Cana Unveils a ‘Netflix for Drinks’ That Can Make Nearly Any Type of Beverage
In late 2018, food tech entrepreneur and investor Dave Friedberg got together with a few scientists for dinner and drinks and talked about a research study that suggested most any beverage is made up almost entirely of water, with only about one percent or so making up a drink’s unique flavor.
It wasn’t long before someone wondered aloud if it would be possible to create a machine that could synthesize nearly any drink.
“Why not just make the Star Trek Replicator and let people print any drink they want, when they want, right in their own home?”
That night the concept for the Cana, a ‘molecular drink printer’, was born.
The device, which one investor describes as a “Netflix for drinks”, uses a single cartridge filled with flavor compounds that Friedberg claims can make a nearly infinite number of drinks: “We know we can print an infinite number of beverages from a few core flavor compounds. We know we can do this across many existing beverage categories — juice, soda, hard seltzer, cocktails, wine, tea, coffee, and beer. Consumer taste testing panels score our printed beverages at the same or better taste levels as commercially available alternatives. Our hardware designs will print beverages quickly and accurately. Our pricing and the footprint of our hardware can yield significant savings and advantages for most households..”
To read the full article about Cana’s molecular beverage printer, head over to The Spoon.
Virtual Event: The New Restaurant Tech Stack
For today’s restaurants, it’s no longer enough to rely on disjointed technology systems cobbled together over time. Creating a great customer experience that attracts dining dollars starts with having the right technology in place. It starts with a stack, built from the ground up, with the future in mind.
Join us on February 16th at 10:00 am Pacific for The New Restaurant Tech Stack webinar; we will explore the challenges for restaurant operators to build a modern technology infrastructure to power their consumer experience across all consumer touchpoints.
This event is sponsored by Paytronix.
Food Tech Predictions for 2022
You want food tech predictions? We got em! Last week we look at restaurant tech, food robotics, plant-based meat and consumer kitchen tech. Below are excerpts from each.
Five Predictions for Consumer Food & Kitchen Tech in 2022
Meet The Smart Food Delivery Locker
For the last few years, companies like Walmart, Amazon, and others have been trying to figure out how to deliver food when we’re not home. Ideas have run the gamut, from delivering products directly to our fridges, onto our dinner tables, depositing groceries in our garage, to even dropping deliveries into our car trunk.
All this effort would be unnecessary if homes just had temperature-controlled storage lockers, something that – at least until lately – hadn’t existed.
Until now. This month Walmart and HomeValet announced a pilot program that will deliver fresh groceries to the HomeValet smart outdoor delivery receptacle. Another company, Fresh Portal, is building a temperature-controlled home delivery box that is accessible both outside (for delivery companies) and inside the home. And then there’s Dynosafe, who appeared on Shark Tank in the spring of 2021 and got an investment from Robert Herjavec.
While companies like Yale have been making smart boxes for delivery for a little while, there hasn’t been a widely available temperature-controlled smart storage box. In 2022, I expect we’ll start seeing more deals like the Walmart/HomeValet deal, as well as some integration deals with third-party delivery providers.
To read all of our predictions for consumer kitchen tech, head to The Spoon.
Five Plant-Based Meat Predictions for 2022
The Year of the Whole Cut
After years of countless plant-based burgers and other minced alt-meat product introductions, the plant-based meat industry will see lots more whole cut analogs make it to market in 2022 and beyond.
We first got a hint at CES 2019 that Impossible was interested in whole cuts when The Spoon broke the story the company was working on a steak, but since that time we’ve seen a bunch of companies announce they are working on building whole cut alternatives.
Juicy Marbles, Novameat and Redefine Mean are also working on whole cut steak analogs. Others like Atlast are offering mycelium-based whole cut bacon. Then there are those making whole-cut seafood analogs like that from Plantish.
Many of these companies are looking to deliver their products in 2022, and you can expect a wave of new plant-based whole cut concepts introduced throughout the year.
You can read all of my plant-based meat predictions on The Spoon.
Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022
Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out
Get ready for the restaurant in-a-box. There are a number of startups with robo-restaurant concepts already in fully operational pilot tests who are looking to expand with multiple self-contained robot restaurants in 2022.
