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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Instacart Files Lawsuit Against Uber’s Cornershop Over Grocery Listings

Today Instacart sued Cornershop, which Uber bought a majority stake in last year, alleging that Cornershop stole product images and other intellectual property.

The Information was first to report on the lawsuit, with reporter Amir Efrati tweeting out the following:

According to Bloomberg:

Instacart claimed Cornershop stole copyrighted images and modified the file names in order to conceal the alleged theft. Instacart also said Cornershop posted job listings for software engineers with “advanced scraping” and other skills indicating that taking and reusing content is part of a company-mandated effort, according to the complaint.

Instacart’s lawsuit comes on the heels of Uber announcing earlier this month that it was expanding grocery delivery into the U.S. through its Cornershop unit.

Grocery e-commerce has seen record sales over the past few months in the U.S., spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. With the coronavirus negatively impacting Uber’s ridesharing business, the company’s ability to diversify its revenues has become more important. Uber also this month announced that it was acquiring rival third-party delivery service, Postmates.

We’ll be following this story as it progresses, but its clear that Instacart, which has raised more than $2 billion in funding, will actively protect its grocery delivery turf. With the lockdowns, Instacart became an essential service for people needing food, and the company bolstered its gig-working delivery worker ranks to 750,000 to meet up with demand.

How big a threat Uber can be with its later and currently limited arrival into grocery delivery reamains to be seen, but the company does have a huge installed base and Instacart looks like it is taking no chances.

Drone Grocery Delivery Coming to Mobile, Alabama

I should apologize. In a post published on The Spoon this morning, I asked How Are You Getting Your Groceries? Delivery, Curbside Pickup or In-Store? In doing so, I failed to include “by drone delivery” among the choices, and it looks like I should have, at least, if you live in Mobile, Alabama.

Rouses Market, which has 64 stores along the Gulf Coast, announced yesterday that it has partnered with Deuce Drone to test grocery delivery by drone in Mobile this Fall (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive, who first reported the story). According to the press release, the drones will be able to deliver groceries in under 30 minutes.

Image via Deuce Drone’s website

There are plenty of other drone delivery programs in various stages of deployment around the world, but Rouses’ is the first we know of that’s specifically for groceries. In Ireland, Manna is doing restaurant delivery. Ditto for Uber in San Diego. Google’s Wing did latte delivery in Canberra, Australia. And in India, food delivery company Zomato acquired drone company TechEagle.

The press announcement didn’t specify anything around flight range or how much cargo each drone flight could/would carry. So we don’t know if it can replace a full trip to the grocery store or not (probably not, given how heavy groceries can get). We’ve reached out to Deuce Drone for more details. UPDATE: Deuce Drone sent us the following via email:

The drone currently being used for early development has a payload capability up to 12 lbs and will be used in the planned early demonstrations and revenue tests. Longer term, we plan to use a range of drones that are or will be available on the market that give us payload efficient payload ranges in the 0 to 2.5 lb, 2.5 lb to 10 lb, 10 to 25 lb and greater than 25 lb. Range for the current drone with full payload is about 6 miles one way at a maximum speed of nearly 40 mph.

There are a lot of other complications around drone delivery. Flight paths need to be created, areas like schools need to be avoided, and drones constantly buzzing overhead can get irritating.

But even with those considerations, Rouses’ grocery drone delivery is coming at the right time. With the pandemic forcing people to stay at home, they are turning to online grocery shopping in record numbers. All of those orders need to be fulfilled whether its through delivery or curbside pickup. Adding fast drone delivery, especially for smaller basket sizes, could ease logistical congestion and make curbside and delivery fulfillment more efficient.

So if you live in Mobile, by all means, let us know if you’re going to get your groceries by drone.

How Are You Getting Your Groceries? Delivery, Curbside Pickup or In-Store?

It’s easy as a reporter to get wrapped up in your own little corner of the world. If you aren’t careful, you confuse your own experiences as a stand-in for everyone’s experience. This is obviously myopic and wrong.

I thought about my potential short-sightedness upon reading Vox’s scoop yesterday that Walmart plans to launch its Amazon Prime-like subscription service this month. Dubbed Walmart+, it comes with a bunch of benefits for subscribers including same-day grocery delivery.

Neither Walmart nor Amazon deliver groceries to my rural neighborhood, so the news doesn’t affect me personally, but even if they did, I don’t think I’d use grocery delivery. My local grocer delivers, as does Safeway, but I eschew them for curbside pickup. Mostly because curbside seems to be more flexible both in time slots available and how I spend my time (tying a bunch of out-of-house errands together). Oh, and curbside pickup is also free.

