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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Come Explore The Future of Meat at our May Food Tech Meetup

It’s time for the next event in our monthly food tech meetup series! We’ll be exploring a subject that’s been making a lot of headlines recently: the future of meat. Join us on Thursday, May 24th at Galvanize Seattle for drinks, snacks, and some rousing discussion. (Bonus: it’s free to attend, thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps!)

The Future of Meat

We’re at a crossroads: meat consumption is on the rise, but demand for meat alternatives has never been higher. And technology is changing the way we create, market, and eat animal products. From plant-based chicken nuggets to lab-grown burgers to transparent distribution channels for high-quality steak and pork, our panelists will discuss how technology is disrupting the meat industry — and what they think meat will look like in 5, 10, and 50 year’s time.

The panel will include:

–Christie Lagally, Seattle Food Tech

–Dr. Isaac Emery, the Good Food Institute

–Ethan Lowry, Crowd Cow

-Catherine Lamb, The Spoon

There will be drinks and snacks, so come hungry and ready to meet the Seattle food tech community — and bring a few business cards while you’re at it. Register here to reserve your spot!

Always Wanted to Try a Blowtorch? With Cheffer, You Can Rent One

If you love gadgets as much as we do at the Spoon, your kitchen counter space is at a premium. Sure, you may want to try that blowtorch or sous vide circulator, but a cooking gadget addiction can end up costing you a lot in terms of space and money.

Boston-based startup Cheffer is here to solve that problem. Started in December 2017, they let you rent kitchen gadgets for a small fee, much like Rent the Runway lets you rent high-end clothing for a fraction of the price.

Interested folk can peruse Cheffer’s online catalog of kitchen appliances, which runs the gamut from versatile equipment staples, like KitchenAids or Vitamixes, to more niche gadgets, like pizza stones or home beer brewing kits. Each tool on the list has been vetted by their in-house chef, so users know they’re getting the best possible brand and version. Once they make their selection, Cheffer will deliver the appliance — as long as they’re within 20 miles of the Boston area. For a small fee, users can request a chef to come into their home to help set up the gadget and give a lesson on how it works.

Cheffer’s online catalog.

After their rental period is finished, someone from Cheffer will come pick up the appliance and take it back to their warehouse for a thorough cleaning before it can be rented again. If customers fall in love and decide that they want to keep their gadget, they can purchase it from Cheffer for a prorated fee, depending on how much they paid to rent it. 

Most rental periods are three days and users pay a rental fee which varies depending on the gadget. For example, a KitchenAid would cost $15 per day, while a pizza stone would only be $7 per day. 

Cheffer has ambitions to be a lot more than just a simple kitchen appliance rental service, however. “We try to focus on the experience of cooking rather than just renting,” said founder Lina Mamut.

A big part of that is Cheffer’s recipe component. The startup has a professional chef on staff to develop recipes that go along with each appliance. Immediately after customers book a gadget rental through the Cheffer catalog, they’ll get an email in their inbox with recipe suggestions based on their cooking skill level and dietary registrations — two fields they fill out during registration. So, for example, if you’re a novice cook that just became a vegan and you’re renting a sous vide circulator, Cheffer would send you relatively simple vegan recipes to make with that tool. As of now, they have a database of over 500 recipes. 

Strawberry Dacquoise made with a Cheffer-rented KitchenAid.

Mamut told us that they’re also planning on developing an app that will focus more on cooking than appliance rental. It will most likely include tutorials instructing users how to best cook with their rented gadgets. Eventually, they hope to build in a recipe progression which will build in difficulty, teaching people basic cooking skills.

Mamut, who used to work at a tech startup in NYC that focused on AI and automation, is even playing around with the idea of a holographic chef that would walk users through recipes. (If you were at the Smart Kitchen Summit last year, this concept might sound familiar.)

She’s working on an algorithm to help streamline Cheffer’s operations. She’s currently gathering information on what times of day people rent gadgets, in which neighborhoods, and what kinds of dishes they’re cooking with them. Once they have enough, they’ll be able to better predict what type of recipes to develop, as well as which appliances to purchase for which markets.

It’s too soon to say for sure if Cheffer can achieve these lofty ambitions, but they’ve certainly come about at the right time. More millennials are cooking at home than any other generation. At the same time, as we discussed at our Future of Recipes food tech meetup, convenience is key. Cheffer’s concept is an easy, low-risk way for people to get a little more adventurous in the kitchen, without having to do anything more difficult than peruse an online catalog.

