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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Gallup Poll: Grocery Shoppers Prefer In-Store to Online, Shun Meal Kits

A recent poll by Gallup shows that the 84 percent of U.S. adults say they “never” buy groceries online, and 89 percent never order meal kits. By contrast, 81 percent say that they shop for groceries in person at a store at least once a week. (Hat tip: Food Dive)

The Gallup poll reinforces other studies which found that people like to shop for groceries in-store so that they can see and touch them. But it also highlights two trends to watch: meal kits’ continued shift away from mail order, and the transformation of grocery stores into curbside fulfillment centers.

We’ve been skeptics of mail order meal kits for some time, so seeing Gallup’s statistic that 89 percent of respondents never ordering a meal kit isn’t that surprising. Look at the current meal kit landscape: Home Chef is owned by Kroger, Plated is owned by Albertsons, Chef’d abruptly shut down last month, and its assets were purchased to focus on retail. Even stalwarts like Blue Apron and HelloFresh are both rolling out retail strategies.

Part of this is because mail order meal kits deny people the convenience that they want. According to research by Acosta and Technomic, 85 percent of U.S. diners decide what to eat for dinner the day of, which is why placing meal kits in grocery store aisles makes more sense than requiring people to pre-order meals days (or weeks) in advance. People in the grocery store can grab what they want to eat that night — no pre-planning required.

For meal kit companies looking to make the move to retail, however, it might already be too late. As mentioned, Krogers and Albertsons own their own meal kit companies, but they’re far from the only ones: Amazon makes its their own meal kits, Walmart has started to. On a smaller scale, regional grocery stores like New Seasons are getting in on the action, too. There’s only so much grocery shelf space, and a retailer is probably going to promote its own branded kit over a third party’s.

Meanwhile, the in-store shopping experience is going through its own transition. Large grocery stores are starting to be outfitted with robotic micro-fulfillment centers and expanded drive-through pick up options. Alert Innovation is building out such a center for Walmart and Takeoff will announce its first in-store robot operation later this year. These fast, automated centers inside local grocery stores will allow for online grocery order pickup within a half hour to better fit in with people’s busy schedules of errand running or grabbing something on the way home from work.

Additionally, the ability to pick up items in person allows people to inspect their purchases on the spot for quality and freshness — and return something if necessary — while still at the store. They get the convenience of ordering online, the ability to pick up while already out (without having to wait at home for a delivery window), and the power to make adjustments before heading home.

But wait, Gallup said people aren’t buying groceries online. That’s correct… for now! If you look at the demographic break down, 14 percent of adults with children under 18 and 12 percent of adults aged 35 – 54 order groceries online. Compare that to the 8 percent of people 55 and older who buy groceries on the web. And sure, only 9 percent of adults aged 18 – 34 purchase groceries online (they are mostly ordering takeout), but this is a generation being raised on digital convenience.

If these demographic trends hold true, it seems like as though as younger generations age up and start families, the number of people comfortable with ordering groceries online will grow.

With all these changes, I’m looking forward to seeing the same Gallup poll five years from now.

Survey: Older Consumers Not Buying Groceries Online

Not many Americans over the age of 50 are shopping for groceries online, according to a recent study conducted by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation and the AARP (hat tip to Supermarket News).

The IFIC and AARP surveyed 1,004 Americans ages 50 years and older last month and found only:

  • 17 percent had ever ordered groceries to be picked up from a store
  • 17 percent ordered from a prepared meal delivery service
  • 16 percent ordered groceries to be delivered
  • 10 percent ordered from a meal kit delivery service

Older consumers, it seems, prefer going to the store; 90 percent of respondents shopped at the supermarket at least once a month, 71 percent at a super-store and 46 percent at a warehouse/discount club.

The survey shows that older consumers can see the value in ordering online: not having to travel to the store, a wide variety of products and eliminating the “physical burden of getting around the story or carrying groceries.” But, there are barriers that prevent them from fully adopting the technology.

The top barrier was high delivery fees for 89 percent of respondents. Coming right under that, 88 percent said that they still want to see and touch any item purchase to ensure its quality. These people had concerns about purchasing bad or bruised produce, as well as potential difficulty in returning a product if they ordered it online.