I’m also not interested in doing my grocery shopping in-store anytime soon, as this pandemic doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. I realize the risk of contracting the virus while shopping is low, but when curbside pickup is so fast, so easy and so contacless, why bother roaming the aisles and standing in line with all those other people (who may or may not be wearing a mask)? Plus, more people shopping in-store seems to put more grocery workers at risk.

But I understand why people would want delivery or to shop in-store. Delivery is great for people with limited mobility, family considerations or otherwise can’t physically make it to a store. And while I don’t want to set foot in a store, my wife masks up and has gone in on two occasions because she wanted to pick out her own fresh produce.

So I’m curious, how are you, dear Spoon reader, handling your grocery shopping during this pandemic? Are you doing delivery, curbside pickup, or shopping in-store?

The question isn’t just about fear of contracting the coronavirus, it’s also about technology and convenience. Retailers seem to have worked out the kinks that beset online grocery order fulfillment early on during the pandemic. Instacart added hundreds of thousands of gig workers to shop and deliver orders. Amazon’s first full-on grocery store in Woodland Hills, CA went dark so it could focus on fulfilling online orders. And non-traditional companies like restaurant food suppliers have gotten into the consumer grocery delivery game to fill some gaps.

But my question remains, given the choice between delivery, curbside or in-store, how are you getting your groceries? I’d honestly love to know how you handle it in your corner of the world.

Uber Launching Grocery Delivery in U.S. Amidst Record-Setting E-Commerce

Uber announced today that it will launch grocery delivery in select cities this month. The announcement comes at a time when the global COVID pandemic has spurred consecutive monthly record-setting grocery e-commerce sales in the United States.

From the Uber blog post announcing the news:

Starting today, in collaboration with our partner Cornershop, customers in select cities in Latin America and Canada can order groceries through both the Uber and Uber Eats apps. And starting later this month, grocery delivery will be available in Miami, FL and Dallas, TX. In those two cities Eats Pass and Uber Pass members will receive an additional benefit, free grocery delivery on orders over $30. 

According to Grocery Dive, the service will be available through the Uber and Uber Eats apps, where users can select a participating retailer and order their groceries. And though Cornershop is fulfilling orders now, Uber drivers will be able to sign up to make grocery deliveries.

Uber announced last October that it was acquiring a majority stake in Cornershop, an online marketplace for on-demand delivery from supermarkets across Chile, Mexico, Peru and Toronto. That deal still hasn’t gotten formal approval from the Chilean government, though Uber believes that will happen in a matter of days.

This grocery expansion news comes just one day after Uber announced that it was acquiring third-party delivery service Postmates for $2.65 billion. Both the Cornershop and Postmates deals show how Uber is bolstering its Eats delivery business at a time when the COVID pandemic and quarantining is hammering its ride sharing business.

The pandemic is also driving a grocery e-commerce boom. According to surveys from Brick Meets Click, online grocery shopping has had month-after-month of record setting sales as restaurants were shut down and people were forced to shelter in place. With the pandemic showing no signs of slowing down here in the U.S., getting into grocery is a smart move for Uber.

Uber is, however, facing stiff and well-funded competition. Last month, Instacart raised $225 million (and has raised $2.1 billion in total) as it has seen a surge in demand. It was also ratcheting its ranks to 750,000 Shoppers (the gig workers who shop and deliver) to increase delivery availability. Not to mention huge grocery retail players like Walmart and Amazon making and expanding their own delivery programs.

For its part, however, Uber does have a large installed user base from ride sharing and restaurant delivery that it can tap into. Now we’ll have to see what kind of an impact it can make when it comes to getting people groceries.

AiFi to Launch 330 Autonomous Stores by the End of 2021

AiFi, a cashierless checkout startup, announced today that it will deploy 330 new and retrofitted autonomous stores globally by the end of 2021.

AiFi is perhaps best known for its NanoStore, a fully automated pre-fab pop-up retail experience packed inside a small building akin to a shipping container. AiFi’s Orchestrated Autonomous Store Infrastructure and Services (OASIS) tech platform can also be used to retrofit existing retail spaces with autonomous capabilities, allowing shoppers to simply walk in, grab what they want and leave. The system charges them automatically.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, AiFi’s OASIS technology will be powering 330 new autonomous stores that range anywhere between 800 sq. ft. convenience stores to 10,000 sq. ft. grocery stores. The new stores will be primarily located across the U.S. and Europe, with expansion to other parts of the world planned for the future

The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging across the U.S., which could be accelerating the adoption of autonomous or contactless checkout. Fears over the coronavirus have already caused grocery stores to close down salad and hot bars. Automating checkout would remove the necessity of standing in line with other people, limit cashier exposure to the virus, and obviate the need to interact with a payment terminal that lots of other people have touched throughout the day.

