Restaurant subscription, DeSci + Food, Microreactor-Powered Unagi
Is it just me, or does every restaurant have a subscription system these days?
Others, like Panera, have been around for years, but last year seemed to be when restaurants caught membership fever. Taco Bell kicked off 2022 by announcing its Taco Pass. Soon after, Subway introduced its half-price subway subscription to its 10,000 biggest fans. The PF Chang Group recently joined the group with its points-driven Platinum program.
Then there are those who go the web3 route. Gary Vee’s Flyfish Club has become a global sensation after raising $14 million through an exclusive NFT membership program. Later, we scratched our collective heads at Starbucks Odyssey, a Web3 extension of their popular loyalty program. Others, such as Chubby Cattle and Wow Bao, have also entered the game.
But it’s not just chains that have subscription fever. Small restaurants, like Mamma Ramona’s, also see membership as a way to drive repeat business and reach new potential customers,
Food delivery executive Andrew Simmons bought an Italian restaurant in Ramona, California, in early 2020 and soon began completely revamping the restaurant’s operations with technology. Not only did he refresh the digital collaboration stack with a combination of Toast, Ovation, and Incentivio, but he also incorporated automation into both the front and back of the house.
Today the Dinerbot T5 robot server helps waiters and bus workers pull large orders from tables and deliver dirty dishes to the kitchen, and the Picnic pizza kitchen spits out pies at a speed of up to 130 per hour. In addition, Simmons added a new dough press, several Turbochef pizza ovens, and new refrigerators to keep up with his high pizza production volume.
This automation – coupled with the digital transformation of the restaurant – is the enabling feature of the restaurant’s subscription system. The restaurant began selling subscriptions in late 2022 for $149 a year (or $99 on Black Friday), entitling subscribers to one pizza a week for 52 weeks. Simmons says this faster production speed and lower cost per pie — both enabled by automation — allow him to handle the weekly volume increase.
And there are surges. According to Simmons, on a Friday in January, he served 183 customers in three hours, the area’s busiest night. By the end of January – the first month members signed up for pizza received their rewards – business was up 12% from the previous January. Out of a total of 1,197 pizzas that were eligible for redemption, Simmons said they ate 611 pizzas from subscribers, a redemption rate of 51%.
Can growth last? One good sign that yes is the continued success of some restaurants that have established subscription programs. For example, Panera says its coffee subscription system accounts for 25% of the brand’s activity, and the Pret-a-Manger system in the UK is used 1.2 million times a week.
While it may be too soon to say that Mamma Ramona will see continued growth, early indications are good. According to Simmons, February saw a 6% increase in order volume over January.
I’ll be chatting with Andrew later today at our virtual event, Spoon Food Robotics Outlook 2023. If you want to listen or ask Andrew a question, you can register here.
Umami Meats Partners with TripleBar to Accelerate Development of Farmed Fish Cell Lines
Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a farmed seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable farmed seafood, starting with Japanese eel according to a release posted to Spoon.
Triplebar uses a microfluidics platform that says it can process thousands of complex tests per second with the sound signals of a fluid handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these tests are processed using what she calls microreactors.
“The way to think about this is that we’re taking a test tube, and we’re taking it smaller in this microreactor that’s much smaller than a human hair,” Cho told Spoon. “And we can put the thing we want to test in this microreactor, and then the assay reagent tests the thing we want.”
With Umami, that “thing” they will look at is whether the cell line has the necessary characteristics to grow in a bioreactor versus an animal. That animal, in this case, is eel, or unagi, the most popular fish in Japanese cuisine around the world. Unfortunately, due to its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. Although most unagi available for human consumption is now produced through aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the voracious nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).
To read the full story about Triplebar’s microreactor tech, head over to The Spoon.
Spoon Partner Event
It is best to reduce food waste early in the supply chain as it achieves a higher carbon footprint when it is transported, processed, purchased, and delivered to the consumer’s home. This looks like harvesting everything that has been invested, finding new markets for selling products that do not meet the consumer’s needs, and developing communication systems that convey forecasted demands and support the supply chain to manufacturers. Solutions may include: Sub- and Additional Production Stations, Expansion of Buyer Definition, Picking, Partial Order Acceptance, Field Cooling Units, In-Field Hygiene Monitoring, New Grower Contracts, Labor Matching, Small Harvest Batches, and more.
Don’t miss it again register today to learn more about the latest innovations in reducing food waste!
Podcast: How the DeSci Movement Will Change the World of Food
Do you know what DeSci is?
Don’t feel bad if you don’t, especially if, like me, food is your main focus.
A16Z’s book Future describes DeSci as an organization where “a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are using blockchain tools, including smart contracts and tokens, in an effort to advance modern science. Collectively, their work has come to be known as the decentralized science organization, or DeSci.”
If you haven’t heard of DeSci yet, the reason is that while the trend has caught the attention of the biotech and research funding world, it hasn’t fully entered the future food conversation yet.
But it’s only a matter of time, so I figure there’s no better time to learn than now. To help us do that, I invited Dr. Jocelynn Pearl, biotech scientist, entrepreneur, podcaster, and DeSci expert, on podcast.
In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Pearl we discuss the following:
- What is DeSci?
- How DeSci is changing the traditional and outdated world of research publishing
- Advantages of using Web3 tools like DAOs, blockchain, and NFTs in scientific research
- Why DeSci hasn’t caught up to the food industry of the future and why that may soon change
- What might the future of scientific research look like with these kinds of tools
To listen to this podcast, listen here or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Vertical Gardener Oishii Doubles Down on Unique Japanese Brands with the Launch of Koyo
Vertical farming startup Oishii has launched another strawberry variety, Koyo Berry, to join the Omakase Berry product offering launched in 2018.
Koyo Berry is a Japanese variety that is grown outside of Tokyo in the winter. The berries will first be grown on vertical farms on the east coast of Oishii, which use advanced robotics and traditional Japanese farming methods to produce the fruit. Koyo Berry will be available through FreshDirect online shopping in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for $15 MSRP per tray. The brand is expected to expand to other markets, including Los Angeles, later this year.
Oishii introduced the first strawberry, Omakase Berry, in 2018. Oishii’s founder and CEO Hiroki Koga decided, when he built his own farm, to try to replicate the elements of a perfect day in Japan (eg, humidity levels, light) inside a controlled-environment farm in the US This allows the company to grow now Komakako 3 days – Berry.
Find out by reading the full story here on Spoon.
This Finnish company uses radio waves to monitor and reduce milk waste
Dairy plants around the world are facing a new set of challenges as they face rising raw milk costs and growing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints as plant-based competitors try to compete with animal milk. A Finnish startup called Collo wants to help both parties using what it describes as liquid fingerprint technology.
According to the company, its technology can detect any type of fluid in pipelines in real time, giving companies a way to increase productivity and reduce product losses. Collo says its technology is able to follow the fluid in the pipes, showing where the leak is. This enables dairies, breweries, and other liquid entities to address the problem at the source.
Collo’s technology is based on an electrical resonator that emits a radio frequency field from a liquid. The signal responds to disturbances caused by different components, chemicals, and liquid phases, and the Collo analyzer immediately warns of any disturbance so that the process can be corrected.
Read the full story on Spoon.
