This British Supermarket Will Be Powered Entirely by Its Own Food Waste - Altavia Watch - (Author : VICTORIA TURK) A supermarket chain in the UK announced today that it’s going to power one of its stores entirely off food waste. It’s an attractive solution to two of the most gnawing sustainability concerns: waste and energy. A Sainsbury’s in Cannock, a town in the West Midlands, will get all of its electricity from food waste through a process called anaerobic digestion. The process is pretty much what it sounds like: waste food is “digested” by microorganisms in huge tankers sealed off from the air, which Sainsbury’s compares to a human stomach. Those two aren’t particularly desirable—they’re greenhouse gases—but a site run by bioenergy consultants NNFCC explains that their production is offset by the fossil fuels they go on to replace when they’re turned into energy, and adds that if the same food waste went to landfill, it would rot and release methane anyway.
Source : motherboard.vice.com. Avec Instacart, l’économie du partage s’invite au supermarché. T-shirts verts et smartphones à la main, de drôles de clients arpentent les allées des supermarchés de San Francisco. S’ils font les courses, ce n’est pas pour remplir leur réfrigérateur. Mais celui des clients d’Instacart, un service de livraison le jour-même, surfant sur la vague de l’économie du partage (« sharing economy »). Lundi 16 juin, il a officialisé une levée de fonds de 44 millions de dollars. Le principe est simple: après avoir choisi sa grande surface, il suffit de faire sa sélection de produits.
Sur le même principe que les chauffeurs d’UberX ou de Lyft, les « personal shopper » ne sont pas salariés d’Instacart, qui se contente uniquement de faire le lien entre les deux bouts de la chaîne. Le service n’est pas gratuit. Lancé en 2012 à San Francisco, Instacart est désormais disponibles dans neuf autres villes, dont New York, Los Angeles, Chicago ou encore Philadelphie. Pourtant, de nombreuses entreprises proposent déjà de faire ses courses en ligne. Photo: Instacart. INSTACART The Next Big Thing You Missed: Online Grocery Shopping Is Back, and This Time It’ll Work | Business. Instacart shopper Laura Barnum delivers groceries to a business in downtown San Francisco. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED Webvan is a name synonymous with dotcom failure.
At the turn of the millennium, the heavily funded startup and its many investors bet that the time was right to sell groceries online. They were wrong. Very wrong. But more than a decade later, tech-savvy retailers and retail-savvy tech companies are ready to try again. In San Francisco, bright green Amazon Fresh trucks rumble through downtown, delivering groceries straight to apartment doors. Online grocery shopping is back. Apoorva Mehta thinks so. Though Mehta won’t share exact numbers, he says his 18-month-old company is delivering groceries to a measurable percentage of San Francisco households, and he believes that, unlike Webvan, it will continue to grow.
Instacart CEO and founder Apoorva Mehta. Back in 1999, Webvan decided the path to success depended on its own infrastructure. Just a Smartphone and a Car. Que peut-on attendre des circuits courts? Cette histoire commence dans les années 1960, quand des mères de famille japonaises, inquiètes des risques d’empoisonnement au mercure, s’organisent et fondent les premiers teikei : en échange de l’achat par souscription de leur production, des paysans s’engagent à fournir des aliments exempts de produits chimiques.
Le mot « teikei » se rapporte à l’action de se tendre la main, à l’entraide. Il renvoie aussi à l’idée de mettre un visage sur les aliments. Ce système alternatif de distribution est l’ancêtre du circuit court. Des consommateurs-militants C’est à partir des années 1980 et surtout 2000 que le modèle se répand en Occident, porté notamment par la vogue de la vente en panier, des partenariats locaux solidaires entre producteurs et consommateurs. On pense spontanément aux fruits et légumes, mais le modèle du circuit court recouvre une réalité plus complexe et moins connue.
Cet aspect social de la « proximité » est, sans grande surprise, très présent dans le secteur alimentaire. Avec Instacart, l’économie du partage s’invite au supermarché. Food 3.0 & the Instacart anomaly | VentureBeat | Business | by Ezra Galston, Chicago Ventures. Instacart, currently the most well funded and fastest growing startup in the emerging food space is an anomaly.
The evolution in food startups – from the scheduled warehouse deliveries of the past decade to the highly curated, on-demand prepared food companies currently proliferating the Bay Area – seem to have bypassed Instacart’s elementary appearance as an un-curated, broad, digital grocery store. But drill deeper and Instacart holds the potential to be the most powerful consumer facing food ecosystem in the market.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched the food industry closely and worked with a number of Chicago Ventures’ investments in the space such as AgLocal, Food Genius, and Morsel. My thesis of the industry’s evolution has largely bucketed companies into three categories: And then there’s Instacart. And it doesn’t fit in to any bucket. Where the food evolution goes from there is beyond my field of vision.