This desire to personally inspect food before purchasing is actually cross-generational. An eMarketer study earlier this year found that 96.1 percent of respondents shopped for food and beverages in-store, and an Adeptmind study this month found that the biggest perk of shopping in-store was to evaluate the product in person.

From the data, older consumers who do shop online are more attentive to food labels — but, they overwhelmingly say that label information is harder to get online. This makes sense for an aging population, which probably has to be more careful about what it eats. Displaying nutritional information more clearly could be an opportunity for retailers to open up more of this market.

It seems like these numbers will change as different generations who are more used to technology and the act of ordering groceries online ages up. But it’s still good to examine these numbers and look at implementing changes today to adapt to the older consumer market of tomorrow.

Research Confirms: The Kitchen is Dying. Unless it’s not.

The Spoon was borne out of The Smart Kitchen Summit, our annual conference about the future of the kitchen. But analysts seem unclear as to what exactly the future of the kitchen is. Are millennials and delivery killing off the kitchen? Or is the kitchen staying put and evolving into something different?

These questions kicked off in earnest last month when investment firm UBS came out with a report titled “Is the Kitchen Dead?”, which posited that by the year 2030, delivery could replace most meals cooked at home. The people burying the knife in the back of the kitchen? Millennials (obvi). Well, not just millennials. Robots, delivery apps and virtual kitchens would all play their part in killing off the kitchen.

And if you look around today, it’s not hard to reach that same conclusion. Services like UberEats are growing rapidly. And startups like Kitchen United are launching commercial kitchens so restaurants can meet the demand for delivery.

Bolstering these trends are generational shifts. Millennials spend less on groceries and more on eating out, and they can’t identify a garlic press or roast a chicken. So, once again, millennials are ruining everything.

Or are they? Especially when it comes to the kitchen?

Our own research conducted by The Spoon last year showed that 47 percent of millennials cook at home 5 or more times per week. And a new Datassential report shows that millennials over index when it comes to the types of cooking tools used (juicers, sous vide wands, Instant Pots, etc.). So millennials use the kitchen, they just do so differently than other generations.

And thinking differently about the kitchen is what new research from the NPD Groups suggests we do (hat tip to Food Dive). David Portalatin, Vice President, Industry Advisor at NPD published a blog post yesterday titled “The American Kitchen is Alive and Thriving.” In it, Portalatin says that while restaurant spending was up in the year ending May 2018, actual visits to restaurants (which includes delivery) was flat over the same time period. He also says that restaurant meal prices are going up faster than the cost of a home cooked meal.

Portalatin goes on to write:

“In our daily research of U.S. consumers’ eating behaviors, we consistently show that four out of five meals are prepared at home, and although the relationship of in-home prepared meals versus those sourced away-from-home has been stable for a few years, we still prepare more meals at home than we did a decade ago.”

Portalatin predicts that what will happen is we will blend meals we make at home with ready-to-eat items we buy from outside the home. It’s easy to see how something like grocery-store bought meal kits fits nicely into this scenario. You’re basically buying all the ingredients to make a meal at home, just without so much of the work.

Already, grocery retailers are setting themselves up for such a blended future. Kroger purchased meal kit company Home Chef, and Albertsons owns Plated, while Walmart and Amazon (via Whole Foods) offer their own branded meal kits. This isn’t to say that meal kits will dominate every dinner, but they offer a flexible and convenient option for consumers looking to eat a complete meal at home without having to do a ton of work.

You can even see this on the hardware side as appliances like the June oven, or Tovala or the forthcoming Suvie or Brava ovens look to take over most of the work in making a meal. Right now those devices are expensive, but they will get cheaper, which will cause their own evolutionary pushes in the kitchen.

So in the end, is the kitchen dead, dying, atrophying, or is it just fine, thank you very much? The answer none and all of the above. The kitchen as older generations have known it is dying, but that’s not just because of delivery, it’s also because we have a wave of newer, safer, and more robust cooking tools like Instant Pots and Tovalas that are changing how we cook.

Will it die off completely? Unlikely. Where would people stand during a cocktail party? I kid, but more seriously, until you can teleport 3D printed foods directly into your home, there will always be hungry people in houses looking for reach-in-the-pantry-or-microwave levels of instant gratification. Not to mention people who just plain like to cook.

But the role of the kitchen is something we consider every day here at The Spoon. In fact we are planning the full rundown for our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit: North America in October. You should get your tickets to see what experts from across the food tech industry will have to say on the subject.

