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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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FRO’s All-Electric Dessert Truck Takes Food Mobility to Another Level

If there was such a thing as a Spoon Bingo card, FRO would be a winner, ticking off a number of trends we follow including sustainability, plant-based foods, and the rapidly emerging world of restaurant mobility.

Los Angeles-based startup FRO runs an electric, solar-powered food truck that serves up vegan “ice cream.” FRO Founder and CEO Deloss Pickett was formerly with Tesla, where he worked on that company’s Powerwall battery storage product. Pickett took that electrical know-how to build out the first FRO electric truck, which houses a bank of batteries to power the company’s frozen dessert offering. The truck even has solar panels to provide extra juice for the machines to keep the batteries humming.

Because all the power is supplied by these batteries, the FRO truck doesn’t need an external gas generator or to plug into an outlet when it stops to serve customers. It’s all self-contained and can last ten hours on a full charge (with a couple extra hours provided by the solar panels on a sunny day). This zero emissions aspect is a nice bit of sustainability, but it also increases the FRO truck’s mobility.

Food trucks have been around for a long time, but their very nature is undergoing a pretty rapid evolution in the back half of 2019. In September, Zume launched its first mobile kitchen, which allows restaurants to extend their delivery footprint by placing full ghost kitchens-on-wheels directly in neighborhoods, closer to customers. Then earlier this month, Ono Food launched its robot-smoothie-maker in a van, also in Los Angeles, which can travel to different parts of the city in the same day to follow the crowds (and their money).

Think of FRO as the smaller, more lightweight next step in that evolution. Sitting somewhere between a food truck and a vending machine, Pickett told me by phone this week that the vehicle is actually classified as a cart, so it can go on city sidewalks. But it’s demure stature and self-contained power supply makes it easy to set up shop quickly on college campuses, at farmers markets or in outdoor festivals.

Once set up, FRO sells a patent-pending vegan frozen soft serve. Pickett wouldn’t tell me the exact process, but it starts with Evolution brand pressed juice to which they add some vegan stabilizers to produce flavors like strawberry lemonade and citrus chocolate. We don’t know if FRO is as good as Perfect Day’s flora-based ice cream, but FRO is building on the idea that you don’t need dairy to make a cold dessert that people will want.

One trend the FRO truck is not following is full automation. A human is still on board to pour out 7 – 8 oz. desserts for $6.00 a piece. Pickett said that they had looked at creating more of a self-serve situation, but that wound up slowing the whole process down. While having a human on board does speed things up, it does deprive FRO of deeper, software-driven data insights that it could use to become more efficient in its inventory management, and location placement.

FRO is bootstrapped right now and Pickett said he’s focused on generating revenue and learning from real world conditions before he begins the process of raising money and scaling up. Though FROs are owner operated right now, it seems like once its technology has been built up and iterated, there’s no reason FRO couldn’t license out its platform to other brands in other parts of the country. That would certainly check one more box on The Spoon Bingo card.

Ovation Raises Nearly $1M in Seed Funding for its Restaurant Rating Platform

Ovation, a software platform that gathers customer feedback for restaurants and retailers, announced today it has raised $965,000 in seed funding led by Monta Vista Capital and includes 500 Startups.

Ovation recently graduated from the 500 Startups accelerator in San Francisco as part of Batch 24, and uses a combination of QR codes, texting, kiosks, or other integrations to gather customer feedback and measure their experiences through survey tools. There is no app to install, account to create or code needed from paper receipts. Customers who were happy with their experience are invited to share why and encouraged to come back, while dissatisfied customers can immediately engage in an SMS chat with management to determine why.

Based in Provo, Utah, Ovation charges a monthly subscription for its service, and says it has more than 300 customers.

Restaurants face all kinds of new and different pressures from today’s diners. First, more diners are choosing to get their restaurant meal delivered to their home, with QSR magazine reporting that delivery sales are projected to grow at more than three times the rate of on-premises revenue through 2023. So restaurants need to make sure that any diners that come in have a good experience. Ensuring a good customer experience is even more important in a world where a bad review can go viral online, severely damaging a restaurant’s reputation.

