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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Spoiled Opportunities: How Tupperware Could Have Reinvented Itself Before It Was Too Late

In recent weeks, news reports about the struggles of the housewares brand Tupperware have surfaced.

It’s unfortunate to see such a storied brand on the brink of bankruptcy, but it raises the question: was this avoidable? Could Tupperware have saved itself by embracing new ideas to modernize its brand and products?

We’ll never know for certain, but a household name like Tupperware might have had a chance if it had explored new products and business models a little sooner. Here are a few ideas of how the company could have reinvented itself:

DTC Housewares Rollup

Tupperware could have transitioned to a direct-to-consumer (DTC) model sooner, either natively or through acquisition. Although Tupperware products are available for purchase on its website, the company still largely relies on its direct sales model, which is based on the party plan concept. While some companies can still make this model work (like Thermomix), the Tupperware Party is a relic of the past that does not resonate with modern consumers.

One approach the company could have considered is a brand rollup strategy, similar to what we have seen from Pattern Brands. Pattern has been gradually acquiring successful DTC brands like GIR, Yield, Poketo, and Onsen. Each brand already had its own loyal following, and Pattern was able to achieve operational scale by consolidating back-office, marketing, and distribution. Tupperware could have also considered larger deals with successful social media-driven brands like Caraway.

Focus on Eco-conscious and Toxin-free Housewares

Tupperware is primarily associated with its plastic storage containers for fridges and freezers. Although the company has diversified into other materials, it has not made a name for itself in eco-friendly products. While some silicone-based products can be found on their website, it is surprising that Tupperware did not embrace this popular material, known for its heat resistance and toxin-free properties. The company could have developed Stasher-like bags and sets of GIR-like kitchenware.

Smart Food Storage and Management

As Spoon readers may know, the current state of home food storage has not embraced technology to address a significant issue: food waste. While startups like Silo, Uvera, and Ovie have attempted to rethink home food storage by incorporating smart technology, they are all still in various stages of development. Tupperware did experiment with crowdsourcing ideas for new container approaches a few years ago, but it seems nothing ever materialized from that effort.

If Tupperware had developed a smart storage platform that leveraged connectivity standards and smart home technologies like Alexa and HomeKit, it might have gained traction. Although the company’s home ambassador model is not ideal, a high-end storage “system” like a smart food container product could have benefited from hands-on sales.

Additionally, Tupperware could have created a food storage management app for use with either conventional food storage or a smart storage system. The company could have also collaborated with established appliance brands like Samsung to integrate a smart food management system into their devices.

These are just a few ideas for how Tupperware could have avoided its current fate. While the brand might survive, either by navigating a restructuring or through the sale of its name and assets to a buyer (who, let’s hope, would not turn it into a Zombie-brand like Polaroid), one can’t help but wonder what might have been if the company had embraced one or two ambitious ideas for reinventing itself before it was too late.

After Getting Derailed by COVID, Smart Food Container Startup Silo Attempts a Come Back

Back in late March of 2020, Silo CEO Tal Lapidot had a decision to make. The dark clouds of a global pandemic had gathered overhead, threatening to derail his company’s progress on finishing a product he’d been working years to deliver.

The product, called the Silo food storage system, was a new take on a stale category where most everyone used the same plastic containers their parents had used before them. The Silo featured lots of cool bells and whistles, including a built-in scale, Alexa integration, and spoilage notifications. The big idea, though, was a vacuum seal system that promised to extend shelf-life of food by up two to three times.

It turned out that lots of people liked the idea of a better food storage system and the company was flying high when it ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 that raised over $1.4 million. I was one of them, becoming backer #2531 after I plunked down $219 for the ‘enhanced basic’ reward package that included the Silo base and four containers. The promised ship date was April 2019, but after having backed a few hardware projects before this one, I knew ship dates were less hard promises than loose guidelines.

Lapidot and his team had been regularly posting updates on the progress of the company on Kickstarter, and the backers were, for the most part, both understanding and encouraging. With COVID-19 infections spreading and a whole lot of uncertainty about the virus, Lapidot felt he had no choice but to send his workers home. He posted an update on Kickstarter letting everyone know about the situation:

We hope this update finds you well, and you and your loved ones are staying safe. Since our last update, the world has changed in terrible ways. Unfortunately, this has significant implications for all businesses, including ours.

