Sorry, I had to. Anyway, please look at these pictures of how Nerds Gummy Clusters are made — and keep your eyes peeled for them this Halloween because they are scary good.
[The New York Times]
Our friends at New York peek into Wonder, the rapidly-expanding fancy food hall / delivery app that partners with fancy chefs and restaurants to bring their signature dishes to more locations. The back-end is, well, food kits?
Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. (Not for nothing, Wonder acquired the meal-kit service Blue Apron last year.) It’s not heat-and-eat, as Blue Apron is, or even reheated, Wonder’s CMO, Daniel Shlossman, assured me, but it is true that all of the finishing can be done in the restaurants’ all-electric kitchens by non-chef staffs, which are outfitted with quick-cooking ovens, hot-water baths, and electric fryers. There are no flames in Wonder kitchens.
One the one hand: brilliant. On the other: weird!
[Grub Street]
DoorDash is bundling Max’s $9.99 / month ad-supported plan with its annual DashPash membership in the US, which costs $96 / year. Uber One offers a similar bundle with Disney Plus in the UK.
Bullying works: after TikTok users complained about Chipotle’s inconsistent portion sizes, the company announced this week it is “doubling down” on training to ensure customers get “correct and generous portions.” It will cost the company $50 million, executives told analysts.
With 8 temperature sensors, the Combustion Predictive Thermometer works even if you don’t place it “just right.” Those sensors also track temperature on the food’s surface and in the oven to “predict” when your food will be ready within minutes of starting to cook.
Reviews say the Combustion is very good at its job and makes guessing when the turkey will be done or overcooking a steak a problem of the past.
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Most induction requires a 240V outlet, but this new cooktop from Impulse Labs has a battery inside that stores up juice for when you want to cook.
This means it will still work when the power is out, but the company plans to make more appliances with batteries to eventually form a “fractionalized home battery backup system.”
The Impulse Cooktop costs $6,000 and should ship later this year.
The GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker delivers on its promise of bringing smoking indoors, but sadly its smarts didn’t make me a better pitmaster.
Its robotic arm heats vegan burgers and crispy potatoes while relegating humans to assembly line jobs.
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Verge Score
The $800 GE Profile Smart Mixer improves on the category — but not enough to justify its high price tag and hefty size.
It’s hard to overstate Wendy’s satisfaction with its FreshAI chatbot, which it’s currently using to take drive-thru orders at four restaurants in Columbus, OH. In an update, the company says the generative AI system can takes orders without the need for employee intervention 86 percent of the time, and in one location is 22 seconds faster than average. Franchisees will be able to pilot the AI next year.
Food, fine dwarven food straight from Orzammar!
Applying the advancing tech to how we grow and cultivate our food has some big upsides — but is it worth the cost?
Wonder, a delivery service that licenses recipes from restaurants, bought Blue Apron for $103 million and, where available, will now use its couriers to deliver BA kits.
Of the five meal subscription services we reviewed in 2016, Plated and Peach Dish are out of business, Blue Apron and Purple Carrot have been acquired, and the winner, Hello Fresh, has seen its stock value drop by 55 percent in the last three years. This Washington Post article from last year has more info on what’s happened.
[The Washington Post]
Just Eat is trialling a new AI-powered chatbot that’s designed to add items to your shopping basket in response to a query like “egg and cheese mcmuffin from mcdonalds.” It plans to pilot the assistant with UK users in the next few weeks, with a wider rollout to follow. Coincidentally, rival Uber Eats also plans to launch a similar chatbot this year.
The company’s been experimenting with its “Caper Cart” at limited Kroger and other food market locations — which automatically recognizes and rings up items as you put them in the cart — but now new versions are available at a Spotswood, New Jersey ShopRite, and are coming soon to a Fairway Market in NYC.
Instacart’s VP of connected stores David McIntosh tells The Verge the updated carts have “software upgrades such as advanced computer vision AI,” and also support stacked charging.
This is why we started this website in 2011. This exact sentence, as tipped by reader Dave Lee. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em (meats).
Google announced at IO that Bard would include images where relevant in its responses, and that change is live. Below, a tweet shows what that looks like. The images come from sites like Pinterest. I wish they were AI-generated for extra fun, but alas.
Still, I tried asking it for the best food in Austin, TX, and it failed to highlight Casino El Camino.
