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ID on the Glass, Please. The New Normal of Walmart Grocery Pickup

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Though I wasn’t even going into the store during my grocery pickup from Walmart this week, I still wrapped myself in a facemask and gloves. Mainly because I was buying alcohol, and last time I did so from Walmart, I had to talk directly with a worker in a situation that was way closer than six feet, and I had to sign for the booze with my finger on a device that presumably had been touched by a ton of other people that day.

But it turns out that a lot has changed in the past few weeks and, at least at my store, Walmart was being more aggressive about safety than even I was. Gone was the tablet to sign; instead the pickup worker asked me to stay in my car, roll up my window and press my ID up against the glass.

Additionally, I saw someone, who I presume was a supervisor, shout out to a customer and worker that they were too close and needed to stay six feet apart.

I can’t speak for the working conditions inside or more broadly — Walmart doesn’t have the best reputation for the way it treats its workers — but from a grocery pickup standpoint, my Walmart is taking COVID-19 very seriously.

There were more changes that I noticed on this trip. Walmart added a bunch of new pickup spots as well. They, like every other grocer, are grappling with ways to keep up with the surge in online grocery shopping. Walmart reportedly saw a record number of downloads for its grocery app over the weekend, surpassing Amazon.

While Walmart scrambles to keep up with safety protocols and meeting demand, there are some signs it’s struggling. I had issues with the app this week, both ordering and coordinating pickup. Like, big issues that even re-installs wouldn’t save. This was confirmed on two separate calls with Walmart customer service, both of whom said there were widespread problems with the app.

Walmart isn’t the only grocer struggling as it tries to meet demand. Amazon announced yesterday that new Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods customers have to wait to be invited before getting deliveries. And ShopRite is putting online customers into a virtual waiting room before they can shop.

Accelerated is almost too soft a word for what COVID-19 has done to grocery e-commerce. With 31 percent of US households using online grocery as of last month, compared with 13 percent in August, retailers experienced a year’s worth of growth in a matter of weeks. Problems in the supply chain and logistics were bound to arise.

Thankfully, the hiccups I’ve encountered have been minor and few. Since I live in a more rural area, grocery delivery is hard to come by, and Walmart pickup has been a godsend for my family. I appreciate those workers still showing up everyday and stocking my trunk. I wish there was an option to tip them, but hopefully they can see my sincere appreciation through the driver’s side window.

Can a Software Upgrade Save Food 3D Printing?

3D printing food has long held the promise of unlocking sci-fi-like benefits for society. Think of a machine teleporting sushi or creating highly customized food on the spot made just for you.

But 3D food printing has stalled in recent years, and as Spoon Founder Mike Wolf reported this week, the answer to kickstarting it might be better software, writing:

[Marine Coré] Baillais, the founder of a French 3D food printing consultancy called The Digital Patisserie (La Pâtisserie Numérique), told me that the reason general purpose 3D printing software doesn’t work well is it’s designed to print with \materials like plastic filament, not food paste. This usually leads to less than optimal results because a food paste has unique characteristics that make it much different than filament.

It’s actually a pretty cool idea and you should check out his full story for more details (plus, Notre Dame inspired food printing).

During a Pandemic, Don’t Be a Pandummy

This should go without saying, but if there was ever a time to be kind and generous with one another, it’s during a deadly pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying economies.

So we were a little disappointed when reading stories about customers tip-baiting Instacart shoppers; promising a big tip for grocery delivery only to remove it once the job is done. That is (*#$@$^ evil. Don’t do that.

Third-party delivery services, which had some sketchy business practices even during better times, got a bit of a slap on the wrist from the city of San Francisco this week. Mayor London Breed ordered a temporary cap of 15 percent on delivery fees third-party services can charge restaurants during the shelter in place. One would wish that a new rule wasn’t necessary for something like that, but… here we are.

We understand times are difficult, to say the least. Be kind where you can. It makes a difference.

This is the online version of our weekly food tech newsletter. If you would like to get The Spoon in your inbox, subscribe here.

Newsletter: COVID-19 Could Help Us Build a Better Restaurant

Welcome to the first-ever Weekly Spoon newsletter that’s entirely focused on restaurant innovation. That we chose to launch this just as a pandemic is sweeping across the globe is entirely intentional. Of all the food tech sectors out there, none has been hit so hard or will change — forever — as drastically as the restaurant biz.

With that in mind, let’s kick this thing off by not rehashing the gloomy stuff. Instead, let’s highlight some ways in which the current restaurant business meltdown is spurring a ton of initiatives that could make a better overall industry in the long term — if we let it.

The Virtual Tip Jar Will Stick Around

As anyone whose ever waited tables, tended bar, or delivered pizzas knows, tips are an important portion of workers’ incomes. With most bars and dining rooms closed right now, an astounding number of what are basically virtual tip jars have popped up online. We first got wind of this last week, when we came across a site called chatt.us that lets at-home drinkers leave tips for service workers in Chattanooga, Tenn. via Venmo or CashApp. 

A little more digging uncovered more of these virtual tip jars in, well, pretty much every state from Maryland to Idaho. One site in particular, serviceindustry.tips, lets you choose specific cities from a list and direct your funds to workers in that area from a very user-friendly web interface. Others are simple spreadsheet interfaces, though no less popular from the number of entries on some of them.

While these virtual tip jars can’t make up for the lost wages and job layoffs many restaurant workers now face, they could at least provide some aid to those currently struggling.

They could also be a valuable tool for the restaurant industry even when dining rooms re-open. As one restaurant owner explained to me recently, in-house staff prepping the off-premises orders don’t see any of the tips left through third-party ordering platforms. A virtual tip jar could be a way for customers who wanted to hand over a little extra to tip those employees for their work. There are also well-documented issues around tipping delivery drivers in general. Since fewer folks seem to carry cash these days, a virtual tip jar could be a way to bypass that aspect of the platform, thereby making sure it’s the worker who gets the tip — not the tech companies.

Ditto for Contactless Delivery and Payments

Three months ago “contactless delivery” wasn’t even a phrase, at least not in the vernacular sense. In an effort to stem the spread of coronavirus worldwide, what started in China (see above image, courtesy of Yum China) has now quickly caught on. All the major delivery platforms as well as grocery sites like Instacart and individual restaurant chains now either use contactless delivery as the default option or make it clearly available through their apps.

I doubt we’ll revert back to the old method once this horror show is over.

At their most basic, contactless delivery methods as well as contactless payments are just more hygienic. Fewer germs can spread when cash and cards aren’t being handed back and forth over a counter, or when customers and their delivery couriers stand a certain distance apart during a drop-off. I doubt I’m the only person who’s ever ordered delivery while having bronchitis. Contactless delivery would go far in protecting workers — many of whom do not get paid sick leave — from illnesses their customers might be carrying while they’re stuck at home. Vice versa, too.

