Food+City Magazine, Issue V

Food+ City How We Feed Our Cities

ISSUE V

Grocery Tech: How and Why Your Store Knows What You Buy page 18 Shelf Life: Nifty New Ways to Make Fresh Food Last page 26 Surviving and Thriving: Mom-and-Pop Shops Navigate a New Retail Reality page 13

IS S UE V

$18.00

THE WAY BACK Meat and dairy — staples in most households — are located in the rear of the store, ensuring that you wander through the center aisles, perhaps picking up products not on your list, on the way to the milk case.

Music is a ubiquitous tool in retail.

It helps long lines feel less torturous, creates a certain brand experience and can even influence a shopper’s pace. A famous 1982 study found that people spent 34 percent more time shopping — and buying — in stores that played music.

BANANAS ARE AN ART FORM Bananas are America’s favorite fruit. To keep that trend going, growers and grocers know exactly what shade of banana you’re most likely to buy: Pantone color 12-0752, also known as “Buttercup.” According to Fast Company, bananas with Pantone color 12-0752 (“Butter-cup”) sell better than Pantone color 13-0858 (“Vibrant Yellow”). Some stores even use special lighting to make bananas look more appealing.

SHINY PRODUCE Glistening produce — just misted — gives the appearance of fresh merchandise (and the water can add weight). But select from the back — retailers put older merchandise up front to encourage quick sales.

ENTER HERE Flowers, fruits, vegetables and bakery items are strategically placed near the entrance to catch your eye and get your salivary glands going.

34.61

$

average sale per customer in 2017

SHELF PLACEMENT What you see is no accident.

Items at eye level are usually big, popular brands with large profit margins. Niche or regionally made items live up top, while kid-focused merch is lower down, where they can get a good look.

THE CART Today’s carts are three times their original size (back in 1937) and still growing. Stores know that when you have more room in your cart, you tend to buy more stuff — 40 percent more when carts doubled in size.

Food + City Magazine

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

SOUTH END GROCERY, ROCKLAND, MAINE

Dody and Steve Hiller are “mom and pop” of a small grocery store in Rockland, Maine, a fishing village turned tourist town. Fishermen still live and work there, but a few decades ago the town looked toward its art community for income and began shedding its image as a working waterfront.

South End Grocery has endured these changes, competing with modern mega-markets and maintaining a close connection with its community. The store thrives in a city whose 7,000 year-round residents have an annual median income of just $30,000, despite its new persona as an arty destination.

On a steamy summer day, customers form a long line at the lone cash register. The Hillers’ store is the third-largest grocery store in Rockland behind Shaw’s and Hannaford’s, two big supermarket chains. Despite its competitors’ being so large, South End seems to carry much of what they do — and more. You can find baseball memorabilia in one case, aisles lined with beer-packed coolers that share space with bananas and a bustling deli at the back of the store.

A bright blue runner leads customers through its single doorway, in which one often finds a community volunteer, raising funds for the animal shelter or a bereaved family that just lost a child to cancer. Sharing their space is one way the Hillers maintain a connection with their customers, about 75 percent of whom are fishermen.

When the economy crashed in 2008, the Hillers saw fishermen struggle to make ends meet and decided to address their needs, seeking lower-priced products whenever possible.

Dody runs the deli area, which is responsible for 60 percent of their revenue, preparing meatball sandwiches and breakfast sausages. Son Shawn manages the bookkeeping and tech side of the business and boasts an impressive knowledge of local craft beers, which may be the reason South End is the top seller of beer kegs in the region.

Steve is the logistics guy, always calculating how much to order and when, then figuring out where to store it. He’s always on hand to meet vendors and distributors who pull up outside. In fact, if truck drivers roll into town too early to deliver their loads at Shaw’s, they rumble down to South End, where Doty greets them with hot coffee.

When a Walmart store came to the area a few years ago, the Hillers thought their store might be threatened.

But their business recovered and carried on as usual, holding steady every year since then. Their biggest fear is the arrival of a Dollar General Store. Chances are, though, it won’t come with its own mom and pop.

TEXT BY ROBYN METCALFE PHOTO BY MATT COSBY

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

1

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Food+City publisher Robyn Metcalfe has been an editor and writer at Sunset Magazine, a heritage pig farmer and a food historian. You can find her @foodmiracle on Twitter because she thinks food is a miracle.

GROCERY UPDATE: HIGH TECH IS HERE

O

f all issues so far, this one was the most difficult to wrangle. New applications of technology that address how we buy food are appearing every day. Just when we think sensors will guide us through the store aisles, we learn that grocery carts will not require any guidance at all from humans. As we go to press, the future is becoming the present.

Facing a rapidly changing retail landscape, grocery companies feel the pressure to adapt.

Grocery stores are fending off food-delivery companies, rooftop farms and changes in our shopping behavior. E-commerce has turned some stores into human-less grocery pick-up sites. With profit margins of 1 or 2 percent, the grocery business is hard-pressed to invest in sensors and new software for tracking customers and the items they buy. But they are responding, and those efforts are evident in this issue. Larissa Zimberoff’s description of the Internet of Things in grocery stores and Ari Levaux’s story about tracking beer kegs are examples of these changes.

Both grocery stores and consumers are weighing the effects of new technologies in the shopping experience. And since we enjoy exploring how humans and technology interact in this Brave New World of food, we offer some insights about that interconnection, or lack thereof.

Sarah Axe shares confessions of personal food shoppers and how communication challenges can sabotage even the most advanced online shopping services. And while stores are changing, some have remained the same: We found local mom-and-pop stores that have survived the arrival of Walmart, higher labor costs and e-commerce. Why? Take a look at one survivor that has persisted for more than 20 years in midcoast Maine. Some stores adapt, some re-invent themselves into boutique specialty stores and, alas, some die. And while we figure out how to use the new tech in stores, we still are flummoxed when asked if we want paper or plastic — or our own bags. Some changes require decades.

People yearn for solutions that will lessen

2

Food + City Magazine

food waste and protect the environment. Bag choice is just one of the sticky dilemmas. There’s also the messy world of food labels and the debate over what it means to be “fresh.” Jill Santopietro takes you through the store aisles, asking questions about freshness and the many ways stores attempt to extend the shelf life of food we buy.

Grocery stores are also contending with the shifting landscape of food sourcing. Food buyers who procured lettuce from farms in Central California and salmon from Norway find their sources have moved to rooftops and fish and bug farms. Laurie Zapalac explores how Maine is adapting its fishing industry to incorporate aquaculture, and Kristin Elise Phillips examines a large grocer that’s growing food steps away from the store. Henry Gordon-Smith discusses how Smart Cities must include urban agriculture, including rooftop farms. And Cory Leahy boldly takes you into the world of edible bugs that may join a new crop of proteins on the grocery shelf.

While technology steams ahead in our food-shopping world, some rebels are testing the waters for older ways of getting food on the table. Sail Cargo operates a shipyard in Costa Rica that ships high-value products on sailing vessels. And our back pages show how grocery stores have used the same floor plans since Target introduce the planogram during the 1970s. While traditional store layouts are changing — including new experiences such as grocerants (restaurants inside grocery stores) — sails and planograms are reluctant artifacts.

At Food+City we are anxious to experience new grocery stores and to find out how we humans adapt to new technologies in our food landscape. We continue to support startups that are developing new ways to get food to our tables — you’ll find examples of these startups throughout this issue — and hope you’ll find their stories encouraging.

P U B L I S H E R, EXECUTIVE E D I TO R

Robyn Metcalfe EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Joy Nathan

M A N A G I N G E D I TO R

Cory Leahy

DESIGN

Julie Savasky, 508 Creative C O M M U N I C AT I O N S &WEB

Cole Leslie

A D M I N I S T R AT I O N

Karen Thomas

C O P Y E D I TO R

Joan Phaup

RESIDENT DOGS

Barbara + Bok

G E T I N TO U C H

For info about writing for us or magazine advertising, email info@foodandcity.org.

Food+City magazine is published by Foodmakers, a nonprofit based in Austin, Texas.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.

SUBSCRIBE

Visit foodandcity.org.

Follow us at @foodcityorg on Twitter and Instagram and at facebook.com/ foodcityorg for news about how the food system works, from farms of all sizes to tables of all sizes.

Printed in the USA

by CPY, Houston.

issue v

I S S U E I V D E PA R TM E N T S

1 FOOD FOR THOUGHT Welcome to South End Grocery in Rockland, Maine. The independent general store persists in a town that’s morphed from working waterfront to arty tourist destination.

6 KEG CYCLE When beer kegs get lost, breweries lose money. But new technology helps track errant kegs wherever they are in their journey, saving margins and ensuring more fresh beer.

9 TRENDING: S M A RT K I T C H E N S Pop-up kitchens, personalized food printers and countertops that are screens and charging stations — welcome to the (near) future of smart kitchens.

10 SHOPPER CONFESSIONS Lingering in the produce section? Watch out, you might get run over by a personal food shopper on a deadline. What’s the most elusive item in stores? Read on to find out.

14 PA P E R O R PLASTIC Single-use bag bans are all the rage. But is that the right environmental option? The rise and fall of the ubiquitous plastic bag.

46 RE C I P E T R AC KE R : EDIBLE BUGS From grasshopper tacos to mealworms on chocolate bars, edible bugs are turning up in restaurants and tasting parties. What are you waiting for?

50 SAIL CARGO More than 150 years after the sailing age ended, tall clipper ships are reappearing as a greener option for transporting premium cargo.

LARGE PHOTO BY JULIE SAVASKY; INSET PHOTO BY MATT COSBY

52 ON OUR LOA D I N G D O C K The best books, podcasts, films and other media exploring today’s food system.

54 SMART CITIES Henry Gordon-Smith says cities must incorporate urban ag into their future planning.

Find out why.

COVER: Dody Hiller holds down the fort in the storage room of South End Grocery, the small supermarket in Rockland, Maine, that she owns with her husband, Steve, pictured at left with their son, Shawn. For more than 20 years, the Hillers have served their waterfront community, weathering the changes that have seen Rockland transform from a fishing village to an arty destination.

12 GALLERY Small, independent groceries were once vital to communities, the places where you could find anything. As their numbers have declined, we went in search of resilient mom-and-pop shops across the country.

T HIS PAGE & BACK COVER : The Leakey Mercantile been around for 45 years in Leakey, Texas, and is still doing well despite a Dollar General and another high-end food market opening in town. They have better meat, staples and everyday supplies, including locally grown pecans from the store owner’s farm.

fooda ndci t y .org

8, 16, 45 & 57 ADVICE We’ve been visiting with past Food+City Challenge Prize contestants. Get their latest big news and hear their advice to other startups.

58 PLANOGRAM A supermarket’s layout is all about managing shoppers.

Food + City Magazine

3

CONTRIBUTORS

ADDIE BROYLES @broylesa

LINDSEY DANIS @lindseydanis

ARI LEVAUX @arilevaux

JILL SANTOPIETRO @jillsantopietro

Sarah is a research and writing fellow with Food Tank.

Prior to completing her Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, she was a Teach For America corps member in the Rio Grande Valley and taught Middle School Algebra I for nine years in Texas and Argentina.

Addie Broyles is the food writer for the Austin AmericanStatesman and co-host of the “I Love You So Much” podcast. If left on a desert island, she’d be happy with an unlimited supply of Fuji apples and kombucha.

Lindsey Danis is a Hudson Valley– based freelance writer who covers food, culture, LGBTQ and travel. When not writing, she is cooking, kayaking or hiking.

Ari LeVaux writes Flash in the Pan, a weekly syndicated food column that appears nationally in newspapers. His work has appeared in Outside Magazine, Slate and elsewhere.

He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

Jill Santopietro is a food writer and stylist, cooking instructor and recipe developer. She has been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Pursuits, Epicurious.com and The Boston Globe.

Prior to launching her freelance career, Jill worked at CHOW.com and The New York Times Magazine.

She co-created and hosted The New York Times’ Kitchen 4B video series. She is somewhat obsessed with anchovies and gelato (just not together).

CORY LEAHY @coryleahy MATT COSBY @mrboots

KENNY BRAUN @KennyBraunPhoto Kenny Braun is known for environmental portraiture, landscape and fineart photography.

Music, surfing and photography have been his passions since high school, each influencing the other. His series on Texas Surfers and the Gulf Coast, Surf Texas, was published in 2014.

Other books include the Salt Lick Cookbook (2012), and Jack Allen’s Kitchen Cookbook (2014).

His new book on the Texas Landscape, As Far as You Can See, was published in early 2018.

4

Matt Cosby is a photographer based in Portland, Maine. He has been interested in people and what people are interested in for as long as he can remember. Recent work includes stories for The New York Times, Maine Magazine and an ad campaign for the U.S. Board of Tourism.

Food + City Magazine

Cory Leahy — editor, writer, runner, enthusiastic cook and veggie-leaning omnivore — has spent more than 20 years as an editor of books, magazines and websites. She recently stepped out of familiar labels and into new territory to reimagine a next chapter that’s all about food.

KRISTIN PHILLIPS After half a decade observing how rhesus and woolly monkeys compete and forage for food, Kristin Phillips now writes for the Office of Sustainability at The University of Texas at Austin.

Previously she was the science publicist at The American Museum of Natural History. Kristin holds degrees in journalism and biological anthropology.

HENRY GORDON-SMITH @TheAgritect

LAURIE ZAPALAC @LaurieZapalac

Henry Gordon-Smith is the founder and managing director of Agritecture Consulting, a global consulting firm focused on integrating urban agriculture with the built environment.

They started as a blog and have since assisted with more than 60 projects in 10 cities, with municipal partners including the City of Atlanta, New York City, The City of Paris, Horticulture New Zealand, Sidewalk Toronto and the Qatari Development Bank.

Laurie Zapalac is the founder of Zapalac Advisors, a Boston-based urban planning firm providing research and strategic planning for urban revitalization and enhancement.

Laurie is passionate about understanding how and why digital technology is making historic urban environments newly attractive as places to live, work and play.

When not traveling farther afield, you can find her trekking the New England coastline and enjoying local bakeries.

ALBERT TERCERO @albert_tercero JULIE SAVASKY @juliehsavasky After spending 22 years at international design firm, Pentagram, Julie recently opened her own design consultancy, 508 Creative. Her work includes editorial, identity, strategy, web and environmental design projects and has won multiple awards. She lives with her family in Austin, Texas.

Deviled eggs and dark chocolate are currently heavy in her food rotation.

Albert Tercero is a freelance illustrator and designer living in Barcelona, Spain.

