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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Juicero

You Can Now Buy a Juicero and the Coolest Cooler (as Toys)

The food tech landscape is littered with devices that coulda been and companies that had great aspirations but for various reasons failed spectacularly. Now, two of the most infamous hardware failures, the Juicero and the Coolest Cooler, are being resurrected — as toys.

Internet collective MSCHF has dropped its collection of Dead Startup Toys (hat tip to The Verge), featuring five famous tech hardware flameouts: One Laptop Per Child, Theranos Minilab, Jibo, Juicero and Coolest Cooler. Each toy is a mini version of its real-life (well, real dead) counterpart made out of PVC, costing $40 a piece.

Along with the tiny collectibles, MSCHF has also released some deep satire explaining its move, writing on its website:

Behold these beautiful mutants, hoisted on petards of their own solid-aluminum-unibody construction. We salute these voyagers, flown too close to the blood-red suns of their own fever dreams, on wings made of oh-so-flammable dollar bills, whose inexplicably sincere hopes became our most surreal entertainment…

That sharp tongue isn’t spared when it comes to either the Juicero or the Coolest Cooler. Juicero, of course, was the company that raised $120 million and sold a $400 juice machine that squeezed juice from proprietary packets of fruits and veggies. The company died almost overnight when Bloomberg reported that your hands basically worked as well as the machine. Juicero had actually set up a pretty sophisticated supply chain and packaging process that could justify some of its fundraising, but most people only remember the hardware, which, as MSCHF points out, is pretty easy to make fun of:

A teardown of the Juicero machine revealed massive overengineering and production spend clearly approved without input from either a businessperson or production manager. The machine was full of specialized custom-tooled parts, all in service to a fundamentally flawed general operating concept that involved applying force by means of a flat plate with 0 mechanical advantage. This contributed to both its massive cost and remarkable non-utility.

Image via MSCHF

For its part, the Coolest Cooler was an early example of hardware crowdfunding that goes nowhere. The multi-function device (it had a blender and a speaker!) raised $13 million on Kickstarter, but the company behind it was woefully unprepared for the realities of mass production and eventually wound up in hot water with the Oregon Department of Justice. MSCHF sums the whole situation up pretty well, writing:

The Coolest Cooler stands as a cautionary tale for crowdfunding as a whole, and possibly the landmark event in the crowdfunding paradigm’s fall from grace. For that at least we salute it in memoriam.

I’m not sure whom would purchase these toys, but they are a playful reminder that not everything that glitters in food tech is gold. And that even good ideas, when poorly executed, can wind up remaining famous for all the wrong reasons.

3 Tips to Avoid Failure, from the Man behind Juicero and Amazon Echo

In the hardware startup world, the margin between success and failure can be razor-thin. Malachy Moynihan knows a thing or two about both: He was the Chief Product Officer at infamous kitchen hardware startup Juicero, and also led the charge for Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV devices.

At the Smart Kitchen Summit yesterday, he sat down with the Wall Street Journal’s Wilson Rothman to talk about why some tech products succeed — and why others become a cautionary tale.

So how did Juicero go from a startup darling with $120 million in funds to, in Moynihan’s words, “the poster child for Silicon Valley excess and VC ineptitude?” The infamous Bloomberg story may have been the nail in the Juicero coffin, but according to Moynihan there were significant hurdles much earlier. Getting 20 packs of cold-pressed juice to customers every week is a very expensive process that doesn’t have an efficient supply chain in place. “The logistics just don’t scale,” explained Moynihan, which other companies (such as meal kits) are struggling with to this day.

“We should have stayed in the commercial space,” said Moynihan. “We really went after a fully branded experience… with lots of money spent on Facebook doing influencing.”

Moynihan finished with three takeaways for new hardware startups:

Always think about your consumer first.
“If there’s one lesson I learned from Amazon, it’s to always think first about the customer, said Moynihan. To make a successful product, you have to engineer a perfect consumer experience with the minimal amount of friction. Take the Amazon Echo: It cuts out the step of typing on a phone or computer, and reduces the amount of appliances you need on hand.

The first product doesn’t have to be perfect.
“Think very very deeply about the really critical features that you have to have — and the ones that would be nice to have,” said Moynihan. You don’t have to get everything into the first iteration of your product; patience is key. Patience for failure, patience for roadblocks, and patience for consumer acceptance. “The path to a lot of these products is: ‘It won’t work it won’t work it won’t work — oh my God, it worked!” said Moynihan.

