Ever want to distill your own spirits? That job may have gotten a little easier, at least if you own a PicoBrew brewing appliance. That's because the company announced they've started shipping the PicoStill, an add-on to the Pico brewing appliance that will convert beer into the hard stuff, to their Kickstarter backers.

Yesterday, U.S. Patent No. 9,908,760 B2 was awarded to Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. for "Shopping facility assistance systems, devices and methods to drive movable item containers." Translation, robot shopping carts could be making their way to Walmart.

When dealing with any type of customer service online these days, I just assume that I'm talking with a chatbot. Companies like chatbots because they take the place of actual people who need things like paychecks, healthcare, etc. But if you reorder product from energy bar startup Verb, you will be texting back and forth with an actual human, and according to the company, it will always be this way.

It's a good day for wine lovers (and wannabe lovers) everywhere. Vivino, the world's most downloaded wine app and largest online wine marketplace, just raised $20 million in series C funding.

You know the time between when you order a meal for delivery or takeout and when it arrives? The 'hanger gap'? Well, Amazon wants to eliminate that waiting time between when you get hungry and when the food arrives by predicting exactly when you want to eat and preemptively ordering a meal for you.

We already know that robots can harvest our crops, cook us a medium-rare cheeseburger, bring us our takeout, and even make us a cappuccino (extra foam). In fact, it seems that every time we turn around there's another story about some company making robots to perform some task within the food system (or a podcast!). And now they're coming for your groceries-and then they're going to deliver them to you.

What do you get when you take a meal kit marketplace, cover it with the contents of a can of Cream of Mushroom, and let the two simmer over low? Probably something like this new partnership between Chef'd and Campbell's.

For just about a year now, Central Market in Dallas has tested out offering produce that was grown on-site in a Growtainer. Evidently, that partnership has gone so well that Central Market is making the relationship more permanent and expanding it with the addition of another Growtainer.

Though it sounds like a hardcore street narcotic in some rain-soaked cyberpunk noir story (apologies, I've been binging Altered Carbon), Nucane, a new sugar product, is actually quite sweet. And if it works as promised, the sweetest part could be a new industrial approach to making sugar... I don't want to say "healthier," but at least less bad for you.

Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the hamburger flipping robot, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B round, led by Acacia Research. In a press release, Miso said it will use the new funding to expand its suite of kitchen robots and broaden the applications for its Miso AI machine learning platform.