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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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A Snapshot of the 6 Biggest Fast Food Companies’ Sustainability Pledges

Environmental issues are no longer an invisible threat. With temperatures warming, oceans are heating up and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and forest fires, as we’re currently seeing in Australia, are happening more frequently.

There’s only so much individuals can do to lessen our impact on the warming planet, including flying and driving less and cutting back on meat. It’s on governments and businesses, especially corporations, to stave off catastrophe.

As we start off a new decade, let’s take a look at the sustainability pledges of the top fast food companies by revenues. As emissions that result from meat and dairy production are on track to contribute 70 percent of the total allowable greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the BBC reports, fast food chains’ decisions have a lot of impact on the planet, although most pledges have centered around packaging. As some of the largest brands on the planet, these moves will not only cut back on climate change causing emissions and pollution, but provide an example to other businesses.

1. McDonald’s

The world’s biggest restaurant company in 2018 was the first fast food company to commit to sustainability. McDonald’s pledged that by 2025, “100 percent of McDonald’s guest packaging will come from renewable, recycled, or certified sources,” and also “to recycle guest packaging in 100 percent of McDonald’s restaurants.” For this year, it also set a goal that “100 percent of fiber-based packaging will come from recycled or certified sources where no deforestation occurs.” The company has also invested in a wind farm and a solar farm that it said will produce “more than 2,500 McDonald’s restaurants-worth of electricity.” As far as plant-based options, the Golden Arches is expanding its Beyond Meat test in Canada.

2. Starbucks

According to the coffee giant, “an estimated 600 billion paper and plastic cups are distributed globally,” and Starbucks accounts for an estimated 1 percent of that total. It has set a goal to “double the recycled content, recyclability and compostability, and reusability of our cups and packaging by 2022.” It plans to phase out straws this year. (A small competitor of Starbucks, Blue Bottle, plans to eliminate disposable cups entirely.) Starbucks, which said it has invested in renewable energy, has also set a goal to design, build and operate 10,000 “Greener Stores” globally by 2025. Starbucks offers several plant-based milks, and is expanding its lineup of non-dairy drinks.

3. Subway

The sandwich company hasn’t made any specific pledges, and pins a lot of the responsibility of energy conservation on its franchise operators. Subway offers a meatless Beyond Meat meatball sub. The company says its paper products, including towels, tissues and napkins, are made from 100 percent recycled material. As for the rest of its materials, including cups, wraps, bowls and lids, Subway makes no further commitments to make them more sustainable.

4. Chick-fil-a

The popular chicken restaurant that closes on Sundays also hasn’t issued any major sustainability pledges. The company said last year it is “thoughtfully searching for sustainable design solutions that are recyclable, compostable or contain recycled content — starting with new bowls” made of recyclable PET plastic. Chick-fil-a has committed to reducing construction waste for its new locations. The chain offers no plant-based options.

5. Taco Bell

The Mexican-inspired food chain is the latest to issue a big sustainability pledge. It has committed to “making all consumer-facing packaging recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025 worldwide,” as well as adding recycling and/or composting bins to all restaurants, “where infrastructure permits.” Last year, it committed to more sustainable beef. Taco Bell has long featured vegetarian and vegan options, and recently made them more prominent on its menu.

6. Burger King

The other burger chain also hasn’t set any firm sustainability commitments for the decade. Rather, it said it will “continuously review our policies on animal welfare, sourcing and environmental impact to ensure that we remain good corporate citizens in the communities we serve.” The company, responding to a Change.org petition, said it will stop giving out plastic toys, but only in the U.K. At least you can get the Impossible Whopper at every U.S. store.

Of course, the companies who did make pledges are not beholden to them. It’s up to investors and consumers to hold each company responsible to do their part to reducing their contributions to climate change.

If any company updates their pledges, we will revisit and update this article.

