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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

startups

How Now, No Cow: Animal-Free Dairy Startup PerfectDay Raises $24.7M

Someone’s moo-ving up in the world.

PerfectDay, a food startup developing technology to make animal-free milk, just raised $24.7 million in series A funding. This brings their total funding to $26.8 million. The round was led by Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investment company, with participation from Horizon Ventures, Iconiq Capital, and Lion Ventures, among others. Berkeley-based Perfect Day is on a roll: earlier this month, they received a patent to use their animal-free dairy technology in food applications.

Though it’s been attracting a good bit of attention as of late, PerfectDay has been around for a while. The company launched in 2014 under the name Muufri, but rebranded to PerfectDay in 2016. (Fun fact: The new name comes from a study which found that cows produced more milk when listening to soothing music like the eponymous Lou Reed tune.) They plan to use their new funding to expand their staff (currently 32 people strong) and accelerate commercial marketing of their product with dairy & food companies.

Unlike other milk alternatives, which are made of plants like soy, almond, or peas, PerfectDay uses fermentation to create the exact same elements found in cow’s milk. Scientists give genetically altered yeast a “blueprint” so that, when fed with certain nutrients, they produce two key proteins in milk: casein and whey.

The resulting proteins can be used to make lactose-free, gluten-free, soy-free, and nut-free milk. They can also be used to make a myriad of dairy products such as cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. While there are plenty of vegan dairy products already on shelves, no cashew cheese or coconut-based gelato will ever taste exactly the same as the dairy original. Products made with PerfectDay’s milk proteins, however, taste just like the “real thing”—after all, the proteins are genetically identical.

When they first launched, PerfectDay was trying to do two things: create a supply chain for animal-free dairy components and put a single brand of cow-free milk on supermarket shelves. In November of 2017 co-founder Perumal Gandhi announced on LinkedIn that they would shift course to focus on a B2B model, creating a supply chain for animal-free dairy products and partnering with food and drink companies to bring their technology to market.

And this, in my opinion, is where things start to get really interesting. “Nobody else was working on the supply chain side,” Gandhi told The Spoon. “We started this company to have the largest possible impact on the effects of animal agriculture on our planet, and now we can do that by working with grocery stores across multiple channels. We can be national from Day One.”

 

Animal-free milk has significantly lower environmental impact than cow’s milk.

By joining forces with existing food manufacturers, especially large dairy companies, PerfectDay hopes to alter the system from the inside. With the recent trends for vegan products and milk alternatives, this disruption could prove to be pretty profitable—both for PerfectDay and the planet. And given their investors’ connections with large-scale food and beverage brands, PerfectDay will likely be able to commercialize their “milk” protein technology relatively quickly.

Gandhi said that, while they’re also partnering with smaller, family-owned businesses, they need to team up with big companies to truly change the food industry. He hopes that their lab-grown casein and whey will eventually be like pea protein is today: an ingredient that used to be rare, but is now fairly commonplace in animal-free products.

The path ahead is not without obstacles. PerfectDay will have to convince consumers that cow-free dairy products can taste and function indistinguishably from traditional dairy, and can be produced at a competitive price. They will also have to figure out what their new products will be called.

In fact, the PerfectDay team is currently in talks with the FDA to determine what sort of labeling use for their cow-free dairy. Unlike lab-grown meat, which is fighting Big Beef to be able to use “meat” on their labels, Gandhi said that they want to call their product something other than “milk.” “We’re trying to come up with a nomenclature to show the consumer that this is produced in a new way, without animals,” he said. “If we call it milk then we’re not being transparent.” This makes sense, especially if their products are more expensive; people want to know why they’re paying a premium.

Challenges aside, their technology as a service model has the potential to be hugely successful. By choosing to use a B2B model, PerfectDay will no doubt be able to scale more quickly than with a B2C model. It will be interesting to follow their progress and see how they compare in, say, 5 years with other food tech startups who chose to market directly to consumers.

