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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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August Home Expands In-Home Delivery Platform, Adds Deliv as Partner

Not long ago, my mom ordered a box of tea online, which a guy in a pizza delivery car tried to steal from her front porch while she was at work. Obviously, she’s not the first person to ever experience this. In her case, a neighbor happened to catch the guy in action and set the cops on his trail, recovering the package in process. Most folks, though, aren’t so lucky, and lots of them are ordering much more than a $20 box of tea.

All the same, risk of theft doesn’t deter most who order goods via same-day delivery. As we get busier and more mobile, we rely more and more on the convenience factor for anything from stereos to dental floss. And since this is as unlikely to change as mankind’s need to steal, it makes sense that that same-day, in-home delivery is rapidly becoming an option for both consumers and retailers.

News from August Home should help accelerate that option. The smart-lock maker just announced that it is opening up it’s in-home delivery platform to any retailer, and that it has formed a partnership with same-day delivery service Deliv for last mile delivery fulfillment.

It’s a pretty straightforward operation. August owners can order at a participating retailer and choose “same day” at checkout, along with their desired time window. Once the transaction is completed, they can opt to authorize “secure in-home delivery.” If no one answers the doorbell, the delivery driver can access a one-time-use passcode to unlock the door and leave the package. Users are notified via phone, so they know a delivery is occurring, even if they’re up the block folding the last of their laundry. If they have the equipment, customers can also choose to watch the delivery in real time through the August app (or view a recording of it later).

August’s move to expand its platform comes after Amazon launched Amazon Key in late 2017, which uses its own combination of smart lock and cloud camera, and helped make the concept of in-home delivery more prominent with mainstream consumers. Just last month, Amazon also purchased the maker of Blink security cameras, in a move that could bolster Key offerings.

August and Deliv partnered with Walmart this past September to test drive their new service. Not only did consumers have the option of in-home delivery, they could also get “in-fridge” delivery, where the driver enters your pad and puts any perishables in the fridge or freezer. Presumably, the same option will exist for this wider rollout of the August-Deliv service.

I’d love to say I’m weirded out by the idea of some dude walking into my house and opening my fridge, but I’m not. People open their homes to strangers all the time— cleaning services, maintenance work, and pet care, for example. And while a camera and a one-time passcode don’t guarantee complete security, they beat having your groceries swiped off the front porch by, of all things, the local food delivery guy.

Target Jumps into Same Day Delivery Battle with Shipt Acquisition

Retail giant Target announced today that it has acquired same day delivery service Shipt for $550 milliion. It’s a keeping up with the Joneses move for Target as competitors like Amazon, Walmart ramp up the race to get you your groceries fastest.

With the Shipt acquisition, Target says it will start offering same-day delivery to roughly half of its stores by early 2018, and will be offered in all major markets before the 2018 holiday season. The service will start off with groceries, essentials, home and electronics and will expand to include all major product categories by the end of 2019.

As Recode notes, Shipt currently operates in 72 U.S. cities, customers pay $99 a year (just like Amazon Prime!) for unlimited deliveries from a number of grocery chains. Target customers will have to pay for a Shipt membership in order to get their groceries.

The Shipt acquisition follows Target’s August purchase of Grand Junction, which provides technology infrastructure for local deliveries.

Target most likely feels the, ahem, target on their backs as retailers continue to up the stakes for consumer delivery expectations. The competition is fierce:

For retailers like Target et. al., who sell everything, food and recipes and same day delivery will also become a gateway for people to purchase hard goods. This is at the heart of Walmart’s deal with Tasty. Be inspired by a recipe, buy the ingredients and any device you need to make that meal.

Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Shipt has raised roughly $65 milliion in funding and will be run as a wholly owned subsidiary of Target and will continue to sign partnership deals with other retailers.

BuzzFeed’s Tasty Expands E-Commerce Capabilities with Walmart Agreement

BuzzFeed’s cooking site, Tasty, along with Walmart and Jet.com announced a partnership today that allows consumers to purchase equipment necessary for making certain recipes directly from the Tasty app. The move continues the trend of vertical integration we’ve seen elsewhere in the food world, and sets up BuzzFeed to expand its e-commerce ambitions.

