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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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As Bored & Hungry Shuts Its Doors, It’s Worth Looking at State of Web3 and Food


In March 2022, NFT and crypto investor Andy Nguyen purchased Bored Ape #6184 along with three Mutant Apes and soon decided to establish a Bored Ape-themed restaurant named Bored & Hungry. The restaurant opened its doors on April 9, and by the end of its first day, it had served 1,500 burgers and had lines stretching around the block.

Two years later, Bored & Hungry has closed.

Last week, Nguyen announced on Instagram that the restaurant’s original location in Long Beach, California, was closing. He shared that they had sold the concept to a franchising company from Asia known as HUNGRY Dao.

From his post:

“Happy 2 year anniversary @JustBorednHungry!Today we say goodbye to the original Bored & Hungry location in Long Beach, CA. We also want to congratulate our partner’s from Asia, Hungry Dao – a branding and franchising company who has acquired the brand from us. It’s been an insane 2 years, that was originally supposed to just be a 3 month pop up experiment.”

While Bored & Hungry was perhaps the most high-profile effort to bring the world of Web3 to food, it was far from alone. Since the NFT trend burst into public consciousness in 2021, numerous early-adopting restaurant operators, crypto-curious chefs, and FOMO-driven corporations have launched initiatives to connect their food businesses with Web3 elements. Nowadays, most of these ventures—like Bored & Hungry’s U.S. location—have either shut down or scaled back.

A few examples:

Starbucks recently announced that it’s shutting down its Web3 loyalty program, Odyssey. According to an FAQ about the program’s transition, Starbucks said the community would close the Odyssey beta on March 31, 2024, and users had until March 25, 2024, to complete any remaining Journeys. The lead for Odyssey, Steve Kaczynski, was let go as part of the move.

In March 2022, celebrity chefs Tom Colicchio and Spike Mendelsohn launched the CHFTY Pizza NFT project, promising holders access to virtual and in-person events, classes, kitchen accessories, and more. Today, the CHFTY website is inactive, and the project’s Discord channel has been quiet for the past year.

Even some housewares brands dipped their toes into this trend, though their efforts were minor and did not gain traction. Old-school home appliance brand Crockpot released an NFT commemorating its 50th anniversary. The NFT, still available on Opensea, has not received any offers.

Web3 initiatives like Dinner Dao and Burger Dao have largely been abandoned. At the same time, FriesDAO, a group that raised $5 million via an NFT offering, suffered a lethal blow when hackers made away with most of the group’s cash.

Yet, not all Web3 food ventures have failed. The coffee subscription site Bored Breakfast Club continues to operate. Flyfish, a high-profile NFT membership dining club, is set to open this summer, albeit offering a traditional non-NFT membership option. Additionally, Blackbird, the NFT loyalty program started by Eater and Resy founder Ben Leventhal, recently launched a breakfast club and sold out within hours.

So, with the dust of the first Web3 wave now settled, where does that leave us? Was the enthusiasm for food & Web3 more hype than substance? Or is the persistence of a hearty few continuing to march forward a sign of long-term viability for this space?

At this point, it’s too early to tell. Those who realized early on that Web3 and blockchain were a means to an end to enhance consumer-side benefits may have staying power. The same goes for those who realized they can’t require significant behavior change on the part of consumers regarding onboarding. Blackbird is a good example of both here. Others, like Flyfish, have demonstrated that they can make the necessary pivots to survive.

But big brands like Starbucks? They may take a while to come back. The Seattle-based coffee company arguably still has the leading loyalty program in the food business, and the fact company management decided they didn’t need to push any further into Web3 is a pretty good indication of whether they believe it’s required to unlock significant consumer value. Clearly, at this point, they don’t.

Some, however, like Wow Bao, realize this is a long-term waiting game. As company CEO Geoff Alexander told me this week, describing his company’s entry into the Metaverse, “Anything that you do new and technology takes time for adoption.”

