Uber for food

Uber is best known for delivering people for prices that black cabs can’t beat. But it’s recently started delivering something else: food.

UberEATs, which launched on Thursday, delivers lunch, snacks and dinner to Londoners from 11am to 11pm, seven days a week.

The service is already available in 16 cities including New York and Paris. But will Uber be able to cope with London’s dreadful traffic? Or beat established competition like Deliveroo at service and speed?

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Maple to the rescue

Maple, a David Chang-backed restaurant in New York City, doesn’t have any tables, cash registers, or waiters. Instead, its customers order meals through its website or mobile app, and a fleet of bike couriers deliver them. By eliminating the dining room and bringing meals to you, Maple is betting that it can sell more meals per hour, using less real estate, than a traditional restaurant.

The current gold standard for zipping patrons through a lunch line (what the industry calls "throughput") is Chipotle. According to its 2014 annual report, Chipotle manages to serve 300 meals per hour—a transaction every 12 seconds—at its best-performing locations, and the chain is so obsessed with its productivity that it assigns employees efficiency roles with names like "linebacker."

When Maple launched its first location in April, it served around 50 meals per hour at peak times. Less than a year later, on average it is now serving 800 meals per hour from each of its four kitchens. A few days before I visited in February, it had set a new record: 1,100 meals cooked and delivered in one hour...

That’s why continuing to invest in technology that can squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of its modest space and crew is important. Maple recently introduced, for instance, ordering windows that serve a dual purpose of allowing customers to schedule their lunch delivery at certain times and, at some point, helping to manage demand. The app could, for instance, allow people in a building where deliveries are already scheduled to order lunch, while telling a customer in an address not already scheduled in a route that lunch is sold out. Or, it could accept your order for instant delivery of a salad, which can be prepared in minutes and can join a trip to your address that’s almost ready to leave the kitchen, but tell your coworker who wants to order a chicken breast, which takes longer to cook, that his order will need to be slotted into the next hour’s trip.

With data science and smartphones, possibilities for increasing efficiency seem endless. As it scales, Maple even plans to coordinate its couriers so that they don’t need to come back to one kitchen to pick up orders—they can return to a different, closer hub, or receive a new order from another courier they’ll pass on the way.

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Momofuku

Ando is named, like its parent company, after instant-ramen creator Momofuku Ando. (It is also Spanish for "I walk"—fitting for a delivery service. Momofuku itself is Japanese for "lucky peach," hence the name of the magazine and also Má Pêche.) The business is a joint venture with Expa, a San Francisco–based startup lab built by Uber cofounder Garrett Camp. Expa is designing the app and overseeing logistics, while UberRush will tackle the actual food drop-offs. "We have a pretty big vision for it," said Expa partner Hooman Radfar, Chang’s cofounder on the project. "But our focus is very much delivery to delivery, meal to meal, neighborhood to neighborhood, until we get it right. We want to make this feel great—like Momofuku at home." Tosi is also involved; she’s creating three new cookies that will be initially sold exclusively through Ando: salt-and-pepper, Ritz Cracker, and what she describes as "darn good, slap-your-mama chocolate chip."

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Gete-okosomin

In 2008, on a dig in the First Nation’s Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, archaeologists made a small but stunning discovery: a tiny clay pot.

Though it might not have seemed very impressive at first glimpse, this little piece of pottery was determined to be about 800 years old.

And inside that pot? Something that changes how we’re looking at extinction, preservation, and food storage, as well as how humans have influenced the planet in their time on it.

It’s amazing to think that a little clay pot buried in the ground 800 years ago would still be relevant today, but it’s true! It’s actually brought an extinct species of squash that was presumed to be lost forever. Thank our Indigenous Ancestors! Even they knew what preservation meant. They knew the importance of the future, Is it not amazing that they are affecting our walks of life even to this day?

