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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

predictions

2023 Restaurant Tech EcoSystem: Nourishing the Bottom Line

In collaboration between TechTable and Vita Vera Ventures, we are pleased to share an updated 2023 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem map.

We all saw that the pandemic brought a wave of experimentation in the restaurant tech space, but we also know that tech-driven change is not always linear. 

In early 2022, we made bold predictions about the restaurant tech environment in 2023, as we anticipated numerous acquihires ahead (acquisitions primarily driven by tech talent vs strategic tech value). This was due to the tight tech labor market (at the time) and the increasingly challenging funding and interest rate conditions. 

However, with the recent wave of macro tech layoffs, the tech labor market is no longer tight, and we believe more restaurant tech companies may be forced to shut down rather than finding a soft landing through acquisition. We’ve already seen a strong reset on requirements for capital efficiency and valuations of startups in the sector. This macro shift may create potential for rollup opportunities, but many early-stage assets across the sector are overfunded single-point solutions and still subscale.

This is ironic as the need for tech-driven solutions has never been stronger, but companies without the right growth metrics will likely struggle to survive. The inflationary environment is also forcing harder decisions for operators, which may further dampen their willingness to engage with new solutions.

With that in mind, we are pleased to share our 2023 Restaurant Tech Ecosystem, which serves as a current heat map of the broader ecosystem within the US (and is clearly not exhaustive). 

Click here to enlarge/download image of map. Click here for downloadable PDF.

The Journey from Point Solutions to Comprehensive Tech Stacks

While single-point solutions for things like online ordering, loyalty programs, and delivery were popular during the pandemic, we have reached a moment now with perhaps too many point solutions in the market. 

Tech stacks that require too many logins are now in fact creating a cognitive burden for employees, rather than the intended promise of efficiency and ease of use. As a result, operators are beginning to seek integrated systems and smaller tech stacks that can do more. (See commentary in the previous section about rollup opportunities!) 

Restaurant tech advisor David Drinan succinctly identifies the near-term priority for most operators: “The restaurant industry is thirsty for technology innovation that will deliver high margin, incremental revenue.”

On the operational side, managers are still struggling with certain areas such as scheduling and inventory management. These tasks can be time-consuming, especially for independent restaurant owners who have limited resources. As a result, we have seen a growth category of solutions that can automate these functions and provide real-time data to help operators make informed decisions.

Help *Still* Wanted   

The labor shortage in the restaurant industry has been a major challenge for operators in recent years, and labor optimization is still at the top of every operator’s mind. The pandemic caused many workers to permanently leave the hospitality industry, leaving restaurants short-staffed. 

According to the National Restaurant Association, almost two-thirds of US restaurant operators say they do not have enough employees to support existing demand. Instead of replacing this lost workforce, many operators are turning to tech to automate more functions and reduce the need for human labor. 

From digital menus and ordering kiosks to automated kitchen equipment, there are many ways that technology can help restaurants operate more efficiently with fewer employees. By automating basic tasks such as taking orders and processing payments, operators can free up their staff to focus on more complex tasks that require human expertise, such as customer service and food preparation.

Another trend the restaurant industry is grappling with is the changing expectations of younger workers when it comes to the employer/employee relationship. With more emphasis on work-life balance, career development, and job satisfaction, younger workers are looking for more than just a paycheck. 

To meet these expectations, operators are looking for workforce management solutions that can help to improve engagement, development, and rewards for their employees. This includes tools for tracking and managing schedules, as well as innovative solutions for tip outs and other compensation mechanisms. By investing in these solutions, operators can not only attract and retain top talent but also improve the overall efficiency and productivity of their workforce.

Finally, it is worth noting that basic scheduling and labor management tools can have a significant impact on profitability by reducing labor costs and improving operational efficiency. By automating scheduling and timekeeping, for example, restaurants can reduce the likelihood of overstaffing or understaffing, which can be costly in terms of wasted labor or lost sales opportunities. 

In the end, the ability to leverage technology to optimize labor is critical for restaurants to remain competitive in a challenging operating environment. While kiosks and text ordering have shown promise in the QSR space, there are many other opportunities for technology to make a positive impact on the industry as a whole.

Ghost Kitchens: It’s Even More Complicated

In our 2021 restaurant tech retrospective, we had a lot to say about this growing subsector, including the challenges for success (a.k.a. profitability) within the confines of a ghost kitchen business model.  

Now, as the concept of virtual and ghost kitchens continues to evolve even further, it’s important for operators to understand the complexities involved and navigate these challenges to build successful ghost kitchen operations.