Ovation is among a crop of startups looking to help restaurants protect their reputations through instant customer engagement. Presto, which raised $30 million earlier this year, uses a combination of on-table tablets and wearables to provide customers with direct communication with their servers. Other restaurant software systems like Toast also provide in-house feedback tools for restaurants.

Google Maps Adds Popular Dish Feature to Surface Favorite Meals at Restaurants

Google Maps has always helped navigate you to a nearby restaurant, but with a new feature launched today, Maps will help you navigate that restaurant’s menu by surfacing its most popular dishes.

The popular dishes feature uses machine learning to parse through photos and reviews of dishes posted by Google Maps users and identify a restaurant’s most popular meals. The new feature is available now on Android with an iOS version to follow later. From a Google blog post announcing the service:

Simply pull up a restaurant on Google Maps to find its popular dishes in the overview tab. Feeling extra peckish? Dive into the menu tab to scroll through all the most-talked about meals, and tap on a popular dish to explore reviews and photos. In a country where you can’t read the language? Maps will also translate the reviews for you too.

Google has certainly been interested in feeding you lately. Last week, the company announced a feature that allows Google Maps, Search and Assistant users to order food for delivery directly through those apps. Earlier this month, the company revealed a new Google Lens feature that let users point their phone cameras at a menu to bring up pictures of popular meals. And there’s also, Google Duplex the human-sounding AI assistant that can make restaurant reservations for you.

It’s not hard to connect the dots to see where all this is going. Knowing what restaurants are nearby, what type of cuisine they serve and what their most popular dishes are creates the foundation for an even more powerful AI assistant. Why should Duplex stop at making restaurant reservations when it could also order your food for home delivery? While this is useful on your phone, having this kind of functionality on a Google Smart Hub smart screen would be equally powerful for families ordering dinner. Google can recommend the restaurant, suggest dishes and then automatically have it delivered to your door.

Getting your purchase history and surrounding data (when you ordered, etc.) would provide Google even more data to power its algorithms, and the company is pretty upfront about wanting that data. From the Popular Dishes blog post today:

At the end of the day, this feature is made possible because of contributions from people around the world who want to help others using Google Maps. So if you want to pay it forward to the next dinner, simply take a photo of your meal (before you’ve scarfed it down!) and add a dish name so others can know what’s good on the menu.

Of course, in a world where we freely hand over so much information about ourselves, at some point you have to ask: who, exactly, is being served?

Instawork Raises $18M to Connect Hospitality Shifts with Workers

One of the reasons restaurant owners give for moving towards robots is that they have a hard time finding human workers. We’re still a ways off from a full robot restaurant revolution, so in the meantime restaurants, hotels and other hospitality businesses can find qualified workers to pick up shifts through platforms like Instawork, which announced today that it has raised $18 million in new funding.

The round was led by Spark Capital, GV, and Burst Capital, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, Y Combinator, Tuesday Capital, and SV Angel (hat tip to VentureBeat). This brings Instaworks total amount of funding to $28 million.

Through Instawork, qualified workers like servers and chefs can post their services and look for shifts, sometimes at the last minute. Instawork vets all candidates, checking references and ensuring they are qualified to do the work. Companies post shift openings, and after a worker selects and completes a shift, they can be rated, and even requested for future shifts. Instawork charges companies a per-shift booking fee, and takes care of the insurance, billing and payments.

Right now, Instawork is available in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego. However, as part of the funding announcement today, the company said that it is expanding to Phoenix, Scottsdale and Mesa, Arizona.

If you consider that there are more than a million restaurants and 15.3 million restaurant workers in the U.S., it’s no wonder that there’s a mini-industry sprouting up to connect the two. In addition to Instawork, there are startups like Jobletics, which does much the same thing, and Shyft, which lets employees more easily swap shifts amongst themselves.

Who knows? Maybe services like Instawork and others will work so well restaurants will have an easier time finding workers, though that probably won’t stop the robots.

Bear Robotics Launches Second-Gen Restaurant Robot, Adds Swappable Tray System

Bear Robotics has officially launched the second-generation version of its Penny restaurant robot. The autonomous robot, which shuttles food and dishes between the front and back of house, now features a versatile tray system for carrying more and different types of items.