And if this look into China’s (sort of) newly reopened restaurant scene is anything for the rest of the world to go by, mobile payments will see a boost, too. More customers will be using apps like Apple Pay, CashApp, and Google Pay to avoid constantly handing over a credit card.

Simpler Menus Will Beget Better Service

“Pare down your menu” is a directive I’ve been hearing a lot as restaurants quickly pivot to serving customers through takeout and delivery channels. That means offering only the items that are easy to produce, will travel well, and are ones that customers actually want. 

That’s not breakfast, at least not right now. In a statement this week, McDonald’s announced it was temporarily pulling breakfast items from its menu and will focus on serving its most popular items. Taco Bell also nixed breakfast items for now. More chains are likely to follow.

Of course, these moves are in response to the potentially billions of dollars the restaurant industry will lose over the next few months. I suspect, however, that slimmed down menus could actually improve certain aspects of the restaurant industry, particularly where tech is concerned. Have you ever tried to navigate a Taco Bell self-service kiosk? Finding Waldo inside Google Maps was an arguably easier task.

Smaller menus could also speed up times in the drive-thru, improve AI-powered upsell recommendations, and use fewer ingredients overall, thereby reducing food waste.

In no way am I suggesting that menus need to look like this one from 1973. And who knows? Breakfast and Monster Tacos might go back on the menu at some point. But maybe this strange, unsettling shift in which we now find ourselves can show us that simpler menus leads to better experiences for everyone involved.

Keep on truckin’,

Jenn

Newsletter: Everything We Saw in Kitchen and Food Tech at CES 2020

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The Spoon team descended on Vegas last week to try and find all the food and kitchen tech we could lay our hands on. We also held our second annual FoodTech Live event because, well, we’re lazy and we wanted the food tech to come to us.

And now that we’re back in the snowy foothills of the Pacific Northwest, the Spoon team had some time put our thoughts about the tech expo together, record a podcast, and decipher what it all means. 

So here it is, our CES Food Tech wrapup. I’ve got kitchen tech covered below, then Catherine looks at Impossible Pork and what else she saw on the fake meat front, and finally Chris gives his thoughts on robots and kitchens coming out of what has been an eventful couple weeks in that space. 

Kitchen Tech at CES

Because I’ve gone to CES more times than I could count, I’ve gotten pretty good at searching out what matters to me the most so as to make productive use of my time. That’s always been a challenge in food tech since CES and its exhibitors have largely ignored the category. But that all changed this year because of what happened last year: The launch of the Impossible Burger 2.0. 

And while fake meat is a long ways from a smart oven or a food robot, I think having the food tech unicorn choose CES as its venue to launch its new products has just given momentum to everything food-related, included the future kitchen.

What did I see? Well, I wrote a deep dive full kitchen tech wrap-up report detailing everything kitchen tech at CES this year, but if you’re looking for the short-short of it here are the top takeaways:

Personalization is Impacting Everything, Even Physical Space

There’s no doubt, personalization is impacting everything in food (heck, it’s why we decided to have a dedicated event on it). But when it comes to personalization, we usually are talking recipes or diet plans, not physical space. GE wants to change that, and so they showed off an adaptable kitchen concept that personalizes the space depending on the needs of the individual. 

Of course, there was also lots of meal planning and recipe personalization, as well as a couple startups like DNANudge and Sun Genomics looking to help you build meal journeys based on your personal biomarkers and DNA. 

Food Waste Only Gets A Half-Nod

There were better and more capable smart fridges to help us take better inventory and there were smart pantries to help us keep track of our dry goods, but I didn’t see a whole lot of effort focused on helping us reduce consumer food waste. One company, however, that wanted to help us all get better at composting our food waste was Sepura Home, which had a good solution that integrated with your home disposal to route food waste to a composter and liquids down the drain. 

Focus on Full Meal Journey Rather Than Point Solutions

When it comes to the smart home and connected kitchen, we’re used to seeing standalone technologies that show off a cutting edge new technology rather than a bigger solution tailored towards solving consumer problems. I think that’s starting to change, as companies like GE and Samsung showed off bigger ideas tailored towards helping people solve problems and connect the different parts of the meal journey. 

Drink Tech!

There were so many drink tech offerings at CES it was hard to keep track. We wrote about the Matcha making machine, tried out the Spinn and saw new beer-making robots.  We even checked out a new seltzer machine that is targeting reducing plastic waste in hotels and homes.

Countertop Cooking

Being a kitchen tech nerd, I have to admit it was cool have the guy who basically invented the home sous vide circulator give me a walkthrough of the Anova Precision Oven (you can listen along to Scott Heimendinger’s guided tour here.) We also took a look at the Julia multicooker here. 

Once again, check out my full kitchen tech wrapup for CES 2020 here. But first, see what Catherine has to say about fake meat this year at CES…

Impossible Pork at CES 2020 [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

I came into CES especially excited about one thing: Impossible Foods’ press event. The company had teased something major on Twitter, so I guessed we would see a new product — probably pork or chicken. And pork it was!

We got to taste the faux pork in a number of applications and it was juicy and fatty, though slightly more neutral-tasting than traditional pork — a great blank canvas for a number of porky recipes. If you’re feeling FOMO right now, don’t sweat it — you can soon you can sample the faux pork for yourself in the Impossible Croissan’wich, featuring Impossible’s plant-based pork sausage, which is rolling out in select Burger King locations this month.

While eating a bao stuffed with plant-based pork, I couldn’t help but wonder — what will be the next food to make a splash at CES? Last year Impossible stirred up a lot of attention when it won the Best of the Best award from Endgadget, even though it was the first edible food company to show at the tech expo. Now that the company has proven that food is, in fact, technology, it has opened up the door for more food companies to make a splash at CES.

One company to keep an eye on is Dutch startup Meatable. The cultured meat startup, which is growing pork muscle and fat cells outside of the animal, actually had its own small booth at CES this year. They didn’t have any of their actual meat on display, but Meatable’s CEO Krijn De Nood told me that they were hoping to bring cell-based pork samples to Vegas in 2021 for a limited taste test. They plan to start selling the pork on a large scale — pending regulatory approval — by 2025.

I guess that means we’ll have to start building up an appetite for CES 2021.

FlowWaste’s image recognition device. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Other cool stuff I saw (and tasted) on the CES show floor:

Food Robots: Do We Need Them?