If the current trend towards animal protein alternatives continues, PerfectDay will no doubt take home some serious (cow-free) cheddar.

We Tried The Impossible Burger, And It Was…

On a rainy day in Seattle, Mike Wolf and I set off on a mission. We were going to sample the much-hyped Impossible burger. As a vegetarian who hasn’t tried a beef burger in 4 years or so, I was pretty psyched to sink my teeth into one of these look-alikes. But would it be everything I dreamed of?


Look at all of that excitement!

First off, a little background about Impossible Foods: the Silicon Valley-based millennial darling trying to make meat alternatives that are as good as the real thing. Their plant-based burgers are sweeping the country by storm, garnering a mega Instagram following and pretty favorable reviews. While the patties were originally available at only a few trendy restaurants, they’re now on menus in a lot of major cities.

Impossible patties contain wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein and their ace in the hole: heme. An iron-containing compound found in blood, heme is what gives red meat that rich, umami taste. Impossible Foods’ scientists have found a way to extract heme from plants, which they hope will give their burgers a magic meatiness missing in so many veggie burgers.

Unlike plant-based burger competitor Beyond Meat, which is sold in grocery stores across the country and online, Impossible burgers are only available in restaurants. They premiered on the menu at celebrity chef’s restaurant Momofuku Nishi in 2016 and have since expanded to restaurants around the country. This business model might change, though, as their website hinted that they do have retail plans in the pipeline.

An Impossible burger, ready to go on the flat top.

So did it live up to expectations? Mostly. The Impossible burger is definitely good: it’s savory, has a good texture, and even has that umami flavor that comes from red meat. I suppose that’s thanks to the heme, which is also what makes the Impossible burger “bleed” when cooked rare.


Don’t worry, we washed our hands first.

Sadly, ours was very well-done, so we couldn’t test the bleed. But that’s alright. The burger was still juicy, despite a seared, caramelized exterior. I was surprised by how much it reminded me of burgers of yore, and I even tasted a distinct animal-like funkiness (thanks, heme!). It wasn’t quite as chubby and rosy-tinted as the photos on their website, but it still beat my expectations. I didn’t even add ketchup, and I always add ketchup.

I also appreciated how fatty it was, chiefly thanks to coconut oil. Impossible isn’t trying to make a health-food burger—just one that tastes as good as meat. In fact, their patty has comparable levels of protein, iron and fat to an 80/20 beef burger, though it doesn’t contain cholesterol. This makes sense if they’re targeting a wide, flexitarian audience, instead of a health-conscious vegan one.

Of course, there’s the possibility that my perspective was skewed since I haven’t had beef in a few years. So Mike Wolf took a bite of each to compare and contrast.


The true taste test. 

We got cheese on our burgers and, according to Mike, there wasn’t a huge difference between the two patties. In fact, if you topped your burger with bold flavors like blue cheese, special sauce, and pickles, you might not even notice that you weren’t chomping into a quarter pound of cow flesh.

The Impossible burger also had a delicious taste of self-righteousness. We all know that meat isn’t exactly great for the environment and that we should probably be reducing our beef consumption. Impossible’s website claims that by replacing one meat burger with one of their wheat protein-based patties, you’ll spare 75 square feet of land for wildlife, save water equivalent to a 10-minute shower, and spare 18 driving-miles worth of greenhouse gases.

Now for the downsides: Most notably, the Impossible burger is expensive. It cost an extra $4 to replace a beef patty with an Impossible one, at least at the restaurant we went to. That put the beef burger at $5.99 plus tax, and the Impossible burger at $9.99. Customize it with cheese and a topping or two, and things start to add up. It’s not a huge difference, but if they’re aiming to nab flexitarians price could be a big deciding factor.

In the end, I really enjoyed my Impossible burger experience. In fact, if someone suggests a burger night, I would go out of my way to find a spot that serves their patties (they have a map for that). Now if they could get started on making plant-based pulled pork, it would be much appreciated.

