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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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I Tried Underground Cellar’s Gamification Tech for Online Wine Shopping

Not all of us are lucky enough to have a wine cellar within our homes to store bottles at the perfect temperature, humidity, and darkness. Most of us don’t casually reach for a $70 bottle of wine. A Napa Valley-based company called Underground Cellar is looking to change that. Through its e-commerce platform, users can virtually store up to 500 bottles and receive free upgrades to more expensive bottles of wine.

The Shark Tank-backed platform has existed for about five years, and in June 2021, the company raised $12.5 million in funding. Underground Cellar recently reached out to me and offered site credit to test out its platform. As someone that typically only buys a $10 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from Trader Joe’s, I was excited to give it a try.

Example of how the upgrades work

Every day, the Underground Cellar’s platform features different wineries, regions, or varietals. A bottle price is listed for each select deal, and the minimum purchase number is three bottles per order. However, most of them are upgraded to more expensive bottles after you purchase wine, but the user still pays the lowest price listed. On top of this, every deal includes a “top upgrade,” which means you have the chance of receiving a rare or expensive bottle of wine.

My CloudCellar and the wines I received

I ordered three bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, and each bottle cost $35. I did not know exactly what brands or vintages I would be receiving until after I placed the order. I actually ended up with bottles of wine valued at $45, $60, and $85. Two of my bottles were ready to ship right away, and the one took about a week to become available. The bottles are stored in my “CloudCellar,” which means that Underground Cellar is storing them in its Napa Valley facilities until I am ready to ship the wine to my house.

Other platforms that sell and recommend wine exist, like Vivino and Winc. However, Underground Cellar’s gamification feature sets it apart from the other sites. Buying wine on the platform feels like a safer, tannin-infused version of gambling. As the user, you know you will at least get a bottle worth what you paid for. The chance of getting upgraded to something like a 1975 Dom Pérignon Oenothèque (worth $2,000) is what keeps the user hooked and coming back for more deals.

I liked the platform because it forced me to try completely new wines that I normally would not have reached for in-stores. As a 25-year-old millennial on a tight budget, I would never spend $85 on a bottle of wine, but I was given this opportunity with the upgrade technology. I definitely don’t have a wine cellar, and I liked knowing that my bottles of wine were being stored in perfect conditions.

On the flip side, some people might not like that they cannot choose exactly what wine they want. On top of this, most bottles on the platform start at around $30-$35 (except for the occasional $20 blowout deals). Certain people, like myself, typically stick to the $5-$20 range when it comes to buying wine. Shipping is a bit pricey, costing $21 for ground shipping for three bottles of wine. To receive free shipping, 12 bottles must be shipped together.

Overall, I found Underground Cellar to be a neat platform I would recommend to my wine-loving friends. Since its recent funding round, the company has been growing its team, improving its gamification tech, and making more connections with wineries.

Yelp Now Displays Feedback on Restaurants’ COVID-19 Safety Measures

Yelp users will now be able to provide feedback on restaurants’ COVID-19-related health and safety practices, according to a company blog post from this week. 

Effective now, Yelp will display if users observed — or did not observe — practices like social distancing and the wearing of masks at restaurants and other businesses. The information will be posted on the business’s Yelp page under a “Health and Safety Measures” heading in the COVID-19 section (see image above).

Yelp says that to ensure the feedback is fair and accurate, several different criteria must be met before COVID-19 safety information can be listed on its page, including:

  • Multiple user responses “with consensus from multiple users” on social distancing and mask-wearing
  • Responses received within the last 28 days
  • Responses from users logged into their Yelp account

For businesses with multiple locations, the user feedback will only be relevant for the location which the reviewing users visited.

To provide feedback, users can either answer survey questions, much as they would when contributing feedback on other aspects of a restaurant, or they can use the “edit” button on the restaurant’s COVID-19 updates section. Yelp will also notify users via push notification when a relevant restaurant has updated its COVID-19 information. 

For restaurants and other businesses that want to be a little more proactive and display their COVID-19 safety efforts, Yelp will also now allow them to list whether they have the following services: staff checked for symptoms, contactless and/or disposable menus, heated outdoor seating, covered outdoor seating, indoor dining, private dining, and DIY meal kits.