Starting today, Tasty recipes will include direct links to Walmart/Jet.com to buy the tools needed for that dish. Right now, users can only buy hardware items such as a slow cooker, or skillet or measuring cups. The company says it plans to include the purchase of groceries “beginning next year.”

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1. Walmart Tasty
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For Walmart, the partnership gives the retailer access to the enormously popular Tasty base, which has generated more than 65 billion video views and has more than 90 million followers on Facebook. Tasty has already shown that it can move units. As The Spoon’s Mike Wolf wrote last month:

“Last year, the company worked with Oster to run a sponsored cooking video that included the Oster grill. Within a day, the Oster grill had completely sold out on Amazon, despite the fact the cooking video didn’t have a link to the Oster grill Amazon page.”

Recipes are becoming more than a set of instructions, they are becoming more direct commerce vehicles. AllRecipes launched shoppable recipe lists through AmazonFresh earlier this year. And as same day delivery companies like Instacart expand, recipes are no longer constrained by what people have in the kitchen. With instant gratification increasingly available, inspiring recipes can inspire people to pay for the tools and ingredients immediately.

But this also sets the stage for BuzzFeed to expand it’s own hardware ambitions. As the company missed revenue targets, it is expanding its Product Labs, which created the Tasty One Top induction cooking device. From a memo BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti sent out to employees:

“Finally, we are expanding our Product Labs business, which exceeded our expectations in its first full year of operations, into BuzzFeed Commerce which has a strong lineup of new licensing and commerce partnerships, and new products for 2018. BuzzFeed Commerce will work closely with our new BuzzFeed Media Brands team to create new opportunities for our brands in the way it has with Tasty.”

Partnering with Walmart lets BuzzFeed use Tasty as a way to convert the eyeballs of its massive audience into consumers who buy the $149 One Top, or whatever BuzzFeed-branded cooking implement the company wants to create.

BuzzFeed has proven adept at navigating rapidly changing technology trends and fickle attention spans. This deal with Walmart is another great example of the company’s nimbleness by expanding the utility of Tasty in a way that is organic to the experience and potentially adding to the bottom line.

Wal-Mart to use Robots for more Efficient Re-Stocking

Real world retail giant, Wal-Mart, announced today that it will deploy shelf-scanning robots in more than 50 of its stores to help make inventory management more efficient.

The robots are two feet tall with a telescoping tower outfitted with cameras and lights. As the robot passes down an aisle, it scans the shelves to see where items are low or gone, as well as if items have the correct pricing information or are mislabeled. This information is beamed back to employees who can re-stock.

Walmart Tests Automation to Scan Shelves, Free up Time

Wal-Mart tells Reuters that the robots are “50 percent more productive” than humans and can scan shelves three times faster than a person. With stats like that, it’s not hard to imagine that humans are on the way out at Wal-Mart.

The company says it wants to use robots for tasks that are “repeatable, predictable, and manual,” and insists that robots won’t replace human workers or affect headcount.

Sure, sure. For now.

Wal-Mart and Amazon are locked in a head-to-head battle over efficiency throughout their chain, and robots will play an increasingly large part in making sure consumers get what they want when they want it. Heck, Amazon even bought a robot company to help with this. Robots are just better for repetitive tasks like inventory management. They can be faster, more precise and not get injured. And they are only getting better.

In that context, the final shot of the promotional video Wal-Mart released about the shelf-scanner seems all the more creepy as human workers smile as they gather around their new robot co-worker.

The robots are coming, and the key will be creating new opportunities for humans that robots can’t replicate, or taxing companies that use robots to finance other jobs.

Walmart & Amazon Want To Send People Inside Our Homes. Will We Let Them?

A couple weeks ago, Walmart announced an agreement with August Home and Deliv to create a direct-to-fridge delivery service. The idea is to use August’s smart access technology to grant temporary access to a delivery person to place the groceries inside a customer’s fridge.

And last week, word leaked that Amazon was also working on its own direct-to-fridge delivery effort by developing a smart doorbell (one would assume the doorbell would also connect an electronic access control product like a smart lock). Both efforts are intended to add extra convenience for consumers and address the problems of unattended delivery.