He’s right that things take time. And if he’s right about the Metaverse, companies like his that stick it out for the long haul might benefit most.

At this point, though, nothing is a sure thing when it comes to Web3 and food.

Wow Bao Launches Hot Bun Vending Machine In The Metaverse

You can now visit a hot bun vending machine in the metaverse.

No, this isn’t a plotline from the sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine, but the next chapter in the continuing push by digital-forward restaurant chain Wow Bao to expand into the Metaverse and web3. The company, which launched its NFT program a year ago, announced last week that Wow Bao has launched on Roblox, a hugely popular virtual gaming platform with over 200 million monthly global users. According to Wow Bao, their launch on Roblox marks the first time that a fast-casual restaurant has launched in the Metaverse with a loyalty program that gives away in-real-life perks.

Those physical, non-digital perks come in the form of a free box of Wow Bao products, which a player qualifies for once they enter the Wow Bao game (called Dim Sum Palace) on Roblox, complete a couple of achievements, and connect their Wow Bao loyalty program (called the Hot Buns Club). Those without a Hot Buns loyalty club membership are instructed how to join, a process that involves leaving the game, getting the loyalty website URL from from a pinned post on Wow Bao’s Twitter profile, and signing up.

With a free box of Wow Bao on offer, I decided to join Roblox and check out Dim Sum Palace. I found the mini-game slick, but after I finished my achievements—earning a bao-themed headdress and a coupon for a free box of Wow Bao—I didn’t have much to do. The most time-consuming part was signing up for and connecting to my Wow Bao loyalty account (which, to be fair, went quickly after I jumped off to Twitter and found the URL).

Stepping back, it’s worth asking why the fast-casual Asian food chain is spending all of this time and resources to create a Metaverse game that likely won’t result in any significant customer revenue in the near future. According to Wow Bao CEO Geoff Alexander, the push into the Metaverse is a long-term play that they believe will pay off as more and more gamers look to garner IRL rewards for their Metaverse exploration.

“One of the things Wow Bao has always wanted to do is be wherever the consumer is,” Alexander told The Spoon. “There are a large number of people who game, and nobody’s talking to them.”

How is Wow Bao going to attract Roblox players to its Minigame? Alexander said they plan to raise awareness through paid advertising in Roblox, discovery on the home screen, and the giveaway of 10,000 UGC.

The company worked with production studio Sawhorse Productions, which developed the mini-game, and loyalty tech companies Flaunt and Paytronix to integrate their rewards program into Roblox. The company also continued to work with Devour for their Web3 ordering.

The risk for Wow Bao is that they invest in building a Metaverse presence, and, as we’ve seen with many brand efforts over the past few years, engagement remains low and overly complex for the average user, and eventually, they exit. According to Alexander, the company thinks being patient will ultimately pay off.

“Anything that you do new and technology takes time for adoption,” Alexander said. “We’re betting that the adoption will come. Today, it might be small. Tomorrow might be a little bit bigger. It might fall, and then it might come back. We’re in for the long game.”

Yes, I’ve Entered the Meataverse

Last year, when news got out that Slim Jim had gone and registered the term meataverse, we all had a good laugh.

Over a year later and a few notches down the Gartner Hype Cycle, the salty meat stick company has finally launched its web3 world effort to get people to go online and collect digital art of cartoon meat sticks. The company, which, in a sarcastic nod to Facebook’s new corporate name, has periodically rebranded itself as MEATA on Twitter and described the effort in its trademark finding as something providing “services featuring virtual goods, virtual food products, and non-fungible tokens,” along with “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy, sell and trade virtual food products.”

But now, they’ve gone and done it by Jim, and I’m going along for the ride. Sure, it sounds ridiculous and something an adult who doesn’t eat Slim Jims would probably avoid wasting his time on, but here I am, the proud owner of GigaJim #1070.