Cultivate the press.
That last one may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, but it’s important nonetheless. Good press is critical to the success of any product — especially a consumer-facing hardware one.

Look out for more posts on the panels, companies, and news from the fourth Smart Kitchen Summit!

 

Juicero, Sprig and Teforia Among 2017’s Notable Startup Failures

PitchBook, the financial data and software company, released its 2017 Startup Graveyard list today, highlighting eleven companies that raised more than $1 billion combined in VC funding, and all of whom shut down this year.

Of the eleven notable startup failures, three were in the food tech space: Juicero, Sprig and Teforia. Together, these companies had raised $197 million and had a valuation just shy of $700 million. That they all met an untimely demise should serve as a cautionary ghost story for any company looking to get into, or get more funding for, a high-end drink device or meal delivery service.

Juicero, creator of the connected (and expensive) juice machine, raised $121 million in funding and had a very Icarus-like valuation of $459 million. That is, until word got out that you could squeeze the juice packets with your hands, decimating the company and any value it had created.

And just last week Teforia, the maker of the $1,000 tea infuser, reached a bitter end after raising $17 million (for a tea maker) and reaching a $35 million valuation.

Then there was Sprig, which waded into the competitive world of on-demand food delivery. The service raised $59 million and hit a valuation as high as $169 before shutting down in May, with the company noting the challenges of scaling meal production and delivery.

While the food tech startups on the list raised their fair share of VC funding, its not like the sector was that egregious. Juicero, Sprig and Teforia almost seem frugal compared with Jawbone, which raised a whopping $542 million and was worth $1.5 billion at one point before crashing and burning.

Nor should this list be interpreted that food tech is dead or on life support. Far from it. There are a number of successes to celebrate this year such as InstantPot, Anova and PicoBrew. And the meal kit companies… well, to be honest, there will probably be more hardships to endure as the space matures, and its likely only a company like Amazon has the level of infrastructure needed to truly make it work.

Food tech has a lot of promise (everyone eats and drinks), and its share of pitfalls. Earlier this week, Mike Wolf here at The Spoon wrote a great piece examining why some smart kitchen companies fail while others succeed. Two of his takeaways were that products should offer consumers new capabilities that would otherwise be too difficult or time consuming without it, and a product should be either affordable or provide immense value.

If you can fulfill those criteria, it’s less likely anyone will dance on your company’s grave.

Podcast: Juicero is Dead

Over the past six months, there probably hasn’t been a company more roundly mocked in startup land than Juicero. The funmaking started after a Bloomberg article showed how one can squeeze the company’s juice packs by hand, essentially making superfluous the company’s $400 juicer.

When you raise $120 million, this is a PR problem, one the company seemingly never recovered from.

And so this week, the company announced it is shutting down.

But the company’s problems went beyond an expensive juicer. On today’s podcast, Ashley Daigneault and I discuss how the company had created a nearly impossible logistical and supply chain problem almost from the outset.

We also discuss Miele’s new RF solid state powered wall oven and Sharp’s deal with SideChef, as well as Mike’s trip to Tokyo for the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.

Juicero Announces It Is Shutting Down

Juicero, the high-profile juice startup that became a symbol of Silicon Valley excess after a scathing Bloomberg article showed their $400 juicer wasn’t required to squeeze the company’s juice packs, announced today it is shutting down immediately.

It’s a surprisingly fast downfall for a startup that launched just a year and a half ago. Let’s take a look at how we got here:

A Look At The Timeline

The company, which raised approximately $120 million, showed the first signs of trouble last fall when founder and CEO Doug Evans abruptly stepped aside and handed the reins to Jeff Dunn, a former Coca Cola exec who had previously been CEO of Campbell’s Fresh.  The move, likely pushed by a Juicero board that included Campbell’s Soup (which had invested $13.5 million in Juicero), was a sign they were getting impatient and felt the company needed an exec with experience scaling a beverage business.

Dunn’s first major move as CEO was to drop the price from $699 to $399.  A significant price cut early on in a product’s life cycle is usually never a good sign and, in retrospect, this was the first signal the company was missing its sales goals by a large margin.