Starbucks’ Chinese Competitor Luckin to Launch IoT-powered Self-service Coffee Machines

Luckin, one of China’s largest coffee chains, announced this week in a press release two new offerings aimed at getting coffee to consumers as quickly and conveniently as possible: the Luckin Coffee EXPRESS smart unmanned coffee machine and the Luckin Pop Mini smart vending machine. Both machines are part of Luckin’s push further into the world of self-service locations, what the company calls “the unmanned retail market” in an effort to reach more customers and stay competitive with its chief rival, Starbucks.

These unmanned terminals will be in office buildings, college campuses, bus terminals, gas stations, highway service stations, and residential communities, according to the press release. Though Luckin hasn’t specifically said what for, IoT and facial recognition will be used, most likely to speed up the ordering process. 

Of course finding faster, easier ways to get coffee to customers is a major priority right now for chains. Starbucks opened an Express store in Beijing last year that focuses specifically on delivery and pickup orders. It is also operating ghost kitchens in China in collaboration with Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets. 

In the U.S., both Briggo and CafeX have self-service coffee kiosks manned by robots at airports around the country (though it’s worth noting that CafeX just shuttered all three of its downtown San Francisco locations). Meanwhile, a company called Bandit operates a mobile-order-only cafe in Manhattan, where customers order ahead via the Bandit app and simply pick their drink up when it’s ready. 

Luckin, which has so far focused heavily on delivery and pickup order formats, doesn’t yet have any locations in the U.S. For now, its focus seems to be expanding further across China and in doing so competing with Starbucks. Luckin’s self-operated stores numbered 4,507 by the end of 2019, according to a press release. Starbucks, meanwhile, has tried self-service vending machines in the past, a concept that never took off and is no longer being promoted.

Whether Luckin’s new self-service offerings prompt Starbucks to double-down on its self-service efforts again remains to be seen. The Seattle-based coffee retailer has already said it plans to open more express stores in high-traffic areas in China. That probably includes airports, bus terminals, and office parks — the very same places Luckin is placing its self-service machines. 

3 Predictions for the Ghost Kitchen in 2020

In 2019, the idea of a restaurant kitchen with no dining room that would exist solely for the purpose of fulfilling off-premises orders was an intriguing but little-known concept. Fast forward 12 months, and ghost kitchens are now a major talking point in the discussion around how to meet customer demand for delivery and takeout orders. And it’s not just restaurants getting involved. Third-party delivery services like DoorDash have opened their own ghost kitchen facilities, companies like Kitchen United, who provide kitchen infrastructure to other brands, are expanding across the globe, and even non-restaurant food brands are capitalizing on the craze.

It’s still early days for the ghost kitchen concept, and as I noted with The Spoon’s most recent market map, this is a part of the restaurant industry that will change rapidly over the next year as it becomes more commonplace among both restaurants and consumers.

Here are a few things we expect to see happen in 2020.

Ghost kitchens will become the norm for large restaurant chains. 
Last year around this time, I wrote that “where the [ghost kitchen] concept could really shine in 2019 is by taking on delivery orders for existing businesses, so the brick-and-mortar locations of those restaurants don’t have to shoulder the entire burden.”

Without a shadow of a doubt, that began to happen in 2019. In 2020, it will become the norm. Many early adopters of the ghost kitchen concept in 2019 were national or international chain restaurants with the kind of reach and influence that will compel other establishments to take similar steps. Chick-fil-A already rents space from DoorDash’s ghost kitchen facility. Starbucks has teamed up with Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets in China to run ghost kitchens out of the latter’s stores. The coffee giant is also building out its own express stores that will function largely as ghost kitchens for delivery orders. Fat Brands is using its own kitchens to double as ghost kitchens for sister brands.

All of which is to say, many brands will create many iterations of the ghost kitchen concept in 2020. As we move though the next 12 months, which types of ghost kitchens (commissary, in-house, etc.) make the most sense for which brands will become clearer. 

Restaurant brands will compete with their kitchen providers.
Both large chains and virtual restaurant concepts will quite possibly find a new competitor in 2020: the folks renting out the kitchen space they use.