The site, which allows you to join for free and to mint one of ten thousand NFTs free of charge (they even pick up the gas fees), is user-friendly and targeted at the average meathead who doesn’t own a crypto wallet. I have a Metamask wallet lying around somewhere, but I just let Slim Jim’s Meataverse create a wallet for me, and within 5 minutes, I had minted my GigaJim.

The site comes complete with an origin story for the Meataverse world, detailing how how a brilliant young scientist named “Slender” Jim (what else?) is recruited by Slim Jim Industries to head up its secretive M.E.A.T. (mechanics engineering and technology) lab and, within a few years, Dr. Jim has proposed a theory of alternate meat dimensions (aka the ‘meataverse’), virtual worlds that are “meatier, spicier and home to powerful energies.”

When I started looking for ways to increase my GigaJim’s value, it (surprise, surprise) required buying Slim Jims and scanning the bar code. Once you show you’re consuming meat sticks in the physical meat world, you’re given more base sauce to add to the sauce extractor, and once you have three base sauces, you can create a super sauce and level up your Jim.

As I said, it’s all ridiculous, but I have to say, as corporate brand web3 metaverse efforts go, it has me (somewhat ashamedly) thinking about running to the local store and picking up some Slim Jims (which is, of course, the point).

See you in the Meataverse!

The Weekly Spoon: A Farmers Markets in the Metaverse & The Coming Home Robot Invasion

This is the Spoon Food Tech newsletter. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

Come With Me as I Walk Around a CPG Farmers Market in the Metaverse

Last night I walked around a farmers market. I spent about an hour walking from stand to stand, having conversations, and learning about new CPG products. Someone even offered me free candy. It was a blast!

And all of it happened in the metaverse. I attended a virtual pop-up farmers market put on by an organization called The Metamarket. The event featured over a dozen different CPG brands, each of which had a virtual exhibit stand in a virtual 2D Sims-like world that allowed me to interact with both the products and the people.

The platform The Metamarket used for the event is Gather, a virtual world/metaverse startup that started during the pandemic and has since raised $76 million in funding. Gather has some interesting features, including one called ‘proximity chatting’ in which a video pop window emerges for chats with people in the space (see below), making it a nice mashup of video game meets professional networking tool.

Come to SKS Invent on October 12th to Explore The Future of Food & Cooking. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 20% off tickets!

Robot Butlers & Roombas: Elon and Amazon Are Getting Serious About Building Home Robots

Last week, Amazon announced they were acquiring iRobot. The acquisition of the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums comes less than a year after Amazon unveiled its own home robot, Astro.

The news came the same week we got a sneak preview of Optimus, Tesla’s robotic humanoid. After the preview, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he thinks the impact of the Optimus could someday exceed that of the company’s hugely popular electric vehicles.

“I’m sort of surprised that you know people are like analysts out there are not really understanding the importance of the Optimus robot,” Musk said. “My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term.”

While Musk has suggested his company’s robot will someday provide a nearly inexhaustible amount of “labor” (of the mechanized, non-human variety), he also outlined how the robot will also help us at home with everyday tasks.

“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” he said.

For Amazon, much of the early hot takes on the company’s purchase of iRobot frame it as part of a larger effort by the online giant to better understand its customers. And no doubt, adding the home mapping capability of the Roomba to the already rich data profiles Amazon has through our purchase history and Alexa voice interactions will give the company an even better contextual understanding with which to sell us even more stuff.

But I also think Amazon is serious about becoming a leading platform builder in home robotics. Robotics are just a natural evolution of the smart home – something us old-timers used to call ‘home automation’ – and I expect the roboticization of the home will ultimately lead to a multi-hundred billion dollar market. Today’s consumer robot market – mostly products like the Roomba – is forecasted to be a $9 billion market next year. One can only imagine how big it will be once multipurpose, life-assisting robots that can do more than just clean our floors are widely available.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Waste 

From Grad School Project to $115 Million Series B: Afresh’s Matt Schwartz on Building an Operating System for Fresh Food

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany.

