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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

metaverse

Emily Elyse Miller Wants to Reinvent Breakfast Cereal. That Means Vegan Ingredients, Edgy Mascots, and (Of Course) NFTs

Emily Elyse Miller knows a thing or two about breakfast.

Not only has the one-time journalist and fashion trends forecaster written a book on the topic (complete with 380 recipes from 80 countries), but she’d also run a consulting company that helped world-renowned chefs like Enrique Olvera develop breakfast events.

But after years of writing and teaching about first-meal, Miller realized that cereal, the centerpiece of the American breakfast for generations of kids and adults, had gone stale. So she decided to start a cereal company of her own to reinvent the category.

Called OffLimits, Miller’s company created a line of irreverent brands like Dash and Zombie, each with its own ‘moody mascot’ and a clean ingredient list.

The funky mascots were important for Miller, because while she loved the rainbow-colored pop culture she grew up with in the cereal aisle, she felt it was time for something new.

“Tony the Tiger is not cool,” said Miller. “Cereal is one of the only products that carry culture in this unique way, and that culture has not been updated in decades.”

Emily Elyse Miller

Miller worked with artists to design the cereal brands’ characters and boxes. Now, she sees NFTs as a natural evolution to bring the creations to life and connect directly with the OffLimits’ community.

“The mascots have moody personalities, and there are highs and lows to those personalities too,” said Miller. “They have mental health issues as much as they have kind of successes and wins, and I think that’s what makes the brand so right for building out in the Web3 space.”

New to Web3, Miller initially started small by giving away NFTs during a pop-up at the Art Basel art fair last December in Miami Beach. Attendees of the pop-up scanned a QR code to claim an NFT for what Miller describes as the first-ever “NFT cereal toy.” The giveaway was gamified, so some who scanned got an “exploding cereal” NFT and given an OffLimits cereal variety pack.

The Art Basel NFT giveaway gave Miller confidence to go bigger. “My first NFT protect was just so I could understand who would claim it and if people would care at all,” said Miller. “People very much cared, so that helped just like solidify that I get to pay a lot more attention to this.”

That extra attention resulted in a new NFT project announced this week called “Best Cereal in the Metaverse.” The project will feature a collection of 2,500 NFTs (.111 Etherium (~$290)), each with its own unique artist-created spin on an OffLimits’ mascot. In addition to unique artwork, NFT owners gain access to the private discord and can participate in the custom cereal box design process by submitting an NFT they own to be featured on a custom-designed cereal box. Each NFT holder will also get four of the custom-designed boxes of cereal shipped to their home.

OffLimits is part of a bigger trend of upstart food brands pushing into NFTs. Startups like Bored Breakfast Club, Liquid Death, and Yerb have all launched NFT projects over the past few months as a way to directly connect with their customers and create a new commerce model. For Miller, while all of this is exciting and represents opportunity, there’s still lots of work to do.

“While people were excited to learn about an NFT (with the first project) and potentially claim it, the amount of questions that we got and education that we have to do for our community who are not crypto native is a lot,” said Miller. “So brands need to take their responsibility.”

That responsibility also means talking to other brands curious about the Web3 space and conveying what she’s learned.

“I’ve been talking to so many brands about how they can be more involved in the space,” said Miller. “For me, everything’s about functionality, which is why I wanted this project to have a lot of layers. I wanted to involve our existing community to help grow a larger community of artists and just keep a circle of engagement going. That’s why I feel like there needs to be a physical product for something digital, trying to keep a good balance.”

If you want to sign up for the OffLimits NFT, you can do so here.

Ready or Not, OneRare’s Supreet Raju Wants to Welcome You to the Foodverse

While we can’t (yet) enjoy food in all its multisensory glory in the virtual world, Supreet Raju thinks connecting food to the metaverse makes perfect sense.

“Food has to be eaten in the real world,” said Raju, co-founder OneRare, a food-centric metaverse. “But there’s a lot of things that can happen in the virtual world apart from tasting it.”

Raju, who spoke last week at SimulATE, the Spoon’s Web3 food summit, pointed to the popularity of Instagram and TikTok videos and how people love cooking shows, even if they can’t taste the food being made on their screens.