To be sure, eliminating the traditional checkout stand would be a huge undertaking, and large grocery chains aren’t exactly nimble when it comes to implementing new technology. Plus cashierless checkout brings up ethical issues around serving populations that are underbanked. Perhaps, however, AiFi will be taking a page out of Zippin’s playbook and only automating part (like one aisle) of a partner’s store rather than retrofitting the entire building.

We won’t have to wait long to see. AiFi says that it is already powering 10 stores in locations around the world including California, Texas, Amsterdam, Paris and Shanghai. AiFi also has partnerships with Albert Heijn, Carrefour, and others it has yet to announce. If AiFi sticks to its schedule, it will be launching an average of 18 stores per month for the next year and a half.

Online Grocery Sales Climbed to $7.2 Billion in June

U.S. grocery e-commerce sales continued to break records as they hit $7.2 billion in June, up 9 percent from May (which saw $6.6 billion in sales), according to a new Brick Meets Click/Mercatus Grocery survey announced today.

The survey, conducted between June 24 – 25, also found that 45.6 million households used delivery and curbside pickup for a larger portion of their grocery needs, and order frequency grew to 1.9 orders per month, up from 1.7 in May.

Online grocery shopping has had a big year, spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic and people sheltering in place. I was particularly interested to see what the June numbers would bring, as many states relaxed their lockdowns restrictions. However, despite re-openings, the coronavirus still loomed large over people’s shopping in June. From the Brick Meet Clicks press announcement:

In June, 44% of all households reported high levels of concern about someone in their household contracting COVID-19, up two percentage points from the previous month. The increase was almost entirely driven by a 9% increase among shoppers in the over-60 age segment since May.

Brick Meets Click noted that retailers of all sizes have been aggressive in expanding capacity to meet the demand for all this increased e-commerce. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve seen this play out where I live, as grocery stores big and small have both launched new online ordering platforms and carved out more space in the parking lot to fulfill pickup orders.

Will record-setting grocery e-commerce continue into the summer? There’s a good chance it will as the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down and restaurants are forced to shut down again. With three full months of pandemic quarantining in place, new habits have definitely formed. And all the confusion around opening/closing/partial opening, people could just force people to throw their hands in the air and stick with online grocery shopping for the rest of the year.

Basket is like Waze for Local Grocery Price Comparison

In these uncertain economic times, it’s more important than ever to get the most for your money, especially when it comes to groceries. But comparison supermarket shopping isn’t exactly easy in the time of COVID. We’re supposed to be limiting our trips to the store, not adding more of them to see where we can get the best deal on eggs.

That’s where Basket comes in. It’s an app for iOS and Android currently in beta that lets users compare the prices of items across multiple grocery stores in their area before leaving the house.

So for instance, after downloading the app I enter my location and select from stores nearby (Walmart, Target, Trader Joe’s, etc.). I compile my usual grocery list, and once I’m done, Basket tells me how much my list costs at each store. That way I can know where I’m getting the best deal and go to that store.

Andy Ellwood, Co-Founder and President of Basket, told me by phone this week that Basket users save an average of 20 percent on their orders.

But Basket also figures that money isn’t the only thing that is valuable to people. In its results, Basket highlights both the cheapest and the nearest store options because you may not want to drive 10 miles out of your way to save five bucks.

The app gets its pricing information from people, called shoppers, who use the Basket app to upload pricing information on a variety of items across the store. Ellwood said that Basket has had around 50,000 of these shoppers over the life of the app, which launched a beta in 2018. On an ongoing basis, the app has a couple hundred to a couple thousand price shoppers per month.

Much like Waze, where Ellwood once worked, many of these shoppers do it just to be a part of the bargain hunting community (read: volunteers). But Basket does engage some “Commerce Moderators” who log a lot of prices, and rewards them with a variety of prize incentives to seek out and upload even more pricing information.

The Basket app is free to download and use, and the company has raised $10 million in funding so far. Basket makes its money by providing pricing data to manufacturers who want to better understand how much items cost at any given time in different areas.

One thing Basket does not have is an e-commerce tie-in. So once you’ve assembled your grocery list, you can’t buy everything at a selected store through the app. You still have to go out and into the store to actually grocery shop. Ellwood said this is type of integration with delivery or curbside pickup is on the Basket roadmap.

