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  • Spoon Plus subscribers can access all of the content below.

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May 4, 2023

The Spoon 2023 3D Printing Deep Dive

To hear what’s happening in the world of 3D food printing, The Spoon brought together some of the leading thinkers in the world of food printing for a conversation about the current state of this nascent market.

We discussed the current and future outlook for software-controlled printed food, beverage printing, meat printing technology, food printers for space travel & more!

Speakers:

  • Jonathan Blutinger – Coauthor, The future of software-controlled cooking
  • Anjan Contractor – CEO, BeeHex
  • Marine Coré Baillais – Founder, The Digital Patisserie
  • Giuseppe Scionti – CEO, NovaMeat

March 9, 2023

Video Sessions: Food Robotics Outlook 2023

We also heard from entrepreneur and restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, who is reinventing his neighborhood restaurant with digital technology and robotics.

Atish Aloor told us how his company CloudChef is creating a way to digitize the chef and building an operating system for repeatable, high-quality cooking.

Mark Oleynik of Moley and Khalid Aboujassoum of Else Labs discussed the opportunity and challenges of building cooking robots for the home kitchen.

Arthur Chow of S2G Ventures and Buck Jordan of Vebu Labs discussed the funding environment for food robotics startups and how the market’s unique characteristics make it different from other food tech verticals.

This content is for Spoon Plus subscribers. However, if you are interested, you can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

February 20, 2023

Video Sessions: How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change The Food Biz

The summit included the following panels:

The Potential Applications of Generative AI – Speaker: Neil Sahota (UN AI Advisor, former IBM Master Inventor, Author “Own the A.I. Revolution: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition”

Generative AI & The Future of Restaurants – Speakers: Hadi Rashid (cofounder, Lunchbox) and Matt Wampler (CEO & cofounder, ClearCOGS)

Creating Next-Gen Proteins with AI – Speakers: Geoffroy Dubourg-Felonneau (Machine-learning lead, Shiru)

Customer Interaction & AI: What’s the Future? – Speakers: Deon Nicholas (CEO, Forethought AI), Benjamin Brown (Head of Marketing, ConverseNow).

These sessions are available for subscribers of Spoon Plus. To get access to these sessions, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus here.

January 30, 2023

The CES 2023 Food Tech Review

Despite all that hard work, we still made time to check out many of the food tech startups making their way to Las Vegas in January and, now, we have included all of that research in the CES Food Tech 2023 Review.

Before you read this report, here is a quick note on how we structured this review:

Category: We included a number of different categories for the food tech review. We categorized each company into the primary category they represented themself as for CES 2023. These categories included everything from agtech to kitchen tech to food robotics.

One sentence description and company HQ location: We also included a short one-sentence description of each company’s product and where they are headquartered.

Company description: For each company, we included a description of the company and what they were showing at the show. These were sourced from the company’s announcements, The Spoon’s own articles, as well as, if possible, from checking them out on the show floor during CES.

Mike’s Take: For most companies, we included a quick take about their product or technology to provide some context around their showing at CES and how we see them fitting into the broader food tech market.

Video: Since we know that showing is often the best way for someone to get a quick understanding of a product, we tried to include a video about each company. Some of the videos were shot by The Spoon at CES, others were captured by the company or another publication. For additional context, for each video, we included who produced the video and, if possible, a general time frame for when it was created.

Mapping Them Out

Our Japan partners at SIGMAXYZ created a nice graphic mapping out the different food tech startups they found at CES. The categories, by and large, correspond with how we saw them, with only a few difference. You can click on an enlarged version of the map here.

 

If you’d like to read the full report, you can subscribe to Spoon Plus, our premium research service, here. 

September 4, 2021

Come Along On A Video Tour of a Plant-Based Chicken Manufacturing Plant

This video is a tour of the Rebellyous Foods plant in Seattle. Rebellyous makes plant-based chicken nuggets, patties, and tenders. Our guide for the tour is Rebellyous cofounder and CEO, Christie Lagally.

Our tour starts off with a presentation by Lagally, who gives us an introduction to Rebellyous. After that, we go on a walking tour of the Rebellyous factory.

Note on the tour video: It was presented via the Zoom platform and I was the cameraman (apologies for the lack of camera stabilizer!). I followed Christie around and fielded questions from our partners in Japan.