Silo recently had to pause all operations as the whole team is under stay-at-home orders, which, unfortunately, also caused the delay in sending this update. As a hardware startup, we have tried at first working from home, but this has proven to be highly inefficient as we cannot make actual progress without our team having access to our office lab and equipment.

Mothballing the project meant bringing his team back from China, where the company had been working with a contract manufacturer preparing to build the product. They’d already invested in the tooling for the product manufacturing run, one of the most expensive parts of building a hardware product.

“The idea was, once COVID subsided a bit, we would restore the operations, ” Lapidot told me in a phone interview. “But as you know, that took longer than expected.”

A couple of years longer than expected. While a big part of it was due to an inability to work on the product both in their office in Israel and on-site in China, an even bigger issue was the company soon ran out of funding. Although they’d managed to raise an impressive amount of money with their Kickstarter, the cost of engineering a product and manufacturing systems for over 5 thousand backers would cost much more than $1.4 million. Lapidot had expected this and managed to find investors for the company, but once COVID hit, one of them got cold feet.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying ‘hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds’,” Lapidot said.

From there, with a furloughed team, stalled operations in China and a lack of funds to get things going, Silo entered a period of stasis as Lapidot just tried to keep the lights and preserve the company’s assets while he searched for new funding.

“The situation sort of stagnated, and we tried to figure out how we can get back on track.”

Two years on, things are finally starting to look up. The company has found a new investor to help fund the production run for the product, and now Lapidot is working to get the company back to where they were in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. A big part of that is trying to reassemble a team and ramp up engineering and technical talent.

“We basically just send everyone home one day, and so there was no organized process of preserving the knowledge,” Lapidot said. “So we have everything, and now we’re trying to get to where we were.”

Other challenges include a lingering lack of critical components due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions. And then there are the continuing travel restrictions to China as the country tries to tamp down a new wave of COVID infections.

“We cannot travel to China because it’s 21 quarantine days just to enter, and it’s not very simple even to get that approval,” Lapidot said. “So it’s going to be a bit more challenging because we have to work more remotely instead of being there.”

According to Lapidot, the company has enough funding for an 18-month runway for the company, and his focus is on getting the first units of the product built. He has started building an engineering team and has reestablished ongoing contact with the manufacturers.

The biggest challenge, according to Lapidot, will be securing the critical components they need to build the final prototypes. They need those to finish debugging the system to prepare for manufacturing, after which they plan to send out factory-made units later this year.

In the meantime, Lapidot knows that the early goodwill he had among backers has evaporated as his updates have gone silent since last July as he has tried to figure out how to get the company back on its feet. Like many stalled Kickstarter projects, most of the messages from backers nowadays are less words of encouragement and more of the “what happened to my money?” variety.

Lapidot told me he plans to apologize to the backers and that he will be transparent about where things are in an upcoming update.

“I know people got hurt from the situation and I feel horrible. We didn’t want this situation. I’ve been a backer on the Kickstarter community for a while. Being in the doghouse after you have seen it from the other side, it’s not an easy experience.”

CES 2022: Uvera’s Smart Food Storage Uses UVC Light To Kill Bacteria

If you’re like me, no matter how hard you try, you end up throwing out food.

And while I recognize most of that waste is on me – a huge part of reducing food waste, after all, is being more mindful about how much is made and remembering to eat what’s already been purchased – I am also pretty convinced that better food storage technology could help me better manage and reduce food waste.

This is why I was intrigued to see the Uvera home food storage system at CES. The Uvera smart food storage system is similar to the Silo system in that it has a base unit that will vacuum seal containers to extend the life of food stored in the device. However, what sets the Uvera apart is its use of UVC light.

Why UVC light?

According to Uvera CEO Asrar Damdam, UVC kills bacteria, which helps extend shelf life and make food after.

“UVC light creates a sterilized environment,” Damram said. “It destroys viruses and bacteria such as COVID-19, salmonella, E.coli, and H1N1. So UVC light alone can extend shelf life of food, but now we’re combining vacuuming as well to increase shelf life even further.”