While Chris wasn’t able to get around CES this year (save for our event FoodTech Live), he was watching for food robots and saw buzz around quite a few:  

I was unable to attend CES this year, and as such, I missed a bunch of robot stuff. LG showed off a mock restaurant with a robot cooking food and making pourover coffee. Samsung demoed a concept robot that was billed as an “extra set of hands” in the kitchen that could grab items, pour oil and even wield a knife. IRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum announced it too was developing robotic arms to load dishes or carry food to the table. And of course, who could forget the robot that makes raclette melted cheese.

But in the end, he started to wonder: Do we need these more advanced robots in the consumer kitchen? …my initial response to robot arms swerving around a kitchen is why? Are these robotic ambitions the best way to gain greater convenience in the kitchen, or do they just make things more complicated? Let’s acknowledge that there are definite use cases for robotic arms to help those with disabilities or who are otherwise movement impaired. The University of Washington is working on a voice-controlled robot that can feed people who need such assistance. And researching how robots interact with odd-shaped and often fragile objects like food can help the robotics industry overall. That’s one of the reasons Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and why Nvidia built a full kitchen to train its robots. But in our homes, and especially smaller apartments with even smaller kitchens, robot arms seem like more of a menace than a help, taking up space and potentially getting in the way. A case of futuristic form over function.

You can read Chris’s full piece about the robotic consumer kitchen and where he thinks it’s all going here. 

Newsletter: Tokyo Takeaways, Fighting Food Waste, and Reality TV Style Restaurant Rescue

My dad’s super power is writing thank you notes. He never misses sending one. Ever. So it is with the spirit of Pappy Albrecht that I am transforming this week’s newsletter into a big, wet, sloppy thank you to Tokyo for all the great food tech times The Spoon had there last week.

The first thank you goes out to our partner company, SIGMAXYZ, which hosted us and put on the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan conference. Much like our upcoming SKS: North America show in Seattle (get your tickets now!), the Japan summit featured two days packed with tremendous talks, presentations and demonstrations.

What SKS: Japan highlighted more than anything is that the foodtech community is a global one that is still enthusiastically innovating, pushing boundaries and thinking big. I mean, there was a TV in a plate, and not one but two different roadmaps for feeding people in space, along with a talk on teleporting sushi, for goodness’ sake.

The second thank you goes out to the city of Tokyo itself, which provided seemingly endless opportunities for eating well. I don’t think any member of The Spoon team had a bad meal while there. Whether it was grabbing (many) egg salad sandwiches at the 7-11, enjoying a delicious pasta meal while listening to vinyl in a record cafe, or slurping up ramen noodles in some non-descript restaurant, I learned that you don’t need high-tech for haute cuisine.

Finally, one last thanks goes out a little closer to home. While Mike, Catherine and myself were in Tokyo, Jenn Marston did the real hard work of keeping the site up and running with fresh content. Thank you, Jenn!

Check out some of the best of what we saw at SKS Japan right here.

Image via Hazel Technologies.

Hazel Technologies Raises $13 Million
Food waste was not a problem for us during our trip. It’s safe to say we ate everything we were given. Gladly. However, food waste remains a huge problem around the world.

Thankfully there are a number of startups tackling the issue head-on through a number of different tactics. One way we’re seeing more of lately is extending the life of food itself. Hazel Technologies announced a $13 million Series B round of funding yesterday for its take on food waste. Here’s Jenn explaining their method:

The USDA-funded company makes packaging inserts in the form of sachets with 1-MCP technology that get placed in boxes of bulk produce at harvest time. The sachets (see image above) are biodegradable, 3.5cm packets that can be tossed amid the produce and emit a vapor that reduces the respiration rate of produce and increases resistance to the plant hormone ethylene. Doing so slows the decay of produce, increasing its shelf life of fruits and vegetables.

Hazel joins other startups like Stix Fresh, Apeel Sciences and Cambridge Crops in using science to slow down the decay of food, and help save us from our waste problem.


Deliveroo to a Restaurant’s Rescoo
Finally, in a move that sounds straight out of reality TV, UK-based food delivery service Deliveroo launched a “Restaurant Rescue Team” last week.

It is basically what it sounds like: Deliveroo will identify dead or near-dead restaurants on its platform and send out a (presumably peppy and pretty) squad of staffers to offer them a ghost kitchen within the Deliveroo Editions program, as well as helping out with branding, menu development and pricing support.

It’s a smart idea, and one assumes Deliveroo will use their data to identify restaurants that could actually make them money, so it’s not a huge risk for the company.

Soon your Deliveroo-delivered meals may include made-for-TV uplifting stories with a side of joyful tears.

Newsletter: Knife-wielding Robots, Incubators and Accelerators Explained, and $200 Coffee

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I heard an interview with comedian Neal Brennan in which he said a guiding principle for him is asking “And then what?” He uses it in terms of success and personal happiness, but as a journalist, it’s a good reminder to not just think in the moment, but also look at what lies ahead.

“And then what?” came to mind when I wrote a story this week about how researchers at Iowa State University built a knife-wielding robot. Through a bunch of incredibly complicated math, the robot can coordinate and combine a series of push, press and slice motions to cut up an onion. Sure, the technology is crude right now, but nonetheless: a robot can autonomously use a knife to figure out how to chop food, and even adjust its actions when something unexpected (like hitting something hard while cutting) happens.

When we write about robots now, it’s often in the context of taking over a job that’s menial, repetitive or dangerous. But the ability for robots to do human-style tasks is accelerating. Iowa State’s robot is only on onions now, but carving more intricate/delicate things like meat won’t be that far behind. Flippy the robot can grill a burger and fry up chicken tenders, and its creator, Miso Robotics, has already said it is working on programming Flippy to do prep work like, say, chop onions.

When robots can do those tasks more precisely and consistently than people, what does that mean for our human workforce and us as a consumption society? Over the past year we’ve said that these are questions we need to start asking. But as robots get better and more skilled, we need to start “and then what?” right now.

If you have any thoughts on the subject, drop us a line, or join or our Slack Channel to chat with other food tech executives.

An email newsletter I’ve become addicted to lately is “What’s the Difference?” by Brette Warshaw. In each issue, Warshaw breaks down how subtle things are difference (this week’s is biodegradable vs. compostable).

In much the same way, my colleague Jenn Marston did an excellent piece over the weekend on the difference between startup incubators and startup accelerators. The explainer came about because of our Food Tech Fireside Chat we held last week, I feel like it’s one of those questions that a lot of entrepreneurs want to ask, but might hesitate out of fear of looking stupid.

Never fear! We’ve got your back, shy food tech entrepreneur. TL;DR: An incubator helps a startup that is really more of an idea, an accelerator helps a company that’s already up and running.

