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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

office food

Fresco Fridge Brings its Smart Fridges to Offices in the U.S.

The most facile way to describe Fresco Fridge is to say that they are like the Italian version of Byte Technology. That’s not entirely fair to Fresco Fridge, which has built up its own business halfway round the world and this month entered the U.S. with a new Manhattan location, but the comparison is kinda the quickest and easiest way to set the stage.

Fresco Fridge makes a smart refrigerator platform for offices and other high-traffic buildings. It’s a vending machine that uses RFID tags on the items inside so someone can open the fridge with their smartphone, grab what they want, then get automatically charged for it.

See? It sounds a lot like what Byte has been doing in the Bay Area.

Unlike Byte, which started out in the food biz but has since moved on to become more of an open platform, Fresco has never stocked the fridges with its own food. Instead, Fresco has since day one been a vehicle for selling some other vendor’s food.

One of the alluring aspects of a smart fridge like Fresco’s is that it allows offices to provide fresh food for its employees without having to take on the expense of catering meals. Companies can subsidize food in the fridge as little or as much as they want to give their workers more eating options on premises.

Fresco provides its fridges for free to a location and makes its money by charging a monthly fee and collecting a rev share with the food vendor. So if Sandwich Shop X stocks the fridge with food, Sandwich Shop X pays the fee and splits the sales. Vendors also get access to inventory management software, marketing opportunities (special offer notifications) and sales data and analytics as part of the package.

Fresco Fridge launched in September of 2018 and has raised €2 million in funding from a mix of European angel and venture investors. So far the company has 100 fridges in the field in Europe and a new one just recently installed in Manhattan. Fresco has also announced a partnership Proper Foods to sell that company’s assortment of healthy snacks and dishes. The company also has a partnership with an undisclosed commercial real estate company that has buildings across the U.S. and Europe.

Despite any similarities to its competitors, the potential market for Fresco and other smart vending services is pretty massive when you consider all of the office buildings, residential buildings, hospitals, etc. that could offer more food options on-site. As Fresco continues to expand throughout the U.S. next year, a lot more people could be saying “Ciao!” to the smart fridge.

SMOODI Joining Forces with UGo Smoothies to Bring Keurig-Style Smoothies to Offices

When Pascal Kriesche, Co-founder & CEO of SMOODI, told me how he and his co-founder joined forces last fall after discovering each one was working on a self-contained smoothie making machine for offices, I initially wrote it off as a rather banal origin story.

But I was wrong. In a lesson for journalists and entrepreneurs alike, I should have asked a follow up question, and Kriesche should have been more specific with his storytelling.

Turns out the other co-founder is Morgan Abraham, and the product Abraham was working on was UGo Smoothies, which I wrote about a little over a year ago. Turns out that UGo is gone and has now hooked up with SMOODI.

Honestly, I should have realized something was up when Kriesche laid out SMOODI’s product and business plan, which is essentially exactly what I wrote about UGo last year:

UGo makes a self-cleaning countertop smoothie machine targeting offices, gyms and universities. UGo is taking a Keurig-type approach by providing both the blender and cups full of pre-assembled fruit that go into the machine. It can even provide the freezer to keep those fruit cups frosty before you blend them.

Just swap out the name UGo for SMOODI.

There have been some changes since UGo was subsumed into SMOODI. First is a new emphasis on customization. SMOODI machines now allow users to choose their preferred smoothie thickness (this actually just adjusts the amount of water used, the system doesn’t incorporate dairy or other thicker milk liquids), and now offers boosts like oats, chia, protein powder or coconut.

The price has also gone up. UGo’s initial pricing was a monthly lease of the machine for $500 plus $3 per cup. SMOODI is now $500 a month for the machine and a variable per cup fee, depending on volume, with higher volumes costing $3.50 and lower volumes costing more.

Kriesche said the company is also working a model that would allow companies to charge end users directly per cup. This would be for settings like co-working spaces or for smaller business that can’t afford to subsidize all of the smoothies for employees. But this is still a ways off for SMOODI, as its machine can’t do transactions at this point.

SMOODI is currently in one beta test at the Boston Consulting Group office in Boston, where SMOODI is based. Through this trial, the company is examining pricing and working on its second generation machine. SMOODI hopes to go out more commercially next year.

SMOODI will be joining a crowded field of startups making all-in-one devices built to feed offices. Genie, which launched in the US earlier this year, provides small appliances that heat up pre-assembled food pods. Byte Technologies helps small retailers outfit offices with smart fridges that sell snacks and drinks.