Much like grocery stores display their own brand of pasta on the shelves along side CPG brands (or, for a more web-friendly parallel, Amazon has its own Amazon Basics brand), ghost kitchen providers will start to use their facilities to house their own virtual restaurant concepts that compete with those of their tenants. 

This is already happening. Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens startup, which operates a network of ghost kitchen facilities, provides space for brands like Sweetgreen to fulfill off-premises orders. It also houses its own virtual brands like Excuse My French Toast and B*tch Don’t Grill My Cheese. 

Not all kitchen providers will take this route. For example, Kitchen United said recently it did not want to be a restaurant itself.

But for many kitchen providers, offering their own virtual restaurants allows them to own yet-another piece of the restaurant stack and therefore more revenue and the all-important customer data. And as more and more non-restaurant food brands, from diets to celebrity chefs, try out virtual concepts, launching a virtual restaurant will (in theory, at least) get simpler for these kitchen providers to do without incurring much additional overhead. No, B*tch Don’t Grill My Cheese won’t stand a chance against a big brand like Chick-fil-A if a customer is really craving those waffle fries, but in the future, the two entities won’t be working out of the same ghost kitchen facility anyway.

Which leads us to our next point.

Third-party delivery services will open more kitchens. Big brands will follow.
Remember above when I said we’ll see an explosion of big-name restaurant brands adopting the ghost kitchen model? At some point in the future, most of them will be doing it out of kitchens run by third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats. That’s not because providers like Kitchen United don’t offer delivery options (they do), but because the delivery companies themselves are approaching the restaurant chains.

DoorDash is a case in point. When the third-party delivery service opened the doors on its own ghost kitchen facility in Redwood City, CA this year, it had four existing restaurant chains onboard — all of whom it approached because the company had user data that said people were looking for that type of food in the California Peninsula area. Chick-fil-A soon signed a lease for exactly the same reason.

This is almost a no-brainer. Restaurants already working with delivery companies use these services for things like marketing, technical fulfillment, and last-mile logistics. Adding kitchen space to the stack seems almost a foregone conclusion.

The other thing ghost kitchens are likely to encounter at some point in 2020 is a reality check. At the moment, optimism is flowing into the sector alongside the millions in capital companies are raising. Soon enough, though, the questions will start pouring in. Who gets to own the customer data? Can ghost kitchens become sustainable or will they just pile more trash into the ocean via takeout boxes? Is the model actually profitable, and for whom? Expect these and many other questions to surface in the next year as the ghost kitchen goes mainstream. 

Survey: 71% of Consumers Are ‘Amenable’ to More AI in Their Restaurant Experience

Well over half of consumers “are amenable” to more artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced tech in their restaurant experience, according to a new survey from ad-tech firm AdTheorant.

The survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults, conducted this past September by The Harris Poll, looks at consumer sentiment and interaction with quick-service restaurants (QSRs) and fast-casual restaurants (FSRs) across a number of areas, AI among them.

Of those survey respondents, 71 percent said they would be “open to QSRs/FSRs incorporating AI into their business.” In particular, consumers would be most interested in AI if it could help drive down the cost of menu items (43 percent) and speed up the ordering process (42 percent).

As to the actual AI technologies that could do that, consumers are most interested in screens, according to the survey. Sixty-six percent said they were interested in using a touchscreen device (phone, kiosk, etc.) to order and nearly half of respondents, 42 percent, said they would like a voice-ordering system. 

Restaurants are already trying to meet this demand. Self-service kiosks are becoming a regular fixture at QSRs and FSRs as chains revamp their store formats to be more delivery- and takeout-friendly. In the last few months alone, we’ve seen Shake Shack, Chopt, Sweetgreen, and Krispy Kreme, among many others, unveil new store formats that feature kiosk ordering. Meanwhile, KFC is reinventing the concept of the drive-thru to be more touchscreen-centric, and McDonald’s leads the pack in terms of AI in the restaurant with its 2019 acquisitions of AI company Dynamic Yield and and voice-tech startup Apprente.