At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future.

“That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of eating, to be able to nourish the world sustainably. And those two things converged into saying, I want to accelerate this fresh technology thing.”

The focus on fresh food soon led Schwartz and his eventual cofounder of Afresh, Nathan Fenner, to do a graduate study in which they talked to close to one hundred people involved in the food supply chain. It wasn’t long before they realized that, despite the increasing importance of fresh food for food retailers, there wasn’t any technology optimized for managing it.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Q&A: Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe Talks About Her Plan To Build a $100 Million Company Addressing Food Waste & Food Insecurity

Last month, food waste reduction and food insecurity startup Goodr raised an $8 million Series A funding round.

When Jasmine Crowe founded the company, the Atlanta-based startup used technology to help large food service providers reduce food waste. Over the past two years, Goodr has expanded its business to provide expertise to companies looking to provide food to those in food insecure situations.

I wanted to catch up with Crowe to ask her about how the business has evolved, the challenges of raising venture funding as a Black founder, and where she sees the company going in the future.

You can read the full interview transcript below.

Before this most recent round, you’d managed to operate without a lot of outside funding.

We really just bootstrapped. To date have done more revenue than we’ve done in funding, which is something I’m personally proud of.

What was some of the thinking behind deciding to go after new funding?

It was really about scaling up to meet our demand. We had so many big deals that we were bringing in, so many new customers that we were onboarding. Because we have always been really lean and capital efficient, we’ve also had a very small team. So it really got down to ‘hey, we need to, we got to get more people in the door.’ And so that’s kind of really what happened. I was like, ‘I’ve got to raise money because I’ve got to hire more people.’

This round comes at a time where we are seeing a pullback in venture funding. You were right in the midst of that pullback.

We definitely were 100% all involved with that market change and it was scary. It was really scary because we just didn’t know. When I started raising funds in the market in late September, October of last year, and I remember one of my investors was like, ‘oh, Jasmine, your numbers are so great, look what you’ve done.’ At the time, I had only raised like $1.4 million or whatever prior to so we were like ‘you’re going to be able to raise this money so easily, like this is going to be the fastest money you’ve ever raised’. And it definitely wasn’t that. I think we had some struggles with it.

To read the full interview, click here. 

Food Delivery

‘Late Empire Sort of Stuff’: Wonder Faces Backlash Over Environmental Impact of Vans

By and large, the residents of the northern New Jersey suburbs where Wonder delivers agree that the well-funded startup’s food tastes great.

What they can’t agree on is whether having hundreds of Mercedes diesel vans idling curbside each night while Wonder employees prep meals is a good idea at a time when most experts agree climate change is fast becoming an existential crisis.

A story published in the Wall Street Journal details the bickering that has broken out amongst residents of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, about the omnipresent vans zig-zagging through their towns each night.

On the one hand, some feel the Wonder trucks are an unnecessary and carbon-emitting extravagance.

“There’s a stigma of calling the Wonder truck and having them idle outside your house for the decadent purpose of making you dinner in a truck,” resident Will Meyer told the Journal. “It feels like this is late empire sort of stuff.”

And then there are those who don’t see a problem with the trucks.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Lisa Bressler, who didn’t see the trucks being much different from Amazon and UPS trucks driving around town. “I guess I like unnecessary luxuries.”

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Future Food

Here’s Our Q&A With Ranjani Varadan, Who Just Became Shiru’s New CSO After a Decade With Impossible Foods

When she became the first scientist ever hired by Pat Brown at Impossible Foods in 2011, Ranjani Varadan became a pivotal part of the R&D team for one of the earliest entrants in the modern plant-based meat industry. Over the next decade, she would play a part in helping guide Impossible through many technical milestones, from the very early days in its stealth lab all the way to commercial scaleup.

