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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Hey Robot Vending Companies, Y’all Should Team Up!

There are a lot of smart people currently working for robot vending machine companies. Building mechanisms that autonomously make lattes, mix salads and serve hot pizza isn’t easy. But after writing about startups like Briggo, Chowbotics and Bake Xpress, I really hope their marketing departments are smart enough to talk to each other because there is a big opportunity to bundle some robot food services.

For instance, it would be cool to have a Briggo Coffee Haus right next to a Bake Xpress in an airport. That way, when you order a robo-coffee, you could also grab a robo-choco-croissant. Or there should be a Yo-Kai Express next to a Chowbotics’s Sally so you could have soup and salad.

The nice thing about vending machines is that they don’t take up very much space and can carve out their own culinary niche without competing with one another. So as more vending machines come online, it could be entirely possible to have a whole automated food court offering all different kinds of cuisines tucked away in the corner of an airport terminal or the lobby of a hospital.

This means that there are plenty of opportunities for vending machine companies to mix and match promotional and marketing opportunities. Buy an Alberts smoothie, get ten percent off your Fresh Bowl salad. Order a Basil Street Pizza, and get a dollar off your Cafe X iced tea.

Obviously, there aren’t a lot of these high-end vending machines out in the world right now. Yo-Kai Express lists just 10 locations, half of which are at private corporate campuses. Cafe X has just two locations now. Alberts is only in Europe and Basil St. hasn’t even launched yet.

But that newness may actually work in these companies’ favor. Perhaps they can coordinate as they determine new installation locales. They are all going after the same types of locations anyway — airports, hospitals, corporate and college campuses. Why not team up and give those locations more robot bang for the buck?

Fresh Bowl Raises $2.1M, Plans for 50 Vending Machines Open This Year

Salad and snack vending machine company Fresh Bowl has raised a $2.1 million seed round, reports Restaurant Hospitality. The round was led by Betaworks and Ground Ventures, with Tuesday and Mana Capital also participating.

In addition to being a healthy food vending machine, Fresh Bowl’s hook is that it serves its meals in recyclable glass jars. When the company launched, it charged a $2 deposit for the jar, which could be rolled over into the next purchase upon its return.

But it looks like Fresh Bowl has changed up its model. Fast Company today wrote that instead of tacking on a deposit on top of the price of a meal, Fresh Bowl now offers a discount on the next bowl if you return the jar. With this new approach, Fresh Bowl says its seen an 85 percent return rate.

Armed with more cash, Fresh Bowl is also looking to expand to more places. The company lists six locations on its website right now, and Fresh Bowl co-founder, Zach Lawless, told Fast Company that they are looking to have a total of 50 machines in operation by the end of this year.

To quote Jack White, “I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating now.” We are entering a golden age of food vending machines. Companies like Fresh Bowl, Briggo, Chowbotics, Farmer’s Fridge, and Yo-Kai Express are all working to deliver restaurant quality meals from a teeny-tiny automated footprint. These vending machines can be squirreled away in office buildings, dormitories, factories and airports, operating twenty-four hours a day, serving up delicious meals in minutes for busy people on the go.

Hopefully more of this cohort will be able to take a page from Fresh Bowl’s fresh approach and incorporate recyclable containers into their service.

Oh My Green Acquires Byte Foods Business from Byte Technology

Oh My Green announced today that it has acquired Byte Foods, the food distribution and logistics service of Byte Technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Before we get too far, it’s important to make the distinction between Byte Foods and Byte Technology. In 2015 Byte launched its own line of smart fridges for offices that wanted to provide healthy eating options for employees but weren’t able to afford a full catering solution. As we wrote back in 2018:

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.

Since its launch, Byte Foods had grown to 500 smart fridges installed around the Bay Area. But those locations all had to be managed and stocked by Byte, and owning and operating your own mini-stores is not a super scalable business for a startup. So in 2019, Byte bifurcated into Byte Foods, which managed its own fridges, and Byte Technology, which is responsible for the underlying technology and software management platform that powers Byte’s fridges.