Hyper-Robotics, which makes fully automated containerized robot pizza restaurants that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour, is beginning to roll out its pizza robot restaurants in Israel. Cala, a French startup that makes fully autonomous pasta-making robots, is already operating a robot in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district. Another startup called Mezli, which is currently running its containerized bowl-food restaurant in Kitchentown, has plans to eventually launch more locations.
These are just a few self-contained robo-restaurants and we expect to see many more rollout in 2022.
Check out all of my food robotics predictions for 2022 on The Spoon.
Five Restaurant Tech Predictions for 2022
Restaurants Will Deploy More AI, Automation & Cloud-Powered Labor to Offset Labor Challenges
Like many other restaurant chains, Checkers has struggled in recent years to find enough workers to cover the various shifts. Going forward, they won’t have to worry about that when it comes to manning the drive-thru as the company rolls out AI-powered voice bots to 267 of their restaurants.
This is only one example of how we’ll see restaurants embrace more technology to deal with what has become a permanent labor shortage in the restaurant space. Of course, automation and robotics will also be a part of the equation, but I think we’ll also see more restaurants find help through remote labor through platforms like Bite Ninja.
See all my restaurant tech predictions for 2022 on The Spoon.
Planning food tech world domination in 2022? Run a campaign with The Spoon!
We are experts in virtual events and webinars, have massive reach with our hugely popular newsletter, and reach hundreds of thousands of readers every month at The Spoon.
Reach out for a media kit and we’ll be in touch!
Here Are The Details About Flyfish Club, Gary Vaynerchuk’s NFT Restaurant Opening in 2023
While we already knew some of the basic details about Gary Vaynerchuk and VCR Group’s NFT restaurant concept, we’ve learned more in the last week about how the whole thing will work.
Here’s some of what we’ve learned and my quick thoughts:
Token as Membership. At a high level, the Flyfish Club and its NFT membership is essentially a new, crypto-ized spin on an old idea: a member’s only dining club. To start, VCR initially made a total of 1,501 membership tokens for the Flyfish Club available to the public and reserved 1,534 for the company. Membership remains valid as long as a person owns the token. As just like most NFTs, the owner can resell the token (and many are already trying to do just that) on marketplaces like Opensea.
Flyfish Has Two-Tiered Membership. Flyfish has two types of tokens available: a Flyfish token and a Flyfish Omakase token. The Flyfish token, initially offered at 2.5 Ethereum (~$8,400), gets you into the restaurant and cocktail lounge while the Omakase token, offered at 4.25 Ethereum (~$14,300), gets you all that plus entry into the exclusive Omakase room.
To read all the details about Gary Vee’s NFT restaurant, head over to The Spoon.
ALSO!: David Rodolitz, the CEO of the Flyfish Club, will be speaking at our Food NFT and Metaverse mini-summit. Use discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets!
While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.
The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.
The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.
You can read the full story about the new crop of startups helping to scale future food at The Spoon
Pizza Hut Launches a Fully Robotic Restaurant-in-a-Box (Video)
This month, Pizza Hut debuted a fully automated robot-powered restaurant.
The ‘restaurant-in-a-box’ is based on technology from Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based food robotics startup that makes containerized restaurants.
The restaurant is operating out of the parking lot of Drorim Mall, a shopping mall located in the central Israel city of Bnei Dror. The restaurant is fully self-contained, doing everything from dropping toppings to baking and boxing. About the only thing it doesn’t do is make the dough, but according to Hyper its pizza restaurant can hold up to 240 types of dough in different sizes.
When Hyper launched its robot pizza restaurant in November, it had a capacity of 50 pies per hour. It also had 30 warming cabinets, two robotic dispensing arms and dispensers for up to 12 toppings.
The customer initiates an order for a pizza directly from a touchscreen kiosk on the restaurant exterior or through the Pizza Hut app. After the pizza is made and boxed, a Pizza Hut employee takes the pizza from a dispensing tray and hands it to the customer. In future versions, the restaurant will be able to dispense the pizza directly to the customer.
To read the full story and see a video of the Pizza Hut containerized robot, click here.
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