You should definitely check out Jenn’s whole piece because it provides more background and insight, as well as a handy list of food tech startup accelerators and incubators that you should look into.

Finally, what better way to wash down this week’s newsletter than with a $200 bottle of coffee.

That’s right. Two. Hundred. Dollars. For a bottle of Elemental Beverages’ limited-batch Gesha coffee which, as Catherine Lamb writes is “made with beans that score 90+ on the Coffee Quality Institute’s Q Grading Scale, which puts them in the top 0.1 percent. The beans also cost a whopping $450 a pound.”

Catherine pounded down a bottle of the $200 coffee (sidenote: she did not share) and came to the conclusion that it was “crazy delicious.” Check out her full review, and if you want bragging rights to your own ridiculously expensive bottle of coffee, act quickly — it’s almost sold out.

One thing you definitely want to get your hands on before it sells out is a ticket to our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle. This year’s show promises to be bigger and better than ever, so grab your early bird discount ticket today!

Future Food: The Confusion around Cultured and Plant-Based Meat

This is the web version of our weekly Future Food newsletter. In it we cover the alternative protein landscape, from plant-based meat to cellular agriculture to insects. Subscribe here!

Plant-based meat companies are leveraging technology to create a product so good it makes eating meat from an animal unnecessary. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are both doing an excellent job of it so far, and will continue creating new iterations that taste even closer and closer to the real thing.

But where does cell-based meat — still likely a few years from our plates — fit into the equation? If plant-based meat tastes so good people will willingly choose it over the real thing, do we even need to bother making meat in a lab?

This week I tackled that question and zoomed out to take a broad picture of the alternative meat ecosystem, now and in 10 years. Spoiler: Yes, I think that cultured meat has a place in our future diets and is worth pursuing. See if I can convince you.

Photo: New Harvest.

*Is* plant-based meat actually healthy?

My boss Michael Wolf posted that piece on Linkedin got some interesting responses including one from Sean Butler, the Managing Director of LIDD Supply Chain Intelligence and former SVP of Retail at the meal kit startup Chef’d. He said:

I think that consumers may come to see the current crop of plant-based [meat] as “chemical-based” in the future, creating a strong opening for cellular meat, which can be billed as a (relatively) natural and sustainable alternative. Time will tell!

I’d always assumed consumers actually felt the opposite way. After all, plant-based meat is chiefly made up of recognizable ingredients, like soy and pea protein, whereas cell-based meat is more of a mystery — at least for those of us without a cell biology degree.

But just because we know the basic ingredients in plant-based meat doesn’t mean it’s necessarily more healthy. Many meat alternatives are quite high in fat (in order to mimic the juiciness of real meat), and are heavily processed to nail the texture. Despite this, plant-based meat companies like Beyond and Impossible typically market their products as healthy alternatives — which is one of the reasons why flexitarians are flocking to them in droves.

In the rapidly evolving world of alternative protein, it can be confusing for consumers to delineate healthy and non-healthy, natural and non-natural, meat and non-meat.

Mission (actually) Impossible

I got in a bit of a news kerfuffle this week. Spurred by a piece in the Washington Post, I wrote a story about how Burger King will start selling the Impossible Whopper in Sweden.

As it turns out… that’s not the case. A food tech-connected source in Sweden reached out to let us know that the new plant-based burger to be sold in BK is not, in fact, from Impossible and has nothing to do with the famous “bleeding” burger. A rep at Impossible later confirmed.

There’s one good reason that Impossible isn’t available in Europe yet, even while their competitor Beyond Meat is: heme. Impossible produces heme through genetic engineering. While we’re cool with that in the States, the EU is very hesitant about what sort of genetically engineered foods it allows to be sold. That’s one reason why I was surprised to hear that Impossible was moving into Sweden so quickly.

So which plant-based burger can Swedes expect to order from their local BK? According to an email from Iwo Zakowski, the General Manager of Burger King Sweden and Denmark, the new Unbelievable Whopper will be made with a plant-based burger composed of soy and wheat protein. He didn’t give the name of the producer but clarified that it wouldn’t be Nestlé’s Incredible Burger, which is on menus in McDonald’s Germany.

If you happen to be in Sweden and are able to take a taste, let us know what you think, wouldja?

Sausage party

It may not be in Sweden, but Impossible made some other expansion moves in the U.S. this week. They’re now at Little Caesar’s, whose new Impossible Supreme pie is topped with sausage made of Impossible’s “bleeding” plant-based meat.

Interestingly, this marks the first time the company has developed a unique, non-beef product for a restaurant partnership. Which makes me think that we’ll soon see a wave of new plant-based sausage products coming to market. Beyond’s already there, as are some veterans in the alterna-meat space like Field Roast and Lightlife. Now Impossible has followed suit. Maybe next they’ll roll out some plant-based breakfast sausage patties, or bratwursts for the grill?

Ocean Hugger Foods’ new plant-based eel sushi.

Protein new ’round the web

  • Ocean Hugger Foods, who make a vegan raw fish substitute from tomatoes, unveiled a new plant-based “eel” sushi at this weekend’s National Restaurant Association Show.
  • Livekindly: In the U.K., supermarket chain Aldi is expanding its line of private label plant-based products with “sausage” rolls and “chicken” burgers.
  • Nation’s Restaurant News: Pret A Manger is buying British competitor Eat and turning all of its locations into Veggie Prets, which only serve (you guessed it) vegan and vegetarian food.
  • malaymail: In Singapore, food delivery giant Deliveroo will offer dishes from eight restaurant brands made from Impossible Foods’ plant-based meat.

Eat well,
Catherine

Newsletter: Entering the Golden Age of Vending Machines

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On a recent trip to San Francisco, I enjoyed a steaming hot bowl of ramen that was fast, delicious… and came from a vending machine. Last week, PanPacific unveiled a beer vending machine that uses biometrics to verify the age of the buyer. Briggo announced this week that it is opening up a second automated Coffee Haus robo barista at the Austin airport.

We are entering the golden age vending machines, and I am totally here for it. (You will be too.)

No longer dull black boxes with half-filled coils of Doublemint gum and Texas-sized cinnamon buns, vending machines are increasingly complex devices that are equal parts robot and IoT-connected automated storefronts.

All this is to say that vending machines are the new food court. Only this food court 2.0 requires little real estate, no on-site staff, and can operate around the clock in busy places like airports, hospitals and dorms. Need a meal before your 6 a.m. flight? No problem!

But all the automation and convenience in the world is useless if these machines serve a cruddy product. The good news is, they don’t. Briggo roasts its own high-end coffee. Yo-Kai Express’ menu was created by a Michelin-star chef. And PanPacific’s beer vending machine can be outfitted to serve any kind of craft brew to satisfy even the most discerning of palates.