And then of course, there is Replenish, which makes… a self-cleaning smoothie machine with Keurig-like fruit pods for offices.

Perhaps SMOODI will be joining forces with them.

‘Office-Food-as-a-Service’ Startup Level Discontinues Hot Pantry Service

The Spoon has learned this week that Level (formerly known as Markov), a startup that offers a managed office-food-as-a-service offering combining both food delivery and an AI-powered smart oven, has started to pull out of customer installations.

According to our sources, Level employees have picked up the Level oven and fridge that combine to make the Level Hot Pantry service from customer locations this week, telling customers that things “haven’t worked out.”

I reached out to the company and was able to confirm the news.

“We are going to discontinue the Level Hot Pantry program,” cofounder and CTO Arvind Pereira told me via email. “We are working on a transaction and will have more to share in the future.”

Level is (or was) one of a number of different startups trying to rethink and innovate around the office meal. Other startups combining new cooking tech alongside food delivery include Genie and Kitchenmate, while a number of others like Byte and Chowbotics are offering up different spins on fresh food delivery and assembly.

Pereira indicated they are looking at selling the Hot Pantry offering (which presumably includes the food delivery business and the smart oven), but it’s yet to be determined if the company itself will continue as a going concern.

We will update this story as we learn more…

Fresh Bowl’s Vending Machine Dishes Up Healthy Food and Uses No Plastic Containers

Research shows that eating at work isn’t very healthy. Whether it’s grabbing a burger and fries or a salad drenched in too much dressing, eating while working doesn’t always work in your best interest.

Fresh Bowl is among a raft of startups looking to change how we eat at the office by providing a “Farm-to-Desk” vending machine experience that serves up healthier food options like lentil salads and açai bowls. The company even wants to improve how we consume our food by dispensing it in reusable glass containers.

The startup launched its first Fresh Bowl vending machine at the WeWork West in Soho New York City last November. The machine features food made from scratch that is delivered every morning. Prices are just under $10 for salads and just under $5 for a snack.

However, since food is served in reusable glass jars, there is an additional $2 jar deposit on top of that price. But what’s pretty cool is that you can return the glass jar to the vending machine and roll a $2 credit towards your next purchase (which covers the cost of your next jar deposit).

Fresh Bowl is similar to other players out there with the same mission of making office meals more healthy. Farmer’s Fridge raised $30 million last year to expand its salad-dispensing vending machines. Chowbotics raised $11 million last year to expand its menu robot-made salads to robot-made food bowls. And Byte provides offices with smart vending machines that are loaded with healthy food.

While there is plenty of competition on the healthy eating front, the reusable glass container is a nice differentiating hook for Fresh Bowl. The eco-friendly packaging comes at a time when the stigma around single-use plastic is increasing, and even big CPG brands are getting into the reusable packaging game. In a recent social media post, Fresh Bowl says that 90 percent of the jars were returned.

FreshBowl raised an undisclosed sum of money in December last year from a Bay Area investor and a few NYC-based angels. The company has three employees and is looking to roll out more vending machines by the end of March.

Markov Rolls Out Hot Pantry Food Service, A ‘Google Cafeteria’ in a Box

Let’s face it: Not every company is a Google when it comes to profitability, technology prowess or lunch.

Wait, lunch?

Yep. Google’s food program has become the gold standard in the tech world and beyond for its healthy choices and focus on sustainability, and has played an outsized role over the past decade in raising awareness about how important food is in creating a productive work environment and satisfied employees.

The only problem is not every company has the resources of Google or a food service visionary like Google Food director Michiel Bakker to lead the charge, especially those small to midsize firms where food is sometimes an afterthought.

But now Markov, the company behind the Level smart oven, wants to change all that by providing the food service hoi polloi with a turnkey service that turns their break rooms or kitchenettes into mini-Google cafeterias. The San Francisco startup’s new service, called Hot Pantry, combines the Level smart oven with food delivery that keeps an employer’s fridge (also provided by Markov) stocked with healthy food choices ranging from breakfast items like red flannel hash to mix and match lunch offerings like Tuscan short ribs and kimchi fried rice.

The Level oven

According to Markov CEO Leonard Speiser, the company isn’t building out its own kitchen (unlike consumer-focused Tovala, maker of a smart steam oven), but instead is partnering with food companies to create the various food offerings.

“We took our technology and partnered with the food service industry to provide companies of 30 to 300 employees with a little slice of the Google experience in their own office kitchenette,” Speiser told me via email.