Check, Please! Ex-Googlers Bring Robot Food Runners to Restaurants

Are you ready for even more robots in your daily life? Yes? Good—because they might soon be whirring along through your favorite local pizza joint, delivering your pepperoni pie, clearing up the scraps, and bringing you the check.

Silicon Valley-based startup Bear Robotics has created robots to bus tables and deliver food in restaurants. Their AI-driven robots—which vaguely resemble hip-height bowling pins with a flat disc on top—use self-driving technology to navigate through restaurants, avoiding people and other obstacles. 

When food is ready to run, managers simply use a tablet with Bear Robotics’ connected app to call a robot (dubbed “Penny”) to come pick it up and whisk it off to hungry customers. When they’re finished eating, Penny will return, ready to deliver dirty dishes to the kitchen before bringing the bill. 

If you’re thinking that this sounds very Silicon Valley-esque, you’re not wrong. In fact, Bear Robotics co-founder and CEO John Ha spent six years as an engineer at Google before turning his sights on the hospitality industry. He invested in a Korean restaurant, which is where he started to realize how inefficient and difficult foodservice could be.

“[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard,” Ha told The Spoon. His company wanted to streamline the point of sale and increase efficiency in front of house operations. So they decided to build a runner robot who could deliver food quickly and clear dishes. 

Hence, Penny was born. Well, made.

The company currently has one robot deployed at Ha’s restaurant Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas, CA. When it was first introduced in August 2017, engineers had to be on call to make sure that the robot was running food smoothly. Since December, however, Ha says that the robot has been deployed every day, unsupervised by engineers. It now works seven days a week.

The robots are controlled by an app which Ha claims is very user-friendly. Restaurant owners or managers can simply mark key locations (Table 1, kitchen, etc.) and the robot will learn the layout by moving around the space, drawing a map as it goes. When food is ready in the kitchen managers use the app to call a Penny, who then runs the dishes to their matching customers. 

Penny doesn’t have arms, though, so either servers or the customers themselves still have to transfer the food from the robot to the table. This means that the robots don’t necessarily save a lot of time, though Ha claims that that time adds up. By not spending time waiting in the kitchen for food to be ready or running back and forth to the kitchen with dishes, servers are able to stay in the dining room and chat with diners.

Ha is in the process of selling his flagship restaurant to focus on expanding Bear Robotic’s robot food-running empire. The company plans on renting out Pennys using a labor as a service business model to local chains for an hourly or monthly fee. So far, local pizza chain Amici’s Pizza has signed on to add food running robots to their staff once a week. Ha is also in the process of opening a Japanese ramen place which will “employ” three robots to serve and clear dishes. 

So how do customers feel about having their entrées delivered by a robot that sort of resembles a slimmer R2D2? According to Ha, most of them are all for it. “People love to interact with the robot,” he said. “They especially love paying the bill when the robot brings it to them.” 

In the future, BearRobotics is hoping to expand Penny’s functions beyond simply running food back and forth. Ha envisions a future when the AI system can integrate more fully with POS, possibly even taking orders directly with customers without the guidance of an app.

Bear Robotics PennyBot demo

Unlike other companies who are applying AI to food production with burger-flipping and salad-mixing robots, BearRobotics is focused solely on the front of house operations. “By focusing on the front of house we [can] have a better impact on the industry and reach a bigger market with a simple, versatile product,” said Ha.

In other words, not every restaurant needs a robot with a specialized preparation skill like crepe-making, but most of them do need someone (or something) to run food and bus tables. That means that Bear Robotics’ Penny robots could function in virtually any type of restaurant, regardless of layout or type of cuisine.

I was surprised to learn that Ha doesn’t envision his robots (or their future iterations) completely replacing human servers. Instead, his goal is for their robots to help bulk up staff during busy times and decrease labor intensity on employees. He hopes that Penny can shoulder the physically draining parts of service, like dish clearing and delivering heavy plates, so waiters can focus on the more fulfilling aspects of their job, such as chatting with customers.