With its new design, Penny has lost its bowling pin shape and single carrying surface. Instead, Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

On the inside, Bear updated the smarts of Penny, giving the robot enhanced obstacle-avoidance technology, and while the company didn’t go into specifics, a tablet can now be attached to Penny for expanded customer interaction capabilities.

Penny 2.0 is being shown at the National Restaurant Association trade show this weekend and is available now. While Bear doesn’t disclose actual pricing, Penny is offered on a monthly subscription, which includes the robot, setup and mapping of a restaurant and technical support.

Penny is among a wave of robots coming to restaurants in the near future: Flippy makes burgers and fries up chicken tenders, Dishcraft is still stealthily working on automating tasks in the kitchen, and there are entire establishments like Creator and Spyce built around robotic cooking systems.

Any discussion of automation always involves the loss of human jobs. John Ha, CEO of Bear Robotics, actually owned a restaurant and built Penny after noticing how hard servers work, often for little pay. By automating the expediting of food and bussing, Bear aims to free up humans to provide higher levels of customer service (ideally earning those humans higher tips).

Ha and Linda Pouliot, CEO of Dishcraft recently spoke at our recent Articulate Food Robotics conference about the challenges restaurants face, and how robotics can help. You can watch their session in full right here.

Articulate 2019: Robots in Restaurants

With McDonald’s Dynamic Yield Deal, is the Era of Personalized Menus Upon Us?

Let’s face it, menus are pretty boring. Go into almost any restaurant — fast food, fast casual or that fancy place you take mom once a year — and what you get is a set of food choices that don’t differ from one customer to the next.

And ok, we’ve seen incremental improvements over the past few years through interface technologies such electronic order kiosks and voice ordering, but the reality is a menu today is pretty much the same for us as it was for our parents and grandparents: a one-sized-fits-all list of food choices.

But here’s the good news: judging by recent moves by big restaurants like McDonald’s, that may soon change. Just this week the fast food goliath announced they were buying menu personalization startup Dynamic Yield for $300 million to make their drive thru and in-store menus more technologically dynamic. Chris has the story here.

Here’s an excerpt from the company press release describing what they plan to do with the new technology:

McDonald’s will utilize this decision technology to provide an even more personalized customer experience by varying outdoor digital Drive Thru menu displays to show food based on time of day, weather, current restaurant traffic and trending menu items. The decision technology can also instantly suggest and display additional items to a customer’s order based on their current selections.

Sounds great, right? After all, who wouldn’t want contextualized menu choices based on external environmental factors? Plus, trending items will mean more optimized options than the usual.

But here’s the thing: if that’s the extent of the personalization that a $300 million deal buys you, I’ll be pretty disappointed.

There’s Personalized and Then There’s Personalized

No matter what industry you follow, at this point you probably know personalization is hot. Whether it’s entertainment, nutrition, food or what-have-you, there’s probably more than a dozen startups who want to deliver something highly tailored to you, the end user.

The problem with most of these offerings today is that in most cases, personalized doesn’t really mean personalized, but instead it just means something slightly different based on a set of localized and current environmental factors.

What if instead we were to get truly personalized results tailored specifically for us? What if instead of a menu based on whether it’s hot or cold we got a menu based on what type of food we – you, me, us – like and eat on hot days or cold days?

In short, what if we were to see truly personalized food choices based on specific food profile?

This level of personalization is something we’ve been thinking about at The Spoon for a while. We talked about this exact topic at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2017. Alpha Labs’ Mike Lee had this to say about the idea:

“I’ve always believed there needs to be this interoperable data standard that encapsulates what your food preferences are,” said Lee. “Something that can be used from this app to this app to this grocery store. Much in the same way you have single sign-on with Facebook, I can log in somewhere, and it can show me content that’s sculpted to what I have.”

Think about it: instead of getting just an updated list of food based on what’s trending that day or if it’s hot or cold outside, you would get a menu that was created specifically based on your taste profile, biomarkers, allergies and more. This menu would be an entirely new thing to the world, something made for you and your unique characteristics.

Sounds intriguing.  It also sounds like the future. But is it a future that is near or far? A lot of it depends on how companies like McDonald’s, with Dynamic Yield in the fold, move in that direction.