More surprising was the lower percentage of survey respondents who said AI offering more personalized food recommendations was important. On of the goals for McDonald’s when it acquired Dynamic Yield this past March was to make menus more “Netflix-y.” In other words, menus could dynamically generate recommendations based on a number of factors (past orders, trending items) and in doing so offer more relevant recommendations and upsell items.

AdTheorant’s report, however, notes that just 22 percent of consumers said this would be an important driver of their adopting more AI tech during their restaurant experience.

Part of that may be a matter of exposure. McDonald’s aside, many chains are still just getting started when it comes to the AI-driven menu. Dunkin’ is said to be dabbling with it. Starbucks says AI is a key piece of its overall digital strategy moving forward and that it’s Deep Brew initiative, which will (among other things) power better menu recommendations will be a big part of the chain’s focus in 2020.

Spoon Market Map: Ghost Kitchens in 2019

Just half a decade ago, the phrase “ghost kitchen” referred to restaurants that looked legit on Grubhub and Seamless but were actually digital fronts for unregulated kitchens. In other words, chicken tenders from what appeared to be a local restaurant might actually have been cooked in someone’s apartment.

Then the delivery boom went off, thanks largely to the growth of third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash, and by the many digital channels through which customers could suddenly get food. Order tickets proliferated for restaurants, but so too did the stress around how to fulfill those orders without over-burdening the in-house kitchen staff.

The answer to the problem? Take the restaurant out of the kitchen.

In the last few years, restaurants have been moving many of their operations around delivery and to-go orders to dedicated kitchen spaces outside the main restaurant location. The name “ghost kitchen” has stuck around, but now it’s a health-department-friendly term for these spaces that act as hubs for off-premises orders.

But actually, there are many names nowadays for the concept: ghost kitchen, virtual kitchen, cloud kitchen, the (slightly nauseating) description “kitchen as a service.” All those phrases amount the same thing: a kitchen facility that exists solely for the purpose of helping restaurants cook and fulfill to-go orders and get them into the hands of delivery couriers. There is no dining room or front-of-house staff in a ghost kitchen, the tech-stack is more streamlined than that of a full-service restaurant, and, increasingly, the location is completely separate from a restaurant’s dine-in location(s). Now, too, there are also kitchens on (literal) wheels, which add yet-another piece of mobility to the business model. 

To help you navigate the evolving world of ghost kitchens, we’ve created a market map for your reference. This market map is intended to be a snapshot of the current ghost kitchen landscape in 2019. It’s not comprehensive, and we expect both it and the overall landscape to change drastically over the next 12 months. That means you can expect to see this map updated regularly. As always, we welcome suggestions for additional companies and players in this space.

Have suggestions? Drop us an email.

1. Kitchen Infrastructure Providers

The largest category in ghost kitchens right now, Kitchen Infrastructure Providers can be likened to cloud computing providers: they rent companies the space and tools needed to run a business, either as a flat-fee model for on a pay-as-you-go basis. 

Kitchen United, for example, charges a monthly membership fee that includes rent, equipment, storage, and services like dishwashing. Reef, which originally made a name for itself reinventing the concept of the parking garage, offers these things as well as direct partnerships with major third-party delivery companies like DoorDash and Postmates.   

Normally these facilities are large, warehouse-like buildings that hold multiple “restaurants” under a single roof. For large restaurant operators with multiple chains looking to fulfill extra demand brought on by delivery or test out new concepts without incurring too much risk, these are ideal.

Multi-unit chains can also use these spaces to reach customers in areas where they might not have a brick-and-mortar store. Chick-fil-A is widening its reach in the SF Bay Area by working out of DoorDash’s newly opened facility.

2. Restaurant-operated Kitchens

For some restaurants, running a ghost kitchen operation themselves makes more sense than teaming up with a third-party kitchen provider. This is often the case with smaller, independent restaurants, whose ghost kitchen might consist of nothing more than an area of the restaurant’s existing location(s) dedicated to fulfilling off-premises orders. Or it might apply to multi-unit chains who simply want to expand to new areas and don’t have the capital or inclination to deal with the burden of a full-service restaurant. Colombian chain Muy is one such company, having started as a dine-in restaurant before expanding its ghost kitchens to serve more areas of Latin America.

