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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Manna

Food & Retail Drone Delivery Specialist Flytrex Gets FAA Approval For One Mile Deliveries

Flytrex, a startup specializing in on-demand delivery of food and retail items, announced this morning it had received approval from the FAA to expand its delivery radius to one nautical mile across all its operating stations in North Carolina.

According to a release sent to The Spoon, the company, which received approval in May of this year to operate over people, has completed “thousands” of deliveries to customers. With over 10 thousand potential customers within the company’s new expanded delivery radius, expect that pace to pick up further.

Customers interested in a drone-delivered meal can order via the Flytrex app with participating stores and restaurants. The app sends updates to the customer while the package is en route and, once the drone arrives, the package is lowered by wire into the customer’s backyards. Flytrex drones, operated in partnership with drone delivery operator Causey Aviation Unmanned, have a payload of over 6 pounds.

The news comes on the heels of a $40 million Series C funding round announced last month. The funding, which the company is using to develop its hardware further and expand its business development practices, should solidify the company as an early leader in the drone delivery market. The company, which launched its first drone delivery system in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2017, has established partnerships with the likes of Walmart and Chili’s. Flytrex is one of eight companies participating in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) BEYOND Initiative, a program focused on finding solutions for challenges of unmanned air service integration.

Flytrex does have some competition, including the high-profile efforts of Amazon through its Prime Air group. However, nearly nine years after Jeff Bezos first wowed the world when he teased the idea of Amazon drone delivery, the mega e-tailer’s efforts have shown outward signs of potential struggle as of late. On the other hand, Manna, another backyard drone delivery specialist, continues to plug away in Europe, reaching a delivery milestone of 50 to 100 deliveries per day in the spring of 2021.

“Drone delivery is reaching new heights faster than anyone could have expected,” Yariv Bash, co-founder, and CEO of Flytrex, said. “This approval from the FAA will allow us to cater to the growing demand for fast and efficient on-demand delivery in suburban America. We look forward to continuing on this exciting flight path, bringing five-minute delivery to the millions of backyards across the USA.”

Introducing Manna Cooking, the Recipe App That’s All About Community

The idea for Manna Cooking came, in a way, from CTO and co-founder Guy Greenstein’s mom — a private chef who cooks all-vegan, all-kosher food. It dawned on Greenstein one day that his mom’s workstation was totally unmanageable, a chaos of notebooks and binders overflowing with heavily annotated recipe clips. He searched for an app that would help her to streamline things but came up empty-handed.

So Greenstein teamed up with his childhood friends and co-founders Josh and Rachel Abady to create a platform that would allow users like his mom to organize, customize, and share recipes. The app, Manna Cooking, is making its official debut today on the Apple App Store. I got on Zoom last week with Josh and Rachel (the company’s CEO and CMO, respectively) to learn more about the launch.

The name of the app was inspired by the three co-founders’ early years at a Jewish day school. “Manna is what supposedly fell from the sky to nourish the Israelites — to give them everything they needed,” said Rachel, who came up with the name. “Our app is supposed to be your buddy in the kitchen that gives you everything you need to cook.”

Rachel and Josh led me on a tour of the app over Zoom. The digital environment is bright and easy to navigate, made friendlier by Chef Mic, the app’s cartoon personality. The app draws on popular social media features to help users discover new recipes: You can flick through recipes dating app-style in swipe mode, or scroll through other users’ posts in the discover feed. Users can also create and import recipes themselves.

Manna follows through on its promise of creating a single, centralized space for users to manage their recipes. In the cookbook environment, the app allows you to edit any recipe you’ve liked and save a new version. (The app also automatically flags recipe ingredients that might be incompatible with your diet.) When you want to start cooking a dish, the app guides you through the recipe one step at a time in much the same way Google’s Maps app takes you step-by-step toward your destination, saving the need to scroll back and forth between an ingredients list and instructions.

There are currently about 10,000 recipes on the app. Some are from a collection of pre-approved websites from which users can instantly import recipes; some were created by the app’s beta testers; and some were curated by Manna’s in-house recipe creator.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Greenstein and the Abady siblings to take an unconventional approach to fundraising. They had secured some funding pre-COVID (including from David Greenstein, Guy’s father and a co-founder of the brand incubator Wonder Brands) but the pandemic scorched opportunities to proposition restaurateurs and other funders. “But we realized, even more than it’s about food, our app is about community. So if we’re a community, why not use the community to be the source of our funding as well?” Josh said.

The team used Wefunder to raise about $150,000, which helped them to create a beta version of the Manna Cooking app. That crowdfunding approach also helped the team to create a pool of dedicated beta testers: “Our first wave of testers really had skin in the game, because they had given us funds anywhere from $100 upwards,” Rachel said. “So we already had built-in super testers.”

Manna has partnered with restaurateur and chef David Burke, giving users access to simplified recipes for restaurant dishes. They’ve also identified brand-aligned social media influencers, who are creating recipes, providing feedback, and helping to promote the app.

This spring, Manna will work on raising a more conventional seed funding round. In the next couple of months, the team plans to lock in a partnership with a grocery retailer, which will allow them to launch an automatic ordering feature.

But the team’s number one priority is user acquisition, and their success there may hinge on how well the platform fosters in-app community building. At the end of the day, the promise of the app is to provide a simplified, social cooking experience, especially for users with specific dietary needs — people who want to cook gluten-free food, or vegan food, and get inspired by others who cook and eat like them.

As Josh put it: “There’s millions of people who fit each of these descriptions, and each of them should feel like they have a community that they can engage with in one, centralized place.”

Meet The Spoon’s Restaurant Tech 10

The restaurant industry has changed drastically over the last 18 months when it comes to tech. What was once a sector slow to change and reticent to embrace digital is now practically at bursting point in terms of the many technological solutions available to restaurants. As food tech investor Brita Rosenheim recently wrote, “the past 18 months, technology solutions across the restaurant and hospitality industry evolved at such a fast pace that keeping up with changes proved challenging, even for those of us who work in the space. This rapid rate of adoption in the industry caused even the technophobes in hospitality to rapidly embrace tech solutions. “

Picking just 10 companies from the hundreds out there was a Herculean challenge when it came time to make this list. From virtual restaurants to maintenance management solutions to making better use of data, there’s no end of innovation in the restaurant tech sector these days. Our list is a tiny sliver of that innovation, showcasing what we believe are some of the most unique and intriguing companies shaking up and rethinking the restaurant business. Some of these companies will be at our upcoming Restaurant Tech Summit (make sure to get your ticket!), some we’ve written about recently, and some we are just getting to know.

It goes without saying, of course, that this isn’t an exhaustive list, and if you have a restaurant tech company you’d like to get on our radar, drop us a line anytime.

In no particular order, here are The Spoon’s Top 10 Restaurant Tech Companies:

Too Good to Go

When it comes to eliminating food waste, Too Good to Go was too good to not include on this list. The Denmark-based company partners with hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and other businesses that have surplus food items at the end of each day and sells that food at a discount to consumers, who pick up the food at a designated time. Too Good to Go started in Europe, but raised $31 million and expanded into the U.S. this year. Businesses win because it turns leftover foods into revenue. Consumers win because they get good food at a discount. And the world at large wins because there is less food waste going into landfills. 

86 Repairs

You can’t run a restaurant without a fridge (or stove, or electricity), which means maintenance and repair management will always be relevant in the biz, no matter how many pandemics you throw at it. Chicago, Illinois-based 86 Repairs is leading a new generation of companies helping to make the management of maintenance and repair tasks a little less burdensome on restaurants. The platform digitizes information about all a restaurant’s equipment and coordinates troubleshooting, warranty checks, booking technicians, and other tasks. The idea is to give restaurants one central location at which to view all data about all maintenance, even for large, multi-unit chains with thousands of units.

Bite Ninja

The restaurant labor shortage will go down as one of the major issues — probably the major issue — restaurants faced in 2021. One of the most intriguing solutions to the issue comes from a company called Bite Ninja. In essence, the Bite Ninja platform lets restaurants outsource their staffing needs for the drive-thru lane to gig workers that take orders remotely. Drive-thru customers see a face on a screen and order as they would normally. They may not even know the person taking the order is probably sitting at their kitchen table instead of standing inside the restaurant. Bite Ninja’s founders say the platform can increase order accuracy and upsell rates for restaurants, while workers don’t actually have to report to a physical location to clock in. In the future, the tech will be available for more uses than just the drive-thru, including front-of-house kiosks, curbside pickup, and phone orders.

ConverseNow

ConverseNow currently creates conversational AI assistants for restaurant drive-thrus. In use at 750 restaurant locations in the U.S, ConverseNow says its AI achieves 85 percent order accruacy and bumps check sizes up by 25 percent. But ConverseNow is about so much more than just helping automate the drive-thru. The company wants its software to be the virtual plumbing for all of a restaurant’s digital ordering, connecting the drive-thru, mobile ordering, phones, kiosks and more. If it can achieve this, ConverseNow will convert many restaurant operators over to AI. 

Crave Collective

When The Spoon got a virtual tour last year of the Crave facility in Boise, Idaho that serves 16 virtual restaurant concepts, it felt like a look into the future of what restaurant/food delivery design could look in Metro areas. Not only were the physical attributes like a conveyor belt system that shuttled meals towards the front for delivery and a customer pick up area interesting, but Crave’s custom-built tech stack and in-house delivery drivers were indications that the company had built a facility and business model tailored towards the virtual brand era. The company wants to take it’s concept to four additional locations this year, and 10 by 2022.

Slice

While it’s easy to think most pizza restaurant shops are savvy at online ordering, the reality is that the typical independent sees only about one in five pizzas ordered online compared with three out of four for Dominos. Slice saw this as an opportunity and created a consumer app to help put independent pizza shops (16,000 of them so far) on solid digital footing to compete with the 800 pound gorillas in Dominos and Little Caesar’s. But what helped Slice make this list was their acquisition of POS startup InStore. Before Instore, Slice helped indies enter into the world of online ordering. Now, Slice Register (the POS based on Instore) enables the small guys to level up to the big guys and create a true multichannel pizza business with loyalty programs and integrated online/offline marketing programs.

Qu POS

The past decade saw restaurant point of sale move into the cloud and adapt features like pay-at-table and integrated online ordering, but the virtual brand explosion may be the biggest test yet for these systems. Qu POS is betting big on a virtual restaurant future with their KitchenUP platform, which acts as a lightweight operating system for ghost kitchen/virtual brands with unified management of multichannel order management, reporting, third-party delivery integration and other features built into an API-first architecture. FranklinJunction is utilizing KitchenUp across its network of 500 “host kitchens” to help power virtual concepts for such brands as Nathan’s and Frisch’s Big Boy.

Ordermark/NextBite

An arguably bigger trend than ghost kitchens this year has been restaurants finding and leveraging underutilized kitchen space in which to run delivery-only restaurant concepts. NextBite, a company created by restaurant tech company Ordermark, helps restaurants find that space and launch those concepts. The platform operates a number of virtual/delivery-only brands restaurants can add to their existing business and in the process make some incremental revenue. The company raised a whopping $120 million for this concept at the end of 2020, and has since launched more than 15 virtual brands in thousands of kitchens around the country. 

Manna

Look! Up in the sky! It’s your latte! Drone food delivery seems like sci-fi, but Manna is making it a reality right now. Earlier this year, the company was doing 50 to 100 drone deliveries a day and it’s prepping to launch service in a second Irish city. Though there are still regulatory hurdles to overcome, drone delivery could be a boon for restaurants because it delivers meals in minutes without needing to put a full-sized delivery car on the road. Drones are starting to take flight around the world, and Manna is helping the industry take flight. 

Delivery Hero

Delivery is table stakes at this point for the restaurant industry, but we pub Delivery Hero on this list because of all the big-name services out there today, it has one of the more noteworthy approaches to the concept. In addition to operating restaurant food delivery services around the world (via a bunch of different subsidiary brands), the Berlin, Germany-based company has also launched its own VC fund to foster food tech innovation, opened an education program to teach coding to underserved individuals, and, most recently, kicked off a new initiative to provide its restaurant partners with sustainable packaging. All these efforts point towards the possibility of a food delivery industry that’s not only faster and more efficient, but also more inclusive and sustainable.

Irish Drone Delivery Startup Manna Raises $25M Series A

Drone delivery startup Manna announced today that it has raised a $25 million Series A round of funding led by Draper Esprit, with participation from Team Europe, partners of DST Global, as well as returning investors Dynamo Ventures, Atlantic Bridge and Elkstone. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Manna to $30.2 million.

Based in Dublin, Ireland, Manna operates unmanned aerial vehicles for high-speed deliveries over the last mile. Drones fly out of a main hub carrying food orders and can reach a customer’s home in just three minutes. The customer uses something similar to a Google Map image of their home divided up into a grid and select where the drone should fly to. Once at that location, the drone hovers 50 feet above the ground and lowers the order down via tether.

Manna says that a single operator can conduct roughly 20 deliveries per hour. Manna is currently piloting drone delivery in Galway, Ireland, where it is doing up to 100 deliveries a day. In today’s press announcement, Manna said that more than 30 percent of Galway’s 10,000 residents are already using its service.

Drone delivery is quickly becoming a reality around the world as more pilot programs are launched and more companies get funded. Flytrex, which is testing drone deliveries with Walmart in North Carolina, raised $8 million last month. Dragontail Systems and Pizza Hut have partnered for drone delivery in Israel. And iFood and Speedbird Aero are deploying drone delivery in Brazil.

Here in the U.S., government agencies are clarifying rules around commercial drone operation. In December of last year, the FAA announced its final rules around the safety of drone flying. With more clarity will come more innovation and more drone delivery availability.

In addition to its pilot delivery program in Galway, Manna has also kept busy on the business development front. The company has signed partnerships with JustEat, Samsung, Ben & Jerrys and Tesco.

If you want to learn more about the future of drone delivery, be sure to attend ArticulATE, our food robotics and automation virtual conference on May 18. Manna CEO Bobby Healy will be speaking, along with a host of other executives across the robotics, restaurant and retail landscape. Get your ticket today!

Manna Now Doing 50 – 100 Drone Deliveries Per Day in Galway, Ireland

It’s fitting that on this St. Patrick’s Day, we check in with Irish drone delivery startup, Manna, which is beginning to take off. The company is now doing between 50 and 100 deliveries per day in the city of Galway, Ireland, Manna CEO and Founder, Bobby Healy told me during a video chat this week.

Galway is a city of 80,000 people on the western coast of Ireland. Manna has established a drone takeoff platform on top of a Tesco in town, and makes food and drink deliveries with partners like the Camile Thai restaurant chain.

According to Healy, the average drone delivery time from takeoff is three minutes, with the drones flying between 50 and 80 meters (164 to 262 ft.) high at a speed of 80 km/h (50 mph).

When users place an order, they designate a specific area on their property for the drone to fly to. For example, when ordering from Camile, customers use the Camile app and select drone delivery. They are then presented with a GoogleMap image of their home that has been divided into a grid. The user picks a specific grid. When the drone arrives, it hovers 15 meters (50 ft) above that spot and lowers the food down by tether via a biodegradable linen thread.

One Manna drone can do between six and seven deliveries per hour, and a single drone operator can do 20 deliveries in an hour. A typical payload from Camile is five to six pounds, which includes two meals and drinks, and with an average flight time of just three minutes, food and lattes arrive still hot and is delivered in a contactless manner.

Even though the drone program is still in the pilot phase, Camile Founder & CEO Brody Sweeney said during that same video chat that Manna is doing almost 70 percent of Camile’s deliveries in Galway. “This is a real part of our future,” Sweeney said, “We are primarily suburban based, so drones are perfect for delivery. We haven’t worked out all the details, but we think it will be less than [current car-based] delivery.”

Healy said Manna is making deliveries at night and its drones can even brave inclement weather like rain and wind, though the energy output to do so is greater and limits the total number of trips a drone can make.

We’ve seen a lot of movement for drone delivery over the last year. Dragontail Systems is starting to do pizza delivery by drones in Tel Aviv, Israel. Walmart is testing drone delivery with Flytrex in North Carolina. And iFood is making drone deliveries in Brazil.

While there has been definite progress in drone delivery, there are still regulatory issues that must be overcome. Here in the U.S. the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) clarified its rules around safety at the end of last year. And Healy said that Manna is working with European regulators to conduct flights that aren’t line of sight.

Healy said that Manna will be bringing its service to the U.S. during Q2 of this year, and a broader rollout around the world over the next 18 months. He also said that Manna should be serving 100,000 customers by July of this year.

CORRECTION: This article originally misstated the population of Galway as 10,000. It is 80,000, and Manna is servicing 10,000 of them. We regret the error.

Manna to Make Drone Delivery Flights Outside Dublin, Ireland Next Month

Meal delivery by drone is coming to the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland at the end of March, courtesy of the Irish startup, Manna, reports Bloomberg. Manna will run hundreds of tests flights with different food partners to make deliveries to the University College Dublin campus over the next few weeks as part of a bigger plan to provide permanent service to small Irish towns.

Manna’s MNA-1090 drone operates similarly to the Google Wing drone, in that it hovers above its destination and lowers its package on a retractable tether. According to Blooomberg the Manna drone can carry a meal payload weighing 4.4 pounds, and can make a delivery more than 2 kilometers out in under three minutes, even in inclement weather.

Drones are set to have a pretty big year in food delivery. In addition to Manna’s impending takeoff, Unilever, through its Ben & Jerry’s brand, has partnered with Terra Drone Europe for airborne ice cream tests. Uber Eats is planning to launch its drone food delivery in San Diego this summer. And the aforementioned Google Wing is already making deliveries in Virginia.

Questions remain, however, about the ultimately viability of drone delivery. Regulations around toting pizza pies in the skies has yet to be worked out (though startups like Air Space Link are helping sort that out). Then there is the very real issue of privacy and noise and how people will react to fleets of drones flying over their houses.

The promise of drones, however, according to Manna, is that they can provide fast, big city-type food delivery to smaller towns at a lower cost. This, in turn will make delivery more profitable and drone operations more scalable.

If drones can provide a lower cost way of getting a piping hot burrito delivered to people’s patio, all the hindrances might just be forgiven.

Manna Raises Additional $3M in Funding for Drone Food Delivery in Ireland

Manna, an Irish drone delivery startup, announced today that it has added $3 million to its seed funding, led by Dynamo VC. This brings the total seed round raised by Manna to $5.2 million.

Manna plans to start with food deliveries in rural Ireland in March 2020, when it will work with restaurants and dark kitchens to deliver food across a two kilometer radius in as little as three minutes. Manna’s drones don’t fly higher than 500 ft and use a biodegradable linen string to lower food deliveries at their destinations. Manna has a partnership with food delivery service Flipdish, and will add on a fee of three to four euros for each delivery.

The skies are definitely getting more crowded, and 2020 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for drone delivery around the globe. Google has been testing drone delivery in Australia and recently started in here in the U.S. in Virginia. Uber Eats will officially kick off drone delivery in San Diego next summer. Amazon had promised its own drone delivery “within months,” though that was months ago at this point, so it’s safe to assume it’s been pushed into the new year. Fling is doing drone delivery in Thailand and, earlier this year, Zomato successfully tested its own drone program in India.

But drones still have quite a few hurdles to overcome before they become an everyday occurance. First, drones typically have a negative connotation with the general public, who can associate them with big, bad things like war and surveillance, or more minor inconveniences like the irritating buzz of a hobbyist flying them in a park.

Then there are the legal and safety issues surrounding fleets of drones flying overheard. There are startups like Airspace Link, which provides FAA clearance and flight paths to avoid ground risks, but federal, state and local governments are all grappling with how to regulate an entirely new category of commercial flight and all the complications that brings.

Manna founder Bobby Healy told The Irish Times that he thinks the Irish market will need up to 4,000 drones, with a drone doing five deliveries an hour. He estimates the UK market would need roughly 44,000 drones.