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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

NFT

Front Of House Takes an NFT Program to Smaller Restaurants

If you’ve ever taken home a souvenir menu or ashtray from your favorite restaurant, you will understand the role NFTs play in the hospitality industry. The same goes for attending a restaurant theme night or local pop-up of a new dining establishment. As Front of House (FOH) co-founder Phil Toronto eloquently puts it, a restaurant establishing a successful NFT strategy is “a beautiful merging of the digital and physical experience.”

Launching on May 18, Front of House (FOH) is a marketplace for NFTs of digital collectibles and experiences for independent restaurants. Co-founders Phil Toronto (VaynerFund), Colin Camac (former restaurateur), and Alex Ostroff (Saint Urbain) represent a mix of people with backgrounds in digital technology, advertising, and the hospitality industries. Initial clients include Wildair and Dame, with upcoming partners such as Rosella, Niche Niche, and Tokyo Record Bar.

The company’s business model is for the restaurant to keep 80% of the sale of digital collectibles. If an establishment uses a collectible as an invite to a unique dining experience, the restaurant will keep all the money from the food event.

Toronto stresses that FOH’s digital collectibles will be the digital analog to buying swag (such as a sweatshirt or tote bag) from your go-to dining establishment. Over time, he adds, the digital representations can grow to become interactive experiences that can be shared and/or enjoyed as a personal keepsake. “It’s a passport of sorts from your favorite restaurant,” the FOH co-founder told The Spoon in a recent interview.

The early adopters of using NFT as a marketing and sales tool are “scrappy entrepreneurs,” Toronto added, who had to get creative to stay afloat during the pandemic. “The commonality is that every restaurant owner interested in our program is entrepreneurial and looking to go outside the box,” he said.

Marketing and being on the cutting edge are only part of it. The impetus for jumping on board the growing NFT trend is about money. In addition to their regular dining business, an owner can collect revenue from digital collectibles, but the aspect with the most upside is creating memorable dining experiences. A key to all the possibilities is to make it simple for the customer to engage. A key to FOH’s success will be what the co-founder calls creating a frictionless experience, making it a little more than a typical eCommerce check-out experience.

“One of the avenues we’d like to explore is ticketed experiences where Front of House will work with a restaurant to buy it out for the night and have a special ticketed experience,” Toronto said. “That experience is sold through a digital collectible that lives on as a memory and a digital ticket stub you can take.”

Toronto said he is surprised that 65% of the customers he approaches get the idea and understand its value but might have a wait-and-see attitude. Once the pioneers prove NFTs successful and more than a “get rich quick” concept, he believes any reluctance will disappear. Also, Toronto commented that the NFT opportunity for restaurants isn’t limited to New York, Los Angeles, and other coastal towns. Given the hospitality business’s everyday issues, the concept will work just as well for Des Moines or any eatery wanting to explore a new business opportunity.

Yep, It Looks Like Brightloom is Powering Starbucks’ NFT Initiative

Back when we first heard that Starbucks was heading into the NFT business, I suspected a company helping them get there was a startup called Brightloom.

The reasons were pretty straightforward: Not only is Brightloom effectively a carveout of Starbucks former digital business AND Brightloom’s CEO Adam Brotman is the former of head Starbucks digital, but there’s also the fact that Howard Schultz namechecked Brotman at the employee town hall where the subject first came up.

But if there’s any remaining doubt, I think it was put to rest this week when Starbucks published a memo co-authored by Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer Brady Brewer and Adam Brotman (who, on the piece, is titled a “consultant”) about NFTs last week in which the company detailed its plans. Titled We’re creating the digital Third Place, the memo describes how Starbucks sees NFTs as ushering in a “shared ownership model” for loyalty and sees them as digital “access passes” for experiences and rewards.

In some ways, Brotman and Weber’s memo echoes many of the same ideas we’ve heard Brotman speak about when asked about his thoughts on Web3. When I interviewed him in March, Brotman talked about how NFTs can be tickets to unique experiences for a restaurant’s most loyal customers.

Restaurants “know who their best customers are, either by name or some loyalty program,’” Brotman said. “And they give them an NFT. Say, ‘here’s a code to claim your free NFT. And by the way, we’re only giving there’s only ever going to be 300 customers that can own the NFT.”