Enjoy the tour! This video tour is available for Spoon Plus Subscribers. You can click here to learn more about Spoon Plus.

March 19, 2021

Video: Alex Canter on the Evolution of Restaurant Tech Before, During, and After the Pandemic

Among the things in the restaurant industry COVID-19 changed forever, businesses’ relationship to technology is a big one.

Historically, many restaurants have been slow to adopt much, if any, technology for their day-to-day operations. That worked so long as the bulk meals served were going out to dining rooms. When the pandemic shut those down, businesses were suddenly scrambling to accommodate the sudden demand for takeout and delivery formats as well as the industry-wide shift towards digital ordering. 

Of restaurant tech’s evolution over the last year, Ordermark cofounder and CEO Alex Canter says, “10 years of progress maybe happened in a couple of months, not out desire, but really out of necessity.” 

I recently got the opportunity to chat with Canter over Zoom. A longtime restaurant industry veteran (his family owns Los Angeles’ famous Canter’s Deli), he’s no stranger to the concept of either running a restaurant or improving its operations and margins through technology. Ordermark, meanwhile, was helping restaurants manage their delivery orders long before Covid-19 hit, and NextBite, the newest entrant to the family, assists businesses with launching virtual restaurant concepts.

All of which is to say, if you want a glimpse into the concepts and technologies that will matter moving forward for restaurants, Cater’s brain is a good one to pick. Below you can watch our full conversation, and also read along with the transcript.

The Spoon Interview: Alex Canter of Ordermark from The Spoon on Vimeo.

Jenn Marston
Hi, everybody, I’m Jenn Marston with The Spoon. I’m here today with Alex Cantor from Ordermark and NextBite, and we’re going to talk some restaurant tech today.

About the middle of March in 2020, restaurants had to close because of state regulations and health and safety concerns. Over the last year, we’ve seen the most incredible shift towards new technologies towards new dining formats. Alex and I are going to have a conversation about that evolution and specifically, what’s the technology driving these changes? What can we really expect to be around for the long term? So, Alex, thanks for joining me today. And before we get into all that, why don’t you give us a little bit of what happened and what it’s like now for you and your companies.

Alex Canter:
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I’m happy to share my thoughts here. And I think everything is moving so quickly that, you know, it just feels like we’re in this the fastest changing market we’ve been in as a restaurant industry. And I want to start by just saying this has been a devastating year for restaurants. There’s no denying how challenging this has been for restaurants, from mom and pops to large chains and everything in between. We’ve already seen over 120,000 restaurants go out of business in the last 12 months, which is a crazy large number.

There are a lot of predictions around what was coming over the next 10 years in terms of technology and advancements shifted digital ordering. And COVID really accelerated a lot of that shift forward. I think, you know, 10 years of progress maybe happened in a couple of months, not out desire, but really out of necessity. And it was because restaurants had to really scramble to figure out, How am I going to keep up? How am I going to have to change my business to accommodate this new reality where dining rooms are shut down, and cities are going into lockdown. There are a lot of restaurants that were set up well for [that]. Think the Wingstop world that already had so much of their digital tech stack figured out and already had a very solid plan in motion and team members dedicated to the digital experience.

But for the majority of the industry and particularly most of the mom and pops, it feels like it was an all-out scramble to try to very quickly get creative, figure out new ways to reach customers rethink menus, rethink technology in general. And that has been a very fascinating thing to watch happen in such a short amount of time because there’s so much to learn for a lot of these restaurants that were newer to this experience.

We started Ordermark four years ago to help provide technology solutions to restaurants to be able to adapt to this new digital off-premise diamond world that we live in. And Ordermark has worked with thousands of restaurants to aggregate all of their incoming online orders, giving restaurants the single device in their kitchen to power orders from Doordash and Postmates and all the channels that they’re utilizing.

But since Day One, Ordermark has always been in the business of helping restaurants drive incremental orders into their underutilized kitchen. And we at the end of 2019 we started developing and bringing to market a newer product offering that we launched called NextBite, which is our portfolio of delivery-only turnkey brains, virtual restaurant brands. So we’ve basically created [the platform] from scratch based on you know data of what’s performing well in which markets and what time of day. We’ve really built these menus that are designed for an off-premise experience and we’ve been working with restaurants to to basically train them on how to become a facility partner for for additional menus and drive an extra 10, 20, 30 orders a day. [Many of] these kitchens are underutilized. They have extra capacity [and] fixed costs already running. Like, the rent is fixed, the lights are already on, the staff is already in the kitchen of these hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the U.S. Why not do more out of one kitchen by launching three to five additional virtual restaurant brands.