How An Obscure Academic Project May Have Just Started A Kitchen Robot Revolution

Imagine it’s 2031 and you’ve sat down for dinner with your family.

It’s middle of the week so tonight’s meal is nothing too ambitious, mac and cheese or fajitas. As is the usual routine, you catch up with the family and share a few laughs until the meal is finally served, at which point everyone loads their plates and starts chowing down on what turns out to be a tasty dinner (the third one this week!).  Soon your youngest – the finicky one – asks for seconds.

Congrats parent, another successful meal, but don’t spend too much time patting yourself on the back because here’s the thing: Neither you nor your significant other spent any time preparing tonight’s dinner.  Instead, tonight’s dinner – and every dinner this week – was prepared in its entirety by a robot, the very same robot who is now in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner and preparing dessert.

Futuristic? Yes. A science fiction movie cliche? Definitely. But the above scenario may also be a very realistic possibility in large part due to an obscure research project involving 32 GoPro adorned home cooks making dinner.

Creating A Technology Big Bang

With any technology that changes the world, there’s almost always a research breakthrough or two that helps unleash innovation. In today’s world of AI and robotics, most experts would agree that one of these technological “big bangs” was a 2012 ImageNet Challenge research team led by the University of Toronto’s Geoff Hinton.

ImageNet is a crowdsourced database of millions of annotated images. The accompanying ImageNet Challenge is an annual contest where teams of researchers in the area of machine vision come together to pit their machine vision algorithms on the ImageNet dataset and against one another to try and achieve the highest degree of accuracy.

Hinton’s 2012 team had what is widely believed to be a breakthrough in AI research by utilizing deep learning techniques to achieve much greater accuracy than before (85%).  Since this breakthrough effort six years ago, there’s been leaps forward each year – today’s ImageNet Challenge teams routinely achieve 95% accuracy, better than most humans –   helping to drive significant progress in all corners of the AI world from autonomous driving to augmented reality to industrial and consumer robotics.

All of which brings us back to the kitchen.

And Now Into the Kitchen (The Epic Kitchen)

Now, a group of research academics is trying to create what is the equivalent of an ImageNet for the kitchen. Called EPIC-KITCHENS, the project is an ambitious effort to capture people performing natural tasks in their home kitchens like cooking, cleaning and doing laundry and then release the resulting millions of annotated images into the wild. The ultimate goal behind EPIC-KITCHENS is to create an open dataset about kitchen-centric objects, behavior, and interactions upon which researchers across the world can then focus their deep-learning algorithms on in the hope of advancing artificial intelligence in the kitchen.

Why the kitchen? According to the study’s lead, Dr. Dima Damen, the kitchen is one of the most complex environments in everyday life for artificial intelligence to master because it involves so many tasks and actions.

EPIC-KITCHENS 2018 TRAILER

“The most challenging type of object interactions tend to be in our kitchen,” said Damen in a phone interview I conducted last month. “We’re doing lots of tasks, on short notice, we’re multitasking. We might be adding something to our meal and moving something around. That makes the kitchen environment the most challenging environment for our types of perception.”

Damen, who is with the University of Bristol in the UK, partnered with researchers at the University of Toronto and Italy’s University of Catania to bring the project to life. The project took about a year to complete and involved a panel of 32 home cooks across ten nationalities in four cities in Europe (United Kingdom) and North America (Canada and US). To capture their activity, each participant mounted a GoPro on their head and went through 1-5 hours of preparing meals, cleaning and whatever else came naturally.

“We gave them a camera, sent them home, and said just record whatever you are doing in your kitchen for 3-5 days,” said Damen.

From there, the participants watched the video and narrated their videos so researchers had an audio track from which to manually annotate the atomized images – 11.5 million in all- captured in the 55 hours of video.

The result is a massive database its creators hope will help researchers in training their AI systems to better understand the kitchen. Like ImageNet, the creators also hope to foster competition with challenges and will track the progress with online leaderboards.

The data itself is something many will find somewhat mundane:

Distribution of actions in kitchen. Source: Epic Kitchens

The above distribution of annotated actions and objects are what you would probably expect: a really long list of things – like vegetables, kitchenware, spices – found in the kitchen. Same for actions. The above distribution breaks down pretty much all the verbs we perform in the kitchen such as put, take, twist and so on.