While some gadgets aren’t that pricey to straight-up buy (a small blowtorch will run you about $20 on Amazon), Cheffer is a good way to test out if you actually want to add it to your cooking arsenal before you commit. It’s also a helpful service for those with low kitchen confidence; by providing customized recipe suggestions and the option of having a chef demo each product, Cheffer doesn’t just drop off a gadget and leave you to it. Which also means it might not be the most helpful service for experienced home cooks who know which kitchen tools they want and how to use them.

Cheffer is bootstrapped and currently has 6 people on staff, including delivery drivers. They’re in the process of launching a prototype in Boston, but they’re planning to expand to NYC and other cities on the Eastern Seaboard by the end of 2018. I for one can’t wait until they make it to Seattle so I can finally indulge my inner kitchen gadget dilettante without breaking the bank.

Coffunity Makes Anyone a Coffee Expert (Yes, Even You)

Unless you’re a barista by trade, you might not know all that much about what type of coffees you like. Ethiopian? Light roast? Notes of milk chocolate or stone fruit?

That’s where Coffunity comes in handy. The company, which is based in El Salvador, developed an app which lets users rate and review coffees, discover new brands and varietals, and determine their overall coffee preferences. Founded by Andrea B. Pacas, a 6th generation coffee producer, and Federico Bolanos, a professional roaster, cupper, and barista, the Beta version launched in March 2018.

The app made quite a splash at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle last weekend when it won the Best New Product Award for Technology and the overall Best of Show.

Here’s how it works: Users take a picture of a coffee label and Coffunity will use a Google Vision scan and identify the label’s text. If that label is in their database, the app will give users a rundown on the beans’ taste attributes, origin, processing methods, and quality. It can get pretty granular, down to the exact varietal of the beans, the altitude on which they were grown, and even the name of the farmer(s) who grew them.

Coffunity users can rate coffees after they drink them and leave public reviews. So before you invest in a bag of beans, you can check and see if it matches your coffee preferences and find out what others wrote about it (i.e. tastes best with milk). If the app doesn’t recognize the coffee label, you can enter in its information and add it to the database.

Users can also search Coffunity’s library to determine the best coffees for them to purchase. For example, if you know you like fruity coffees, you can enter that in and see which brands and roasts might be a good bet for you. You can also search for coffees based on parameters like price, origin, retailer, or overall rating.

The company is even working on integrating geolocation services into their app so that users can discover nearby highly-rated coffee spots. So if you’re in a new city and want to source some nice beans for your Airbnb, you won’t have to wander aimlessly or settle for Starbucks.

And if you don’t know what you like, Coffunity will keep track of all your coffee rankings and create a profile of your taste preferences. The more coffees you rate, the more data it has to generate your profile, the more you can discover which coffees you like — and which you don’t.

There’s also a social aspect to Coffunity: you can follow friends on the app (or local baristas) to see which brands and varietals they’re drinking and liking. Sort of like Spotify, but for coffee. And if you just want to follow the crowd, the app keeps a list of the top-ranked coffees each day according to their global user base.

Coffunity hopes that their app will create the world’s largest coffee community. But they also want to encourage people to drink better coffee, be more aware of the variables and minutiae that goes into producing the beverage, and get more familiar with coffee producers, who are often isolated from the people drinking their product.

It might be surprising to some that at an event rife with barista robots and connected roasting machines, something as un-flashy as a coffee community app stood out as Best in Show. Their win indicates a movement in the craft coffee market towards democratization and accessibility.  You no longer have to be an SCA-trained expert to know a thing or two about high-quality coffee beans.

They’re not the only app geared towards educating people about and connecting them with good coffee. Apps like Cupper and Beanhunter help people find good coffee shops near them, while Acacia and Intelligentsia help you find the optimal home brew method. As specialty coffee becomes more and more accessible, I bet we’ll see more apps geared towards education and democratization of everyone’s favorite morning beverage.

The app is free and iOS compatible, though a version for Android is in the works. So far Coffunity has 950 downloads and over 150K coffees in their database. Coffunity currently has a staff of 12 and has been downloaded in more than 54 countries, though with this recent SCA Expo win under their belt, I bet they’ll soon be expanding.

Chef Dazzer Wants to Bring Professional Chefs Into Your Kitchen

In the past, if you wanted to book a decent caterer, you either had to find one through word of mouth, do a lot of googling, or just settle for a pre-made crudité plate with Ranch from the supermarket.

Chef Dazzer, a Boston-based startup which just launched in March 2018, hopes to change that. Its platform connects culinary professionals, personally vetted by their staff, with people for private event catering.

