Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

lunch

Here Are Four Tech-Powered Lunchboxes That Might Help You Fight Lunchflation

Everything is getting more expensive lately, and food is near the top of the list.

For those of you who work outside of the home (and don’t have free and tasty food as a work perk), you’re probably trying to figure out how to fight the suddenly very real problem of lunchflation. The easiest and most obvious way is to pack your own lunch, but often times food tossed in a brown bag or a plain old lunchbox (Evil Knievel or otherwise) doesn’t stay warm or cold enough or whatever needs to be done to optimize freshness.

Luckily for you, we live in an era of feature-packed lunchboxes. Models with everything from temperature zones to hydro flasks to stackable compartments and more give everyone from school kids to lunch-toting nine-to-fivers an abundance of options for bringing a meal along for the day.

And things are about to get even better. A new generation of tech-powered lunchboxes is on its way to help make eating homemade lunches outside the home an even better experience. Below I take a look at four of these new options coming to market for those looking to pack up their lunch for work or school:

The Sunnyside Solar-Powered Lunchbox

The Sunnyside lunchbox features a solar panel on the top of the lunchbox to charge its 10000mAh power bank, which powers the onboard cooling and heating (or both). The Sunnyside’s heating system utilizes induction coils to heat the food, and the built-in cooler uses coolant and fans to chill the food.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the company claims the whole thing can be thrown in the dishwasher – including the solar panel top and the electronics-filled bottom. Even so, I would definitely hand-wash the box and lid since I don’t think it’s a good idea to put any electronics in a dishwasher.

For some, a solar-powered lunchbox may not make sense, especially if you mostly work inside an office, live in a less-sunny locale (hello from Seattle), or don’t get a chance to put the box outside during your busy workaday routine. That said, my guess is the Sunnyside – which has a USB port to charge phones with the power bank – can also be charged via USB like a typical power bank.

The Sunnyside debuts on Kickstarter later this week and will go for $59 backer price and for $125 retail.

The Steambox Steam-Heating Lunchbox

While a plain-old thermos or insulated bowl might keep your meal mostly warm until lunchtime, why not add a little steam to heat things up and keep your food moist? That’s the idea behind the Steambox, a steam-enabled lunchbox that debuted on Kickstarter last year and made a splash at CES in January.

The Steambox features a sealable inner container, two steam outlets, an app, and Bluetooth connectivity to control and monitor your device (it also has on-device on/off controls) and a bamboo lid.

The Steambox has shipped to backers, but if you want to buy one now, you can order on the website (if you’re ordering this month, you’ll have to wait a couple of months before it’s shipped).

The Jarsty Food Storage System

The Jarsty system isn’t a lunchbox so much as a food prep system, where the food containers can be used to store meals, either raw or fully cooked. The Jarsty can also be used in the microwave and heat (or fully cook) the meals. The containers, which are vacuum-sealable and can be thrown in the dishwasher, come in various colors.

I could envision committed meal-preppers storing a week’s worth of meals in advance in a Jarsty system. The company behind Jasty just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign, but I imagine they’ll make a purchase option available on their website soon.

The Forabest Electric Lunchbox

While all o of the other lunchboxes above are not quite here yet, there are a variety of electric lunchboxes you could buy today on Amazon and other online retailers. The Forabest electric heating lunchbox is one of the most popular, and you can buy it on Amazon today for about $40. The system features a car charger and 110V power cord and takes about 30 minutes to warm a meal.

Minnow Launches its Lunch Delivery Pods in Portland, OR

Minnow, which makes IoT-connected cubbies for lunch deliveries in office buildings, is swapping one Portland for another as it officially launches its business.

Though the company began in Portland, Maine back in October of 2017, when it came time to go live, Minnow picked Portland, Oregon as its launch city, where it has installed its pods in seven different locations. The company has also moved its headquarters from Maine to Seattle, where it believes it will have access to more talent and capital.

As my colleague Mike Wolf wrote previously (when the company went by the name Kadabra), Minnow essentially makes an Amazon locker for food. You could also think of it as an Eatsa/Brightloom service, but for offices. Minnow installs their pods, which house 20 different cubbies, in office buildings. Office workers use either SMS or the mobile web to pre-order their lunch from a rotating menu of local restaurants. Once the restaurant completes the orders, Minnow then delivers all the orders at once at a designated time, putting each order in its own cubby. To collect their lunch, the recipient just goes to the Minnow pod, clicks in a special mobile link and the cubby housing their food is opened.