And now, Varadan hopes to witness many more seminal moments in the alternative protein space as part of her new role as the Chief Science Officer for Shiru, a company that makes ingredients for CPG companies building plant-based meats and other alternative proteins. Varadan will oversee all aspects of R&D, from discovery and screening to ingredient pre-production.

I sat down with Varadan to talk to ask her about her time at Impossible, the decision to come to Shiru, how she believes her new company differentiates itself in a fast-growing alt protein market, and what she sees going forward for the plant-based foods and alternative protein industry. Answers have been edited slightly for readability.

You can read the full interview with Ranjani at The Spoon.

Podcast: Building a Next-Generation Ingredient Company with Shiru’s Jasmin Hume

As the former head of food chemistry for Eat Just, Dr. Jasmin Hume thought there was a lot of white space for innovation when it came to food ingredients.

She knew food companies would increasingly need new and novel ingredients they could build plant-based food products around, but felt there wasn’t enough research being done to discover these critical building blocks.

So she decided to start a company to do just that. So far, the company has raised over $20 million and recently hired Impossible Foods’ former VP of R&D and strategic ingredients.

On the podcast, Jasmin and I discuss a variety of topics, including:

  • How the alternative protein market is evolving from early fully vertically integrated brands to companies like Shiru that build ingredients and solutions for a variety of companies
  • The new cohort of food companies utilizing AI and ML to build the next generation of food
  • How what Shiru is doing with precision fermentation is different from that of Perfect Day and others trying to create animal-identical proteins
  • Where Jasmin sees the ingredient industry going in the future
  • Plus lots more!

You can listen to the full episode at The Spoon or, as always, find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Robots

Ottonomy Debuts a Swervy, Customizable Delivery Robot in Ottobot 2.0 as it Closes $3.3M Seed Round

Earlier this month, Ottonomy, a maker of autonomous delivery robots, unveiled its second generation robot, the Ottobot 2.0, alongside its announcement of its $3.3 million seed funding round according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new funding, which is led by pi ventures, also has Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures, and Sangeet Kumar (Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies) joining the round.

As you can see in the video below, the second-gen Ottobot introduces several features, including a new swerve-drive capability (which Ottonomy calls “crab mode”) in which the Ottobot’s drive train can turn each wheel independently. This allows the Ottobot 2 to spin in place (aka ‘zero-radius turning’) and swerve as it navigates (vs. the more tank-style mobility of robots without a swerve drive) towards it destination. This type of advanced maneuverability allows robots to weave through tight spaces, something that the Ottobot will need with its emphasis on both indoor and outdoor delivery.

To read the full story, click here!

From the Paneraverse to the Wendyverse, the Food Web3 Trademark Gold Rush is On

While it’s uncertain at this point just how profitable the food industry’s efforts to build out a presence in the metaverse will be, what we do know is those sure to make out in the near term around all these food web3 initiatives are trademark attorneys.

All anyone has to do is make a casual search of the USPTO’s trademark database or check out trademark Twitter (there’s a Twitter for everything) to see that there’s been a rush by food brands to file web3-related trademarks to ensure they have their place reserved in the metaverse for whenever they’re ready to make a trip.

Coverage of these filings in the crypto-press is often templatized, usually featuring tweets from one of a couple of trademark attorneys making a name for themselves on crypto twitter by talking about different trademark filings. Whether it’s Snickers or Chuck E. Cheese or Panda Express or you name it, the stories generally tell us these brands are set to enter or headed to or already have entered the metaverse.

And the reality is that many – if not most – of the food brands aren’t heading anywhere right away but are more than likely hedging their bets by filing trademarks to make sure they stake a claim for their brand in the metaverse and have some form of trademark protection for whatever their eventual plans are.