According to Damdam, the company will begin offering the Uvera food storage appliance via a crowdfunding campaign in March of 2022. Let’s hope the company has better luck than the Silo, which is over two years late and hasn’t updated its Kickstarter backers since July.

You can see Damdam explain the Uvera smart food storage system in the video below.

CES 2022: A Look at the Uvera Home Food Storage System

Agtech Platform Silo Raises $9M to Fight Food Waste in the Supply Chain

San Francisco-based Silo Technologies announced today it has raised $9 million for its cloud-based platform aimed at cutting down on food waste in the U.S. food supply chain. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from existing investors Capital and Haystack Ventures.

Silo (not to be confused with smart-storage maker Silo) wants to minimize food waste in the supply chain by automating operations within it, including buying and selling food, forecasting supply and demand, and managing relationships between the different players in the chain. The software, which is available to food growers, buyers, distributors, and sellers, also digitizes tasks like accounting, inventory management, and reporting, making them quicker and more accurate tasks.

The company said in today’s press release that while food waste happens across the food system, it’s “particularly heavy in production and distribution.” Examples of this include products that spoil in production process because of inadequate storage and transport and projects that are rejected by buyers. While food loss of this kind is less widespread in the U.S. compared to developing nations, it nonetheless happens with plenty of regularity. 

Given that it’s a global, multibillion problem, food waste in general has seen plenty of new investments and developments of late as the issue becomes more urgent for companies, governments, and consumers alike. Clean Crop Technologies nabbed $2.75 million in June of this year, while major CPGs including Walmart and Tesco recently joined the Consumer Goods Forum’s Food Waste Coalition. And as we outline in a recent Spoon Plus report, a sizable number of companies are coming to market with products and appliances that fight food waste in the consumer home. 

Silo says it will use the new funds to expand nationwide, opening offices in both Los Angeles and New York City. It will also build out its engineering staff and develop tools to better streamline logistics and financial tasks in the food supply chain. 

Fighting Consumer Food Waste at Home Means Rethinking the Refrigerator

What’s the most effective way to fight food waste in the home? Take a look at your fridge.

Most consumers at this point are aware of the world’s multibillion food waste problem. A great many more now understand that, at least in North America and Europe, the bulk of that waste happens at consumer-facing stages of the food journey, including our own homes. What we’re less certain of is how to curb that excess.

Researching solutions for “The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report,” which you can read on Spoon Plus, I came across a number of different methods for reducing food waste in the home. But after sifting through the many storage and preservation options out there, the meal-planning and meal-sharing apps, I’m left wondering if the trick to reducing at-home food waste isn’t just re-envisioning the refrigerator itself.

The appliance hasn’t changed much over the last several decades. But in 2020, the pandemic is keeping more folks at home, we have more information about how much food we’re actually wasting (it’s a ton), and more investment in the food tech sector in general. The convergence of those factors makes now an ideal time to change that point and introduce more innovation into the world of refrigerators. Here are a few ideas:

Smarter Features That Are Actually Affordable

By now, many consumers are at least aware of high-tech refrigerators that can track items placed in the fridge, alert owners when those items are running low, and scan and identify foods to help consumers plan meals and find recipes. LG’s ThinQ and the Samsung Family Hub are two appliances that lead the smart fridge market.

They also cost thousands of dollars, making them out of reach for most consumers. True, having cameras and image-recognition technology inside the fridge is a relatively new concept, so a higher price point is to be expected. But in order for the new applications of those technologies to be most effective, they’ll need to get cheaper. By that I mean, we’ll need to see options for them build into most fridges.

Another option is add-on tech for the fridge. As we note in the report, Smarter makes a device can be retrofitted for any fridge and recognize the items inside. Fridge Eye has a similar device.

Smaller Fridge, Bigger Freezer

“Everyone loses something in the back of the fridge,” food waste expert Dana Gunders told us when interviewed for the report. Her point is that the sheer size of most modern refrigerators means older items will get pushed out of view and forgotten as newer ones are placed in the fridge.

High-tech fixes like the ones mentioned above can help, but the fridge design itself seems ripe for an upgrade. Or downgrade, as it were, since a smaller fridge compartment with a bigger freezer might be a surefire way to reduce food waste. Much of our food, even items like milk and bread, can be frozen until we need to use them. And research shows that things like frozen fruits and vegetables maintain more or less the same nutrients as their fresh counterparts. 

