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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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A Snapshot of the 6 Biggest Fast Food Companies’ Sustainability Pledges

Environmental issues are no longer an invisible threat. With temperatures warming, oceans are heating up and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and forest fires, as we’re currently seeing in Australia, are happening more frequently.

There’s only so much individuals can do to lessen our impact on the warming planet, including flying and driving less and cutting back on meat. It’s on governments and businesses, especially corporations, to stave off catastrophe.

As we start off a new decade, let’s take a look at the sustainability pledges of the top fast food companies by revenues. As emissions that result from meat and dairy production are on track to contribute 70 percent of the total allowable greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the BBC reports, fast food chains’ decisions have a lot of impact on the planet, although most pledges have centered around packaging. As some of the largest brands on the planet, these moves will not only cut back on climate change causing emissions and pollution, but provide an example to other businesses.

1. McDonald’s

The world’s biggest restaurant company in 2018 was the first fast food company to commit to sustainability. McDonald’s pledged that by 2025, “100 percent of McDonald’s guest packaging will come from renewable, recycled, or certified sources,” and also “to recycle guest packaging in 100 percent of McDonald’s restaurants.” For this year, it also set a goal that “100 percent of fiber-based packaging will come from recycled or certified sources where no deforestation occurs.” The company has also invested in a wind farm and a solar farm that it said will produce “more than 2,500 McDonald’s restaurants-worth of electricity.” As far as plant-based options, the Golden Arches is expanding its Beyond Meat test in Canada.

2. Starbucks

According to the coffee giant, “an estimated 600 billion paper and plastic cups are distributed globally,” and Starbucks accounts for an estimated 1 percent of that total. It has set a goal to “double the recycled content, recyclability and compostability, and reusability of our cups and packaging by 2022.” It plans to phase out straws this year. (A small competitor of Starbucks, Blue Bottle, plans to eliminate disposable cups entirely.) Starbucks, which said it has invested in renewable energy, has also set a goal to design, build and operate 10,000 “Greener Stores” globally by 2025. Starbucks offers several plant-based milks, and is expanding its lineup of non-dairy drinks.

3. Subway

The sandwich company hasn’t made any specific pledges, and pins a lot of the responsibility of energy conservation on its franchise operators. Subway offers a meatless Beyond Meat meatball sub. The company says its paper products, including towels, tissues and napkins, are made from 100 percent recycled material. As for the rest of its materials, including cups, wraps, bowls and lids, Subway makes no further commitments to make them more sustainable.

4. Chick-fil-a

The popular chicken restaurant that closes on Sundays also hasn’t issued any major sustainability pledges. The company said last year it is “thoughtfully searching for sustainable design solutions that are recyclable, compostable or contain recycled content — starting with new bowls” made of recyclable PET plastic. Chick-fil-a has committed to reducing construction waste for its new locations. The chain offers no plant-based options.

5. Taco Bell

The Mexican-inspired food chain is the latest to issue a big sustainability pledge. It has committed to “making all consumer-facing packaging recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025 worldwide,” as well as adding recycling and/or composting bins to all restaurants, “where infrastructure permits.” Last year, it committed to more sustainable beef. Taco Bell has long featured vegetarian and vegan options, and recently made them more prominent on its menu.

6. Burger King

The other burger chain also hasn’t set any firm sustainability commitments for the decade. Rather, it said it will “continuously review our policies on animal welfare, sourcing and environmental impact to ensure that we remain good corporate citizens in the communities we serve.” The company, responding to a Change.org petition, said it will stop giving out plastic toys, but only in the U.K. At least you can get the Impossible Whopper at every U.S. store.

Of course, the companies who did make pledges are not beholden to them. It’s up to investors and consumers to hold each company responsible to do their part to reducing their contributions to climate change.

If any company updates their pledges, we will revisit and update this article.

New Food Containers Promise to Keep French Fries Warm and Crispy

One easy way to ruin a relaxed takeout dinner at home are soggy french fries that lack a satisfying crunch when you eat them.

Novolex, a 16-year-old maker of packaging for the food, medical and building industries, hopes to prevent this food catastrophe with its new EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers, which it said in a press release keeps fried foods warm and crunchy. The containers do that with “micro-flute corrugation for superior rigidity and crush strength to maintain food integrity during transport and delivery.” Micro-flutes are the wavy paper in packaging that commonly protect all those items you order online.

“These containers even keep french fries crispy, warm and tasty,” said Adrianne Tipton, senior vice president of innovation at Novolex, in the release. “That’s a real innovation in food delivery.”

The company said the containers are designed for restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets, caterers and delivery services, and are made with a minimum of 33 percent post-consumer recycled content.

A request for more information from Novolex was not returned by press time, so we don’t know when these containers will be available and how much they cost compared to other containers.

Better food containers are much needed now, as delivery apps are becoming more popular, even spurring the creation of ghost restaurants, which exist solely to serve delivery customers. Bloomberg cited data by market-data firm App Annie that food delivery app downloads have increased 380 percent compared to three years ago. DoorDash leads the pack, with Grubhub and Uber Eats not too far behind.

Another company, aptly named Soggy Food Sucks, also offers a solution to the problem with a condensation absorbing patch that can stick to the food containers.

Hopefully, with these innovations in place, you’ll only have a bad feeling about fries when you eat too many of them.

I Tried the JUST Egg Frittata at Le Pain Quotidien. It’s Another Win for Plant-Based Foods.

Quick service and fast food restaurants, from Burger King to Dunkin’, are clamoring to add plant-based options to their menus. You can now count Le Pain Quotidien among them, which teamed up with JUST for a chicken egg-free frittata that is now available at U.S. locations as of Wednesday.

The “Plant-Based ‘Egg’ Frittata” is made of the mung-bean derived egg substitute, roasted butternut squash, broccoli, caramelized onions and almond milk. Le Pain Quotidien feels so strongly about the plant-based version that it will replace its previous frittata.

I had the chance to try the JUST Egg frittata a week before it launched, and it’s clear why Le Pain put it on the menu: it’s delicious, and if I wasn’t told it was egg free, I wouldn’t have known. The way my fork slid into it felt natural, and nothing about the look and texture of the frittata would tell you that it was made with an egg substitute. It’s amazing how mundane, and I mean that in a good way, plant-based foods have become.

Many of other people who got a preview, which included nutritionists and influencers, came away with the same impression.

JUST says in a press release that the liquid version of its egg “has nearly as much protein as conventional chicken eggs, is free of cholesterol, saturated fat and artificial flavoring and its ingredients require considerably less water and emit fewer carbon emissions than chicken eggs.”

The company, which is also working on cultivated meat, has seen other restaurant partnerships hatch: restaurant chain Silver Diner and burger chain Bareburger (where you can also order an Impossible or Beyond Burger) will include JUST Egg on their menus. The company also announced that the liquid egg replacement will be available at Walmart and Kroger stores.

It’s been an impressive run for a product that only launched last year.

Food Tech News: New Olo Tablet Software, Baskin Robbins Non-Dairy Dessert and FluroSat Funding

Sure, our news round up is cool, but it’s not going to give you any relief if you’re in the middle of one of the global heatwaves. But it will make you smarter about food tech, so… there’s that.

Chill as best you can. And while you’re at it, catch up on a few more pieces of food tech news from the week:

Olo Releases New All-in-One Restaurant Tablet Software
Restaurant software company Olo announced the release of its new Expo tablet software, designed to help restaurants manage the entire digital ordering stream. The new tablet manages the entire flow of the order from direct and indirect channels, interfaces with third-party delivery services, and alerts restaurants to large orders. (press release)

Baskin-Robbins Scooping Up Non-Dairy Desserts
Not wanting to miss out on the plant-based craze sweeping the nation, Basin-Robbins will introduce two non-dairy dessert flavors next week. Non-Dairy Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Non-Dairy Chocolate Extreme are made from a base of coconut oil and almond butter. Sounds pretty sweet and we can’t wait to try it. (QSR Magazine)

FluroSat Raises $3.2M Seed Round
Microsoft’s M12 venture fund co-led the round for the Australian startup, which uses hyperspectral imaging to help predict disease in cotton and grain crops. Hyperspectral imaging uses light reflection, scanning and analysis to asses different qualities of foods. There are lots of startups using the technology in various applications throughout the food chain. (AgFunder News)

The Food Tech Show: Personalized Menus

Over the past decade, we’ve seen how big data, mobile and social media has created a wave of personalized services for consumers in everything from music and entertainment to news to financial services.

So why is it that the restaurant menu still offers a one-sized fits all offering for guests?

To discuss why the restaurant menu seems stuck in time, I am joined on this episode of The Food Tech Show by Scott Sanchez, CEO of The Fit. We talk about where the menu will go in the future, whether we’ll eventually ever see personalized food profiles and how Scott’s own personal struggles with weight led him to eventually create The Fit.

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, download direct to your device or just click play below.

Will Punchh’s New ML-Based Customer Lifetime Value Predictor Create More Data Darwinism?

Punchh, a software startup that creates digital marketing tools for physical retailers like restaurants, announced the release of its new machine learning-based “Predictive Customer Lifetime Value” (PCLV) application this week. But will this new technology just be another avenue for data darwinism?

CLV is a metric companies use to predict how much money they will reasonably get from any one customer. The concept certainly makes you wonder whether restaurants are feeding you meat, or if you’re the meat feeding the restaurant. Regardless, it’s something restaurants are using more. Fellow restaurant app-maker, Toast, did an explainer post on CLV awhile back.

From the Punchh press release:

From the moment a customer makes their first purchase, Punchh instantly predicts their CLV, then constantly refines that prediction as the relationship between the brand and customer deepens. Based on that PCLV, retail marketers can create target segments with this data to, for example, encourage high CLV segments to enroll in rewards programs while offering low CLV segments incentives through coupons.

While this PCLV may be useful to a restaurant for marketing purposes, it also feels like more data darwinism, like my purchases will determine a company’s level of interest in me. If a restaurant predicts that I’m a low-ticket customer for them from my very first purchase, will they just ignore me? Or will I get worse service? I asked Punchh about this and Xin Heng, Punchh’s Senior Director of Data sent me the following response:

Xin: They won’t be ignored, they will just be put in a different bucket (or segmentation). In other words, low CLV customers will be continuously monitored and treated with winback campaigns. But those who are outside this segment can be subject to games, compression campaigns, a referral callout and more. It’s just about segmentation, but every customer is consistently monitored regardless of what segment they fall into.

Great(?), a restaurant will still be sending me emails no matter how much–or little–I spend! The company is billing the PCLV tool as a restaurant’s virtual data scientist, but it seems like moneyballing me could be just another way that data ruins dining out with too many predictions about my behavior.

We’ll soon see, as Punchh works with more than 160 brands including Pizza Hut, Del Taco, Denny’s and TGI Friday’s. The company has raised $31 million in funding and earlier this month opened up an engineering hub in Toronto.

Happy Happy CallJoy: Google Creates Virtual Phone Agent for Small Businesses Like Restaurants

When Google debuted its Duplex AI voice assistant last year, a lot of people freaked out over the way it sounded human enough to trick an actual person on the other end of the line. Sidestepping the ethical debate over human-sounding AI for a moment, I wasn’t as concerned because it seemed that at some point, Google would create a virtual assistant for small businesses. That way Google would own and get data from both the caller and the business on the receiving end.

This week, Google did just that — kinda. The company unveiled CallJoy, a phone-based virtual assistant for small businesses that can help with tasks like placing orders and provides a Google Analytics-like insights into customer calls.

Once CallJoy is activated, the small business gets a local phone number. CallJoy starts blocking spam calls, and the CallJoy assistant offers up a greeting with basic information like business hours, location, etc..

Based on a Google Blog post, CallJoy doesn’t appear to be a full-on AI assistant carrying on conversations with incoming callers. In the case of restaurants, if a caller wants to place a to-go order or make a reservation, the CallJoy assistant will text the caller with a link to complete those tasks online. Landline calls and other requests get forwarded to the business’ main number.

CallJoy records and transcribes all calls so a business owner can tag and search conversations for particular topics. CallJoy also provides a dashboard to keep track of metrics like call volume, returning callers, etc. Having these type of analytics can provide restaurants with insights that might otherwise be lost.

What Google doesn’t spell out is what happens if a Duplex rings up CallJoy. What does AI-driven virtual assistant small talk sound like?

Restaurants interested in CallJoy can sign up today to request early access. Once implemented, the service costs $39 a month.

CallJoy - Answer with intelligence

Amazon Patents Personalized Restaurant Suggestions. Could a Reservation Platform be Next?

Every year in the run-up to Mother’s Day, I usually remember – often too late – to make a reservation at a nice restaurant to take my children’s mom (who is also, not so coincidentally, my wife) out to brunch.

Now I know what you’re thinking: I should probably offload this activity to my kids (she is their mother, after all, not mine). But the reality is figuring out a good restaurant to make reservations at is a challenge that pops up for me throughout the year, which is why I was intrigued to stumble upon this patent issued today to Amazon for personalized restaurant suggestions.

The patent, entitled “Implicit occasion personalization for restaurants,” describes a system that makes highly-customized suggestions based on a contextual understanding of a person’s past behavior, friend and family network, and specific time-based events such as birthdays, anniversaries and, yes, spouse-specific holidays that demand attention as to avoid marital doghouses.

In one example described in the patent, the system would recognize that a person has an important event coming up in their life, either based on their own calendar or that of their family or friends, and suggest a reservation at a high-end restaurant:

“Perhaps the date (e.g., March 5th) is the birthday, anniversary, or other occasion that is personal to the user, the user’s family and/or the user’s friends. The service provider may leverage the user pattern to make recommendations to the user. In at least one example, the service provider may recommend a reservation at the high-end restaurant to the user on or before the date.”

And while the system described in the patent can certainly help suggest restaurants for important dining occasions, it also describes helping with the more mundane ones. One proposed example has the system recommending new pho restaurants based on similarities to other restaurants the user patronizes.

This isn’t the first time Amazon’s dabbled in preemptive restaurants suggestions. Earlier this year, The Spoon uncovered a patent from Amazon that described a system that would use contextual information to trigger a preemptive restaurant delivery order. With this new patent, it looks like Amazon is trying to corner the market on predictive recommendations around a person’s entire restaurant purchasing behavior, whether that be for dine-out or delivery.

Not only would it make sense to integrate these services with the online giant’s food delivery marketplace as well as with Alexa (“Alexa, can you tell me what I should do for dinner tonight?”), but I can also envision Amazon building out their own reservation platform and marketplace to take on fast-growing startups like Tock and Resy and well as industry goliath OpenTable.

Robots, Instagram, and Flan: Highlights from our Future of Restaurants Meetup

For our latest food tech meetup, we decided to do things a little bit differently. We were lucky enough to work with Chef Eric Rivera (formerly of Alinea in Chicago) and host the event at his new incubator space, addo.

We knew Chef and his team had high standards, but we were still blown away when we walked in the door. Addo is a creative culinary mind’s dream: the space is a coffeeshop during the day and plays host to pop-up dinners, cooking classes, and community get-togethers (Mario Kart tournaments, salsa classes, etc.) during the evening and weekends. “Basically, it allows me to do whatever I want,” he said.

That means that he lets chefs — usually ones who are up-and-coming or have been recently let go — to host pop-up dinners there, and fills the pastry case with locals who want somewhere to display their baking chops. The space opened its doors 2 months ago and already has a staff of 20.

Part of the reason that Rivera could even create a place like addo is because of new technology. When he returned to Seattle to cook after working in the legendary Alinea, where he was Director of Culinary, Rivera hit a lot of roadblocks. People told him he couldn’t start a restaurant without a certain amount of money, or investors. But Rivera decided to forge ahead and create a space inspired by his own struggles — powered, at least partially, by technology. Culinary booking services like Tock allowed him to do things like host 2-seat dinners out of his home kitchen before he got the addo space, and food delivery from his current operation pads his business.

Over a Puerto Rican meal of roast pork with chimichurri, fried plantains, and flan (Rivera’s mom’s recipe), the chef joined The Spoon’s Michael Wolf and Modernist Cuisine’s Scott Heimendinger in a conversation about how technology big and small is changing the restaurant — from robotics to sous vide to Instagram.

Instagram may seem relatively banal when it comes to restaurant tech — after all, most of us use it to post food pictures all the time — but for bootstrapped entrepreneurs like Rivera, it’s been game changing. “I don’t have the money to hire a marketing or PR firm,” said Rivera. Instead, he uses Instagram as a marketing platform, as well as a way to target certain demographics.

It’s also a tool for him to tap into another trend we cover a lot in the food tech space: personalization. When diners reserve a spot online, Rivera has them fill out a questionnaire to get their dining preferences, but he also does a little sleuthing on their social profiles to see what restaurants they like to eat in, food preferences, etc. It’s a little Minority Report-y maybe, but when you’re paying a hefty price, you want each dish on the menu to be something you really want to eat.

Chef Rivera in front of his beloved smart oven.

Of course, we also had to cover a contentious subject for the future of restaurants: robots. “Robots are better than people for almost everything,” said Heimendiner. Especially for when you need to do something that’s highly repeatable or requires lots of accuracy.