And at last week’s SimulATE Food Web3 summit, Brotman talked about why he became fascinated with Web3. “Why I’m so turned on by the Web3 space is the idea that there’s this concept of owning a digital collectible that also doubles as an access pass.”

Brotman also discussed how the Web3-powered ownership could be a gamechanger for loyalty programs. “If you don’t understand NFTs or you don’t understand crypto, you don’t need to,” Brotman said. “If any of you ever either invested in a company, or had your own company, or had a stamp collection or a card collection, what they all have in common is that you have some skin in the game and you feel like you’re a co-owner.”

All of this may seem a bit inside baseball. Still, I think it’s newsworthy since there is a small but growing cohort of digital restaurant platformers like Brightloom, NextBite, and Lunchbox jockeying to position themselves as the restaurant onramp to Web3. And so, if Brightloom has indeed locked up the bluest of blue-chip customers (and it looks like they have), they will have established themselves as the early leader in Web3 platform horserace.

If you’d like to watch Adam Brotman talk Web3 (along with Chef Spike Mendelsohn and LA Eats’ Perrin Davidson), you can watch their session on Web3 and restaurants below.

SimulATE Spring: Web3 and Restaurants

Meet the Experts and Innovators Inside the Foodverse and Web3

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

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

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

Hope to see you inside!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spoon Weekly: Tobacco Plant Bioreactors, Roboburgers & Starbucks NFTs

Welcome to the Spoon Weekly. The Spoon Weekly features some of our favorite food tech stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox.

BioBetter is Turning Tobacco Plants into Bioreactors to Drive Down the Cost of Cultivated Meat Growth Media

Food tech startup BioBetter has developed a novel way to create growth factors for cell-cultivated meat utilizing tobacco plants.

Based in Kiryat Shemona, Israel, the company announced that it has developed a method to create growth factors via molecular farming techniques by essentially turning the tobacco plant into a bioreactor. BioBetter’s technology employs plant cells to produce growth factors instead of more traditional techniques which utilize yeast, bacteria, or CHO in a bioreactor to produce growth factors.

The company’s technology involves identifying the gene of the target protein, cloning it, and transferring it into the tobacco plant. They then select the highest-yielding plants, breed them to develop higher yields, and then ultimately grow and harvest the plants.

As the tobacco plants mature, their cells express the growth factors and store them until harvest. The company then uses a proprietary protein extraction and purification technology that enables it to exploit nearly the entire plant, producing a high purity product at lower overall costs.

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

As Meat Prices Rise, Could Plant-Based Meat Become a Value Option for Consumers?

Have you seen the price of meat lately?

It’s not pretty. The average price of a pound of ground beef in the United States has jumped over 20% in the past year and seems to just keep going up.

Meanwhile, the cost of a 12-ounce package of Impossible ground has continued to drop and is showing up at under $6 at some retail establishments, about the same price of a pound of extra lean ground beef.

Not quite price parity…yet. But as Impossible and other plant-based meat providers continue to ramp up volume, it’s worth asking: when meat alternatives reach price parity and, eventually, sell at a discount to animal meat, could customers start reaching for plant-based meat to save a buck?

You can read the full post at The Spoon.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

You can read the full post here. 

The Spoon is Hiring!

Do you love food tech? Are you a dynamic sales leader who can close? We want to talk! The Spoon is looking for a sales lead to help generate new sales, expand existing relationships and help build our business! Check this and other positions out at the Spoon Job Board!

Smart Kitchen

Holy Smokes: FirstBuild’s Arden Indoor Smoker Hits Crowdfunding Target in Two Minutes

FirstBuild, GE Appliances’ innovation arm, has launched its latest crowdfunding campaign, and this one looks like a potential home run.

The same group that brought you the Opal ice machine and the Paragon induction cooktop are now bringing an indoor pellet smoker called Arden to market via a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The Arden can smoke up to two racks of ribs at a time or a small brisket, all inside your home without setting your fire alarms off.