In March, the company struck a deal with Whole Foods to serve glasses of juice at Whole Foods. It was a good move for a company who had had some success in professional markets (restaurants and cafeterias), but the trial was small, with only 11 Whole Foods in southern California offering up Juicero juice for $5 a pop.

And then came the Bloomberg article. The piece, which focused on the fact the Juicero juice packs could be hand-squeezed, soon became a viral sensation.

And last month, things looked dire as the company announced layoffs of 25% of staff and planned to accelerate a move to a lower-cost, second generation juicer.

What Happened?

My feeling is Juicero’s problems weren’t so much in a high-priced juicer but had more to do with a hugely challenging supply chain issue of its making. The problem, as I saw it, was this: the company was the sole source of juice packs for their juicer which they needed to produce in each region given the lifespan of each packet, but to make those juice packs they needed to build more factories, which would require massive amounts of capital.

That’s it. While most focused on a high-priced juicer, the part of the story most missed is the company had spent a large chunk of their capital building their factory to make juice packs. When I interviewed Doug Evans last year, he told me they had initially tried to find a company to make juice packs, but since no one could readily meet their exacting standards, they had decided to build their own.

It was then their fate was sealed.

The company ended up building a factory in Los Angeles, which meant they could easily supply juice packs to the California market (where they launched), but I always wondered how they could move beyond that. Think about it: The juice packs had a total life span of seven days.  The juicer, which wouldn’t press juice beyond the expiration date, essentially imposed a ticking clock the company had to beat once a juice pack shipped.

This, I think, was what did Juicero in.

The company as much as said this in an open letter on their website:

In order to fulfill our mission, we announced last month that we would shift our resources to focus on lowering the price of the Press and Produce Packs. We began identifying ways that we could source, manufacture and distribute at a lower cost to consumers.

During this process, it became clear that creating an effective manufacturing and distribution system for a nationwide customer base requires infrastructure that we cannot achieve on our own as a standalone business. We are confident that to truly have the long-term impact we want to make, we need to focus on finding an acquirer with an existing national fresh food supply chain who can carry forward the Juicero mission.

Where To From Here?

In the letter, the company indicated they are up for sale and are looking at acquirer with a national fresh food distribution chain. I think its telling that this company is not Campbell’s Fresh, a company that invested in Juicero (through its parent company’s investment fund) and is headed by its former CEO.

Bottom line, the company’s self-imposed supply chain restrictions are going to be difficult to overcome. The Juicero brand, somewhat tainted by the viral Bloomberg story, isn’t enough to attract an investor at this point. The company’s IP around building a cold-pressed juice machine and supply chain might be of interest to some company with designs are tapping into a fresh-squeezed juice product, but chances are it will be at firesale prices.

Goodbye Juicero, we hardly knew ye.

Juicero To Lay Off 25% of Staff As It Accelerates Plans For Gen-2 Juicer

Juicero, the high-profile connected juicer startup founded by cold-press juice pioneer Doug Evans, is laying off 25% percent of its staff in an attempt to lower costs as it accelerates the development of a second generation juicer.

According to a report in Fortune, Juicero CEO Jeff Dunn sent a letter to employees which said the company is planning to lay off a quarter of the staff as part of a plan to lower costs as it transitions away from a premium pricing strategy.

“The current prices of $399 for the Press and $5 – $7 for produce Packs are not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire,” wrote Dunn.

Much of these struggles come in the wake of a Bloomberg article in April that showed how the company’s juice packs can be squeezed by hand without the company’s $400 juicers. The article and accompanying video resulted in dozens of similar blog posts all asking essentially the same question: How on earth could a company raise $120+ million to build a $400 juicer when all you need is your hands?

As I wrote back in April, Juicero brought much of the crisis on themselves. Not only did their premium pricing strategy for the juice press and pods rub many the wrong way, the company also brought out the snark with talk of their product as a “platform”.  With popular shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley mocking the excesses and faux gravitas of today’s tech entrepreneurs, more and more people are quick to question why every gadget has to be viewed as more than just a gadget.

However, I also felt the Bloomberg article didn’t paint a full picture of the company. While the post’s authors pointed out the folly of investing $120 million in a juicer that could be replaced with one’s hands, they never discussed how the company spent much of that initial investment to create an entire juice pack factory and delivery supply chain system. The article also failed to mention that while pretty much any form of automated kitchen task performed today such as blending, cutting or squeezing can be done without a machine at a lower price, people have shown they are willing to pay for convenience in the form of task automation. It’s this very idea of paying for convenience that is the foundational principle behind pretty much any store that sells tools, whether it’s the corner hardware store or a Williams-Sonoma.