And these hedges often take the form of an exhaustive list of different ways the company may use an NFT. Take, for example, Panera’s filing, which not only hints at Panera’s virtual world called the Paneraverse or presence in a third-party virtual world with the same name, but goes into extensive detail about every which way a restaurant could connect with their consumers via an NFT: virtual goods, tokens for real-world food, NFTs as a foundation for loyalty and incentive programs for discounts on Panera’s food, virtual food, virtual beverages, etc., etc. It’s like Panera’s legal team took a web3 word list, put it in a blender with food terms, and listed the first 200 word combinations on their trademark filing.

But not all brands are just filing long trademark applications. Some, like Wendy’s, are already building out their presence in the metaverse. On April 2nd, they opened their virtual restaurant in Horizon Worlds, a virtual destination called Wendysverse that features a restaurant, town square, and more. Last week, they announced Sunrise City, which is, believe it or not, a breakfast-oriented expansion of the Wendysverse that features gameplay complete with bacon bridges and flying biscuits. Those that enter Sunrise City can get a complimentary breakfast sandwich with purchase.

No matter what stage the effort, food-related brands of all types seem to be reserving their spot in the metaverse for whenever they decide what they want to do, including big beer companies like Miller and Budweiser, CPG brands like Mars and Kraft, and even home appliance companies like Instant Brands.

Just how seriously many of these are remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: the filings – and the buzz around them – will continue for some time.

Tablz Wants to Metaverse-ize Restaurant Reservations and I am on Board With It

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went out for our anniversary dinner.

I’d made reservations for two with OpenTable at a nice little steak place and mentioned it was our anniversary in the ‘special occasion’ field. When we arrived, the staff was friendly and gave us special treatment.

Overall it was a great experience, except for one little thing: the table. We’d have preferred a window seat, not one in the middle of the room near the entrance. Nitpicky, I know, and something the staff had no idea about since I didn’t tell them and I wasn’t able to pick a specific table when I made reservations

But what if I could have? What if I could have picked my table location like I would when buying a ticket on an airplane or for a concert? Better yet, what if I could have walked around a virtual version of the restaurant and seen the table and the view before making the reservation?

That’s the future a startup called Tablz is hoping to make possible. The San Francisco-based company has created a table reservation platform that allows prospective diners to virtually tour a restaurant and pick their table. As you can see in the video below, the experience is not unlike moving through a video game like The Sims or touring a home with a 3D walkthrough on Zillow.

Finding a Table With Tablz Reservation Technology

In other words, the company has shown us what the restaurant reservation experience will look like in the metaverse, and I am here for it. The first description I heard of Tablz was that it allows you to pick a seat like you would on an airplane. That’s accurate, but it doesn’t really do it justice. By being able to walk around the restaurant and pick a table, see where it is on a 3D floorplan or dollhouse view, and look around from your prospective seat with a 360-degree view is a game-changer when it comes to making a reservation.

Tablz’s technology can be plugged into existing reservation sites like OpenTable and Rezy, which makes it a lot more appealing to prospective restaurant owners who have spent years building followings on those platforms. It also makes it more likely that the entrenched platforms themselves will embrace the technology rather than see it as a competitor. I also wouldn’t rule out the incumbents either creating similar technology or acquiring a company like Tablz as restaurant reservations evolve and move into the metaverse.

Tablz was initially incubated as the first product from a company called Transparent Kitchen. The Transparent Kitchen’s founders saw enough potential with the product to sunset the original company and focus full-time on Tablz. The company has raised a small seed round of funding from Branded Hospitality Ventures and a private investor group, including restaurant advisor Steven Kamali and Bbot founder Steve Simoni.

Tablz technology is being used at a handful of restaurants today like Roka in San Francisco and Dog & Tiger Public House in Toronto, but I expect we’ll see more soon as restaurants look for ways to stand out from the crowd as we come out of the pandemic.

SimulATE Spring Video Sessions: The Food Web3 Summit

Earlier this month, SimulATE Spring convened the leaders pioneering in food & web3. Now you can watch all the sessions here!