Chef Dazzer works in two ways: Customers can either get in touch through the company’s website, where they can chat with a staff member who acts as a personal “concierge” to match them to a chef. They can also download the app. On the app, chefs can create profiles, showcasing different menus and cuisines that they offer. Customers can flat-out book a particular menu from a chef, or they can chat via a built-in messaging platform in the app to customize which dishes they would like at their event. 

The two different platform entry points put me in mind of dating services: you can either go into an app and see what’s available, or you can go through an intermediary — like a matchmaker — to help with the selection process. In general, the website is for customers who want a little more hand-holding and want a person to talk to about their event — which, according to their CEO Mike Cormier, is one of the most popular aspects of the platform. 

After their catering event, customers have the opportunity to rate the chefs on a five-star system. When the clients pay the chefs, Chef Dazzer takes a 15 percent cut.

Chef Dazzer is not the first company trying to connect professional chefs to private clients. But it might have come along at the right time. One of the first companies to try this model was Kitchensurfing, which closed in 2016 after raising $20 million in capital. According to Cormier and Avery Gordon, who runs the chef operations side of Chef Dazzer, it’s at least in part because they launched before the Boston market was ready for this kind of model.

“Back when Kitchensurfing came out, having someone come to your house and cook for you was still a very new idea. Now with things like care.com, people are much more comfortable with the idea of having someone you don’t personally know come over,” said Cormier. 

Chef Dazzer also hopes to distinguish themselves by curating a high-quality experience, both for the chefs and the clients. They want to showcase culinary talent by choosing chefs that they know are high-quality, so you won’t book a local high schooler posing as a Michelin-star to cater your 400 person black-tie event. 

To pick which chefs will join their platform, Gordon dips into her years of experience in the Boston culinary community. The approach seems to be working for them now, since they’re new and small, but it will be interesting to see if they can keep up this vetting strategy as they grow and expand to new cities. 

Another potential issue for the company is lead time: most of ChefDazzer’s clients book chefs two weeks to one month out, though they can also contact a chef a few days before the event. At a time where people are used to ordering a slew of pizzas for a party and having them delivered in 45 minutes, it’s a risk to bet on customers being willing to plan that far ahead.

So far, Chef Dazzer has seen a good bit of demand — mostly on the chef side. They have a queue of 55-60 chefs who are interested in joining the platform, but only 10 or so are currently live on the website and app. They hope to scale up as they build their community of both chefs and clients.

Chef Dazzer is bootstrapped and hopes to create a solid user base before building their seed round. Until then, Bostonites can browse chefs to cater their next event, as long as they’re ready to plan a bit ahead. 

Scoop: Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M to Jumpstart Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing

You’ve heard of Impossible Foods, you’ve heard of Beyond Meat — but there’s a new plant-based meat company on the scene. Seattle Food Tech launched in 2017 and recently raised a $1 million seed round, led by Fifty Years and Blue Horizon.

The nascent company hopes to produce plant-based meat at a scale and price comparable to traditional meat. In February, they finished developing their first product: a “chicken” nugget made of textured wheat, oil, chicken flavoring, cornstarch, and corn breading. What sets the product above its humble ingredients and makes it so good, according to founder and CEO Christie Lagally, is how it’s processed.

“It’s really all about the processing,” she told The Spoon. In order to make plant-based meat at scale and at a price competitive with meat, plant-based food companies have to develop intensive manufacturing technology specialized to their product.

This is the big way that Seattle Food Tech is disrupting the meat — heck, even the plant-based meat — industry. Along with several partners and equipment suppliers, Lagally is working on developing specialized machines for plant-based meat production. Essentially, she wants to industrialize the meat alternative industry.

At the moment, the “nuggets” are made through a contract manufacturer. However, the end goal of Seattle Food Tech is to start a facility specifically designed to manufacture plant-based products on a large scale. If they succeed, Lagally believes that it would be the first and only company to do so.

Seattle Food Tech also distinguishes itself from other plant-based meat companies in its go to market strategy. While Impossible Foods goes after restaurants and Beyond Meat sells on supermarket shelves, the Seattle-based company plans to market their product wholesale to institutional dining halls, such as school and hospital cafeterias.

By opting not to sell their nuggets as a CPG, Seattle Food Tech would be able to offer them at roughly the same cost as meat — around $2 per serving. Lagally says that eventually, once they get their volumes up, they might consider putting their products in large grocery stores, such as Walmart and Costco.

They hope to have their nuggets in schools and hospital dining halls by fall of 2018. Next up, they want to tackle “chicken” strips, which, along with nuggets, are two of the most eaten low-cost chicken products. This is a tougher mechanical lift than the nuggets, since replacing the strip will require extrusion to mimic the texture.