Given how the pandemic has created record levels of online grocery shopping, Basket may want to fast-track that type of functionality. Granted, we don’t know how much of that record-setting traffic will become the new normal, but if Basket is supposed to help make my grocery shopping more cost-effective, it should be able to make my trip to the grocery store more efficient.

The Basket app will officially launch out of beta later this summer.

Chipotle Launches a Direct-to-Consumer Virtual Farmers’ Market for Its Suppliers

As if helping reinvent the restaurant weren’t enough, Chipotle is now trying to digitize the farmers’ market concept. Today, the fast casual chain announced the Chipotle Virtual Farmers’ Market, which gives the company’s suppliers a chance to sell their good directly to consumers via e-commerce. 

Four suppliers are currently selling their wares through those online storefronts now: Niman Ranch, Petaluma Creamery, McKaskle Family Farm and Meister Cheese. Each Chipotle supplier gets their own online storefront through which it can sell meat, dairy, grain, and other items (grits!). Chipotle said in today’s press release it is covering hosting fees for the sites (which are powered by Shopify) for two years and “assisting with the development” of the sites.

A quick scan through the shops turns up both items you’d find in a Chipotle burrito (pork, rice, Monterrey Jack cheese) and other food staples (grits!) for the home pantry. 

For consumers, the shopping experience is much like any other e-commerce site out there, and, for those inclined, another way to support small farms. Chipotle making these supplies available to consumers is also an extension of something we saw during the pandemic, when restaurants sold inventory directly to consumers in the midst of panic buying sprees.

No one is panic buying at the moment, but this new virtual farmers’ market powered by a major restaurant chain is another example of the blurred lines happening right now between the restaurant and the grocery store. And with the trajectory of the pandemic uncertain, some restaurants look to be riding this restaurant-as-a-market wave for the foreseeable future.

More importantly, selling directly to consumers is a way for farmers to gain more revenue at a time when the pandemic has crippled sales that would ordinarily be got from in-person farmers’ markets, restaurants, and other traditional channels. Whether tied to a major foodservice brand or no, small farms are currently encouraged to take advantage of selling directly to consumers online in order to build resilience. Judging by the state of the pandemic this week, that resilience will be needed in the near future. 

Refraction AI Officially Launches Robot Grocery Delivery in Ann Arbor, MI

Refraction AI, which makes the three-wheeled autonomous REV-1 delivery vehicle, announced today that it is expanding beyond restaurant meals and into grocery delivery.

The company’s robots are delivering around a three-mile radius in Ann Arbor, MI, and today’s announcement is basically an official unveiling of a program that the company has been testing for months.

If you are in the Ann Arbor delivery and want to check out the delivery service, visit this site that Refraction has created. The company is working with a local grocer called The Produce Station, and it looks like the process is a little kludgey right now. Customers need to visit Produce Station’s Mercato store to see what items are available, and then manually enter the items they want into special form on Refraction’s site. The robot is then dispacted to the store where staffers pack the items into the vehicle before it drivers itself to the delivery location.

It’s understandable that Refraction’s process might not be the smoothest. After all, the company is in the robot business, not the e-commerce business. But it makes me wonder how how the company will connect consumers and robots as it grows beyond Ann Arbor? Will restaurants and grocers have their own REV-1s running back and forth? Or will a third-party delivery service like DoorDash have a fleet of them deployed to make deliveries? Or will it be a combination of both?

Autonomous robot deliveries are attracting more attention during this COVID-19 pandemic as they can reduce human-to-human interactions and, hopefully, human-to-human viral transmission.

Refraction’s REV-1 is a Goldilocks robot, in that its size is right in between the small cooler-sized rover bots of Starship and the big pod-like vehicles of Nuro. This sweet spot of a size, plus the REV-1’s ability to handle inclement weather was one of the reasons we named Refraction AI to our 2020 Food Tech 25 list of innovative companies.

Target Rolls Out Grocery Curbside Pickup Options Nationwide

Target announced today that it is expanding its Order Pickup and Drive Up services for fresh and frozen groceries nationwide. These services will be available in 400 stores by the end of this month and will hit 1,500 stores by the holidays this year.

According to the press announcement, 750 items across produce, dairy, bakery, meat and frozen products (so it doesn’t seem like you can order everything from Target’s grocery section). Orders will be ready for pickup just a few hours after being placed, and there is no extra charge for using the pickup services.

Techcrunch writes that Target won’t be using Shipt, the logistics company it acquired a few years back, for fulfillment. Instead, Target employees will pick and pack the groceries and hand them off.

