Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

NFT

Dinner DAO is Creating IRL Dinner Clubs Built Around NFTs

After eating at home for much of the past 18 months, most of us are itching to get out into the real world and have dinner with interesting people. If this is you, may I suggest a new way to break bread: An NFT dinner club.

That’s the idea behind Dinner DAO, a new community creating IRL (in real life) dinner clubs using non-fungible tokens.

Here’s how it works: Prospective diners become members of a club – or Dinner DAO (DAO stands for ‘decentralized autonomous organization’) – by buying a Dinner DAO NFT. The cryptocurrency raised during the sale of the NFT is pooled in a shared treasury and used to purchase meals whenever the club gets together throughout the year.

Like many NFTs, Dinner DAO uses Ethereum because of the cryptocurrency’s built-in smart contract functionality. Dinner DAO NFTs are minted using a platform called Unlock, which creates the locks and keys for NFT membership. Membership can take the form of a season pass or even one-off dinner tickets.

Dinner DAOs are location-based, meaning members join together for dinner in a specific city. Members discuss potential restaurants using the Dinner DAO Discord, which acts as the central gathering spot for the community. From there, they vote on where to eat using Snapshot.org, a decentralized voting site popular with the crypto crowd.

The Dinner DAO concept is the brainchild of artist and designer Austin Robey. Robey, who lives in Brooklyn, created the first Dinner DAO NFT for New York City, and the first meal was at a restaurant in Little Italy called Shoo Shoo Nolita. I asked Robey how his club paid for the meal since memberships are purchased in virtual currency and most restaurants want dollars or another government-backed currency. He told me that one of the members of the club had a Coinbase debit card (Coinbase is a company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange, and where many users keep cryptocurrency balances stored in the Coinbase wallet). The group transferred Ether from the pooled treasury to the member’s debit card and Coinbase converted it to US dollars when the bill was paid at the restaurant.

“I think it feels like it would defeat the purpose if everyone’s paying with a Bank of America credit cards,” said Robey.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, it is, at least for those not well-versed in cryptocurrency and NFTs. But for crypto converts, creating a Facebook group and paying for things with a regular credit card goes against the organizing principle of the virtual currency and NFT movement: decentralization. Robey and other Dinner DAO members are ok with taking more time to create a crypto-based dinner club because, in doing so, they are pioneering a new way to meet for a meal without having to rely on big technology companies or banks. In other words, they are getting together in real life by putting their dinner club on the blockchain.

“I have just have been interested in collective ownership within tech and collective governance within tech,” said Robey. “Which is part of the reason why I’ve been excited about digging into things that Unlock can do in the web three in crypto space to enable these new forms of human and corporate organization.”

Those who want to organize a new Dinner DAOs can do so by joining the Dinner DAO Discord and creating a proposal for a new city. Users vote on potential cities and, once awarded, the new Dinner DAO chapter lead will mint an NFT and put it on an exchange such as Opensea. Chapter leads are only allowed to invite two in-real-life friends and the rest must be new acquaintances. Once the eight seats are sold (each Dinner DAO club has a total of eight members), chapter members vote on a location and, finally, get together and eat a meal.

The newest Dinner DAO chapter is in Portland. The city lead is web anthropologist Amber Case, who was attracted to the idea of Dinner DAO because she felt the old-world way of splitting a check was such a pain. In her application for the Portland chapter, Case wrote she had at one point tried to create a dinner club, but “when we looked at the fundraising aspects of it, it quickly became annoying. My former co-founder and I even tried to make a startup to make it easier to split the check! We put that idea on ice while we waited for something better to emerge.”

Almost a decade later, Case has found her something better in Dinner DAO. If you’d like to look into creating a Dinner DAO, you can check out the group’s website.

Yes, Crockpot Has an NFT Too

Remember when your mom started using Facebook, TikTok or some other technology-related thing, and you thought, ‘ok, now everyone’s doing it?’ I just had that moment with NFTs. Only instead of my mom, it’s her slow cooker that’s jumping on the technology bandwagon.

That’s because Crockpot, the genericized brand of slow cooker from Newell, has released an NFT to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The NFT, which you can bid on until midnight tonight on Opensea, is basically an animated GIF that shows a bunch of different cartoon renderings of the Crockpot from its origin in 1971 up to today.