Instead of deploying its own fridges, Byte Technology sells the hardware and licenses out its platform to food providers like grocery stores and restaurants. These food providers can then wrap these smart fridges in their own branding to extend their sales channels to where people are — namely at work — without the cost of building an entirely new permanent physical store. Through Byte Technology’s platform, these grocery and restaurant licensees get access to all the data from their customers, as well as inventory management tools and analytics.

By selling its Foods business, Byte Technology will be able to focus its energies on the much more scalable software side of the business. Byte Technology currently operates 1,000 smart fridge stores across the U.S., and with this acquisition, OMG will become a customer of Byte Technology.

Like Byte, Oh My Green is an office catering startup based in the Bay Area. OMG offers a full suite of food related services for corporations from chef-made catering to stocking the office room with snacks. OMG has raised $20 million in seed funding and with the acquisition of Byte Foods’, OMG will be able to offer an additional, Goldilocks-like sales option for companies that want to provide more than snacks but less than full catering.

In the press announcement, OMG says that in addition to offices, the company plans to provided smart fridge storefronts to hospitals, government facilities and universities.

OMG’s acquisition is another step into the forthcoming golden age of vending machines that we are entering into. Smart fridges like Byte’s, and robots like Chowbotics’ Sally are providing new levels of fresh food to high-traffic areas 24/7.

Fresco Fridge Brings its Smart Fridges to Offices in the U.S.

The most facile way to describe Fresco Fridge is to say that they are like the Italian version of Byte Technology. That’s not entirely fair to Fresco Fridge, which has built up its own business halfway round the world and this month entered the U.S. with a new Manhattan location, but the comparison is kinda the quickest and easiest way to set the stage.

Fresco Fridge makes a smart refrigerator platform for offices and other high-traffic buildings. It’s a vending machine that uses RFID tags on the items inside so someone can open the fridge with their smartphone, grab what they want, then get automatically charged for it.

See? It sounds a lot like what Byte has been doing in the Bay Area.

Unlike Byte, which started out in the food biz but has since moved on to become more of an open platform, Fresco has never stocked the fridges with its own food. Instead, Fresco has since day one been a vehicle for selling some other vendor’s food.

One of the alluring aspects of a smart fridge like Fresco’s is that it allows offices to provide fresh food for its employees without having to take on the expense of catering meals. Companies can subsidize food in the fridge as little or as much as they want to give their workers more eating options on premises.

Fresco provides its fridges for free to a location and makes its money by charging a monthly fee and collecting a rev share with the food vendor. So if Sandwich Shop X stocks the fridge with food, Sandwich Shop X pays the fee and splits the sales. Vendors also get access to inventory management software, marketing opportunities (special offer notifications) and sales data and analytics as part of the package.

Fresco Fridge launched in September of 2018 and has raised €2 million in funding from a mix of European angel and venture investors. So far the company has 100 fridges in the field in Europe and a new one just recently installed in Manhattan. Fresco has also announced a partnership Proper Foods to sell that company’s assortment of healthy snacks and dishes. The company also has a partnership with an undisclosed commercial real estate company that has buildings across the U.S. and Europe.

Despite any similarities to its competitors, the potential market for Fresco and other smart vending services is pretty massive when you consider all of the office buildings, residential buildings, hospitals, etc. that could offer more food options on-site. As Fresco continues to expand throughout the U.S. next year, a lot more people could be saying “Ciao!” to the smart fridge.

I’ll Bet You’re Thinking of How this Beer Vending Machine Can Be Tricked While You Read This

In a world where there are vending machines that dispense pizza and hot ramen, it only makes sense that eventually we’d have one that serves up ice cold beer and other adult beverages. Last week, PanPacific unveiled the SmartPan Pro, an age-verifying, beer dispensing vending machine.

If you’re like me, your first thought was well how quickly will a high schooler be able to trick that machine. But according to the press release, the machines use “ultra-accurate finger-vein biometrics as the consumers’ identifier” which also prevents ID sharing. Once the user completes an account creation process, they can use their finger on any SmartPan Pro machine.

The SmartPan Pro is meant for venues like sports arenas and other, similar, high-traffic venues. Operators can add restrictions to the machine to create purchase or timeframe limits.

At first glance, it seems like this type of unattended sales mechanism would be ripe for abuse. Finding ways around booze restrictions is a time-honored tradition, after all. But borrowing someone’s finger to buy a beer is a lot harder than borrowing their ID. Sure, someone could buy a beer and then give it to an underaged friend somewhere else, but that always has and always will happen — with or without vending machines.

