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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Local Libations

IoT-Led Disruption Powers the Future of the Bar Business

Fans of the Spike TV show, Bar Rescue, are more than aware of the challenges of being a barkeep in a highly competitive market. Issues that include employees pilfering from the till and drinking while on duty are one thing, but over pouring and giving away free drinks are a recipe for disaster—not to mention bankruptcy—for bar owners charged with daily multitasking.

Inventory control systems are crucial to a bar’s success and have been in place for decades. Moving from a pen and paper operation, such processes evolved into the 20th century with tracking spreadsheets and early use of RFID technology. Prime for disruption, though, the hospitality industry has been the focus of IoT investments that offer tighter control over bar inventory management, with some options replicating Amazon’s Dash button. Using web-based technology, the Dash button facilitates replenishment when stocks reach a predetermined level by directly contacting the supplier.

Palo Alto-based Nectar is in the development phase of its product which automates Amazon’s Dash button by automatically reordering spirits when their volume reaches a set threshold. Armed with $4.55 million of fresh financing, Nectar hopes to build a solution which can eventually create a cache of data that can be used for predictive analysis to understand patterns which can help in business development. For example, knowing seasonality trends of various cocktails can allow pre-ordering in bulk which can save a bar owner considerable money. In addition, such advanced inventory control systems can track the habits of individual bartenders by giving them individual IDs that tie to the business’ Point of Sale system. That way, such costly behavior over pouring or an abundance of free drinks can be spotted and remedied.

In addition to Nectar, Bar Fly from a company called Local Libations offers a smart-device-based keg monitoring system. Using geotags attached to the individual kegs, a smartphone app or computer can track the beer volume and provide automatic reordering. Much like Nectar, Bar Fly can compile data used for predictive analysis related such areas as customer drinking patterns and busiest hours for staffing purposes.

Following the success of single-server coffee brewer, Keurig, innovators in the IoT space are racing to take the lead in the home bar market. The current state of the home mixology world consists of a mix of startups, with products approaching the market via crowd funding, and those with “cocktail robots” available at retail. These auto-bartenders come in two flavors—closed loop systems which require the consumer to buy premixed drink pods from the device manufacturer and open-loop systems which allow the home drink master to use his own booze and mixers. In both cases, these countertop marvels connect to a smart device via Wi-Fi and allow the user to select from a myriad of various cocktail choices. The machine, such as Burlingame, Calif.,-based Bernooli, then precisely measures the libations to build the perfect Martini, Bloody Mary, Rob Roy or something more exotic, like a Blue Lagoon or Bahama Mama.

Bernooli uses a smart spout system which, when paired with its proprietary app, uses Bluetooth to light up the bottles required for a given adult beverage. The spout allows precise pouring amounts are for the home user. Others in the race to become the Keurig of the cocktail set include Somabar, Monsieur, and Bartesian.

With so many options in the development pipeline, clearly IoT and the “robot cocktail” space is headed in some interesting directions. Additional market contenders include Picobrew, which uses smart technology to turn consumers into home beer brewmasters.  With another twist to attract the wine connoisseur, D-Vine offers mini tubes of wine correctly cooled and aerated for proper serving.

 

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.