The Feed

Paul Shapiro is the Founder & CEO of the Better Meat Co, a startup with the second largest mycoprotein fermentation plant in the world. Imagine walking into a Shake Shack and ordering a burger blended with fungi-based protein to form a patty that contains 50% less meat. That’s what Paul and his team are working to build with foodservice and CPG brands for poultry, seafood, and beef products as they also sell their proprietary Rhiza strain as an ingredient for pure meat alternatives.

Ilir Sela is the Founder & CEO of Slice, a dedicated marketplace and end-to-end ordering solution for over 16,000 independent pizzerias nationwide. Instead of 20-30% commissions of DoorDash and Uber Eats, Slice charges restaurants a flat $2 fee for any order above $10. We chat about everything from the $47bn highly fragmented pizza landscape to the startup’s expansion into building its own POS system and payments solution inside the four walls.

David Bishop is a Partner at Brick Meets Click, a decade-old consulting and research firm in the e-Grocery space. Each month, David runs a survey that is considered one of the industry’s most prominent benchmarks tracking monthly online sales across delivery, pickup, and ship-to-home. We chat about everything from Amazon’s grocery strategy to the fight between third-party marketplace and traditional grocers.

Ashwin Wadekar is the Chief of Staff at Gorillas, a new pure-play small basket grocer that delivers items in less than 10 minutes from over 115 dark stores. We chat about everything including the shift in consumer behavior from weekly stockups to on-demand purchasing, Gorillas’ full-time labor model, and sustainability when it comes to food waste and e-bikes. If you’re curious about the battle of convenience and on-demand grocery, this conversation is for you.

Ellis McCue is the CEO of Territory Foods, a hyperlocal marketplace of personalized, chef-driven meals. Territory has created a distributed network of commissaries in 24 cities across the country that deliver pre-made dishes cooked by restaurants and chefs to customers who don’t want to sacrifice wholesome, healthy food for convenience. We chat about everything including the rise of the micro-chef, the sustainability of delivery, and how Territory leverages 90,000 data points on consumer preferences to inform its weekly menus.

Chris Baggott is the Founder and CEO of Clustertruck a fully-vertical delivery service that serves over 80 dishes across multiple cuisines throughout the Midwest. Prior to ClusterTruck, Chris sold Compendium Software to Oracle and took ExactTarget public before it was eventually acquired by Salesforce. We chat about everything from how ClusterTruck is able to coordinate its kitchen-to-doorstep time of less than 10 minutes to a host of consumer-facing issues plaguing other delivery companies today.

Pradeep Elankumaran is the Co-Founder and CEO of Farmstead, a same-day online only grocer that delivers a selection of 1500 fresh items at a fraction of the cost of its competitors. As online grocery penetration reached 10% of the total trillion dollar spend in the US, Farmstead is helping traditional brick and mortar grocers open up new delivery hubs that can fulfill 2,000 delivery slots per day. That’s over 13 times what an average store can currently handle. We chat about everything from the rise of GoPuff to leveraging AI to reduce food waste as we cover the current state of this highly essential industry.

Jaydeep Barman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mumbia-based Rebel Foods, The World's Largest Internet Restaurant with 320 ghost kitchens in three continents powering over 26 native and third-party brands like Wendy's. Founded in 2011 as Faasos, a QSR biryani chain, the startup quickly saw most of its sales go towards delivery with 73% of customers reporting having never visited a store. After realizing that the e-commerce revolution that occurred in books and travel would soon hit food, Faasos quickly pivoted to what is now known as the ghost kitchen model.

Matt Schwartz is the co-founder and CEO of Afresh, an AI-powered merchandising and ordering operating system helping grocers save 100s of billions of dollars caused by food waste, inventory shocks, and online order fulfillment headaches within this trillion dollar industry. This was a really engaging discussion about the legacy technology that grocers have relied upon for decades and the trickle down effects when it comes to providing consumers with fresh, nutritious food that doesn’t go bad by the time it makes it to the fridge. Be sure to stay tuned to the end where Matt talks about his ideas for the grocery store of the future and his perspective on Amazon Fresh.

Check out the intro song, "It's the S" by Great Ghost: https://spoti.fi/2Yfq1Qv

Frank Beard is a retail consultant, speaker, and writer who is a thought leader in the convenience store space and Sam Polk is the CEO of Everytable, a retailer of pre-prepared meals whose mission is to make nutritious, delicious food accessible and affordable in every community. 93% of Americans live within a 10 minute drive of a convenience store, making them incredibly attractive real estate. In this episode, we explore ideas around healthy grab-and-go meals, electric vehicle charging, food delivery, and curbside pickup from these last-mile hubs.

Intro song: "It's the S" by Great Ghost: https://spoti.fi/2Yfq1Qv