“We as audiences, we never eat that food, but we look at that food, and we are so tempted to tune in. So I think virtual food also makes a connection with people.”

Raju and her husband started OneRare during the lockdown of the pandemic. They began with the idea of food NFTs, where users would collect ingredient NFTs and would use them to claim a dish NFT. The vision grew quickly, and soon they were thinking of a full metaverse with in-world games, chef and brand partnerships, and exchanges of virtual assets for real-world utility. Adding to the momentum was the $2 million-plus raised in November via an NFT drop.

“It was supposed to be a simple project where you collected ingredients to claim your dish NFT. But from there, we’ve added layers. We started thinking about games. Then we started thinking about the utility of NFTs. And here we are, creating the first foodverse in the world.”

Part of the vision includes working with food brands, chefs, and restaurants to bring them into the metaverse and offer residents of OneRare real-world utility in the form of coupons for food, unique recipes they can use, and more.

This week, the company struck its first brand partnership with Urban Platter, an India-based ingredient provider. OneRare players will be able to use tokenized Urban Platter ingredients in in-game recipes and eventually will be able to exchange them for ingredients in the real world. Over time, the ingredient company plans to launch a virtual store in OneRare’s Foodverse where visitors learn about products and even shop.

Not surprisingly, in a world where most people still can’t explain Web3 or blockchain and virtual reality is still for early adopters, there are lots of skeptics when it comes to the idea of a foodverse.

While it may take some time, Raju thinks the skeptics will come around.

“When Instagram came in 2009, brands never took it seriously for the first two, three years,” said Raju. “And then they saw a chef who was just making recipes at home get to like 5 million followers, get his own cookbook, and then get his own restaurant. That’s when chefs and brands started saying, ‘oh my God, we need to make an Instagram account.'”

In the long term, Raju envisions the OneRare foodverse weaved into the broader metaverse, where OneRare powers virtual food experiences in other virtual worlds. The company plans to integrate with other Web3 platform companies to get there, and one example is Chumbi Valley, an NFT role-playing game the company partnered with last year.

“We look at ourselves as the food people here,” said Raju. ” We want to put it on the blockchain. You need an energy drink to train for a race? We’ll be there. You need pizza for your party? We’ll be there. That’s the kind of way we’re building OneRare.”

You can watch my full interview with Supreet Raju below.

SimulATE: All Sessions From Food Web3 & Metaverse Summit

Here’s the lineup:

  • Building a Crypto Powered Food Future – Amber Case (Unlock Protocol), Chad Horn (Devour Token), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)
  • Welcome to the Foodverse – Supreet Raju (OneRare), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)
  • Jobs in a Web3-Powered Food Industry Amogha Srirangarajan (Carbon Origins), Barry Herbst (The Elliott Group)
  • Case Study: Making an NFT Restaurant with Flyfish Club – David Rodolitz (Flyfish Club), Josh Capon (Flyfish Club), Conor Hanlon (Flyfish Club), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)
  • Building Web3 Burger Joint – Al Chen (BurgerDAO), Perrin Davidson (LA Eats)
  • How Will AR Change Food & Cooking – Lauren Cason (XR Creative Technologist), Michael Wolf (The Spoon)
  • NFT Strategies for Consumer Packaged Goods – Brad Klemmer (Bored Breakfast Club), Brett Fink (Yerb), Perrin Davidson (LA Eats)
  • Chefs Spike Mendelsohn & Tom Colicchio Talk CHFTY Pizzas

 

Spoon Plus members can watch the complete sessions below.  If you would like to learn more about Spoon Plus, you can do so here. 

Your Next Job May Be in the Metaverse. Here are Four Ways Web3 Will Change The Way We Work

This week at SimulATE, the first-ever event examining the intersection between food and beverage and Web3, The Spoon hosted a panel on the future of work in the metaverse.

To look at how our jobs may change in a Web3-powered world, we welcomed Amogha Srirangarajan, the CEO of delivery robot startup called Carbon Origins, and Barry Herbst, a VP and executive recruiting firm The Elliott Group.