Amongst others, he has worked for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Vice, IBM, Reebok, Institutional Investor, Absolut Vodka, It’s Nice That, Booooooom!, Le Monde, and more.

LARISSA ZIMBEROFF @lzimberoff Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer covering the intersection of food and technology. Although she’s lived in New York for over six years she has never had food delivered to her rent-stabilized apartment.

OPPOSITE: PHOTO BY MATT COSBY

SARAH AXE @sarahabigailaxe

issue v

I S S U E I V F E AT U R E S

18 Grocery Store Tech They know where you are in the store. They know what shelf you’re looking at. They know which product’s ingredient label you’re reading. And now, thanks to hidden cameras, sensors, beacons, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and our own mobile phones, stores — and the brands they carry — can respond to your actions with instant coupons, flash sales and other enticements to buy.

Brick-and-mortar stores are going digital.

26 Best Before... Who Knows?

S ome foods seem never to go bad. Just about anything sold in a box or a can is likely to have a long shelf life.

But fresh ingredients — produce, dairy, meats — are ticking clocks: weeks, days or even hours from spoiling and becoming part of the 400 pounds of food each American wastes each year. Fortunately, prolonging shelf life is an endeavor brimming with innovation these days. Read on to learn about some of the newest techniques for keeping food fresh — from farm to fork.

34 Fish Out of Water hen you think of lobster, you probably think of W Maine — its cold waters are the perfect breeding ground for the buttery crustacean. Despite lobster’s success, Maine’s fishing industry is working hard to diversify its catch, and new aquaculture methods are a big piece of the puzzle. From small-scale scallop growers to an international salmon-farming corporation, the newest generation of Maine’s seafood producers is moving beyond the lobster claw.

40 The Freshest Leafy Greens L ettuce is a cool-weather crop. It likes pleasant days and chilly nights. But that ideal temperature range doesn’t exist in most places for more than a few weeks at a time. Most leafy greens grow in California or Arizona and travel a long way to your store. Unless your store is growing its own lettuce in high-tech containers and selling just-picked salad greens the same day.

Read about the store that’s become its own supplier.

FOOD MOVER

few pieces of hardware are as synonymous with a good time as a keg. And while other carbonated fluids are stored in these aluminum or stainless steel tanks, when we hear the word keg, we think of one beverage: beer.

Nationwide, breweries opened at a rate of nearly three per day during 2017 — 997 in total — and each brewery has its own fleet of kegs. Each one of these vessels has a salmon-like lifecycle in which it leaves its homeland full of life and returns home depleted. Unlike a spent salmon, an empty keg can jump back in for another round. But like all too many migrating fish, many kegs never make it home. Of those 997 breweries that opened in 2017, 165 went belly up. For a company that’s barely covering its costs, keg loss can make the difference between a red or green bottom line for the year.

When a keg is filled at a brewery, it is ready to go out into the world and do its job dispensing beer to the people. A distributor facilitates its journey, which may include a retail outlet such as a bar, restaurant or liquor store — the first stop before its destination at a party by the lake or other #goodtimes. If all goes well, and everyone keeps their word, the empty keg will eventually return to its home brewery. If not, and the keg never makes it home, the brewery that owns it foots the bill.

An American-made stainless-steel keg can cost a brewery more than $100, and the average annual keg The ability to track a loss nationwide is about 6 percent, says Tim Cogbeer keg’s movements nata, business development director of the beer through its journey from full to empty services company Satellite Logistics Group (SLG). helps brewers keep This transformation from stainless steel to statistic keg replacement costs ends up costing a lot more than the $30 deposit down. Each steel keg costs around $100. normally collected when the brewery lets a keg

6

Food + City Magazine

go. For a small brewer, he says, replacement costs for kegs can add up quickly and take a big bite out of the profit margin.

SLG offers a service called KegID, introduced in 2012, which uses scannable barcodes to keep track of a keg’s movements, including timestamps at various stops in the keg cycle and notes about maintenance and contents.

If a keg is not returned, services like KegID provide concrete data for tax-loss purposes. Even though breweries may lose more than 5 percent of its fleet of kegs, Cognata says, most breweries are writing off a mere 1 to 2 percent drop in keg numbers because they don’t have the documentation to prove greater losses. If breweries had tracking data for each keg, they could claim all of those lost vessels without worrying about facing a penalty for overclaiming, in the event of an audit.

The same data that allow a brewery to prove its loss to the IRS can also serve as evidence with which to confront a distributor for losing kegs. Sometimes a retailer collects a larger deposit than the brewery charges the retailer, which can be especially bad for keg recovery. Regardless of the reason a keg is lost, and whether or not it’s found, breweries are happy to be armed with the data KegID provides, says Cognata.

“KegID has an invoice function where you can bill a distributor for the residual value of a keg, minus the deposit,” Cognata explains. “Most distribution contracts state that the distributor is responsible for any lost assets. We provide the concrete data so that conversation can happen: ‘We sent you X number of kegs, and Y came back.’”

Thanks to that hard evidence, Cognata says, when distributors know a brewery partner uses KegID, kegs start coming back.

Other technologies are being deployed toward similar goals. A handful of well-to-do breweries are welding GPS transmitters to their kegs to track their every move — but it’s extremely expensive (think satellite phone versus cell phone). In 2009, New Belgium Brewery began attaching Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) to its 100,000 kegs. RFID is a different way to keep track of information similar to what KegID stores. “(RFID) lends itself to keeping track of whole pallets of cargo rather than individual kegs,” Cognata says. New Belgium has since moved from RFID to SLG’s tracking technology.

The ability to closely track these mobile assets adds up to big cost savings for brewers. Today, more than 200 breweries use KegID, from well-known national micro brands like Sierra Nevada to well-named niche labels like Moustache Brewing Company.

When the container is worth almost as much as the contents it holds, it pays to keep track.

A R I L E VA U X

issue v

IMAGE COURTESY SATELLITE LOGISTICS GROUP

KEG CYCLE

Food + City Magazine

7

ADVICE

What’s your founding date?

Originally known as Evaptainers, Fenik started out as a student project at MIT. The team’s goal was to develop a low-cost method for preserving fruits and vegetables in remote areas. Five years and many prototypes later, Fenik recently wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign and launched production of its Yuma No-Ice Cooler. And while the new product will keep your camping supplies nice and cool, Fenik’s larger mission is to provide an inexpensive food-preservation solution for people in developing countries who lack access to electricity and refrigeration. We caught up with co-founder Spencer Taylor to hear Fenik’s latest news.

FENIK YUMA 60L

The Yuma No-Ice Cooler assembles easily and needs only water for evaporative cooling. The water is stored in the cooler's walls and lowers the internal temperature 10-20 degrees — or more in drier environments.

September 2013.

The coolest food system innovation I’ve heard of is... the

How big is your team?

sheer amount of innovation going on in the food space these days.

Five people.

What problem are you solving?

Last-mile food insecurity in arid developing nations.

What’s been the biggest surprise about running your business? How few true-impact

investors actually exist. They are often talked about, but you rarely meet one.

The scariest thing about today’s food system is... the amount of

waste that is endemic throughout the cold chain in both developed and developing markets.

What’s your latest big news?

We’re taking delivery of our first production units of the Yuma in January 2019.

Best advice you’ve received?

What was the big idea that got you started?

Hardware is hard.

In an MIT class called Development Ventures, on the first day the professor said, “I want you to come up with a good or service that will change the lives of one billion people.”

What advice do you give to potential startup founders?

Who are you competing with?

Primitive evaporative coolers, such as the Zeer Pot, or draping wet cloth over food to help to preserve it.

Start with a problem you have experienced, or one that you deeply understand through others.

Assume nothing and validate your approach compulsively as you progress with your client base.

Constant course corrections are not the product of inexperience; they are critical to success.

IMAGES COURTESY FENIK

Fenik

Fenik co-founders Spencer Taylor (left), Quong Truang and Jeremy Fryer-Biggs.

The company won Food+City’s Gold Prize in 2017.

8

Food + City Magazine

issue v

The Dizzconcept pop-up kitchen unfolds like an armoire to reveal counter space, appliances, storage shelves and drawers — and even a well-lit sink.

TRENDING

GROCERY STORES, MEET SMART KITCHENS

PHOTO COURTESY DIZZCONCEPT

as i was leaving for the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle in October, my toaster broke. The ashen heating elements failed to flicker for one last slice of bread. In fact, all toasters — those kitchen staples since 1893 — may be on the way out.

Based on what I saw at the Summit, toasters — and practically all other kitchen appliances — are about to be unfamiliar in every way. Manufacturers promised that my appliances will recognize my face and voice to know my food preferences and biomedical data to produce the most perfect toast the world has ever tasted. And it won’t be a toaster, but a device that may toast, boil, sous-vide, fry or braise. Transforming ingredients into meals will be the goal of our new Smart Kitchen.

Imagine this: Your kitchen in 2030 will use voice activation to operate the handful of kitchen tools and appliances that remain after designers remove wires, InstaPots, trash cans and microwaves. Your kitchen will be smaller and wireless, maybe even portable. Croatian startup Dizzconcept makes portable, pop-up kitchens that fit into any space. Perhaps our new homes will come without kitchens, and we’ll simply select these movable, modular, personal kitchens to drop into our new spaces.

Countertops will be charging surfaces for your devices.

Screens will be voice activated (so you don’t have to touch a screen with fingers sticky from the syrup dispenser). These new surfaces will show what’s in your refrigerator and pantry, with data about the shelf life of all perishables. Your fridge will sense when you need to buy more milk — and will order

fooda ndci t y .org

it for delivery when your house knows you will be home. Garbi, another startup, is working on a trash can that recognizes what you discard, sorts it for recycling and reorders items.

Recipes will be personalized. No more single recipes from that book on the shelf, printed on paper, that may be good for someone but not you, with your recent calcium deficiencies and preference for mild flavors. Your kitchen will know what’s in your pantry and will design what to cook based on its knowledge about your health and preferences. Big Data for food has arrived.

Where does that leave grocery stores and restaurants?

Many will be left out of this new food landscape, while others will get smaller and prepare food for delivery services. Still others will become experience centers, with more grocerants (restaurants in grocery stores) where you select your ingredients and the grocery store chef cooks it for you to eat in the store. Grocery stores, themselves smarter because of all the customer data they now own, will be fulfillment centers, some modeled after Amazon, and many integrated into Amazon’s platform.

Because your kitchen will be so smart, it will become a commerce center. You will shop from home, with tools such as augmented and virtual reality that give the sensation of being at the store. You will smell and touch what you buy, without the headache of parking or standing in a checkout line.

Perhaps these new kitchens will be maker spaces, educational centers that will teach us how to cook, what to cook and inspire us to tell stories around our food making. We’ll be content makers for a new media — food — a far cry from the static food photos we post on Instagram. We’ll stream our cooking experiences in our kitchens.

And who really likes to peel potatoes or chop onions?

Food printers now produce fresh food from organic ingredients, freeze-dried and pulverized. The Last Mile is now no mile at all.

Kitchens, grocery stores and restaurants will be hubs for innovation. The engineers and designers at Bosch, GE, Kenmore and Siemens are fiddling with a whole new world in our former kitchens. Appliance makers have become hardware and software companies. Grocery stores and restaurants will fill new roles as they adapt to these new “platforms,” as our kitchen counters and frying pans will come to be known.

We might miss the joy of cooking. Or the satisfaction of making. Or the delight of creativity and the unexpected.

Where along the road of automation will we pause? As our kitchens change into service centers that defrost and heat food delivered to our home, will we yearn for the temperamental toaster?

ROBYN METCALFE

Food + City Magazine

9

FOOD MOVER

Instacart shopper Dennis Stickrod knows Austin grocery stores really well — including where to find tahini, an elusive item on many shoppers’ lists.

he’s standing near the fresh herbs, staring at a forest of tiny green bundles, scratching his head, looking up and down from his phone. I offer some help, and he asks, “Where’s the basil?” After I help him choose a perky bunch, he thanks me and mumbles, “I hate shopping for vegetarians.” He’s wearing a shirt emblazoned with the Instacart logo.

Twenty minutes later I’m back in the produce section, and the man is still staring at herbs, looking defeated. “She wants fresh sage, not dried sage. What is it with these vegetarians?” he grumbles. In his defense, none of the herbs are labeled. I point out the fresh sage and wish him luck.

Those increasingly ubiquitous personal grocery shoppers roaming the aisles at a supermarket near you are paid a per-order bonus in addition to the minimum wage they earn per hour. The more orders they can complete in an hour, the more money they can make. But when they can’t find the right fresh herbs, like the shopper I encountered, their slowed quest results in fewer completed orders that day: in other words, money left on the table.

“If you do enough orders in a day and you’re really fast, you can make a lot of money,” explains a different Instacart shopper nearby.

Personal food shopping services have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years. In Austin alone, six companies offer a range of personal shopping and delivery services at more than 10 stores. Nielsen’s Food Marketing Institute predicts that by 2025, 70 percent of consumers will be purchasing consumer

“Ask anyone at HEB if they’ve had to find tahini and they’ll tell you, yes, it’s the hardest thing to find, and everyone wants it.” packaged goods online. According to One Click Retail, Amazon already holds 18 percent of all online grocery sales.

That said, grocery shopping can be deeply personal.

Customers have habits, preferences and quirks that retailers must accommodate with their third-party hand-pickingproduce abilities.

As one shopper explains, “The people at Whole Foods are, well, ‘Whole Foodsie,’ ordering $50 jars of honey” and giving picky instructions about their produce. Because of this fastidiousness, online grocers started out offering only consumer packaged goods — pantry items like rice, beverages and breakfast cereals. But lately, most businesses have developed strategies for also offering fresh produce.

Still, online grocery shopping has room to grow. Less than 10 percent of customers in North America buy their fresh

10

Food + City Magazine

groceries online, according to Nielsen. Companies like Instacart have developed technologies that enable customers and shoppers to communicate as the shopper moves through the store. It’s a handy way to reassure customers that they’re getting exactly what they want. But shoppers may find their flow disrupted by picky comments such as, “Can you make sure to get the salmon that’s fourth from the back with the horizontal grill marks?” Or more frustrating: “I’m allergic to that brand.”

Customer demands can get extreme, and shoppers feel the need to be polite even as they try to round up everything on their list.

Each company operates slightly differently for shoppers, who tend to stick to one company and one unique store. One exception is Burpy, which operates like the Uber of grocery delivery. Burpy shoppers may fulfill one order with products from a variety of stores. Shoppers are also paid differently depending on the company, ranging from minimum wage with bonuses per order, to flat hourly rates, to tips only. Shoppers generally work flexible schedules, which makes it an attractive second job or a good fit for students.