One of the major points we discussed at last October’s Smart Kitchen Summit was that visualizing cleanliness and safety in restaurants is now “table stakes” for restaurants. Even after a vaccine is widely available, consumers are likely to demand more visual cues about a business’s health and safety practices. So while Yelp’s new feature is a response to a (hopefully) short-term situation, user-generated feedback on these areas will be a standard feature moving forward for most restaurant review platforms. 

Yelp Adds New Alert to Flag Businesses Accused of Racist Behavior

Yelp unveiled in a blog post this week a new consumer alert to warn users about restaurants, bars, and other businesses that may be associated with racist behaviors. The Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert can be applied when a business gets attention for reports of racist language symbols, and other conduct.

From Yelp’s blog post:

“The new Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert is an extension of our Public Attention Alert that we introduced in response to a rise in social activism surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. If someone associated with a business is accused of, or the target of, racist behavior, we will place a Public Attention Alert on the business page to warn consumers that the business may be receiving an influx of reviews as a result of increased attention.”

For business accused of “overtly racist actions,” where the incident can be linked to a news article, Yelp said it would escalate its warning to the Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert.  

The company noted that reviews mentioning Black-owned businesses were up 617 percent this summer compared to last. However, “while searches for Black-owned businesses surged on Yelp, so did the volume of reviews warning users of racist behavior at businesses.”

The new alert comes in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black people, and at a time when protests against racism have ramped up and advocates are calling for change around racism and police brutality. Yelp said the Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert is in response to “a rise in social activism” around the Black Lives Matter movement.

Yelp Is Now Listing Restaurant Hygiene Scores, and Not Everyone’s Thrilled

Today, Yelp announced the national rollout of its LIVES program, which posts restaurant hygiene scores alongside other basic info about eating establishments (via The New York Post).

Not everyone’s happy about this. Especially the restaurants.

Yelp started the LIVES program in 2013 in the company’s hometown of San Francisco. To expand on a national level, Yelp teamed up with HDScores, who reportedly has data on almost 1.2 million U.S. restaurants.

This could be a big win for consumers. After all, nobody wants a side of salmonella poisoning with their huevos rancheros. And while some states require by law that restaurants post their health grade in the window, much of the granular information is hard to find. As Yelp writes on its official blog:

“Unfortunately, this information is often buried on clunky ‘dot gov’ websites beyond the easy reach of consumers. Or equally inconvenient, it’s accessible in the offline world, displayed somewhere in the physical business, and not always obvious to the diner.”

Yelp wants to change that by pulling information like inspection type, number and type of violations, and score over time from government databases and making it easy to read online:

 

On the other hand, it could just be another way for Yelp to needlessly ruin the reputations of restaurants. The San Francisco rollout of LIVES was met with some controversy, since SF’s flawed health-inspection system is well-documented and scores could be outdated and not reflect the actual state of a restaurant. But the casual diner looking for a meal isn’t likely to factor that in when they see “Customer Alert: Poor Food Safety Score!” next to a listing. Yelp and independent restaurants have never been great bedfellows anyway. Complaints against the site run the gamut, from the potentially harmful filtering algorithm to accusations of extortion.

But Yelp’s not going anywhere anytime soon, so if you’re an independent restaurant owner, it’s advisable to arm yourself with tools that can make a business more ready for a visit from the health department. Last year, the FDA released software to help businesses better comply with regulations. There’s also a growing number of apps, of varying quality, that cover everything from food temperature and handling to training staff on best practices. These can help restaurants minimize the risk of getting a poor health-inspection score.

Underscore that word “minimize,” though. Health departments around the country are famous for being fickle and sometimes downright unreasonable. Plus, as others interviewed by the Post worry that Yelp, being a business and not a health department, won’t understand the nuances of some laws and violations. There’s also an added complication that restaurant-inspection laws and scoring varies from state to state. NYC, for example, uses a letter grade system, while Washington DC doesn’t follow a score system and instead files reports. How Yelp will standardize this information and make sense of it for the average person looking for dinner remains to be seen.

As of today, Yelp LIVES is focused on restaurants in California, Texas, Illinois, and Washington, DC. It will roll out updates to other states over the coming months. As to whether or not the program will meet with success in these areas, consider the grade still pending.