Below are four ways our panelists saw work changing as we enter the era of the metaverse:

The Metaverse Will Become A Way to Do All Forms of Work

Srirangarajan, whose company Carbon Origins hires virtual reality experts to operate their sidewalk robots, said in the long term, the work-from-anywhere nature of the metaverse would open doors for workers who have previously been shut out of the labor market.

“You’re going to have jobs that anybody can do in the metaverse.” said Srirangarajan. “The jobs that we’re creating are from all walks of life are moms and dads, as they’re called students, people with disabilities, people from all around the world. They can choose what time they work, how long they work with who they work, and what type of jobs that they work on.”

Web3 Jobs Will Be Community Driven

According to Herbst, jobs in Web3 will be centered around communities.

“Web2 is all about profit, while Web3 is all about that community,” said Herbst. “Brands coming into this space are going to add value to their consumers in a whole different way, connecting with their consumers, their customers, their patrons.”

Srirangarajan agreed that community is essential and sees the metaverse as a great place to find enthusiastic new talent.

“This is how we found every single one of our Skipsters,” said Srirangarajan, referring to the term the company uses for their remote VR robot operators. “The technology’s there now to support large groups of people coming into this virtual world with affordable hardware, and hanging out and building communities.”

The Metaverse as The New Job Training Ground

According to both panelists, the metaverse will be used to teach us new skills we will need for our jobs.

“Training is why we started using VR at Carbon Origins,” said Srirangarajan. “Training is going to be a big application early on. Training for all sorts of industries, starting with the service industry.”

“I foresee a lot of continued training and development not only in the real world but also with the headset, which will save companies a lot of money,” said Herbst. “Having that experience, whether it’s learning how to clean or cook, or even going on a date, having that shopping experience, eating a meal in the metaverse. Humans are social animals, and while we thrive on having that connection with people whether it’s face to face, it’s also fun having just as we’re doing now.”

Meet The Chief Virtual Officer

According to Herbst, Web3 will push brands to create a new executive job role, the Chief Virtual Officer (CVO), and one of the skills required by the CVO is that of digital real estate manager.

“The chief virtual officer will have to be very fluent first in digital land,” said Herbst. “What are the best in class metaverses to buy digital land?”

Another necessary CVO skill will be an understanding of digital security and the ability to fortify a brand’s metaverse presence.

“How do you secure those assets safely? How do you handle a hardware wallet to ensure that you’re not going to get hacked, or have your assets stolen or fished?”

And finally, the CVO will also be the chief Web3 community officer.

“Managing that community and paying it forward is going to be a really large focus for this chief virtual officer,” said Herbst. “At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships and keeping that community intact.”

You can watch the video from the panel, Jobs in a Web3-Powered Food Industry, moderated by The Spoon’s Ashley Daigneault, below.

SimulATE Summit: Jobs in a Web3-Powered Food Industry

Tomorrow: Learn about the food metaverse at SimulATE 2022

Tomorrow (Feb 1st) we’re kicking off our first virtual event of the year, tackling a fast-growing area of food tech: the metaverse. We’re bringing together those helping to build the food metaverse and experts in crypto, NFTs and mixed reality to discuss the seismic shifts coming to the world of food tech.

SimulATE: the Food Metaverse + NFT Mini-Summit will kick off The Spoon’s virtual event series in 2022 and host speakers like David Rodolitz, the CEO of Flyfish Club who is working with Gary Vaynerchuk to build the world’s first NFT restaurant.

Another session with Amber Case from Unlock Protocol and Shelly Rupel from Devour Token will focus on cryptocurrencies and the role non-fungible tokens, the blockchain, DAOs and crypto overall will play in the future of dining, food retail and delivery.

We’re going to talk with Supreeet Raju, co-founder of OneRare about the work happening to build the “foodverse” and what it looks like to create a gamified and immersive food experience for users.

What does a Web3 burger chain restaurant look like? Co-founder of BurgerDAO Al Chen will discuss the work of building and funding a completely new operational model for quick service restaurants and the role NFTs will play in supporting the opening of each chain.