Regardless of payment criteria, speed matters. Shoppers create efficient strategies for moving through stores. Texas regional grocer HEB even has a digital platform that sorts a customer’s order according to the store’s unique layout, creating a “perfect workflow.” But despite deep store experience and superior technology, some items are still elusive to shoppers.

“Tahini,” one shopper says. “I’ve worked at five HEBs, and every time it’s a wild goose chase. I think it likes to hide itself.

Ask anyone at HEB if they’ve had to find tahini and they’ll tell you, yes, it’s the hardest thing to find, and everyone wants it.”

Even when shoppers find everything on the list, customers must still get the groceries home. Because customers see only an itemized list, they often don’t realize how large their order is — an especially risky scenario when it’s for a pickup service or orders from Costco. Sizable orders of bottled beverages pose serious challenges.

“They pull up, and we’re dragging out three carts of groceries, two of which are full of bottled water, and they pull up in a VW Bug,” complains an HEB Curbside shopper. Amazon Fresh shoppers experience the same problem: “People will order 40 boxes of La Croix seltzer, and it’s crazy! You need eight shopping carts and that’s a lot of work.”

Despite the interconnected relationship between shopper and customer, an interesting disconnect remains. Shoppers frequently work in stores in which they do not personally shop, and often shoppers are asked to select items out of their comfort zone, like fresh herbs or fine wine. It begs the question: Can personal shoppers overcome these barriers to make this platform the future bread and butter of grocery shopping?

SARAH AXE

issue v

PHOTO BY KENNY BRAUN

CONFESSIONS OF A PERSONAL FOOD SHOPPER

1

2

3

4

5

6

12

Food + City Magazine

7

issue v

We’re not the only ones thinking about Mom & Pop Shops. We’ll link to a collection of articles about the small, independent grocery scene in this story on foodandcity.org.

GALLERY

MOM & POP SHOPS

PHOTOS 1, 4, 5, AND 7 ROBYN METCALFE; PHOTO 2 JOAN PHAUP; PHOTO 3 CHARLOTTE HERZELE; PHOTO 6 COLE LESLIE; PHOTOS 8-10 JULIE SAVASKY

8

9

As we conceived of this grocery-themed issue, our minds naturally went to the tech-laden big-box stores.

But then we remembered how grocery began: the small, independent momand-pop shop. Here’s a selection of our followers’ favorite small groceries — some stores are thriving, while others are shuttered, perhaps depending on economic realities of the communities they serve. #1 Mussel Ridge Market in Thomaston, Maine: Thriving #2 Monson General Store in Monson, Maine: Renovated and thriving. #3 Avenue B Grocery in Austin, Texas: Thriving. #4 Owls Head General Store in Owls Head, Maine: Shuttered, November 2017. #5 Keag Store in South Thomaston, Maine: Thriving. #6 La Adelita market in Cedar Park, Texas: Thriving. #7 Lincolnville Center General Store, Lincolnville, Maine: Renovated and thriving. #8-10 Leakey Mercantile in Leakey, Texas: Thriving.

10

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

13

Read more details about how Canada is managing single-use plastic grocery bags. We’ll link to it in this story at FoodandCityorg.

FOOD MOVER

PAPER VS PLASTIC

100 BILLION the number of single-use plastic bag used annually in the U.S. in 2009

325

per person

2-4 YEARS the jail sentence in Kenya for violating the country’s plastic bag ban

0.5%

the portion of litter that is plastic bags (EPA)

the plastic grocery bag as we know it today comes from Sweden.

Working for a plastics company called Celloplast in 1965, engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin developed a technique for sealing a folded tube of plastic and punching out a hole to create sturdy handles.

The polyethylene bag was waterproof, less likely to tear than paper, cheap to make and light to ship — and so cheap that stores have been giving them away since Day 1. Alas, they are so light that they blow into trees, fences and waterways with ease.

These single-use bags that revolutionized the retail world have now polarized it.

As one of the more visible forms of litter, plastics bags have over the past decade become the target of environmentalists around the world who advocate banning them. Some of the bag bans passed in cities such as Austin have been challenged by lobbyists and lawmakers who argue that plastic bags are more useful than they are harmful to the environment.

Even though bag bans in places like China and California have led customers to reduce all bag use by upwards of 70 percent, critics cite numerous studies that have found that manufacturing and shipping paper bags is two to three times more harmful to the environment than making and moving single-use plastic bags.

For example, a single truck can transport two million plastic bags, but it takes seven trucks to transport the same number of paper bags.

That works out to five to seven times more cargo weight on both sides of the chain — i.e., coming to stores as new bags and transported in the waste stream — as well as added greenhouse gas emissions.

A cotton bag requires more resources to make and transport than a plastic bag. So many more, in fact, that you'd have to use it 173 times for it to be more environmentally friendly than a plastic bag. But, plastic bags are much more toxic to aquatic environments.

1

USE

14

Food + City Magazine

Scientists use what is called a life-cycle assessment to determine the global warming potential and environmental impact of how different kinds of bags are made, transported, used and recycled. The United Kingdom’s Environment Agency compared different kinds of bags for a life-cycle assessment study in 2011 and found that you’d have to use a paper bag four times for it to be more environmentally friendly than a standard single-use plastic bag.

And what’s more surprising? A cotton bag would have to be used at least 173 times. In other words, because of the intensive resources used to make and manufacture cotton bags, you’d have to use a cloth reusable bag 173 times to have the same environmental impact as a single-use bag.

But there are other factors to consider in that study: Plastic bags are more toxic in aquatic environments, and they break down into micropieces; however, paper bags require more water, energy and chemicals to produce, which can be toxic to the environment during the manufacturing process.

As is often the case, the solution may not be a simple binary choice between paper or plastic. For example, in some countries with bans, such as Morocco, you’ll find flimsy recycled paper fiber bags that feel like soft fabric and are biodegradable, while Canada is leading efforts to create a recycling stream for existing polyethylene bags.

Even if the bag bans don’t last, the effort to use more sustainable, reusable packaging to move our food will continue. That requires changing consumers’ and retailers’ behavior, no small feat in the grocery business.

ADDIE BROYLES

4

USES

173 USES

issue v

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

15

ADVICE

Grit Grocery has put a gourmet grocery into a food truck. Working directly with farmers and other local producers, Grit Grocery launched a fleet of grocery trucks to bring fresh ingredients and meal-kit bundles into urban areas — starting in Houston — underserved by traditional grocery options. We visited with cofounders Michael Powell and Dustin Windham (below) to find out how they’re doing after competing in the Food+City Challenge Prize in 2018.

local farmers and ranchers as much as possible. As a retailer, we are at the front line of customer interaction.

What was the big idea that got you started? Why is it so difficult to put to-

Founded in 2015, pilot in 2016-2017, full-scale launch in April 2018.

gether all of our meals over the course of the week with fresh, local, healthy food? There’s something wrong with food retail — and with the traditional grocery store model, in particular — that makes it hard for so many people to eat healthy, find local foods and put together meals. While we’ve seen a lot of innovation in how food is grown and produced, retail innovation has been lacking. New online options are promising but lack the flexibility to be a good fit for today’s urban life. This is where Grit Grocery started.

How big is your team?

Who are you competing with?

Five co-founders, plus a team of seven who drive trucks, sell food, work in the kitchen and organize the warehouse.

Traditional grocery stores and other big-box stores are obviously the main source of food retail. Organic and specialty grocers offer food more in line with what Grit offers, but they mainly carry nonlocal food and a lot of processed food. Farmer’s markets are not competitors, but they do overlap with Grit’s offerings — though their shopping experiences are not strategically designed for customers. Online grocers and meal-kit providers are similarly flexible when it comes to delivering food retail access, but they also come up short in responding to a customer’s daily food issues and needs.

What’s your founding date?

What problem are you solving?

Grit Grocery trucks bring fresh local food products to urban locations that don’t have food retailers or that have stores that carry mainly processed nonperishable food. We’ve designed a shopping experience that provides ideas and inspirations for healthy, easy, fresh, local-food meal solutions, tonight.

What’s been the biggest surprise about running your business?

A lot of local brands are producing and growing great food, but they don’t have access to customers through a retail outlet. We get a lot of these groups asking to get their products on the truck.

We also hear from apartment complexes and developers requesting that Grit be at their residences. We already have a long waiting list of sites.

What's your part of the food system are you in? Grit Grocery is a retail

destination. We source directly from

16

Food + City Magazine

The coolest food system innovation I’ve heard of is...

Coolbot. Build a poor man’s walk-in cooler.

The scariest thing about today’s food system is... nowa-

days, food is everywhere you look,

from the airport to the hardware store, schools to the office. But most of it seems to be processed junk. Society is busier than ever and we have created more on-the-go occasions to eat food than can possibly be healthy, or that can accommodate real food solutions.

The processed food industry likes that and profits enormously.

What’s your latest big news?

We released a Chatbot in October that allows people to use their smartphone to order a meal for pickup at the truck.

They can also use the Chatbot to find the Grit Grocery truck and order a Grit-Together, a unique dinner party event for small groups.

Best advice you’ve received?

Be resilient. That’s what grit is all about. Keep trying new things, putting ideas into action and watching to see what works and what needs further improvement.

What advice do you give to potential startup founders?

Good strategy and technology are not enough. People and their food habits are kind of weird and hard to predict.

You need to test and get in front of people, see how they really engage with your food or product in their daily lives.

IMAGE COURTESY GRIT GROCERY

Grit Grocery

PeachDish Meal Kits & Groceries Fresh, wholesome ingredients from sustainable producers delivered to your door. Join our community of foodies and farmers who care. fooda ndci t y .org

P EAC H D I SH .CO M

Food + City Magazine

17

IN DEPTH

Grocery Stores: The IoT of Food

BY LARISSA ZIMBEROFF I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY A L B E RT O T E RC E RO

Tired of comparisons to the much flashier internet, supermarkets are working hard to ditch their unsexy descriptor: big-box stores.

These days you’ll find a Murray’s Cheese outpost in Kroger, a kombucha bar at Whole Foods and poke bowl counter at Albertsons.

All these flashy foodie options are good distractions from what’s happening under the hood, which is that grocery stores — the physical four walls — are going digital.

18

Food + City Magazine

issue v

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

19

IN DEPTH

Ready or not, consumer packaged goods (CPGs) — those prewrapped items found in so many center aisles — are nudging grocery stores into the future. And so is Amazon. The online retail giant’s entrance into brick-and-mortar supermarkets forced every retailer to innovate or die.

It’s been decades since the internet changed the way we shop, so why are American retailers slow to get on board? The founders of Trax, a retail technology firm based in Singapore, might point to our love for the status quo. The U.S. Census Bureau’s figures (from second-quarter 2018) bear that out, indicating that e-commerce sales account for 9 percent of total sales.

That means 91 percent of sales still occur in stores. Maybe U.S. retailers aren’t scared yet?

In contrast, the true retail visionaries are found in Australia, Brazil and China. Yair Adato, Trax’s chief technology officer, says China is five years ahead of the U.S. “In China, you can go to a store, scan what you want to buy, put it in your cart and they’ll deliver it to your home in 30 minutes,” Adato says.

Soda giants were early pioneers in creating speedy distribution channels. Yet despite raking in billions of dollars in sales, they couldn’t point to exactly how, when or why. Brands were guessing what was on the shelf, how much was left, what was selling at what times of day and even what their competitors had on the shelf. Short of physically walking in to every single store in the world and snapping a photo of the soda aisle, they had no idea what was happening.

In some countries, brand managers might have trusted their employees when they said they went to a store and reported that everything “looked good.” But in China or Brazil, managers wanted visual proof. “It’s a culture thing,” said Adato. “I want to know that I paid the right bonus to my employee.” In Australia, instead of proof, they wanted to improve processes using data analytics.

But it was a little bit like the chicken and the egg. Brands wanted to harness data to make better business decisions, and stores wanted to evolve.

They saw that online shopping was more engaging for customers than a trip

20 Food + City Magazine

9%

amount of total grocery sales e-commerce sales accounted for

issue v

to the store, but it was an expensive undertaking with no clear financial incentive for either party.

While a brand like Coke might want to push retailers for improved ways of tracking its sales, the reality is that it has only a few thousand SKUs (aka, inventory items). Target, on the other hand, has hundreds of thousands. But before it could become cost-effective for retailers to adopt new tracking tools, the technology — sensors, beacons, cameras — needed to advance.

In 2010, Trax began offering its image-recognition software, which incorporated physical images (taken by humans) and store data (including store layout and register sales), then stitched them into one actionable gold mine. For the first time, sales teams could have detailed product and category information including out-of-shelf, share-of-shelf, planogram, pricing and promotional compliance delivered to their mobile phones in real time. This was something managers could trust.

“In a grocery store there is so much dynamic movement,” says David Gottlieb, vice president

fooda ndci t y .org

of retail at Trax. “Something like 40 percent of products will change — a new item, or line extensions and new packaging.” Gottlieb deeply understands the in-store problem.

“Manufacturers are using us, even without feet on the street [robust sales teams] to collect information to get true metrics as to what degree their customers are making perfect stores, and that incentivizes the sales team to do a better job,” explains Gottlieb. He joined Trax in 2018 when the company purchased his startup, Quri, which used a crowdsourcing model to leverage large groups of people to perform paid “microtasks,” like taking images of store shelves.

With the acquisition, Trax now has half a million shoppers active in 6,000 U.S. cities with access to 150,000 stores. Despite this, the company is moving beyond human photographers and is beginning to install battery-operated internet-connected cameras underneath the shelves. The cameras take photos every minute of the day. [See page 23 to learn how they work.]

“It creates opportunity for use cases —

Food + City Magazine

21

For a deep dive into grocery store technology, read Joseph Turow’s book, “The Aisles Have Eyes.”

like intra-day replacement,” CTO Adato says.

“Our customers are looking at how long things last. That’s an indicator of lost sales that wasn’t available.” CPG clients that use Trax report their out-of-stock rates reduced by 10 to 15 percent and category sales (e.g., soda, crackers or condiments) increased by 3 to 5 percent.

While Trax was homing in on the perfect store, Shelfbucks, an Austin-based technology startup, was grappling with another unknown: marketing. Brands were spending money on in-store product merchandising displays to promote their products, but they had little idea what worked or whether they even made it to the floor.

Erik McMillan, the CEO of Shelfbucks, made a fairly compelling argument for his technology: “You spend a $100, and you’re wasting $50.”