The most notable of all the companies in this category right now is Starbucks. In addition to building out “to-go” stores that exist solely for the purpose of fulfilling off-premises orders, the company has also partnered with Alibaba to turn parts of the latter’s Hema supermarkets into ghost kitchens in China.

The boundaries around this category are especially fluid. In other words, just because you operate your own ghost kitchen in one part of the country doesn’t mean you can’t team up with a third-party provider in another, as The Halal Guys and Chick-fil-A have done.

3. Virtual Restaurant Providers

This is where the lines really start to blur between restaurant, kitchen provider, and delivery company. Anyone can make a virtual restaurant, and as the category in our map shows, more than just restaurants are trying their hand at food concepts that can only be ordered through digital channels and are prepared in a ghost kitchen. Whole30, for example, is a diet concept better known for its cookbooks than its dealings with the restaurant industry. The folks behind that brand teamed up with Grubhub and restaurant company Lettuce Entertain You to create a virtual restaurant offering meals with Whole30-approved foods. 

On the other hand, a company like Keatz runs a network of virtual restaurants it houses beneath the roof of its own ghost kitchens. Taster, based out of France, creates native restaurant brands for food delivery companies like Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Food is cooked in Taster-run kitchens.

4. Mobile Kitchens

In slightly more its own category, companies like Ono Food Co. and Zume are creating robotic, self-contained kitchens on wheels that offer restaurant experiences that can be tailored to specific neighborhoods in a city and also plug into third-party delivery services.

Restaurants can also partner with these kitchens on wheels to expand their reach into new markets, as &Pizza has done by teaming up with Zume.

What’s Next for Ghost Kitchens

Ghost kitchens will become the norm for multi-unit chains. With off-premises orders expected to drive the majority of restaurant sales growth over the next decade, multi-unit brands (think Panera, Chipotle, etc.) will find ghost kitchens a cost-effective way to meet this demand without overburdening existing restaurants. The majority of them will rent space from kitchen infrastructure providers, as Chick-fil-A is currently doing with DoorDash. 

There will be an explosion of delivery-only brands. Since ghost kitchens provide a cheaper, faster way for food entrepreneurs and small restaurants alike to test-drive new concepts, we will see an influx of delivery- and pickup-only brands come out of these kitchens over the next year. Many will be born inside the walls of facilities like Kitchen United or CloudKitchens. Meanwhile, the number of virtual restaurant networks like that of Keatz will increase. 

Artificial Intelligence will be designed into the kitchen. AI is a really broad term that’s often misused. That fact aside, its presence in the restaurant industry is here to stay, and in ghost kitchens, it will prove itself valuable for everything from tracking ingredients to helping staff curb food waste. On the consumer end, we expect to see the technology more deeply integrated into the apps and websites from which customers order, improving recommendations and upselling opportunities.  

More non-restaurant food brands will launch virtual restaurants. In keeping with a trend recently made popular by Whole30 and Bon Apétit, food brands, diets, celebrity chefs, and other non-restaurant businesses will team up with third parties to launch delivery and pickup concepts. Grubhub and Uber Eats are two such third parties already doing this. Expect many more such partnerships — soon.

Bonus: The tech stack will get pared down. No front of house means no POS, right? Quite possibly. With less (or no) customer-facing technology like digital menu boards, self-order kiosks, and tabletop ordering, much of the restaurant tech on the market today becomes irrelevant in a ghost kitchen setting. As the folks at Reforming Retail noted recently, “under this scenario the POS is just an ordering node in the cloud that outputs your menu to a consumer and sends orders to your kitchen.”

That doesn’t mean restaurant tech is going by the wayside. Some ghost kitchens, like those of Muy, have a walkup option where customers order at kiosks onsite, and there will doubtless be new solutions created that are specifically for the ghost kitchen. But the tools of tomorrow’s ghost kitchen won’t look a thing like today’s bloated restaurant-management tech stack. For everyone involved, that’s a bonus.