One major obstacle has been the potential for tension between virtual brands and existing businesses, where adding virtual brands can lead to direct competition with their own existing businesses. Finding the right tech and operational partner to balance between these two is key.

Additionally, ensuring food safety and maintaining quality standards across multiple brands can be a challenge. Many of the generic virtual brands have lacked distinct value or clear taste standards, leading to underwhelming food quality issues and removal from the major third-party delivery platforms.

Last Mile Magic

Making the economics work for restaurant delivery is a growing priority for the industry. This includes better interoperability between POS/Kitchen systems and delivery providers, better routing and batching systems, localized kitchens, and of course even the mode of transportation for delivery.

We are tracking over 20 companies in the North American unattended last mile category, but it is still early days with most (all?) of the solutions operating in limited geographies and customer trials. So we have left this slice off the infographic for 2023, but don’t forget to keep your eyes on the sky, as we’ve seen recent growth of backyard drone delivery companies which are proving to be faster and better for the environment (if they can outweigh the noise and regulatory concerns).

GenAI on the Menu

Tech entrepreneurs have long dreamed of personalized food recommendations, but few have succeeded in creating true personalization beyond dietary concerns, allergens, or ingredient likes/dislikes. 

However, we have now reached a unique moment where new technologies like ChatGPT will be able to create meaningful and personalized interactions with guests. This has always been the premise of a variety of AI-driven restaurant tech startups, but the ability to leverage the underlying data to engage and interact with guests in a truly personal and conversational manner is game-changing. 

By using data from previous orders and interactions alone, ChatGPT can help to create a more tailored experience for guests, from recommending menu items to offering personalized promotions. ChatGPT can become a critical part of a restaurant’s marketing team by creating content, with the ability to easily translate to different languages as well. This could give operators a crucial competitive advantage as consumers demand more personalized experiences. We have only begun to see the capabilities of ChatGPT with free templates being offered to restaurant operators already.

Moreover, conversational AI like ChatGPT can also be a valuable tool for restaurant operators seeking to understand their own operating metrics. By integrating ChatGPT into their tech stack, operators can ask natural language questions and receive real-time responses, empowering them to make informed decisions about their operations.

Emerging Restaurant Tech Concepts to Watch

  • Chat/AI across marketing and operations
  • Tech-enabled employee support and training (for example, personalized perks, tip-out options, or language choices) 
  • AI for scheduling to free up managers
  • Dynamic pricing
  • Reusable containers + tech-driven circular economy for foodservice 

Looking ahead –  As always, we welcome your thoughts and reactions, and look forward to continuing to follow this sector together in the coming years. Reach out to us: Brita@vitavc.com and hello@techtablesummit.com. 

Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022

Food tech prediction week at The Spoon continues, and today we’re looking at the home. And if you haven’t already, make sure you check out my predictions on restaurant tech, food robots, and plant-based meat.

Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker

For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.

All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.

Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.

While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.

Steam-Powered Cooking Gains Traction

Although steam cooking has long been a fixture in pro kitchens, it’s never taken off in the consumer kitchen. However, that could change in 2022.

Consumer steam cooking picked up, um, steam in 2020, when Anova started shipping their countertop Precision Oven. At CES this year, LG showed off a new microwave with steam cooking. And then there’s Tovala, the food delivery and steam oven startup which has started advertising it on national Sunday night football broadcasts.

While steam cooking has followed a similar path to sous vide circulators – a pro tool making its way into the home – I think it has much wider appeal. Because they know the power of steam-cooking, some chefs have pined for an affordable home combi-oven. Now that they’ve finally got their wish, 2022 might be the year consumers take notice.

Amazon Debuts a Smart Fridge

Back in 2017 when I first asked if Amazon might build on a smart fridge, all the evidence I had to go on was a couple of patent filings. Since that time, we’ve watched as the online giant launched branded kitchen appliances and worked on making Alexa a capable home cooking assistant.

And then last fall, Business Insider wrote about Project Pulse, Amazon’s top-secret smart fridge project. According to insiders, the fridge would include machine vision and other advanced technology tell us when food’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish through Amazon. The effort is reportedly being led by the same group that developed Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology and has been in the works for a couple years.

Truth be told, the smart fridge category could use Amazon. The market has grown stale as big US appliance brands have slowed down their efforts in this space, including market leader Samsung. While the South Korean appliance giant has historically been the most aggressive among the bigs in the category, Samsung didn’t make any substantive announcements about Family Hub at CES this year other than adding it to the Bespoke Fridge line. There are also signs that the company may be shifting its focus to its new Home Hub as the center of its smart home strategy.