Watch for yourself:

Listen, I get it, brands that want to tap into the pop culture zeitgeist will often jump on the latest trend, and the effort by Crockpot is part of a push by the brand at what it is calling “newness.”

“We wanted to celebrate our history without getting too nostalgic,” said Christine Robins, CEO of Home Appliances at Newell Brands, via a press release. “Minting an NFT might seem like an unexpected move from the Crockpot team, but expect to see more newness from our brand as we embark on the next 50 years.” 

But unfortunately for Crockpot, NFTs are tricky. Unlike ostensibly owning something like the first tweet ever, an NFT like Crockpot’s doesn’t have a history behind it that adds to the perceived value. For most, it just appears like another animated GIF.

As I’ve written before, NFTs will find the most success in the food market if they act as a golden ticket to some unique real-world experience. So if Crockpot had created, say, a one-off unique 50th-anniversary collective Crockpot that came with the NFT, I think they may have had something.

But maybe I’m wrong, and there’s someone who wants a Crockpot’s NFT. So if that person is you, hurry up and head on over to place your bid before time expires.

The Culinary NFT Trend Is Just Beginning

If you thought the romance between the culinary world and NFTs was a quick spring fling, I have some news for you: This relationship looks set for the long haul.

The latest evidence of an embrace of non-fungible tokens by restaurants comes in the form of new promotion launches over the past few weeks by both Burger King and Dave & Buster’s.

The Burger King NFT promotion is part of an effort to raise awareness around the company’s Keep It Real campaign, a marketing initiative in which it is eliminating 120 artificial ingredients from its menu. Here’s how the program, which is powered by the Sweet NFT platform, is described in Restaurant Dive:

“Guests can scan a QR code on each Keep It Real Meal box to receive one of three collective NFT game pieces, according to details shared with Marketing Dive. When the full set is collected, guests are programmatically provided a fourth NFT, a reward that could be a 3D digital collectible, free Whopper sandwiches for a year, autographed merchandise or a call with one of the campaign’s celebrity ambassadors.

In short, the burger chain is creating a loyalty program that entices consumers with real-world rewards like burgers. In other words, a modern equivalent of the old McDonald’s Monopoly game, only built on the blockchain.

Much like Burger King’s effort, Dave & Buster’s is an NFT powered loyalty program that promises prizes, even if the odds are longer and prizes are essentially just more game tokens. The program, which also uses Sweet’s NFT platform, offers digital cards and tokens in exchange for tickets won by customers playing games in the restaurant. According to the announcement, each location will offer a unique game card and coin, and the first customer to collect all the locations will win a “1 of 1 Super Master NFT and a $10,000 Dave & Buster’s Power Card.”

Beyond these efforts by the big chains, NFTs are also making their way into higher-end cuisine. In July, chef Marcus Samuelsson turned his chicken recipe into an NFT and threw in the opportunity to eat at the chef’s restaurant. In August, food critic Agnes Chee Yan-Wei announced she’s collaborating with NOIZchain.com to create an NFT marketplace for chefs. And then there’s Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT restaurant, where he plans to offer exclusive membership dining privileges for owners of one of the restaurant’s NFTs.

While much of the early forays into the NFT trend seemed a bit forced, the latest efforts are encouraging for a few reasons:

These NFTs offer real-world rewards, not just digital art. Digital art isn’t a bad thing, but the reality is if NFTs are ever to become mainstream, they need to translate to tangible rewards. Burger King is offering free food, while Buster & Dave’s offers the promise of free gameplay.

The rewards are available to everyone. Sweet, whose NFT platform underlies both Burger King and Dave & Buster’s offerings, call their approach “broad-scale”. What this means is there’s more than just one single copy of a digital asset everyone bids up to the stratosphere, and instead the programs offer rewards that are seemingly within reach and have similar odds to other more traditional game contests.

For those that want it: exclusive real-world experiences. For those who want to pay the price for membership, NFTs can also be a blockchain-powered ticket to exclusive real-world experiences. Vaynerchuk’s NFT restaurant and Chef Samuelsson’s NFT offer tangible but exclusive things high-end foodies would be excited about, like actual food.

So while early efforts to capitalize on NFTs may have been slightly cringe-inducing, the world of food is beginning to fine-tune their crypto offerings into something that real-world consumers might actually want.

