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Why I’m All-in on Smart Vending Machines

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Vending machines are cool.

No, really! Between robotics, IoT and way better food, today’s vending machines are poised to be a great, pardon the phrase, disruptor in food tech.

To fully understand why I’m all-in on vending machines, you should check out my new report, The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report over on Spoon Plus, our new research and virtual events membership community.

The report covers a ton of players in the space including Chowbotics, Yo-Kai, API-Tech and many, many more. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but here are just a few reasons I’m so excited about the smart vending machine space:

  1. COVID-19. If/when we all emerge from this pandemic, people will want fewer human hands touching their food. Smart vending machines literally keep all their ingredients inside a sealed box and provide automated service.
  2. Small footprint. Because they don’t require much physical space, they can be set up quickly almost anywhere and run around the clock. They also provide a lower-cost way to launch a food brand into new outlets (like existing retail spaces!).
  3. Better food. Robotic arms and fast service don’t amount to much if the food is junk. Thankfully, there is a new wave of machines making fresh food from menus created by actual chefs.

To be sure, things right now aren’t exactly rosy for the smart vending machine space. Cafe X shut down its SF locations, Stockwell shut down and the European Vending & Coffee Service Association said its operators are experiencing losses of up to 90 percent.

It’s not hard to understand why we’re in a dark time. Vending machines are meant to be in high-traffic areas where people want food quickly. Places like airports, offices and dorms. Guess what’s shut down right now? Airports, offices and dorms.

But as I lay out in the report, there’s reason to believe that new opportunities will arise, and with it the whole smart vending sector.

Sign up for Spoon Plus and take a look at the report let me know what you think.

Could Apple Clips Bring Contactless Payments into the Mainstream?

During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, Apple announced App Clips. Basically, it let’s you get can access specific functionality of an app without having to download the full version of that app.

So for example, you could visit a coffee shop and pay with your phone without having to download that coffee shop’s app, set up an account and enter credit card information. Everything is done through Apple Sign In and Apple Pay.

This is actually a big move in a pandemic world where contactless payment options will be more important when it comes to getting customers to eat inside restaurants again. Apple greasing the skids like this with its massive footprint could make contactless payments more ubiquitous.

Apple also showed off other potential uses for Clips, including finding a nearby restaurant and even interacting with connected kitchen services like Drop. Perhaps we’ll see micro-transactions for connected devices, like buying a recipe specifically for an appliance, rather than getting a premium subscription.

We’ll certainly be watching to see what kitchen uses Clips comes up with.

Investing into the Future of Restaurant Tech

Restaurants are going through an unprecedented time of flux. What are some of the opportunities and challenges ahead for the industry? Brita Rosenheim, a Partner at Better Food Ventures recently shared her thoughts on “the new normal” for restaurants and what they need to do to adapt. Following is an excerpt of her guest post (you should totally read the whole thing, though):

Convenience reigns supreme: The shift to take-out/delivery will reshape the basic premise of many restaurants

Well before COVID-related shutdowns, the increasing customer demands for convenience had already fueled a major shift from dine-in to take out/delivery. In 2019, we reached the tipping point where off-premise sales (drive-thru, takeout, delivery, catering) represented a majority of U.S. restaurant revenues. Now, intensified by a decimated restaurant industry and an uncertain socially distanced future, the growth of off-premise will only continue.

As restaurant operators increasingly respond to our “new normal”, we have seen many full-service restaurant concepts testing a more “fast casual” off-premise approach, with increased tech-focused integration, minimized employee/customer exposure, and a lot of creativity to inject hospitality into socially-distanced interactions.

The bottom line is that the restaurant experience – from QSR to Fine Dining – will increasingly no longer be confined to the four walls of a restaurant. We have reached an urgent point where the basic premise of dine-in restaurants must evolve in order to generate the sales volume and margins to remain financially viable. 

The Premium-ization of Coffee and Taking Roasting to the Edge

Bellwether Coffee makes ventless, electric coffee roasters the size of a fridge that automate the roasting process. It’s an interesting play to take coffee roasting away from centralized producers and bring it closer to the edge. At least in theory, that means fresher java for consumers, and bigger savings for Bellwether customers (which range from cafés to grocery stores).

To learn more about how coffee roasting is evolving — and where the coffee market is headed in general post-COVID — I spoke with Bellwether’s CEO Nathan Gilliland. 

This long-form interview is exclusive to Spoon Plus subscribers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

S2G Ventures’ Managing Director on the 4 FoodTech Trends That Will Rise Post-COVID (Spoon Plus)

I wanted to (virtually) sit down with Krishnan to discuss S2G’s recent white paper entitled “The Future of Food in the Age of COVID-19.” It outlines four foodtech trends that S2G expects will grow in the coming months and years: digitalization, decentralized food systems, de-commoditization, and food as as medicine. Krishnan and I unpacked these four trends — and speculated about how investors will change their focus post-COVID — in our call.

The Deep Dive interview is available for subscribers to Spoon Plus. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

How a Materials Scientist Invented an Edible Way to Keep Your Avocados Ripe for Longer (Spoon Plus)

Apeel just raised $250 million from investors including celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry. I spoke with Rogers a few days before they announced the funding to learn more about how he, a materials scientist, got the idea to switch from creating solar panels to developing produce technology. We also got into bigger discussions around food waste, how tech is mitigating it, and the ways in which COVID is affecting our relationship with food (and waste).

The interview is an exclusive offering for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Melissa Snover of Nourished on How 3D Printing is the Key to Personalized Food (Spoon Plus)

Since Nourished lies at the intersection of two burgeoning food tech trends — personalization and 3D printing — I reached out to Snover to learn more about Nourished. In our interview she clued me in on how they settled on 3D printing (fun fact: she actually invented the first ever 3D food printer!), why she’s not rushing to link up with DNA analysis, and sets the scene for a futuristic vision where your health is managed autonomously by wearables and home 3D printers.