Nitpicks of the Bloomberg article aside, the reality is the company needs to lower pricing to reach a bigger audience. As I wrote in January when the company dropped the price to $399, while they are still in a unique position as the only company making a pod-based cold-press juicer, they needed to drop pricing to reach significant growth.  The company’s next-generation juicer, expected to be priced around $200, could stimulate significant demand, particularly if the company could just figure out how to lower the price of its juice packs to three bucks or even lower.

Long-term, the company has an even bigger challenge: figuring out how to scale its juice pack production. With only one production plant currently (located in Los Angeles), they will eventually need to figure out how to get packs to customers around the company quickly. The answer is likely more production facilities which, of course, will likely require tens of millions of dollars to build.

CEO Dunn, which at one point oversaw Coca Cola operations for North America, clearly has ability to scale production and distribution of a drink. The challenge will be whether he can now do it with a startup that has much more limited resources than his former employer.

Podcast: Here’s A Fresh, Hand-Squeezed Podcast For Your Enjoyment

This week’s guest is Home:On’s Richard Gunther. Richard and I discuss the Bloomberg story about Juicero that showed you can bypass the company’s $400 juicer and squeeze the Juicero packs with your hands. We also talk about the ongoing story of Ring’s acquihire of Zonoff, the acquisition of iDevices by Hubbell, IKEA’s smart lights, and Samsung investment in Nomiku and the August’s new Z-Wave smart lock.

Enjoy!

Why Did The Internet Hate On Juicero?

The Internet can be a cruel place.

That’s especially true when you or your company becomes the subject of a widely shared article where everyone piles on and has some fun at your expense. That’s exactly what happened last week to Juicero, maker of a connected juicer, when Bloomberg posted an article entitled Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze. In the article, the authors “scooped” that users could squeeze Juicero’s juice packs with their hands and get a glass of juice without using the company’s $400 cold press juicing machine.

The article soon went viral, resulting in thousands of tweets and retweets and dozens of follow on thought pieces that pointed to Juicero as an example of Silicon Valley excess. ‘Look’, they all seemed to say, ‘a company raised $120 million to create a $400 juicer for the home and you don’t even need it.’

So, was the article fair? And why exactly did the Internet decide that Juicero was so deserving of mockery?

To figure that out, let’s take first take a look at the article that caused all the commotion.

The Bloomberg Article

The article’s main focus centers around the fact you can squeeze the juice packs with your hands to pour a glass of juice. Bloomberg even created a video titled “Do You Need a $400 Juicer?” in which they showed a side by side comparison of a person hand-squeezing the Juicero packs and the Juicero machine squeezing a pack to create a glass of juice. The video is narrated by a text overlay that declares at the end of two minutes, “no expensive juice machine needed.”

The authors go on to tell us about how two investors in Juicero were surprised to learn that you could squeeze the Juicero packs and get roughly the same amount of juice. They tell us about how “one of the investors said they were frustrated with how the company didn’t deliver on the original pitch and that their venture firm wouldn’t have met with Evans if he were hawking bags of juice that didn’t require high-priced hardware.”

In short, the article has all the necessary ingredients to create a collective Internet gasp, in which everyone agrees about the silliness of investing in company that created an expensive juicer that you don’t really need.

But was Juicero deserving of all this mockery? And, in the end, was it silly to invest $120 million in a company that created a cold press juicer for the home that users could make superfluous with their own hands?

Here are my thoughts:

Juicero brought much of this on themselves.

At this point, every company should know that by proclaiming that your company is creating a “platform” and is trying to, in its own way, change the world, you are setting yourself up for some take-no-prisoners commentary when you stumble.

Take this tweet from CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal:

In today’s world where shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley regularly skewer the tech industry’s self-importance, any talk about changing the world with high-priced products that are largely targeted at higher-income consumers is ripe for poking some fun at.

You Can Hand Squeeze The Juice Packs. So What?

Yes, you can hand-squeeze the juice packs. But here’s the thing: if you’re paying $5 to $8 for a glass of juice, chances are you’re the kind of person who will pay for the convenience of a $400 juicer to do that for you every morning.