Register for SimulATE tickets + use SPOON for 25% off

Between sessions, you’ll have the chance to network with professionals across the channels and industries involved in Web3, crypto, blockchain, NFTs and mixed reality.

If you don’t work in those spaces but you’re trying to put your finger on the pulse of the “food metaverse” and need a crash course in the future disruption of food with metaverse tech, SimulATE is the place to be.

Check out the full agenda for SimulATE here and get your tickets; the event starts at 9:00 am Pacific on Tuesday, February 1, 2022 and runs until 1:00 pm Pacific. But, if you can’t make it live, grab a VIP pass that gives you total digital access to each session after the event.

We’re running a last-day sale — just click “TICKETS” in the upper right corner and use code SPOON to get 25% off both live and VIP tickets.

Here Are The Details About Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Restaurant Opening in 2023

While we already knew some of the basic details about Gary Vaynerchuk and VCR Group’s NFT restaurant concept, we’ve learned more in the last week about how the whole thing will work.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned and my quick thoughts:

Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a new, crypto-ized spin on an old idea: a member’s only dining club. To start, VCR initially made a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club available to the public and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as a person owns the token. As just like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do just that) on marketplaces like Opensea.

Flyfish Has Two-Tiered Membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), gets you into the restaurant and cocktail lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), gets you all that plus entry into the exclusive Omakase room.

Frequency and Guests: A token owner can eat at Flyfish pretty much whenever they want, but they’ll have to make a reservation first. Token owners will need to call ahead up to 14 days in advance for a table. Each token holder can make as many reservations as they’d like (capacity willing) per month, and each token member can bring the number of guests allotted for a specific table (for example, if they reserve a four-person table, they can bring three guests).

Flyfish Token Owners Still Have to Pay for Food. So you just spent $14 thousand on your new membership? That’s great and all, but you better have some left over to pay the bill. As with a traditional exclusive dining club, membership fees to Flyfish are just that, the cost of entry. Food, payable in US dollars, will be purchased for each meal just as if you were at any other restaurant.

Flyfish Has Raised $14 Million in Funds So Far. That’s right, $14 million in about a week. This is impressive and signals a potentially game-changing way to start a restaurant. Of course, there can only be one ‘first’ and not everyone has millions of followers like Gary Vaynerchuk. Still, I can certainly see a lot of celebrity chefs jumping into NFT-driven membership restaurants in the next couple of years.

The Tokens are Leasable. This is an interesting (and smart) twist: Flyfish permits token owners to lease them to others on a monthly basis. Leasing essentially turns a semi-liquid asset with a limited ability for near-term recurring revenue into a potential cash cow. Say, for example, you buy a Flyfish token for $4 thousand and lease it out to executives or curious upscale foodies for $1,000 a month. This would allow you to essentially treat a token as say you would a home you purchase to put onto Airbnb: An investment with potential for both long-term appreciation potential and near-term short-term recurring revenue.

There are a lot more details on the club’s FAQ page, which I would recommend reading. Overall, I think Gary Vee and crew have created a fairly common-sense initial framework for an NFT-as-membership concept that will undoubtedly become a template for others (of which I expect will be many).

If you’d like to learn more about how NFTs will chance the restaurant and food business, make sure to join The Spoon’s Food NFT/Metaverse mini-summit on February 1st. Registration is free (but limited), so hurry up and register today!

BurgerDAO Wants to Create a Decentralized Web3-Powered Burger Chain

Web3 has reached the burger joint.

A new community called BurgerDAO wants to create a decentralized burger franchise. According to the announcement, the group is looking to create a ghost kitchen burger chain with funding derived from the sale of tokens for the organization via Juicebox.

Owners of BurgerDAO tokens would have a say in the operational structure as well in things such as menu creation. The group also plans to use funding from token sales to eventually hire an operational staff (and likely pay service fees to a ghost kitchen company). According to the group, the operation’s profits would go back into the treasury, which would result in appreciation in the value of the tokens.

