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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

soggy food sucks

Tired of Cold Take Out? SavrPak Believes It Has The Answer With New Packaging Prototype

Although everyone seems divided in these tumultuous times, there are still a few things in this world we all can agree on: Jeopardy won’t be as good without Alex Trebek, Facebook is evil, and cold food sucks.

While we can’t do too much about the first two, the final one might be a solvable problem, at least according to SavrPak. That’s because the company has debuted a new delivery packaging prototype that it claims will keep food at a safe temperature.

This is important because once food drops below 140o F, bacteria forms on the food’s surface. Unfortunately, that doesn’t take long for food packaged up in the typical foam or molded pulp packaging.

According to SavrPak, the company’s new packaging prototype can keep food at 140o or above for more than 20 minutes. While the typical wait for food ordered via a delivery service like DoorDash is about 40 minutes, a good chunk of that time is waiting in the prep queue and the actual making of the food, and 20 minute time window is about the average time it takes for a food package to arrive at the customer’s door once it’s picked up by the delivery driver.

And not only is hot food safer, but it also tastes better. And while there have been research projects on everything from using exhaust fumes of delivery vehicles to using inductive heating and chemicals as ways to keep food warm in transit, the beauty of SavrPak’s approach is its simplicity. SavrPak new prototype uses a small plant-based patch that is placed in the food packaging that extracts moisture and keeps the food warm. The packaging is insulated, and the combined impact is warmer (and less soggy food).

The soggy-free food part is no surprise for those familiar with SavrPak’s history. The company was originally called Soggy Food Sucks after Bill Birgen developed a patch to keep the lunches he made to take to work at his day job as an aerospace engineer from getting soggy. After patenting the technology and debuting it at The Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase in 2018, companies from around the world began to contact Birgen. Last year, the company rebranded to SavrPak, and Mark Cuban even decided to invest after co-CEO Greg Maselli sent him a cold email.

I asked Birgen how it feels to create successor technologies and see the company grow beyond that original concept he came up with for your work lunch?

“It’s been incredible to see SAVRpak resonate with people and businesses around the world,” said Birgen. “I’m most energized about our plans to help the food industry be more sustainable. We see huge potential in SAVRpak’s ability to extend the shelf life of produce and reduce food waste.”

According to company co-CEO Grant Stafford, the company’s new packaging prototype is being trialed by Kitchen United and a variety of QSRs, and he expects the product to roll out in both the US and Mexico this quarter.

After Cold Email Pitch, Mark Cuban Invests in SAVRpak (Formerly Soggy Food Sucks)

Perhaps the old addage “It never hurts to ask” has never been more true than in the case of SAVRpak. The company announced today that it has closed a $3.5 million Series A round of funding led by famed investor Mark Cuban. How did Cuban get involved? SAVRpak’s co-founder and co-CEO Greg Maselli skipped the Shark Tank and sent Cuban a cold email directly.

We don’t know what magical combination of words Maselli used to sway Cuban (presumably it did not involve NFTs or Dogecoin), but SAVRpak is actually a pretty good pitch in and of itself. The company produces special patches made from paper and a plant-pup-based solution that are affixed inside food takeout containers. Using the principles of thermodynamics, the patches absorb moisture to keep delivery food crisp and fresh (no soggy fries). The patch does not use chemicals and will receive its biodegradable certification later this year. 

We hate to brag, but we knew SAVRpak was cool way before Cuban. The company used to be known as Soggy Food Sucks, and it won the Startup Showcase at our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit. The company changed its name to SAVRpak in September of last year when it realized that family-friendly brands didn’t necessarily want to do business with any company with “Sucks” in their name.

When we spoke to SAVRpak last September, company co-founder, Bill Birgen said that COVID-19 had been a double-edged sword for his company. On the one hand, with restaurant dining rooms shut down, delivery and takeout were bigger than ever. But at the same time, restaurants hanging on by a thread were reluctant to add another item to their expense sheet.

In September, SAVRpak was producing 1 million units per month and had plans to scale production up to 15 million units per month by the end of the year. With this new funding, SAVRpak said it will expand production capacity by up to 50 million units a month, and advance applications in the agriculture, grocery, and consumer markets.