There are definitely barriers. In a world rampant with data breaches and consumers increasingly worried about their privacy, the idea of more places having information about you and your specific preferences, biomarkers and more can be petrifying (not to mention perilous from both a political and business standpoint).

Still, I think it’s worth pursuing and I’m not the only one. Jim Collins, the CEO of Kitchen United, said menu personalization is one of the biggest opportunities going forward in restaurant. To him, today’s menus are like search engines of the early 2000s: kinda dumb.

“If you’re gluten-free, why do you see menu where 80 percent of the items have gluten?” he asked last fall on our panel about restaurant tech. “Why don’t you see one that only shows the 20 percent that’s not? That’s what I’m looking for.”

I agree and I’m pretty sure McDonald’s (and others) does too: true menu personalization is the holy grail. So while in the near term this deal likely means trending items and McFlurry recommendations when it’s hot out, in the long term I think we’ll see menus created instantly – based on your own McDonald’s or perhaps a more universal profile – for you.

2ndKitchen Raises $1.35M to Provide Businesses Like Bars with Virtual Kitchens

When you go out to (or wind up at) a bar that doesn’t serve food, typically you have two options: go hungry or go somewhere else. This is the lose/lose scenario that 2ndKitchen is trying to fix by pairing businesses that don’t have a kitchen with nearby restaurants who want to outsource theirs.

Today, Chicago-based 2ndKitchen announced that it has raised $1.35 million in funding led by Hyde Park Ventures.

It’s expensive for a bar or brewery to add its own kitchen facilities, so 2ndKitchen creates what could almost be considered a virtual food court. It connects a bar (or other business without a kitchen) with restaurants that are within walking or biking distance to curate a menu of items. Customers can order from this mini-menu via kiosks in the kitchenless establishment or a mobile phone app with the food delivered straight to their table.

This symbiotic relationship between a bar and nearby restaurant isn’t new. One of my favorite bars in California let you order food from the restaurant next door. But what is new is the automation of it all, streamlining the ordering and delivery via your phone or kiosk. 2ndKitchen manages menu, payments, delivery and customer support so the bar doesn’t have to, and creates (theoretically, we haven’t tried it yet) a win/win for the bar and restaurants by giving customers a reason to stay at that bar and the participating restaurant new business.

Right now, 2ndKitchen operates in the midwest and has been working with bars and breweries, but is expanding to help any business without a kitchen (hotels, office buildings, campuses, etc.).

KitchenPodular Makes Ghost Kitchens Modular

The boom in restaurant delivery has created a mini-boom in companies looking to help those restaurants make delivery. Much like the pickaxe salespeople during the gold rush, startups like KitchenPodular are eager to provide tools that restaurants can use to cash in on this wave of dining convenience.

The Las Vegas-based company creates small, modular commercial kitchen spaces that can be installed just about anywhere. KitchenPodular CEO and Founder, Michael Manion, told me their goal is to provide restaurants and other eateries with a versatile, affordable and completely controllable way to scale up delivery operations.

He also wants to draw a distinction between “ghost kitchens” and “cloud kitchens.” Ghost kitchens, according to Manion, are facilities that a restaurant runs completely. Cloud kitchens, he says, are facilities where you turn over some portion of control to that facility. KitchenPodular does ghost kitchens, Kitchen United, to Manion, is a cloud kitchen.

KitchenPodular pods can be purchased (or financed) for $150,000 on average and are anywhere from 206 square ft. to 430 sq. ft., depending on the configuration. Pods contain a walk-in cooler, sinks, ventilation hood as well as eletrical and plumbing, and can be customized with a drive through and/or walk-up window. Restaurants still need to provide their own ovens and stoves.

The idea is that restaurants can keep their existing sit down location as is. There’s no need to re-architect the existing building to accommodate increased order expediting or additional parking for waves of delivery drivers pulling in and out of the restaurant. Instead, they can shift those resources to a kitchen pod, which can be stationed anywhere to expand delivery capacity or extend a restaurant’s delivery range. Additionally, Manion said that if it turns out a restaurant doesn’t like the pod’s initial location, it can just pick up the pod and move it to a new one.