Before you disagree with me, I’d suggest to first do the math: If you are a home juicer who wants to spend $50 a week on Juicero juice packs, note this will come to about $2500 a year. If you have enough money to spend $2500 on your juice habit, you have enough money to spend $400 on a device to save you a little time and hand fatigue every morning.

This doesn’t even consider professional markets, where Juicero is finding some early success, where multitasking restaurant or cafe workers don’t have 2 minutes to squeeze juice from raw vegetables and fruit into a glass.

The Investment Was Significant, But It Was For More Than Just a Home Juicer

What the Bloomberg article fails to mention is the $120 million invested in Juicero went to more than just the creation of an expensive home juicer, but also to the creation of a full delivery system, which includes the company’s own factory to make the juice packs.

Back when Doug Evans was looking to create what became the Juicero, he tried to find a food packing facility that could create his juice packs, which would involve taking raw fruits and vegetables, putting into small delivery pods, and getting them out to the end user in a matter of a day or two since the packs had a shelf life of about a week.

In the end, he couldn’t find anyone that could meet those timelines needed for this new system so he decided to create his own factory.

My guess is much of the capital went towards the creation of this full end-to-end pack based delivery system.  Sure, that doesn’t hide the fact that $120 million is a significant amount of capital to entrust to a CEO who’s previous juice company eventually went out of business (ed note: after Evans had sold it off to another company), but I think the vision is a bigger one than was portrayed in the Bloomberg story.

It’s Might Be a Platform. But It Is Definitely A New Delivery System…For Juice

Above I discussed that where Juicero got into trouble is when they called their cold press juicer and pack-based delivery system a ‘platform’. The word platform is an overused one today in Silicon Valley, in part because VCs so love a word that connotes a bigger idea and ultimate return on investment, especially when the alternative in the hardware world is something that might be termed a “gadget”.

Who wants to invest $120 million in a gadget?

What the company probably should do more is talk about their end-to-end delivery system for fresh juice, which is in a sense something no company had created before. Sure, you can buy “cold-pressed” bottles of juice at the grocery store, but those bottles were cold-pressed in a factory, not in your home. You can also press juice from raw ingredients the old fashioned way, but the result is a mess and 30-60 minutes of your morning down the drain after you’ve cut, sliced, juiced and cleaned up.

Bottom Line: My view is the Juicero juicer and delivery system is focused on creating more convenience for the home juicer in a market in which hardware alone is a $3 billion business. That’s before one factors in how much people spend on the raw ingredients for juice, which I am sure far exceeds the amount spent on hardware.

In creating its juicer and delivery system, they spent a lot of money, and may have over-engineered the juicer and added extra cost to the machine. But, they’ve also likely created defendable intellectual property and a delivery model that could see significant traction in both professional and home markets over time if they can defend that IP.

Will it pay off? Too soon to tell. But regardless of the ultimate end result for the company, I don’t think the fact you can hand-squeeze their juice packs will be the determining factor in the success or non-succes of the company.

You Can Now Drink Juicero Juice At Whole Foods For $5 A Pop

If four hundred bucks is still a little steep for you get into the Juicero business, don’t worry: if you live in southern California, you can now head down to the local Whole Foods and throw down some Green Zing for five bucks a glass. The two companies announced this week that Juicero cold-pressed juice will be available at 11 locations across southern California.

Whole Foods is a perfect match for Juicero. The food retailer’s high-income shoppers expect to pay a premium for healthy and fresh food, and $5 a glass is a bargain compared to what you pay at your local juice bar.

For Juicero, this is just another move further into the pro market. As I wrote last June, the company has been finding early success in the pro market ever since the launch of the cold press juicer, in large part because Juicero provides a way for on-site pressing without the huge cost of a professional presser or having to put a giant machine in a space-constrained kitchen.

The company started its relationship with Whole Foods last spring when the food retailer launched in Silverlake, California. Under this new expansion, each location will feature four to seven juice blends and from one to three Juicero machines. Consumers will insert their own packs and pour their own juices in the store.

What strikes me most about this announcement is the pricing. It’s unusual that a price at retail would be lower than that for the home consumer, but that’s exactly what we have with this new announcement. A glass of juice at Whole Foods will go for $5 vs. $7 per pack for the Juicero home consumer.  Normally retail pricing is higher since the store has to add in its own margin. My guess is Whole Foods made the lower price a requirement of doing business and Juicero complied.