That was really the premise for NextBite. We built it with a with a in a pre-COVID world with full dining rooms in mind. And the operational complexity of running the restaurant is already very challenging that we knew when we were building these concepts and these menus, we didn’t want to build anything that was going to come in and disrupt the restaurants existing operation. But rather, you know, be incremental and additional in a way that that’s lighter for the restaurant to adopt.

In a post-COVID world, there’s been a massive adoption of restaurants who need these additional orders more than ever. And as a company, we’ve been able to make a very big impact for these restaurants when we come in and layer on top of their existing business a couple extra $100,000 a year in annualized gross sales. So we you know, we’ve been really focused as a company on what can we be doing right now to help make sure that our restaurant customers and partners that we’re working with can make it through and come out even stronger. And you know, we have gotten love letters, restaurants saying these orders really [make the difference of] keeping the doors open or not. And I think that’s really been motivating for our team specifically. And it’s helped bring a lot of business into our company and attract a lot of investor attention, which is why we at the end of last year, we ended up raising a Series C led by SoftBank, which was $120 million financing to do what we’re doing on a much bigger scale. I’m trying to really advance more restaurants forward into this new digital era.

So it’s been a roller coaster of a year, we’re incredibly grateful that as a business, we ended up on the right side of all of this, to be in a position to really help these restaurants. Because I know that there, there are a lot of restaurant technology companies that, you know, unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of this as well. And a lot of what was happening from you know, in-store applications like reservations and catering businesses that that just became irrelevant overnight in such a short amount of time with no notice. It’s really hard when things are moving so fast. But we did see a lot of new technologies emerge such as the QR code making a massive comeback in the restaurant industry. Just just a lot of experimentation with curbside and restaurants turning their menus into grocery shops, which are like restaurants that offer groceries and obviously the old versions of virtual restaurants. It’s been a really crazy last 12 months. So there’s so much to talk about. I have a lot of ideas for where things are headed as well. But but that’s that’s basically an overview of what what we’ve seen happen over the last 12 months.

Jenn Marston: I’ll echo that it’s been really devastating for a lot of restaurants out there. To me, one of the really attractive things about what you all are doing with NextBite is it, it seems like you’re in some way showing restaurants that there can be digital options, there can be strategies for doing delivery, and takeout and virtual restaurants without them having to go off and invest a bunch of upfront capital or sign, you know, really long leases with traditional commissary kitchens. But this seems like a, for lack of a better word, a more frictionless way for your average restaurant to be able to introduce another revenue stream without having to really overhaul what they’re already doing.

Alex Canter: I think you’re thinking about it correctly. When I think about what’s happening right now I see these vacant dining rooms that are that are way too large. You think about fine dining restaurants, full service restaurants. I felt this way even pre-COVID, but I felt like the restaurant market in general was already very oversaturated and very difficult to even be successful. First place because there are so many options. And as more and more people enjoy the convenience of delivery, the need for those large seating capacity diminishes over time. And the need for larger kitchen spaces actually is even more in demand than ever.

In order to produce food for both in-store and takeout, you need to have the means to have more kitchen space to have more staff to be able to produce work in the back of the house from the front of the house. And so I think over time, we’re going to see dining rooms getting smaller with a bigger emphasis on the size of the kitchen, which I think we’re starting to see a little bit with these new ghost kitchen facilities and commissary kitchens that are designed specifically for an off-premise and delivery and takeout experience.

But the desire to dine out at restaurants will never go away. People will always want to enjoy restaurants and hospitality, in the experience of celebrating a birthday going on a date, going out to eat with friends, that’s something that will never go away. But it’s tough for restaurants to even hit three to 5 percent margins on an annual basis. And that’s why a lot of restaurants fail in their first or second year. Even in a pre-COVID world, there was there were too many options. And now, you know, I’m hoping that this, this is somewhat of a market correction that’s happening, we’re coming out of this, the restaurants that do survive and make it out will be stronger. And, you know, it’s hard to know how long that’s going to take. But there’s still a very exciting restaurant market ahead of us that, you know, is gonna just be a little bit more advanced for from a tech perspective, from a digital family perspective. We saw a lot of restaurants, resisting off-premise and delivery for a long time. And now, you know, it’s their lifeline. It’s where more than 50 percent of their orders are happening. And even as they open up their dining rooms and make shift back a little bit, [off-premises] will be a strong part of the off the experience. I don’t see there being many restaurants who don’t have some sort of off-premises experience coming out of this.