Here it is! The pot was unearthed on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, where it had laid buried for the past 800 years

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Mobile food cart

Students of Texas Southmost College in instructor Murad Abusalim’s class have, after two months, completed a community service project — a mobile farmer’s market.

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OAXIS

Most Gulf countries import up to 90 percent of their food, which neither bodes well for food security no climate change – since the food that is brought in from Europe and elsewhere has a lot of what are called “food miles.” True to their name, Forward Thinking Architecture proposes a solar-powered hydroponic food belt as a solution.

Acknowledging that they are not designing anything new – because there are already several projects throughout the Arabian peninsula that utilize the sun and hydroponics to deliver food in the desert. One project that comes to mind is the Sahara Forest Project which has received a great deal of international press.

The OAXIS system aims to fuse existing technology in a modular, linear arrangement. The growing medium will consist of prefabricated and recycled steel structures equipped with super efficient irrigation technology that uses roughly 80 percent less water than most farms require. Rooftop solar panels provide energy not only for the architecture itself, but also to power artificial LED lighting that will help promote greater crop growth.

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Crowd Funded Grocery Store

Combine a powerful, supportive civic society with killer marketing chops and enlightened grassroots activism, and amazing things can happen. Case in point is the Westwood Food Co-op in Denver, Colorado, which just raised $50,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign to fill its shelves full of wholesome, locally-grown food. With these funds, the co-op will become the city's first community-owned grocery store in a known food desert.

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fast quinoa food

The restaurant, Eatsa, the first outlet in a company with national ambitions, is almost fully automated. There are no waiters or even an order taker behind a counter. There is no counter. There are unseen people helping to prepare the food, but there are plans to fully automate that process, too, if it can be done less expensively than employing people.

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mega food parks

42 mega food parks to start operations by 2019: Harsimrat Kaur Badal 

The Mega Food Park Scheme, based on the cluster approach, is modelled on hub-and-spoke architecture, which follows principles from the spoke-hub distribution paradigm.

It aims at facilitating the establishment of a strong food processing industry backed by an efficient supply chain, which includes collection centres, a central processing centre (CPC) and cold chain infrastructure. 

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St. Louis Rooftop Garden

Mary Ostafi, an architect who founded the nonprofit Urban Harvest STL in 2011, has led an effort to dump some 40 tons of dirt on the building’s 9,000-square-foot roof and grow organic vegetables in a venture called the Food Roof Farm.

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Food Cart + Mobility + Social Causes

Geneva-based architect Aurélie Monet Kasisi has designed a mobile stand based on street-food carts to travel around Switzerland as a promotional vehicle for a suicide prevention organisation.

"The mobile units often used to serve food or sell various goods host a small collective experience within the city," she said. "That is exactly what I wanted the mobile stand to generate in Swiss public spaces."

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Spain food center

Under a tight budget, this charitable food distribution center in Tarragona, Spain was designed and constructed in just three months. NUA Arquitectures created the building using a combination of prefabricated and constructed elements, allowing the structure to be finished with the help of 120 volunteers in the course of a single afternoon, creating a charitable space that provides a secure area to help those in the area who are in need.

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interaction between producers and consumers

The Future Food District is in the centre of the Expo Milano 2015 site, in a 6500 sqm area between the Cardo and the Decumanus. Designed by Carlo Ratti Associati, the pavilion is the product of a partnership between Coop and MIT Senseable City Lab, and aims to answer questions such as: “How will we do our shopping? What will we eat? Who will handle food and food products before they get to consumers’ tables in the future?”.

Carlo Ratti Associati offer an experiment, a new retail layout with greater interaction between producers and consumers, a reference to the old-fashioned market. In the“supermarket” area the layout of the goods is organised on the basis of five routes representing five production processes, and “augmented or intelligent labels” designed by the architects provide consumers with complete information on the produce or food purchased. The Exhibition Area will be a multipurpose facility projecting visitors into the future, for example with prototypes of sea farms.