The Arden uses a smoke-elimination technology that requires no additional filters to clean or replace. According to FirstBuild, the technology was first developed for GE’s smart hearth oven and has now been incorporated into the Arden.

The unit uses the same pellets used with other smokers. Once the smoke is pulled out of the chamber and into the smoke eliminator, it eliminates all smoke and just CO2 and water are exhausted into the kitchen. This allows users to sit the Arden on a countertop and smoke a slab of meat without any special venting.

To read the full story, head here.

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

To read the full story, head here.

Smart Kitchen Platform Company Drop Changes Name to Fresco

Drop dropped Drop.

The startup that started with a connected scale eight years ago announced it has a new brand identity. The company is now called Fresco, a name which “(reflects) the company’s priority to connect dots in the kitchen between appliances, home cooks and recipes to make cooking effortless,” said the announcement.

Fresco CEO Ben Harris said that the company needed a new brand given its evolution beyond its hardware roots.

“Drop was a great name for a physical product, but we pivoted to become a smart kitchen platform, providing end-to-end solutions to make appliances connected, from firmware development to IoT expertise and an app that pulls all the appliances together,” Harris said. “As a result, we needed a brand that better represented this.”

Drop is part of a cohort of smart kitchen startups that offer software and connectivity solutions to power kitchen appliances and help consumers cook and plan meals. While some of its peers have increasingly focused on shoppable recipes and looked to help power online grocery integrations, Drop has doubled down on expanding its solutions and increasing its partner roster in the connected kitchen and guided cooking space.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Plant-Based Eggs Starting to Crack Open The European Market
 

Here in the US, a version of a plant-based egg from Eat Just, Inc. has been on the market since 2013, starting with an earlier version from when the company was Hampton Creek. The company’s current product, which uses its flagship mung bean formulation, began selling in the US market in 2019.

But if you wanted to try JUST Egg in Europe, you were out of luck.

That’s about to change. That’s because the company just got approval for its mung bean protein from the European Commission. The approval, which follows an earlier greenlight last fall by the European Food Safety Authority, paves the way for the introduction of JUST Egg to the European market by the fourth quarter of 2022.

That’s not the only good news if you are looking for an egg alternative in Europe. Berlin-based Perfeggt has been working on an egg alternative that derives its protein punch from fava beans, and is starting to ship in Germany.

Read the full post here.

Israel’s Vanilla Vida Wants to Expand and Improve the World’s Favorite Flavor

Here’s a fun fact: Did you know that vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor? In addition, how about the idea that 95% of all vanilla sold is synthetic, generally made from an oil or lab-developed chemical compound. Sounds like a supply and demand issue for a real deal vanilla pod.

Vanilla Vida has done its homework and sees an opportunity to tickle the universal taste buds by using technology and data to produce large quantities of top-quality vanilla anywhere in the world. Madagascar and Indonesia are the top crop producers but face issues with uncertain weather, quality control issues, and a long drying process. With proof of concept completed, Vanilla Vida CEO Oren Zilberman is ready to expand beyond Israel and launch climate-controlled farms worldwide.

Zilberman’s experience as a VC is instrumental in the success of his new company. “When you are building a startup, you are always looking about what is the chance it can do a major impact and some change in the world and at the same time, have a really good business,” the company’s CEO said in a recent interview with The Spoon. He also explained that his experience led him not to want to develop something new or go into an unproven segment. By expanding the opportunity for a wildly popular product, such as vanilla, Vanilla Vida can hit the ground running instead of requiring a great deal of marketing to drive customer awareness.

Read the full post here

Food Robots

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

To read the full story, click here!

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

You can read full post here.

Here Are Four Ways Starbucks Could Get Into The NFT Business

Starbucks is getting into the NFT business.

That’s according to company CEO Howard Schultz, who recently held a company town hall to discuss what the company’s plans are for the coming year. Schultz, who retook the reigns of the coffee giant this week, said the company would be in the NFT business before the end of the calendar year.

“If you look at the companies, the brands, the celebrities, the influencers that are trying to create a digital NFT platform and business, I can’t find one of them that has the treasure trove of assets that Starbucks has, from collectibles to the entire heritage of the company,” Schultz said.