But if set up properly, a self-service beer vending machine makes sense. Place one or two in a designated beer garden (to check IDs before getting in), and you can free up human staff to serve higher ticket food items that require more human-level skill. (Well, until robots do those jobs too.)

This isn’t actually the first time you’ll be able to use your finger to pay for beer at a ball game. Last year, CLEAR (of airport fame), debuted a system at CenturyLink Field in Seattle allowing people to pay for concessions including booze.

A combination of tech like age verification, robotics and internet connectivity is transforming the capabilities of vending machines, opening up whole new options for eating around the clock in busy places like airports and hospitals. Though, the ER seems like a bad place for a beer vending machine.

Yo-Kai Express Dishes Out Delicious Ramen Bowls (and Accepts Airline Vouchers)

In the not-too-far-off future, if you’re stuck at the airport at an ungodly hour, at least you’ll have good food to eat, thanks to a wave of high-tech vending machines like the Yo-Kai Express.

Yo-Kai Express is built for high-traffic areas (like airports) and can dispense piping hot bowls of ramen 24 hours a day. Today I got a chance to watch a Yo-Kai in action, taste its wares (it was delicious!) and see how it stacks up among the cohort of new high-tech vending machines coming up.

“Yo-Kai is a Japanese ghost that can appear anywhere at any time,” Yo-Kai Founder and CEO Andy Lin told me in front of his machine at the Metreon in San Francisco. This is pretty much how Lin envisions his machine: popping up anywhere so people can eat at any time. Office buildings, airports, malls, any place where there are a lot of people who might be looking for a quick meal.

There are four menu choices, costing between $11 and $12. Each machine holds 40 frozen bowls of ingredients such as meat, vegetables and noodles. When someone orders their food, there is some secret, proprietary stuff that happens behind the scenes to hydrate and heat the contents, and less than a minute later, out comes a sealed bowl of literally piping hot soup (there’s actually a caution sign warning customers how hot the food is). The machine also gives you a little packet of utensils that includes a spoon, fork, napkin and chopsticks.

Lin says the key to its preparation is that the company has developed a flash freezing process that minimizes the size of the ice crystals that can form and damage the food. Because the food is stored frozen in the machine, Yo-Kai can prepare and freeze everything in a central kitchen. When the machine runs low, it alerts corporate HQ, which can then bring replacements (kept frozen the entire time).

The Yo-Kai made its debut at the Metreon in Feb. 2018, and is now in 14 additional locations including Tesla, Netflix, and Capital One offices in the Bay Area. The machines are free for the company to install, with Yo-Kai collecting all the revenue. This provides offices with a way of providing hot food for office workers, without incurring huge costs.

Lin didn’t want to provide sales numbers, but said that if a machine sells 40 bowls a day, it will recoup its cost in four months.

One of the more interesting aspects of Yo-Kai Express is that in addition to credit card, mobile payments and even cryptocurrencies, the machine will also accept airline vouchers to buy your food. Though there aren’t any Yo-Kais set up in airports yet (the first one goes into SFO in June), Lin said the company is working with United Airlines. By accepting the voucher, if your flight is delayed or you get bumped or whatever and the airline gives you a food voucher, you can use it at Yo-Kai after hours when other airport restaurants are closed, which is very smart.

Yo-Kai certainly isn’t the only company that sees high-end vending machines as the next wave of high-volume food service. Chowbotics’ Sally robot is busy making fresh salads in offices and hospitals, and while it hasn’t come to market yet, Basil Street is developing a pizza machine that heats up frozen pizzas.

Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Yo-Kai has raised $1 million in seed funding, and has a mix of 13 execs, contractors and other employees working for the company. Lin said the company is busy prepping the next generation of its Express box, which will feature two dispensers so people don’t have to wait in line for a long time.

Yo-Kai won’t be able to make your long flight delays go away, but at least that time lost will become more tasty.

Fresh Bowl’s Vending Machine Dishes Up Healthy Food and Uses No Plastic Containers

Research shows that eating at work isn’t very healthy. Whether it’s grabbing a burger and fries or a salad drenched in too much dressing, eating while working doesn’t always work in your best interest.