22

Food + City Magazine

Through a fortuitous meeting with two of the biggest display producers in the U.S. — WestRock and Menasha Packaging Co. — McMillan gained access to an untapped business opportunity that helped brands answer their age-old question: Does my marketing have an ROI? If it sounds like meta-marketing-speak, that’s because it is. You send a physical piece of signage into your supply chain and on the other end it arrives at a store. It’s supposed to be put up somewhere, on the end cap (those shelves at the end of each aisle often filled with promotional items) or the shelf, but maybe it never makes it out of the back room. With no analytics, you’re left hoping for the best. Given the amount of money spent on merchandise promotion whose effectiveness can’t be tracked — a waste factor of 50 percent, according to McMillan — in-store marketing isn’t much better than shooting in the dark.

In coordination with brands, Shelfbucks puts sensors on displays, and in coordination with retail customers, it places sensors throughout stores. The sensors track the movement of the signage — whether it’s in the back room or out on the floor. When there are problems, Shelfbucks gets an exception report, which is sent to the store manager as an alert in the store’s task management system.

“We are literally generating data about something (store managers have) never seen before,” McMillan says. In 2014, one of Shelfbucks first customers was CVS Pharmacy; today Shelfbucks is in CVS stores nationwide. Fresh food is his next target. “We are focused on the three national chains: Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold USA.” How these changes benefit consumers is open for debate. Perhaps it’s as simple as knowing our favorite soda — Dr Pepper Vanilla Float, perhaps — will never be out of stock again. And while it may seem as if the CPGs of the world are driving change, McMillan reminds us otherwise.

“Brands can’t force retailers to do anything.

Retailers have the power. That’s a really important point,” McMillan says. “The brands have the money, and the customer buys their product, but the retailer owns the shopper.”

issue v

IN DEPTH

HOW THEY’RE WATCHING US In the early days, retail stores tracked customers via turnstiles.

After turnstiles, some stores turned to electronic beams, while others used light sources to count traffic in aisles. These methods were largely impersonal — they didn’t capture our faces, our phones in our pockets and they didn’t connect the dots: Suzy likes to shop on Mondays, has three kids and prefers to buy name brands. These days, our favorites stores have that information and a whole lot more. Here are ways we’re being tracked:

WI-FI While you’re wandering the aisle, your phone is busy looking for a Wi-Fi signal.

Retailers can use this ping to track us as we wander the aisles wondering what to eat for dinner. This can be a good thing, says Mike Lee, an expert in supermarket behavior.

“If done right, these tracking technologies can provide a wealth of data that can inform merchandising and layout decisions aimed at creating a more efficient shopping experience,” he says.

Using GPS and Wi-Fi tracking tied to shoppers’ mobile devices allows retailers to deliver targeted messaging, advertising and coupons in a more precise manner.

fooda ndci t y .org

BLUETOOTH Similar to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth is a wireless technology that allows our movements to be tracked by the persistent ping from our phone to any Bluetooth beacon within range.

Although a weaker signal than Wi-Fi, Bluetooth is a good backup when Wi-Fi is disabled.

If both of these are disabled on our phones, our phones still give off a traceable signal. According to Joseph Turow, in his book, “The Aisles Have Eyes,” our phones’ own signals can establish location within 150 feet.

As long as there are several access points, Wi-Fi is accurate to within a few meters and Bluetooth can locate you to within a few centimeters. This means eventually you’ll be reading the back of a box of cereal and simultaneously receiving an alert to get a dollar off that very box.

APPS ON OUR MOBILE PHONES Most cell phone makers disguise our Bluetooth signals using randomized codes. But if you have an app downloaded then you’re fair game.

Recently, Amazon connected its Prime membership to its Whole Foods stores, offering discounts on certain grocery store items. How did they want us to connect our accounts? Using the Whole Foods app on our phone. If your location services are turned on, you can bet the retailer is watching you.

SENSORS & BEACONS Most cell phone makers disguise our Bluetooth signals using randomized codes.

But if you have a store app downloaded onto your phone then you’re fair game. Recently, Amazon connected its Prime membership to its Whole Foods stores, offering discounts on certain grocery store items. How did they want us to connect our accounts? Using the Whole Foods app on our phone. If your location services are turned on, you can bet the retailer is watching you.

HIDDEN CAMERAS Trax, a Singapore-based retail technology firm, makes battery-operated, wireless cameras (see page 20). Mounted underneath the shelves, these cameras take pictures that allow retailers to know what’s in stock and out of stock (using sensors).

The body of the camera is the size of a deck of playing cards.

The camera lens, only 1 by 1.5 cm., extends out from the battery pack via a narrow ribbon and fits onto the edge of the shelf.

The software’s image recognition enables any photos with people to be deleted immediately to protect shoppers’ privacy. The cameras talk to each other and to local servers inside the markets so that Trax can accelerate image processing on site to deliver real-time metrics.

Food + City Magazine

23

IN DEPTH

MARKETS GO IT ALONE The buzzword for today’s brick-and-mortar retailer is “frictionless.” It refers to a shopping experience where customers can come and go with ease. It means not waiting in lines and never having to take cash or a credit card out of your wallet. Sounds dreamy, right?

It’s happening now, and here’s where to find it.

ZIPPIN: SAN FRANCISCO, CA

When Krishna Motukuri’s wife sent him to Trader Joe’s for a bottle of milk, he came back emptyhanded. Why? The checkout lines were too long.

When he dug into a study from MIT that found 37 billion hours were lost waiting in line every year, he was stunned. Wanting to help solve this problem, Motukuri took his computer science background and co-founded Zippin.

But while most of us think of the physical store as the end goal, Zippin only wants to be the powerful back end. This month, the startup launched a basic concept store in San Francisco to showcase its technology. To get through the slick entry gate, customers scan a QR code on their mobile phones. Once identified, customers can pick up a can of mango La Croix, a bag of sea salt Boomchickapop popcorn or perhaps a deli sandwich. Soon after they pass through the exit gate, an electronic receipt is sent to the Zippin app. And that’s it. Zippin’s AI-based software platform will allow retailers to deploy a “frictionless” shopping experience that wipes out time spent standing in line. According to Motukuri, operators of physical stores would need only minor upgrades — weight sensors on the shelves and overhead cameras — at a cost of about $25 per square foot. These enhancements, along with Zippin’s software (charged on a monthly subscription) will tell a retailer precisely what has been taken off the shelves.

AMAZON GO: SEATTLE, WA

In January, Amazon opened its first cashier-free store on the ground floor of one of its many offices in downtown Seattle. Called Amazon Go, the store is a free-for-all of convenience foods, meal kits; even beer and wine. As reported by Recode, by being first on the scene, Amazon hopes to “carve out

24

Food + City Magazine

a loyal customer base outside of its website and inside a physical store where the vast majority of food and grocery shopping still occurs.”

Shoppers with the Amazon Go mobile app gain access to the store with a QR code, shop for snacks, take whatever they want and then they “Just Walk Out” — the name for Amazon’s technology. This includes overhead cameras, weight sensors and deep learning technology that detects what shoppers take off the shelves or if they change their mind and put something back. When customers leave the store, the “Just Walk Out” technology debits their Amazon account for the items and sends a receipt to the mobile app. In August 2018, Amazon opened a second location in Seattle. Expect subsequent stores to crop up in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, where Amazon has already signed leases for two locations including one in the famed Willis Tower.

THE MOBY MART: SHANGHAI, CHINA

While Amazon wants to help us eat more snacks, Wheelys, a Stockholm startup, is developing a market on wheels stocked with hip sneakers, fashionable magazines and yes, milk and cookies.

In collaboration with Hefei University of Technology and tech firm Himalafy, the team created a roving, train-shaped convenience store on the university campus, 450 miles west of Shanghai, that can be located using an app. Self-driving, drone-equipped, powered by solar and always open, The Moby Mart is a tech nerd’s space-age fantasy come true.

Wheelys’ foray into automation began with modular-bike cafes. The easy-to-schlepp coffee carts could be moved around Stockholm for anyone not ready to commit to a lease. It was so popular that by 2016 Wheelys had sold 550

issue v

bikes. Looking beyond their Nordic country for their next innovation, the founders settled on China because of its large population and the country’s near-ubiquitous adoption of phone payments. While The Moby Mart is still running in beta, Wheelys is moving ahead with what co-founder Tomas Mazetti is calling “magic tech,” or hidden tech.

“At the moment, we believe that hidden technology is the next revolution, not just in retail but in many industries,” Mazetti says. “Imagine walking in through an open door, seeing a beautiful pair of sneakers, trying them on and then leaving the store with them, without ever having talked to anyone or seen any security.”

FARMHOUSE MARKET: NEW PRAGUE, MN

Thankfully, not every automated market is so hands-off. In Minnesota, married couple Kendra and Paul Rasmusson opened Farmhouse Market in 2015. The Rasmusson’s wanted to open a store

fooda ndci t y .org

that offered delicious goods from local farmers, but they knew that staffing a store (and raising their three small children) would be a big challenge. Undaunted, the pair came up with some ingenious ways to run a mostly automated farm store that has some human touches.

First, there’s a membership base — $99 to join and then $20 annually. Members (now in the hundreds) can drop by 24-7 and receive a 5 percent discount on all purchases. Nonmembers can get in on the action at specific hours during the day when there is an actual person behind the counter. And it’s not all that high-tech: Members and farmers use a keycard entry system, and motion-activated lights and tablets enable self-checkout. (There’s a one-theft-and-you’rebanned-forever policy.) The store, only 650 square feet, is monitored with remote cameras, and inventory is tracked digitally. As with every one of these stores, humans are still quite important.

Ms. Rasmusson prices items from home and texts orders to suppliers.

Food + City Magazine

25

26

Food + City Magazine

issue v

Who Knows?

BY JILL SANTOPIETRO

Real food. It’s what everyone wants — farm fresh and chemical free. But real food spoils. In the field, on the truck, at the store and in your fridge. That’s why innovators and entrepreneurs are coming up with new and nifty ways to help prolong the life of food.

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

27

The next time you purchase perfectly heart-shaped strawberries on the East Coast, consider this: They were probably picked and packed into their plastic clamshells on a Central Valley farm in California between five and eight days ago.

POLLUTING THE PLANET

Wasted food is bad for humanity, but experts believe it could be even worse for the earth.

Food waste is responsible for 16 percent of our country’s methane emissions — the pollution equivalent of driving 37 million cars per year. Growing, processing, transporting and disposing food uses roughly 10 percent of the U.S.’s energy budget, 50 percent of our land and 80 percent of our fresh water consumption. So when you figure 40 percent of that goes unused, that’s a lot of unnecessary pollution accelerating global warming and climate change.

28

They could have been harvested on a balmy 70-degree morning or in the 95-degree heat of mid-afternoon. Perhaps they sat in the field for one hour — or four. Maybe the pallets took five days to cross the country in a temperature-controlled trailer, or maybe the trailer refrigerator broke down halfway through the journey. Once at the store, the strawberries might have sat on the shelf for a day, or a few more. “Many things can impact shelf life,” says Kevin Payne, vice president of marketing at Zest Labs, a San Josebased tech company trying to take the mystery out of produce shelf life. “But you can’t see those until the very end,” when 24 hours later, your picture-perfect ruby strawberries morph into camo-green fuzz balls.

Six dollars wasted. Dreams of strawberry shortcake vanished.

And now you can add that pound of trashed berries to the 400 pounds of food you personally waste each year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), 40 percent of food produced for human consumption in the United States goes uneaten. Just one-third of that wasted food could feed the 48 million Americans living in food-insecure households.

Wasted food is bad for humanity, but experts believe it could be even worse for the earth. Food waste is responsible for 16 percent of our country’s methane emissions — the pollution equivalent of driving 37 million cars per year. Growing, processing, transporting and disposing of food uses roughly 10 percent of the U.S.’ energy budget, 50 percent of our land and 80 percent of our fresh water consumption. So, when you figure 40 percent of that goes unused, that’s a lot of unnecessary pollution accelerating climate change.

In the developing world, most food waste occurs in the field or in transit due to poor infra-

Food + City Magazine

structure or lack of refrigeration. But in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, the majority of food is wasted on the farm, at the supermarket and at home.

The food industry had mostly resigned itself to these inefficiencies. “The approach has been that waste is the cost of doing business,” Payne says.

“And the solutions have historically been reactive.”

That’s all starting to change thanks to a shift in food culture, environmental awareness, technological advances and a host of entrepreneurs shaking up the industry through food-shelf-life innovations.

PROTECTIVE SKIN

Searching for ways to prolong a food’s shelf life is nothing new. Humans have been salting fish, meats and cheese for thousands of years. We’ve created techniques like smoking, pickling, waxing and, more recently, adding chemical preservatives or ozone, to prevent spoilage. Today, delicate greens are packaged in Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAPs) to replace most of the oxygen in the bag with carbon dioxide (a gas that slows spoilage).

What’s more, refrigeration technology, which many experts agree is the key to extending shelf life, continues to grow more efficient.

Yet some of the industry’s most impressive technologies — canning, freezing and pasteurization — were developed nearly 200 years ago.

Fresh produce, which is wasted more than any category of edible food, is in higher demand now than ever. People want cleaner food — food that’s safe, with few ingredients and very little processing. Therefore, we need to find alternative ways to slow down the basic life process known as respiration. Food respires after it’s harvested, which means it consumes oxygen and gives off CO2, heat and water. If you slow a plant’s respiration rate, you can extend its shelf life. If you extend shelf life, you can reduce food waste.

“Most solutions today have been focused on the transport period” of harvested produce, says James Rogers, founder and CEO of Apeel Sciences, a San Diego-based company that developed an imperceptible, tasteless and organically derived second-skin for produce. “We have controlled-atmosphere shipping, refrigeration, high-humidity storage — all of these are kind of solving the key things that cause produce to spoil, which are water loss and oxidation.”

issue v

To better understand the science behind Apeel’s product, check out a story from WIRED magazine. We’ll link to it in this story on FoodandCity.org.

the resulting liquid can be rinsed over produce at wholesale produce-sorting facilities to create an undetectable “second skin.”

“We’re trying to use food waste to solve the food-waste problem,” Rogers says. The added “peel” acts to “physically slow down the rate at which water evaporates out of the produce and the rate at which oxygen gets into the produce,” he explains. “By doing that, we can dramatically extend the shelf life of most types of fruits and vegetables even without the use of refrigeration.” This science led to a Series B $33 million investment in the company, with big grocers like Kroger and Costco buying Apeel-treated produce to reduce their food waste.