Lagally said that Seattle Food Tech will use their funding to hire staff and continue developing specialized manufacturing equipment.

“Fundamentally we can’t replace meat if it’s not convenient, good tasting, priced well, and widely available,” said Lagally. To do that, Seattle Food Tech will need some very innovative manufacturing technology — and some very good-tasting nuggets.

Motorleaf Uses AI to Predict Crop Yields for Indoor Farmers & Greenhouse Growers

Between unpredictable weather, pests, and degrading soil quality, farming is an extremely difficult way to make a living. Indoor farming, though less weather-dependent, carries its own set of burdens.

Montreal-based startup Motorleaf wants to lighten the lift for indoor farmers by improving crop yield predictions and optimizing growing conditions. The company hopes that their software, which CEO and co-founder Ally Monk likens to a “virtual agronomist,” will take the uncertainty out of farming.

To do this, Motorleaf first gathers data on the grow environment through machine vision, agricultural sensors, and historical information. It then applies algorithms and AI to help farmers determine the adjustments they need to make to the indoor grow environment to optimize their crop. Which means farmers can monitor CO2 levels, light spectrum, and other atmospheric conditions remotely through wireless devices or laptops.

Customers can opt to install Motorleaf’s own hardware (a suite of IoT-enabled sensors), though they can also just connect the Motorleaf’s software to the farm’s existing pre-installed hardware to measure and remotely adjust environmental inputs. Its interoperability makes Motorleaf an easy tool for larger greenhouse operations, ones who already have their own monitoring hardware in place, to install.  “At the end of the day, we are a software company,” said Monk.

Motorleaf isn’t the only company helping indoor farmers help manage the lifecycle of their crop. In fact, it’s not even the only company which sees itself as a “virtual agronomist.” What sets it apart, however, is its ability to predict crop yield. Monk claims that motorleaf is the first company to use AI and machine learning to increase the accuracy of yield estimations.

This is a lot more important than an average person (read: the author) might think. Commercial greenhouses pre-sell produce before their harvest based on estimations given by agronomists — though they’re not always accurate. It’s extremely difficult to guarantee the quantity or quality of their crop before it’s harvested, and miscalculations can lead to loss of profits for both the buyer and producer, and also generate huge amounts of food waste.

Motorleaf claims that their software can cut yield prediction error by more than half — at least for some crops. Monk explained that each plant needs its own specialized software for yield prediction, likening farming to a recipe. “Maybe they think there’s a right recipe to growing kale; they need this many nutrients, this much light,” he explained. “We very strongly disagree with that. We think that any farming protocol needs to be dynamic, because if something happens in a greenhouse — which happens all the time — why would you stay rigid? You have to adapt.”

So far, their AI has only been proven to work for estimating tomato yield. However, they’re also deploying algorithms for peppers and silently developing technology for five other crops.

Photo: Motorleaf.

I was surprised to learn that indoor farming environments could be so volatile. After all, that’s the whole point of bringing them indoors, right? Apparently, not so. Monk explained that variable factors like sunlight, outside air temperatures, and human error can all affect greenhouse conditions. Even the plants themselves can do unexpected things that can affect their climate change.

Motorleaf got $100,000 Canadian dollars from the FounderFuel accelerator in the summer of 2016, and later that month Motorleaf raised $850,000 (US) for their seed round of funding. The startup is currently working with clients in Canada, USA, South Africa, South America, Mexico, Holland, Poland, New Zealand and the UK, and aims to be in Spain, France and Germany by early 2019.

Monk concluded our call with what he called “a crazy thought,” one he had when he saw celebrity-branded color palettes. “Why can’t I have a Jamie Oliver taste palette? Why can’t I buy a radish that’s the exact kind he likes to cook with?“ he asked. Farmers could use Motorleaf’s software to manipulate crops into having a certain taste and look, one that would be specific to, and branded by, celebrity chefs. Consumers could purchase produce that had the same taste profile as those preferred by their favorite chefs, and even integrate them into those chef’s recipes.

In the age of celebrity-branded meal kits and baking mixes, this idea isn’t too far-fetched. We’ve even seen companies like Bowery use AI to tweak the flavor, taste, and color of fruits and vegetables.

Motorleaf hasn’t started developing any of this technology yet, but Monk used it chiefly as an example to show how AI can open up “a whole slew of possibilities” for farming. He hopes that one of its applications will be to take the unpredictability out of farming, and put the power back in the hands of the growers.