Fresh Bowl is among a raft of startups looking to change how we eat at the office by providing a “Farm-to-Desk” vending machine experience that serves up healthier food options like lentil salads and açai bowls. The company even wants to improve how we consume our food by dispensing it in reusable glass containers.

The startup launched its first Fresh Bowl vending machine at the WeWork West in Soho New York City last November. The machine features food made from scratch that is delivered every morning. Prices are just under $10 for salads and just under $5 for a snack.

However, since food is served in reusable glass jars, there is an additional $2 jar deposit on top of that price. But what’s pretty cool is that you can return the glass jar to the vending machine and roll a $2 credit towards your next purchase (which covers the cost of your next jar deposit).

Fresh Bowl is similar to other players out there with the same mission of making office meals more healthy. Farmer’s Fridge raised $30 million last year to expand its salad-dispensing vending machines. Chowbotics raised $11 million last year to expand its menu robot-made salads to robot-made food bowls. And Byte provides offices with smart vending machines that are loaded with healthy food.

While there is plenty of competition on the healthy eating front, the reusable glass container is a nice differentiating hook for Fresh Bowl. The eco-friendly packaging comes at a time when the stigma around single-use plastic is increasing, and even big CPG brands are getting into the reusable packaging game. In a recent social media post, Fresh Bowl says that 90 percent of the jars were returned.

FreshBowl raised an undisclosed sum of money in December last year from a Bay Area investor and a few NYC-based angels. The company has three employees and is looking to roll out more vending machines by the end of March.

Chowbotics to Bring its Salad Making Robot to Europe

Chowbotics will be bringing a version of its salad making robot to Europe, courtesy of a new partnership with French vegetable company Bonduelle.

While here in the U.S. Chowbotics‘ ‘bot is named “Sally,” the forthcoming French version will go by “Cabaletta.” From the press release:

Like Sally the Robot, Cabaletta can operate 24/7 and will offer custom salads from any combination of 20 ingredients selected by Bonduelle, in addition to chef-crafted, pre-programmed recipes. Users can also fine-tune the calorie total by adding or subtracting ingredients, as well as view full nutritional details for each recipe. The robot’s proprietary technology reduces the risk of foodborne illness, as ingredients are kept sanitary and separate.

The agreement calls for Cabalettas to be deployed across mainland Europe, but the first robots will be installed in several offices and businesses around Lille, France. Though the partnership will kick off with salad robots, Chowbotics raised $11 million last year to fuel expansion into robot-made food bowls with ingredients like grains, yogurt and even poke, so perhaps we’ll see some of those put into circulation as well.

Robots are beginning to take hold around Europe. Based out of Belgium, Alberts is rolling out its Albert smoothie-making robot. Elsewhere in France, Ekim is building its tiny pizza-making robot restaurants. And over in Moscow, MontyCafe‘s robot arm is serving up coffee.

We’ll be sure to ask Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar about his company’s European strategy at our upcoming Articulate conference on April 16th in San Francisco. He’s among the many luminary speakers we’ll be chatting with about all things food robot and automation. You can be a part of the conversation too, get your ticket today!

Farmer’s Fridge Stocks up with $30M

Farmer’s Fridge, the company which makes vending machines that dispense healthy meals such as salads and protein bowls, today announced that it has raised a new $30 million round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors. This brings the total amount raised by the company to $40 million.

With 186 locations across Chicago and Milwaukee, Farmer’s Fridges are high tech machines stocked with kitchen-made meals such as Smoked Cheddar Cobb Salad, Tarragon Chicken Salad Wrap, and Almond Butter Oats Bowl. Customers can order either through a touchscreen menu on the machine or via an accompanying mobile app.

Farmer’s Fridge is part of a wave of startups that are transforming the notion of automated food service and bringing it into a more modern, health-conscious era. Byte Foods operates smart fridges for offices that are stocked with fresh food options. Moniker (formerly Bodega) sets up mini convenience stores inside apartment buildings. And more directly, Chowbotics has its own robotic vending machine that makes salads and soon bowls as well.

All of these companies are targeting high-traffic areas such as airports, universities, office buildings and more. So don’t be surprised if the vending machine room in your building starts to get crowded.