SPICY SOLUTION

Another entrepreneur using food to save food is Kavita Shukla, founder and CEO of The FreshGlow Co., which developed a natural paper infused with organic spices and active botanicals that when placed near produce can double — sometimes quadruple — its shelf life.

The idea came to Shukla when she was 12 years old, visiting her grandmother in Bhopal, India. Her mother had warned her not to drink the water, but she forgot while brushing her teeth. Her grandmother quickly mixed up a spice elixir for her to drink. Shukla never got sick.

When she got home, she began experimenting to see if the same spices could clean dirty pond

IMAGE COURTESY APEEL SCIENCES

Slowing food spoilage during transit is important, but Rogers wanted to protect produce through all stages of the supply chain, especially on the farm and at the grocery store.

“If you look at some of the most successful companies of our era, they’re using resources that were not being optimally utilized,” Rogers says, referring to Uber and Lyft for ride sharing and Airbnb for house sharing. “We can use technology to unlock some of that wasted value to improve efficiency.”

That’s what Rogers did when in 2012 he launched Apeel Sciences. The idea came to him while driving through California’s lush Central Valley, listening to a radio program about the one billion people who are hungry on this planet. He wondered why, when there was such an abundance of food growing around him, was one third of that food being wasted. With his knowledge of material sciences as a Ph.D. student and grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, he began experimenting with ways to improve the shelf life of African cassavas, mangoes and bananas without using costly and environmentally unfriendly refrigeration.

To do this, he looked to organic materials left over on farms — grape skins, stems, leaves, etc. He and his team of scientists blended the matter up and extracted fats and specific food molecules. When these molecules are transformed into powder and combined with water,

FreshPaper sheets are infused with organic spices and active botanicals.

The FreshGlow Co. founder Kavita Shukla learned as a child that certain spices can inhibit bacteria growth.

She turned her home remedy into a simple solution for prolonging the life of produce.

Apeel’s product coats fruits and vegetables, slowing water loss and oxidation — two key factors in spoilage.

The coating is made from edible plant materials and reinforces the protection provided by a fruit or vegetable’s natural skin.

The diagram shows the microscopic layers of a strawberry’s skin.

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

29

water. They did. Her tests soon turned into a winning science-fair project, which set the course for her professional life.

“For the most part, food-spoilage technologies involve toxic pads, refrigerated transport or a lot of plastic,” Shukla says. But “customers are really aware now. They are asking, ‘Hey, is that apple waxed? What is the wax?’”

To make FreshPaper, the company infuses a proprietary blend of bacteria-inhibiting spices into compostable, organic paper. The paper can be slipped into berry cartons, vegetable bins or bags of leafy greens. The exposure you get to the spices is similar to what you might get while walking through the spice aisle of a grocery store, Shukla explains.

Best of all, Shukla’s paper is inexpensive, compostable and safe for humans and the environment. “I had my grandmother in mind when I designed the technology,” Shukla says. “She never had a refrigerator.” The product is already sold in 180 countries.

For the FreshGlow Co., which has taken it slow and steady, scaling up is the goal: to bring its product to larger produce companies and food distributors around the world. “That was always my intention — to use the technology to reduce food waste across the supply chain,” Shukla says.

DATA-DRIVEN DISTRIBUTION

While entrepreneurs are recognizing the financial

and humanitarian opportunities of extending food shelf life, Silicon Valley hasn’t really tapped into this huge revenue stream. Zest Labs in San Jose is trying to change that. The tech company is making the cold supply chain more efficient by accurately predicting the shelf life of produce as it moves around the country. It does this through the Internet of Things (IoT), the interconnection of computers and everyday objects through data sent and received via the Internet. These IoT sensors monitor the temperature of produce on each pallet, from field to the retail shelf.

“The largest impact on produce is temperature, harvesting conditions and variety of the product,” says Zest Labs’ Payne. “Pallets harvested first will vary from bottom to top,” he explains. “We can figure out that pallet A has this much shelf life, and pallet B has this much.” They do this by producing a Zest Intelligent Pallet Routing (ZIPR) code, which routes pallets with less freshness to the nearest location and those with a longer shelf life further afield.

Zest Labs has “removed the randomness of food distribution,” says Dr. Jean-Pierre Emond, a co-founder of The Illuminate Group and an expert on the cold chain. “For each pallet coming in, they now know exactly what to do with it.”

Zest Labs technology is enabling growers and retailers, who have never had this type of data, to profit more and waste less. They do this by reducing pre-harvest water, fertilizer and labor

30 Food + City Magazine

IMAGE COURTESY ZEST LABS

Zest Labs uses palletby-pallet temperature data to help predict the rate of produce spoilage. “No other industry would accept one third of their production going to waste,” says Zest Labs CEO Peter Mehring in a video on the company’s website.

issue v

costs, as well as post-harvest costs for waste removal. Large companies like Costco have tapped into Zest Labs’ technology to help their growers, distributors and themselves.

“I never see anyone winning with food waste,” Emond says. The entire food supply chain stands to benefit from these new solutions.

IMAGE COURTESY DAILY TABLE

SELL BY? USE BY? WHY?

Food loss on the farm, in transit and at the retail store is significant. But the largest category is even closer: Nearly half of America’s food waste happens at home. A 2012 NRDC study found “the average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia, up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s.”

The food-waste problem is partly cultural.

In the U.S., food is relatively inexpensive compared to other parts of the world. Thanks to busy lifestyles, we over-buy and under-plan.

And inconsistent shelf-life food labeling confuses consumers and retailers. What does “sell by” and “best if used by” mean? Are foods past those dates actually spoiled? Often, they are not.

In 2013 the NRDC reported that food expiration date codes contribute considerably to the estimated 160 billion pounds of food trashed each year in the United States, “making food waste the single largest contributor of solid waste in the nation’s landfills.” Food expiration date codes are not federally regulated. They vary by state and are often arbitrary, providing false confidence in a food’s freshness or spoilage.

“There isn’t a rhyme or reason to how food codes are set,” says Michael Malmberg, chief operating officer of Daily Table, a nonprofit Boston-based grocery store that sources nearly expired food from local farms, distributors, grocery stores, restaurants and bakeries, and resells that food at affordable prices. “It’s set by the manufacturer or packager and can be done for marketing reasons — if they want to turn a product over faster.”

Doug Rauch, a former president of Trader Joe’s — and Malmberg’s boss — saw an opportunity to change perceptions of shelf life at the retail level. Rauch was well aware of how much perfectly good food was wasted by grocery stores due to confusing food labels. While a fellow at Harvard University, he also learned that food malnourishment meant not just “a deficit in

fooda ndci t y .org

calories; it was a deficit in nutrition, and supply chain issues,” Malmberg says. “(Doug) realized there is a need not only for access to food, but access to healthy food that’s affordable.” Out of that came the concept for Daily Table, which opened its doors in June 2015.

Rauch likes to think of his two grocery stores, located in Roxbury and Dorchester, Massachusetts, as the T.J. Maxx or Marshalls of the food world — where you can shop for quality products at reduced prices without the stigma that comes with visiting a food bank. This model, backed by the PepsiCo Foundation, the Kendall Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, recognizes the flexibility in food expiration codes.

“It’s all well and good to have healthy produce,” says Malmberg. “But if people get home from work and don’t have dinner on the table, they’re in trouble.” So Daily Table also set up an on-site kitchen and hired chefs to turn ugly produce or products that are not moving off the shelves quickly enough into affordable, nutritious, ready-to-cook and grab-n-go meals that cost the same price or less than nearby fast food.

Daily Table hopes to open more stores because “the concept will be more effective at scale,” says Malmberg. “We are currently covering 65 percent of our expenses. We think with a third or fourth store, we can break even.”

Breaking even, when it comes to food waste, would be a big step in the right direction.

Daily Table in Massachusetts takes in food rejected by other retail outlets for aesthetic reasons. For example, an entire pallet of organic cauliflower heads that were deemed “unmarketable” due to a few brown spots were saved before they ended up in a dumpster. The DT team sorted and repackaged them for sale as raw produce and as part of their prepared foods offerings.

Food + City Magazine

31

PROTECTING PROVISIONS Food packaging has been around as long as people have traded goods in markets. How else are you going to schlep that wine home across the desert? Given all that’s new in packaging and shelf-life technology, we’re taking a look back to some golden oldies, from skins and amphorae to the humble milk bottle.

SKINS

Plants, animals and even humans have skins that inhibit the loss of water, so we will last longer. Food packaging performs the same function, inhibiting water loss and gain to extend freshness during transportation and storage. Too much water for any living creature causes cell death, so food scientists have been working for centuries to find the best way to provide a barrier between food and the environment.

Before the 17th century, that optimal barrier was literal skin. Leather bladders and other animal hides were convenient packaging materials beginning in prehistoric periods, and most “packages” for food were not removed during the cooking process. Animal bladders held meats and mixtures of vegetables and seasonings over the cooking fire. In a sense, haggis and natural sausage casings are modern-day versions of this ancient packaging.

Though we now have more options than our 17th-century ancestors did, we still protect many foods from spoilage by applying a protective skin.

Think of spoilage this way: Any perishable food ingredient, processed or unprocessed, breathes just like we do, taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. Bacteria grows faster if it exists in conditions that enable it to breathe, allowing it to break down the plant or animal cells. That’s why you frequently see cheeses and fruits covered with wax. The Chinese popularized this tactic during the 12th century, when they wrapped citrus fruits in wax to decrease the interior oxygen content and ensure the fruits made it to the emperor’s table. Different types of waxes (e.g., sugar cane and carnauba) are often applied by spraying or dipping fruits and vegetables to preserve or improve the appearance and protect the produce during storage.

Wax isn’t the only kind of protective skin: Victorians used lard to coat food, and M&Ms are covered with confectioner’s shellac, a substance made of an insect-derived coating that’s produced in India and called lac dye. Your french fries remain white and crispy because of a coating applied during processing to inhibit discoloration. Some other coatings aren’t so natural, including calcium acetate and calcium ascorbate. Even wheat gluten becomes a skin for some foods that are not grain-related at all.

32

Food + City Magazine

issue v

GLASS, CRATES AND CARTONS

JARS AND POTTERY

Three thousand clay jars of fermented fish sauce emerged gently from the sea in 2015. A team of archeologists led by Simon Luca Trigona celebrated their trove after two years of painstaking work around a Roman ship that was built sometime in the first or second century. These containers, called amphorae (singularly, amphora), have been around since the Neolithic Period (10,000 to 2,000 BCE). They were made of clay and often carried wine, oil or a fish sauce known as garum. The fish sauce, which resembled ketchup, was most likely from Spain and bound for Roman markets.

Fish sauce traveled in pottery vessels long before the sinking of the Roman ship. At the time, clay was also used as a sealant for baskets that carried grain. To eliminate the absorption of liquids by the vessel, clay, resin or pitch coated the interior surfaces. Manufacturers of amphorae applied a stamp to the outside that indicated its origin. In some cases, other information would be written or painted on to indicate weights, contents and market information.

Not often recycled, Greek and Roman amphorae were broken up after they reached their destinations. Rome’s Monte Testaccio is a mountain of these vessels, a Roman pottery garbage heap.

fooda ndci t y .org

Milk travels along the supply chain in bulk and consumer packaging, contained in glass, plastic and paper. A rusty milk jug worked its way up to the soil surface in our backyard last summer, with a metal label indicating it had belonged to the Turner Center Creamery in Auburn, Maine. The creamery, which operated in Auburn in 1893, manufactured the first commercial ice cream in New England. Customers would send jugs to dairies where the farmers would refill and deliver the milk back to the customer.

In more urban areas, metal milk jugs had been replaced with glass bottles topped with metal caps. Alexander Campbell introduced these bottles in 1878 in Brooklyn, New York, and by the early 1900s, fiber material and paraffin covered the metal caps. At first, customers resisted the glass bottles because glass was commonly used for medicines from the drug stores, and dairies worried about broken glass. But distributors preferred glass for sanitation and easy handling, so both dairies and consumers overcame their concerns, and glass replaced the metal jugs until paperboard appeared in the early 20th century.

In 1915, John Van Wormer patented a wax-sealed paper carton with a gable top that could be shipped flat for assembly at the dairy. Gallon and half-gallon plastic jugs became the preferred package for milk by 1970, but paper milk cartons have made a comeback since being fitted with screw tops in the 1990s.

Plastic jugs travel to stores in milk crates, which were once made of metal, but were replaced with plastic by the 1960s. Each crate carries four to six one-gallon plastic milk jugs. About 20 million crates go missing every year, stolen for shredding and reselling at a profit. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) estimates that U.S. dairy companies spend between $80 and $100 million to replace stolen or missing plastic milk crates (read about another beverage container that often falls out of the supply chain on page 6).

MILK PACKAGING THROUGH THE YEARS

1880s Metal-capped glass bottles improved milk’s hygiene.

E A R LY 1800s Metal cans stored milk and carried it from farm to town.

1960s Customers could buy more milk in lightweight plastic gallon jugs.

1950s Paper cartons were the first single-use milk containers.

1960s Invented in Australia, the plastic milk crate holds four or six gallon-sized jugs.

Food + City Magazine

33

Maine fishermen check their “ear-hanging” scallops, all suspended from a floating line. The Maine Aquaculture Co-op has been a leader in instigating scallop farming in the cold waters off Maine’s coast, with an aim to diversify income streams for small, independent fishermen.

34

Food + City Magazine

issue v

Out of Water Fish

BY LAURIE ZAPALAC

PHOTO BY MERRITT CAREY

As the lobster capital of the U.S. looks to diversify its commercial fishing industry, new options for harvesting seafood are emerging — in ocean-based farms, in cold rivers and even on land. Maine is diving into aquaculture.

fooda ndci t y .org

independent fishermen, the backbone of the Maine commercial seafood industry, play a vital role in the state’s culture and economy. Roughly 5,000 lobster fishermen produce 80 percent of the value of Maine’s commercial seafood catch – an estimated contribution of more than $1 billion to the state economy. But relying too much on any one species could put the state in a precarious position. The volume and value of Maine lobster fell more than 15 percent from 2016 to 2017, from $533 million in 2016 to $434 million in 2017. Tariffs imposed in July 2018 by China on select American products, including lobster, represent a new factor that could affect Maine lobstermen this year, despite a very productive season so far.

Climate change is another problem. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) has identified the waters off of coastal Maine as “one of the fastest-warming ocean ecosystems on the planet.”

The volatility of the water temperature is just one reason many small fishermen began to focus primarily on lobster, where prior generations made a living on a varied catch. In this new reality, re-diversifying production and having more direct control over cultivation will help sustain Maine’s commercial seafood industry.