Plant-Based Seafood Company Good Catch Foods Nets $5.5M

Tuna melts are great and all, but they can lose some of their appeal when you hear about mercury in the fish, or how dolphins sometimes get killed by being caught in tuna fishing nets.

Pennsylvania-based company Good Catch Foods is developing vegetarian shredded tuna, crab cakes, and fish patties made of lentils, chickpeas, fava beans, and other legumes. Founded in 2017, the startup is trying to change the way we look at tuna by, according to their website, “disrupting the seafood category, not the ocean’s resources.” Last week they got a little closer to their goal when they raised $5.5 million in Series A funding from Stray Dog Capital.

Good Catch is one of many companies capitalizing on the recent consumer trend towards plant-based and flexitarian eating. Vegan burgers have been creating a lot of buzz as of late — think Beyond Meat and the Impossible burger — but there are surprisingly few players working to create seafood alternatives, especially considering the popularity of seafood and the fishing industry’s massive environmental and ethical costs.

According to Good Catch’s website, fish are the largest class of farmed animals and account for roughly 4 out of every 10 pounds of animal product consumed. 90% of global fish stocks are overfished and fully depleted, and those that are wild-caught can have high levels of mercury or other contaminants.

These sobering stats have led to the creation of startups like Aquabyte, which uses machine learning to optimize fish farming, and Hatch, an accelerator geared specifically at aquaculture companies.

But they’ve also prompted some companies to start looking at ways to replace seafood altogether. Wild Type, a cellular agriculture startup, recently raised $3.5 million to continue its development of lab-grown salmon. Finless Foods is working on culturing bluefin tuna, which they hope to have to market by 2019. And New Wave Foods recently created the world’s first plant-based shrimp alternative, while Ocean Hugger Food is making the first vegan alternative to raw tuna.

Good Catch’s is developing plant-based tuna in three flavors: original, Mediterranean, and olive oil & herbs. They’re made with their signature 6-Bean Non-GMO Plant Protein Blend, and has 13 grams of protein per serving. That’s roughly half the protein of canned tuna, which has 25g of protein per similar-sized serving.

Good Catch claims their fish-free tuna will be in the market by the end of 2018. It will be interesting to see if their product makes the same splash (sorry) as other recently-launched meat alternatives, like the Impossible burger. I guess I’ll have to wait and put it to the test myself — preferably in a tuna melt.

Sage Project Uses Adorable Graphics to Break Down Nutrition Labels

When you’re in the grocery aisle deciding which type of crackers or canned tomatoes or granola to buy, you might check the label for nutritional information. Maybe you seek out the calories, the protein, or the fiber — but what does it all really mean? 

New York-based startup Sage Project is hoping to cut through the confusion with their nutrition data platform. The best part? It looks great doing it.

Started in 2015, Sage Project initially came out of CEO and co-founder Sam Slover’s research thesis at NYU in which he tracked his food intake for a year. During that time he realized that there wasn’t a tracking tool out there that was user-friendly and gave a helpful context to what you were eating. So Slover decided to create a nutrition platform that provided a lot of data points, but which also personalized the information and made it accessible — even to someone that didn’t have a nutrition degree.

What separates Sage Project from other services that quantify food’s nutritional value, such as Weight Watchers, is its level of contextualization. When you click on a branded product on Sage Project’s website, it will immediately give you a visually appealing nutritional breakdown, listing calories, protein, carbs, vitamins, and fat per serving. Which is what you would find on any nutritional label. But then Sage Project takes it further by giving information on where the product brand’s headquarters are, which diets it works well with, and other notable health aspects (gluten-free, vegan, etc).

Food items may also have something called “badges”. Which are sort of like Girl/Boy Scout Badges, but for health. For example, a pre-prepared bean and cheese burrito might get a badge for being certified organic, or a chocolate bar might earn a badge for having fewer than 5 ingredients.

“We’re not giving advice through the app,” said Sage Project Community Manager (and registered dietician) Georgia Rounder. “We’re providing information — and we want to provide it in a way that’s educational and fun.”

And fun it is. My personal favorite part of the site is a gif that shows how many minutes you would have to bike, run, swim, jump rope, do yoga, or dance in order to burn off the calories in one serving of your selected food. Which can be a little shocking (20 minutes of dancing to burn off one serving of crackers?!), but I didn’t mind. Because the visuals are just so. Darn. Cute.

“There’s a whimsical feel that sets it apart from other nutritional services,” said Rounder. After poking around the Sage Project site for a while, I would have to agree; the platform presents a lot of information, but the clean layout and pastel colors (not to mention the animated foodstuffs) somehow make it not overwhelming. Which is especially important since Sage Project is providing nutritional data, which can feel pretty intimidating — especially if you’re trying to figure out how to eat within the guidelines of a diet like diabetes-friendly or ketogenic.