The move into office food service is an interesting one for Markov, which has largely been known to this point for its next-gen smart oven that utilizes a patented cooking technology to steer RF beams within the cooking chamber. But providing a turnkey food offering paired with its oven might just be a smart business move to differentiate itself from the increasingly crowded market of startups looking to reinvent the office cafeteria with fresh and healthy food options.

While the Level oven is an impressive device, I think one of the company’s biggest challenges will be communicating to office managers why an office food service needs something other than a standard microwave oven. Cooking tech nerds like myself can appreciate the uniqueness of a cooking box that can see its food, steer RF signals and heat different foods at different rates and temperatures within the same cooking chamber, but communicating that to an office worker is a different story. This is probably why Markov’s consumer-facing messaging puts a big emphasis on the oven’s interactive front-display touch screen, which provides visually rich information about Hot Pantry’s food offerings, ingredients and nutritional information.

Another key variable that will help determine the success of Hot Pantry is pricing, something the company is not disclosing at this time. While the corporate market is less price-sensitive than the fickle consumer market, oven or no oven, Markov will need to be price competitive with other corporate food service providers.

Today the Hot Pantry is only available in the Bay area, but Markov hopes to expand Hot Pantry eventually to new markets.

“It would be great if all companies could offer Google programs, but most don’t have the scale,” said Speiser. Markov hopes to change that, and the company’s CEO thinks they may even have a leg up on the search giant in one area:

Unlike Google, “the Level Hot Pantry experience is open 24/7,” said Speiser.

Startups Aim To Bring Fresher Choices To The Office Vending Machine

Office life can often mean tight deadlines, which in turn often means making tough choices like ‘Funyuns or Fritos?’ when lunch rolls around.

But for those of us who believe that no time starved employee should have to sustain themselves on bags full of salt and high fructose corn syrup, things may be looking up: a new crop of startups are trying to revisit the office vending machine and bring fresher choices to those of us chained to our desk.

One of those startups is Byte Foods. The company operates a fleet of smart fridges installed in office break rooms and cafeterias throughout the Bay Area.  The company, started by the husband and wife team of Lee and Megan Mokri in 2015, licenses their fridges stocked with fresh food from local producers such as Blue Bottle and Mixt Greens. Companies pay a monthly service fee, and Byte manages food inventory, payments and allows the employer to check out purchasing patterns with a web based dashboard. Employees access the food by swiping their card, choose what they want, and a bill is sent to their smartphone.  Each food item has a small RFID tag on the bottom which helps the fridges determine which items the employee has chosen.

The Mokris ran food delivery startup 180 Eats before getting into fresh vending machines. The current version of Byte is a result of 2016 acquisition of Pantry, a company which made the fridge and software tech licensed by Byte when they launched in 2015. After a year of perfecting the combined offering of fresh food delivery with the product licensing model inherited from Pantry, the company is now looking to expand beyond the Bay Area with the cash from their recent $5.5 million funding round.

Another company bringing fresh food to office cafeterias as well as other locations such as O’Hare airport is Chicago based Farmer’s Fridge. The company, which operates in about 75 locations throughout the Windy City, stocks their fridges with fresh salads made in their kitchen. Customers can check their fridges for inventory with the Farmer’s Fridge app, which also helps them to find locations around town.

Like Byte, Farmer’s Fridge recently received an investment to fuel growth. The company recently received a $10 million investment led by French food giant Danone’s venture arm, Danone Ventures.  The investment team also includes former McDonalds CEO, Don Thomson, through though venture firm he founded, Cleveland Avenue.

It’s not just American startups who are rethinking the vending machine. Foodles, a French startup, is using a model similar to Byte where they will install turnkey connected vending machines stocked with food for $3,400 per month. The company, which is operating in a dozen locations throughout Paris, has raised just over $2 million in funding.

And as it turns out, big companies are also toying with the idea of fresher food from the vending machine. At SXSW this year, Panasonic showed off a smart vending machine called ‘Bento@Your Office’, which dispensed – you guessed it – bento boxes for employees.

In some ways, this new crop of startups is taking many of the ideas created by micromarket movement that’s started to gain traction over the past few years. Fresher food and better technology have started to push vending machine operators across the country evaluate new models. The vending market, which is a $20 billion plus market across food and other items, is a potentially significant opportunity for those looking to shake things up.

And that’s exactly what this new crop of startups bringing fresher food to offices looks to do. The race is on to create national footprints as these companies look beyond their home markets to find new customers for their turnkey fresh vending concepts.

And hopefully, for those of us racing to meet deadlines, we will soon have more choices than Funyuns or Fritos for lunch.

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