While it can often be cringe-inducing when CEOs talk about new digital formats – something Schultz acknowledged by admitting he’s not a digital native – he’s right that the company has many assets that could be tokenized and create new ways to engage with its customers.

So what exactly could Starbucks’ entry into the NFT business look like? Here are a four ideas about how Starbucks could leverage NFTs:

Create a Loyalty Program That Gives Special Rewards for Starbucks’ Most High-Value Customers

Back when Adam Brotman, who used to run Starbucks digital and now is CEO of Starbucks-invested Brightloom came on The Spoon podcast, he suggested that restaurants could reward their most loyal customers by issuing them an NFT.

They could say “here’s a code to claim your free NFT,” Brotman said. “And by the way, we’re only giving there’s only ever going to be 300 customers that can own the Portofino’s NFT.”

Brotman – who Schultz called out in the video above as a ‘digital native’ – highlighted different benefits restaurants could give such as special events, exclusive offers and more. In Starbucks’ case, I can imagine benefits like first access to special drinks or coffee roasts, a monthly free menu item, or digital assets like special coffee recipes.

A Membership Coffee Club

Another potential avenue for a Starbucks NFT could be a subscription coffee club. A club could be something like the Bored Breakfast Club, an NFT-powered subscription service that sends NFT holders special coffee roasts by mail. It could also include some Flyfish-club like benefits like special access to Starbucks’ unique venues like their roasteries.

Access to Unique Digital Experiences

A Starbucks NFT could also be a ticket to unique online experiences such as a tour of coffee locations or virtual online event with coffee experts. When asked about where he sees the metaverse going, Adam Brotman even suggested this as an idea.

“If I’m a Starbucks in the metaverse, I’m not just serving coffee. I’m growing coffee. I’m giving people tours of my farm in Costa Rica. What are the things that I wish I could transport people to experiences that I can’t scale in real life because of distance or cost or physics?”

NFTs Could Be Deep Insights Into Starbucks’ Coffee

One thing that makes NFTs and the blockchain interesting is their ability to provide proof of provenance for food and beverage products. Starbucks has long made noise about its use of fairtrade coffee, so it’s easy to envision how NFTs could be proof of where the coffee was sourced and provide deep insights to the coffee purchaser about the coffee chain of custody and provenance.

While all of this is speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two of my guesses is close to the direction Starbucks heads with their NFT effort. The company is a leader in digitization of the customer experience and is recognized for having one of the industry’s best loyalty programs.

Finally, given Adam Brotman’s presence at the Starbucks town hall and that the company he now leads, Brightloom, was essentially the result of Starbucks’ attempt to spin out its digital program assets into a standalone company, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brightloom plays a part in whatever NFT efforts emerge out of Starbucks this fall.

What Do NFTs and Web3 Mean for Small Restaurants?

So while it may not be surprising that a restaurant concept by alpha-adopter and Internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk can raise millions of dollars selling NFTs, what about that mom & pop place on the corner?

In other words, how does a small restauranteur that doesn’t have the followers, fame and early adopter advantage of a Vaynerchuk take advantage of web3?

This is a problem Adam Brotman has been giving some thought to. As the former head of digital for Starbucks and CEO of a company that powers digital loyalty programs for restaurants big and small in Brightloom, he’s been imagining what a world looks like when more consumers know what an NFT is and how to hold it.

I asked him how a corner restaurant like the one in my neighborhood called Portofino’s might eventually use an NFT. According to Brotman, local restaurants like the one at the end of my street will eventually be able to put NFTs to use, but not in the same way celebrities as Vaynerchuk can.

“Portofino’s could say, ‘Yeah, we know who our best customers are, either by name or some loyalty program,'” Brotman said on the Spoon podcast. “And they give them an NFT. Say, ‘here’s a code to claim your free NFT. And by the way, we’re only giving there’s only ever going to be 300 customers that can own the Portofino’s NFT.’

Brotman says that there are plenty of benefits popular smaller restaurants can give loyal customers that would make an NFT valuable such as reservations whenever they want, free valet parking, special offers, and events.

Brotman acknowledges some things need to fall into place before small guys can use NFTs, the first of which is to make the onramp for customers to buy and hold NFTs a whole lot accessible.