Bottom line, if an Amazon smart fridge becomes a reality in 2022 (and I think it will), it would catalyze some much-needed innovation from other large appliance makers.

Home Food Waste Technology Comes Into Focus

Smart composting appliances are one nascent category within home food waste innovation coalescing into a legitimate category. Kickstarter darling Lomi has finally started shipping, Vitamix, known for lits blenders, is shipping its FoodCycler FC-50, and a variety of others are on the way.

But composting is the last stop on the food waste mitigation express, and everyone would be better off preventing food from heading to the compost bin. To do that, we need better food storage, something a startup called Uvera is working with its food storage system that uses UVC light to kill bacteria and extend shelf life. There’s also Blakbear, who is working on a food storage system that would measure gasses emitted from food to help measure shelf life. And though they’re long overdue, startup Silo has told me they should be shipping in 2022.

For their part, most appliance brands still don’t seem to have a cohesive strategy for helping consumers reduce food waste, but that didn’t stop them from talking up sustainability at CES year. I hope all the talk translates to more action in 2022.

AR Takes Guided Cooking to the Next Level

Ever since Thermomix pioneered the category of guided cooking with the launch of the TM5 (and more recently the TM6), there’s been an array of companies building tech to assist consumers as they cook. In the last few years, that’s meant voice assistants from TinyChef and Amazon, software and connected cooking hardware from Hestan and others, and we’ve even seen futuristic concepts like this one at SKS 2020 that monitors eye glances as a way to help a consumer manage meal-making.

But the biggest leap forward in cooking assistance might come in the form of augmented reality. Last fall we saw Snap release their food scanning app that utilizes their augmented reality bar to help provide contextual information for items scanned by the phone, and last month we wrote about a cool demo of how a pair of AR glasses could significantly level up the home cook’s capabilities in the kitchen. And while Lauren Cason’s demo was just that – a demo – I expect some appliance makers may have taken notice of how powerful the combo of cooking and augmented reality could be.

We have a couple more prediction posts to come, so make sure to tune in next week!

Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022

Food tech prediction week continues here at the Spoon, and today we’re looking into our crystal ball to predict what 2022 holds for plant-based meat.

After you’re done reading this, make sure to check out my predictions for restaurant tech and food robotics!

Let’s do this.

The Year of the Whole Cut

After years of countless plant-based burgers and other minced alt-meat product introductions, the plant-based meat industry will see lots more whole cut analogs make it to market in 2022 and beyond.

We first got a hint at CES 2019 that Impossible was interested in whole cuts when The Spoon broke the story the company was working on a steak, but since that time we’ve seen a bunch of companies announce they are working on building whole cut alternatives.

Juicy Marbles, Novameat and Redefine Mean are also working on whole cut steak analogs. Others like Atlast are offering mycelium-based whole cut bacon. Then there are those making whole-cut seafood analogs like that from Plantish.

Many of these companies are looking to deliver their products in 2022, and you can expect a wave of new plant-based whole cut concepts introduced throughout the year.

Fungi-Powered Meat Alternatives

As we enter 2022, a whole crop alt-meat startups are rolling out a variety of meat analogs powered by fungi. One is Meati, which has developed prototypes of steak and chicken using mycelium grown using a submerged fermentation technique. Then there’s Nature’s Fynd, which debuted its breakfast patties which use its novel mycelium last fall. And in early January, MycoTechnologies debuted its meatless crumble brand Goodside Foods at CES.

The rise of myco-powered meat products shouldn’t be all that surprising since fungi, after all, is a lot closer in its molecular makeup to mammals than plants. For this and other reasons, fungi-based meat products don’t need as much high-tech trickery and processing to create a realistic meat analog. I predict this is only the beginning and we’ll see more fungi-based meat products debut throughout 2022.

Clean Label Enters Alt Protein

One criticism of some early plant-based meats is the long list of ingredients. While these alt-meats are no doubt miracles of modern food science, the unfamiliar ingredient list has scared away some customers concerned about eating exotic or genetically modified ingredients.