There are actually a few benefits to this office cubby approach. For the restaurant, it consolidates a bunch of orders first thing in the morning, so they start the day with some revenue and can more easily manage fulfillment since all the orders are being picked up at the same time.

For the building locations, it serves as a tech-forward amenity to attract tenants, and it can help reduce the number of delivery people coming in and out of the building. Instead of ten different delivery people for ten different lunch orders at ten different times in the morning, there is just the one drop off.

For office workers, this type of asynchronous approach means that they don’t have to wait around for a lunch delivery person, or have that delivery person arrive during an important meeting. Lunch is delivered at a set time and waits in the cubby until pickup. Additionally, the delivery fee for Minnow is just $1 and there’s no tipping or extra service fees that often come with other third-party delivery services, so it can be a more economical way to get your meal delivered.

There are limitations to Minnow, however, especially as it gets started. It offers a rotating menu featuring just one restaurant a day per location, so there isn’t a ton of variety. And you have to lock in your lunch order early on in day, so there isn’t a lot of wiggle room if plans change. Also, with just 20 cubbies available (for now), the service can sell out in busy offices with lots of people, and those cubbies aren’t temperature controlled, so your hot stuff can get cold if you don’t grab it in time.

But as noted, Minnow is just starting out and will be ironing out some of these bumps as it grows. The company has raised more than one million dollars in seed funding, and has three revenue streams: it collects an amenity fee from the office building, it takes a cut of the sales it gathers for the restaurants, and it gets that delivery fee.

Minnow’s approach is similar to the Outpost delivery system Sweetgreen put in place a couple years back. Though the advantage to having a Minnow system is the ability to order from more than just Sweetgreen.

And like Byte Technology, Minnow is staking its territory in the middle ground of office lunches. It’s a meal solution for offices that can’t afford full-on catering or an on-site chef, but still want to provide an easier way for workers to eat on-site. It would be great if Minnow could work with offices to enable meal subsidies to provide an extra perk and incentive to workers (Minnow says this feature is on its roadmap).

If Minnow takes off, it’s next step will be raising more money so it can grow beyond PDX, PDQ.

Sifted Wants to Be the One-Stop Solution for the Catered Office Lunch

Say you’re a newish tech company looking to attract coveted young programmers to your startup. How do you entice them?

One trend more and more offices are looking to is catered lunches. But unless you’re a Google or a Facebook with a giant in-house team constantly making fresh food on site, you’ll have to choose a catering partner. And that’s where the options start to stack up: Do you want to order directly from local restaurants? Farm the selection and ordering process out to a middleman? Put a bunch of cold cuts and a salad bar out and call it a day?

Jess Legge and Kimberly Lexow co-founded Sifted four years ago to simplify the ways offices handle catered lunches. The Atlanta-based catering operation serves workplaces which invest heavily in lifestyle perks. But unlike most other services, Sifted handles the entire catering process in-house, from ingredient sourcing to menu planning to food prep and delivery.

Monday through Friday, the company offers two lunch options: one with meat, one vegetarian. All of Sifted’s food is served buffet-style. Pricing depends on the size of staff required and frequency of service. Sifted company currently has around 150 staff.

Throughout our conversation, Legge kept repeating one phrase: “We really want to become your single food vendor.” However, that definition seems chiefly narrowed on lunch. Legge told me that Sifted will also do Happy Hours and snack services, but their main focus is midday eating.

According to Legge, Sifted’s main draw is that its entire operation is controlled in-house. The company has a chef team in each of their cities — Atlanta, Austin, Denver, Seattle, Nashville, and, next month, Phoenix — which work out of commercial kitchen spaces. Sifted also has a staff to set up and serve food. This level of control gives more transparency to Sifted’s office partners (they always know exactly where the food is coming from), and also gives the company the flexibility to pivot and adjust offerings based on diner feedback.

This is where Sifted can really differentiate itself. Every day, Sifted staff record metrics for production, worker lunch participation, etc. After service, all leftovers are weighed, to inform decisions about future food offerings. For example, based off of leftovers, Sifted could surmise that a particular office loved the Eggplant Parmesan but wasn’t a fan of the Chicken Parmesan, and update their menus accordingly. “Data drives us,” Legge emphasized.

