The Next Big Things in Food and Drink, According to a Whole Foods Exec

Grocery shopping used to be a drag. You'd troll the aisles, gathering boxes under fluorescent lights. Whole Foods, which was founded in 1980 in Austin, changed all that. It transformed the supermarket from a place of picking up staples to a destination of discovery.

Christina Minardi, a 23-year Whole Foods veteran and executive vice-president of operations, led the charge. She helped reshape the culture of grocery shopping. (Whole Foods was the first grocery-store chain to sell certified organic products.) And, as a top-of-the-food-chain buyer, she's one of the tastemakers to thank/blame for the rise of kale, quinoa, kefir, avocados, purple carrots, and cauliflower. Her secret: "We have foragers around the country," she says. "They go to local farmers markets and shops, and then Whole Foods helps with packaging and conducts taste tests at in-store kiosks. It builds loyalty from the purveyor and helps give Whole Foods the edge in new products."

Justin's nut butters started in one Whole Foods store. Sir Kensington condiments started small with the company. White Moustache yogurt is growing under its tutelage. Whole Foods racked up $16 billion in gross sales in 2016 from 458 stores worldwide, with a growth rate unmatched in the industry. Here's what's next, according to Minardi.

"Fake chicken or fake hamburgers is a big trend that isn't going away, but there are a lot of young chefs doing such good things with vegetables," she says. "We are moving away from vegan food, like fried seitan with a heavy sauce, toward great vegetable-based main dishes," such as whole roasted plantains topped with hot honey or cacio e pepe made with mushrooms instead of pasta.

"In the last two or three years, milk products have increased from a three-foot section of our stores to a fifteen-foot section," Minardi says. That's spurred by soy, almond, and cashew milks, but also by an emerging market for hemp, oat, and flax milk, she says.

"Customers are more and more daring and adventurous," she says. "Ten years ago, our customers were growing comfortable with cooking Mexican food. Now they want to cook food from Croatia." Whole Foods' new hot-bar options reflect this, expanding beyond salad bars to grain-based bowls that incorporate ingredients from foreign cuisines.

"Consumers are more adventurous in the sense of their drinking habits, too." Though rosé sales continue to stay steady, Minardi says sparkling reds are gaining traction. Seek out sparkling Shiraz or Lambrusco. Pair it with Ethiopian, Thai, Moroccan, or Israeli food.

Fast food via drone takes flight

MARON KRISTóFERSSON is looking forward to the completion of a new roof on his office in downtown Reykjavik. It is not that the old roof leaked, but rather that the new one will be heated. Mr Kristófersson is the boss of aha, which delivers on behalf of restaurants and shops in Iceland's capital. The heated roof will let his delivery drones take off from and land on the top of the building throughout the winter, without anyone having to clear away the snow.

When drones, in the form of small, electrically powered rotorcraft, came to public attention around a decade ago, various commercial uses were proposed for them. Some of these, such as surveying, aerial photography and law enforcement, have now become routine. But one, in particular, has not. This is the idea of household deliveries. In 2013 Jeff Bezos, Amazon's boss, said that the online retailer was testing just such a system. Others suggested using drones to deliver medicines and fast food. Apart from various demonstration flights, however, not much then happened.

This slowness was caused less by technological inadequacy than by caution on the part of regulators. In most countries people are not allowed to fly drones above other people, near buildings or out of sight of the operator. Commercial activities are strictly regulated and some flights need clearance from aviation authorities. This has kept drone operators on a tight leash while regulators got to grips with what is, after all, a new form of aviation. Slowly but surely, however, as operators have gained experience and demonstrate a good safety record, some regulators have begun to relax the rules.

Dinner is on its way
Iceland is a typical example. In August 2017 Mr Kristófersson teamed up with Flytrex, an Israeli drone-service company. The pair persuaded Iceland's transport authorities to let them start a drone delivery service across Viðeyjarsund, an inlet that divides Reykjavik from its eastern suburbs. Delivery drivers would load goods weighing up to 3kg into a drone on one side of the inlet and it would fly autonomously along a fixed route to land on the other side, where the goods would be collected by another team of drivers who would take them on to their final destinations.

“We learnt a lot,” said Mr Kristófersson. One thing was the impact of weather. Iceland is often wet and windy, but the drone used for this operation could not fly in rain—and for safety reasons aha avoided gusty conditions. This meant that the drone was grounded for about half of the time it might otherwise have been flying. Nevertheless, when it could fly it saved time and money because the flight took four minutes instead of the 20 or more required to drive around Viðeyjarsund.

The experience they gained in running the trans-Viðeyjarsund service allowed aha and Flytrex to obtain permission to run 12 other routes across Reykjavik, including journeys over land. And operations have just been extended again, permitting drones to deviate by up to 700 metres either side of those fixed routes. This means deliveries can now be made to the backyards of registered customers who have obtained their neighbours' permission for flights to pass overhead.

Those customers can order goods using online apps and, weather permitting, select a drone delivery. Most of the shops and restaurants taking part are close to aha's office, where they drop off goods to be delivered. These are then loaded into a drone by a company employee, who dispatches the craft after entering the destination using a hand-held device. The customer gets a message to say the drone is on its way, and can use the app to follow its progress on a map. When it arrives, the customer enters a PIN into the app to accept delivery and the drone lowers its package on a line. Should someone try to pull the line, it detaches from the drone.