Two aquaculture endeavors now in development represent decidedly different alternatives for America’s lobster capital.

THE RISE OF AQUACULTURE WORLDWIDE

Aquaculture in Maine has been practiced since at least the 1800s.

While laws regarding fish and shellfish culture date back to 1905, the Maine Legislature only began to regulate aquaculture as an

Food + City Magazine

35

MERROIR like the French terroir, which refers to the flavor notes a wine gets from the grapes’ soil and growing region, merroir describes the way seafoods reflect the taste of the waters in which they’re grown.

industry in 1973. In the last few decades, Mainebased institutions have dived into aquaculture research, but many questions remain about how to make production more cost-efficient. Farmers bringing product to market also play an important role in determining aquaculture’s viability: by finding ways to integrate into existing supply chains or to create new ones and by understanding how consumers relate to new products, including their willingness to pay to them.

Worldwide, consumers seem very willing to pay for farmed fish. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), global per-capita fish consumption is on the rise. As of 2016, aquaculture accounted for 47 percent of all fish consumed as food. Further, the first-sale value of all aquaculture production was estimated at $243.5 billion — almost double the value of global fishery production.

Investors have noticed. Venture capital and private-equity capital from the same entrepreneurial ecosystems that have long funded tech startups are turning to food systems ventures.

“Fish is the new beef,” says Mike Velings, a Dutch venture capitalist and founder of Aqua-Spark, the first aquaculture investment fund. His 2015 TED talk, “The Case for Fish Farming,” has been viewed more than a million times. In light of this global surge in aquaculture, Maine’s fishing industry is exploring ways to move beyond lobsters.

ALL EYES ON SCALLOPS

Tenants Harbor in St. George is a picturesque spot in Maine’s mid-coast region, nestled between two hillsides that protect it from the winds off the bay. I’ve come here to meet Ryan McPherson, Merritt Carey and Peter Miller, members of the newly formed Maine Aquaculture Co-op. The topic: sea-scallop farming in Penobscot Bay. It’s a new idea for a region more associated with lobsters, and the hope is to reintroduce a measure of diversification for independent fishermen so they can continue to make a living from the sea.

“It’s all about local knowledge,” Miller, a fourth-generation fisherman, says. “I want every young fisherman to have the chance that I had.”

Maine isn’t new to scallop production, but its cold ocean temperatures mean they grow slowly.

“To harvest wild scallops in Maine, they have to be four inches, which takes about four years,” McPherson explains. “The product we’re landing

36

Food + City Magazine

doesn’t have those restrictions, because we’re growing them.”

A former fisherman with a degree in entrepreneurship, McPherson purchased Glidden Point Oysters in Edgecomb, Maine, with leases in the deep water of the Damariscotta River, in 2017.

He has quickly made inroads in the state, expanding relationships with chefs and maintaining Glidden Point Oysters as a premium product, a philosophy he brought to his involvement with the Maine Aquaculture Co-op. In addition to making chefs aware of the co-op, he fostered a tie to Island Creek Oysters, which provides a robust point-of-sale and distribution network for products that share Island Creek Oysters’ emphasis on celebrating American merroir. The co-op’s first live, whole scallops — not just the abductor muscle that most people traditionally think of as a scallop — started selling on the platform in early 2018.

“Before we pull them out of the water, they are already sold,” McPherson says. Literally pulling them out of the water is interesting, too.

As the net emerges from the water, the petite scallops respond to the change in their environment and clap their shells shut in unison.

A 2016 market analysis for Maine-farmed shellfish confirmed that the portion of shellfish produced by aquaculture in Maine remains quite small — less than 1 percent of the landed value of oysters, mussels and scallops in the United States. Despite the small quantity, Maine scallops garner the highest price per pound of any state.

Yet Maine produces only 2 percent of the country’s volume. To meet consumer demand, the United States imports 40 million pounds of scallop meat, with a value ($350 million) close to the value of scallops it produces domestically ($380 million). Projections about future consumer demand may be conservative because they don’t consider the impact of expanding direct-to-consumer buying options and prepared meal kits. The report also notes that Maine has the cold, clean waters to support shellfish aquaculture expansion, with projected acreage needed by 2030 estimated to be less than .3 percent of state waters.

THE SALMON STORY

Maine’s wild Atlantic salmon population hovers on the brink of extension due to loss of fresh-

issue v

PHOTOS BY LAURIE ZAPALAC

For delicious scallop pics and shots of the sea farmers at work, follow @MaineAquacultureCoop on Instagram.

Clockwise from left: Merritt Carey pulls a lantern net out of the water to reveal juvenile scallops in an early stage of growth; Ryan McPherson explains the staging float and its relationship to the leases held by the Maine Aquaculture Co-op farther out in Penobscot Bay; a juvenile scallop fresh from the bay.

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

37

WHAT IS AQUACULTURE?

The term aquaculture refers to the farming of aquatic organisms in water and can include finfish, shellfish, crustaceans, sea cucumber, seaweed, kelp, algae — anything that grows in water. It’s related to hydroponics, which generally refers to growing plants in nutrient-rich water, without soil, as well as aquaponics, the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating environment. Aquaculture differs from conventional fishing or even harvesting of shellfish and seaweed in that it explicitly includes propagation (almost always in a land-based, lab-like setting, or “hatchery”) as well as tending to the crop, or stock, through the whole growth cycle. Vertical ocean farming is essentially an aquaponic practice in an ocean environment, in which seaweed and shellfish farms are vertically arranged in the water column, mimicking the arrangement of natural systems and promoting interactivity with other ocean species around them.

38

water spawning habitat, overfishing, pollution and other forces. Heavily depleted by the late 1960s and declared an endangered species in 2000, wild Atlantic salmon is no longer fished commercially in Maine waters. In 2016, habitat restoration projects began, and small upticks in population are now being recorded.

Responding to the vast U.S. market hungry for salmon, Norwegian investors are focusing on Maine for land-based production. The U.S. exports the majority of the seafood it harvests, while importing species such as salmon — an inefficient crossover that generates heavy carbon dioxide emissions. But salmon farmed in Maine can efficiently reach more than 50 million people in adjacent states, a “grow-local” solution.

“The exciting thing is, you can place production close to the consumer,” says Erik Heim, CEO of Nordic AquaFarms. “So instead of airfreighting in tons of salmon from New Zealand, Chile, Norway, Scotland, you can produce it locally.”

MOVING INDOORS

Nordic AquaFarms aims to produce 30,000 metric tons (approximately 66 million pounds) of salmon annually in a facility in Belfast, Maine, estimated to cost $500 million when fully complete. Due in part to concerns associated with ocean-based finfish farming, including fish feed sourcing, disease, use of antibiotics, fish escape, pollution and others, the location of aquaculture is changing dramatically. Earlier aquaculture

Food + City Magazine

practices for finfish entailed producing eggs and growing juvenile fish in land-based hatcheries, then releasing them into sea-pens — or in the case of stock regulation, into the wild. Today’s finfish aquaculture is increasingly keeping the fish indoors for life.

Heim explains that the facility will comprise three main production areas: hatchery, grow out and processing. The facility’s engine is a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS).

“Land-based farming is basically where everything is happening indoors,” Heim says. “You’re taking water in and releasing water out, so you can clean it and treat it,” a practice that allows for recirculation and a reduction in overall water usage and nutrient discharge. “That’s a key part of the concept.”

Deploying aquaculture on a large scale indoors means confronting questions about selective breeding, genetic engineering, use of fertilizers and antibiotics, and waste processing — issues familiar to other types of industrial-scale landbased farming. Another question is how the introduction of foreign-investor-driven projects will impact the local communities and economies that host them. While operations of this size should mean more jobs, fishermen may have to adjust to harvesting their catch on land.

While building on decades of knowledge, Nordic AquaFarms operations are relatively new. Founded in 2014, its business units include Sashimi Royal in Hanstholm, Denmark, the largest

issue v

IMAGE COURTESY THE WATER BROTHERS

Juvenile scallops grow in vertical “lantern nets” (left), a Japanese aquaculture technique adopted by some Maine scallop farmers. Once they’re larger, the scallops are drilled and hung on long lines in water 25 feet deep, where they grow to full size.

Learn more about vertical ocean farming in a TED article.

We’ll link to it from this story on Foodandcity.org.

What does releasing waste and nutrients a mile off shore really mean? How will it affect the bay?

How will it affect me as a swimmer? How many people do you intend to employ and how much will you pay them?

ON THE DINNER TABLE

Land-based salmon farming and ocean-based scallop farming operate under wildly different assumptions about how people acclimate to new ideas, from winning over potential consumers to gaining support from host communities and existing players in the commercial seafood industry. Each presents a distinct set of questions about the impact on the state’s environmental resources. Each relies on and will amplify different industry knowledge. Can Maine go forward in a way that its land- and sea-based farming industries not only limit negative impacts for each other, but also find opportunities for knowledge sharing and mutual benefit?

Returning home to Boston, I find a flyer in the mail from the meal kit delivery company HomeChef, showing whole carrots, enticing bok choy and two precisely cut salmon filets. It reads, “Designed with you in mind, using fresh, thoughtfully sourced ingredients.” As food production and consumption continue to evolve, it still remains up to us to decide what exactly “thoughtfully sourced” means.

Overhead rendering of Nordic Aquafarms’s site in Belfast, Maine. The first phase of construction of the indoor-salmonfarming facility is projected to be complete in 2020 or 2021.

IMAGE COURTESY NORDIC FARMS

yellowtail kingfish facility in the world, which began producing commercially in early 2018; and Fredrikstad Seafood in Fredrikstad, Norway, which will be the biggest salmon facility in Europe when it comes online in 2018. The Fredrikstad operation is “the blueprint for what we’re doing here. What we’re looking to do is not just build a land-based facility. We want to change this industry, and we’ve invested a lot into innovation,” Heim says. “We’re taking the science to an entirely new level.”

This raises an important question: How can radically new practices — so new they aim to be innovative on a global scale — be embraced by communities devoted to traditional methods?

Heim takes a stab at the answer. “If you look at the Maine seafood industry, it is very fragmented, many small producers, mostly concerned about their own business. Enormous resources go into building seafood brands and salmon brands in Norway. I think there is an opportunity for the industry (in Maine) to get together and do more.”

Yet, Maine is a vastly different place politically, socially and economically than Norway.

Rather than solely focusing on exporting Nordic best practices, what will the Norwegians seek to learn from Mainers, ensuring that knowledge sharing is a two-way process? And how will they address concerns raised by their host community:

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

39

CASE STUDY

The Freshest Leafy Greens

BY KRISTIN ELISE PHILLIPS

Have you ever had a salad with lettuce freshly picked from the garden? Maybe your grandmother grew her own greens, or perhaps that farm-to-plate restaurant you love makes amazing salads. Unless you have your own backyard garden, fresh lettuce most likely travels the distance from the farm to your grocer on a long-haul truck. Until now.

A Dallas Central Market — the regional gourmet grocer — now offers really, really fresh salad greens. The store grows the lettuce in tricked-out shipping containers on a lot behind the store.

fooda ndci t y .org

a 21st-century lettuce farm no longer requires muddy rows cut into a rural field subject to the whim of weather and labor. Behind a suburban grocery store in Dallas, fresh leafy greens are produced under a limitless pink glow inside a clean, 53-foot-long, steel shipping container, yards away from where they will eventually be sold.

The glow — provided by LED lights in both the red and blue spectra — is an engine that works 24-7, producing spicy arugula rich in vitamins and antioxidants, fresh green leaves ruffled in purple and romaine so crisp that it oozes milky sap when cut.

Since May 2017, Central Market, the gourmet offspring of the family-run, Texas-based H-E-B Grocery Co., has been selling lettuce and herbs grown on-site. Production is contained and perfected so that customers have access to a daily harvest of fresh, organic greens. While Austin-based rival Whole Foods has partnered with another company to sow seeds on a store’s roof, and startups like San Francisco’s Plenty have

built large urban food-production facilities, Central Market’s growing container represents the first time that a grocery store has grown produce on-site with their own staff.

The container garden is the brainchild of Marty Mika, produce specialist and buyer for Central Market. After years of working to procure the freshest ingredients for customers, he is well aware of how difficult it is to always have the best on hand.

“There are so many variables in produce: Mother Nature, seasonality, labor issues, water and even transportation,” says Mika. “So, we looked at how we could take over some of the supply chain and put all of these issues under our own umbrella.”

Americans eat a lot of lettuce — about 11 pounds of romaine and other leafy lettuces per person per year, and even more if hardy iceberg varieties are considered. In 2017, romaine and other leafy green harvests were valued at over $2 billion, a substantial increase in value from the previous year. Salad, a key component

Food + City Magazine

41

Clockwise from top left: Lettuces lined up; a Central Market grower inspects the progress; almost ready for the produce aisle; the plain white box conceals a productive indoor garden; pink light — a mix of red and blue — is all plants need to thrive indoors; samples to taste inside the store.

42

of a healthy diet, is so popular that many fastfood chains have added salads to their menus.

At-home salad consumption is increasing too, thanks partly to new packaging in bags and clamshells that can extend freshness.

But getting lettuce to the table at the peak of perfection is not an easy task. The challenges are numerous: drought, pests, temperature, contamination and physical damage during transportation.

Lettuce is a cool-weather crop, so it grows best when days are not too hot and nights are not too cold. Because of this, 90 percent of all romaine and leafy greens harvested in the U.S. hail from either California or Arizona. As a result, much of the lettuce produced travels great distances to end up plated with a tomato and vinaigrette.

The transportation challenge means that lettuce is often picked just before maturity and immediately bundled onto a truck for distribution. Driving lettuce to markets adds to the cost of food, especially when fuel costs fluctuate.

A 2013 USDA report found that a doubling of diesel prices could lead to an average increase of 20 to 28 percent in wholesale prices for a variety of produce.

Another issue related to transportation is nutrient loss. Research has shown that as lettuce is trucked across the country from farm to market, levels of ascorbic acid, chlorophyll, carotenoids and important minerals decrease, a reduction in quality that persists as long as the lettuce is being moved or sits on a shelf in a supermarket before purchase. Transportation also introduces new risks into the food chain: If vehicles are not adequately cleaned and maintained, there is always the potential for contamination.

So, what is a purveyor of produce to do?

Contain. Contain. Contain.

To facilitate growing their own fresh greens, Mika and his Central Market team purchased a domestic shipping container from Growtainers that had a few modifications crammed into nine feet of headspace: neat units with four shelves, a system for modulating temperature and an LED growing system that shines 24 hours of pink light into every corner. The crop grows in a perfectly controlled environment primed for maximum production.

