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Blue Apron faces lawsuit from former employee who alleges violation of Family and Medical Leave Act
On the heels of Blue Apron’s lackluster debut on the public market, a former employee is suing the company for allegedly violating the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires that companies provide employees with job-protected, unpaid leave for certain medical and family reasons. Read More
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MIT is building a system that can identify a recipe using pictures of food
Mastering the ability to distinguish hot dogs from not hot dogs is truly one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Attempting to one-up that sort of masterstroke would surely be flying too close to the sun — but researchers at MIT are trying nonetheless. The team’s pic2recipe system uses neural networks to determine the recipe of a given food, in an attempt to gain… Read More
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Billionaires make it rain on Plenty, the indoor farming startup
SoftBank Vision Fund, the huge tech-investment vehicle helmed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, has led a $200 million investment into indoor farming startup Plenty. Joining Son are notable tech billionaires Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos. Plenty farms can grow anything except tree fruit and root vegetables, and produce crops at yields 530x greater than a typical field. Read More
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Every member of Hampton Creek’s board has stepped down except for the CEO
Hampton Creek is in the news again — and not for the reasons it would like to be. Hampton Creek’s entire board of directors have left, except for CEO Josh Tetrick. Read More
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Trademarks show Amazon has sights on meal-kits, “single cow burgers” and other fast food options
Amazon has made no secret of its ambitions to expand into more fresh food services, from its own, homegrown efforts like AmazonFresh for groceries (first launched in 2013) and Amazon Restaurants for restaurant delivery (first launched in 2014), through to its most recent plan to acquire Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. In fact, the company has its sights set on a number of other culinary areas… Read More
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Hungry? There’s a robot for that at TC Disrupt SF
Robotics has the potential to change the world. From jobs that are difficult or dangerous to jobs that people simply don’t want to do, robotics will undoubtedly step in. Two such jobs are cooking and delivering some of our favorite comfort foods, burgers and pizzas. We’re thrilled to announce that Miso Robotics and Zume will be joining us at Disrupt SF to chat about food tech. Read More
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Revere launches with $2M in funding to sell workout drinks made from plants
Dietary supplements don’t need approval from the Food and Drug Administration before they are marketed, which means the industry is rife with dubious claims. Revere, a new startup that sells monthly subscriptions of its workout and energy drink powders, wants to cut through the buzz with straightforward mixes of plant-based ingredients, such as pea protein and sweet potato powder. Read More
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Blue Apron falls 9% on fourth day as a public company
Blue Apron sends you the ingredients to help you cook delicious meals, but some investors are considering its shares unsavory. The meal kit delivery company, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week, has had a rough debut on the stock market. After significantly lowering its IPO price range, the company priced its IPO at $10 per share. The stock closed Wednesday below $9. Read More
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Will Blue Apron’s rebound continue?
Cooking kit delivery company Blue Apron traded up 3.5% on the stock market Monday, erasing some of the losses from its first two days as a public company. Shares closed at $9.67, which was still beneath last week’s $10 IPO price. This is in contrast to a lot of public debuts, where companies are typically in the green for the first day “pop.” It’s the subsequent days… Read More
Latest Crunch Report
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Blue Apron whiffs on first day of trading
Blue Apron investors might be shedding a tear — and it’s not from the chopped onions. The subscription service for at-home cooking closed the day just barely above $10 per share. This is not only a disappointment for the company, which hoped to raise more money by selling stock at $15 to $17 to share, but also for the new investors who bought at the $10 IPO price. Read More
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Blue Apron IPO off to a rough start
Meal delivery business Blue Apron opened for trading at $10 per share on Thursday, significantly below the originally proposed range of $15 to $17. It’s also flat compared to the $10 they priced it at last night, meaning the IPO investors have yet to reap any gains. Read More
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Zume Pizza adds extra automation as it rolls out to new cities
Zume Pizza has its eyes set on disrupting legacy pizza players like Pizza Hut and Domino’s by improving on both speed and quality with the help of robots. The company is announcing the addition of a “Doughbot” designed to replace a dough spinner. Zume soon will be putting its decentralized delivery model to the test with a fleet of oven trucks and delivery scooters. Read More
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Nestlé leads $77M round for healthy meal startup Freshly
Freshly has raised a big funding round from a big name — the U.S. division of food and beverage giant Nestlé. Co-founder and CEO Michael Wystrach has pitched the startup as a way to get healthy, on-demand meals. That doesn’t mean you order from Freshly every time you want to eat — instead, you get one delivery  of all your meals for the week. Then, when you’re hungry… Read More
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Baby food delivery service Yumi launches with $4.1 million in seed funding
Yumi, the Los Angeles-based baby food delivery service co-created by former TechCrunch and Wall Street Journal reporter Evelyn Rusli and Angela Sutherland is finally open for business, with $4.1 million in seed investment from VC firms Brand Foundry, August Capital and NEA, as well as several angels, including early Dropbox investor Ali Partovi, WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg, and Philip… Read More
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The Z Grills Elite 900 is an all-in-one cookout workhorse that’s easy to use
It’s just about time for BBQ season regardless of where you happen to be in North America, which means grilling time, too. The Z Grills Elite 900 is a new smoker/BBQ/general purpose cooker option that combines a lot of versatility into a relatively compact package, without requiring the kind of special attention and handholding that you often get with real wood smoker options. Read More
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Evaptainers decouples refrigeration from electricity to help rural farms and families
Some 1.4 billion people lack access to electricity worldwide today, most in rural areas across Southeast Asia, China, India and Sub-Saharan Africa. While others are focused on wiring up those places and developing new energy sources, a startup called Evaptainers has created a kind of refrigerator that requires no electricity, but instead runs on water. Read More
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On-demand food startup Sprig is shutting down today
The on-demand food business is tough, especially if you’re trying to handle all elements of the experience, like sourcing the food, cooking the food and delivering it. It’s a lot. That said, Sprig, the startup that makes and delivers its own food, is shutting down today. Read More
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Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown says VCs need to ask harder scientific questions
Impossible Foods has raised more than $200 million to make a burger engineered from plants that tastes at least as good as ground beef. The company’s many backers are hoping to disrupt the massive “animal products” industry with food that is appealing, affordable and produced in an environmentally sustainable way. Read More
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Despite a fickle market for fancy home appliances, new investors get behind Brava Home
Customers are notoriously fickle when it comes to sophisticated kitchen devices. On the one hand, there’s undoubtedly a market for items that are deemed useful and priced appropriately. Consider, for example, the Anova Precision Cooker, a $145 WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled device that managed to get its parent company sold to the appliance giant Electrolux in February for $250… Read More
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