Having a contactless curbside pickup program is table stakes anymore during this pandemic, as many people still look to avoid actually going in to grocery stores. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted a study from Nielsen that found grocery pickup sales are up 81 percent since the beginning of the year. Retailers like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons are carving out more space for curbside pickups, and Walmart, in particular has a geofenced system so it knows when you arrive.

Having tried curbside pickup from a number of different retailers over the past couple of months, Target’s was always the most frustrating. Some items were available for Drive Up service, while others were only available for in-store pickup — or only available if you shopped in the store yourself. This patchwork of availability made creating some unified e-commerce order across their entire store a mess.

Hopefully this rollout will smooth out these inconsistencies and create another nationwide option for online grocery shoppers who want curbside pickup.

The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report

Thanks to advances in hardware, the internet of things, and food preparation, vending machines today are basically restaurants in a box. They offer high-end cuisine in minutes, require minimal setup time, and have the on-board computing smarts to manage inventory and communicate any issues that arise.

With these capabilities, it’s no wonder the vending machine category was valued at more than $30 billion in 2018, according to Grandview Research, and was anticipated to have a CAGR of 9.4 percent from 2019 through 2025.

Had this report been written even just a few months ago, the main takeaway would have been that vending machines are perfect for high-traffic areas that operate around the clock: airports, corporate offices, college dorms, and hospitals.

But we’re living in a world continuously being shaped and reshaped by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Right now, some form of shelter-in-place orders blanket most of the U.S. Global air travel volume has plummeted, so airports are not busy. Non-essential businesses are closed and people are working from home, not office buildings. And colleges may not hold in-person classes until 2021.

While on the surface, those factors suggest vending machine companies will be yet-another sector wiped out by coronavirus, there has actually never been a better time for the automated vending machine industry. The small footprint and high-end food these devices offer are perhaps more important than ever at a time when minimizing human-to-human contact in foodservice is paramount to doing business. That makes the vending machine market uniquely positioned to capitalize on a post-pandemic world.

This report will define what the automated vending machine space is, list the major players, and present the challenges and opportunities for the market going forward.

Companies profiled in this report include Alberts, API Tech/Smart Pizza, Basil Street, Blendid, Briggo, Byte Technology, Cafe X, Chowbotics, Crown Coffee, Farmer’s Fridge, Fresh Bowl, Le Bread Xpress, Macco Robotics, TrueBird, and Yo-Kai Express.

This research report is exclusive for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

Dumpling Raises $6.5M Series A for Grocery Delivery Platform

Dumpling, an online platform that allows people to start their own grocery shopping and delivery business, announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Floodgate and Fuel Capital. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $10 million.

Unlike Instacart, which is a grocery delivery company that directs independent contractors, Dumpling is a platform for individuals to start their own grocery shopping and delivery business. These business owners, as Dumpling refers to them, set their own pricing and delivery areas, and develop their own clientele. Dumpling provides not only the technical and payment infrastructure for its shoppers, but also coaching on how to build and market their businesses.

I spoke with Dumpling Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Joel Shapiro and Nate D’Anna by phone this week. According to them, this approach means more empowerment and money for its business owners, and more choice for the end customer. Shapiro and D’Anna said that Dumpling shoppers earn $33 per delivery (and that’s a pre-pandemic number, which has since gone up given record setting grocery e-commerce).

Additionally, because Dumpling is not affiliated with any one grocery store, Dumpling shoppers are able to shop at multiple stores for a single order, so a person could get their favorite snack from Trader Joe’s and a six-pack of Coke from Safeway delivered at the same time from the same person.

The system isn’t perfectly efficient yet. Dumpling is not plugged directly into the inventories of store. So instead of tapping on items in an app, a customer may need to write out actual lists or send photos of the products they are looking for.

Dumpling makes its money by charging a 5 percent fee per order, which the business owner can pay or pass on to the customer, as well as a set monthly fee or $5 per transaction to the business owner to be on the platform.

Today’s funding announcement comes on the heels of grocery delivery giant Instacart raising $225 million last week. While Instacart has raised $2 billion so far, Dumpling’s more hands-off, DIY approach to its shoppers could keep it competitive because it pushes the marketing and business building on to its shopper network. Plus, at least so far, Dumpling hasn’t run into the same labor issues that Instacart seems to run afoul of.

Dumpling’s funding is also coming at a time when states are re-opening and people are starting to go back into grocery stores. How much people retain their online grocery shopping habits remains to be seen, but it appears that the peak for online grocery shopping may have passed (at least for now).

There are currently 2,000 Dumpling business owners operating in all 50 states. The company said that it will use its new funding to develop tools that allow its business owners to shop and build out their individual businesses more efficiently.