Jenn Marston: Yeah, I would I would agree with that. Let’s talk for a minute about those big dining rooms that are currently sitting empty, because we were seeing some, there is some trickling back to the dining rooms, I mean, different states have different relax different regulations. At the same time, obviously, vaccines are slowly but surely getting distributed. So at some point in the near(ish) future, the option to go out and eat at a restaurant is going to be less less scary for folks, basically. But where do you see? And you could you kind of already alluded to this, but you don’t see this need for delivery, and takeout and curbside, and all these other formats going away.

Alex Canter: You know, I think I think the ordering demographic has really shifted over the last year. It used to be a lot of 18- to 34-year olds who were using these apps and placing orders on Doordash. That has really expanded to all generations, from teenagers to you know, my grandparents [use] Doordash because they can’t go out and don’t feel safe going to restaurants anymore. But now that they’ve gotten used to this platform, they have the Dashpass they have their address saved on file, their favorite order restaurants are order history. This is a convenience that’s not going away anytime soon.

That larger demographic is naturally going to mean that a larger percentage of orders volumes can happen [off-premises]. Also with business travel changing. You know, many offices have committed to hiring remotely and not going back to centralized workplaces. And therefore I think, you know, opportunities with catering are going to permanently shift. And I foresee more of the happening through delivery and takeout. Restaurants have to adjust and get used to that. There were so many restaurants that were that were largely dependent on big catering orders. I think the event spaces will return your weddings, large parties, stuff like that will start to open back up again, but probably not the same levels that we’ve seen in the past.

Depending on what type of business you are, you’re probably coming out of this a little bit different. You have to rethink the consumer experience. And you see companies like Sweetgreen implementing drive-thru [and] examples of restaurants understanding that their customer base wants to interact with them differently than maybe before. And that that’s where it’s really hard to adjust and make those changes, I think, you know, many, many SMB operators and mom-and-pop restaurants don’t have digital teams. People have marketing teams, traditionally, sometimes maybe the owners do need some of the marketing themselves. But there’s so much technology that’s available now. And it’s up to the restaurants to figure out, to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t work in a very quick way. And we’ve seen some really, really impressive restaurants, you know, very quickly understand that they can’t just sit around and wait for things to get better and change. But they have to go out and make the really hard adjustments. So their business models to their staffing to their to their tech stack to really embrace what’s happening rather than sitting idly by hoping that things are gonna get better.

Jenn Marston: I know you and your family obviously are in the restaurant industry. I don’t think we’ve mentioned that yet. But, and I know Canter’s was already pretty savvy before the pandemic, you all were doing the ghost kitchens and the off-premise and things like that. But just from your own personal experience and your family’s experience, you know, what is Cantor has had to kind of deal with in terms of this adjustment you’re talking about?

Alex Canter: Yeah, so Canter’s is one of the largest and oldest restaurants in Los Angeles. And we had a very devastating start to this whole COVID experience where we had to lay off almost 90 full-time employees, from from waiters, the busboys, dishwashers, some that have been working in the restaurant for 30, 40, 50 years. It was, you know, incredibly challenging to make that that common decision and we as a, as a restaurant, we knew that this was not going to be a sustainable operation in a delivery-only format. Until, you know, until we start to get more creative. Luckily, funding definitely helped, we probably would not be open today without it. But that’s kind of a short-lived solution.

We ended up having to rethink many reasons pricing rethink the the entire physical experience when you walk in, to cater to an off-premise-only demographic and, and you know, we luckily were able to make those pivots and changes very quickly. LA did allow outdoor dining, but we decided not to invest in converting our space to accommodate that because it was quite an investment for so much uncertainty of like, how long is this gonna last? And luckily, we didn’t because shortly after outdoor dining became that thing, they actually pulled it back again. And it’s it’s been an emotional roller coaster for all these restaurants trying to figure out how to make this work.