Integrating robots into the staff can also help human servers make more money—at least in theory. If a robot is covering food running and bussing, restaurant managers can schedule fewer servers per shift. That means that servers don’t have to tip out their bussers and runners at the end of the day. However, if a robot is delivering customers’ food, they might not feel the need to tip as much as they would with a human server—no matter how good of a job it does. 

Despite Ha’s assurances otherwise, I can’t help thinking that Penny (and other restaurant robots) still bring us one step closer towards an automated restaurant experience. We’re already seeing automated restaurant experiences in fast-casual joints like Eatsa and coffee shops like CafeX, but Bear Robotics is hoping to incorporate robots into nearly every type of eating establishment.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: front of house automation could well lead to more efficient ordering and food delivery, so you’ll never have to deal with cold fries again. But it is worth noting that Penny does cut out two full-time restaurant jobs which are pretty commonplace at high-volume and fancy establishments: bussers and runners. No matter how much it frees up servers to spend more time asking about your day, it still probably means fewer hospitality jobs for humans. 

The effectiveness of server robots will most likely depend on the type of restaurant experience. At a low-key pizza place I most likely don’t need any help ordering (anchovies, of course), but for a more fine dining experience I appreciate a more, well, human touch. Servers guiding me through the menu, explaining specials, and recommending dishes in an engaging manner is part of what makes forking out for a big meal worth it.  

Ha told us that he wanted to create a company that was “the Google of the restaurant field,” and in a way I think he’ll succeed. I could envision a future where Pennys are pretty ubiquitous, especially as their self-driving technology inevitably improves. Plus, if Ha’s predictions are true, Bear Robotics will expand their robots’ operations until they could effectively run the entire front of house by themselves. So if you weren’t already mentally prepared for robots to enter every aspect of your life—even your pizza parlor—now’s the time. 

Minneapolis-St.Paul

Techstars Unveils Startup Accelerator for Foodtech Innovators

Agriculture in the U.S. is a $3 trillion industry, but, paradoxically, it’s innovations in technology that have slowed growth in terms of how many people the agriculture industry employs. All that’s to say there are fewer workers on farms nowadays, which means fewer people and less time for innovative ideas.

Entrepreneurship network Techstars wants to change that with its latest startup accelerator. The Farm to Fork Accelerator is Techstars first program that will focus on helping companies in the food and tech side of agriculture develop their ideas and businesses. Early- and late-stage startups from areas like AgTech, manufacturing, food safety, and waste reduction are invited to apply for the three-month program, which will be held in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area this summer. 

Techstars has partnered with the $13 billion water and energy provider Ecolab, as well as food- and agriculture-services provider Cargill. “The Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator is the perfect platform to connect these global giants in food processing, food safety and agriculture with innovators who have ideas and technical knowledge,” Farm to Fork managing director Brett Brohl recently wrote.

The three-month program helps entrepreneurs across several stages: finding mentors, building out products, and learning how to communicate with investors and major stakeholders. The program ends with a demo day where participants show off their progress.

Techstars says its choice of The Twin Cities as a host for a food innovation program is a strategic choice: food and ag tech programs there are worth more than $25 billion, and these companies employ over 100,000 people. “Our history is food and agriculture and with programs like this food and ag tech will play a big part in the region’s future,” Brohl says.

Agriculture technology has a growing number of startups in it these days that cover everything from farm data platforms and online marketplaces for imperfect produce to livestock management and using blockchain to assess sustainability. “Digital agriculture” is a trend to watch out for in this space in continuing search for more sustainable farming methods and using biotech to create food alternatives (e.g., plant-based “meat”). Given those trends, now feels like an exciting and appropriate time to launch a startup accelerator focused on this area.

The Farm to Fork program will run from July 16–October 11, 2018. Applications open on January 8, and close on April 8.

Cooking Tech That Lets You Keep Taste & Save Time

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS. Below we take a look at one of these finalists, IXL Netherlands.