According to the funding announcement, Farmer’s Fridge will use the new funds to scale up its business. This will be a challenge for the company as it trades in fresh food. Stocking a machine with preservative-packed “food” like Twinkies is easy, because they will survive the apocalypse. But perishables like salads are another matter. As it looks to scale up, Farmer’s Fridge will need to live up to its promise of “transforming the supply chain through technology and creating a new paradigm for fresh food,” as the company says in its press release. Farmers Fridge will need kitchens, cooks, and delivery drivers close to wherever they open up a new machine location.

Good thing the company stocked up on cash.

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Action Hunger’s Vending Machine Helps Feed the Homeless

The story of Huzaifah Khaled is undoubtedly familiar to anyone working in a major tech hub like San Francisco or Seattle. During his commute into the city by train, he would encounter homeless people at the station. Unlike so many of us, Khaled actually did something to help the problem in a way that highlights how food tech can be a force for social good.

Khaled started Action Hunger, a company that uses vending machines to dispense necessary items for the homeless. The program launched last month in Nottingham, England and is meant as an easy way for homeless people to get items like healthy food, water, socks or toothpaste.

The vending machine is connected with the Friary, a homeless center in Nottingham. The Friary hands out keycards to its clients who can use the cards to access three items from the vending machines a day for free. By using a vending machine, the homeless can get necessities at any time, and are not restricted to the open hours of the Friary.

Action Hunger will monitor what items are most used and adjust inventory accordingly, and Khaled hopes that by providing some basics for free, he can track long-term usage and help people get off the street. Action Hunger has plans to expand to New York City next month, and then into San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles.

We write a lot about how food tech startups are working up and down the food stack to reduce waste and improve efficiency, but it’s good to highlight groups like Action Hunger who make an immediate impact, including:

As we look out for food tech trends in the new year, let’s hope to see a lot more startups focusing on social good.

Bodega, The IoT Convenience Store, Meets Early Resistance

Now introducing the concept of place-based commerce. That is the idea of putting relevant products in the just the right place for busy consumers who can buy them with the swipe of a smartphone. The bet for projects such as Bodega is that busy millennials will be willing to trade convenience for the social interaction of traipsing to the corner mom ’n’ pop store for a late night shopping spree.

Bodega, founded by two ex-Googlers, starts with what is basically a cabinet-based vending machine. But, instead of loading it with sugary soft drinks and microwave popcorn, it dispenses goods related to a specific location or purpose. A Bodega placed in a health club might have sports drinks and protein bars; one in the lobby of an office building could have healthy lunches and a Bodega in the lobby of a college dorm would sport anything from handheld devices to personal hygiene products. To keep things secure, the company uses a set of techno future security measures in which the customer opens the Bodega with his or her smartphone. After selecting a product, an AI-powered camera captures the purchase and debits the user’s payment method. The camera also collects crucial data on what was purchased, when and by whom. The resulting information is a goldmine for Bodega as a planning tool for inventory replenishment and for future system improvements.

From concept to name, Bodega has not been given a front row seat on the welcome wagon.

First, there’s an issue with the name. Bodega has come to mean a small grocery store—one that often features Hispanic products. Hispanic leaders consider naming the new concept after such a proud institution in the Hispanic community as an insult.

“It’s sacrilegious to use that name, and we’re going to do whatever we need to do to fight this,” Frank Garcia, chair of the New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, told the Guardian. “It was devastating to find out … and it’s not fair to the local bodegas now that don’t have the angel investors that these guys have.”

Here's why people are mad about 'Bodega'

Paul McDonald, one of the Bodega’s founders claims the company name was thoroughly vetted and was not met with any resistance by the Hispanic community.

McDonald told the Guardian that the company surveyed those who live in relevant areas to see if the name was an issue. The survey asked “(If the) Latin American community… felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations” and said 97% said no.

There also is some question about Bodega’s business model which does not compensate locations (such as a health club) for placing the unit in their facility. The new company’s logic is the autostore is a benefit to the location and acts as a customer draw.

Beyond the possible racial implications, there’s a matter of possible wiping out the countless small convenience store businesses that rely on local customers. Organizations that support local retailers are upset over Bodega’s rollout which depersonalize the relationship between a community and neighborhood businesses.