Lower pricing is a trend lately for Juicero, which dropped the price of the juicer to $399 (from $699) a couple months ago. The company’s new CEO, Jeff Dunn, comes from the high-volume packaged good food market (Coca Cola and Campbells) and looks like they are trying to push down the gas pedal on Juicero’s growth.

Juicero Drops Price $300 As First Clone Comes To Market

When Juicero first announced its connected cold press juice machine, all anyone could talk about was the price.

Sure, a seven hundred dollar price tag is enough to induce sticker shock, but when you raise north of $100 million to build the first Keurig-like pod system to make cold-press juice at home – and even build your own pod factory in California to achieve such a feat – a higher price makes some sense.

Still, despite early success in the restaurant and work markets for their connected juicer, the company’s management knew it would need to bring their price down if they were to find success in the consumer market.

So now they have. The company just announced a $300 price reduction, making their connected juicer now just $399.

Why now? According to company CEO Jeff Dunn, they decided on a permanent price drop only after the company saw orders surge to twice their normal rate after a Black Friday sale.

But here’s the thing: increased unit demand should not have been a surprise. Lower pricing is the most important level to pull if you want to increase unit sales. It’s clear management thinking changed along the way since they had originally planned to lower prices a year to 18 months from now with the launch of their second-generation juicer.

One reason for lowering the price could be increased competition. Recently at CES, a Juicero clone by the name of Juisir was on display and, before long, the product showed up on Kickstarter.  (Interesting story about the man behind Juisir, Leo Chen, a Chinese pharmaceutical heir who had a previous hit with his Nespresso clone for tea).

Admittedly, the Juicero price drop is probably not a direct response to the arrival of the Juisir, a product that may not ever ship in the US since it looks to violate some of Juicero’s intellectual property.

Still, company management probably saw the writing on the wall. Juicero is currently in a competitive window where they are the only product on the market with a pod-based cold-press juicer. They also recently hired a new CEO from Coca-Cola with experience running a large consumer beverage operation at scale. And, make no doubt, competition will likely come if Juicero shows the model works.

The company’s board could have prodded management to make a price drop. With over $100 million invested, they no doubt want to see hockey stick like growth curves, something they were never going to see at a $700 price point. So with competition coming, anxious investors, and a new CEO who built a career scaling large beverage companies, the Juicero price drop makes sense.

And after all, in Silicon Valley, timing is always of the essence.

 

Meet 5 Entrepreneurs Changing the Urban Food System

The urban food system is a living organism, and it’s never been changing so quickly. That’s why Robyn Metcalfe started Food + City last year, a part of The University of Texas at Austin that is mostly an incubator for radical technology startups trying to change the food landscape. Last week Food + City announced the finalists in the 2017 Food + City Challenge Prize, and some of the projects are so intriguing that we had to highlight them.

You may recognize Metcalfe’s name for many reasons. She’s married to Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet, and she has a pretty impressive CV of her own: A food historian and research scholar, she’s written three books, taught at universities for years, and is a regular at events like SXSW and Tedx.

Here are five finalists whose companies echo the hottest themes in technology right now.

Food Tracking

Increasingly customers want to know where their food came from, along every step of the supply chain.

Slovenian company Prospeh’s goal is to increase food’s transparency for the end consumer: Its OriginTrail platform traces each meat, dairy, and vegetable product back to the farm, and its Foodko distribution sharing network allows you to order food and have it delivered directly to your door.

Meanwhile Florida-based FreshSurety wants to reduce the amount the fresh produce industry wastes (currently $200 billion) by allowing grocery stores, specialty stores, and the like to track a product’s shelf life by carton for only a few cents per case. Local Libations targets the producers themselves: Barfly, its keg-monitoring system, allows breweries to track their kegs’ location and volume in real time so that they can better serve the restaurants, bars, and so on that offer their beer. All of these remind me to some degree of what Juicero is doing with its juice packs.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The call to be more judicious with our food and food packaging is never ending, and serious, as people increasingly want greener and greener products and systems.