What does the future of cooking really look like? Current heating techniques often blunt flavor and take away a food’s core nutrition. One startup in Europe hopes to change all that with a new cooking technology known as Pulse Electric Field (PEF). IXL Netherlands combines the effects of electroporation and pulsed ohmic heating in the eCooker, allowing cooked food to maintain its nutritional value, flavor, color, structure and taste.  The appliance features three individual compartments. Each compartment works independently of one another, consisting of two vertical electrodes that are connected to a high voltage pulse generator inside the apparatus featuring electronic communication. The machine has the capability to program different process parameters and their results can then be stored.

Food Valley Award winner 2011 Nutri-Pulse e-Cooker, IXL Netherlands

This sounds overly technical – but the process for users is fairly straightforward. Users start by placing the food in one of the baskets along with a liquid sauce that acts as an energy transferring medium. They can then select a cooking strategy based on the type of food they’re cooking from the program on the tablet. The eCooker then cooks the food using electrical pulses, evenly heating the contents without destroying taste or nutrition. Once the required temperature is reached, the unit automatically turns off to save energy. And, as it turns out, cooking via electrical pulses is pretty quick.

The result is a healthy, hot meal using low temperatures cooked in just a short period of time.

To learn more about IXL Netherlands, visit http://www.e-cooker.eu/

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Move Over Coffee Pot, Chime Is The Keurig For Chai

Coffee gets all the glory – the fancy machines, the social media memes, the cute mugs. But outside the U.S., different forms of tea are even more popular than coffee. First created in India, chai tea is renowned for its unique, spice-based flavor and has a cult-following of devotees across the globe. The team at Camellia Labs believe that the chai tea latte is just as special as a cup of coffee and deserves its own unique experience and they inveted Chime, the first authentic chai tea brewer to create just that.

INTRODUCING CHIME - AUTHENTIC CHAI IN 3 MINUTES!

Like a Keurig or similar cup-based brewing machine, Chime is a single touch brewer. Chime simmers milk for the beverage while combining whole tea and spices in a brewing chamber. When the two are ready, the milk and steeped tea come together for the ultimate chai tea. The machine uses recyclable capsules called Chime Caps that are filled with Indian tea, similar to K-Cups. The current flavor lineup includes black tea, cardamom, ginger, cardamom ginger, and masala.

Chime lets users tweak the temperature, strength and milk content of the beverage to further customize their chai tea latte. The system adapts to a user’s chosen preferences and remembers for the next cup. With Chime, Camellia Labs is looking to increase the chai market presence and make chai tea more accessible to people who are currently unfamiliar with the drink to create a whole new wave of fans of the unique beverage.

To learn more about Camellia Labs and Chime, visit http://brewchime.com/

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Bubble Lab Wants Robots To Brew, Pour & Serve You Coffee

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Imagine your Starbucks coffee one day being served to you by a robot – that’s the vision that Beijing based Bubble Labs had when they created the Drip barista robot. Drip is a precision engineered fully self-functioning mechanical arm that can brew, pour and serve coffee all while maintaining product consistency. It mimics the movement of a human performing every piece of the coffee brewing process.  Drip first wets the filter and warms the server. Then, it distributes the coffee cups, pours the coffee and cleans up the space, while wiping down the counter, and even discarding the filter offering a complete coffee creation experience. Every detail is considered – down to the ability to create recipes and customize parameters that Drip then utilizes to create product that is consistent.

Robotic barista making hand drip coffee by Bubble Lab

Busy café owners often run into the issue of creating consistent, quality-made product for mass quantities of coffee, while also maintaining a level of cleanliness in their establishment. Drip aims to enhance the experience of café-goers while also streamlining and simplifying operations for managers. Drip also gives baristas back their time, freeing them up to create different kinds of coffee drinks rather than wasting time on the same product. For example, Drip could be calibrated to only create black coffee so baristas in a shop are able to create lattes adorned with eye-catching designs that may be more time consuming.

Although the Drip arm is set to work for coffee making now, Bubble Labs have shared that additional robots for varying scenarios are also in the product pipeline. Robot taco makers, anyone?