KitchenPodular also offers cheaper “pick-up pods” for around $100,000. These can be freestanding or built on to existing buildings to help facilitate delivery. For instance, a restaurant in a mall could install a pick-up pod in the parking lot. Expeditors would run orders out to the pick-up pod where they would be stored until the driver pulls up to get their food, eliminating the need for them to find parking in a big lot just to grab a meal.

KitchenPodular has been making similar, though more beer-related pods for Anheuser-Busch since 2014. The company is self-funded as of now, though exploring the idea of venture backing as it looks to scale. Manion told me that so far the company has “Sold a handful, but are in production on a lot” of full kitchen pods. Customers are typically big brands, and coffee and juice companies are “huge” for KitchenPodular.

While there are certainly some advantages to these pods, restaurants need to consider other factors to figure out what’s the best solution for their situation. Pods may reduce the need for expensive build outs, but they have to be staffed, and unlike a facility like Kitchen United, there is no shared labor for dishwashing and cleaning. Plus, even though they are small, kitchen pods are still facilities, and each requires management of power, gas, water and more.

Even with those caveats, KitchenPodular seems like it could make sense for companies wanting to take advantage of delivery. The pods are turnkey and provide for those gold rushing restaurants to mine new markets without making a huge commitment.

CheckMate Raises $3M to Streamline Restaurant Ordering

Tiger Global has invested $3 million in CheckMate, a service that helps restaurants unify orders received across multiple platforms, according to TechCrunch. This is a Series A round for CheckMate and is the first outside funding the startup has received.

Off-premise ordering has become a growing part of a restaurant’s business (at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit, restauranteur Richard Blais said delivery was thirty percent of his restaurant’s business). Services like Uber Eats, PostMates and DoorDash can open up a restaurant to new customers, but it can also bring chaos to a restaurant as none of those services talk to each other. That means restaurants need to set up separate tablets for each platform, resulting in a bank of incoming order screens that staff needs to manage and manually enter into their PoS system.

CheckMate works to alleviate that morass by aggregating all those disparate orders from different services and plugging them into a restaurant’s existing management system. This unification reduces complexity and simplifies the order management process.

The rise in restaurant delivery services has spawned a mini-boom of startups looking to clean up the complications those delivery services create. In addition to CheckMate, there’s also Ordermark and Ingest.ai.

For its part, Tiger Global has been investing in pieces that connect all of the dots when it comes to the evolution of restaurants. In July, Tiger Global invested in restaurant POS software maker Toast, and in September, the company led the $300 million investment in Postmates.

Report: Being Cashless Backfires When Payment System Crashes

Customers at the sweetgreen in Hollywood (Sunset and Gower location) reportedly got a nice surprise during lunch time yesterday — a free meal. A social media post yesterday from a customer who was there that said the restaurant’s payment system went down, and since sweetgreen is a cashless establishment, the store wound up giving away lunches to all the people standing in line waiting to order.

We don’t have many details except the one eyewitness (who asked to remain anonymous when we followed up with them) report who said that the Hollywood sweetgreen found itself with a “completely crashed system” during the lunch rush. The restaurant had no way to accept cash and instead of closing, they decided to give away food for free.

If it happened as told, this is probably an isolated incident (we reached out to sweetgreen, see below). But the situation highlights the perils restaurants can experience when going cashless, especially if they don’t have contingency plans in place.

The sweetgreen salad chain went cashless in January of 2017. From that point on, in order to pay for your food you had to either order through the app or use a credit card in-store. As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote last year, going cashless has its pluses and minuses.

The good thing about going cashless is improved safety for workers (nothing to rob), faster service, and improved accuracy. All good things! The downside, however, is that it’s expensive to implement, local governments may make it illegal, and it shuts out the poor and young as customers. All bad things!

Going cashless has also had its ups and downs as a businesses decision, for those who tried it. Shake Shack abandoned its self-service, cashless store in New York. And while Eatsa retreated on its plan to roll out its own automated, cashless restaurants, Wow Bao was so taken with Eatsa’s technology and after an initial test decided to open a second cashless location.

We reached out to sweetgreen asking about the incident and to see what type of back up plans the company has in place if and when outages like these happen. A PR rep for the company wrote us back neither confirming nor denying the outage, simply saying that they were going to pass on the opportunity to answer any of our questions.