Enter the clean label. We started to see some startups begin to offer new plant-based meat analogs with simpler (and shorter) ingredient lists in 2021 and I expect to see more of this this year. Nowadays offered up their new pea-protein-based chicken nugget with seven ingredients, and Daring launched their soy-based nuggs that have a fairly straightforward recipe label. And then there’s No Evil Foods, which is leaning heavily into the whole plant-based clean label with a lineup of alt-meats ranging from chorizo to jerky. Expect to see these companies and other new ‘clean-label’ alt-meat startups push their simple (and understandable) recipes as a primary point of differentiation between themselves and those built with more (and more processed) ingredient lists

The Rise of the Plant-Based Meat Building Block

While many early-stage alt-meat companies have built much if not most of their end product in-house, nowadays there’s a growing cohort of new companies providing plant-based meat building blocks to enable others to get to market faster.

Take Motif. Last month, the Ginkgo Bioworks spinout announced the commercial launch of their yeast-derived heme protein HEMAMI, an umami-flavor and texture building block for alt-meat makers trying to produce a realistic alternative. This is good news if you’re a maker of alt-meat products who wants to replicate Impossible’s proprietary plant-based heme, because now instead of spending tens of millions trying to build it yourself, now you can buy a similar technology from Motif.

There are others making building blocks to get to market faster, whether that’s Jellatech and Geltor with their animal-free collagen, Hoxton, Melt & Marble and Nourish with their alt-fats, Umiami making a plant-based fibrous muscle alternatives, or Kingdom Supercultures creating the next great novel ingredient.

Forget Burgers, Let’s Eat Some Fish

While companies like Good Catch and Ocean Hugger have been at the plant-based seafood game for a while, others are diving in with new offerings: Asia plant-based giant Omnifood launched their line of plant-based seafood last summer, Plantish came out of stealth with their whole cut salmon last week, and Madrid-based Mimic recently launched its tomato-based alt-tuna. If 2021 was a big year for alt-fish, expect 2022 to be even bigger.

Bonus Prediction: Plant-Based Meat Consolidation

How many plant-based burger and chicken nugget brands can we expect to make it?

As with any market moving beyond adolesence, don’t be surprised to see some consolidation in plant-based meats. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, there are simply too many offerings in many of the same categories to survive. In 2022, I expect we’ll see some market consolidation as bigger players scoop up smaller players either to kickstart their plant-based lines or to shore up holes. And, sadly, some companies simply may not survive.

That’s it for today. Tune in tomorrow when I make predictions about the future of consumer kitchen tech!

Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022

It’s our second of five consecutive days of food tech predictions for 2022. Yesterday we looked into our crystal ball to predict the future for restaurant tech in 2022 and today we’re looking at food robots.

So, how exactly will robotics change food in 2022?

Front of House Automation Will Shoulder More of the Load for Workers

If there’s an area of dine-in restaurants impacted most by COVID, it’s the front of house. High turnover, social distancing and masking requirements have all put significant stress on staff who interface with consumers.

The good news is there is a new class of food robots ready to lend a hand. In the second half of 2021, we saw both Denny’s and Chili’s begin rolling out front-of-house robots from Bear robotics. Others such as Keenon and Pudu are also building robot servers to handle the load of overburdened workers.

And then there are the fully automated robots making and dispensing food that are being utilized within the confines of an existing restaurant, whether that’s robot bartender with personalities like Cecelia or cookie-making bots in Alabama.

Whether it’s waiter-bots or fully automated task-managers, expect more robots to help shoulder the load in the front of house in 2022.

Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out

Get ready for the restaurant in-a-box. There are a number of startups with robo-restaurant concepts already in fully operational pilot tests who are looking to expand with multiple self-contained robot restaurants in 2022.

Hyper-Robotics, which makes fully automated containerized robot pizza restaurants that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour, is beginning to roll out its pizza robot restaurants in Israel. Cala, a French startup that makes fully autonomous pasta-making robots, is already operating a robot in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district. Another startup called Mezli, which is currently running its containerized bowl-food restaurant in Kitchentown, has plans to eventually launch more locations.

These are just a few self-contained robo-restaurants and we expect to see many more rollout in 2022.

Age of the Food Robocorn

One could argue that – at least for a while – that Zume hit unicorn status as it hauled in wheelbarrows of Softbank cash for its robot meets pizza delivery concept. However, the company eventually hit troubled waters and has since pivoted to sustainable packaging.

Since that time, a new wave of food robot startups has launched, but – outside of the warehouse space – we’ve yet to see any of these startups reach the same rarified valuation. I expect that to change in 2022.

As more restaurant and food delivery businesses adopt robotics and automation, we should see which robot startups hit escape velocity. My guess is we’ll see the next food robo-corns in food delivery space and restaurant robotics.