Learn more about Bubble Lab at http://www.bubblelab.com/

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Chefling Is The Smart Kitchen Personal Assistant You Never Knew You Needed

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Created in 2016 by a group of Northwestern University grads, the Chefling app was designed to be the ultimate smart kitchen assistant. The app, available on both Android and iPhone aims to resemble life spent in the kitchen of an average family and comes with three main features: a home inventory management system that syncs across devices, a colorful shopping list and a smart cookbook that suggests recipes based on available ingredients.

The home inventory management system monitors what a user buys and then keeps an eye on freshness levels, based on purchases. It also syncs across every family member’s device so any quick trips to the grocery store are simplified. The shopping list feature allows users to organize and create a list that is not only easy to browse, but easy to share. The cookbook feature browses a user’s inventory using an algorithm that calculates recipe matches based on what is in the pantry.

Chefling also has Amazon Echo and Google Home skills so users can operate the app hands-free through voice control.

Chefling’s long-term goal is to bring the platform outside of the phone and into smart fridges, as well as incorporating advanced A.I. elements and image recognition technology to create an assistant that is truly integrated with the home kitchen.

Learn more about Chefling at http://www.chefling.net/.

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Toast Wants To Make Going Out To Dinner Better For Everyone – Even The Servers

Steve Fredette, Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm’s venture into entrepreneurship first began while waiting for their drinks in their favorite after-work bar. The wait seemed never-ending and the three engineers decided among themselves that there had to a be a way to improve the customer experience in bars and restaurants. MIT graduates and naturally gifted tinkerers, they began to imagine all the ways they could potentially improve the dining out experience by removing common pain points, like splitting checks or updating menus. From there, Toast was born.

Toast is a full-service, cloud-based, point-of-sale system created for the restaurant industry. It streamlines every element of running a successful restaurant – front-of-house, back-of-house, online orders, loyalty programs – and syncs them for easy access and quick changes. Toast provides real-time data, across multiple locations, to zero in on what’s working and what’s not, so owners can pivot when needed. In addition to their platform, Toast offers hardware that easily integrates their solution into a variety of terminals or tablets.

“In a world where consumers expect on-demand everything – television, meal delivery, car rides – businesses cannot afford to be slow,” says co-founder and president, Steve Fredette. “Toast brings efficiency, convenience and an exceptional customer experience to the restaurant industry at a time when the demands are higher than ever.”

Addressing the unique challenges only found in the restaurant industry is part of Toast’s service model. “Every member of the Toast team, no matter what their area of focus, has some level of restaurant experience on their resume. Toast is designed for restaurants, by people who know, love and have worked in restaurants,” says Steve. This attention to detail is found in every aspect of the platform’s user experience – from their customizable POS interfaces that include table setup, menu setup and kitchen workflow, to real-time POS customization like adding tickets directly to a kitchen’s display screen to reduce back and forth time from servers, to post-service reporting that dial down on every aspect of the restaurant’s sales and efficiencies. Toast brings the power of data analytics and insights to restaurant ownership and management to allow for more streamlined operations and better customer experiences.

When restaurant patrons can air their grievances as they wait for the check via Yelp or Facebook, a positive experience is more necessary than ever before. By simplifying and optimizing all operations, owners can transform their teams into nimble guest experience gurus. This allows the focus to transfer back to the diner, resulting in a more attentive server, shorter wait times and splitting checks with ease.

“Restaurants tend to function in a state of organized chaos,” says Steve. “From front-of-house to back-of-house, dining in to take out, and customer service to the customer experience, every interaction is interconnected. With Toast, we want to build on that by tapping into the restaurant supply chain with real-time, data-driven insights to reduce inefficiencies, improve interactions and elevate the guest experience.”

So what’s next for Toast? The company has already raised $101M in Series C funding, with plans to hire 1,000 employees by 2018 and were just named one of the world’s top cloud companies in the Forbes Cloud 100. The Toast leadership team is also looking beyond their current model for ways to further customize and curate the restaurant going experience.

