The Feed

Zhong Xu, Co-Founder & CEO of Deliverect, discusses the latest virtual brand marketplace for restaurants, how Unilever uses it for on-demand ice cream stores, and maximizing digital upsells through aliases and tailored promotions.

Matt Jozwiak is the Founder & CEO of Rethink Food, a New York-based non-profit that has built a unique system that empowers local restaurants to provide nutritious ready-to-eat meals to local communities. In this episode, we’ll chat about how restaurants are donating surcharges from each check to feed local communities, how Rethink is building a marketplace to match local supply and demand for over 7mm meals, and how it’s rescued 1.2 million pounds of perfectly good food waste from some of the city’s best restaurants.

Josh Domingues is the Founder & CEO of Flashfood, a mobile marketplace that connects shoppers to discounted produce and fresh food from local grocers that would have normally been thrown out. If food waste was a country, it would be the third largest global emitter of greenhouse gasses behind the US and China. In this episode, we’ll chat about the inflationary pressures that are challenging food accessibility, how Flashfood is changing consumer behavior, and how grocers are leveraging the platform to drive more traffic to their stores.

Matt Mahar is CEO of Cana, the world's first molecular beverage printer (or Star Trek beverage replicator). The startup is creating its own "app store" of beverages, allowing anyone to download tea, coffee, juices, sodas, and cocktails for 29 cents to $2.99 per drink without any packaged waste. In this episode, we’ll chat about the science behind Cana’s secret sauce, the immense environmental impact of the bottled beverage industry, and the long tail of potential beverage creators. The future is now.

Alex Munoz-Suarez is the CEO of Fuku, a seven-year-old quick service fried chicken sandwich concept birthed from David Chang's Momofuku group. Fuku is now live in over 20 locations nationwide through a mix of ghost kitchens, stadium concessions, and corporate-owned locations. In this episode, we’ll talk about Fuku’s opex-light virtual licensing partnerships with Franklin Junction and Family Style, the entrepreneurial DNA inside Momofuku, and the lessons learned from David Chang’s 2016 vertically integrated delivery service Ando.

Larissa Zimberoff is an investigative journalist focused on food tech and author of Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat. Larissa has dug deep into startups like Just, QOA, Upside Foods, and AppHarvest for publications like Bloomberg, Fast Company, and Wired. In this episode, we’ll discuss Larissa’s critical eye towards trends like cell-cultured meat and ugly produce, what she’s most optimistic about, and her recent dinner series that hosts meaningful conversations amongst industry leaders.

Atul Sood is the Chief Business Officer at Kitchen United, one of the leading ghost kitchen providers in the US with 13 live facilities. The startup has recently partnered with Simon Property Group and Westfield to open next-gen food courts within their malls as well as Kroger to allow shoppers the ability to mix and match from different virtual and physical restaurant brands in a single takeout or delivery order. In this episode we’ll talk about how ghost kitchens can disrupt the marketplace model, the importance of pickup, and how retailers and real estate owners are leveraging Kitchen United’s technology and labor.

Stephen Klein is the Co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, an automated makeline for salads, bowls, tacos, and burritos, reducing total restaurant labor costs by nearly 50%. Thanks to its pricing model that charges restaurants as low as 70 cents per meal, the startup is transforming the fixed cost of kitchen labor into a variable "AWS for restaurant labor." We’ll chat about what sets Hyphen apart from other articulated robots, how it plans to expand into new categories, and the future creator economy around food as the marginal cost of production falls to pennies per dish.

Zeke DeSantis and Conrad DeMasi are the co-founders of Provecho, a link-in-bio recipe product for the next generation of chef creators building their audiences on social media. On TikTok alone, there are nearly 60 billion views for content tagged #FoodTikTok, but no easy-to-follow recipe guide nor a streamlined way for culinary influencers to monetize their recipes through branded sponsorships. In this episode, we’ll dive into the startup’s two-sided marketplace between chefs, CPG brands, and consumers, what Instacart’s TikTok partnership means for its strategy, and the startup’s vision to become the link between online recipe discovery and home cooking.

Brendan Sweeney is the Co-Founder and CEO of Popmenu, a direct end-to-end platform that provides a website builder, online ordering platform, delivery aggregator, and more to over 6,000 small and medium sized restaurants. We'll chat about how the team used its outsider mindset to identify major whitespace for restaurants, the impact of first-party reviews on SEO, and the need for consolidation and competition in the space.