And that’s the point, at least if you’re a researcher hoping to train an artificial intelligence system. Just as this type of granular data helped ImageNet Challenge teams achieve a 95% accuracy rate with their software, the EPIC KITCHENS team hopes to reach a similar level of accuracy. By helping these systems understand what everyday objects are and how people manipulate them in a series of actions every day to do the basic functions of like in our kitchen like cooking and cleaning, the EPIC-KITCHENS data and what evolves out of it can provide a foundation upon which technologists can eventually create robots that act like humans and perform human-like functions in the kitchen.

The result could be an explosion in innovation in spaces like augmented reality, personalized food identification apps and, yes, cooking robotics. And while a fully-functional Rosie the home cooking robot could be the ultimate end-result of this research a decade from now, chances are we’ll see much more evolutionary improvements between now and then in the form of smarter appliances, more capable virtual assistants and more immersive guided cooking experiences.

And oh yeah: if you’re the type who wants to keep the robots out of the kitchen altogether, don’t worry. One of the biggest challenges with machine understanding of food is that the three-dimensional human comprehension of taste, smell and texture is extremely hard to replicate with machines. Add in the difficulty of AI to understand context and it makes me think that while we may eventually get to cooking robots, they may only be average cooks at best.

The real artists, the chefs – whether home based are on TV – are probably safe from the robot invasion.

Probably.

Study: Smartphone Shoppers Want Smart Shopping Assistance

A new survey from the Ericsson Consumer & IndustryLab shows that smartphone shoppers are interested in a smart assistant to help with purchase selections, automatic re-stocking of certain items and to receive deliveries when they are not at home.

The Beyond smartphone shopping – the rise of smart assistants report, released this month, used an online survey of 5,048 “advanced internet users in Johannesburg, London, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, San Francisco, São Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo.”

Some key findings from the survey include:

  • 67 percent of smartphone shoppers regularly pay with their phones in-store
  • 36 percent of smartphone shoppers believe that “they should pay lower prices in stores than online if they take the trouble to go there”
  • 43 percent of smartphone shoppers want shopping assistants to help narrow down purchasing choices
  • 47 percent of smartphone shoppers want a service that automatically restocks every day items
  • 44 percent of smartphone shoppers want a digital assistant to receive deliveries when they aren’t at home
  • 69 percent of augmented and virtual reality users thing that smartphones will deliver all of the benefits of brick and mortar stores in three years

The first thing that jumped out when looking at these findings was just how much of this Amazon is already working on. In addition to driving down prices, Amazon’s Dash system inches customers towards automatic re-stocking of staple items, Amazon Key is a new service to accept deliveries in your home or car when you aren’t there (and Amazon might even be working on a robot assistant), and the company is even experimenting with AR.

The study also points to the important role AI will play in our shopping. As we are inundated with tons of choices for everyday items, an intelligent assistant who is able to understand our history, preferences and probably even genetics (some day) will be able to whittle down that list to find the right product for us. As the study notes, smartphone shoppers are also looking to smart speakers from Amazon and Google to provide smart shopping assistance and handle routine house shopping needs.

While this survey should be considered a data point and part of an overall glimpse into the current and future state of shopping, anyone in grocery retail should take note and smarten up.

Survey: Robots and VR to be Mainstream in Restaurants by 2025

Human-less restaurants may be stumbling a bit in their infancy, but a recent survey from Oracle predicts that robots and virtual reality will become mainstream in the restaurant biz by 2025.

The findings of the Oracle survey were presented at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas earlier this month. Here are some of the highlights (read the full story at Kiosk Marketplace):

Facial Recognition/3D Imaging
Nearly half of the consumer respondents said the use of facial recognition and 3D imaging would make their restaurant experience better. They like the idea of being identified without giving their name or showing a loyalty card.

On the restaurant operator side, 46 percent of respondents said facial recognition and 3D imaging would be mainstream by 2025. The applications for this tech would be both in the front and back of the house including security and food safety.

Virtual Reality
Restaurant operators see a benefit to using VR in their establishments, predicting it will become mainstream by 2025. They see its use in staff training and designing restaurant flow, as well as guest entertainment (enjoy that virtual filet mignon!).

Artificial Intelligence
It would be interesting to see how the researchers framed this question, since AI can be widely misinterpreted. But according to the survey, a little more than a third of consumers would like a more Netflix-y meal, with suggestions based on previous dining.