Modularized Robots and the Food Automation Integrator

One of the biggest challenges for rolling out automation tech in high-volume restaurants is how to begin the process of integrating a new robot into a kitchen. Established restaurants have their workflows and processes, which means an operator can’t just drop a robot into a kitchen and expect to see instant results.

This is why companies like Picnic, Hyphen, Miso and others are creating modularized back-of-house robots to assist workers by taking over a portion of their existing food production workflow. Meanwhile, some operators like Sweetgreen are bringing robotics expertise in-house and are trialing ways to bring food to their customers.

Finally, not only do I expect to see more food robot startups offer up modular-build approaches tailored to operators with locked-in workflows, but I also expect 2022 will see the rise of the ‘food automation integrator.’

Robot Vending Everywhere

Why eat a stale bag of chips when you can have fresh food? That’s what many office workers, university students and travelers will start to wonder as they come upon highly automated fresh food vending machines. Companies like Yo-Kai, DoorDash (with Chowbotics), and Costa Coffee’s Baristabot (formerly Briggo) are already moving towards wider deployment, while others like Basil Street are looking at significant expansion in the coming year.

Bonus Prediction: The Robot Operator Will Be a Hot New Job Category

It may seem like a dream job for a virtual reality nut, but apparently, VR-piloted delivery bots are now a thing. Also now a thing: Hospitality training programs that give prospective hospitality managers experience with deploying robots.

While there is concern among some that robotics could eventually displace workers in many of these spaces, I expect that we’ll also see many food industry employees clamoring to take on robotics operator as part of their job description. We can expect more robot operator jobs to become in demand in 2022, as we see food robots exit the pilot stage and enter full daily operation across restaurants, food service, delivery, grocery, and other food adjacent venues.

That’s it for restaurant robots. Tune in tomorrow for our alt-protein predictions for 2022!

Five Restaurant Tech Predictions for 2022

It’s food tech prediction week at The Spoon!

Each day we’ll publish five predictions for a specific area of the food tech universe, starting with restaurant tech.

The Ghost Kitchen Market Will See Growth in Hosted Models, Consolidation in Some Other Areas

The ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant markets were white-hot in 2021, with lots of venture funding pouring into a range of different concepts. However, one of the growing realizations about the ghost kitchen market is that while many of the offerings have had tech platform valuation multiples, a good number of them are facilities-based concepts that have cost economics closer to that of real estate business.

Because of this, I expect much of the action in 2022 will be in host kitchen concepts that leverage existing restaurant brands or create wholly new ones powered by social communities. The launch of TikTok Kitchen, powered by Virtual Dining Concepts’ and their host kitchen model, is one I’ll be watching closely to see if they can replicate the success they have with MrBeast Burger.

Finally, we can also expect to see some prominent players either exit or downscale their ambitions. Reef just announced they were closing one-third of their kitchens, likely in part due to the fallout from company’s continued health department certification problems. I expect we will see more of this in 2022.

Restaurants Will Deploy More AI, Automation & Cloud-Powered Labor to Offset Labor Challenges

Like many other restaurant chains, Checkers has struggled in recent years to find enough workers to cover the various shifts. Going forward, they won’t have to worry about that when it comes to manning the drive-thru as the company rolls out AI-powered voice bots to 267 of their restaurants.

This is only one example of how we’ll see restaurants embrace more technology to deal with what has become a permanent labor shortage in the restaurant space. Of course, automation and robotics will also be a part of the equation, but I think we’ll also see more restaurants find help through remote labor through platforms like Bite Ninja.

Restaurant Operators Will Jump Into Membership NFTs

Last week, we saw Gary Vaynerchuk and his team raise $14 million with the auction of membership tokens for their NFT restaurant set to open in the first half of 2023. With this success of Flyfish – and the rapidly rising prices of the the token in post-drop trading – I predict we’ll see lots of others try to use a similar template. Of course, many will fail, but I can see how NFTs could become a new way to finance restaurants in lieu of traditional financing for chefs with large followings.

Rethinking of Restaurant Concepts To Serve Off-Premise Driven Demand

The idea behind PizzaHQ is fairly simple: Utilize centralized kitchens powered by automation to feed a market where the vast majority of customers never expect to come into your restaurant. As off-premise continues to grow and real estate prices continue to rise, we can expect more new restaurant concepts that embrace different elements of dark kitchens, automation, contactless pickup, and more.