Vending machines are also poised to change the way we eat. The smaller footprint means more meal choices in a smaller space. The connected devices will provide data on inventory and sales for more accurate and efficient supply chain and logistics. Taken together, this will mean hungry people, especially those in a hurry, will have more and healthier meal choices (and will spend more money).

That sure beats a sad row of Texas Sized Cinnamon Buns.

Elsewhere, it’s felt a bit like the Battle of Winterfell here at The Spoon over the past month, trying to keep up with all the plant-based protein news. While Beyond Meat is set to go public this week, Impossible Whoppers will be available at all 7,000+ Burger Kings by the end of the year. Fake meat is going mainstream, baby! Though, all that demand is generating its own problems, as we learned that Impossible is having a hard time keeping up.

To help you understand the onslaught of plant-based protein news, Catherine Lamb, The Spoon’s own Arya Stark, launched our Future Food newsletter this week. In addition to slaying, she’ll break down all the innovation, deals and developments in the world of alternate-protein you need to know. Sign up for it here!

Also, we’ve been launching our full session videos from The Spoon’s ArticulATE conference last month in San Francisco. Check out talks with Creator, Albertsons, Starship and Auto X, as well as a presentation from the Director of Google Brain.

Finally, with ArticulATE in the books, we’re busy working on our flagship food tech executive summit, SKS 2019, where we’ll be talking about the future of food, the kitchen, food robots and more! You’ll want to be sure to be in Seattle in October, and as a newsletter subscriber you can get 15% off our Ultra-Early Bird pricing by using the discount code NEWSLETTER.

Until next week!

Weekly Spoon: The Intelligent Edge for Food, Specialty Coffee Expo Takeaways, Beyond Moves Beyond Tyson

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In a previous life, I wrote a lot about consumer broadband technology. As with any industry, the world of Internet and broadband has a lot of inside baseball conversation, and one of the evergreen themes the industry wrestles with is whether or not the intelligence in the network should reside centrally or at the edge.

In the 90s, the industry talked about network computing. At the beginning of this century, it was about fat vs. thin clients. Later we started talking about distributed and edge computing. While the terms change and technology evolves, this a conversation the world of tech has been having – and continues to have – ever since the network became the lynchpin to everything that we do.

Why am I talking about this in a food tech newsletter?

Because for the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking about how the power of technology – digitization, software, robotics – is reversing what has been a longstanding megatrend towards centralization of nearly everything in food. All along the food value chain – from big ag to food manufacturing to food retail – the primary focus of innovation up until the past decade has been towards a concentration of the means of production, distribution, culinary expertise and pretty much everything else to gain massive efficiencies of scale. If we’re going to feed a rapidly growing population, why not apply what we learned from Henry Ford and other titans of the industrial age to food?

But now, through the power of tech, we’re seeing a reversal of this century-long trend, where digitization, software, IoT, AI, and robotics are unleashing a massive reinvention of food systems and unleashing pockets of innovation and the power of creation everywhere you look.

What this means is we are seeing the great decentralization of food intelligence. In food retail, IT, robotics and digital powered micromanufacturing start to make its way to the different storefronts. In the restaurant space, we’re beginning to see automation and robotics to create hamburgers at the quality a Michelin star chef would make them, only without the chef. And at home, we’re witnessing the emergence of digital technologies used to grow food and prepare food and beverages beyond the capability of the home cook.

No matter what we want to call it – digitization of food, the intelligent edge for food (distributed fooding?) – I see it everywhere I look, including in this week’s news…

Photo: Garrett Oden.

One example of the intelligent edge of food is in coffee.  Our coffee tech expert Garrett Oden was at the Specialty Coffee Expo this past week and wrote about how Bellwether is moving coffee roasting from the roastery into the coffee shop with their tech-powered coffee roasters. Others like Bonaverde are creating multifunction coffee machines that give the home coffee user new capabilities through technology.

Distributed, digital powered intelligence.

And last week, we talked about robots bringing micromanufacturing to the grocery store aisles, fresh-tossed salads to vending machines and making amazing burgers in restaurants.  Sure, automation has been a big deal for in food for some time, but mostly in centralized environments. What’s different now is the advancement in software, sensors, and robotics to mimic essentially some of the things only a person had been able to do more recently.

Venture investor Avidan Ross, who spoke on our investor panel last week at ArticulATE, talked about just this topic and how while we’ve been automating food production for decades, it’s only in the last few years where we’ve seen robotics advance to the point where new capabilities in the creation of food using these technologies have been possible:

“I think what’s interesting now is that we’ve been able to move into chaotic unstructured environments at the endpoint,” said Ross.

This, by the way, is the same point made by Google’s robotic chief, Vincent Vanhoucke, at the same event. From this morning’s post by Chris Albrecht:

Vanhoucke’s team is working on taking the things robots do well — moving around — and marrying that with advancements in computer vision and deep learning to make robots more useful in the messy and complicated real world. And it turns out that food in particular, with its different textures and properties, is quite messy and complicated.

In short, technology is enabling us to do things with food at the edge in a way that was not possible before. Whether it’s the peace dividends from advancements software, autonomous cars, AI or what-have-you, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the world of food is seeing the emergence of distributed intelligence that is creating a new wave of innovation that will continue to disrupt the food systems for decades to come.

There was lots of interesting news this week outside of coffee, robotics and the intelligence edge for food, including continued activity in the world of alternative protein. Catherine wrote this morning about the recent exit of protein giant Tyson from its investment in Beyond Meat on the eve of the plant-based meat startup’s IPO. She also covered a new startup trying to create animal-free cheese using a process they describe as “recombinant protein technology.”

In the consumer kitchen, Innit partnered up with contract manufacturer Flex and Google to create a suite of ingredient solutions to fast-track the development of smart kitchen appliances. On the delivery front, Google got approval from the FAA to do drone delivery, while Postmates beefed up its delivery location roster in advance of its IPO.

Finally, there are just a few days left to get the best price of the year for Smart Kitchen Summit tickets with Super Early Bird pricing.  Use the discount code NEWSLETTER for an additional 15% off (use this link to have the promotion automatically applied).

That’s it for now. Have a great week everyone!
Mike

P.S. We’re launching a Future Food newsletter covering alternative proteins, cell-based meat, bioreactors and more! Interested? Subscribe here.

Newsletter: Nigella Lawson’s Instagram Competitor and the Coolest Foodtech Startups at Y Combinator

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

If you’re a food tech polymath — interested in a little of this, a little of that — then this was your week.