Artificial Intelligence Is Now a ‘Very Important’ Part of Starbucks’ Digital Strategy

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one phrase we’re going to hear a lot more of in the restaurant industry from now on. McDonald’s and KFC are already experimenting with it, and this week, Starbucks said the technology is a key piece of the company’s overall digital strategy moving forward.

On an investor call, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson highlighted the company’s Deep Brew initiative, which will be a major area of focus in 2020. And as Johnson explained in a LinkedIn post recently, Deep Brew involves machine learning technologies that will improve back-of-house elements like inventory management and employee scheduling. Johnson said the technology will also power better recommendations and upsell offers to customers via the Starbucks mobile app. “Deep Brew solutions will support our partners in many ways such as sequencing orders, anticipating equipment maintenance, streamlining supply chain logistics, and more,” he wrote in the post.

On this week’s investor call, Johnson called Deep Brew a “key differentiator” for the future and said it will free up time for employees to focus on higher-quality interactions with customers.

That emphasis on customer service has been a major selling point from restaurants as they automate and digitize more of their businesses. From the aforementioned McDonald’s to fast-casual chain Sweetgreen, which just opened a digital-centric store in Manhattan, companies are claiming technologies like AI and robotics won’t replace workers’ jobs, but instead redeploy where workers spend their time and energy.

Certainly, Starbucks will have the opportunity to test this idea out as it builds out its Starbucks Now stores in China, which are locations that focus on digital pickup and delivery orders and where much of the order, pay, and pickup process is automated. The company opened its first Now location in July in Beijing. On the investor call, Johnson said the company will open more of these stores in China’s “top-tier cities” in 2020. Starbucks also has a location planned for NYC.

The Week in Restaurants: Starbucks Expands Delivery, Lavu and Omnivore Simplify In-House Tech

Between earnings reports and food delivery bidding wars, there was much to keep a pulse on this week in the restaurant biz. Before you slam into that pumpkin-spice latte on your desk (for shame, btw), here’s a glance at some new developments in restaurant tech from the week.

Starbucks Expands Delivery to 5 New Markets
Starbucks announced this week the latest expansion in its quest to deliver coffee across the nation. Through its Uber Eats program, the chain has added Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and New Jersey, along with further expansion into the New York Metro area. The new locations bring Starbucks total delivery radius to 16 U.S. markets. A nationwide rollout of delivery is expected for early 2020. Now it will need to start adding more ghost kitchen-like locations to help supply the demand of all those lattes in transit.

Lavu and Omnivore Partner to Simplify Third-Party Restaurant Delivery
Point of sale (POS) system Lavu has teamed up with Omnivore to better connect restaurants with third-party technologies up and down the restaurant stack, from back-of-house inventory management to third-party delivery services. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, restaurants using the Lavu POS system will be able to access Omnivore’s marketplace of third-party restaurant technology apps, which includes everything from Uber Eats to Yumpingo to OpenTable. With many restaurants these days lagging in terms of meeting customer demand for technology, Lavu’s POS capabilities with Omnivore’s more than 200 integrations definitely makes access to tech easer.

McDonald’s Franchisee Eliminates 200 Tons of Plastic Waste
To help combat the terrifying problem of single-use plastics in which we now find ourselves, Arcos Dorados, the world’s largest McDonald’s franchisee, announced this week it has eliminated about 200 tons of single-use plastics since removing straws from its beverages. Arcos Dorados, which operates 2,200 McDonald’s locations across Latin America, says the effort is part of McDonald’s ongoing contributions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The company plans by 2025 to make all McDonald’s packaging from renewable, recycled, or certified sources. Whether that material will actually get recycled is a question for another Friday.

The Week in Restaurants: Papa John’s Hearts Food Delivery Apps, OpenTable Expands Delivery Options

We’re neck-deep in final preparations for The Spoon’s Smart Kitchen Summit, which kicks off Monday morning in Seattle. (There’s still time to snag a ticket, btw.) But news doesn’t stop just because we’re throwing a fab event, and for the restaurant industry, it was business as usual this week. Before I hop on a plane and head west, here are a few more pieces of restaurant-tech news from the last few days.