Roughly a third would also like to be automatically charged, eliminating the wait to pay. Combine this wish with the acceptance of facial recognition and your Minority Report-style experience isn’t that far off.

Robots
The restaurantbots are coming! “Many restaurant operators” anticipate robots becoming mainstream by 2025, performing tasks such as cleaning, food service and preparation and hosting.

The year 2025 is not that far off and readers of The Spoon are already preparing themselves today for the mainstream restaurant tech of tomorrow.

Survey: People Don’t Grocery Shop Online (for now)

Do you buy your groceries online, or do you prefer roaming the aisles at your local supermarket in real life? According to a recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos, most people still shun online grocery shopping and head for the store.

From the Reuters article on the survey results:

Seventy-five percent of online shoppers said they rarely or never buy groceries online, according to the survey of nearly 8,600 adults from Aug. 12 to Sept. 1. Even among frequent online shoppers who make internet purchases at least weekly, almost 60 percent said they never buy groceries online or do so just a few times a year, according to the poll.

This actually makes sense given how so much of how we pick our food depends on the quality of the product — sorting through bunches of bananas to find the right bunch, getting the best cut of meat, etc.. Additionally, online groceries run into the same lack of spontaneity problem that prepared meal kits do. You don’t always know what you want until you roam the aisles, see all the options at once, and pick what you are in the mood for then.

The Reuters article uses this data as a backdrop to question Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. But we think this actually reaffirms why Amazon paid $13.7 billion for the high-end grocer.

Amazon has been trying to get into the grocery business forever. Buying online works for staples that you eat all the time, such as restocking your favorite yogurt and bread each week, and other pantry items. But when it comes to more perishable and fresh items, the company realized it needed an option for people to pick up in person.

Buying Whole Foods gave the company an instant country-wide, supply chain and delivery network built specifically for food that was already in the neighborhood. The bonus of buying a higher-end chain like Whole Foods is that people are more inclined to believe in the higher quality of its product.

Through a combination of what it knows about you already, connected devices like Alexa, machine learning and unparalleled expertise in delivering items to your home quickly, Amazon will get people to (slowly) migrate people to buying more groceries online.

Even Reuters points out that while people may not be buying their groceries online right now, that doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Nielsen predicts online groceries will grow to a $100 billion business by 2025. A survey in that year will most likely have drastically different numbers.

The Smart Home Insiders: Alexa Ruled 2016; AI, Security And Voice Will Define 2017

In December of 2016, NextMarket Insights and The Spoon surveyed a group of smart home industry insiders to ask their opinion about what they thought about the year that was and what they expected in the coming year for the connected home.

Here’s what we found:

Alexa and voice interfaces were the clear winner in 2016.  7 out of 10 respondents said that virtual assistants and voice control were the story of 2016.

While many expect voice and virtual assistants to be important this year, things are not as clear cut. Many believe the defining story of 2017 in smart home will be the growing need for more robust solutions for privacy and security, likely a direct result of the wake up call that was Mirai botnet attack last fall.  Others see machine learning and artificial intelligence as a candidate for the defining trend of 2017, while a smaller number see mesh Wi-Fi and robotics as important but having a lesser impact.

Many saw 2016 as a disappointing year overall in the smart home, with nearly half (49%) feeling the smart home market didn’t meet expectations last year.  Their outlook for 2017 is a more optimistic – if tempered – one. About 39% see the smart home as having a ”great” year this year, while 54% see the market as performing “Ok”, where it will continue to serve mainly early adopters.

When asked what they saw as the biggest hurdle to the adoption of the smart home, the number one choice by our panel of experts was consumer confusion over technologies and products to choose. Other hurdles to broader adoption included lack of a compelling need for consumers to buy smart home products and too much fragmentation in the smart home market.

These concerns about smart home fed our respondents’ wishes for the future of the smart home when we asked them the one overarching goal they’d like to achieve in the smart home in 2017. Tied for the top response was greater consumer understanding about the value of smart home and reduced fragmentation.

Overall, this survey of smart home experts shows an industry at an inflection point, one that has learned some hard lessons about product value and approachability, the need to industry cohesion and standardization and is starting to coalesce around innovative and disruptive new approaches taken by industry leaders such as Amazon and Google.

You can view the report below: