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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Merryfield Raises $3.5 M, Set to Launch App That Rewards Clean Label Purchases

Merryfield, a soon-to-launch app that rewards shoppers with gift cards for buying clean label products, announced this week that it has raised $3.5 million in a seed round.

Merryfield, which will launch on iOS in April, was founded by David Mayer, a former healthcare private equity investor, and Joe Dickson, former director of quality standards at Whole Foods Market. The app curates a list of packaged goods products that meet Merryfield’s set of clean label standards, with participating companies paying membership fees to Merryfield as well as the costs of the points when shoppers buy their products.

The platform is retailer agnostic — all Merryfield users need to do is look at the app for clean label products when shopping and then scan their receipts that include any qualifying purchases. Points will then be added to their accounts that can be used for gift cards from brands such as Adidas, Amazon, Sephora, Starbucks, Target and Whole Foods.

Dickson told The Spoon during a phone interview that Merryfield chose to go the app route instead of a package label sticker because it easily allows shoppers to research products and track shopping lists.

“It takes hours to go down the aisles to figure out what brands people should trust — that’s why we’re here,” he said. “We want to incentivize people to try new brands and for continuing to choose those products. We’re looking to thoughtfully curate the brands and products to focus on the true innovators and standard bearers.”

Merryfield’s appeal to brands is that it can be difficult and expensive for individual companies to create their own loyalty programs, a necessity amid increasing competition and rising customer acquisition costs in the food space, Dickson said. Speaking of members, Merryfield boasts of well known food companies: Applegate Natural & Organic Meats, Beyond Meat, Califia Farms, Good Culture, GoMacro, Health-Ade Kombucha, Justin’s, Once Upon a Farm, Thinksport, RightRice, Stonyfield Organic and Vital Proteins. Merryfield said in a press release it is looking to add six to eight additional brands covering different product categories ahead of its April launch.

Merryfield will eventually be available on Android devices, and Dickson said his team is looking into possibly including ecommerce purchases. The Boston-based 2-year-old startup is a public benefit corporation that donates 1 percent of its sales directly to No Kid Hungry.

The CPG industry is increasingly leaning toward cleaner labels, but as Dickson pointed out, average consumers either have to rely on label claims or conduct their own research to find products that meet their needs. A third party that verifies products may be welcomed by consumers, especially with the promise that their purchases also lead to rewards.

Kelloggs Debuts New Plant-based Sausage to Compete with Impossible Pork

Incogmeato, Kellogg’s intriguingly-named line of meat alternatives, is branching out.

The brand revealed the new Morningstar Farms line back in September with plant-based burger and chicken, which will launch in the refrigerated meat cases of select grocery stores in March (h/t CNBC). Today Kellogg announced that they’re already diversifying their lineup with two new products, meat-free Italian sausages and bratwurst, set to launch in March. These new offerings will be made with soy, similar to Impossible Foods (Beyond Meat’s sausages are made with pea protein).

In fact, Incogmeato’s plant-based sausages could be a direct bid to compete with Impossible, which announced its entry into meatless pork at CES last month. Thus far Impossible is only selling its new product in the form of a breakfast sausage patty through a limited launch with Burger King. But judging from the wide range of ways they prepared the alt-pork at the CES launch party — showcasing it in formats like ground pork over noodles to banh mi patties — I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before Impossible diversifies into other plant-based pork products (cough, bratwurst).

Then again, Incogmeato has the edge over Impossible in retail, thanks to Kelloggs. Impossible sells packages of its signature “bleeding” ground beef alternative in select retailers in certain regions, but it’s far from a shelf regular. The company has also yet to announce when (or if) it will start selling its faux pork in grocery stores.

Impossible aside, Incogmeato still has to compete with a handful of other plant-based sausage offerings on the retail shelf, including those from giants like Beyond Meat and Tofurky.

I also doubt that Incogmeato will be the last line to diversify into pork. Breakfast is becoming a white-hot space for plant-based foods, especially breakfast sausage (whose texture is much easier to copy than, say, bacon). Incogmeato’s new offerings aren’t breakfast-specific, per se, but considering how quickly they’ve added to their portfolio before they even hit shelves, it could be only a matter of time.

SKS 2019: Food Retail is Evolving Fast, but Some Things Aren’t Going Anywhere (Hint: Brick & Mortar)

The next time you step into a grocery store, take a look around and think about how much work went into orchestrating the selection. Which CPG products should the store stock? How many? And how does fresh food factor in?

Those questions don’t have an easy answer, and they’re the reason that food retail is such a tricky business. Thankfully, there are companies trying to reinvent the space with the help of tech, innovation, and creative thinking. And we heard from a few of them onstage last month during a panel at SKS 2019.

In the panel, Brita Rosenheim of Better Food Ventures spoke with Stefan Kalb of Shelf Engine, Mike Fogarty of Choice Market and Andreas Wuerfel of METRO Group about how companies are re-imagining food suppliers to be more sustainable, more efficient, and be better at serving quick-shifting consumer demands. 

You should check out the video below to get a deeper look into how companies are leveraging tech to transform food retail. First, here are a few high-level takeaways:

Food retail is changing — and fast
 Kalb kicked off the panel by pointing out that the grocery space is in the midst of rapid transformation. “Because it’s a highly commoditized industry, changes spread quickly,” he said. His company Shelf Engine helps retailers stay on top of fast-moving trends by crunching customer data to forecast exactly how much of each SKU needs to be ordered. The more retailers they work with, the more data they get, the better they can help grocers optimize selection. Which, in today’s incredibly competitive food retail market, is crucial. 

Brick and mortar isn’t going anywhere
“In retail, the physical space is always going to be a quintessential part of people’s lives,” Fogarty told the SKS audience. Right now, only a small percentage of grocery sales happen online (though that number is growing). Physical retail space, he argues, will be an “anchor” for all the different sales channels that are emerging now, like pickup, delivery, vending machine, and more. 

Food retail is a slippery challenge. Tech can help
Wuerfel pointed out that optimizing retail in a company with a global presence (Metro has 750 stores in 35 countries) is, unsurprisingly, incredibly tricky. They have to “cater to every possible palate out there,” all while ordering the right number of products to reduce waste and maximize profit. To do so, Metro knew it would have to leverage new technologies. So it teamed up with TechStars to make an accelerator program to catalyze outside-in innovation for the company. That, according to Wuerfel, has helped their company stay on the cutting edge of food retail.

Check out the full video below to hear more insights from these three thought leaders in grocery and food sales. It’ll make you think a lot more the next time you set food in your local grocery store.

SKS 2019: Re-Imagining Food Retail

Looks Like L.A. is Where Impossible Foods will Launch in Retail

If you bet that Impossible Foods would be doing its retail launch in L.A., congratulations! You’re probably right.

The Spoon came across a Facebook post from Impossible Foods today advertising an event called Impossible Grandma’s House. The free event will be held on Friday September 20 from 11am-6pm at the Cabana at Westfield Century City in Los Angeles. “Come celebrate (and taste) Impossible Foods’ launch in grocery stores! Grandmas unite under one roof to #CookImpossible and share their culinary wisdom,” reads the invite.

This event also gives us a probable candidate for first grocery store to sell Impossible: Gelson’s is located in the same Westfield Century City complex as the Grandma event.

Details are pretty scant about the event itself. Is it just a PR event with free Impossible Foods grub? Will people migrate over to Gelson’s for the first Impossible retail sale? Are grandmas actually involved?

It’s the grandma bit that trips me up. Why is Impossible, a startup that’s all about leveraging technology to reinvent meat with plants, whose bright branding and hashtag-heavy PR strategy is clearly geared towards the millennial crowd, focusing so heavily on grandmas for their retail launch?

I think I get what Impossible is going for here. The company is trying to show that its plant-based meat is so versatile and delicious that even traditionalists can easily use it in their favorite family recipes. However, I think the strategy rings untrue, especially since the launch event is at a trendy, glitzy shopping mall and not, say, a community restaurant or local market.

As I pointed out in the latest issue of Future Food, it doesn’t really matter where Impossible Foods decides to do its retail launch. Eventually it’ll probably be as ubiquitous on grocery shelves as Beyond Meat — provided Impossible doesn’t come up against anything drastic like a food safety scare or another production shortage.

The bigger questions will be what products Impossible decides to roll out in retail in order to compete with competitors Beyond Meat and bigger players like Hormel, Kellogg, and, as of just two days ago, Trader Joe’s — and how they stack up, taste-wise. Impossible may have built up a recognizable brand through its many restaurant partnerships, especially fast-food ones like Burger King, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to success in the crowded retail aisle.

We’ll be doing deep dives into the Impossible retail launch and rollout on our Future Food newsletter! Make sure to subscribe.

Tally ho! Simbe Robotics Raises $26M for its Inventory-bot

Simbe Robotics, which makes the autonomous Tally inventory robot for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Venrock with participation from Future Shape, Valo Ventures, and Activant Capital. Additionally, Simbe also announced today that it is expanding its existing partnership with SoftBank Robotics America to include inventory financing to scale the manufacturing of an additional 1,000 Tally robots over the next two years.

Tally is an autonomous robot that roams store aisles using computer vision and RFID to scan shelves to check on inventory. It’s part of a suite of services from Simbe that provides analytics about purchases and insights about re-stocking management. Simbe provides the hardware for free and charges a monthly subscription for the software and analytics. So far, Tally has been put to work in trials at Giant Eagle and Schnuck’s grocery store chains.

Tally is just one of the robots coming to a grocer near you. Earlier this year, Walmart announced it would expand Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robots to 300 locations, and Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 “Marty” floor roaming robots from Badger Technologies.

While retailers may like the fact that robots are faster and more precise than humans (and the fact that they don’t take breaks or call in sick), there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out with robots. As we’ve written before, robots can make their human co-workers enjoy their jobs less, and shoppers don’t know how to interact with a cold, silent, sentinel (even if they have googley eyes).

Additionally, how long will robots be necessary for things like inventory management? Walmart debuted its IRL store earlier this summer which features banks of cameras installed and computer vision to keep a real-time eye on what’s in stock.

However, retrofitting a store with the cameras, software and sensors needed to keep track of inventory in that way is expensive and will take a long time. So until then, robots like Tally will probably find a place among the produce at plenty of retailers.

Impossible Foods Teases Location for Retail Launch, Reveals First Product

Mark your calendars folks. On September 20th, consumers in one lucky city will be able to purchase Impossible product from the grocery store for the very first time.

We’ve known for a while that Impossible would launch in retail sometime this month. But in a tweet yesterday, the Redwood City, Calif. based startup teased us with a few more details.

This tweet tells us exactly one and a half pieces of information.

Firstly, Impossible’s first retail product will likely be packaged ground “meat,” similar to Beyond Beef. We predicted this might be the case since the startup has been emphasizing the versatility of its product ever since it launched the new Version 2.0 of its recipe at CES this January.

Honestly, it’s a smart move. Refrigerated grocery shelves are becoming crowded with pre-formed plant-based burgers from Lightlife, Beyond, and more. And over the past month alone major players like Kroger, Smithfield and Kellogg (through MorningStar) have all announced plans to launch refrigerated alterna-burgers of their own. By entering retail with a fresh ground meat product Impossible is essentially narrowing its competition down just to Beyond Beef and Hormel.

We haven’t tried Hormel’s ground protein yet but our team is pretty smitten with Beyond Beef. However, Beyond’s ground beef has only been on retail shelves for a few months, so Impossible won’t be too far behind when it enters the category with a product of its own. Plus, Impossible has been busy building up its brand through partnerships with major fast-food chains like Burger King.

Impossible’s tweet also gave us a hint which city it will launch in: one that smells like “palm trees.” Judging from that cryptic hint, it’s likely either L.A. or Miami. (Sadly, it looks like my hometown of Seattle is out. Damn you, evergreens!)

If I was a betting gal, I’d put my money on L.A. The City of Angels loves anything new and trendy, especially if it comes in Instagram-friendly technicolor packaging. L.A. also has the advantage of being much closer to Impossible’s Oakland production facility.

Then again, it’s too soon to count Miami out of the race. As my colleague Chris pointed out, Miami — or really, Florida — serves as a testbed for a lot of new retail technology. Ford is testing self-driving cars to deliver groceries in Miami, Kroger is building its next robotic warehouse in Groveland, Florida, Walmart offers its InHome service in Vero Beach, and robotic grocery fulfillment company Takeoff works with the Sedano’s supermarket chain throughout the Sunshine State. Plus, Miami was one of the first cities to get Burger King’s Impossible Whopper after its successful pilot in St. Louis, Missouri and Florida was one of the first three states to serve Little Caesar’s Impossible Supreme pizza.

There’s still a lot of question marks surrounding Impossible’s launch. We don’t know which stores or how many of them will carry the product or what it will cost. I guess we’ll have to wait 9 days to find out.

Want to stay updated on Impossible’s retail rollout and other plant-based protein news? Subscribe to our Future Food newsletter!

Kroger Launches Own Line of Plant-Based Meat and Dairy

If you’re shopping at Kroger, you have a plethora of plant-based meat and dairy options to choose from. Today the retailer announced that this fall, consumers will have one more — this one coming from Kroger itself.

At the Good Food Conference in San Francisco today Gil Phipps, Kroger’s Vice President for Private Brands, announced that the Cincinnati-based retailer would be rolling out a new plant-based line under its Simple Truth brand. This will make Kroger one of the largest retailers to introduce its own branded line of meatless meats.

Photo: Kroger

The grocery chain’s new product line goes far beyond just burgers and sausages (though it’ll have those, too). The Simple Truth Plant Based line will also include pasta sauces, cookie dough, deli slices and creamy dips, all based around pea protein.

The Simple Truth Plant Based line will debut at 1,800 Kroger stores this fall with new products arriving every month. Pricing details have not been disclosed but presumably the retailer will try to undercut other animal alternative products already on its shelves.

If Kroger’s new line proves popular — and based off of rising consumer demand for plant-based options everywhere and anywhere, I’m guessing it will be — you can bet we’ll see a lot more retailers developing their own alternative protein brands.

SKS Q&A: Andreas Wuerfel on How Big Grocery Can Stay Innovative, Agile and Competitive

If you’ve eaten out in Europe, Russia, or Asia, chances are at some point you’ve patronized a café, hotel, or kiosk that purchase food from mega-retailer METRO AG. As the largest non-U.S. wholesale and foodservice company, the Germany-based METRO functions in 35 countries and serves over 24 million businesses.

One place it doesn’t serve is the U.S. However, Andreas Wuerfel works for METRO as Group Director for U.S. Strategic Partnering; keeping a finger on the pulse on retail trends in the U.S. through local partners and applying them to the METRO network. Which means that he is uniquely positioned to track innovation across foodservice and grocery across the globe.

If you want to hear Wuerfel speak about the ways that METRO is forging the future of retail — digitally and otherwise — get your ticket to SKS. Then get a sneak preview with the Q&A below.

You’re the Group Director for U.S. Strategic Partnering at METRO. Tell us about what your role entails.
While METRO Group has no local operations, the US is a key “lighthouse” market for us. US restaurant, hotel, and retail innovation trends often foreshadows development in our Europe and Asia markets. Gaining an understanding early, and working with key US players is important to the degree [with which we] can cooperate across our Europe customer footprint. With that in mind, my role is to help initiate our “bridge-to-Europe” strategic/commercial deal opportunities, to help create win-win-win value for our Europe customers, our US partners, and METRO at large.

You were involved with founding the METRO Accelerator program, powered by Techstars. Why did Metro AG decide to help create an accelerator?
Globally, the retail sector is undergoing rapid change. Much of that dynamics comes from outside our traditional channels. Outside established large IT firms, it is often young startup teams that best ideate, invent and disrupt “the future of retail”. In working with retail tech and hospitality tech founder teams from around the world, our METRO Accelerator is specifically designed as an outside-in innovation program — to help capture, fund, and shape the relevant early-stage digital applications most meaningful for our small business customers and our own stores long term.

How do you stay competitive in the competitive wholesale retail space, especially against giants such as Walmart or Tesco?
Despite the aforementioned retail industry transformation — simply put — it’s still all about ensuring we offer “the right product for the right customer at the right price exactly when and where needed.” To ensure this “contract with our customers” is fulfilled, METRO leverages its unique footprint and supply-chain advantages. (Globally, METRO Cash & Carry is the only wholesaler doing business in 35 countries, with deep access to local assortment and competitive pricing).

What are a few ways you’ve seen tech transform retail?
Inside METRO, we’ve found tremendous value in helping educate and consult the “long tail” of the hospitality and retail industry. We are unique in that our primary customers are 24+ million small business owners. Not consumers but rather the many independent restaurants, hotels, retail operators, catering companies, and small professional offices — all looking to understand and benefit from the use of digital innovation as well as new “next-gen” food & beverage choices. Our down-market innovation programs and corporate investment initiatives therefore all center around enabling our small business customers and their guests, in the process helping to transform the independent retail customer side of our business.

Keep an eye out for more speaker Q&A’s as we ramp up to our fifth year of SKS on October 7-8 in Seattle! We hope to see you there.

Microsoft Continues March into Grocery Stores with Albertsons Partnership

Microsoft and Albertsons are partnering to integrate Microsoft’s Cloud and AI technologies into Albertsons grocery stores, the two companies announced today. This deal marks another move by Microsoft into major grocery retail operations, following a partnership with Kroger last month.

Details of the new Microsoft/Albertsons partnership are light, with the pres release saying the arrangement “includes immediate and long-term initiatives to digitally transform the customer journey, optimize operations and deliver better products and services”

According to the two companies, part of transforming that customer journey includes “eliminating the friction” customers experience either trying to find products or while standing in checkout lines. Though they don’t say it specifically, this could indicate that the two companies will be working on cashierless checkout at Albertsons stores.

Microsoft has long been rumored to be working on such technology, and there has been a flurry of activity in the cashierless checkout space ever since Amazon launched its Go stores last year. A number of startups are working on cashierless checkout with some, like Grabango, already in pilots with grocery chains.

While this deal with Albertsons is more of a general relationship announcement for Microsoft, the Redmond giant made a more concrete pact with Kroger last month. Microsoft is actually working with Kroger to build out two tech-heavy pilot stores that made extensive use of smart displays and sensors for inventory management. Additionally, those Kroger + Microsoft solutions are meant to be packaged up as a turnkey package that can be sold to other grocery stores.

Both of these announcements seem to be, at least in part, targeted at Amazon. First both of these deals involve Azure, Microsoft Cloud answer to Amazon’s AWS, so Amazon is being shut out of that line of business. But more broadly, ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods, grocers everywhere have ratcheted up their technology efforts to stave off Amazon from dominating the industry.

In addition to launching this new high-tech initiative with Microsoft, Albertsons is also getting into the robot game. The grocer partnered with Takeoff to build out a test mini-automated fulfillment center in the back of one of its stores. We’re actually talking with Narayan Iyengar, SVP of Digital and eCommerce at our upcoming ArticulATE summit in San Francisco in April. While he’s on stage, we’ll see what else we can get out of him about Microsoft as well.

WeStock Lets Shoppers Request Particular Brands at Their Local Grocery Store

I was shocked (in a good way!) to see that my local Safeway carried Ripple pea-based chocolate milk. It was something I wanted to try, but the thought of actually seeking out the store manager and asking them to stock it never occurred to me.

WeStock is guessing that I’m not alone in my reticence to to make product requests in person. The company officially launched its eponymous app today to help shoppers bypass their shynesss and get the brands they want at their local stores.

“Customers don’t know how much weight they have with the buyer,” Cameron McCarthy, Co-Founder and CEO of WeStock told The Spoon.

To help customers better exert their influence WeStock today launched its mobile app. During the registration, users give WeStock their zip code along with some other information, as well as their preferred store. The app then asks you a series of questions to figure out what brand attributes are important to you: GMO, vegan, fair trade, LGBTQ owned, etc.. WeStock then presents you with a curated list of products from its brand marketplace that best fit those attributes. If there’s a product you like, you tap to indicate that you’re interested in buying it.

WeStock communicates this interest with both the brands and interested retailers. So if Arteasan, for example, sees a number of people in the Seattle area saying they are interested in Focus Yerba Matte Tea, the company can work to get it on store shelves there. Likewise, a neighborhood store could see X number of people want it and start stocking it. Once a store in that zip code starts stocking the brand, WeStock notifies the user of its arrival.

In a couple of weeks, WeStock will be rolling out an update with a store locator so users can see, based on their zip code, which stores in their area stock the product.

“Most small and emerging brands are flying blind,” McCarthy said, “WeStock helps brands map out where you focus your sales efforts.”

WeStock makes money by charging brands a monthly subscription fee of $79 for access to the data the app collects: popularity, location, demographics, preferred store, etc.. WeStock is currently focused on natural and specialty brands, but says it can work with brands of all sizes to help in the development of new lines. For instance, a chip company could list new flavors on WeStock’s market to see which ones attract the most requests and where before going into production.

Retailers can access WeStock’s data for free. According to McCarthy, this is because his company “want[s] to help expedite our brand partners ability to get on the shelf.”

WeStock is currently bootstrapped and carries 100 brands on its platform. The app will initially be for iOS only. We’ve covered a lot of companies like Myxx and Whisk that drive discovery of products through shoppable recipes, but what makes WeStock stand out is that it focuses on getting those ingredients to the stores in the first place, giving brands and retailers more concrete data not about products they are already selling, but the ones they could be selling.

Kroger Partners with Microsoft for Smarter Grocery Stores

It looks like Kroger isn’t taking its foot off the innovation pedal anytime soon. The grocery giant announced today that it has partnered with Microsoft to create a smarter, tech-enabled store with solutions that can be packaged and sold to other retailers.

Two pilot store locations — one in Microsoft’s hometown of Redmond, WA, and one in Monroe, OH, near Kroger’s HQ — will be outfitted with an array of IoT sensors and digital displays powered by Azure, Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services.

These high-tech stores will feature the Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment (EDGE) advanced shelving system that uses digital displays to show prices, sales and nutritional information. But the digital displays also act like electronic guides for in-store shoppers using Krogers self-checkout app. Consumers can assign a particular icon to an item (a banana, for instance), and the EDGE display will show that icon so the shopper can identify it quickly. These displays can also be used for Kroger employees collecting items for online orders. The smart displays could also be a source of revenue as in-store advertisements.

Elsewhere in these smart stores will be an array of sensors and cameras which can keep track of inventory for faster re-stocking, and monitor temperatures in cold cases to prevent spoilage.

What’s also interesting about this partnership is that the two companies plan on packaging this smart system and selling it to other retailers. Grocery giants like Kroger and Albertsons have been investing heavily in technology in an attempt to prevent Amazon/Whole Foods from gobbling up the entire sector. So Kroger and Microsoft offering up a turnkey solution could be attractive to smaller and mid-level grocery chains.

Worth noting are the things not mentioned in this press release. There’s no mention of cashierless checkout, which we only bring up since it’s been rumored that Microsoft is working on that technology with Walmart. Additionally, and this is more out there, Monroe is also where Kroger is building out its first robot-powered smart distribution warehouse. Kroger spent last year investing heavily in technology like the smart warehouse, self-driving delivery vehicles and an innovation lab. This year, we may get more insight into how all these pieces will come together and integrate with one another.

DeepMagic Combines Computer Vision and AI to Make Mini, Unattended Amazon Gos

One of the questions that comes up when talking about Amazon Go cashierless stores is when the grab-and-go technology experience will scale up from a bodega-sized convenience store to a full-on grocery experience. But instead of thinking big, startup DeepMagic is going the other direction: developing small unattended, cashierless micro-retail outlets.

Using a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), DeepMagic creates self-contained, cashierless walk-in “Qick Kiosks” that can be placed within existing locations. Customers use an app on their phone to unlock the kiosk doors, go inside, grab what they want and leave. Cameras in the Qick Kiosk keep track of everything taken (just like Amazon Go) and automatically charge your card when you exit the kiosk.

DeepMagic doesn’t want to own and operate its own chain of cashierless stores; rather, it wants to provide these kiosks as a way to create retail opportunities within existing high-traffic areas. Think: pop-up shops inside office building lobbies or big apartment complexes.

“It’s not about replacing existing store formats,” DeepMagic Co-Founder and CEO, Bernd Schoner told me by phone. “We want to give store owners the ability to create additional locations. Office space not big enough for a canteen? You can put a kiosk in that space.’

Schoner said DeepMagic’s approach lets retailers easily create satellite locations that can operate 24/7, without having to build a full store, or hire extra staff. For instance a bodega could run a smaller bodega inside a nearby apartment building.

DeepMagic combines a number of elements and approaches already happening in the automated, cashierless retail space. It has the Amazon grab-and-Go element. But it’s also similar to Stockwell (formerly Bodega), which creates even computer vision driven, credenza-sized containers with snacks and sundries for densely populated buildings. And Schoner’s canteen example is reminiscent of Byte Foods, which puts smart fridges stocked with food in offices.

While DeepMagic’s kiosks may add flexibility to retail locations, the company’s approach has a downside: the kiosks can only deal with one purchaser at a time. There can be multiple people in the same kiosks, but whatever they grab will be charged to the person who unlocked the store with their phone. So it seems like there could be lines that form to get into each kiosk, which kind of kills the convenience of cashierless checkout.

Having said that, DeepMagic’s turnkey kiosks could be big enough to offer a decent selection of items and branding experience for a retailer, yet small enough to create new retail opportunities within existing locations at an attractive cost. That is, if DeepMagic kiosks are at an attractive cost. Schoner wouldn’t disclose pricing on a DeepMagic kiosk, only saying that there will most likely be some combination of lease, SaaS subscription and percentage of retail sales.

DeepMagic has, however, proved its technology in public. Earlier this year, Cisco set up a DeepMagic kiosk to sell swag at its conference. Schoner says the company is working on a number of other deals right now. DeepMagic is self-funded, and has 15 employees across New York and Mexico.

While we wait and see how big cashierless stores can scale up, we’ll also have to keep an eye out to see if staying small pays off for DeepMagic.