Sage Project currently sources its library of data directly from partner brands. So far it has relationships Whole Foods, Kroger, Walmart and more. In the future they hope to expand their partnerships and work with a lot more macro and micro brands, growing their offering until, presumably, they catalog every product on the market.

In fact, the privately funded company has quite a few plans for expansion. In the next month or so, the startup will be rolling out a bigger, more comprehensive platform, as well as a mobile app. The new platform will have a new name (which Rounder said she couldn’t reveal), new features, and will expand on old features. It will also let users get a lot more personalized with their diets. For example, if you’re trying to eat a kidney-friendly or vegan diet, you can let the platform know and it will tell you if each food you select is a good pick or not.

It won’t only be for people trying to follow particular diets, however. Users can also create an individual dietary profile if they want to make it even more customized.

But the most critical aspect of Sage Project’s update will be the addition of a mobile app. In fact, without a mobile app component, Sage Project is basically just a cute novelty tool; a fun way to look up particular food products, but not especially useful in the day to day.  Because if you’re shopping in a grocery store the last thing you want to do is pull up a website on your phone to get some nutritional context for chocolate-covered almonds.

The app will also give consumers a way to add new foods to the database. If they come across a product or brand that isn’t listed, users can take a photo of the label with the app and Sage Project will add its nutritional information. In the future, I could see the startup teaming up with a grocery delivery service (like Amazon, since Sage Project’s first brand partner was Whole Foods) so that users could shop for foods that were in line with their diet directly from their phone.

Jones told me that the Sage Project team is also working on image recognition. They hope that the app will be able to recognize what foods are on your plate so it can give you a nutritional breakdown of each separate ingredient or dish, plus advice on how they fit into your personalized nutrition profile.

Until that day we’ll have to settle for getting our nutrition breakdown for a break-dancing milk carton and a bicycling watermelon. I’m not mad about it.

Byte’s Smart Fridge Is Upstaging the Vending Machine. That’s Great News for Offices

It’s hard to get amped about the food options inside an office building. Unless you work for a Google-like company and get subsidized or free meals, you’re probably stuck with vending machines. And we all know Fig Newtons do not a healthy lunch make.

Byte Foods, founded in 2015 by husband-wife team Lee and Megan Mokri, is trying to introduce a new option to the office food mix. Their company supplies offices with smart fridges full of fresh, healthy food options from local producers, like coffee from Blue Bottle and falafel snack packs from Sinbad Specialty Foods.

To use the fridges, employees simply swipe a credit card and pick what they want. A receipt for each purchase is sent to their email address. Each food item has a disposable RFID tag on the bottom, which Byte supplies to their producers. Before and after the fridge door opens, Byte scans the tag to determine what the employee took, then charges them accordingly. Each fridge also features a screen with nutrition and dietary information as well as prices. “It’s basically a really high quality food court in the office,” Lee Mokri told me over the phone. A food court that knows exactly what kind of kombucha you like.

Byte’s model is full service: they provide the fridge, stock it every day, and take any unsold food away at the end of the day to donate to various shelters. All their corporate clients have to do is pay a monthly service fee. This makes things super convenient for employers who want to provide fresh, healthy food options for their workers, but puts a lot of pressure on the Byte team—if no one wants a ham sandwich, Byte ends up paying for all the leftover ones at the end of the day.

Byte fridges have a screen displaying nutrition facts and prices.

For this reason, Byte relies heavily on data to optimize what they put on offer. “We have pretty robust demand-planning algorithms deciding exactly what we want to put in the fridge every day,” said Mokri. “That’s something that sets us apart from a catering company.” This custom curation smacks of a few other stories we’ve covered on The Spoon, such as Amazon‘s predictive meal ordering and dishq’s AI-powered food recommendations.

Much like Uber, Byte uses dynamic pricing to help push food off the shelves. For example, if a batch of Blue Bottle coffees is about to expire they can discount it to encourage sales. Byte can also hand this power off to their corporate clients, giving them the power to subsidize their employees meals. For example, Tesla, a client, discounts all food in their Byte fridges by 30 percent after 6 p.m., to support their teams burning the midnight oil. Dynamic pricing is currently managed by human employees, but Mokri says they “have a very clear path” for how to automate it.

Byte has also begun licensing their fridges and technology to companies across the country. These partners have access to the Byte dashboard, but can brand the fridges however they like and even fill them with their own food products. Mokri says this is an ideal model for place like hospitals and universities, who have a lot of people to feed but already do their own food production. Basically, their clients are paying for a simplified interface as well as a tool to help track customer food preferences.