“Toast is thinking bigger (and more conveniently) when it comes to food, and is already playing with ideas that will generate more speed and personalization from consumers’ favorite restaurants, bars and food trucks,” Steve adds. “Toast knows what is possible and is building a platform that can get there.”

At Smart Kitchen Summit, Steve Fredette will speak on how restaurants can leverage technology in the front and back of house along with other industry leaders in the Day 1 breakout session Tech Please: How Restaurants Can Leverage Technology In Front & Back Of House. Don’t miss Steve and check out the full list of speakers and register for the Summit, using code TOAST to get 25% off ticket prices.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is the first event to tackle the future of food, cooking and the kitchen with leaders across food, tech, commerce, design, delivery and appliances. This series will highlight panelists and partners for the 2017 event, being held on October 10-11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.

Klove Offers Low-Cost Entry Point To The Smart Kitchen

The current state of the smart kitchen is still, well, kind of expensive. And that’s ok – markets in their early days often produce products with high price tags as demand is still being developed and solutions still being realized. Intelligent ovens, smart fridges, connected tea infusers – it all sounds like an amazing eutopia of high tech deliciousness. But these solutions aren’t making cooking easier for the masses – at least not yet. But some areas of the smart kitchen are starting to produce at mainstream prices – most specifically in the sous vide space with sub $100 machines available at big box retailers like Target.

And then there are startups like Klove. The concept behind the Klove stove top knob is pretty cool – it’s a retrofit device that replaces your dumb stove knobs and adds a pretty crazy amount of intelligence into a little form factor.

The Klove smart knob acts as an entry-level guided cooking system – assessing the state of heat on whatever dish you’re preparing and letting you know when to adjust and when you can walk away. Klove comes with a host of recipes to start with, so you don’t have to guess what to cook when you get started.

Klove -Just Talk and cook

With a companion app (because of course) and Google Home / Amazon Echo compatibility, the Klove smart knob also has some machine learning baked in and will adjust recipes based on your preferences over time. Sure it might say to scramble eggs for 5-7 minutes, but maybe you like yours runny. The knob will learn that over time and adjust its alerts accordingly. Like a little digital sous chef who remembers your favorite type of pancake. (Chocolate chip. It’s always chocolate chip.)

There’s even a safety feature built into the device. Try to leave home with your stove on – the Klove app will alert you before you get out the door, ending the days of wondering “did I leave my stove on?” when you get to work. It will also alert you if you walk away from the stove for a minute or two and are needed to turn something up or down. If you’ve ever cooked something too long – or had boiled water overflow and spill onto the stove top, you’ll probably find this feature helpful.

The best part is that Klove is only $29. Well, for now – it’s available for pre-order on Indiegogo for $29 which is technically a price drop from the company’s first unsuccessful crowd funding campaign. But there seems to be some momentum this time around and the sub $40 price point is pretty attractive. If voice control is driving more interest in connected tech in the home, retrofit devices like Klove can help consumers see the value of technology to assist them in cooking better and easier at home.

Klove has had some momentum recently, having raised $250k from investors in a SEED round of funding and being named “The Next Big Thing” in food tech via the Nestle “Next Big Thing” startup competition in London. Klove isn’t the first company to create a retrofit smart knob for stoves – Meld introduced its smart knob in 2015 and went a step further than Klove to be able to automatically control the temperature during cooking as opposed to notifying someone to turn the dial up or down when ready. Meld ended up cancelling its Kickstarter when it was acquired by Meyer Corp (owner of guided cooking brand Hestan Cue) after the campaign was successfully funded. Hestan took the learning and knowledge behind the Meld knob and used it to build its current guided cooking platform – though the actual knob form factor never resurfaced.

Klove has about 4 weeks left to raise the initial $20k to get started on development – and with a few smart knob competitors in the space, it will be interesting to see how they do. For now, you can grab a Klove for $29 as an early bird backer and expect to see the smart knob right around Christmas.