In Dallas, Central Market employees sow varieties of lettuce and herbs into a medium

Food + City Magazine

made of melted rocks. This clean, sterile substrate is the perfect underpinning for growing plants hydroponically, or without soil. Nutrients are added to the water, and the plants grow rapidly without pesticides or herbicides. In addition, the temperature range in the container can be optimized for growth. And though scientific research has not shown that pink light makes plants grow more quickly, the LED system that uses only some wavelengths of the light spectrum allows plants to flourish while saving on energy costs.

Many commercial hydroponic growers do not want to talk about proprietary data and results; however, research suggests that crops can be coaxed to grow between 20 and 50 percent faster in hydroponic conditions. Recent research also shows that hydroponic farming can yield 11 times as much lettuce per area under cultivation and uses a fraction of the water when compared to conventionally farmed lettuce.

The Dallas team plants and harvests by section within the container. Each new planting takes over a new set of shelves, which enables a scheduled harvest of perfect greens to be plopped into a clamshell and then moved to the market shelf in minutes. The work is very detail oriented, but once the process starts, it is consistent and easy to maintain.

Even better: Transportation of product to retailer is now a mere few feet, and customers have access to pesticide-free, organic produce.

“We produce enough of different, basic varieties each week to sell in the store: not too much, not too little,” said Mika. “Customers like the flavor and freshness of the greens, and they like the fact that we’re reducing the carbon footprint.”

There are some disadvantages to producing container lettuce, though, including high initial costs for equipment. In addition, because container farms tend to be in urban areas — close to customers — the cost of land is high. These costs are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for greens. Hydroponic farming also uses much more energy than conventional farming — more than 80 times the amount of energy, although this excludes energy used for transportation.

Stay tuned. Researchers are developing more sustainable practices for indoor farming that should further reduce the carbon footprint.

issue v

IMAGES ON PREVIOUS SPREAD AND OPPOSITE COURTESY CENTRAL MARKET

CASE STUDY

fooda ndci t y .org

Food + City Magazine

43

EVOLVE THE WAY Community Workspace with Social Impact YOU WORK.

Impact Hub Austin is a globally connected, locally focused coworking community with two locations in Austin.

Come in for a complimentary day of coworking today.

impacthubaustin.com 44

Food + City Magazine

issue v

ADVICE

UAV-IQ Using military-developed technology, UAV-IQ combines high-tech field surveillance, environmental sensors and specialized software to help farmers keep a close eye on their crops. Pinpoint imagery allows farmers to focus on problem areas — locating issues such as water puddling or the beginning of a disease outbreak — and address them before they spread. Information sensed by the drone, including images that show detail down to individual leaves, can be transmitted to tablets or other tools used by farm staff anywhere in the field. We caught up with the Food+City Challenge Prize 2018 winner to get their latest news.

April 2016.

by using properly equipped to drones to rapidly scout fields.

How big is your team?

Who are you competing with?

Five people.

Inertia — sticking with an inefficient status quo — is our largest competitor. We also compete with satellites and other imagery providers.

What’s your founding date?

What problem are you solving?

Precision agriculture has proven to be highly effective for growers who practice it, but many growers perceive pricing or lack of training as barriers to adoption. Starting with drone-based remote sensing (which tells growers where their crops are healthy and where they’re stressed), UAV-IQ makes precision agriculture technology accessible and implementable within existing workflows to growers of any size and sophistication.

The coolest food system innovation I’ve heard of is... the use

of hyperspectral sensors to identify specific disease, ripeness levels and other qualities while the crops are growing.

The scariest thing about today’s food system is... lack of diversity.

What’s your latest big news?

That there are so many people genuinely interested in helping young companies get started.

We are starting to provide a new service that utilizes drones to drop biological control agents (beneficial insects) to suppress pest populations in California.

What part of the food system are you in? We focus on helping

What’s the best advice you’ve received? If it’s not a “hell yes,” it’s

growers.

a “no” when contemplating early employees and partners.

What’s been the biggest surprise about running your business?

What was the big idea that got you started? That one of the most

PHOTO BY SAM DIEPHUIS

fundamental problems for farmers — identifying where their crops are struggling and targeting their treatments precisely where they’re needed — was a solvable problem

fooda ndci t y .org

What advice do you give to potential startup founders?

Focus on building the best team before focusing on building the best product or service.

Food + City Magazine

45

Ready to start cooking with edible bugs? Check out the “Buy Bugs” link on eatbugsevents.com for resource ideas.

RECIPE TRACKER

BUGS AROUND THE WORLD

While eating bugs may be a novel idea for Americans and other Westerners, insects have long been a valuable ingredient in many parts of the world.

Oaxaca grasshoppers (chapulines)

Cambodia ants

China crickets served instead of bar nuts

South Korea silkworm pupae

Flavor notes range from peppery lemon to pine-nutty to prosciutto-savory. Some varieties make for lovely garnishes on your seafood salad, while others are perfect as the heart of a wellsalsa’d taco.

Some new-ancient legume? The latest grain-based trend? No — I’m talking about edible bugs.

And I’m not the only one. Bug-based recipes are showing up all over Instagram and your favorite cooking magazines. Yet while we in the West are playing catch-up, some cultures around the world have been enjoying arthropods and mealworms for millennia.

If you think about it — with a wide-open mind — bugs aren’t all that different from crustaceans. After all, crayfish (or, crawfish) are known by some in Louisiana as mudbugs. Just as we enjoy the sweet flavor of shrimp and the slight crunch involved in devouring a crab or lobster, eating bugs just takes a bit of practice.

That’s what Aly Moore believes, anyway. Her site (eatbugsevents.com) and beautiful Instagram feed (@bugible) are dedicated to making bugs seem like the white-hot snack trend you’re dying to try. She even does bug-and-wine pairings to highlight the wide variety of flavor notes. And, who knows, maybe the wine helps reduce inhibitions against taking that first bite.

“I think people are all really pleasantly surprised,” she says about guests at her bug dinners and wine-and-bug pairing events. “I give people a spiel that does everything from comparing

bugs to seafood to describing the tasting notes, and you can see them starting to warm up to the idea. That lightbulb moment is great, when they realize bugs are not at all bad. In fact, they have a familiar flavor.”

Focusing on flavor is a key tactic for Moore — especially in her wine events, where she highlights specific bug flavor notes and pairs a complementary wine. Crickets go nicely with lighter reds like pinot noir, Moore says, while meatier-flavored grubs want a more robust Zinfandel. Scorpions, you might be surprised to learn, have a delicate salmon-y flavor that’s perfect with a zingy sauvignon blanc.

If you’re not ready to take the plunge with a whole roasted tarantula, there are lots of ways to experiment with eating bugs without knowing they’re an ingredient — for example, cricketflour protein bars or chips are increasingly easy to find in mainstream grocery stores.

But, really, Moore is a fan of highlighting the whole insect in all its glory to help people begin to think of them as a tasty option in their everyday diets.

“Comfort foods” — like pizza topped with meaty grasshoppers (aka chapulines in Oaxaca) or sago grubs, which are known as the bacon of the bug world — “are a great way to help people get over the hurdle,” Moore says. “Making comfort foods that people can relate to helps create positive associations with eating bugs.”

C O RY L E A H Y

South Africa mopane worm RECIPE NOTE

France escargot (technically a mollusk, but they do live in the garden)

46 Food + City Magazine

How do you go from crawling to crunchy without the use of toxic pesticides or a dramatic SQUISH? Oh, just chill — the bugs, that is. While many studies concur that bugs’ central nervous systems aren’t complex enough to feel pain, you might worry a bit anyway. A humane and simple way to corral those critters is to refrigerate them. Because they’re cold-blooded, they fall asleep, at which point you can move them to a freezer to ensure they’ll never crawl, jump or fly again.

Clockwise, from top left: Smoked salmon starter with black ants from Ento Market; pinot noir and crickets, a classic combo; summer salad with chickpeas, pumpkin seeds and roasted crickets from Entomo Farms; mealworms and dark chocolate — bugs can satisfy a sweet tooth!

issue v

PHOTOS COURTESY ALY MOORE; BOTTOM LEFT PHOTO BY ASHLEY CORBIN-TEICH

EDIBLE BUGS: MORE THAN JUST PROTEIN

HISTORY

THE RETURN OF SAIL CARGO

1845

The year clipper ships were developed by American shipbuilders to outrun pirates.

89 days, 21 hours World record for sailing from New York to San Francisco — around Cape Horn — set by Flying Cloud

1000 tons Amount of fuel estimated to be conserved by adding rotor sails to Maersk tanker ships

Vision to Reality consultants recently identified several factors that upped the prospective value of sail cargo, including a lack of zeroemissions shipping options, better customer service on small ships, and inefficiencies in Latin American ports that make sailing ships more competitive. The consultants believe there is potential for “exponential growth” in demand over the next 10 years.

for centuries, sailing ships offered the fastest, best option for transporting goods and people.

The Age of Sail (1571–1862) marked the reign of tall ships, with clipper ships representing the apex of commercial sailing’s progression.

The visually striking clippers had strong lines, V-shaped bows that sliced through water and dozens of sails to capture wind. First developed around 1845 by American shipbuilders looking to give small fishing boats an edge over pursuing pirates, clipper ships evolved to carry modest amounts of cargo at unparalleled speeds.

A clipper ship could reach more than 15 knots and cover 300 nautical miles in a day, easily outpacing a steamer ship’s 9 knots.

During the Gold Rush, in 1849 — 20 years before completion of the transcontinental railroad — ships carried 25,000 Americans west.

While wealthier passengers could spring for Panama-bound steamers, take the train across Panama, then steam up the West Coast, most forty-niners endured a five- to seven-month journey around Cape Horn via clipper ship.

Flying Cloud set a world record for this trip, which stood for more than 100 years, when it arrived in San Francisco after 89 days, 21 hours.

These greyhounds of the sea were the obvious choice for the British Empire’s most prized cargo: tea. Thirst for tea was such that a so-called tea clipper could earn £3,000 from one cargo load — roughly 20 to 25 percent of shipbuilding costs. The first ship of the season to reach London’s docks would win a premium.

The Great Tea Race of 1866 demonstrated the logistics underlying tea mania. Clipper ships lined the docks in Fuzhou. The first ship to clear customs had an early advantage, but favorable winds, stronger tugboats and the luck of the tides made for a competitive 16,000-mile race between five of the day’s fastest clippers, Flying Cloud among them. Ninety-nine days after leaving Fuzhou, Taeping and Ariel docked within 20 minutes of one another and split the premium.

But as 45 million pounds of tea flooded the market, tea prices plummeted, illustrating one of sail’s disadvantages: Ships couldn’t keep a schedule, which meant supply-side volatility.

The Great Tea Race occurred between two dips in the popularity of sailing. When American

50 Food + City Magazine

banks shuttered in the Panic of 1857, trade slowed, as did the demand for sailing ships. Later, in 1869, the Suez Canal opened and gave an advantage to steamer ships, which could complete the EuropeAsia route in 50 days. Overland transport improved, too, with railroad expansion.

By the turn of the 20th century, countries were abandoning sailing ships in favor of steamers, which offered reliability and greater cargo space. With the opening of the Panama Canal and the onset of World War I in 1914, sail’s demise seemed assured. By World War II, sailing ships were restricted to commercial fishing trades. Tall ships seemed destined for nostalgia, until — nearly a century later — the winds shifted once more.

From 2012 to 2017, shipping accounted for 3.1 percent of global CO2 emissions. The International Maritime Organization estimates that shipping emissions will increase by an additional 50 to 250 percent by 2050. As some in the industry look to lower their carbon footprint, there’s renewed interested in wind power.

In recent years, sail cargo projects have sprung up along old trade routes. U.K.-based Grayhound Lugger crosses the English Channel, trading Cornish ale and organic French wine.

Dutch-based Tres Hombres crosses the Atlantic with cacao, coffee and rum. Schooner Apollonia plans to launch on the Hudson River by year end, bringing cider, beer and apples downstream to New York City.

In 2019, Sail Cargo Inc. will open a carbonneutral shipyard in Costa Rica. Through its 3½year build process for Ceiba (a 45-meter sailing cargo vessel with a chilled hold space and 25-ton cargo capacity, crafted from sustainably harvested wood), Sail Cargo Inc. plans to offer a traditional skills apprenticeship program, where participants can learn shipbuilding, blacksmithing or woodwork — all green jobs.

While sail may have traditional roots, its means have been updated. Today’s sailing ships have biodiesel engines or solar batteries to augment wind power, plus GPS and plotting technologies to plan efficient routes.

Still, challenges remain. Routes aren’t operable year-round, and — as in the past — sticking to a schedule can be difficult. Port infrastructure

issue v

IMAGE COURTESY SAIL CARGO

Watch Ceiba’s building progress through a collection of short films at sailcargo.org/filmseries.

might be set up for recreational boats with floating docks that make loading tricky or for the giant post-Panamax cruise and cargo ships. What’s more, to realize a profit, sailing ships need premium cargo. Vermont Sail Freight’s founder, Erik Andrus, said only one crop would deliver an ROI of $0.50 to $1.00 per pound of weight: Pot. Growth potential aside, modern sail freight has neither the capacity nor efficiency to supplant tankers. Instead, cargo shippers will look to wind to lower emissions. Maersk is trialing rotor sails (invented 100 years ago) to add wind power to tanker ships, which will conserve some 1,000 tons of fuel.

And Cargill, which charters over 500 vessels, is co-funding SkySails, a kite sail initiative.

Sail freight’s early adopters are largely companies with the desire (and cash) to align their business with their values by using emission-free shipping for organic, hand-crafted products. Other clients value the interactive marketing experience

fooda ndci t y .org

sail cargo offers: Guests can board the ship, sample products and form a powerful brand connection.

Unlike sailing ships of yore — which competed as fiercely as any 21st-century big-business rivals — today’s sailing ships operate as a network, sharing tips and routes. That unusual collaboration highlights the focus on relationships that could cement this trend as a viable shipping option.

Jason Marlow of Schooner Apollonia acknowledges that sail cargo’s client base is limited at present. Yet, he is optimistic.

The more people start to identify sail transport as an option, the more they will request it.

“As it starts to scale up and there are more vessels and it’s more connected, then it starts to compete pricewise with other modes” of transportation, Marlow says. In the meantime, the new-old industry breathes life into port towns that may be struggling to redefine their economies.

LINDSEY DANIS

Food + City Magazine

51

ON OUR LOADING DOCK

Our nightstands are loaded with books to read, and our laptops are packed with websites to explore and unpack wisdom about the global food supply chain.