It was actually a Mark Cuban-heavy weekend for Spoon-related companies. In addition to SAVRpak, home beer brewing appliance startup, BEERMKR, appeared on Shark Tank last Friday. But while the cold email from SAVRpak resulted in an investment from Cuban, BEERMKR’s pitch got the cold shoulder from Cuban (though to be fair, BEERMKR taped that episode back in September, before the wider shipments of its devices).

Soggy Food Sucks Re-Brands as SavrPak, Starts Scaling Up

When Soggy Food Sucks won the Startup Showcase at our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, you could kinda tell that its moniker wasn’t long for this world. Like the name of some local indie band, Soggy Food Sucks caught your attention and told you exactly what it does, but didn’t exactly scream big enterprise business.

Well today, the company announced a re-branding. Soggy Food Sucks is now the much more professional sounding SavrPak.

“I named the company myself, when it was just me,” Bill Birgen, Founder of Soggy Food Sucks SavrPak told me by phone this week. But the name became a potential issue when talking with prospective high-profile, family-friendly brands who were hesitant about partnering with anything that “sucks.”

For those unfamiliar with the company, SavrPak makes a patch that sticks to the inside of food containers and absorbs moisture. The result, the company promises is, well, no more soggy food when you order delivery.

Birgen said that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bit of a double-edge sword for the company. On the one hand, delivery and off-premises eating is more important to restaurant business than ever. But on the other hand, restaurants, whose margins were already thin before the pandemic, are reluctant to add any new expenses like a patch for to-go containers.

“COVID was a curveball,” Birgen said. “Customers were ready to receive product, but it’s probably a good thing they didn’t. They may not have been around to pay us.”

According to Birgen, SavrPak is producing 1 million units per month and is scaling up to produce 15 million units per month by the end of the year. The company has a number of brands testing out its patch including Wahoo’s Fish Tacos and Kitchen United, with the latter offering SavrPak’s as a packaging add-on for brands housed in its ghost kitchens.

In addition to ramping up production, SavrPak is also developing a patch that can be dropped into products like bags of salad to help keep produce fresh. The company is also in the process of receiving compostability certification. This is a good thing, considering the incredible amount of single-use container waste being generated by the rise in take out and delivery.

SavrPak isn’t the only company tackling the issue of soggy food sucking. Packaging company Novolex makes the EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers that help keep food crisp through “micro-flute corrugation” built into its to-go containers.

With the pandemic still very much impacting our eating habits, off-premises isn’t going away anytime soon. That sucks for a lot of reasons, but when it comes to eating delivery at home, maybe SavrPak can make it suck less?

Q&A: Bill Birgen is Developing New Technology to Keep Your Delivery French Fries Fresh

At the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} 2018, Bill Birgen got up onstage during the Startup Showcase and started talking about a problem that many of us have struggled with: soggy delivery french fries.

“We’ve all experienced the disappointment of food delivery, when our food arrives after being ravaged — ravaged I say — by the horror of condensation,” he said. Annoyed by the severe drop in quality of certain foods during delivery, Birgen, a former rocket scientist, decided to create a technology that would keep food crisp, fresh, and decidedly not soggy while en route to your home. Thus his company, Soggy Food Sucks, was born.

Birgen won the 2018 Startup Showcase. This year he will return to the SKS stage as a speaker to talk about how he’s rethinking food packaging in the age of delivery. To whet your appetite, we sat down with Birgen to do a quick Q&A. Check it out below then be sure to snag your tickets to SKS before they sell out!

You won the SKS Startup Showcase last year with your startup Soggy Food Sucks (congrats!). Tell us more about it.
The 2018 SKS was the first time I had presented my idea in public. Prior to presenting, I was so filled with tremendous apprehension regarding how my invention would be received. Condensation in food delivery is a gap and a pain that I had never heard anyone complain about. The response from the SKS audience and judges were sources of tremendous validation. Winning SKS and subsequent food industry events is an ongoing source of encouragement and motivation. It all started at SKS 2018. I’m really looking forward to returning to SKS 2019, this time as a member of the broader food industry fraternity and less as the dark horse outsider.