Plum Raises $9 Million To Create An AI-Powered Keg For Wine

One of the worst things about opening a bottle of wine and not finishing it – aside from the lack of drunkenness – is the shortened shelf-life that bottle now has. Once air hits the wine, oxidation kicks in and at first may allow the beverage to open up but will eventually cause the wine to go bad.

That is the main problem driving wine startup Plum, a company that’s created and patented a smart wine serving appliance (aka a fancy keg for wine) that preserves a bottle of wine for 90 days, allowing single serving pours for up to three months. Plum has just raised a Series A round of $9 million and plans to ship pre-ordered systems this fall. Similar attempts have been made to create devices to make serving beer more enjoyable and close to an “on-tap” experience but Plum claims to have the first appliance that “automatically preserves, chills and serves wine by the glass” in the home market.

Plum has several unique features and requires very little of the consumer to get started. Place a 750 mL bottle of wine into the appliance’s chamber and close the door. The machine’s specialized (and patent-pending) needle will pierce whatever material surrounds the bottle’s opening and extract wine while also injecting argon gas to prevent oxidation.

The appliance is pretty high-tech too: with built-in cameras along with a cloud database of over 6 million wines, Plum will read the wine label and identify on the touchscreen what bottle is inside. The company claims the device is able to accurately identify wine’s 95% of the time. Plum is a good example of the growth in the use of cameras inside cooking and storage appliances paired with cloud intelligence to enhance the consumer experience with food and beverages.

The machine also chills the wine based on the varietal but can be manually adjusted by the user. And the life of the argon gas chamber is up to 200 bottles (refills are $29) so Plum’s initial longevity can be pretty long, depending on your individual drinking habits. The price of Plum’s smart wine appliance isn’t cheap – one system will set you back $1499 and the company is still taking preorders with plans to ship in “fall 2017.”

The $9 million investment, led by Khosla Ventures (Hampton Creek, InstaCart, Consumer Physics) and Las Olas Venture Capital along with other angel investors from the tech, wine and hospitality markets. The company says the investment will be used to take the smart appliance to the hospitality industry, allowing hotels to put Plum in guest rooms to deliver a better “mini-bar” experience and adding another in-room revenue source. Plum has already inked deals with big hotel chains including Four Seasons, Hilton, Marriott and the Hyatt among others.

Vine to Cart: Grocery Stores Use New Tech To Create In Store Farms

While the demand for organic and sustainable agriculture is growing across the globe, the future of fresher produce might be picking it right at the supermarket.

A startup out of Berlin called Infarm is currently working on an “indoor vertical farming” system with the capacity to grow any kind of fruit, vegetable or herb.  Multiple sensors monitor the plants’ health and connected data lets the system know when to irrigate and feed the crops, creating individual ecosystems. In addition to creating idyllic growing environments for each plant, the system is smart, providing the opportunity for experts to analyze and collect data to optimize growth and flavor and potentially predict problems in the future.

“We are able to develop growing recipes that tailor the light spectrums, temperature, pH, and nutrients to ensure the maximum natural expression of each plant in terms of flavor, colour, and nutritional quality,” Osnat Michaeli, co-founder of Infarm, explained in an interview with TechCrunch.

Although vertical farming is already a familiar concept to agriculture, what makes Infarm so unique is their ability to do small-scale vertical farming in customer-facing situations. The company has already found major success after placing systems in Metro Group locations, one of the biggest wholesalers in Europe, and are now being approached by other grocers that want to do the same. Instead of growing produce outside on traditional farms and dealing with the supply chain to deliver it to each store, grocers could invest in InFarm and allow customers to harvest food right from the vine. In an era where grocery stores are trying to remain more relevant to consumers who often shop online for dry goods, InFarm helps grocers turn into a next gen farmers market with fresh from the plant produce.

Investors have also noticed the potential within Infarm as the company recently closed a €4 million funding round which included Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, Impact investor Quadia, London’s LocalGlobe, Atlantic Food Labs, design consultant Ideo, Demand Analytics and others.