Papa John’s Publicly ‘Embraces’ Third-Party Delivery Apps
Still coming back from controversy that rocked its bottom line, Papa John’s made its stance on third-party deliver clear to the public this week when new CEO Rob Lynch told CNBC that third-party food delivery apps are “an opportunity” for the company, not a threat. This is a direct contrast to Big Pizza rival Domino’s, who staunchly keeps all delivery operations in house. Lynch, on the other hand, says his company continues to meet with multiple third-party delivery services (Papa John’s signed on with DoorDash in March). These apps, he said, have “an impact on our industry, an impact on business. But we believe that’s because we haven’t worked strategically with them.”


Free News Courtesy of Starbucks
As of September, Starbucks quit selling paper copies of national newspapers, which means no more scanning the nearby print copy of NY Times while you wait for your latte. But you can still do it digitally, for a limited time. In a blog post this week, the coffee giant said it is providing “complimentary digital news” with its free in-store Wi-Fi in the U.S. Sites participating include The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), USA Today, The Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and New York Daily News. Many of these papers have subscription paywalls in place that normally limits the amount of content you can see on the website for free. Starbucks also said it will offer discounted subscriptions for print and digital subscribers to the WSJ.

OpenTable Expands Delivery Options to Canada
OpenTable is expanding its delivery capabilities with Uber Eats to Canada, following the launch of the same feature in the U.S. in July. To be clear, you can’t order and pay for food direct from the OpenTable app. Instead, diners perusing restaurants on the OpenTable iOS app will see a “Get it delivered” button and be redirected to the Uber Eats app. It’s another way the company is trying to evolve into more than just a platform for booking restaurant reservations, and in doing so, keep customers inside the figurative walls of its own ecosystem as much as possible.

Revention Unveils New Restaurant Tablet Software
It’s another day and another tablet in the restaurant industry. Point of sale (POS) and mobile order platform Revention launched its own tablet software this week that integrates with the company’s existing POS and mobile order system. The new software, which is compatible with both iOS and Android tablets, promises to streamline restaurant operations, from entering an order to managing and training staff, and works both online and offline. Revention counts Dairy Queen, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and numerous pizza chains, including mall favorite Sbarro, among its customers.

Starbucks Launches Voice Order and Delivery in China With Alibaba

Starbucks customers in China can now order just by speaking. This week, the coffee retailer launched voice ordering and delivery capability through Alibaba’s smart speaker, Tmall Genie.

According to an announcement from Starbucks, customers can now place an order through the speaker and have it delivered within a 30-minute timeframe via Alibaba’s food delivery platform, Ele.me. Users can track their order in real time and earn Starbucks rewards points. In the future, Starbucks Rewards members will also get more personalized recommendations — based on past orders, seasonal items, and other data — when using voice order.

To top it all off, there’s a Starbucks-themed Tmall Genie (pictured above) available through the Starbucks virtual store in China. Because who wouldn’t want to talk to an adorable DJing bear to order their coffee?

The move comes about a year after Starbucks and Alibaba first announced their partnership and is the latest in a series of initiatives to make Starbucks more widely available in China, one of the fastest-growing markets in the world for coffee consumption. While still a predominately tea-drinking nation, China saw a a 16 percent annual increase in coffee consumption between 2004 and 2013 — a growth set to continue over the next few years at 15 to 20 percent.

Starbucks began offering delivery in China through Ele.me in 2018, and also launched a virtual store across Alibaba apps including Taobao, Alipay, and Tmall. In addition, Starbucks now operates ghost kitchens in Alibaba’s Hema supermarkets to fulfill more delivery orders.

Unconnected from Alibaba, Starbucks this year opened an “express retail” concept store for pickup-only orders in Beijing.

These many different moves are meant to help Starbucks as it continues to compete with its main rival in China, Luckin Coffee. The latter is aggressively growing its number of physical locations across China.