The group lays out three overall milestones for their Web3 burger franchise, the first one being the launch of the first virtual BurgerDAO restaurant location. The group puts the cost of reaching this milestone at upwards of $1 million and details four specific deliverables for getting to this first milestone: finding a ghost kitchen partner, deliver-apps integration, branding, and menu creation, and the launch of an NFT for BurgerDAO contributors.

If you think a million bucks sounds like a lot to get a virtual restaurant off the ground, you’re right, but the group explains they may not need all of it:

Will it actually cost $1M? Probably not. But we know opening a restaurant is tough (see above) even with the advent of cloud kitchens. While the DAO will help us make decisions, we will be the ones working with the cloud kitchen, testing ingredients, pay for marketing tests, and other administrative expenses. Opening a basic deli or pizza joint (brick and mortar location) costs between $200-$500K depending on the location just to give you a frame of reference.

From there, the group lays out plans for further expansion of their decentralized ghost kitchen burger franchise, which includes the eventual opening of a brick and mortar location in a specific city and hiring a full-time staff.

On the one hand, the idea of a decentralized burger franchise is interesting, but I suspect it won’t be easy to pull off. In explaining the motivation for the concept, the group points to the inspiration of MrBeast Burger and companies like Virtual Dining Concepts (the virtual restaurant startup which is operationalizing MrBeast) but then asks why a MrBeast or VDC should take home all the profits? The group then explains much of their initial costs will be in finding and working with a kitchen operator (this type of work is what VDC does for the MrBeast Burger franchise and its other virtual restaurant concepts).

In other words, BurgerDAO is against the idea of centralized management and gatekeepers, but will likely need to find a group that has relationships with kitchen operators or build a relationship with and pay a for-profit ghost kitchen operator themselves.

They also haven’t answered the biggest challenge for virtual restaurants: brand building. The most successful virtual restaurants have been able to leverage an influencer’s reach, or they’ve been ones that have already tapped into the existing successful restaurant brand like Wowbao. While companies like NextBite have been able to spin up completely new virtual brands and get broad reach across several markets, they’ve had lots of venture capital to fund the brand-building for their concepts.

All that said, while the group has a big hill to climb, I’m interested to see if they can pull off their web3 burger concept. BurgerDAO is part of a broader movement in the restaurant and food space away from traditional operating models, which includes the move towards automation-powered centralized food production, the move away from physical front-of-house dine-in, and now the embrace of web3 and metaverse-powered digital concepts.

If you’d like to learn more, attend The Spoon’s Metaverse/NFT virtual mini-event on February 1st (Hurry, the first 400 tickets are free!).

Make Pie in the Metaverse? Designer Creates AR Kitchen Assistant With Snap Spectacles

One day when Lauren Cason was making a pie with her dad, it wasn’t long before talk turned to her job.

As an XR designer who helps big brands figure out how to use technology like augmented and virtual reality, Cason explained to her father how augmented reality glasses like the Snap Spectacles work. As she was talking, Cason had an epiphany: she could make a prototype to show him.

“One of the things that’s really cool about the Spectacles is that you can prototype stuff with them very quickly,” Cason said during an interview with The Spoon. “So we worked on the pie, and then I spent the afternoon putting the prototype together, and I made a video.”

The video, which you can see above, shows the view of someone working in the kitchen with an AR lens designed to help them cook. The lens puts relevant information such as cooking temperature and countdown timers over items cooked on the stove and in the oven. Cason also created the ability to pull up a recipe by touching a specific area within the cook’s view and even had a note from her dad appended to the dough roller reminding her not to over-roll the dough.

As soon as Cason put the video on Twitter, it blew up. People loved it, including chefs, who told her they would use something like this in their restaurants.

Lauren Cason

“They said, ‘I don’t know if I would really use this at home, but I would totally use this in my industrial kitchen,'” Cason said.

Cason also got helpful feedback on other aspects of the video. For example, in the first version, a recipe would pop up when the cook tapped on the microwave and a recipe showed up, but some felt the information would obscure the view of the oven as the cook looked around.

“Some folks gave me the feedback that it might be a safety issue if you can obscure the cooktop and the flame area with the recipe,” Cason said. “So I changed it.”