Sifted has another value-add: its crusade against food waste. Legge told me Sifted tries to source the most sustainable ingredients possible, including over-supplied product and “ugly” produce that other food companies might pass over. The company also recently partnered with Copia, an excess-food donation platform, to give each day’s leftover food to those in need. It will be the first of Copia’s partners to donate 100 percent of its uneaten food to local nonprofits.

Reducing the amount of food you donate or throw away is just smart business. But it’s also a smart marketing move in a climate where people — especially millennials — are caring more and more about things like sustainability.

Sifted will need to use every card in its hands to distinguish itself in the crowded corporate catering space, especially since many of its competitors are expanding quickly and raising hefty funds along the way. Chewse raised $19 million for “family style” catering, Oh My Green raised $20 million, and ezCater raised an eye-popping $100 million. However, there’s also been lots of consolidation in the space: Peach laid off 33 percent of its staff, Square bought Zesty, and EAT Club acquired Farm Hill.

Legge is aware of the intense competition in the corporate catering space. But she’s adamant that Sifted’s end-to-end business model gives them a leg up, despite their lack of funding. “With Sifted, eaters know exactly what they’re eating and what to expect,” she said.

So far, Sifted has very intentionally avoided fundraising. Legge explained to me that they want to grow organically, without being beholden to investors’ “grow quickly” mentalities. This strategy is a double-edged sword. Without investor pressure the startup might be able to avoid the bust that has befallen other office catering companies in the past year. Then again, less money = less fuel for growth.

Sure, companies could work with small local caterers and get the same level of transparency and consistency in the food they order. But Sifted is taking that type of intimate partnership and applying it to each of their locations across the country, all while maintaining an ethos of sustainability. That might be an attractive enough option to entice more partnerships with offices across the country — and it’s certainly better than a sub-par platter of cold cuts.

Should Other Cities Follow Mountain View’s Free Office Lunch Ban?

Growing up, my Pappy Albrecht used to say, “Life’s not fair and there are no free lunches.” This bit of wisdom will be especially true for some Facebook employees moving into their new offices this Fall, as Mountain View, CA passed a rule that will prohibit the social network from offering free lunches inside their new location.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that as Facebook settles into its new Village at San Antonio office park:

“Under Mountain View’s rules for the Village complex, meals within the offices can’t be subsidized by more than 50 percent on a regular basis. Facebook can fully subsidize employees if they go to restaurants that are open to the public.”

This is, of course, about money. Rather than cloistering up in their shiny new offices, Mountain View wants those thousands of employees interacting with and buying meals from local businesses. Though the rule was enacted back in 2014, it’s even more relevant today as part of a larger discussion about income disparity, especially in the Bay Area, which has become all but unaffordable unless you’re living large on stock options.

Free lunches are table stakes anymore for tech companies competing to attract talent. Offering free meals intentionally keeps workers in the office so they can theoretically be more productive. But is effectively banning this perk the right solution?

I’m honestly not sure. There is something unsettling about the government making rules about where and how a private business’ employees can eat. But at the same time, tech companies have exacerbated wealth inequality, don’t really seem to be doing anything about it, and keeping employees inside office walls on purpose keeps them from going out into the world and supporting local communities. Maybe they need a little nudge.

So far, other Bay Area cities are shying away from their own free lunch bans, but if Mountain Views’ move winds up generating substantial income, other municipalities might look to follow suit. If so, this could have a ripple effect on the rapidly maturing corporate catering market, which has seen real money flow into it. A number of corporate catering companies such as Hungry, ZeroCater and ezCater have raised millions of dollars just this year. A widespread regulatory revolt would negatively impact the sector.

Who knows? Maybe Facebook will embrace this new rule and use, or more likely create, a service like AllSet, which helps companies facilitate buying lunch for employees at nearby restaurants. This in turn could spark a new way of offering the free lunch perk while supporting local communities.

What do you think about the future of free lunches? Leave us a comment and let us know, or come to our Smart Kitchen Summit in October where one of our discussions will be “Leave The Lunch Box Behind: How Tech Is Changing How We Eat At Work.”