Digitizing of the Back of House

Restaurant kitchen operations can be messy and low-tech, but that is beginning to change as new digital platforms are enabling operators to better optimize their business. A number of startups are combining IoT, AI and software to bring about greater efficiencies in all aspects of a restaurant’s operations, enabling them to create the type of just-in-time models for food production that has existed in traditional manufacturing and other industries for decades.

Companies like Powerhouse Dynamics and their IoT-powered resource monitoring have been at it for a while, and now companies like Perfect Company are doing real-time monitoring of a kitchen to optimize labor allocation, ingredient portion sizing and other aspects of a kitchen’s operations. Other companies like Orbisk are employing machine vision to better help restaurants monitor and reduce food waste, and Miso Robotics and Hyphen are creating providing software and automation to help employees become more efficient.

Bonus Prediction: Data-Powered Personalization

As more customers engage with restaurants through apps, QR codes, and other digital formats, restaurants better understand who their customers are and what they like. While we may be a few years away from the age of truly personalized menus, I expect we’ll see increased restaurants harness all of the data they are gathering from restaurants to create better incentive programs to ensure better customer return rates and satisfaction.

Make sure to tune in tomorrow to hear our five predictions on food robotics for 2022.

Ketotarian, Mushrooms and Innovation Among Kroger’s 2021 Food Trend Predictions

Grocery giant, Kroger provided its food trends recap of 2020 and predictions for 2021 over the weekend. And while the list is definitely a PR move, it does provide a little insight into where the retailer thinks food is headed over the coming year.

But before we get into Kroger’s predictions, let’s take a quick look back at what foods trended at the retailer over 2020. Kroger compiled its results from year-over-year sales growth across Kroger’s business including its roughly 2,800 retail stores as well as pickup, delivery and ship. Based on that, these foods were the big winners of 2020:

  • Zero-Calorie Soft Drinks
  • Four-Cheese Mexican Blend Shredded Cheese
  • Flavored Potato Chips (Hot & Spicy, Regional Flavors & Meal-Inspired Varieties)
  • Sauvignon Blanc Wine
  • Heavy Whipping Cream
  • Fresh Burger Patties
  • Artisan Breads & Restaurant-Style Buns
  • Bulk Individual Coffee Pods (96-Count)
  • Party-Size Bags of Variety Chocolate
  • Black Forest Ham

Snacks. Cheese. Wine. Kroger’s list does seem to accurately reflect our collective mood during the pandemic year, when most of us were locking down and not leaving the house. Perhaps what’s more interesting, however, is what’s not on that list: Plant-based foods. Or plants of any kind, really.

This lack of plant-based burgers is in contrast with larger data showing that sales of plant-based meat (Beyond Burgers, Impossible Burgers, etc.) skyrocketed during the pandemic. The animal-based meat supply chain was strained as people panic-shopped, and ethical concerns over meat processing were raised as meat packing facilities became COVID hotspots.

That there were no plant-based foods on Kroger’s list could be a function of the type of shoppers the store gets, or that the growth in plant-based foods wasn’t enough when compared with the other foods. Snack foods, in particular made a comeback during the pandemic as we all tried to find comfort where we could.

Comfort food is actually a trend that Kroger sees continuing into 2021, writing that “Easy-to-prepare comfort foods are on the rise as consumers look to balance convenience and quick preparation times with flavorful meal options.”

While plant-based foods may have been absent from Kroger’s 2020 trends list, the retailer predicts that a “ketotarian” diet will become more popular this year. As Kroger explains, a ketotarian diet is “a plant-based spin on traditional keto guidelines. Consumers can expect to find a growing selection of these plant-based, high-protein foods on grocery shelves in the year ahead.”

While we’re talking about plants, Kroger also predicts that mushrooms will play a bigger role in our diets this year, writing “Consumers should expect to see mushrooms play a starring role in a variety of new products in 2021, including blended plant-based proteins, condiments, spices, seasonings and more.” We’ve actually been watching this mushroom mania play out over the past year here at The Spoon as mushrooms and mycelium kept popping up as the backbone for new types of proteins including cuts of plant-based meat.

One of Kroger’s 2021 predictions is also near and dear to our Spoon hearts: Innovation in the fresh food aisle. Kroger said to look out for in-store hydroponic farms and plant-based coatings like Apeel that extend the shelf-life of produce among the new technologies to look out for.

A trend that Kroger didn’t mention was food-as-medicine, a space which the retailer has been a leader in. We probably shouldn’t tie this list too much into overall business strategy for the company, but it’s noticeable, given everything that is on the list.