When Cason bakes cookies in the second prototype version of her AR lens, not only does the recipe stick in one place on the wall, but it also includes visual placement guidance on the cookie sheet to help the baker evenly space the cookie dough.

Talking to Cason, my mind began to envision all sorts of ways in which augmented reality could be used as a cooking assistant both in the consumer and professional kitchen alike. Our talk also confirmed what I already suspected: augmented reality, of all the broader technologies that are being grouped under the term metaverse, is the most mature and ready to be useful in real world situations like our kitchens.

When I asked Cason about the metaverse, she said that it’s an interesting time for both the technology and the term itself. However, she also expressed cautious skepticism, especially when it came to big companies like Facebook’s embracing the technology.

“One of my old bosses gave a really good talk about the term metaverse and he said that Facebook was ‘cookie licking’ right now.” Cason said. She explained that the term cookie-licking is when a company treats a new technology space like a plate of cookies, only instead of eating the cookie, Facebook is essentially just picking one up, licking it, and putting it back on the plate.

They’re saying “I’m not going to eat the cookie right now, but I don’t want anybody else to eat the cookie either,” Cason said.

For now, Cason doesn’t concern herself with what cookies Mark Zuckerberg is choosing to lick on the metaverse cookie sheet. Instead, she just plans on continuing to keep iterating on her prototype so her dad – and maybe even a professional chef or two – can bake cookies in the real world with a bit of help from AR.

Restaurants, Welcome to the Metaverse

Restaurants, welcome to the metaverse.

It’s not just a vision that’s 5 or 10 years away. It’s here now. 

For Halloween, Chipotle created a virtual restaurant inside the online game platform Roblox to give away $1 million in free burritos. Fans and gamers could enter the restaurant, experience a Halloween-themed Chipotle, and get a promo code for a free burrito in the real world.

This is a preview of what we can expect to see in the years to come. The next generation of diners will order their food and discover where they are going for their next night out from inside augmented and virtual worlds created by the likes of Epic, Roblox, and Facebook. And the best hospitality companies (and hospitality tech companies) will not wait too long to adapt.

Here are seven ways that restaurants will change in the metaverse:

  1. Marketplaces – apps won’t be the primary ordering channel anymore once more people begin to participate in the metaverse. Companies like Doordash, UberEats and GrubHub will need to rethink their strategy as ordering and discovery will be embedded in more interoperable experiences. Doordash moving to become a pure logistics API is smart because they will be protected if they lose the ordering portal in the metaverse — someone still has to deliver the food after all.
  2. Marketing – brands will start integrating food into virtual experiences. Instead of traditional email marketing, restaurants will be able to recreate their physical space in the metaverse and invite guests from around the world. The metaverse will create new opportunities to test promotions and loyalty programs, just like Chipotle showed by launching their Boorito promo as digital-only this year.
  3. Reservations – the interface for booking a table will completely change. Diners will do a quick virtual tour before booking the specific table they want. Pricing will be dynamic for the very best tables.
  4. Delivery – ghost kitchens will be the building blocks of group ordering in the metaverse. You’ll be able to share a meal with your friends delivered to you at the same time even if you are halfway across the globe.
  5. QR codes – QR codes will be more than just menus. They will be the access point for augmented reality. Friends from the metaverse who can’t make the night out will be able to join in on the fun and send your party a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
  6. Payments – while we expect restaurants to always take dollars, we think the metaverse will have a few different major cryptocurrencies that rise to the top over the next 5 years. The currency that a restaurant accepts will be part of its identity and marketing efforts.
  7. Membership – members-only hospitality experiences like SOHO house will extend their house into the digital realm. Members will have access to exclusive digital worlds if they own the right (non-fungible token) NFT to get in the front door. These NFTs will be traded on open marketplaces as keys to different clubs.

Most of us love sitting down with friends at a restaurant with a chill vibe and having a great conversation in the real world. The metaverse will not change that. Restaurants will continue to provide those unique experiences. But within the metaverse, restaurants will be able to reach more guests that might not always be able to show up in person.

Steve Simoni is CEO of BBot, a maker of smart ordering technology for restaurants and the hospitality industry.