“99% of their customers wouldn’t even know how to hold an NFT,” said Brotman. “You have to have a crypto wallet today. They ask, ‘what is a crypto wallet? How do I get one?'”

Brotman says the entire crypto tech space is working on this problem and believes big consumer-facing crypto companies like Coinbase will eventually offer easy-to-use solutions.

He also thinks the cost needs to come down, both in terms of transaction fees and the impact on the environment. He believes newer blockchain platforms that claim to be carbon neutral like Solana will help here.

Brotman also admits better tools are needed since offering something like an NFT is beyond the capabilities of most restauranteurs and says that this is a problem that Brightloom is working on.

Brotman also thinks the broader metaverse holds potential for restaurants, but it will be a while before all that is figured out.

“I think we’re a ways off from that,” said Brotman. “NFTs being used multi-purpose loyalty, access identity, digital collectible community formation tool is going to be more relevant first before there’s going a critical mass of people living in some virtual reality.”

But, just in case restaurants are already thinking of moving into the metaverse, Brotman doesn’t think they should be overly focused on being transactional, but instead on enabling experiences that are on-brand.

“If I’m a Starbucks in the metaverse, I’m not just serving coffee. I’m growing coffee. I’m giving people tours of my farm in Costa Rica. What are the things that I wish I could transport people to experiences that I can’t scale in real life because of distance or cost or physics?”

You can hear the rest of my conversation with Brotman in the latest episode of The Spoon podcast.

Would Someone Pay $1 Million For an NFT to Get VIP Access to a Restaurant? We’re About to Find Out

Lots of people would like to walk into a restaurant and get VIP treatment. But is it worth paying $1 million for?

We’re about to find out. That’s because a restaurant group called Chotto Matte is going to offer up a $1 million NFT to a bidder to get a singular NFT called The Founder.

According to the release, The Founder “collectible chip card grants exclusive membership access with an array of bespoke benefits, redeemable all over the world and ranging from personal invitations to every Chotto Matte restaurant opening around the world, plus first-class flights and five-star accommodations to major sports event tickets for two people per year (FIFA, F1, boxing, etc.); and more! “

A few months ago, the folks behind Flyfish Club launched a successful NFT campaign that drew thousands of bidders to buy NFTs that granted them membership to a new restaurant backed by social media influencer and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. At the time, I suggested that Flyfish’s success might influence other restauranteurs to jump into the NFT game, perhaps modeling their NFTs on the membership model designed by the group.

From the looks of it, Chotto Matte is not modeling their NFT on Flyfish, but instead hoping for a big “fish” to drop a million bucks to gain VIP access to benefits at the Chotto Matte restaurant. It’s a riskier strategy since there’s a high probability they don’t find anyone willing to part ways with a million bucks for this NFT.

Don’t get me wrong. Exclusive membership benefits that offer true real-world utility are an absolute must for any restaurant going down the NFT route. I just don’t know if VIP treatment at Chotto Matte is enough to convince someone to part ways with that kind of money.

Either way, we should know soon. The company plans to launch its NFT via a special launch event on April 5th at NFT week in Miami.

Tom Collichio and Spike Mendelson’s Pizza NFT Goes Live

Chefs Tom Collichio and Spike Mendelson officially launched CHFTY Pizza NFT project this week. The official “mint” or release of its 2777 unique pizza designs began this week, with the pre-sale started yesterday Wednesday, March 23 and the public sale opening today.


Each NFT is priced at .07 Ethereum (worth $204 as of this writing) which will net CHFTY founders around $566,000. NFT holders will have access to virtual and in-person pop-up events, classes, kitchen accessories + apparel and more. CHFTY Pizza’s Discord has more details including an AMA the team did over the weekend to rally support and add people to the insider “Slicelist” for pre-sale access.

Chefs talk NFT and CHFTY at SimulATE Mini-Summit

Chefs Mendelson and Collichio joined The Spoon at our virtual February 1st SimulATE Food Metaverse + NFT Mini-Summit to discuss their upcoming NFT, its intended purpose and why it was important for the chef community to be involved in the development of Web3.