Especially in the beginning, there was so little notice [around when] these changes were going to go into effect. From an inventory standpoint, we prepared for full dine in service and then we’d get a notification tonight at midnight [about closing].

Luckily, you know, Canter’s is a very big name that has a big following in LA. And so we’ve done very well on a delivery only capacity. But it’s because we’re getting a couple 100 orders a day through these third party marketplaces. Not every restaurant has that kind of volume to be able to generate enough through these platforms to sustain a delivery-only operation. And I think, the sooner that more of these cities will open up person, even if it’s just for outdoor dining, 25 percent capacity, the more likely restaurants will come out of this. But I think there’s also something to be said for, you know, the staff and feeling safe. And I’m glad that I think as of today, people who work in the food industry, at least in LA County, can now get the vaccine, which I’m sure is happening more and more cities. And I’m, I’m hopeful that that will happen. That rollout will happen faster than anticipated. Because, you know, if if these restaurant employees were showing up every day and putting themselves at risk, aren’t feeling safe at work, it’s a very hard situation to navigate for an owner to try to, you know, keep the doors open. Restaurant staff is like family, and you don’t want to put anyone at risk or expose anyone to any dangerous situation. So even even in the beginning, when we wanted to stay open for delivery and takeout, there was some hesitation.

It’s been a journey to get to this point. But for my family’s restaurant, I think we’ll come out stronger again, just like we have for the last nine years, we’ve survived wars and recessions. It’s all because of this mentality of like, we have to adapt or die, we’ll have to make changes, embrace change, embrace new technology. And, you know, I think that’s been the key to our success over the years.

Jenn Marston: I think that’s a great point. What would you say to restaurants out there in terms of what are some of the most important things that they can do for themselves right now, to continue adapting, or if they haven’t done that much to get the ball rolling?

Alex Canter: First and foremost, if you have extra capacity in your kitchen, you should absolutely be experimenting with creating virtual brands, licensing other people’s virtual brands, but really trying to maximize the output of your kitchen. That’s a very low-hanging fruit in my opinion, which we’re seeing a lot of the chains starting to embrace now. We’ve seen announcements from everyone from Chili’s to Bloomin’ Brands to Applebee’s. Denny’s have experimented with luxury, several different menus, several different concepts running out of their kitchens, and those incremental orders are so critical right now. And you know, whether you try to do a virtual restaurant brand yourself or you partner with a company like NextBite or any others in the space, I think that is that is such an obvious way to to drive more orders into your restaurant every single day. So if you’re not doing that, or you’re hesitant for any reason, I highly suggest you try it and just see what happens. You know that there is a big learning curve to understanding how to get it right. And how to, you know, create the right menu and price it and promote it and optimize the placement within the platforms. It’s not as simple as just lighting up a menu on these platforms. But you know, start that process of understanding what works and what doesn’t work, because there’s a lot of opportunity just sitting there. And if you’re not, if you’re only running one, your own restaurant, every kitchen, I think you’re probably you probably have a lot more need for growth, unless you’re in and out of alignment your door every moment of every hour of every day. I think virtual restaurants can benefit everyone who doesn’t have that situation.

Jenn Marston: Any any thing else in terms of I know, we’ve talked in the past about? Also, it’s not a matter of just taking your existing menu and plunking it online, right? It’s, you know, maybe thinking about scaling it back or thinking about which foods might be best suited to this, these kind of newer formats and things like that.

Alex Canter: Yeah, well, you know, one, one strategy that I think every restaurant should be focusing on is shifting as much of your order volume from off-premise from third-party delivery to your own website or your own app. It’s easier said than done, for sure. But at a baseline, you should have an ordering button link on your website, whether it’s powered by ChowNow or Lunchbox or any of these companies that that allow restaurants to take orders directly. It is, you know, every order that’s happening on those platforms, you don’t have to give up as much of a percentage is it’s better. But the reality of the situation is that a disproportionate amount of the volume will still happen on third-party marketplaces. But there are a lot of companies focusing on restaurants creating their own digital strategy to get people to convert through their own service platform. So that’s something that everyone should be looking into as well.

Jenn Marston: I wanted to end just by asking a question, you put it really well, at the beginning of this conversation, we you talked about the just the sheer pace of acceleration and how we’ve, you know, in, what did you say we basically did 10 years in two months, in terms of just adoption and these changes. So as we move away from these widespread lockdowns and dining room closures and things like that, do you see this pace of tech adoption and delivery and takeout adoption slowing down significantly in the near future? Do you think we’ll kind of continue quickly for some time?