This got me to thinking: as the epic battle for the future of grocery delivery extends from our doorstep and into our icebox, how many of us will let total strangers into our homes for a little extra convenience?

According to a survey conducted by NextMarket Insights on behalf of Comcast/August Home in early 2016, about 30% of online consumers said they would give temporary access to a service professional such as a house cleaner or delivery person. While that’s well below a majority, it’s probably enough to encourage Amazon and Walmart that there’s a market for this.

And there should be. The problems of “unattended delivery” are real; food left on your porch can get stolen or spoil, particularly if you spend long stretches of time at work or outside the home.  There are many consumers who would gladly adopt technology such as a smart doorbell/smart lock if it meant their groceries were safe and cold when they got home.

Still, I’m not completely sure if we’ll ever see a majority of Americans trusting enough to let complete strangers into our homes.  My wife and I have had home cleaners come twice a month for about a decade, but I didn’t feel comfortable with them being alone in our homes until after a year or so had passed and I got to to know them personally. How many of us ever get to know our grocery delivery guy?

Historically as consumers, our comfort levels rise as we get more accustomed to new situations enabled by technology. Take Uber or Airbnb. Ten years ago most of us would have scoffed at the idea at getting into a strangers car or sleeping in a person’s home. Now it’s considered perfectly normal.

But will we ever have that same level of comfort with unattended access? It’s our home, after all, not someone else’s.  My guess is that slightly more consumers will get comfortable with the idea of letting strangers into their homes, but not a whole lot more.

And that’s probably fine with Walmart and Amazon, both of which are working on other alternatives such as grocery pickup, drones and locker access. And who knows, maybe Amazon is working on refrigerated version of a storage locker us less trusting types could install our our doorstep.

This Company Uses Blockchain To Fight Global Food Fraud

Sometimes bad food is caused by undercooking or leaving fresh foods out too long – but often it’s because the item was either fake or contaminated before it even reached retail or a restaurant. After suffering a terrible case of food poisoning likely due to this problem while visiting Shanghai, Mitchel Weinberg was inspired to do something about international food industry fraud.

A former trade-consultant, Weinberg founded Inscatech, a global network of investigators that down evidence of food industry fraud and malpractice. Inscatech’s agents inspect a variety of reports of counterfeit and contaminated food products before they reach retailers and food producers with most problems originating in China.

“Statistically we’re uncovering fraud about 70 percent of the time but in China, it’s very close to 100 percent,” Weinberg told Bloomberg Technology. “It’s pervasive, it’s across food groups, and it’s anything you can possibly imagine.”

Currently, Inscatech is in the process of creating molecular markers and genetic fingerprints to help more effectively identify natural products and determine what’s real and what’s not.  Other companies are taking a digital approach and developing technology to monitor where that product originated.

As more Chinese food companies become part of the global supply chain, big supermarket companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, are recognizing the reputational danger of food fraud. Wal-Mart recently completed a trial using the technology, blockchain to monitor their pork supply chain in China. Blockchain, an eight-year-old technology that cryptographically records transactions, helped Wal-Mart to reduce their tracking time from 26 hours to only a few seconds.

Blockchain works as a database of records. It can potentially improve traceability by creating a chain of history that is impossible to alter without destroying the current sequence. Alibaba has also recognized the potential for blockchain within their platforms and is planning to implement a project with food suppliers in Australia and New Zealand, as well as Australia Post and auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“Food fraud is a serious global issue,” said Maggie Zhou, managing director for Alibaba in Australia and New Zealand told Bloomberg Technology. “This project is the first step in creating a globally respected framework that protects the reputation of food merchants and gives consumers further confidence to purchase food online.”

However, Inscatech has its concerns about blockchain. Their agents focus on working with informants who bring attention to the exact location where the food-fraud is taking place and believe that blockchain is only as reliable as the person providing that data. As of right now, blockchain is still the best system in place against fighting food-fraud. In a global food industry that relies mostly on just paper records, blockchain will help identify those putting data into the system and if incorrect, allow them to be held responsible.