Crypto Comes for Food Tech

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this now, but at the start of the year, I sort of dived head first into the world of cryptocurrencies. I hoovered up books like The Basics of Bitcoin, The Infinite Machine, and Kings of Crypto. I bought my first cryptocurrencies and was transfixed as the value kept going up and up.

To be fair, I was, and am, more interested in the mechanics of blockchain and smart contracts, the technology powering Bitcoin and Ethereum. So when Internet omnipresence Gary Vaynerchuk introduced his new NFT restaurant concept and Brave Robot announced it was accepting crypto payments, my knee-jerk reaction was eye rolling, but after sitting with it, I get it.

On Friday, Vaynerchuk’s VCR group announced the forthcoming NFT restaurant, which doesn’t appear to have a name yet, and won’t open until the fall of 2022. The website describes the restaurant as follows:

To experience the restaurant, guests will require a membership. Memberships can be purchased through an NFT (Non-Fungible Token).

The NFT will represent ownership of your membership which will provide access to the restaurant throughout the month, in addition to unlimited enjoyment of the cocktail lounge and access to private culinary experiences.

There will be 3 different NFT Tokens representing a multitude of experiences in the restaurant.

Each NFT is an asset and can be sold or transferred in the secondary market.

Emphasis on that last part is mine, but it’s also why I’m not just going to trash Vaynerchuk’s idea outright. Membership restaurants aren’t a new idea, but typically when you’re done with your membership at one, you’re done. You have nothing to show for it except the memories. With the NFT concept, however, you could potentially sell your spot for a profit if the value of the restaurant’s NFT increases. Vaynerchuk didn’t mention this outright, but because your membership is a smart contract, it could include provisions that ensure his restaurant gets a cut of any secondary or subsequent sale of that membership. That’s additional revenue for the restaurant.

Listen, I’m not saying it’s a great solution, or that more restaurants should adopt it, or that I would ever purchase such an NFT (I wouldn’t). But at least it’s an NFT with some utitility. Unlike the digital collectibles from Taco Bell, or the virtual dining NFT, Gary V’s idea gets you access to an actual meal you can eat.

The NFT restaurant wasn’t the only bit of blockchain news in the world of food tech last week. On Thursday, Brave Robot, which makes animal-free ice cream out of Perfect Day’s fermented dairy proteins, announced that you can now pay for your pints of ice cream with cryptocurrencies. The company’s direct to consumer site will accept payments in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, DAI, Ethereum, Litecoin, or USD Coin. Cryptocurrencies are pretty volatile, so this could wind up being either a really good idea or a bad one, depending on which way the markets go.

What both of these announcements have in common, however, is showing how cryptocurrencies are steadily creeping further into the mainstream — and how the food industry is adapting to these changes. Creating restaurant memberships out of smart contracts and accepting Litecoin for ice cream is a far cry from the 10,000 bitcoins Laszlo Hanyecz paid eleven years ago to get a Papa John’s pizza delivered. But they aren’t ridiculous notions either.

As Brave Robot noted in its announcement, part of the reason for its acceptance of digital currencies was because millennials and Gen Z are adopting the technology. That’s not a guarantee that young folks will carry cryptocurrencies to become the de facto payment method of the future, but neither Gary V or Brave Robot should be embarrassed by their recent blockchain moves.

More Headlines

Forthcoming Tesla Humanoid Robot Will Get Your Groceries, But Should it? – Instead of building a biped, why not just send a self-driving car to get your groceries?

Melt&Marble Raises €750K Seed Round for its Fermentation-Based Fats – The B2B ingredient company can create different kinds of plant-based fats for different types of plant-based proteins.

Slice Launches Tiered Packaging for Its Pizza-Centric Tech Platform – Shop owners that need more digital capabilities can graduate to the Slice Premium level, which gives them access to online ordering, a customized website, and boosted search rankings on the marketplace.

Creator Re-Opens With a New Burger Making-Robot Customers Can Control – The new robot allows users to customize their burgers with seasonings, spices and sauces dispensed to the precise milliliter.

Want to Buy an NFT Virtual Dining Experience?

If was a matter of when, not if, some chef tried to cash in on the current NFT craze. Yesterday, 18 year old chef Logan Guleff announced that he was selling an NFT virtual dining experience.