Carlo Ratti Associati is the focus of an exhibition to be held by SpazioFMGperl'Architettura during the 2015 Salone del Mobile in Milan, due to open on Monday, April 13 2015.

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Package Free Supermarkets

One response to these changes is the package-free supermarket, an idea being rebooted around the world, primarily in hipster bastions like Portland, Berlin, Austin and Amsterdam. For years, health-food stores and bulk-food retailers like Bin Inn have catered to a small-but-dedicated consumer base. New players like Original Unverpackt in Berlin and in.gredients in Austin, Texas are bringing a design approach to the industry.

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Ecotrust's The Redd to bring small food-makers together with social justice bent

Ecotrust has a long history working with Oregonians in rural areas who are producing food and resources, but have always struggled to connect that work with urban consumers.

Nathan Kadish, director of investment strategy at the conservation organization, said the recent purchase of a former foundry in the Central Eastside will help bridge the two. The Redd, named for the riverbed nests where salmon spawn, will host small food-makers -- the people between farmers and diners -- who often don't have consistent use of kitchen space or room to store ingredients.

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OMA's Food Port

The enclosed program is organized by the shared needs and facilities of identified tenants. The Northeast corner of the site is anchored with retail, a coffee roastery and juicery production facilities. Aggregation and processing facilities are located at the center of the site, with a connection to Seed Capital’s offices and the kitchen incubator. The Jefferson County Extension Office is lifted to create a strong connection between their demonstration farm below, and directly connected to the Urban Farm. The recycling facility is placed at the Southwest corner of the site for ease of access. Corresponding outdoor spaces aligned with surrounding thoroughfares include a market plaza, food truck plaza, and edible garden. The efficient building plan also allows for systematic growth to allow the building and its tenants to develop over time.

The Food Port provides a comprehensive survey of the food industry and its processes while relocating many food programs typically separated from the buyer back into the heart of the city. It defines a new model for how the relationship between consumer and producer can be defined and addresses uncaptured market demand and inefficiencies within the local food industry.

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Food Hubs

Food Hubs, a topic of recent inquiry. The design of our food system to utilize, process, distribute, share and educate. This example comes from Louisville KY, and the Seed Capital Kentucky. 

"Seed Capital Kentucky released master plans for the food marketplace last week. Netherlands-based architect OMA worked alongside GBBN Architects of Louisville to design a campus where local farmers can package, distribute and sell goods."

"The project aims to reduce the amount of travel, money and time that goes into local food production, while making consumer access easier.

"Our vision for this project is one that collapses a lot of those middle men and transactions into one place where they can all work together to help create more fresh, regional food and help our region feed itself more sustainably," said Seed Capital Kentucky founder Stephen Reily."

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Food Trucks

"The Los Angeles local is part of an ever-evolving history of mobile food vendors, which began with the ‘chuckwagon’ created in 1866 by Charles Goodnight

Goodnight’s invention was used to feed herdsmen on long cross-country cattle drives and soon was followed by night lunch wagons serving construction workers in New York in the 1890s and mobile canteens in the late 1950s. The appearance of the slang term ‘roach coach’ served to define the cheap and grubby reputation of these mobile food vendors."

"But now with more than three million food trucks and five million food carts in the US, the competition between mobile vendors serving cut-price gastronomic experiences has reached fever pitch."

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Mobile Food Market

"...mobile food market ....brings fresh produce at good prices to the people most in need. Everybody pitched in; the Toronto Transit Commission donated a wheel-trans bus designed to carry people in wheelchairs, so it is accessible to everyone."
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Policy Database

The Growing Food Connections Policy Database is a searchable collection of local public policies that explicitly support community food systems. This database provides policymakers, government staff, and others interested in food policy with concrete examples of local public policies that have been adopted to address a range of food systems issues: rural and urban food production, farmland protection, transfer of development rights, food aggregation and distribution infrastructure, local food purchasing and procurement, healthy food access, food policy councils, food policy coordination, food system metrics, tax reductions and exemptions for food infrastructure, and much more.

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