Alex Canter: Well, from pace perspective, I don’t think the percentages will remain the same. Look at the third-party marketplaces, all the ordering channels, they grew their businesses in some situations three to 5x last year. I don’t think any of those companies will experience the same kind of growth in 2021, just because so many restaurants were scrambling to implement delivery last year. But I see all of these these companies continuing their growth, just not the same pieces as maybe what happened last year.

You think back maybe 15 years ago, most restaurants didn’t even have a point of sale system. There was like maybe a credit card terminal and a cash register. And, you know, the, the evolution of this space has historically been slow. But now, it’s not a choice anymore. It’s something you have to really embrace and take on and and experiment with. And luckily, there are hundreds of great restaurant-tech companies out there that are helping businesses in different ways. And I think it’s really important right now to be experimenting with, with as much as we can handle from a bandwidth perspective. Because there’s a lot [of technology], as a restaurant owner, I probably was pitched by over 500 different restaurant tech companies trying to bring in new services. And some some of those technologies were game changing for us way back in the early days of Groupon or Yelp, or even a third party marketplaces themselves, these were companies that really carried a lot of volume for us. And, you know, without them, I don’t know if we would have made it this far. So it’s really, really hard to navigate this space, because there’s so much happening. It’s like drinking from a firehose and when you think about your tech stack and your strategy, especially as it’s moving so quickly, but I definitely am encouraging as many restaurants to embrace that experimentation.

Jenn Marston: Excellent. Well, thank you for chatting with me, Alex. And for those of you watching and listening, hope this has been helpful and we’ll be running quite a few of these videos and pieces over the next couple of weeks on the spoon. So thanks again, Alex. And Take care everybody.

March 17, 2021

Video and Transcript: One Pandemic Later, Spain’s LABe Keeps on Digitizing the Gastronomy Experience

This interview video and transcript is available to Spoon Plus subscribers. Learn more here about subscribing to Spoon Plus. 

February 3, 2021

The Delivery Robot Market Report

Allowing robots to handle the last mile of these deliveries could do much to make restaurant and grocery delivery faster, enable those deliveries to occur around the clock, and bring down both labor costs and prices for consumers. Self-driving delivery vehicles could also reduce congestion on city streets and bring more equity to our food system. 

But the biggest factors currently driving the acceleration of autonomous delivery vehicle adoption aren’t technological. Rather, like so many other aspects of our lives, the COVID-19 pandemic is increasing the demand for both grocery and restaurant deliveries and fueling the desire for fewer person-to-person interactions in the process. 

Market research firm, Second Measure, reports meal delivery sales grew 125 percent year-over-year in September of 2020. With people forced to stay at home more, 34 percent of U.S. consumers ordered from a delivery service, up from 26 percent during the same time last year. 

Grocery delivery also saw surges in demand, particularly in the early days of the pandemic. While not all of the record-setting grocery e-commerce sales were delivery (curbside pickup was also a popular option), they made up a large portion of those sales. In April, grocery delivery service Instacart commanded 57 percent of the grocery e-commerce market. 

Robots, especially for one-off meals and small basket orders, have the potential to expand delivery options. They are small and nimble and can run all day, opening up new opportunities for retailers and restaurants. Grand View Research estimates that the global autonomous last mile delivery market size will hit $84.9 million by 2027 (includes both drone and ground-based robots).  

Before we can get to that idealized vision of delivery, there are still a number of challenges to overcome. State and city regulators need to establish rules and standards around infrastructure and safety while simultaneously maintaining revenues that might otherwise be lost. 

Though fleets of autonomous vehicles winding their way across city streets and bringing last-minute lattes is already happening, their mainstream presence in our lives is far from inevitable. This report will give readers an overview of the current state of food delivery by robotic vehicles, the key players in the space, as well as challenges and opportunities for the sector.

The full report is available for Spoon Plus subscribers. To subscribe or learn more about Spoon Plus, click here.

August 28, 2020

SideChef’s Kevin Yu on the Future of the Kitchen in a Time of Unprecedented Change

He ran a company called SideChef, which made a recipe app, while it was early days for connected appliances and step-by-step guided cooking, Yu was already looking for opportunities to take his recipe app and use it as a central command system for appliances.

