already have and/or the time we have to go to the grocery store. If we are struck by inspiration, we can order the ingredients we want and have them waiting on our doorstep (or in our home or refigerators).

Back at our Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence declared the “recipe is dead.” Instead of starting with a list of ingredients you need to get in order to make something, Florence believes in starting with what you already have and then algorithmically generating a recipe from that.

But that line of thinking presupposes that you only have access to the ingredients in your pantry. With same day grocery delivery, you are no longer shackled by that presupposition. Make the recipe you want! If you don’t have the ingredients right now, you can get them in plenty of time without having to leave the house or work.

We already see this happening with shoppable recipe lists, like the one recently announced by AllRecipes. See a recipe you like? Click the button and all the ingredients will be sent to you. As The Spoon founder Mike Wolf put it, the combination of same day delivery and shoppable recipes basically means customizable meal kits on demand.

The increased availability of ingredients will open up more recipe options, and smarter kitchen devices will help people cook better, while online communities encourage and inspire. This will open up new avenues of creativity and push people to make new meals they’ve never considered before.

Same day delivery has the power to spark an evolutionary change our entire relationship with food. Just as we want our music, movies and news on demand — so too will we want our meals.

Albertsons isn’t the only one thinking about this. Instacart has now signed up top five U.S. grocers including agreements with Kroger, Costco and even an exclusive arrangement with Whole Foods (until 2021).

Doritos By Drone? It Could Take A While

Across the skies in the U.S., delivery drones are a concept that holds great promise. This vision remains as an elusive scheme held hostage by regulators and uncertain implementations. Companies such as Amazon, Google, and even 7-Eleven are in the pilot and trial phases of drone delivery, as they test range, durability and payload of these flying, robotic carriers. A sign of domestic market uncertainty is that many of these early experiments are taking place on foreign soil.

Israeli-based startup FlyTrex is taking a different approach to the drone delivery opportunity. The company certainly has its eye on the food delivery down the road. While that space sorts out, FlyTrex is offering an out-of-the-box solution, complete with an API program, with potential appeal to markets beyond the culinary world with a focus on non-U.S. customers. Sensing the commercial use of drones for food and/or groceries is, at best, murky, the company has a deal in place with the Ukrainian postal authorities to soon test the delivery of small parcels via these unmanned, low-flying aircraft. FlyTrex hopes this is a first of many such trials.

While local governments in the US are moving quickly to pave the way for slow-moving (and safe) sidewalk delivery robots, delivery drones on the other hand are stuck in a frustrating loop of regulations that prevent the space from moving forward which, in turn, limits the technological progress of this mode of robotic delivery. As with many current legislative battles, regulating drones has become a fight between state and federal government.

“This could be a brave new world — and a cool way to get your stuff,” Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Jason Lewis told Governmental Technology. Lewis is a Republican recently introduced bipartisan legislation to give the state, local and tribal governments’ jurisdiction over drones flying at 200 feet or lower. Lewis believes such a measure protects privacy and property rights while giving a boost to new technology.

The FAA is not keen on turning over drone regulation to local authorities. “If one or two municipalities enacted ordinances regulating [drones] in the navigable airspace and a significant number of municipalities followed suit, fractionalized control of the navigable airspace could result,” the agency wrote in 2015.

Despite obvious roadblocks, Amazon is undaunted in its pursuit of drone delivery. Given the amount of money the company has invested in the opportunity, as well as its pending purchase of Whole Foods, the supergiant retailer must explore every channel for efficiently getting goods from business to business and from business to consumer. Recently, Amazon has set up a research center in Paris to develop an air-traffic control system for drones as well as seeking a patent for cylindrical delivery hubs that work for drones and delivery trucks.

While there are plenty of sample videos detailing tests in various regions of the U.S., or tantalizing futurists with drones delivering beer, it may be years before we reach the viable intersection of food delivery and octocopters. In the meantime, the current zeitgeist for drone delivery is one that requires patience, a strong vision, and the resources to wait out multi pronged inertia.