Whether or not it’s a PR stunt, Kroger’s predictions actually seem pretty reasonable, though I wish they had predicted a few more robots, especially since they are building out all those automated warehouses.

My 2020 Prediction Scorecard: Equity Crowdfunding (✅) and Pop-Up Retail (❌)

Before unceremoniously kicking 2020 to the curb, as an industry watcher, I have to make the yearly mental trek backwards to revisit the predictions I made for this year.

This, wretched, wretched year.

Going into 2020, my big two bets were on equity crowdfunding and semi-permanent pop-up retail experiences. Seeing how it all panned out, I’d say I batted .500 this year. Equity crowdfunding caught on (especially with food robots), but those pop-ups? Not so much-ups.

Equity crowdfunding, or eschewing institutional venture capital money in favor of opening investment up to just about anyone, did seem to catch on this year. Small Robot Company, Winc, Miso Robotics, Mellow, Piestro, Kiwibot, Renewal Mill, Bobacino and Blendid all launched or announced equity crowdfunding campaigns this year.

Why did these companies turn to the crowd? Part of the reason is that skipping VC money means there’s less pressure to scale your business so dramatically. But there are other reasons as well as some Founders told us.

Sam Watson Jones, Co-founder, Small Robot Company told me earlier this year that “VCs are a bit different in the UK. There are very few early stage VCs to fund stuff that requires more development. We knew we had a load of farmers who were excited about what we could develop.” Crowdfunding, Watson said “allowed us to get angels and people who would put ten quid in. It’s been a good forum for us to capitalize on the branding and PR.”

Then just this month, Blendid Founder and CEO, Vipin Jain explained to us why his company decided to equity crowdfund, saying, “Since Blendid has recently expanded into retail establishments with national partners – giving us a much broader audience – it made sense to do crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding not only allows you to raise money, but also drives consumer brand awareness and advocacy, by enabling fans of Blendid to individually invest as well as enjoy our delicious blends.”

So did the campaigns work? That’s kind of hard tell without speaking directly with each company, but here’s what we know:

  • Small Robot Company raised £2,003,880 ($2,596,000 USD), surpassing its goal of £700,000 target
  • Winc raised $5.3 million
  • Miso Robotics raised $16.7 million, or a little more than half of the $30 million it sought
  • Mellow‘s equity crowdfunding was a bust and the company failed to reach its funding goal
  • Piestro‘s first go-round with equity crowdfunding went so well it launched a second campaign
  • Kiwibot has raised $576,034 of the $1 million it wanted
  • Renewal Mill raised $116,777 of its $1 million goal

Bobacino’s campaign won’t launch until next year, and it’s still early in Blendid’s campaign, so we’ll have to check back in on both of those.

I’m curious to see if the food robot world continues to go the equity crowdfunding route in 2021. While it does allow startups to skip the VC death march, so far, it doesn’t seem like a way to raise the large amounts of money a robot company needs to scale. But equity crowdfunding is still a pretty nascent concept. Like so manythings, if someone makes money on it, potential investors will flock to it.

What people weren’t being driven to in 2020 was semi-permanent retail environments. At the start of the year, I thought brands would take to the mini cashierless retail environments created by AiFi with its NanoStore and Zippin with its pre-fab Cubes.

These small, plug-and-play retail environments are easy to set up inside office buildings (or just about anywhere, really). They could, for instance, allow a grocer like Safeway to build a small, unattended Safeway-branded store in a lobby, or a hospital or train station. This is a lot cheaper than building out or retrofitting an existing space. And since there’s no cashier, they can be more economical to run.

But the pandemic forced people to avoid offices and other high-traffic areas, and subsequently pushed them into record amounts of online grocery shopping from home. As such, retailers needed to focus less on creating new retail spaces and more on their own logistics and fulfillment to accommodate all those new e-commerce orders.

I still think cashierless checkout technology will pave the way for a boom in pop-up stores over the next couple of years (AiFi aims to build 330 such stores by the end of 2021). Retailers will want to create more contactless ways of shopping that are fast and get people in and out of stores quickly, and setting up a small, cashierless stores is one way to do that.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll put pop-ups on my prediction list for 2021….

Our 2018 Prediction Scorecard – How’d We Do?

The scariest part of my work day is hitting the “Publish” button on a story. Did I get all the facts right? Was I fair? Was my analysis thoughtful and unique? Did I misspell “its”?

This type of anxiety is compounded when making predictions. Putting your prognostications in stark black and white can be a nail biter that lasts all year as you wait to see if you were right.