The San Rafael-based company isn’t the only one working on improving grab-and-go food options. Chicago’s Farmer’s Fridge and French Foodles are also offering turnkey fridges stocked with freshly prepared meals, and electronics giant Panasonic is even getting in on the action with an IoT-enabled food ordering ecosystem Bento @ Your Office.

This rush to shake up the office dining routine makes sense: the vending market closed 2016 with a seven-year high of $21.6 billion. That means a big opportunity for those players looking to usurp the vending machine. At the same time, there’s a growing consumer demand for healthier food options.

Byte has branched into 500 locations in the San Francisco area and has raised a total of $10 million, according to Mokri. He said that they’re adding about 50 new clients per month. So next time you go to punch in C5 and get a “healthy” snack of Sunchips, you might be able to get something that’s actually healthy, instead.

Amazon Looks At Food Tech To Make Packaged Food Better

Amazon continues to explore ways to dominate the $700 billion grocery market, and this time the commerce giant is turning to military-grade food tech to gain an edge on competitors. Reuters is reporting on Amazon’s interest in a partnership with 915 Labs, a startup based in Denver that’s commercializing a technology known as MATS – or microwave assisted thermal sterilization. MATS is a process that takes prepared food and using a specific heating technique, eliminates food pathogens and microorganisms that cause spoilage.

According to Reuters, the process involves taking “sealed packages of food in pressurized water and heating them with microwaves for several minutes.” A sort of sous vide on steroids, the technique was developed at the University of Washington and received FDA approval in 2012 as a safe way to preserve fresh foods.

MATS replaces traditional preservation techniques which often entail heating foods at high temperatures for up to an hour, significantly damaging the quality and taste of the food. 915 Labs, the startup that’s trademarked MATS, says to solve the problem of damaged foods, companies add things like “salt, flavor, texture and color enhancers, and other unnatural ingredients” to make the foods edible again.

MATS-Made Foods and Beverages

Packaged food has to have a long shelf life in order for dry goods companies to make money – but the game changing element is taste. With MATS, companies could potentially make packaged food appealing again, in an era where the heavy consumer focus is on healthier, fresher options. Which brings us to Amazon.

With Amazon Pantry, Dash replenishment services, the purchase of Whole Foods and the use of machine learning and AI to run next-gen stores, Amazon is all in on the grocery game. And while the company is still working on ways to compete in the fresh foods game, Amazon is taking prime real estate in the middle of the grocery store with dry goods.

And besides boxed snack foods and household items, what lives in the middle of the grocery store? Prepared and packaged foods. From frozen dinners to soups, pasta mixes and “just add water” foods, the center aisles are generally filled with sodium-laden offerings that can be bought and sit in pantries for months.

As Amazon looks at building its own meal kit delivery service(see Mike’s Amazon meal kit review), there’s a clear interest in developing its own line of foods that take advantage of Amazon’s massive e-commerce infrastructure but also don’t require the large investment that fresh food transportation and storage often do, particularly in the form of refrigeration.

And without additives and sodium, MATS produced packaged foods could still stay on the shelf just as long but taste much better and be comparatively healthier than their traditionally preserved counterparts.

The research that led to the development of MATS was funded by several large food companies, including Nestle, General Mills, Delmonte and Pepsi, all of whom also play a big role in dry goods and groceries. But now 915 Labs owns the exclusive rights to MATS and its sister process, MAPS or microwave assisted pasteurization sterilization which is a faster way to pasteurize foods like dairy and baby food.

Reuters reports that consumers are unlikely to see MATS-created packaged foods from Amazon until 2018 – and maybe even later depending on how the company decides to integrate the technology with its current offerings. It’s clear that the omnichannel retailer has big plans for food domination in the future.

Hungry for Funding? New Avenues for Food Startup Financing are Opening Up

Ask many people how to find funding for emerging food projects, and lots of them will point to crowdsourcing sites. After all, sites such as Kickstarter have driven concepts ranging from PicoBrew to the Anova Precision Cooker to levels of funding that would put a smile on any startup founder’s face. Indeed, when it comes to gadgets and devices in the food arena, the widely known crowdsourcing sites can pay off, but other kinds of concepts are finding funding through alternative routes and alternative crowdsourcers.

Where can you turn if Kickstarter or GoFundMe don’t seem right for your project? If you have a food or beverage startup concept, consider PieShell. It’s based in New York, and was founded by entrepreneur Cheryl Clements. Check out some of the concepts that PieShell is funding here.