First and foremost: We’ve got your food celebrity fix. This week the Food Network fangirl in me was excited to hear that chef/cookbook author Nigella Lawson has launched a new app that helps food-lovers take better pics of their meals. We might have an Instagram competitor on our hands! Called FOODIM, the app is currently only available in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. But I for one can’t wait to download it and see if it can make my avocado toast (sorry, millennial) look better than my go-to Instagram Ludwig filter.


via GIPHY

Speaking of new and exciting ventures, Y Combinator recently released the lineup for its 2019 Winter cohort: a whopping 200 companies. We sifted through the list to pick out the 10 food tech startups you should know, from a smart coffee scale to autonomous advertising robots.

We were especially excited to see Shiok Meats included in the list. The company is the first cell-based meat company to be accepted into the coveted accelerator, which means that cellular agriculture is heading towards the mainstream — or at least more investment.

Though they’ll be decamping to Silicon Valley for Y Combinator, Shiok Meats is actually based in Southeast Asia — which is where we (and others) are predicting cultured meat will first come to market. I took a deep dive this week into the reasons cell-based meat will first be available in Asia, not Silicon Valley. TL;DR: keep your eyes trained on Hong Kong, people.

Another company in the latest Y Combinator batch is creating a homemade-meal sharing marketplace. Shef is like AirBnB but for home-cooked meals. In the U.S., peer-to-peer home cooking networks are relatively new. In fact, they only became legal a few months ago with the passage of the law AB 626 in California.

In India, however, the home chef marketplace is already pretty hot. This week Chris profiled FoodCloud, a platform connecting home cooks with nearby hungry diners. Guess who’s using it to make a killing? Grandmas.

In other news:

  • Starbuck’s announced it will invest an eye-popping $100 million into a new venture fund to help incubate new up-and-coming food and retail tech startups.
  • The founder and ex-COO of Blue Apron launched a new venture aimed at reversing climate change through regenerative agriculture, starting with heritage chickens.
  • Amazon meal kits made their long-anticipated move into Whole Foods, which will give the e-commerce company another sales channel and more of their absolute favorite thing: data.

Finally — are you in San Francisco? (Or do you want an excuse for a quick trip?) Join us at ArticulATE, our one-day conference on all things food robotics and automation! This week we did a Q&A with Ryan Tuohy of Starship Technologies — the company that makes the wee food delivery rover bots — to get a taste of how automation will shape the future of food delivery. Snag your tickets today to hear him as well as speakers from Google, Sony, Albertson’s and more. Use code NEWSLETTER10 for a 10% discount!

Newsletter: Is the Burger of the Future Plant-Based, or Made by Robots?

What a month! This January I’ve been hopping around from event to event, stopping briefly at home to pack fresh socks and water my plants. First up was CES, the gigantic, robot-filled wonderland (check out The Spoon and our YouTube page for exclusive video content and interviews). Next, I flew south to San Francisco for the Winter Fancy Food show.

Though strolling up and down the rows of vendors armed with samples of everything from pickle juices to CBD chocolates was certainly a dream, my favorite area of the show was the “What’s Next in Food?” exhibit. That’s where I got to meet companies who are trying to find new ways to feed the world in an ethical, environmentally sustainable way. Like Clara Foods, which is using cellular agriculture to make cultured egg whites, or Farm from a Box, which is, well, a company that lets communities grow a 2-acre farm from a single box. It’s nice to leave a conference not only tired and full of cheese samples, but also feeling inspired.

Before heading back to Seattle, I stopped by the inaugural Alternative Protein Show in San Francisco to see what sort of products and manufacturing technologies are going to change the way we eat animal products. One thing that wasn’t on the menu was cell-based (or cultured) meat, which has yet to come to market. At the conference I met Dr. Sandhya Sriram, whose startup Shiok Meats is not only making cell-based shellfish, like lobster, shrimp, and crab — they’re also the first cell-based meat company in Southeast Asia. Period. Since the majority of cellular agriculture companies are based in the U.S., Israel, or the U.K., it was really exciting to see this technology expanding to not only new types of meat, but also new areas of the globe.

I left the show for a few minutes to pop by the Creator restaurant and watch their robot make a cheeseburger from start to finish. Here’s a sped-up video if you want to see the burger bot do its thing — it’s pretty amazing.

With burgers on my mind, I went by Carl’s Jr. in downtown SF to take a taste the new Beyond Burger 2.0. While I found that the patty itself was more of a supporting player (like many fast-food burgers are), the new formula is pretty good — my one qualm was the texture, which was a little too chewy for my liking. But the Carl’s Jr. staff told me that the burger was one of their favorite items on the menu, so it’s still a win for alterna-meats.

I’m not the only one smitten with plant-based foods. Chris took a look at his shopping list this week and realized that he is slowly turning vegan(ish), thanks to food tech. It made all of us check our own shopping lists and realize that, huh, we’re all eating more plant-based foods, too. And not just for ethical or environmental reasons, but because they genuinely just taste really good — and are (sometimes) healthier, too.

In other news this week: Delivery continued to expand (we called it), with DoorDash now serving all 50 states and UberEats expanding its Starbucks pilot to more cities. And who better to facilitate all this new food delivery than Starship’s new robotic delivery fleet or Robomart’s new self-driving mobile commerce vehicles?

Speaking of robots, did you hear about Articulate, our food robotics and automation summit in San Francisco on April 16th? We’ll have speakers from Google Brain, Sony, Cafe X, Chowbotics, and much more — Early Bird tickets are on sale now, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Finally, if you’re in the Seattle area, we’re having our next meetup on January 29th all about The Future of Beer. Join us! Bonus: All attendees get a free beer.

Until Friday,
Catherine

AutoX Eyes Expanded Restaurant Delivery for its Self-Driving Cars
AutoX, the startup that made a splash last year with its self-driving grocery delivery + mobile-commerce solution, expanded into the hot food delivery space, and is now working with 14 restaurants in the San Jose area.

Chowbus Announces a $4M Seed Round for Its Food-Delivery Platform
Chowbus today announced a $4 million seed round for its food-discovery platform. Founded in 2015, the Chicago-based company bills itself as a food-delivery app that lets users “discover authentic, international foods.”

All_EBT Offers New Tool to Help SNAP Recipients Budget Purchases
With the government shutdown, the 39 million people on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) got their money early this month, and have to make it last through February (and maybe March as well). All_EBT has a new tool to help SNAP recipients budget their purchases.

What’s Next In Food? CBD, Cultured Eggs, Food Waste Cookies and More
A tour through what caught our eye at the What’s Next in Food exhibit in the Winter Fancy Food Show, from upcycled cookies to egg whites grown in bioreactors to a farm in a box.