Mendelson commented, “(Post pandemic) I felt left behind in Web 2.0 and technology, as a restaurant tour and chef. And I was fighting to learn really quick on how to develop your own app, how to drive traffic from those third-party stores to your own app, but we were really way behind that point. So we want to enter NFTs right.”

When Collichio noticed artists and other creators were using NFTs as a way of keeping their own IP and driving revenue back to themselves when releasing their art, the two began a conversation on how to leverage NFTs for chefs and foodies. And out of that, the project that would become CHFTY Pizza was born.

The IP in the culinary world is difficult to protect in the age of digital food content and shareable recipes and food creation — and restaurateurs and chefs are in need of new pathways to profits in a post-pandemic world.

“What this does is that’s going to enable a restaurant term to expand way past their brick and mortar. This is where the world’s going, so we can either sit there and dig our feet and go no, we’re not going to do this or we can embrace it and get in front of it. And I think that’s what Spike and I are doing,” remarked Chef Collichio.

What’s next?

If you’re able to grab one of the 2,777 tokens during the pre or public sale, you’ll have to stay tuned and see what rewards and utilities will be added. First up, CHFTY Pizzas is hosting its first in-person event for token holders in Washington, DC, and will include meet and greets with founding Chefs Tom and Spike along with Andrew Zimmern, Maneet Chauhan and Kristen Kish.

To listen to the entire discussion on restaurants, NFTs and CHFTY Pizza, join Spoon Plus and get access to all virtual event archives.

Food meets the metaverse

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‘It’s Like a Driver’s License for Cows’: Why One Wyoming Company is Creating NFTs for Cattle

Back when Rob Jennings helped found the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition back in 2017, he knew he needed to find a use case that resonated with residents of the Cowboy State. It didn’t take him long before he settled on beef.

“Back then, there was a lot of conversation around about how grass-fed, grain-finished Wyoming fat cattle beef was being mixed into commodity feed yards with lesser animals, let’s say,” Jennings said on a Zoom call with The Spoon. “And so we developed this idea about how you could use blockchain to verify the animal’s provenance.”

Back then, Jennings worked with the University of Wyoming to develop the technology for his first blockchain startup called Beefchain. And while he and other early blockchain enthusiasts found the idea of putting the information about a steer on the blockchain exciting, Jennings found the response more muted when explaining the technology to ranchers, mainly because many of them still couldn’t see the immediate value of such a tech-forward solution.

That’s when Jennings started to think about ways to utilize NFTs. With the early implementations of storing cattle data on the blockchain, Jennings said they would hash an entire excel spreadsheet and put it on the bitcoin blockchain.

“Yes, you’re putting the information there, but it wasn’t functional,” said Jennings.

He knew that there were certain challenges in cattle ranching that could be met head-on with the utility provided by NFTs that would go beyond simply putting information on the blockchain. He knew that to build something cattle ranchers and others in the industry found useful, he had to create a platform for an individual digital record and add on additional functionality through the application layer brought on by an NFT. That’s when he founded CattleProof.

“It’s like a driver’s license for cows,” said Jennings. “I’ve always believed that whatever you want to do with blockchain and all of the functionality that’s promised to us down the horizon, and it starts with creating that record.”

Attributes about the cow such as age, genetics, ranch of origin, and more can be stored and easily accessed by the holder of the NFT. Additionally, certifications such as an inspection record can be appended to the NFT.

“Traditionally, inspection records are a piece of paper,” said Jennings. “Inspectors say, ‘okay, these hundred cows are good’, and then you have that one piece of paper you take along the supply chain. So what we wanted to do is create the ability for all of this metadata that’s associated with each animal to travel along the supply chain. So the next guy who buys this animal, whether it’s one or one hundred, will have access to all of this information appended to this NFT.”

Jennings also said financial functionality could be derived from a cow NFT.

“You could use an NFT record to collateralize the animals with a bank,” said Jennings. “You could use them to track movement. You can use them to do an e-brand inspection and interstate movement.”

Jennings says that transferring ownership via an NFT at cattle auctions will expedite fund transfer for the cow. Funds transfer nearly immediately, compared to the days or weeks through the traditional financial reconciliation process.