It was just six months later Yu was on stage at the first Smart Kitchen Summit talking about how this future we discussed in Austin.

Since that time, much of what we talked about in those early days in Austin has materialized: appliance manufacturers have added connectivity and SideChef has struck deals with many of them to integrate its content and technology. They’ve created their recipe format that atomizes the cooking process and allows for them to launch things like their shoppable recipe integrations.

So in a year with so much change, I thought it would be good to once again catch up with Kevin and his US manager director Carolyn Eschbach to get a read from the front lines of the connected kitchen. We talk about the company’s Facebook Portal integration and the launch of their Premium offering, as well as the rapid changes in consumer behavior. We also talk about how the current state of the connected kitchen.

Subscribers of Spoon Plus can see the full interview below. To learn more about Spoon Plus, click here.

July 22, 2020

The Spoon Plus Guide to Ghost Kitchens

When 2020 began, the ghost kitchen topic poised to be one of the “it” trends to watch over the coming 12 months. Venture capital was pouring into the space, virtual restaurants of all types were popping up, and major quick-service chains were inking deals left and right with ghost kitchen providers. When The Spoon launched its (now outdated) ghost kitchen market map at the end of 2019, we predicted there would be an explosion of virtual restaurant brands and that some major chains would make ghost kitchens a normal part of doing business. 

Nobody predicted a pandemic would swoop in and irrevocably upset the restaurant industry down to its very foundation, which was built on consumers eating meals in dining rooms.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s dire consequences for the restaurant industry cannot be understated, and it would take an entire report of its own to outline just how far-reaching and long lasting the effect will be. A quick overview shows that:

  • Between March and May, eating and drinking place sales were down more than $94 billion from expected levels, according to the National Restaurant Association. 
  • The Association also notes that 4 in 10 restaurants are closed. 
  • More than half — 66 percent — of consumers are not ready to eat in dining rooms again.
  • 1 in 4 restaurants will permanently go out of business because of coronavirus quarantines.

All of this has led to a shift in business models that was underway already but has been accelerated. Off-premises order formats were poised to become restaurants main sales drivers over the next decade. Since the pandemic essentially forced restaurants into a to-go-or-die mentality, that is happening much faster now. 

That in turn has ramped up demand for ghost kitchens. However, just because restaurants are closing and off-premises orders are rising rapidly doesn’t necessarily mean every restaurant should follow the same trajectory when considering a ghost kitchen.

This report examines the kinds of ghost kitchens available to restaurants, the elements they need to consider before actually starting one, and opportunities and challenges in the space.  Companies profiled in this report include: Kitchen United, Kitopi, DoorDash Kitchens, Rebel Foods, CloudKitchens, Zuul Kitchens, ChefReady, Deliveroo Editions, Panda Selected, Muy, Reef Technology, Fat Brands, Brinker International, Wow Bao, The Halal Guys, Keatz, Middleby/Lab2Fab.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

July 10, 2020

Restaurant Robots Used to Be About Labor, Now They’re About Hygiene

This was one of the takeaways from our virtual fireside chat on The State of Restaurant Robotics yesterday. Linda Poulliot, CEO of Dischcraft Robotics, and Clatyon Wood, CEO of Picnic, were our guests, and they shared their insights about what their customers are looking for with automation right now.

At the moment, restaurants, cafeterias and other food service establishments are looking for safety and hygiene, something that robots can definitely help with in a few ways.

For example, Picnic’s pizza assembling robot can top 200 pizzas in an hour without human hands ever touching them. The stretched dough runs on a conveyor belt where robotic nodes dispense the proper amount of toppings consistently. Not only does this reduce the number of people touching food, it also helps in small kitchens where there isn’t enough room for workers to socially distance.

For its part, Dishcraft offers dishes as a service to cafeterias, restaurants and more. Dirty dishes are picked up from a restaurant and brought to a Discraft’s facility where the robot cleans and inspects them better and more environmentally friendly than a human can. The company recently branched out into offering reuseable containers so restaurants can cut down on all the packaging waste that comes with takeout and delivery.

These were just a couple of topics we touched on during our exclusive Spoon Plus event. Spoon Plus subscribers can check out the full video from the event below.

If you’d like to see the full event video, future events and premium reports, interviews and exclusive research, become a member today!

June 24, 2020

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

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