Better Storage to Accompany the Fridge

Back in the 1930s, when the electric refrigerator was just starting to get popular, General Electric sold fridges by promoting the then-newish concept of leftovers to consumers. Along with tips and cookbooks, the appliance-maker sold food storage containers designed to stack up in the fridge and hold leftovers. 

Maybe to curb food waste, we need a kind of rebirth of that concept, this time geared towards curbing food waste and with a high-tech twist. Major appliance manufacturers could team up with startups like Mimica, BlakBear, or Silo to sell smarter storage options — think smart labels and temperature sensors — alongside their appliances. They could also find ways to integrate some of those new technologies into fridge doors, drawers, and other compartments.

For more thoughts on the reinvention of the refrigerator as well as how else we can fight food waste at home, check out the full “Consumer Food Waste Innovation” report at Spoon Plus.

Spoon Plus: The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report

Nowadays, governments, grocery retailers, industries like agriculture and grocery, tech companies, and many others are working to fight food waste at both the local and international level. In the developed world, at least, much of that focus over the last 12 months has been on the consumer kitchen, which is responsible for by far the most food waste in those regions.

This report will examine why so much food is wasted in the consumer kitchen, what new technologies and processes can be leveraged to fight that waste, and the companies working to change consumers’ relationship to both food and waste.

Report highlights include:

  • One-third of the world’s food goes to waste annually. In the U.S. and Europe, the majority of that waste happens downstream, at consumer-facing businesses and in the home.

  • Food waste at home is a three-part problem that stems from a lack of awareness about waste, inadequate information and skill sets around home cooking, and the convenience economy driving consumer behavior.

  • Grocery store shopping, current recipe formats, inconsistent date labels, and a lack of smart storage solutions for grocery purchases and restaurant leftovers are the main drivers of at-home food waste.

  • The refrigerator itself may be one of the single biggest contributors to food waste. Moving forward, appliance-makers will need to consider overhauling the appliance’s entire design to help consumers fight food waste.

  • Solutions for fighting food waste will come from a range of different players. For tech companies, areas of focus will include more smart appliances and more tech-enabled storage systems as well as meal-planning and meal-sharing apps.

Companies profiled in this report include LG, Samsung, Vitamix, Smarter, Ovie, Bluapple, Mimica, Blakbear, Silo, Mealhero, MealBoard, Kitche, No Waste, Ends & Stems, and Olio.

Introduction: The Size of the World’s Food Waste Problem

In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the first edition of its now-famous report, “Wasted, How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill.” That report proved to be a groundbreaking look at the inefficiencies in the U.S. food system that lead to massive amounts of food waste from the farm all the way into the average person’s kitchen. 

The report also proved to one of the biggest catalysts for change in recent years. Since its publication, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030 — the first goal of its kind in the U.S. Similarly, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 seeks to “halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food loss during production and supply.” As NRDC noted in the second edition of “Wasted,” published in 2017, food businesses have made commitments to reduce waste, and 74 percent of consumers polled say fighting food waste is important to them. Most recently, the Consumer Goods Forum launched its Food Waste Coalition that aims, in part, to support SDG 12.3 by focusing on consumer-facing areas of food waste like home and retail. And these are just as sampling of the countless efforts happening on both international and local levels in the war on food waste.

Even so, the oft-cited figure, that one-third of the world’s food supply goes to waste, is as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago when NRDC first published its report.

In 2020, food waste is a multibillion-dollar problem with environmental, economic, and human costs that grow more urgent as the world advances towards a 10-billion-person population. The United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates food waste’s global carbon footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases, and that economic losses of this food waste total $750 billion annually. The United Kingdom’s Food Waste Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) notes that keeping food scraps out of landfills would be the equivalent of removing 20 percent of cars in Britain from the roads. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., rescuing just 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans each year, or well over half of the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.  

Worldwide, different regions waste food in different ways. UN estimates show that per capita waste by consumers in Europe and North America totals to 95-115 kg/year. That number drops significantly, to 6-11 kg/year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeastern Asia. Overall, 40 percent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels in developing countries. Not so in developed nations, where over 40 percent of food waste occurs at retail and consumer levels.