The way CattleProof’s technology works is the rancher creates an account via the company’s website, which creates a digital wallet. Next, the rancher tags the cow via a Bluetooth sensor or an EID (an embedded tag that goes into the cow’s ear), and then uses the CattleProof app to scan the EID for each animal. Next, they enter the data (photo, weight, breed, etc) and, once all the information is entered, the rancher “hits a big red button” and mints an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

From there, the owner of the NFT controls who can see the data and is the only one that can enter new data (past data can’t be changed). If the animal is sold, ownership of the NFT – and all control rights to the data and the animal – are passed onto the new owner.

His company has already run a successful trial of the collaboration with Wilson Ranch in December. The company helped Wilson Ranch create NFTs for 20 steers that were sold through the website of Wilson’s distribution partner, Flying Diamond Beef. The company has plans to expand trials to more ranches in the coming months.

CattleProof has filed for a provisional patent and is currently working to develop a USDA process that the agency can recognize as an approved process flow for a verified claim utilizing blockchain technology.

“It’s exciting,” said Jennings. “I grew up in Wyoming. I like the Western way of life. I want to help producers connect more directly with consumers and democratize the marketplace.”

The Spoon Weekly: An OnlyFans for Foodies, Bear Ships 5K Robots, The Mini-Dishwasher Golden Age

This is the Spoon Weekly, a collection of some of the most interesting stories from the past week. Make sure to subscribe to get the top food tech news delivered straight to your inbox.

Can Food-Centric Streaming Platform Kittch Succeed Where Others Have Failed?

In 2016 I got a pitch about a hugely successful entrepreneur who was launching a streaming site dedicated to foodies.

Steve Chen, the co-founder of Youtube, was combining a love of food with his proven experience building online video to launch a new site that would “allow anyone to direct, produce, and host their own food show.” Called Nom, the site debuted at SXSW on March 9, 2016, and went live to the general public a few days later.

Two years and $4.7 million in funding later, Nom shut down.

There have been other sites with similar pitches since 2016, including YesChef, an “online education platform dedicated to cooking” complete with James Beard award-winning chefs like Nancy Silverton to teach cooking techniques and recipes. Or World Chef, a “platform for foodies; a place where truly special Chefs can share their extraordinary food experiences directly with their fans.”

And then was Fanwide’s hot-minute pivot to a chef platform in the middle of the pandemic, or GE’s attempt to create a video streaming platform for chefs called Chibo that has since shuttered.

So you’ll have to forgive me when my first reaction upon hearing the pitch for Kittch, a site that Vanity Fair calls Onlyfans for Chefs, is one of skepticism.

You can read the full story here.

Consumer Kitchen

The Golden Age of Tiny Dishwashers? Bob and Tetra Begin Making Their Way to a Countertop Near You

Ever since we first stumbled upon the diminutive dishwasher named Bob in the basement of the Sands convention center at CES 2019, we’ve been wondering when the little guy would arrive stateside.

The answer is this year. Daan Technology, the French startup behind the Bob, started shipping the small footprint dishwasher in Europe in 2020 and had originally slated the Bob to arrive in the US the same year. While that model Bob stayed in Europe, an updated global version is finally set to start shipping this year.

The company started a Kickstarter campaign this month and has bundles featuring Bob starting at $379 with an expected ship date of September 2022. For those who don’t want to buy through Kickstarter, my guess is the company will begin up selling Bob on its own website later this year.

Order options include a hose to connect the dishwasher to a faucet (Bob also has a one-gallon water reservoir that can be filled manually) and a range of colorful faceplates. The Bob Premium also includes an interesting UV-C ultraviolet option that allows the user to disinfect items (like phones) that can’t get wet.

You can read the full post here. 

Web3/Crypto

This Farmer’s Market Vendor Has Accepted Bitcoin for 5 Years. Here’s How Things Have Changed.

Back in 2017, before much of the general public had given cryptocurrency a second thought, Alessandro Stortini started accepting bitcoin as a form of payment at his local farmer’s market stand, La Pasta.

Since that time, virtual currencies have become mainstream as everyone from grandmas to pro athletes have jumped into the world of crypto. In fact, from 2017 to 2022, the number of crypto wallets went from under 12 million to over 81 million by January of 2022.