More importantly, Luckin caters primarily to delivery and pickup, with many of its stores acting mostly as hubs for fulfilling these orders.

Starbucks is attempting a similar model with its Star Kitchens and express store concept. Whether adding something like voice-order capabilities makes a difference in the rivalry remains to be seen, though it certainly won’t hurt Starbucks to have a major tech giant like Alibaba in its corner as the fight for coffee dominance in China continues.

Starbucks Plans Pickup Only Store for NYC

Starbucks will soon bring its streamlined, pickup-only store model to Manhattan this fall, according to an article published on Bloomberg.

The NYC store, which is still under development and slated to open at some point this fall, is based on the coffee chain’s “Starbucks Now” model it debuted in Beijing in July.

Starbucks Now stores have limited seating, which wouldn’t be too drastic of a change in Manhattan, where tables and chairs at Starbucks locations are already pretty minimal. More importantly, the concept features an in-wall pickup system where customers order and pay via the Starbucks app and retrieve their orders from pickup portals in the wall, without having to wait in line. The system also works for delivery drivers, who can simply walk into the store and grab their order from the wall and go. One or two baristas will be on hand to make drinks and assist customers if they need it.

Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson told Bloomberg that these stores aren’t meant to replace existing Starbucks cafes and are instead geared towards on-the-go customers (which is basically everyone in Manhattan). The express stores can also double as locations where nearby Starbucks cafes can have their delivery orders fulfilled, freeing up time for employees to focus on non-mobile customers.

They’ll need that extra location for delivery orders. Starbucks recently announced that its delivery partnership with Uber Eats will be available throughout the U.S. by early 2020.

While there’s no official timeline yet, Starbucks will likely plan similar Starbucks Now stores in other cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

The Food Tech Show: The Perilous Existence of Bike-Riding Food Delivery Drivers

It’s been a big week in restaurant tech news, so the Spoon gang got together to record a podcast.

In this episode of the Food Tech Show, we discuss:

  • Starbucks deal with Brightloom (formerly Eatsa) and what it means for the restaurant tech market
  • The New York Times piece about a day in the life of food delivery drivers
  • Uber’s all-in-one app for food, bikes and rideshares
  • Mike’s first-world coffee machine struggle with whether he should have waited for the Terra Kaffe, even as the Spinn nears a ship date

As always, you can hit play below or listen to the Food Tech Show podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Audio Player

Krispy Kreme Gets a Digital Makeover With Newly Redesigned Store

Krispy Kreme debuted its first store redesign in over a decade this week, and it’s all about digital enhancements to speed up ordering, payments, pickup, and delivery for the doughnut-centric business.

According to a press release, the first of these locations opened on Tuesday in Concord, N.C., appropriately just a stone’s throw away from the company’s Global Product & Innovation Center.

Besides an expanded menu and something called “an enhanced doughnut theater experience,” where you can watch the goods being made step by step, the new store design features a number of tech-forward initiatives. Online ordering is integrated into the overall format, as is delivery. In terms of physical layout, the store has a dedicated area for self-service mobile order pickup for customers and/or delivery drivers. Krispy Kreme has also expanded the store’s drive-thru to two lanes — much like Dunkin’ did in 2018 when it opened its next-generation concept store.

The similarities between Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ shouldn’t be taken as a doughnut to donut comparison, though. Rather, Krispy Kreme is merely following the direction most QSRs are traveling these days, which is all about becoming digital-first restaurants that can accommodate the growing number of sales channels (in-store, delivery, mobile app, drive-thru) customers want as options for ordering, as well as growing demand for better personalization. The news comes just days after KFC announced its digitally focused drive-thru of the future, Starbucks opened an express store concept in China, and, here in the U.S., Brightloom (formerly Eatsa) upped the ante on restaurant-tech in general by partnering with Starbucks to license the latter’s tech. Among many other developments.

According to the press release, the Concord, N.C. store is the first of 45 planned Krispy Kreme locations, new and existing, that will get the digital makeover throughout 2020.