Beleaguered Food Delivery Service Munchery Shuts Down
Munchery, a food delivery service that had raised $125 million in venture capital, announced to its customers via email yesterday that it was ceasing operations.

Starship Launches Robot Food Delivery Fleet at George Mason University
A fleet of more than 25 mini delivery robots from Starship Technologies are now delivering food to students at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, which, Starship says, is “the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services 

Starbucks Expands Uber Eats Delivery Pilot Across U.S.
Starbucks is expanding the delivery pilot program it runs in Miami with Uber Eats to other U.S. cities. It’s now available in San Francisco, and will move to NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles over the next few weeks.

Goodr Launched Free “Pop-Up Grocery” Store Featuring Surplus Food for MLK Day
In anticipation for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Atlanta-based startup Goodr has partnered with the Atlanta Hawks to launch a “Pop-Up Grocery” event featuring surplus food from local grocery stores.

A Rough Guide to Ghost Kitchens, According to Chowly CEO Sterling Douglass
Sterling Douglass, CEO of the restaurant tech company Chowly, thinks that “everyone” should be using ghost kitchens. Here, he explains the different types and looks into how they will shape the future of restaurants.

Food Tech is Gradually Turning Me Vegan
Head editor Chris Albrecht looked at his shopping list and realized that, slowly but surely, he was eating more and more plant-based foods. The reason? Food tech.

Newsletter: The Road to CES and Plant-Based Meat Mania

Happy Friday,

It’s all hands on deck here at the Spoon as we prepare for CES. Our comfortable walking shoes are packed, our schedules are taking shape, and our Criss Angel Mindfreak tickets are booked (just kidding on that last one (maybe)).

We’ll be exploring the cavernous show floors all week long, sniffing out stories about new food tech products and smart kitchen appliances — and taking videos along the way. Make sure to check in on the site and on social to see our latest finds. If you’ll be there with a company of your own, feel free to pitch us!

But before we jet off to Vegas, here are a few of the biggest stories we wrote about this week:

Nestlé is tossing its hat into the meat alternatives ring with an offering called the Incredible Burger. (If you think that sounds a lot like the Impossible Burger, you are right!) In the piece I wrote that I was optimistic that Nestlé’s new burger will be successful, mostly because there’s such demand for plant-based meat that it isn’t a zero-sum game: there are room for all sorts of colorfully-named meatless burgers, chicken nuggets, sausages, etc.

After we published the post, however, we began to see some pushback on social media from readers who were skeptical about Nestlé’s choice, and thought that the Big Food company had much baggage to ethically make plant-based meats. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong (look out for a more in-depth post on this debate on Sunday), but regardless it brings up an interesting point about the implications of Big Food cashing in on new eating trends, e.g. plant-based foods.

Photo: Beyond Meat.

Speaking of plant-based foods, is anyone trying out Veganuary? This year record amounts of consumers are going veg for the month (and beyond), and the U.K. is cashing in big time with a myriad of plant-based offerings in major grocery chains and fast-food joints. Even Pizza Hut has a vegan, BBQ jackfruit-topped pie.

Here in the U.S. we may be a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to plant-based options, especially in the fast food realm, but a few players, namely Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, are working hard to catch us up. Beyond Meat just launched on the menu at Carl’s Jr. and Impossible Foods, which is already at White Castle, has hinted that it’ll be dropping some news on January 7th at CES — check back here, we’ll be bringing you the business.

In other news this week, Chris got the scoop on AirSpace Link, a startup which came out of stealth this week and launched a registry that allows people to opt in or out of drone delivery. (Drone delivery may still be a ways away — but autonomous vehicle delivery isn’t!) Mike shared his 2019 smart kitchen predictions, from food-driven revenue models to the emergence sentient kitchen. Finally, Jenn wrote about a research group at Princeton University working to provide an open-source model for vertical farming.

If you’re looking for something to listen to this weekend, check out the latest episode of the Smart Kitchen Show. It’s another editor roundtable where the Spoon writers talk about their predictions for 2019 and what they’re looking forward to at CES. You can also get it on Apple podcasts, Stitcher and Soundcloud!

And finally, we have a job board! We’ve added a whole bunch of listings over the past week, some of which you can check them out below, or you can get the full list on the site. And if you have a job opening at your company, feel free to post it (it is free, after all).

That’s it from me! See you in Vegas (with a glass of wine in hand).
Catherine

Gourmia to Roll Out Smart Multicooker, Coffee Brewer, and Dehydrator at CES
Brooklyn-based smart kitchen company Gourmia will be unveiling three new IoT-connected devices at CES: an air fryer, a multicooker, and a coffee roaster/brewer.

Lifesum Unveils a Google Assistant Version of Its Health-Tracking App
Swedish company Lifesum has unveiled a Google Assistant version of its nutrition app, which allows users to track meals, weight, and water intake using their voice instead of a phone or computer.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: 2019 Predictions And CES Preview
Take a listen to our latest editorial roundtable podcast, in which we discuss our 2019 predictions and what we’re most looking forward to for CES.

Pepsi and Segway Enter the Increasingly Crowded Delivery Robot Space
Both Pepsi and Ninebot, Segway’s parent company, have announced separate delivery robot initiatives.

MyWah to Debut Connected Wine Dispenser for Businesses at CES
MyWah, a connected wine dispenser which uses RFID-tagged bags to track wine temperature and portioning, is debuting at CES.

DoorDash Is Testing Self-Driving Cars in San Francisco
Third-party delivery service DoorDash just announced it has partnered with General Motors’ Cruise Automation to test autonomous vehicles in San Francisco.

As the Food Industry Wakes Up to Blockchain, Online Training Options are Now Available
It’s no secret that the food industry is rapidly awaking to the great promise of blockchain technology, and headlines abound about how it promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. A number of online blockchain resources are springing up to help educate companies on how to use this new technology.

Soylent Adds Snack Replacement Beverage to its Lineup
Rosa Foods, the company behind meal-replacement-in-a-bottle, Soylent, launched Soylent Bridge, a new, lighter liquid designed to replace your snacking on solids. The 11 oz. Soylent Bridge clocks in at 180 calories with 15 grams of plant-based protein and comes in chocolate flavor. The shelf-stable Bridge will last a year

Why Vertical Farming Won’t Grow Without More Data
Vertical farming may be getting lots of funding, but we don’t actually know how well it works. A research project from Princeton University is getting data from vertical farming and working to make an open-source framework for aspiring vertical farm companies.

New Year, New Food: U.K. Grocery and QSR’s Cash In on Veganuary
In the U.K., large grocery chains and fast-food joints alike are taking advantage of the growing interesting Veganuary — and plant-based eating in general.