If you’re like me, you’d figure with almost seven times as many cryptocurrency wallets out there, the number of people looking to spend their virtual currency to buy pasta at their local farmer’s market would have gone up. Not so, according to Stortini.

“We got way more customers paying with bitcoin in 2017,” Stortini said.

Stortini told me the reason for that is because back in those early days, crypto owners were more willing to use it as a form of payment.

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

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.”

Read the full post at The Spoon.

Alternative Protein

SuperMeat Partners With Japanese Food Giant Ajinomoto To Scale Cultivated Meat Production

SuperMeat, a cell-cultured meat company based in Israel, and Ajinomoto, a large Japanese food and biotechnology conglomerate, announced today the formation of a strategic partnership to “to establish a commercially viable supply chain platform for the cultivated meat industry.”

According to the announcement, the partnership, which will include an investment by Ajinomoto in SuperMeat, will combine SuperMeat’s expertise in cultivated meat with Ajinomoto’s R&D technology and expertise in biotech and fermentation capabilities.

One of the main focuses of the new partnership will be in the development of cell-cultured growth media, the broth which contains the nutrients needed for animal cell growth, which remains one of the biggest overall cost drivers in the creation of cultivated meat. According to a study by the Good Food Institute conducted in 2020 of cultivated meat producers, 72% of respondents indicated that cell growth media represented over 50% of their operating costs, and 38% said growth media represented 80% or more of operating costs. By combining SuperMeat’s technology advancements in cultivated meat with Anjinomoto’s biomanufacturing expertise, the two companies hope to drive down costs while increasing the supply of food-grade growth factors.

You can read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Robots

Meet Don Roverto, X’s Robotic Rover on the Hunt for The Next Magic Bean to Feed a Hungry Planet

When you spend thirty years looking for a magic bean, you’re open to a helping hand when trying to find the next one. For the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, that help has arrived in the form of a crop-roving robot nicknamed Don Roverto.

The farmbot is part of Project Mineral, an endeavor from X – Google’s famous R&D subsidiary that researches challenging problems and searches for moonshots – to scale sustainable agriculture. In a blog post published today, project head Elliott Grant describes how Mineral has been assisting the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection.

From the post:

The Alliance’s team has been using Mineral’s technologies at their newly opened Future Seeds genebank in Colombia, which contains over 36,000 varieties of beans. The hope is that what the Alliance discovers with Mineral’s tools can be used to grow better beans for the world, faster.

According to Andy Jarvis, the Associate Director-General with the Alliance, the organization has spent decades building and analyzing its bean collection. Finally, after thirty years of searching, they found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics. With tools like Don Roverto, the organization can process its discoveries at lightning speed and find the next game-changing bean faster than ever before.

To read the full story, click here!

With 5 Thousand Robots Shipped, Bear Robotics Raises $81 Million Series B to Accelerate Growth and Expand into New Markets

Today restaurant robotics startup Bear Robotics announced they have raised an $81 million Series B. The round was led by IMM, with participation by Cleveland Avenue. The new funding brings the company’s total venture investment to $117 million.

Bear, co-founded by former ex-Googler and restauranteur John Ha, makes server robots that help hospitality businesses do everything from delivering food to tables to bussing tables. A few years ago, the company started trialing its first robot, Penny, in Ha’s restaurant, the Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas, CA. Since those early days, the company has shipped 5000 robots, with much of the volume coming last year.

The company has been on a roll lately, winning contracts with big names like Denny’s to Chili’s and a sports stadium or two. Bear’s biggest markets today are in South Korea and Japan, with the US quickly catching up. With their new funding, the company plans to expand further across the US, Europe, and additional countries in southeast Asia

According to Bear COO and cofounder Juan Higueros, the volume they’ve experienced over the past couple of years is the result of a concerted effort to ramp up mass production in 2020.

“It took us all of 2020 to get it done,” Higueros told me via Zoom. “We really started ramping in Q1 of 2020 in the US. It’s been growing at a nice steady pace ever since and we anticipate the US market will continue to grow.”

You can read full post here.

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

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

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

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

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

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