Given the enormous amounts of waste occurring at the consumer level in Europe and North America, it makes sense that recent efforts towards fighting food waste now go towards understanding how and why food gets wasted downstream, at grocery stores, restaurants, and, most importantly, within consumers’ own homes.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. To find out more about Spoon Plus, click here. Use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual or monthly subscription. 

This Startup Is Making A Food Container That Detects How Much Time is Left Before Your Food Spoils

What if food labels could tell you in real time if your food has gone bad?

That’s the vision of a UK-based startup that has developed a set of smart food labels to determine food freshness. The labels do this via an embedded sensor that detects the ammonia levels being produced by the food.

As described by packaging trade publication Packaging World, the smart labeling developed by BlakBear has “two electrodes printed on it as well as an embedded RFID chip.” As food spoils, ammonia is released and the gas is “absorbed into the paper’s cellulose fibers and then dissociates into ions. The electrodes sense and measure the ionic conductivity present in the layer of water that is already naturally present in the paper’s fibers to determine the shelf life of the product.”

Most of us can detect food spoilage by smelling the ammonia emitted as food decomposes, but by the time that happens, it’s usually too late to save the item. According to one of the company’s founders, BlakBear’s sensors are up to 100 times more sensitive than the human nose when it comes to detecting spoilage.

Smart labeling that can detect food freshness is not new. I wrote about a group of researchers from China’s Nanjing University and the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 that were developing a similar technology that would detect biogenic amines (BAs) and communicate spoilage using an embedded NFC chip.

Amazon has also been looking at technology that could detect food spoilage. Back in 2017, I wrote about a patent the company had filed for similar technology that could go into refrigerators and detect the gas emitted as food decomposed.

BlakBear is also interested in bringing this type of technology into the home, only instead of building into an appliance, they are working on a smart food container. The company is creating a system called HoneyBox that incorporates the freshness sensor and then communicates with an app via Bluetooth. The device will send reminders and act as a countdown clock on long the food will be edible.

While BlakBear isn’t saying when the product will be into market, the company is currently evaluating consumer attitudes around potential features and pricing for HoneyBox.

And from the looks of it, HoneyBox isn’t the only product the company has in the works. According to BlakBear’s CEO Max Grell, the company is also working on another bear-themed piece of hardware called BearCub that they are trialing with retailers. BearCub, according to Grell, would also be available to use in consumer homes.

Hopefully, both will be available soon, as I think there’s a huge opportunity for better food management systems that can help us reduce food waste. I’ve long wondered why home food storage has been stuck in time and why the incumbents don’t bring those cheap plastic containers into the future (not that they aren’t trying). Sure, there’s been some small progress by some startups (I’m still waiting for my Silo), but not nearly as much as there should be.

Silo Eclipses $1.4 Million On Way To Kickstarter Smart Kitchen Top Three

The “smart kitchen” category on Kickstarter has a new member of the top three.

Silo, the smart vacuum seal storage solution that debuted a little over a month ago at the Smart Kitchen Summit, just completed its successful Kickstarter campaign this week with over $1.4 million in backer pledges. This haul puts the product just behind PicoBrew and Anova as the crowdfunding site’s top smart kitchen campaigns.

Of course, it should be noted that Kickstarter doesn’t technically have a smart kitchen category, but that doesn’t keep us from segmenting campaigns that way. The reason to do so is the site’s food category – with everything from sous vide circulators to crickets – is massive, and so for our purposes it’s helpful to separate the more technology-forward offerings from the campaigns featuring products like barbecue sauce and bacon jerky (not that those aren’t delicious).

Silo’s campaign puts the company just behind onetime belt holder Anova and current smart kitchen champ PicoBrew C. Both PicoBrew ($1.9 million) and Anova ($1.8 million) not only top our “smart kitchen” category, but they also lead the actual overall food category for Kickstarter.

I personally backed Silo’s campaign because, like so many, I struggle with food waste and found my old school plastic containers aren’t cutting it.  I also like the idea of a vacuum sealer that could extend the life of my food, especially if I can track that food in some way through an app.

The company is one of a new crop of startups focused on food preservation. Earlier this year Ovie also succeeded with a Kickstarter for its food tracking solution, while companies like Karma and Goodr are looking to push tech to tackle food waste further up the food chain.