Restaurant Management Software Maker Toast Raises $115 Million

Toast, makers of the eponymous restaurant management software, today announced that it has raised a whopping $115 million Series D round of funding. The round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates with participation from Tiger Global Management and existing investors. The new funding brings the total amount raised by Toast to $249 million and values the company at $1.4 billion.

As we wrote last year:

“Toast is a full-service, cloud-based, point-of-sale system created for the restaurant industry. It streamlines every element of running a successful restaurant – front-of-house, back-of-house, online orders, loyalty programs – and syncs them for easy access and quick changes. Toast provides real-time data, across multiple locations, to zero in on what’s working and what’s not, so owners can pivot when needed. In addition to their platform, Toast offers hardware that easily integrates their solution into a variety of terminals or tablets.”

In a press release, Toast said that it will use the new money to make new hires, expand its footprint globally and invest in research and development of new handheld, back of house and guest-facing technologies. Toast currently has 1,000 employees and counts Jamba Juice, B.GOOD and The Pizza Press and customers.

There are plenty of competitors in the restaurant management software space, and it’s not hard to see why Toast went out to bulk up its coffers. Last month, TouchBistro raised a $70 million Series D, bringing its total amount raised to $105.3 million. And back in May, Square launched its own restaurant POS system.

Kitchen United Launches to Help Restaurants Meet Delivery Demand

There is no shortage of people ordering restaurant food for delivery. And there is no shortage of services who will gladly deliver those people restaurant food. There is, evidently, a shortage of kitchen space to make all that restaurant delivery food.

That’s where Kitchen United aims to make a difference. The company bills itself as a “culinary on-demand startup,” and today it opened its first commercial kitchen space targeting restaurants that want to increase, or keep up with, the volume of delivery orders.

Located in Pasadena, CA the 12,000 sq. ft. space can house 15 different clients (or “concepts,” as Kitchen United describes them) and features a delivery-specific infrastructure. Restaurants get access to a kitchen with standard equipment (burners, ovens, fryers, fridges, etc.), as well as Kitchen United employees who will wash dishes, manage inbound orders and assist with expediting food to the correct delivery service.

“When a restaurant operator comes to a KU kitchen, they get a virtual restaurant solution,” Kitchen United CEO, Jim Collins told me.

Because Kitchen United was created to help facilitate delivery orders, the building itself is designed to handle the literal traffic generated by the steady stream of drivers. The building has dedicated parking spots for delivery drivers, there are video screens to direct people to the proper pick-up, and attendants to confirm that the right food is going to the right people.

The Pasadena location is the first of 20 to 30 planned Kitchen United centers to be built across the country next year. To help fund this rapid expansion, Kitchen United also announced today that it has raised and undisclosed Series A round from Cali Group, Avista Investments and other private investors.

Unlike other virtual or “ghost” kitchens, where restaurants can experiment with new cuisines, Kitchen United’s main mission is to help national and local restaurant chains keep up with demand for their existing menus. Restaurants that want to sign on with Kitchen United can either pay straight rent, or, if Kitchen United believes it can hit the right numbers, there is an option for revenue sharing.

The Pasadena location has already signed on its first batch of tenants, including Neal Fraser’s Fritzi Coop, Mama Musubi, Barney’s Gourmet Burgers and Canter’s Deli. In a nice bit of synergy, Kitchen United is using Ordermark, the delivery order ticket management system founded by Alex Canter (of the aforementioned deli).

There are many players in the commercial kitchen co-working/rental space, all of whom seem to be growing. PilotWorks, The Food Corridor and Commonwealth Kitchen are all expanding their commercial kitchen services. Those players, however, seem to be targeting food entrepreneurs, and smaller players looking to build a food business.

Collins told me that Kitchen United will serve those type of clientele as well, but its focus on restaurants is a smart differentiator. For the most part, restaurants already know what they’re doing, and since they are focusing on existing menus, already know how to do it. This should reduce the actual amount of work and assistance that Kitchen United needs to supply.

It’s also a smart play for restaurants who can dedicate resources on both the delivery and in-store aspects of their business to ensure the best experiences for each.