Part of PieShell’s concept is that crowdfunding has benefits that go beyond just money. “Crowdfunding ultimately brings you closer to your customers — something that’s crucial for startup success,” notes PieSheller Caroline Halter. “Branching out beyond friends and family helps you learn what your customers like about your product, as well as what they don’t like. For instance, one of our first PieShellers, Edamam, crowdfunded to build a nutrition app. The crowdfunding experience helped them realize that their real potential was in B2B (business-to-business), rather than consumer markets.”

According to Halter, another benefit to crowdfunding is that it can give you an instant hook for a pitch to the press. “Once you get a little bit of press, it’s much easier to get more,” she said.

 Credibles is another avenue to look into for funding. It was started in San Francisco in 2014 by founder Arno Hesse. The twist that Credibles provides is a way for customers to financially support their favorite food businesses. The basic concept is that customers are investors. Customers can prepay a business by starting a tab with the business, and then they draw on the tab whenever they visit.

Credibles offers food and beverage businesses financial flexibility up front. Case in point: Driver’s Market is a small grocery store that focuses on transparent, non-GMO sourcing direct from as many local producers as possible. Through Credibles, Driver’s Market has already raised over $100,000 from its customers, with the first $10,000 arriving in 10 days. You can find out how to get your business or concept funded with Credibles here.

The angel investors who provide funding for technology-focused startups have their counterparts in the food and beverage arena. Food Angels is an organization that strictly invests in early stage food and food-tech startups. The group consists of accredited angel investors who screen companies each month and select a few to consider for funding. Food Angels invests in the form of equity, royalties and more.

There are also community organizations for food startups seeking funding. The Angel Food Network is an organization of emerging food and beverage companies seeking funding. Membership is by invitation and you can apply here.  Some types of food and food tech concepts may also qualify for the IKEA Bootcamp accelerator program, which will reward startups trying to solve the world’s problems. Food tech concepts have the potential to qualify, and you can find out more here.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the world of food funding has its own dedicated conferences. Future Food-Tech is one that is typically held in North America and Europe, and the Food Investing Conference is another one to look into.

Getting a project funded can call for some creativity, but there are more options available to startups than ever before. Entrepreneurs who think outside the box will have the strongest chances to find funding.

Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

Tea Startup Teforia Gets $12 Million Infusion In Series A Round

Last year at the inaugural Smart Kitchen Summit, there was a small team gathered around a high-top round table pouring delicious tea for Summit attendees. Their startup, Teforia, was still relatively unknown, having officially introduced itself only a week earlier. A few months later, Teforia announced a $5.1 million seed funding round and began the work of evangelizing the magic its technology was attempting to bring to tea drinkers everywhere. Accepting around 500 pre-orders to early backers, the company is now about to start early shipping and has just announced a $12 million Series A round led by Translink Capital.

Teforia’s premise is based on a propriety technology and sleek design. Using what’s called the “Selection Infusion Process,” users can customize their tea’s caffeine levels, antioxidant levels and flavor profiles. Teforia’s infuser will know exactly the right brew time and temperature and the result is a unique twist on an ancient drink.

The company has enjoyed early success in part based on founder Allen Han, who in a previous life was one of the designers behind the original XBOX. A trip several years ago to Asia and an excellent cup of tea led Han to explore the niche beverage industry and discover a significant lack of innovation or modern investment.

“…the $90 billion dollar global tea market largely consists of commercialized brewing methods and treatments. Most tea drinkers don’t know what they’re missing, so I wanted to create a way to perfect the process of brewing tea while honoring its tradition.”

Teforia’s device uses a pod-based system, made popular first by Keurig but then replicated by many modern beverage machines. The difference in Teforia’s model lies in the customization features. The pre-packaged “Sips” are filled with gourmet teas that can be “read” by the Teforia infuser and the companion app allows tea drinkers to personalize infusions of any loose-leaf tea to their preferences.

Teforia is banking on the continued popularity of tea around the globe, but particularly within the Millennial generations. While older generations typically prefer coffee, surveyed Millennials drink tea and coffee equally – and while the company is currently only shipping in the U.S., the opportunity abroad may be even bigger. Jay Eum, co-founder and managing director, Translink Capital commented, “As the tea market continues to grow globally, we know that as the company gears up for a successful launch in the U.S., that will only be the beginning. We believe the opportunity for the company could be huge in Asia where tea is deeply integrated into the culture.”

The startup’s Series A round included participation from returning investor Upfront Ventures and Lemnos Labs along with new investment from Mousse Partners and Correlation Ventures, bringing total funding to date to over $17M.