Looking back I can say I am happy with how succinctly I managed to describe the thermodynamic mechanisms, and the condensation nuances surrounding my product. in my 2018 SKS Showcase presentation. I had a few coaches help with my presentation, but in the end, I largely ignored their advice. The advice I kept receiving was to tell a story and avoid being overly technical. For me to be authentic meant being technical. While I didn’t tell a story in a traditional sense, I do feel I was able to be engaging and dare I say entertaining. The Facebook Live stream that I shared online has thousands of view. SKS was fantastic exposure.

Has anything changed for your company since you won the Showcase?
Immediately following SKS2018 TechStars offered me a position in their upcoming accelerator. I did not realize what a huge opportunity TechStars was. Naively, I turned down TechStars, with the expectation that I would be selected as one of the eight startups for Chipotle’s first ever accelerator. When I was not accepted into Chipotle’s accelerator I continued forward, bootstrapping as I had before.

The product itself has recently been redesigned for aesthetics and re-branded as SAVR-pak. The first automated, real production inventory has been received at our distribution facility. Deliveroo has placed a purchase order. GrubHub, and Door Dash cannot be far behind. Marina Bay Sands, Wynn Casinos, Disney and Virgin hotels have all reached out for product and demonstrations. Cambro wants a larger size product that will integrate seamlessly with their larger food delivery platforms.

Subsequent patents have been filed in an adjacent food packaging space. The focus of this new product being the elimination of frost inside frozen food packaging. One of the largest fresh fish processor in Hong Kong has adopted this new anti-frost packaging product.

Think big: How do you envision your technology changing the food delivery experience?
B2C is a massive market that I plan on addressing a year or two down the road, due to the scale of the education and marking required. I will let the public become familiar with seeing my SAVR-pak in food delivery and catering applications before putting it on the shelf at supermarkets, next to cellophane sandwich bags and brown paper lunch bags.

The goal all along of my humble invention was to create a higher expectation for food quality, when it comes to food delivery and storage. Delivering food that is fresher, means less food will be discarded. Aesthetically, it is so much more appealing to open a container sans hundreds of water droplets clinging to every surface. So much of our food experience is aesthetics and perception. Soggy Food Sucks has introduced the SAVR-pak to help with food quality and to reduce waste.

What’s the absolute worst food to eat soggy?
By far the resounding answer from the food delivery industry is French fries. This perspective is biased in my opinion, by the pervasiveness of French fries on our menus. I would challenge this obvious answer, and say spinach salad is the worst soggy food. The spinach leaf has a delicate structure that is quickly compromised by condensation. The result is not just soggy but limp and even slimy spinach, which is wholly inedible. A salad that has been touched by condensation cannot be eaten.

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.

Video: Soggy Food Sucks Uses Thermodynamics to Keep your Fries Crisp During Delivery

“When we talk about the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS), it’s not just about being smart or connected,” said Michael Wolf before he announced the winner of the SKS 2018 Startup Showcase. “It’s about finding an interesting product that hasn’t been there before that solves for a real consumer need. And this winner really showed me that.”

Indeed, Soggy Food Sucks, who took home the title of Overall Winner at the Startup Showcase, makes a product that seems almost deceptively simple. Their frozen patch sticks to the inside of a food containers and wicks condensation to keep takeaway eats crispy, crunchy, and decidedly non-soggy. No artificial intelligence, virtual reality, or robots in sight.

Despite its lack of bells and whistles, Soggy Food Sucks captured the judges’ attention because it solves a real, relatable problem in the food delivery space: how to keep food crisp during its journey from the restaurant to your home.

“We’ve all experienced the disappointment of food delivery, when our food arrives after being ravaged — ravaged I say — by the horror of condensation,” preached Birgen onstage. So he decided to use his engineering know-how (he used to be an actual rocket scientist) and solve the problem with some basic chemistry.

Watch the full video to see Birgen’s charismatic pitch for a product that we think has the power to massively improve the food delivery business. See ya never, soggy fries.

SKS 2018 Startup Showcase: Soggy Food Sucks

For more videos of panels, fireside chats, and startup pitches from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit head to our YouTube channel!