BOOKS The Omega Principle (Paul Greenberg) The author of several books about our seafood, Paul Greenberg takes us for a deep dive into the merits, demerits and challenges of Omega 3, a nutritionally beneficial fatty acid found in seafood.

As you might imagine, the consequences ripple right through the seafood supply chain.

American Catch (Paul Greenberg) In another book, Greenberg uses stories about three types of seafood — Eastern oysters, sockeye salmon and shrimp — to chart the rise and fall of American fisheries.

The Plant Paradox (Steven Gundry) If you think eating bread makes you fat, you might find an argument in this book to support your theory. There’s lots of debate between these covers, and nutritionist Steven Gundry will give you reason to reconsider the science behind most diets.

PODCASTS Eat This: Our Daily Bread series We continue to be fans of Jeremy Cherfas’ “Eat This Podcast.” Recently, he explored every angle and story about wheat in at least 31 micro-episodes. You will learn about Red Fife, sourdough, bakeries, mills and more. We love enthusiasm, and Mr. Cherfas’ zeal takes us to a very complicated slice of bread.

Planet Money Born out of the financial crisis in 2008, National Public Radio’s podcast about the economics of everything covers food in unexpected ways.

From the cost of popcorn in a baseball stadium to the concept of “free” food, Planet Money is full of insights about the role economics plays in how we eat.

Food52’s Burnt Toast Since 2009, Food52 founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have curated this community-based trove of kitchen goods and recipes.

Their podcast, “Food52’s Burnt Toast,” will elucidate just how your toast burns — and why. Such a simple food, with a complicated twist.

52

Food + City Magazine

The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (Marc Levinson) For some history about mom-andpop stores, in the context of the grocery juggernaut that was A&P (aka The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company), read Marc Levinson’s book about the grocery giant.

A&P threatened Main Street stores long before anyone had ever heard of Walmart.

ARTICLE We found another ingredient map in the article “Deconstructing the environmental footprint of a sandwich” in Anthropocene. You may never again order a meat sandwich. Check out the first issue of Food+City for our map of the ingredients for a sandwich made in Austin.

FILM / TV Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown The passing of food legend Anthony Bourdain is a good reason to review (or re-view) his award-winning Parts Unknown. It’s worth reconsidering every episode in appreciation of his close-up view of food and the people around the world who make it.

Ugly Delicious As our screens flood with documentaries that shame and disgust us, we are ready to see a new take on the food world. David Chang does this with his series about ordinary food made by ordinary people. The series also has helpings of Chang’s personal story about his beginnings as a chef and his conflicted relationship with Korean cuisine.

Water and Power: A California Heist Food production relies on water. With fires raging in California during the summer of 2018, water resources for firefighters were even more scarce.

Long the focus of battles between environmental conservation activists and economic development advocates, water resources are hotly contested.

If you want some historical context for this topic, check out the PBS “Cadillac Desert” series, especially “Mulholland’s Dreams.”

issue v

CALLING ALL STARTUPS! MassChallenge can help take your business to the next level.

The most startup-friendly accelerator on the planet.

Not-for-profit. No equity.

texas.masschallenge.org

SMART CITIES

SMART CITIES ARE FORGETTING FOOD smart cities use technology and data-driven solutions to make people’s lives better. But until recently, cities have failed to adopt this methodology for what is perhaps the most critical urban system: food. As urban agriculture builds momentum, now is the time for cities to embrace this young industry and foster urban food systems through a data-driven and “smart” approach.

Urban agriculture has the capacity to ameliorate many issues plaguing urban areas. It can contribute to green infrastructure efforts, create a food source that’s safeguarded against climate events and provide a variety of local jobs. But despite the potential of this nascent industry to improve the lives of city dwellers, urban agriculture is often left out of the Smart City discussions and policy decisions that have quickly gained popularity across the globe.

Nevertheless, the urban agriculture industry is growing rapidly as it tries to meet an ever-increasing demand for nutritious local produce. AgriFood Tech investment reached $10.1 billion in 2017, including $200 million in Series B funding for vertical farming company Plenty.

Let’s be clear: Urban agriculture is not the solution to our food system crisis. Other solutions are sorely needed as well,

“The idea is for cities and regions to understand where the greatest vulnerabilities and opportunities lie within their local food systems.” including ways of fostering stronger regional connections between farms and cities. Food waste is also a major issue that needs to be tackled. But urban agriculture is, and will continue to be, an essential component of how every country and city restructures its food system to make fresh food supplies more available, resilient and ecologically friendly.

CITIES AND AGRICULTURE

Just like energy, transportation and internet access, the processes of food production and distribution are integral parts of the urban ecosystem. And like those other system components, agriculture should be supported through smart policies that are data-driven and context specific. The path forward

54

Food + City Magazine

for resilient cities and communities must include thoughtfully planned urban agriculture.

Some cities around the U.S. and abroad are beginning to implement policies to encourage the industry’s growth as a critical part of local and regional food systems.

In Atlanta, for example, a director of urban agriculture within the mayor’s Office of Resilience ensures that municipal support is consistently available to local farmers via the AgLanta digital resource hub, along with a wide range of other initiatives. Through the city’s “Grows-A-Lot” program, Atlanta residents and nonprofit organizations can secure renewable five-year leases to farm vacant city-owned property.

Many other cities have passed zoning ordinances and started programs to promote the expansion of urban agriculture. In Boston, Article 89 comprehensively addresses where different forms of urban farms should be permitted within the city. In Minneapolis, the Homegrown local food program brings municipal and community actors together to research and plan out future supportive policies. In Paris, a municipal initiative called ‘Parisculteurs’ aims to cover the city’s rooftops and walls with 100 hectares of green space by 2020, and to dedicate a third of that space towards food production. And in Singapore, developers are incentivized to include urban farms as part of green building requirements.

But these efforts are largely piecemeal. Few cities, if any, are using data-driven urban-agriculture planning and analysis to ensure future resilience in this burgeoning sector of municipal economies. By performing in-depth analysis on where the greatest vulnerabilities lie within their local food systems, cities can change what today is mostly a feel-good concept into a critical framework that can be scaled to transform local food production. Using data can help determine the best opportunities to bolster urban and peri-urban production to achieve goals such as food access or stormwater management.

The idea here is not to turn urban agriculture into a topdown model. The decentralized and diverse nature of urban farming models is a major contributing factor to the industry’s rapid pace of innovation and its ability to be a resilient source of food production. Rather, the idea is for cities and regions to understand where the greatest vulnerabilities and opportunities lie within their local food systems, and then to plan out and provide support to targeted areas of the food economy, perhaps through local food distribution hubs and farming incubators for entrepreneurs and startups.

Advances in urban agriculture planning are happening — slowly. Cities and communities are starting to work together across sectors and silos to recognize and promote agriculture’s role as an integral component of smart, resilient cities.

But there is plenty of work to be done.

issue v

Watch Henry Gordon-Smith discuss why smart cities must incorporate more planning about the food system.

We’ll link to the video in this story at foodcity.org.

IMAGE COURTESY AGRITECTURE

TAKING THE NEXT STEP

Now, like passionate entrepreneurs first entering the foodsystem space, many cities have great intentions for urban agriculture. Unfortunately, many cities also lack the capacity and technical knowledge to understand where the local food system should be strengthened to most effectively make it smarter and more resilient against environmental, social and economic stressors.

For cities to become smart in this sector, they no longer need to recognize the many benefits of urban agriculture — that has already happened throughout mayoral administrations, academic halls and even more recently in Congress. The time for putting energy into persuasion is over.

For our part, at Agritecture we have designed a new service called Urban Agriculture Scenario Analysis to assist cities in analyzing and strengthening their local food capabilities. Using site-specific and scale-specific data and modeling, Scenario Analysis can transform a city’s piecemeal farming community into a diversified urban agriculture economy.

The good news: There is a wealth of burgeoning technology around urban and peri-urban food production and distribution.

fooda ndci t y .org

Many urban farms are already “smart,” using sensors and data to tailor everything from lighting to crop nutrition. This is true in large farms such as AeroFarms, which dominates an entire converted warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, and also in smaller farms like Farm.One, which takes advantage of underutilized basement space in Manhattan to cultivate rare specialty crops for the city’s restaurants.

But if cities are going to be successful in integrating advances in food system technology into their wider metropolitan planning efforts, they must apply a data-driven methodology similar to the approach that many urban farmers are taking to more effectively grow crops.

A Smart City revolution is currently sweeping the world.

Although we remain in the early stages, this revolution will soon transform the way that cities support the most essential components of urban life. To ensure that food isn’t left out of the equation, cities must start supporting urban agriculture in targeted ways that work with the urban agriculture industry to reconstruct our food production and distribution systems into smarter, more localized and more resilient networks.

H E N RY G O R D O N - S M I T H

Food + City Magazine

55

ADVICE

Vinder Founded in Port Townsend, Washington,

by Sam Lillie, Vinder connects home veggie gardeners with folks who want to buy that fresh produce. The app brings together community members who are interested in ultra-local food and reducing food waste. It also boosts the local economy by opening up a revenue stream for green thumbs who connect with their neighbors to share their garden’s bounty. We recently reached out to the 2018 Food+City Challenge Prize contestant to find out how things are going at Vinder.

What’s your founding date?

January 21, 2018.

How big is your team?

Four full time.

What problem are you solving? Food waste, cost and

The coolest food system innovation I’ve heard of is... a com-

pany called Vinder that allows you to buy, sell or trade homegrown produce and neighbor-made goods directly from your neighbors.

It’s free to sign up and free to sell or trade.

food insecurity.

What’s been the biggest surprise about running your business?

As much as I heard and read about it, the investor “run-around” has been my biggest surprise. Most professional investors I’ve had the privilege to speak with don’t give a solid “no.” They give advice and information, which is great because it helps hone the pitch and business plan/strategy. But it may not be the right type of advice that works for your company or be useful when approaching other investors. It ends up being a massive time/ energy zap.

What part of the food system are you in? Vinder is situated in

the distribution of hyper-local produce — neighbor to neighbor. Yet, we do not own any delivery vehicles or own any inventory.

The scariest thing about today’s food system is... we have nor-

malized an absence of connection to our food system. We have no idea what is actually going into the soil in which our food is being grown (or what chemicals are being sprayed on them), who is growing it or where exactly it is being grown.

What’s your latest big news?

We are now a user-owned and -operated company. After successfully closing an Equity Crowdfunding round of more than $85,000 via WeFunder and receiving matching angel investments, Vinder issued preferred shares to users who are taking a stand against our current food system and are opting to create the neighbor-made food system of the future. Vinder is also now available for iOS and Android.

Best advice you’ve received?

What was the big idea that got you started? My community, Port

Townsend, Washington, had a big problem accessing local organic produce for a reasonable price.

Vinder was created not to be some massive, disruptive company, but to solve a problem in my community.

Who are you competing with?

For convenience, we compete with HEB or Whole Foods. For freshness and locality, we compete with farmers’ markets. However, we see ourselves as a tool to help those small vendors reach more customers and increase sales direct-to-consumer.

fooda ndci t y .org

In the words of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Paul Graham, “Focus on getting 100 people to love you rather than 1,000 people to kind of like you.”

What advice do you give to potential startup founders?

You don’t need a lot of money to start a company. First, come up with the lowest-budget minimum viable product and validate that the market needs your solution. Then build out manually, followed by tech. Let tech be a solution to make a process more efficient rather than the primary focus.

Food + City Magazine

57

1.5

FOOD + CITY MAPS

SUPERMARKET SUBTERFUGE If you shop in more than one grocery store, you might notice a pattern: produce at the front, meat in the back and all the same cereals and pasta sauces right in front of your face. That’s no accident. Supermarket design is practically a science, with years of research into shoppers’ habits informing everything from what color your favorite banana should be to what song is playing in the background. Take a look at some of the tricks of the trade.

average number of trips to supermarket per week END CAPS Brands pay a premium for heavily trafficked end cap displays. The shelves’ rotating promotions encourage impulse buying. According to the National Retail Hardware Association, a product at an end cap sells eight times faster than the same product shelved elsewhere in the store.

30,098

Average number of products the average supermarket carried in 2017 (according to Food Marketing Institute).

Many carry tens of thousands more.

All those choices can overwhelm shoppers and cause emotional and impulse buying — particularly after the average shopping time of 43 minutes has elapsed. Who can stick to a list after that long?

BEACONS Stores’ increasing use of beacons ties new tech with old marketing: coupons. A beacon sends a Bluetooth signal to your phone as you walk by, spurring an app to message you. Stores place beacons in areas where coupons are already clustered on shelves (the red and green dots on the diagram below), reinforcing a familiar incentive to spend with a modern prompt.

58

Food + City Magazine

issue v

THE WAY BACK Meat and dairy — staples in most households — are located in the rear of the store, ensuring that you wander through the center aisles, perhaps picking up products not on your list, on the way to the milk case.

Music is a ubiquitous tool in retail.

It helps long lines feel less torturous, creates a certain brand experience and can even influence a shopper’s pace. A famous 1982 study found that people spent 34 percent more time shopping — and buying — in stores that played music.

BANANAS ARE AN ART FORM Bananas are America’s favorite fruit. To keep that trend going, growers and grocers know exactly what shade of banana you’re most likely to buy: Pantone color 12-0752, also known as “Buttercup.” According to Fast Company, bananas with Pantone color 12-0752 (“Butter-cup”) sell better than Pantone color 13-0858 (“Vibrant Yellow”). Some stores even use special lighting to make bananas look more appealing.

SHINY PRODUCE Glistening produce — just misted — gives the appearance of fresh merchandise (and the water can add weight). But select from the back — retailers put older merchandise up front to encourage quick sales.

ENTER HERE Flowers, fruits, vegetables and bakery items are strategically placed near the entrance to catch your eye and get your salivary glands going.

34.61

$

average sale per customer in 2017

SHELF PLACEMENT What you see is no accident.

Items at eye level are usually big, popular brands with large profit margins. Niche or regionally made items live up top, while kid-focused merch is lower down, where they can get a good look.

THE CART Today’s carts are three times their original size (back in 1937) and still growing. Stores know that when you have more room in your cart, you tend to buy more stuff — 40 percent more when carts doubled in size.

Food + City Magazine

Food+ City How We Feed Our Cities

ISSUE V

Grocery Tech: How and Why Your Store Knows What You Buy page 18 Shelf Life: Nifty New Ways to Make Fresh Food Last page 26 Surviving and Thriving: Mom-and-Pop Shops Navigate a New Retail Reality page 13

IS S UE V

$18.00