Brooklyn-based Rise makes “beer flour” out of barley mash, a byproduct of the brewing process. They claim their dark-roasted porter and premium ale flours, for example, are gluten free and contain more protein than chicken. People have been using that spent grain to make dog treats, but who knows: Even cricket flour (yes, for human consumption) has become a big thing lately.

On a more serious note, Evaptainers wants to reduce the amount of electricity that we use with its mobile refrigeration technology that employs only sun and water. It’s not super high tech, but it is part of the growing trend to use solar power in the kitchen.

All of the finalists are pretty fascinating; check out the full list here. Over the next 12 weeks they’ll be meeting with mentors to prepare for Showcase Day in February, when one will win a cash prize, among other opportunities designed to jumpstart their business.

 

 

 

The Year in Food Delivery

Despite a distinct cooling off of investment in the food delivery space this year, some big names like Uber, Google, and David Chang threw their hats in the ring.

That’s because the online food delivery market is estimated around $210 billion, with companies like FreshDirect raising $189 million in the past 12 months. It’s become such a pervasive part of our way of life that Google even added a food-delivery shortcut to Maps. And there are plenty of food-delivery crowdfunding projects to go around.

But enough with the numbers. Here are the highlights in this space over the past 12 months.

More Big Players Joined the Party

This year everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Google started to ship fresh food to customers in California through Google Express. Instacart and the Food Network launched a meal-kit delivery service, and Square acquired startup Maine Line Delivery in Philadelphia to boost Caviar. Meanwhile Facebook and Foursquare made it easier to order food from within their apps through Delivery.com.

NYC darling chef David Chang decided to blow up the entire idea of a nice restaurant by launching Ando, a restaurant that only does deliveries, and he raised the bar on delivery food everywhere by launching Maple, his own delivery service that promises a daily delicious menu.

Plus, where would the year be without a few gimmicks? Taco Bell and Whole Foods both came up with ChatBots that help you order food or suggest recipes, respectively, solely through the power of emojis. And Domino’s will now let you order pizza with one tap on your Apple Watch.

The Year of UberEats

So far I haven’t mentioned the biggest player, though: Uber. The company has had quite the year in food delivery. It shut down Instant Delivery in New York City, then launched UberEats in both the U.S. and London. Next UberEats drivers staged protests over the way the pay structure has been changed, and in November a courier filed a lawsuit against the company for missing food delivery tips. Yikes.

All of this commotion from big names and turmoil within UberEats suggest that the food delivery space is still young enough that no one has solved some of the primary problems within it. Companies are grabbing on to any stronghold they see (emojis! self-driving trucks! drones! more drones!), without regard to the longevity of the solution. Uber has faced the brunt of this fast-paced growth, but we expect to see more struggles in the coming years for other players as well.

Eat Local

This year the quest to eat healthily expanded even more into food delivery. Whole Foods hinted at a “meal solution spectrum” with some sort of delivery component in the future. Good Eggs, which many thought was defunct by this point, rose from the ashes with a $15 million round of funding to help it deliver local, quality food.

And Amazon, never one to be shown up, expanded its Amazon Fresh program to Boston, among other major cities. The difference here is that Boston customers can shop from local markets, a feature that we imagine will be implemented elsewhere if it’s successful in Beantown.

You Say Potato, I Say Share Economy

In such a young and moneyed space, different business models are flying around faster than those drones I mentioned earlier.

Some want to deliver fresh ingredients to customers to help simplify cooking at home. Juicero, for example, delivers prepackaged ingredients for green juice, made in its blender that doesn’t even require cleaning. Similarly, Raised Real wants to deliver ingredients for homemade baby food, thereby making it that much easier to make your baby’s food from scratch (sounds ambitious to me).

Speaking of raising babies and tapping new markets, Drizly raised $15 million for its liquor delivery service, among other parts of its ecommerce model. And DoorDash added alcohol to its food delivery options in California (what about the rest of us?!).

Meanwhile Foodhini calls itself a “for profit social enterprise” and delivers ethnic food made by immigrant chefs: Foodhini and the chefs each receive $2.50 from each meal, after costs.

And BringMe wants to out-Uber Uber by combining delivery with the share economy in Fairfax, VA, enlisting regular folks to deliver food as “bringers.” There are already a few models out there like this, such as Favor in Texas and Tennessee, and we expect to see more too.

Of course, while all of these business models are innovative and interesting, none of them beat the ultimate and original delivery food: pizza.