“It’s about having neighbors in your community who know you, who have lived there and been in business for a long time, who have seen changes in the neighborhood and are responsive to customer’s needs,” said Trisha Chakrabarti, senior program and policy manager at Mandela MarketPlace. “That kind of personalization of service, you will never be able to find with an automated service.”

It’s worth noting that the concept of providing last-minute necessities is not a new idea. Catering to the immediacy of meeting a consumer’s specific needs on the spot in itself is not a bad idea and there are many successful applications in place. Many hotel chains offer pantries which stock food, hygiene products and even clothing for travelers. Airports now have vending machines that dispense handheld devices, headphones and other gadgets for fliers in need. The trend for taking vending machines from being unhealthy snack purveyors to appliances that focus on health and convenience has been in place for the past several years.

Whether it’s the name, the terrible PR job that surrounded the Bodega announcement or the world growing tired of Google millionaires thinking they have the next great idea, there’s a lesson to be earned here—market research is a multibillion dollar business for a reason.

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Startups Aim To Bring Fresher Choices To The Office Vending Machine

Office life can often mean tight deadlines, which in turn often means making tough choices like ‘Funyuns or Fritos?’ when lunch rolls around.

But for those of us who believe that no time starved employee should have to sustain themselves on bags full of salt and high fructose corn syrup, things may be looking up: a new crop of startups are trying to revisit the office vending machine and bring fresher choices to those of us chained to our desk.

One of those startups is Byte Foods. The company operates a fleet of smart fridges installed in office break rooms and cafeterias throughout the Bay Area.  The company, started by the husband and wife team of Lee and Megan Mokri in 2015, licenses their fridges stocked with fresh food from local producers such as Blue Bottle and Mixt Greens. Companies pay a monthly service fee, and Byte manages food inventory, payments and allows the employer to check out purchasing patterns with a web based dashboard. Employees access the food by swiping their card, choose what they want, and a bill is sent to their smartphone.  Each food item has a small RFID tag on the bottom which helps the fridges determine which items the employee has chosen.

The Mokris ran food delivery startup 180 Eats before getting into fresh vending machines. The current version of Byte is a result of 2016 acquisition of Pantry, a company which made the fridge and software tech licensed by Byte when they launched in 2015. After a year of perfecting the combined offering of fresh food delivery with the product licensing model inherited from Pantry, the company is now looking to expand beyond the Bay Area with the cash from their recent $5.5 million funding round.

Another company bringing fresh food to office cafeterias as well as other locations such as O’Hare airport is Chicago based Farmer’s Fridge. The company, which operates in about 75 locations throughout the Windy City, stocks their fridges with fresh salads made in their kitchen. Customers can check their fridges for inventory with the Farmer’s Fridge app, which also helps them to find locations around town.

Like Byte, Farmer’s Fridge recently received an investment to fuel growth. The company recently received a $10 million investment led by French food giant Danone’s venture arm, Danone Ventures.  The investment team also includes former McDonalds CEO, Don Thomson, through though venture firm he founded, Cleveland Avenue.

It’s not just American startups who are rethinking the vending machine. Foodles, a French startup, is using a model similar to Byte where they will install turnkey connected vending machines stocked with food for $3,400 per month. The company, which is operating in a dozen locations throughout Paris, has raised just over $2 million in funding.

And as it turns out, big companies are also toying with the idea of fresher food from the vending machine. At SXSW this year, Panasonic showed off a smart vending machine called ‘Bento@Your Office’, which dispensed – you guessed it – bento boxes for employees.

In some ways, this new crop of startups is taking many of the ideas created by micromarket movement that’s started to gain traction over the past few years. Fresher food and better technology have started to push vending machine operators across the country evaluate new models. The vending market, which is a $20 billion plus market across food and other items, is a potentially significant opportunity for those looking to shake things up.

And that’s exactly what this new crop of startups bringing fresher food to offices looks to do. The race is on to create national footprints as these companies look beyond their home markets to find new customers for their turnkey fresh vending concepts.

And hopefully, for those of us racing to meet deadlines, we will soon have more choices than Funyuns or Fritos for lunch.

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