Don’t expect any actual edible fungi in Guleff’s non-fungible token (NFT). The three-course meal exists only as a piece of digital art that you can bid on over at Rarible. From the description:

Delve into this dinner. A vinegar lemon ice cream with radish oranges and poblano pepper and pickled ginger, a grilled Gulf Oyster with butter sweet corn cream peppers and fried candied corn silk, followed by pan seared wild salmon on a nest of fennel and pear with a horseradish cream and topped with steel head caviar from Tennessee. Don’t expect dessert, I usually serve pork!

Only, you don’t get to eat any of it; you just watch a video of the food stylized to look like the opening credit sequence of a 1980s sitcom. You also get to be the sole “owner” this particular piece of food art. The non-fungible token means that it is unique as authenticated by blockchain technology, so it will be the only one of its kind. It’s something you can access and watch whenever you’re hungry but don’t have access to food because you spent your money on digital collectables.

This isn’t the first we’ve seen of the NFT craze creeping into the food world. Taco Bell auctioned off some digital taco art a few weeks back (proceeds went to charity), and Rare Pizzas is looking to add NFToppings to virtual pizza art.

Perhaps most disappointing is that Chef Guleff just made a cheesey (pardon the pun) video of his food. Not to brag, but we at The Spoon came up with more creative ways chefs and restaurants could jump on the NFT bandwagon including NFT recipes, menus and even digital corks for wine lovers.

But if this particular bit of food-related bits is enticing to you, and you have the cash, by all means indulge. As of this writing, the “Dinner for One – Video” has zero bids.

Food Tech Show Live: Online Grocery & Massive Alt-Protein Funding

This week the Spoon editor team (joined by special guest Tom Mastrobuoni of Big Idea Ventures) jumped on Clubhouse to talk about some of the biggest stories of the week.

Here are the stories discussed on this week’s show:

If you’d like to join us for the live recording of our food tech news weekly review, make sure to follow us our club, Food Tech Live, on Clubhouse.

And, as always, you can listen to the recording of the wrapup via our podcast feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts or just click play below. If you are a regular listener of the show, make sure to give us a review on Apple Podcasts!

The Creators Behind Rare Pizzas Want to Use Pizza Art NFTs to Fund a Global Real-World Pizza Party

If there was ever a way to mix the white-hot concept of NFT (non-fungible tokens) with food — outside of opportunistic taco chain promotions that is — making and selling unique digital pieces of pizza art as a way to raise money for real-world pizza purchases is a logical place to start.

And that’s exactly what a collective of creators behind the Rare Pizzas NFT project plan to do.

The collective, which details their plans via a “Pizza Manifesto” in a publicly available “Cheesepaper,” plans to use artwork from 300 or so digital “toppings” artists to “algorithmically” create digital pizza NFTs. These unique pieces of digital art will then be sold via NFT marketplaces such as Opensea and Rarible.

Using the funds from the pizza art NFTs and community donations, Rare Pizzas plans to give away up to 10,000 pizzas on May 22, which is national Bitcoin Pizza Day.

What’s Bitcoin Pizza Day? It’s the annual anniversary of the first recorded commercial transaction using bitcoin, when computer programmer Laszlo Hanyecz bought two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. And now every year on the anniversary of that sale, the community celebrates this now very expensive pizza transaction and publications like Business Insider writes stories about how much ₿10 million is worth in today’s dollars (which is a lot).

The first NFTs of pizza art have already started to drop (on Pi day, of course), so if you want to get in on the NFT-pizza party early, you can load up your Blockchain wallet and head over and start shopping.

If you’re a pizza shop or restaurant and want to get in on the action, you can sign up here. Better hurry: the first 314 participating shops will get a Rare Pizza NFT.

Could Food Companies Cash in on NFTs?

This is the web version of our weekly Spoon newsletter. Subscribe today to get the best food tech news delivered to your inbox.

Seems like you can’t swing a Nyan Cat these days without reading about NFTs.

For the uninitiated, NFT stands for non-fungible token, and in a nutshell it’s a way to use blockchain technology to create scarcity — and value — around digital goods. Some examples include NBA Topshot, which lets you “own” digital highlights of NBA games, an NFT album by the Kings of Leon, and oh yeah, Taco Bell released its own digital art as NFTs this week.

I will readily admit to being an old man, so the thought of paying top dollar for what is essentially bragging rights associated with “owning” a piece digital art escapes me. I don’t get it. But, thanks to the Taco Bell example, rather that just shouting get offa my lawn, I started thinking about other ways food companies could use NFTs.

