Is it me, or does every restaurant have a subscription program nowadays?
Some, like Panera, have been at it for years, but last year seemed to be when restaurants caught membership fever. Taco Bell kicked off 2022 by announcing its Taco Pass. Soon after, Subway launched its subscription for half-price footlongs to its 10 thousand biggest fans. P.F. Chang’s soon joined the party with its points-driven Platinum program.
And then there are those going the web3 route. Gary Vee’s Flyfish Club had the restaurant world abuzz after raising $14 million via an exclusive NFT membership program. A little later, we scratched our collective heads at Starbucks Odyssey, the Web3 extension of their popular loyalty program. Others, like Chubby Cattle and Wow Bao, also got into the act.
But it’s not just the chains that have subscription fever. Smaller restaurants, like Mamma Ramona’s, also see memberships as a way to drive repeat business and access potential new customers,
Food delivery exec Andrew Simmons purchased the Italian restaurant in Ramona, California, in early 2020 and soon set about completely reinventing the restaurant’s operations through technology. He not only refreshed the joint’s digital stack with a combination of Toast, Ovation, and Incentivio, but he also layered automation into both the front and back of house.
Today the Dinerbot T5 robotic server helps the wait and bus staff haul large orders to tables and bring dirty dishes back to the kitchen, and a Picnic robot pizza topper in the kitchen spits out pies at a pace of up to 130 per hour. In addition, Simmons added a new dough press, a couple of new Turbochef pizza ovens, and new refrigerators to help keep up with his higher pizza production volume.
This automation – alongside the restaurant’s digital makeover – is the enabling lever for the restaurant’s subscription program. The restaurant started preselling subscriptions in late 2022 for $149 per year (or $99 on Black Friday), entitling subscribers to one pizza per week for 52 weeks. Simmons says this faster production speed and the lower per-pie cost – both enabled by automation – allow him to handle the weekly surge in volume.
And there are surges. According to Simmons, on a Friday in January, he served 183 customers in three hours, the restaurant’s busiest night ever. By the close of January – the first month pizza subscription members redeemed their awards – business was up 12% over the previous January. Out of a total of 1,197 pizzas that were redeemable, Simmons said that they dished up 611 pizzas to subscribers, a 51% redemption rate.
Can the growth last? One positive sign pointing to yes is the sustained success of other restaurants that have launched subscription programs. For example, Panera says that its coffee subscription program accounts for 25% of the brand’s transactions, and Pret-a-Manger’s program in the UK is used 1.2 million times per week.
While it may be too soon to say if Mamma Ramona’s will see sustained growth, early indicators are good. According to Simmons, February is seeing a 6% increase in order volume over January.
I’ll be interviewing Andrew later today at our virtual event, the Spoon Food Robotics Outlook 2023. If you want to listen in or ask Andrew a question, you can sign up here.
Umami Meats Partners with TripleBar to Accelerate Cell Line Development for Cultivated Fish
Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable cultivated seafood, starting with the Japanese eel according to a release sent to The Spoon.
Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that it says can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these assays are processed using what she calls microreactors.
“The way to think about this is we take the test tube, and we miniaturize it to this very tiny microreactor that’s smaller than a human hair,” Cho told The Spoon. “And we’re able to put the thing that we want to test into this microreactor, and then the assay reagent that tests the thing that we’re looking for.”
With Umami, that “thing” they’ll be looking for is whether the cell line has the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. That animal, in this case, is the eel, or unagi, a fish hugely popular in Japanese cuisine worldwide. Unfortunately, because of its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. While much of the unagi sourced for human consumption is now produced via aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the highly carnivorous nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).
To read the full story about Triplebar’s microreactor tech, head over to The Spoon.
Spoon Partner Event
It is best to reduce wasted food early in the supply chain as it gains more of a carbon footprint the more it is transported, processed, purchased, and taken to the consumer home. This looks like harvesting everything that is grown, finding new markets to sell produce that does not meet buyer specs, and improving systems of communication that relay forecasted demands back up the supply chain to producers. Solutions may include: Imperfect & Surplus Produce Channels, Buyer Specification Expansion, Gleaning, Partial Order Acceptance, Field Cooling Units, In-Field Sanitation Monitoring, Innovative Grower Contracts, Labor Matching, Smaller Harvest Lots, and more.
Don’t miss out and register today to learn more about the latest innovations to reduce food waste!
Podcast: How the DeSci Movement Will Change The World of Food
Do you know what DeSci is?
Don’t feel bad if you don’t, especially if, like me, food is your primary focus.
A16Z’s publication Future describes DeSci as a movement in which “a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are leveraging blockchain tools, including smart contracts and tokens, in an attempt to improve modern science. Collectively, their work has become known as the decentralized science movement, or DeSci.”
If you haven’t heard of DeSci by now, the reason is that while the trend’s caught the attention of the biotech and research funding worlds, it hasn’t entirely made its way into the future food conversation just yet.
But it’s only a matter of time, so I figure there’s no better time to learn than now. To help us do that, I invited Dr. Jocelynn Pearl, a biotech scientist, entrepreneur, podcaster, and DeSci expert, onto the podcast.
In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Pearl and I discuss the following:
- What is DeSci?
- How DeSci is changing the insular and outdated world of research publishing
- The benefits of using Web3 tools like DAOs, blockchain, and NFTs in science research
- Why DeSci hasn’t yet reached the future food industry just yet and why that may soon change
- What the future of science research may look like with these types of tools
To listen to this podcast, listen here or get it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Vertical Farmer Oishii Doubles Down on Unique Japanese Varietals With the Introduction of the Koyo
Vertical farming startup Oishii has introduced another strawberry cultivar, The Koyo Berry, which will join the brand’s Omakase Berry offering introduced in 2018.
The Koyo Berry is a Japanese varietal grown outside Tokyo during winter. The berries will be grown first in Oishii’s east coast vertical farms, which use advanced robotics and traditional Japanese farming methods to produce the fruit. The Koyo Berry will be available through online grocer FreshDirect in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for $15 MSRP per tray. The product is expected to expand to other markets, including Los Angeles, later this year.
Oishii introduced its first strawberry, the Omakase Berry, in 2018. Oishii founder and CEO Hiroki Koga decided, when building out his vertical farm, to attempt to replicate the elements of a perfect day in Japan (e.g., humidity levels, light) inside a controlled-environment farm in the U.S. This allows the company to grow the Omakase – and now the Koyo – Berry 365 days per year.
Find out by reading the full story here on The Spoon.
This Finnish Company Uses Radio Waves to Monitor and Reduce Dairy Waste
Dairy plants around the world are facing a new set of challenges as they grapple with rising raw milk costs and increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints as plant-based competitors try to draw a contrast with animal milk. A Finnish startup named Collo wants to help on both fronts using what it describes as liquid fingerprint technology.
According to the company, its technology can detect any type of liquid in pipes in real-time, giving companies a way to optimize production and cut product losses. Collo says its technology can keep track of the liquids in the pipes, showing exactly where the leakage is occurring. This enables dairy plants, breweries, and other liquid processors to address the problem at the point of origin.
Collo’s technology is based on an electromagnetic resonator that emits a continuous radio frequency field into the liquid. The signal reacts to interferences caused by different components, chemicals, and phases in the liquid, and the Collo analyzer immediately warns of any disturbances so that the process can be adjusted.