The second installment of the SimulATE event series, we explore how the world of web3 will impact restaurants, CPG, ag, community building, and more.

Subscribers to Spoon Plus can get access to all of the sessions below.

Meet the Experts and Innovators Inside the Foodverse and Web3

Our second virtual event looking at the intersection of food, restaurants, agriculture and all things Web3 starts today.

SimulATE Spring Summit will tackle the impact of Web3 on the food, restaurant, agriculture and CPG industries and talk to experts and entrepreneurs in the space, including:

Join us at 9:00 am PT for a day of discussions, networking + talks on the impact of Web3 on various aspects of the food space; and if you miss a session or can’t join us live, grab a VIP ticket for full on-demand digital access to sessions after the event.

Hope to see you inside!

OneRare and Honeybee Burger Partner to Bring Plant-Based Food to the Metaverse

OneRare, the first dedicated food metaverse platform just announced a collaboration with LA-based Honeybee Burger to make plant-based food “more desirable, accessible and available everywhere.”

The vegan burger, founded by former Wall Street execs, is considered a mini-chain in Southern California but has grown in popularity alongside the plant-based movement and is planning to open locations in NYC and Chicago. Honeybee plans to leverage OneRare to enter the metaverse and create a virtual location accessible to anyone around the world.

It’s a good move and one that smaller restaurant groups should watch carefully; as giants like McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Chipotle unveil their proprietary “metaverse” environments that will act like virtual storefronts and communities (Wendyverse, anyone?), taking advantage of already established platforms like OneRare will be important to compete in the fast-casual dining space in the future.

Adam Weiss, CEO of Honeybee commented, “we like to think of Honeybee as an innovator, redefining the potential of vegan food in order to increase the appeal of plant-based dining globally. On the food side, that means bringing new and exciting plant-based products to our customers, including things like Nowadays chick’n nuggets…and also Akua kelp patties, which we were the first QSR to serve. This innovation extends to our business and marketing, where we were one of the first to use Regulation CF to raise funds, and now we want to be one of the first to market in the metaverse.”

For now, Honeybee will use the OneRare “foodverse” to promote plant-based food and sustainable dining and feature an NFT menu created by the vegan chain. OneRare has been busy since raising its first funding round in November 2021, announcing dozens of partnerships with food and restaurant brands along with partnerships with NFT and cryptocurrency platforms.

Food NFT + Metaverse (in a) Minute: NFTs for Purpose Driven Restaurants, Cereal DAO

It’s still early days at the intersection of food and Web3 and that means there’s almost always something new happening and more to learn. Stay up to date with our coverage and these 3 things in this week’s Food Metaverse Minute:

NFTs for Purpose-Driven Restaurant

Chefs using NFTs to fund their next restaurant is becoming a regular thing — but even more inspiring is chefs using NFTs to give back to the workers who are the backbone of the restaurant industry. That’s what St. Paul-based chef Brian Ingram and his group Purpose Restaurants are doing with their next project.

Partnering with Chicago artist Joey Africa, the NFT collection will feature 71 original digital and physical pieces, each token serving as a membership to Ingram’s newest restaurant. The Apostle Supper Club, opening this summer across from the Xcel Energy Center, will hold VIP events like private chef dinners and menu tastings. Ten percent of the NFT raise will go back into the community; Ingram’s restaurant group regularly contributes to Give Hope, his charity created to give funds directly to people in their community, particularly restaurant workers dealing with housing insecurity or addiction.

We’ll be keeping an eye on hose this project performs. The NFTs went on sale last week on Opeaseas but so far there’s been little activity. While there’s been lots of inspiration from the success of the membership of Flyfish Club, no one – not surprisingly – has been able to replicate the success of the Gary Vee-affiliated group.

The DAO-Driven Cereal Company

NFT-branded cereal makes a debut from the “first decentralized CPG company” last week at Bitcoin Miami. The new CPG DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) — named gmgn supply co — launched with its first product, gm cereal and introduced its governance structure. The goal of DAOs is to spread collective decision-making rights along with ownership benefits to all of the involved members.

To drive hype for their launch, gmgn used Web3 marketing with BoredBecky, a curated personality with famous NFT social influencer group Bored Ape Club. The new group hopes to “revolutionize the CPG industry and drive the next generation of beloved brands,” and will be the first consumer packaged goods company to embrace NFTs as a way to fund and the DAO structure to run and grow the organization.

“If you look at the current CPG landscape, the majority of brands we eat every day are owned by 11 giant CPG conglomerates. gmgn supply co is changing this and our members will have a say in what they eat, what products are going to be made and help lead the CPG industry in a new direction that’s been elevated by Web3. We are excited to be leading this change and kicking it off with the launch of our first brand, gm Cereal, slated to drop in the Fall of this year,” said Phillipe LeBlanc, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Funday.” Funday is one of the founding companies that started gmgn.

SimulATE is Back

SimulATE is coming back! We’re bringing back the first virtual event dedicated to the emerging food, NFT, metaverse + crypto space and we’re going to be announcing our speaker lineup and agenda soon. Preview some of that here and if you use THIS LINK, you’ll get 50% off ticket prices through the end of this week (FRIDAY, 4/15 at 11:59 pm PST).

Slim Jim is creating a “Meata-verse” and a marketplace for virtual food

Last year, the meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin got its first public earnings callout from the company that owns meat stick brand Slim Jim. Conagra Brands CEO Sean Connolly pointed to the social engagement from active dogecoin and Shiba Inu meme coin communities as big factors in Slim Jim’s win in the Adweek March Madness-style brand competition.

And now, it seems the company’s interest in Web3 technology goes beyond the gimmicky marketing campaign. Coindesk reported yesterday that Slim Jim had recently filed for trademarks under “Slim Jim,” “Meataverse,” and “Long Boi Gang” that announce plans for a virtual marketplace comprised of NFTs, virtual food products and virtual goods.

The filings also discuss “providing a metaverse for people to browse, accumulate, buy and sell virtual food products” and seem to indicate that the meat snack food brand will try and take a leading role in leveraging virtual environments to extend its reach and engage the next generation of consumers in immersive experiences.

Slim Jim joins other food brands like Nestle and McDonalds with forays into combining food and Web3 technology as consumer interest in crypto and NFTs continues to rise.

To understand what the food metaverse might look like and why food brands across industries including restaurant, grocery, and CPG are planting their flags in Web3, join The Spoon community on May 4 for Simulate Spring Summit: Food Metaverse + Web3 virtual event. Early bird tickets start at $75 – register here.

We’re Bringing Food and the Metaverse Back Together This May

We’re in the business of finding and reporting what’s happening on the bleeding edge of food and technology. Discovering invention and innovation and bringing together the people doing this work to talk about it and help others whose business and work will eventually be impacted — this is what we did in early February at SimulATE Food Metaverse & NFT Mini-Summit.

Want more future food? Join Spoon Plus.

Watch SimulATE mini-summit sessions like “Building a Crypto Powered Food Future” and “Making an NFT Restaurant with Gary Vee’s Flyfish Club” by joining Spoon Plus here.

And we were blown away at the response. Not only in registrations but in requests after the fact for the recorded sessions after the fact when recaps were being shared. Each session generated many questions and follow-ups and mentions of other work that we wanted to learn more about too.

That’s when SimulATE Spring Summit was born. Happening May 4, 2022 on our virtual platform, we’re coming back with even more sessions, talks and demonstrations to help shed more light on the metaverse, NFTs, cryptocurrency (and all Web3 technology) and their impact, disruption and role in food and related industries.

To take a look at more details and early-bird ticket options, visit the SimulATE Spring Summit registration page. For more info on how to get involved with speaking or sponsorships, email events@thespoon.tech for more details.