Which is obviously useful in places with high volume and basic tasks, like flipping burgers. In Rivera’s kitchen, at least, robots won’t be replacing people — they’ll just help them do their jobs better. That might be an exoskeleton to help workers unload heavy boxes of produce, or Roombas vacuuming up at the end of the day.

Possibly the best leftovers plate we’ve ever seen.

For restaurants, food delivery is a blessing — and a curse. It can increase overall sales, capturing people too lazy to get off the couch, but on the flip side it also reduces foot traffic. Heimendinger made an interesting comparison: “The trend in ordering delivery from restaurants follows a little bit the trend of going to the movies,” he said. People are streaming movies at home instead of going to theaters, and are ordering food delivery instead of dining out. “This will change some of the function of a restaurant’s physical form,” predicted Heimendinger. He thinks it won’t be just a space to eat food: it will also, more than already, be a place to relax, meet up, have a meeting, etc. Which changes the business model. “It turns it into a community space,” he explained, “Not just a dinner table.”

Addo is certainly more than just a dinner table. Based on the interest we saw last night in addo’s far-ranging dining experience and community vibe, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more incubators popping up in the future.

Want to hear more of Chef Rivera’s perspective on how technology can help lighten the load of restaurant workers and open up new revenue streams? He’ll be speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th — get your tickets now! 

We ended the night by making some crepes with the Hestan Cue!

Great Restaurant Ideas: Video Manuals, Weather-Based Sales Predictions, and More

Restaurant Business is currently running a great feature packed with “50 Great Ideas” that restaurants are putting in action to boost engagement and sales.

Here are a few smart moves that caught our eye:

Video training manuals. Arby’s has an internal video platform that hosts sub-two minute staff training videos that are often user-generated. These snack-sized snippets fit with how millennials staffers seek out and discover knowledge for self-learning.

Forecasting weather and sales. Mad Greens in Denver, CO, ties a weather prediction service into its ordering software to help gauge sales, plan accordingly, and reduce food waste (rainy day = worse sales).

Instagram-friendly booths. The Boston Chops steakhouse designed a table that lets users move arm lights and change their intensity to help them snap that perfect (viral) dinner ‘gram.

Some of the ideas in the list point to broader tech-driven trends: integrating new data points into existing systems for better predictions, better leveraging social media, and enhanced delivery options. Others are more basic, like creating a happy hour for kids and dogs.

You should definitely check out the full list for a lot of ideas that are sure to become mainstream soon.

TripAdvisor Bolsters Foray into Food with Additional Eatigo Investment

Eatigo, a Thailand-based startup that helps restaurants stay busy during off-peak hours, announced today that it has raised an undisclosed “pre-Series C” round of funding from existing investor TripAdvisor. Tech in Asia reports that this new cash brings the total amount of funding raised by Eatigo to more than $25 million.

According to the Eatigo’s Crunchbase profile, the company “connects empty tables with empty stomachs using time-based discounts.” Eatigo helps restaurants optimize their resources by offering deals for off-peak hours, similar to what Gebni does here in the U.S.. Eatigo operates in six countries across Southeast Asia including India, Malaysia and the Philippines.

With this investment, TripAdvisor continues to expand its interest in food, and illustrates that it wants in on your eating action — no matter where you chow down when traveling. As noted, this is the second time it has invested in Eatigo, which looks to help get people into restaurants. But TripAdvisor also wants to facilitate bringing food to you.

Just last month TripAdvisor entered into a partnership with Delivery.com, which allows people in the TripAdvisor app to order food for delivery from 12,000-plus restaurants. This agreement with delivery.com added another arrow to TripAdvisor’s delivery quiver, which includes partnerships with Grubhub and Deliveroo.

For its part, Eatigo says the new money will be used to expand into new markets, though Asia will remain a key focus for the company. Additionally, TripAdvisor’s reservation portal, The Fork, will help Eatigo with its expansion plans.

DoorDash and Red Lobster to Expand Delivery Locations

If you’ve got a hankering for seafood, but don’t want to leave your house — you’re in luck! Red Lobster announced today that it is expanding its partnership with DoorDash to offer delivery from more than 300 Red Lobster locations throughout U.S. and Canada by mid-July.

DoorDash raised $535 million back in March with an eye towards expanding from 600 cities to 1,600, and the company has struck partnerships with a number of national restaurant chains including Jack in the Box, Wendy’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and more recently Chipotle.

The research firm NPD wrote earlier this year that with a 20 percent increase in delivery sales over the last five years, delivery is a need-to-have for restaurants.