Just about this time last year I noted six trends to watch for in 2018. With the year pretty much wrapped up — let’s check in and see how I did.

1. Alterna-Products Will Get More Mainstream.

Did they? Yes!

When we look back, 2018 will probably be seen as a watershed year for alternative products. Plant-based “meats” that look and feel like the real thing really took off this year. Beyond Meat struggled to keep up with demand, brought on a second production facility and filed to go public next year. For its part, Impossible Foods saw its meat-free patties adopted by a number of restaurant chains (White Castle eating contest, anyone?), had to hire a second shift to boost production, and is set to go into retail next year.

Seeing the heat from all that alterna-meat, Nestlé is perhaps starting up a beef with these upstarts with its forthcoming plant-based Impossible Incredible Burger.

And it’s not just protein. Alterna-milks are growing like alterna-weeds. In addition to soy, almond, cashew, flax there is also Ripple’s Pea milk (but avoid the pea yogurt), Perfect Day partnered with Archer Daniels Midland to scale up production of its milk-made-from-fermentation, and good luck if you want to buy any Oatly oat milk.

And that doesn’t even include lab-grown meat! Though that’s still probably several years away from truly hitting the market in a big way. There’s such a buzz around alternate products that the FDA is getting involved. Perhaps playing the incumbent protectionist card, the government agency has held public forums and is making moves to determine what can and cannot be labeled “milk” and “meat.”

2. Virtual Restaurants Will Pop Up Everywhere (and Nowhere).

Did they? Kind of!

While virtual restaurants aren’t everywhere, we did see a number of industry moves to make this phenomenon more common. Kitchen United, which offers commercial kitchen space for delivery-only restaurant concepts, launched, raised funding and started expanding. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick got into ghost kitchens in LA. And companies like KitchenPodular are making ghost kitchens modular.

I may have been a bit premature in this prediction, but my colleague, Jenn Marston assures me that ghost kitchens are going to be a big thing in 2019.

3. Meal Kit Shakeup.

Was there one? Yes!

It was a tumultuous year for meal kit companies that saw meal kits migrate from mail order to grocery aisles. Kroger bought Home Chef. Chef’d shut down abruptly (only to be re-born with a focus on retail). And Blue Apron continued to go through its own travails. We even saw traditional CPG companies like Stouffer’s and Tyson get into (frozen) meal kits.

Expect more shakeup and thinning of the meal kit herd next year as retail gets data on what people want and adjust accordingly.

4. The Further Instagrammification of Food.

Did it? Ehhhhh, not really.

I thought there would be a wave of restaurants re-architecting themselves with better lighting and booths that facilitated great camera-phone photography. This hasn’t really happened, and it didn’t seem like that much of a priority when I spoke with restaurateur Richard Blais at our Smart Kitchen Summit this past fall. There are chefs like Eric Rivera at Addo that like Instagram for marketing purposes, but the social media platform remained more of a constant rather than a new, driving force.

5. Artificial Intelligence and Robots Rise Up for Real.

Did they? Yes!

I went through a pretty exhaustive rundown of the food robot news from the past year, when I predicted (once again) that 2019 will be a breakthrough year for robots. That may be a bit of a cheat to make the same prediction two years in a row — but I stand by it! A lot of food robots were introduced this year, and next year will bring the scaling.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform our meal journey. Farming, the supply chain, and truly personalized food recommendations are all getting better thanks to data and artificial intelligence.

6. Amazon, Amazon, Amazon.

Amazon? Amazon!

Here’s the thing. After Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, predicting that we’d write about Amazon was kind of a gimme. But the sheer number of different ways we wrote about Bezos and Co. was a surprise. From the cashierless Amazon Go stores spurring an entirely new kind of retail arms race to its variety of patents to in-trunk delivery to its own Alexa-powered microwave — Amazon has its fingers (tentacles) in just about everything, including, possibly, your next house!

All-in-all, I think those predictions turned out alright. One easy predictiion that doesn’t make me nervous at all? Food Tech is only going to get better, more mainstream, and more fun to write about.

The 2017 Smart Home Prediction Show

It’s the smart home prediction show & CES 2017 wrap up all in one super-sized episode.

For this episode, we bring back two of our favorite guests: Nate Williams of August Home and Adam Justice of ConnectSense.

We talk Alexa, Google Home, service provider smart home, smart appliances, smart kitchen and so much more.

You can listen Soundcloud above, subscribe in iTunes or download the episode here.

Enjoy!