It was a super cool conversation that gives real insight into where we’re at right now, both in the 3D printing and personalization spheres. You can read the full transcript of my conversation with Snover, complete with synced audio. I also excerpted some of the most noteworthy parts of our conversation below. 

This Spoon Plus Deep Dive conversation is available only to Spoon Plus subscribers. Purchase a Spoon Plus membership to get access to this exclusive content and much more.

 

The Food Tech Show: The Story Behind Spoon Plus

We write and talk a lot about product launches here at The Spoon, but we look inward on this week’s Food Tech Show as we discuss the backstory behind Spoon Plus, our membership community we launched last week.

If you’re a blog or online content nerd, this one is for you as we talk about our previous efforts at one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs and how the world of online memberships has evolved over the past decade. We also discuss how we’d been planning on building Plus before COVID-19, but how the pandemic gave the launch a little more urgency.

If you’re a food tech nerd, we’ve got you covered too, because in this show we also talk about these stories:

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download it directly to your device or just click play below.

Audio Player

The Plant-based Meat Innovators and Startups Database (Spoon Plus)

But what about the constant stream of innovators bringing their products to market? Companies big and small from around the world are launching plant-based meat products of their own, trying to carve out a piece of the lucrative pie before the market becomes too saturated.

The offerings go far beyond burgers — companies are also creating plant-based seafood and developing next-generation protein ingredients to power these new meat alternatives.

To give you a clearer picture of the playing field, we’ve created a database naming the companies making plant-based meat, fish, and protein ingredients across the globe.

This sortable database includes the following fields: Company Name, Protein Category, Website, Year Founded, Region, City/State or City/Country, Company Summary, Location of Product Availability, Total Funding.

You can apply filters to search the database by keyword and also sort by category such as region, protein type and more.

The Plant-based Meat Innovators and Startups Database is available to Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Meet Spoon Plus, Our New Deep Dive Insights & Virtual Events Membership Program

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015, an event all about the rethinking of cooking and our kitchens, we soon realized innovation was happening everywhere across the food system: at the farm, in our favorite restaurants, at the corner grocery store and, yes, in our kitchens.

It felt necessary, almost urgent, to tell these stories. After all, I’d spent a good chunk of the decade prior working for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs, where I discovered how crucial it is to nascent markets to find those betting big on turning their world-changing ideas into a changed world. Back then it was technologies like cloud computing and IoT upending established industries like digital media and communication, but it didn’t take me long to realize the reinvention of the food system would be an even bigger deal.

After all, everyone eats, right?

So we started The Spoon in 2016 because we had this idea that we would tell the stories of a new generation of innovators working to reinvent the food system. Now, almost four thousand stories later, we are more convinced than ever about the impact of innovation on food.

Which is why we created Spoon Plus.

What’s Spoon Plus? In short, it’s our paid membership community where we’ll be bringing you deep dive insights in the form of research reports, long-form conversations with innovators, and exclusive online events to help you better understand the world of food tech and food innovation.

We’ll have new content every week, and to start we’ve got a great report from our own Catherine Lamb analyzing the emerging market for air protein. We also have a new report by me analyzing the survey results of food-industry executives about the impact of COVID-19 and their go-forward plans for the rest of 2020.

That’s not all. Early next week, I’ll publish my first weekly intelligence brief looking at COVID-19 disruption on new product launches in the kitchen and housewares space. After that, our editor-in-chief Chris Albrecht will soon have a report on the emerging market for next-generation food vending machines, and our restaurant tech expert, Jenn Marston, will have a strategy guide for cloud kitchens in the post-COVID world.

As part of Spoon Plus, we’ll also have deep dive conversations and interviews with industry executives like this one with Chris Young, the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps, who opened up to me recently about what happened with the company he founded and where he thinks the next big opportunities are in the world of food.

As part of our launch of Spoon Plus, we’re also announcing that Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual, and that every Spoon Plus annual membership will include a ticket to SKS 2020. Our belief is that our events and online content have a symbiotic relationship, where our community engages with the same innovators we are writing about and where we often find the next big story at The Spoon. As we go deeper with Spoon Plus, we want our SKS community to be a part of that.

Of course, part of the reason for going virtual with our flagship event is we now live in a world where in-person events that thrive on a global mix of interesting people are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the next 1-2 years. That said, we’re really excited about the SKS reaching even more people. We’ve been working hard at building our virtual event capabilities (we had a virtual COVID-19 food summit last month with over 1500 attendees), and are becoming more excited by the day about the possibilities of SKS 2020 and other exclusive virtual events through Spoon Plus.

So if you want to go deeper with us through research and reports, if you want to attend SKS 2020, if you want to support The Spoon as we grow, subscribe to Spoon Plus. As a way to help you get started, we’re offering Spoon Plus annual memberships for 40% off for the next ten days only. This one-time discount includes our company plans (that’s right – you can get Spoon Plus for your entire team). Just use the discount code LAUNCH when you are checking out and Memberful (the technology powering our membership offering) will deduct the amount from the total.

And of course, if you want to try out Spoon Plus for a month, you can subscribe to our monthly plan (monthly plans do not include a ticket to SKS). We also offer substantial discounts for students and for anyone who is in the midst of job transition.

If you’d like to learn more about those, just drop us an line.

For those of you wondering about The Spoon’s free coverage, don’t worry. We’re more committed than ever to bringing you the same daily news and analysis of those changing the food system for free on our main site. Spoon Plus is for those who, like us, also want to go deeper and access content that connects the dots from our daily reporting.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to building Spoon Plus together as we look to better understand and engage in the future of food.