Newsletter: Food Tech is Going Big Time in 2019

My dad is buying a June Oven.

Normally, I wouldn’t foist the day-to-day tech purchases of the Albrecht family on our Spoon readers, but it occurred to me that this particular decision is somewhat emblematic of where the entire food tech sector is at, and why 2019 could be a watershed year for the industry at large.

Why does my septuagenarian father, who normally doesn’t give a whit about gadgets, want a June? Because it’s automated, repeatable and to him, safer. He likes how the June will cook meat to the proper temperature automatically, that he’ll get the same result every time, and how he doesn’t have to worry about whether or not he left the stove on when he’s out and about. And I’m sure he’s not an outlier.

The second-gen June is among a raft of smart cooking appliances coming to market. The Brava, second-gen Tovala, and the forthcoming Suvie have the ability to turn everyday people into people who cook every day. And as these appliances get more affordable, the audience for them is moving beyond early adopters and into the mainstream.

We’ve seen this greater interest in food tech reflected in our readership. Our audience grew by 186 percent since January of this year, and we had our fourth and biggest ever Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle this October. It’s not just smart ovens that people want to know about. This year, our readers have loved stories on alternate proteins, news about the changing delivery landscape, CBD products, food robots, food personalization and more.

All this is to say that food tech is being called up to the big leagues in a big way in 2019. Speaking of which, you should check out some of our specific predictions for the coming year. Catherine Lamb wrote about the coming rise of CBD edibles. Jenn Marston said to watch out for more ghost kitchens and drone deliveries. And I raised my articulating hand to say that 2019 will be a breakthrough year for food robots.

But before we pop the champagne get all Auld Lang Syne, let’s take a look at the last bit of big food tech news in 2018.

Mike Wolf got the scoop on the much-delayed Spinn Coffee maker raising $3 million. Will this cash infusion mean that the connected coffee maker will finally make it to market?

For those budding or serial entrepreneurs looking for a little help with their food tech ambitions next year, Jenn put together a list of big CPG company accelerators like those from Land O’ Lakes and Coca-Cola.

As Amazon Gos continue to pop up around the country, the debate over who gets to participate in the cashless retail revolution will heat up. One company looking to make the Go experience available to all is All_ebt. We confirmed this week that All_ebt’s users on SNAP assistance will be able to shop (for USDA approved items) at cashless grocery stores like Go.

And finally, if you are looking for a new holiday tradition — may we suggest you be like Catherine and her family and hold a White Castle eating contest which, thanks to the Impossible slider, is now open to vegetarians!

It’s been a fantastic year. Thank you for being with us throughout 2018, we look forward to even bigger and better things in 2019.

Happy New Year!

Be kind.
-Chris

In the 12/28/2018 edition:

Burritos by Air Highlight Noisy Headaches Associated with Drone Delivery

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 28, 2018 08:08 am
There was a lot of chatter about drones this past year: Uber Eats is accelerating its drone ambitions, Zomato acquired a drone company in India, Amazon got a patent for in-flight drone recharging. There was so much activity that my colleague, Jenn Marston predicted that 2019 will be a big year for delivery by drones. […]

Big Food Has Big Plans for Foodtech Accelerators in 2019

By Jennifer Marston on Dec 27, 2018 01:39 pm
Just a little less than a year ago, we highlighted what was then a new trend the foodtech space: major CPGs launching food accelerators geared towards emerging brands. From Chobani to General Mills to Kraft-Heinz, it seemed Big Food had an appetite for assisting younger, trendier, and often healthier brands to grow in 2018. Some […]

Video: Bellwether Cuts Out the Coffee Roasting Middleman

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 27, 2018 09:00 am
“A lot of people don’t realize just how big coffee is,” said Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Bellwether Coffee at the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. Seriously, though: according to him, coffee is the most consumed beverage in the U.S., with people drinking more cups of joe than bottles of water, wine, and beer combined. Not only are […]

My Whole Family Tried the Impossible Slider from White Castle (and Loved It)

By Catherine Lamb on Dec 27, 2018 06:00 am
My family has a… rather unique Christmas tradition. For Christmas Eve lunch, when the 15-odd crew of us gather at my grandparents’ home outside of Cincinnati, OH, we have a White Castle slider eating competition. The record: twenty-one. (Blegh.) As a vegetarian I usually have to abstain from this tradition. But this year, oh this year, […]

What Amazon Did (and Didn’t) Mention in its Holiday Sales Press Release

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 26, 2018 11:00 am
With Christmas now over it’s time for the annual releasing of the vague holiday sales stats from Amazon! This year, Bezos’ behemoth did not disappoint and shared with us a press announcement filled with unspecific terms like “record breaking” and “millions more.” As we said back in November, though these puff pieces from Amazon are […]

Spinn Raises $3 Million As It Eyes Production Of Long-Delayed Coffee Machine

By Michael Wolf on Dec 26, 2018 09:00 am
Spinn, the grind and brew centrifugal coffee machine that is nearly two years past its original ship date, has raised an additional $3 million in funding that it plans to use to ramp up production of its coffee maker. The funding announcement came as part of an update to early buyers via the company’s community […]

Delivery in 2019 Will Be About Ghost Kitchens, Drones, and Boone, North Carolina

By Jennifer Marston on Dec 26, 2018 06:00 am
The food delivery craze will normalize at some point, but not soon. Right now, it’s a segment projected to be worth $365 billion by 2013, and even companies with inherently undeliverable foods are delivering. All of which is to say, food delivery holds a well-earned spot on the list of 2019 hot topics. Major delivery […]

2019 Will Be a Breakthrough Year for Food Robots

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 25, 2018 06:00 am
Right now the year 2019 is still (slightly) in the future, but 2019 will also be a year where we start to feel like we’re living in the future. The reason for that can be summed up in one word: ROBOTS. The food robots are coming and while they won’t become ubiquitous next year, 2019 […]

All_EBT Allows Those Underbanked to Participate in (Some) Cashless Retail

By Chris Albrecht on Dec 24, 2018 12:00 pm
The number of Amazon Go stores are set to explode over the coming years, and while the grab-and-go convenience stores are a marvel of modern technology, they also raise thorny ethical issues surrounding cashless retail. You can only use Amazon Go if you have an Amazon account, and to get an Amazon account you need […]

Whirlpool Awarded Comprehensive Patent For Kitchen-Centric Computer Vision System

By Michael Wolf on Dec 24, 2018 10:00 am
Over the past couple years, there’s been what can only be described as an intellectual property land grab in the world of computer vision as Google, Amazon and Microsoft file more patents in an effort to establish foundations from which to launch an innumerable amount of AI-driven products and services over the next decade or more. […]