Walmart Partners With August Home To Enable Direct-To-Fridge Delivery

Earlier this week, August announced a new line of locks and a doorbell.

Normally I’d say a product lineup refresh would have been the biggest announcement of the week for a Silicon Valley hardware startup, but that might not be the case here. That’s because this week the company also announced they had started a trial with Walmart and crowdsource-delivery startup Deliv to deliver direct-to-fridge groceries.

Now, why do I think this is potentially even bigger news than new locks? While I’m as interested as the next guy in new locks and doorbells, these products are just generational upgrades. That they came the same week that Nest also announced its doorbell tells you just how competitive and saturated the smart security and access market is becoming.

What the Walmart news is a potential new business model for Walmart, Deliv, and August, one which enables new same-day, value-added delivery service not only to the consumer’s home but directly into the home. In an industry that is desperate for differentiation in an Amazon world, this is a big deal for all three companies.

So how will it work? Here’s how they explain it on the Walmart blog:

Here’s how the test will work: I place an order on Walmart.com for several items, even groceries. When my order is ready, a Deliv driver will retrieve my items and bring them to my home. If no one answers the doorbell, he or she will have a one-time passcode that I’ve pre-authorized which will open my home’s smart lock. As the homeowner, I’m in control of the experience the entire time – the moment the Deliv driver rings my doorbell, I receive a smartphone notification that the delivery is occurring and, if I choose, I can watch the delivery take place in real-time. The Deliv associate will drop off my packages in my foyer and then carry my groceries to the kitchen, unload them in my fridge and leave. I’m watching the entire process from start to finish from my home security cameras through the August app. As I watch the Deliv associate exit my front door, I even receive confirmation that my door has automatically been locked.

You can see a video explaining the concept here:

Why the Future Could Mean Delivery Straight Into Your Fridge

On the August side, this trial is utilizing the August Access platform, which integrates their access products like smart locks directly with service providers to enable the service provider to provide home delivery and concierge services (like house cleaning or dog walking) when the consumer is not home.

When I wrote about August Access in 2015 for Forbes, I said, “So what does this mean and why would I want to let people I don’t know into my house using a smart lock? While not everyone would want to or even need to allow a service provider access to their home, if you’re like me, now and then you need someone to take the dog out or clean the house. Because of this, the ability to give temporary access to an approved service provider makes lots of sense.”

For Walmart, this provides a final last-100-feet solution that could be valuable for consumers. The challenge will be taking this offering and scaling it to a wider audience. In Silicon Valley (where the trial is taking place), smart locks are probably pretty common. In Arkansas, probably not as much. One eventual solution could involve Walmart subsidizing the cost of a smart lock when delivery customers sign up for a year of home delivery.

Lastly, there is the question of whether consumers want delivery people to come into their home. Further complicating the concept is Deliv utilizes a crowdsourcing model, meaning it’s essentially an Uber for home delivery, which means you might get part-time students or retirees looking to supplement their fixed income as a home delivery driver entering your home when you’re not there.

The trial is currently taking place with existing August customers in northern California, a crowd that might be more comfortable with both technology and strangers walking into their home. I’ll be interested to see how it performs once they expand beyond early adopters in other geographies.

And who knows: Maybe the next idea is the ability to keep an eye on visitors to the home with a smart home camera or fridge cam.

Could it be those are in August’s next product introduction?

From Safety to Savings, Blockchain Technology Will Disrupt the Food Scene

Behold the blockchain. The disruptive new technology promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers. Headlines appear every day heralding how blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services markets, which remain burdened by unwieldy paper trails and costly proprietary software applications. But blockchain technology will also have a transformative impact on the food industry and many other industries. From cost savings to removal of intermediaries to more efficient and precise tracking of contamination, the food business will derive many benefits from blockchain.

None of this is lost on titans in the food industry and technology giants are focused on blockchain, too. IBM has announced a blockchain collaboration with food giants including Walmart, Unilever and Nestle. Big Blue has announced that it will help global food businesses use its blockchain network to trace the source of contaminated food instantly.  Because blockchain uses digital means to track transactions and trace the flow of food, contamination trails can be solved by data-centric means rather than paper-based ones. Officials from Walmart have demonstrated how this kind of contamination tracking can take place in under three seconds.