Again, the basic premise around NFTs is to create value by using the blockchain to authenticate and limit the number of “original” digital items available. Copies can still be freely made, but the value for the buyer is in owning that validated original.

At first it seems odd that food and eating, which are entirely physical acts, could ever have a collectable digital counterpart. But with a little creative thinking, food-related NFTs could become a way to drive awareness of their brand and possibly make a little extra scratch on the side.

Here are just a few ways NFTs could be used in the food world:

Recipes: A chef/restauranteur could mint and sell recipe NFTs. I imagine there are a number of cooks out there who would buy an limited edition original recipe from a Thomas Keller, or Padma Lakshmi or (insert famous chef), even if the menu was already in a cookbook. Bonus, instead of just admiring the recipe, the owner could actually make the meal. This approach could also work for bars/bartenders.

Menus: Collecting restaurant menus is already a hobby for some. Making them digital NFTs would open up a new wide open market. Menus are digital anyway, but if a restaurant added some artwork and released limited edition, menus could move from just useful to collectable.

Food Photography: Modernist Cuisine is already known for its high-end photography. Physical prints can be bought (starting at $850), but making them or any other food photography a digital NFT could make those images more affordable (or, you know, possibly even more expensive).

Wine: Wineries could offer up “digital corks” that accompany sales of fancy bottles of wine.

Of course the mere fact that a food tech blog is writing about NFTs could be a sign that the fad is over. Things that shine this bright on the Internet (we’re looking at you, $69 million dollars for NFT art by Beeple), tend to burn out quickly.

But there are some high-powered folks like Mark Cuban who believe in (and have invested in) NFTs. And Taco Bell’s NFTs sold out in half an hour (with all the proceeds going to charity), so there still must be some air left in these tires.

At the end of the day and after our pandemic year, restaurants could use any source of income they can get, so digital NFTs could be a very real opportunity.

Seattle Food Geek, Scott Heimendinger helped me bounce some NFT ideas around for this story.

Image via Grönska.

More Headlines

Sweden’s Grönska Raises $2.4M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Operation – The company grows leafy greens in a fully controlled vertical farming environment and also launched its GrowOff cultivation system, which is a smaller, five-story controlled-environment grow system.

Oishii Raises $50M to Raise More High-End, Vertically Grown Strawberries – Not just any strawberries — Omakase strawberries that sell in packs of eight for $50.

StartLife Announces 8 Agrifoodtech Startups in its Sixth Cohort – Companies include cultured meat startup, CellulaREvolution, and Revo Foods, which makes plant-based salmon.

Online Grocer Cropswap Launches New Feature to Help Food Insecure Families – For the Nourish LA partnership, Cropswap as added an in-app donation feature that lets users give a seasonal Harvest Box to those in need for $50.

Taco Bell Issued NFTs for Digital Taco Art

Taco Bell jumped aboard the NFT bandwagon this week, releasing five pieces of “limited” digital art on the blockchain.

A quick primer for those unfamiliar with the latest fad sweeping the internet. NFT stands for non-fungible token, and it uses blockchain technology to create scarcity and authenticity for specific digital items. NFTs have generated a lot of headlines and hype over the past few weeks. Musician Grimes made $5.8 million selling digital art, but that number was dwarfed this week when artist Beeple sold a piece of digital art for $69 million at auction.

This is a food tech blog, so we won’t spend much time going into whether spending money on literally nothing is a solid investment or not. But we can say that Taco Bell is the first food brand we’ve encountered trying to ride the coattails of the NFT hype machine.

Taco Bell announced its NFT art sale on March 7 with the following tweet:

The art was sold on the Rarible marketplace, and according to The Verge, the 25 tokens it put up were sold within a half hour. The good news is that this wasn’t strictly a cash grab. According to Taco Bell’s listing on Rarible, “100% of the profits earned from this sale will be donated to Taco Bell Foundation, Inc. to empower youth to discover and pursue their career and educational pathways.”

Will we see more restaurant brands jump into the NFT game? Probably depends on how long this particular fad lasts. A lot of attention is being paid to this nascent NFT space right now, but as more players — especially big corporate brands — get in on the action, that is usually when the public sours on a trend.

But who knows? Maybe we’ll see Impossible Foods release some Heme-based digital art NFTs sometime soon.