According to the World Health Organization, one in ten people will fall ill every year due to contaminated food. Children under 5 years of age are at particularly high risk, with 125,000 children dying from foodborne diseases every year. Blockchain technology will have a giant impact on these problems. The full list of food companies signed on to work with IBM’s blockchain network is as follows: Dole, Driscoll’s, Golden State Foods, Kroger, McCormick and Company, McLane Company, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Unilever and Walmart.

In this video, Walmart’s VP of Food Safety discussed the huge impact that blockchain will have:

According to Forbes: “By using blockchain, when a problem arises, the potential is to quickly identify what the source of contamination is since one can see across the whole ecosystem and where all the potential points of contamination could be using the data to pinpoint the source. As such it is ‘ideally suited’ according to IBM to address these challenges because it establishes a trusted environment for all transactions.”

IBM has already conducted several pilots focused on food safety in order to demonstrate the ways in which blockchain can benefit global food traceability.

All participants in the global food supply chain stand to benefit from blockchain technology, ranging from growers to suppliers and distributors. Beyond tracking contamination, blockchain promises to usher in much more efficient, trusted financial transactions that can remove many types of intermediaries. According to a new market intelligence report by BIS Research, titled ‘Blockchain Technology in Financial Services Market – Analysis and Forecast: 2017 to 2026′, cost savings of $30 to $40 billion per year will be achieved in trade finance.

The move to blockchain does not necessarily mean buying into expensive proprietary platforms, either. While IBM’s blockchain network resides on the IBM Cloud platform, The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project is squarely focused on keeping blockchain open source and blockchain solutions free. Many powerful companies are partners on the project, and are committed to keeping patent wars and proprietary shenanigans out of the blockchain ecosystem.

“Blockchain technology enables a new era of end-to-end transparency in the global food system – equivalent to shining a light on food ecosystem participants that will further promote responsible actions and behaviors,” notes Walmart VP Frank Yiannas. “It also allows all participants to share information rapidly and with confidence across a strong trusted network.”

Kroger Gives Tech Initiative IoT Spin As Amazon Turns Up The Heat

Back in 2014, grocery store giant Kroger began to discuss its digital shelf technology, where they would replace traditional shelf labels with digital shelf labels to enable features such as dynamic pricing. Over time, this effort would expand to include personalized information for the shopper.

By late 2015, the digital shelf tech had rolled out from a few dozen stores to over two thousand nationwide and had begun to incorporate dynamic pricing and nutrition info.

Now the company is looking to power-up its digital shelf technology with IoT. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Kroger “is testing sensors and analytics technology to let shelves and products interact with shoppers walking the grocery aisles.” The new system would be able to detect individual shoppers and created targeted advertising using the electronic shelf display screens.

This new effort, which looks to employ location-sensing and authentication technology that at least sounds similar to what Amazon is talking about with Amazon Go, is currently in 14 stores in the company’s home market of Cincinnati.

Can grocery giants like Kroger employ IoT tech to make the shopping experience better? They better hope so. After all, it’s not like Amazon is slowing down its grocery ambitions. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Amazon has plans that go beyond the smaller concept store unveiled in Seattle in late 2016.

As Allen Weiner wrote about the effort earlier this week, “Amazon will test two other concepts, including a drive-through version and a larger, expansive store to compete with Target and Wal Mart. Based on its tests, Amazon will move quickly into expansion mode with a full-scale, nationwide rollout. The initial batch of such IoT grocery stores will likely be based in states where Amazon has large fulfillment and warehouse centers.” The Journal reports Amazon could open up to 2,000 such stores under the planned rollout.

For grocery store companies, this move towards context-aware and IoT-powered shopping is nothing new. What is new is Amazon taking things next-level with Amazon Go, which uses IoT and AI to go beyond incremental changes and entirely rethink how grocery shopping should work.

And now, slowly but surely, established players like Kroger are trying to figure out what it means when the leading online retailer moves into their world of brick and mortar.