With a third drone on order—this one a waterproof version that can fly in the rain—Mr Kristófersson hopes to deliver to more places more often, with the potential of as many as 100 flights a day. The drones, made by DJI, a Chinese firm, do not use cameras or radar to navigate. They rely solely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) to know where they are—though, for safety's sake, they have three, independent GPS-based systems on board. But even though the drones fly out of sight of aha's office, they are monitored constantly during their journey and can be recalled if something appears to be going wrong, or ordered to make an emergency landing by slowly fluttering down while making a loud warning noise.

Yariv Bash, Flytrex's boss, says delivery-by-drone services which, like the Icelandic example, start with fixed routes that gradually become more ambitious, are beginning to appear in other places. His company, for example, is about to help launch one that will use drones to deliver packages in Holly Springs, North Carolina. Uber, a ride-hailing service, is also planning to launch drone deliveries for food.

Next month, in Singapore, a drone made by Airbus, a European aerospace group, will begin ferrying supplies and spare parts to ships moored offshore. Airbus is working on the project with Wilhelmsen, a marine-services company. Wilhelmsen reckons that using drones will reduce delivery costs to vessels by up to 90%, and will be safer than employing launches to carry those deliveries by sea. Alibaba, China's biggest e-commerce firm, is making drone deliveries on a number of fixed routes across the vast Shanghai Jinshan Industrial Park and has plans to launch similar operations in other areas.

A common factor among these new drone services is that they are not operating in densely built-up areas. Despite the early predictions that drones would be used to deliver fast food and other goods to city dwellers, the reality is turning out to be rather different. For a start, there are flight restrictions on all aircraft in high-rise places like Manhattan and central London. There is also the difficulty of finding places for drones to land or hover outside apartment windows. Nor do the economics stack up. In cities, typical distances for delivering fast food might be under a kilometre, which makes it efficient to use mopeds or bicycles. Reykjavik, however, is a low-rise, spread-out sort of place. The average distance over which a meal is delivered is about 7km.

If regulators continue to relax requirements for line-of-sight operations, long-distance delivery by drone will become particularly appealing. In some cases, though, a different sort of drone may be needed. One such has just completed six months of test flights in Tanzania. This drone is built by Wingcopter, a German firm, and is of a type known as a “tilt-rotor”. That means it uses its rotors for vertical take-off and landing, but for horizontal flight it tilts them forward to operate like the propellers of an aeroplane. This arrangement, which is beginning to be used for manned helicopters as well, results in a big increase in speed and range. In neighbouring Rwanda, meanwhile, a firm called Zipline does not even bother with vertical take-off. Its drones are small, fixed-wing aircraft launched by catapult.

In the Tanzanian trials, DHL, an international delivery company, used a Wingcopter to fly medical supplies from Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria, some 60km to a clinic on Ukerewe Island. Blood and other samples from the clinic's patients were then flown back to Mwanza for laboratory analysis. The drone journey took 40 minutes, compared with six hours by road and ferry. Zipline, though, is beyond the stage of trials. Its drones are now in regular use delivering blood for transfusion to rural clinics.

Flight-safe mode
Flying life-saving medical supplies around is, to be sure, more important than getting pizzas to customers while they are still hot. But with technology improving, and provided that operators can continue to run safe operations, more companies are likely to follow in aha's footsteps and move into the business of delivering by drone. And safety, too, is improving all the time. Drones can already be “ring-fenced” electronically to stop them straying into dangerous areas, such as airports. Small, automated collision-avoidance systems are also under development, to prevent them crashing into things. Eventually, no doubt, drones that can safely navigate the canyons of tall cities will emerge. But for the immediate future, it is the hungry folk in the 'burbs and out in the sticks who will have first call on the drone-delivery option on their fast-food apps.

This Tarzana Food Truck Delivers Some of LA's Most Compelling New Israeli Cuisine

Israeli food is trending in Los Angeles right now with high-profile, full-service restaurants like Bavel, Kismet, and Mizlala celebrating the tiny Middle Eastern country's robust flavors. Other chefs and restaurateurs have taken the movement to the streets. Tarzana-based Burekas Plus may be the best of a new wave of Israeli food trucks that also includes nearby Falafel on Wheels, Hummus Yummy, and Pickles & Peas.

Burekas Plus owner Shevi Rubinstein worked for famous Tel Aviv chef Haim Cohen in the pastry department at a restaurant called Dixie. She draws on her family's sixth-generation bureka recipe for the truck, a breakout hit after just seven months on the road, with steady crowds including many Israelis.

The flaky, savory phyllo pastry is substantial at Burekas Plus, stuffed with either cheese, spinach & cheese, cheese & olive, or potato. At noon, they were down to just one bureka ($7) filled with briny feta cheese and green olives. Edges formed crispy cheese skirts during the baking process. The top comes studded with black and white sesame seeds. Each plate comes with sliced hard-boiled egg, punchy pickles, nutty tahini, a tomato slurry folded with olive oil, and house hot sauce spiked with schug, a fierce, herbaceous Yemeni condiment.

Shaul Rubinstein, the food truck's frontman and a character in the best sense of the word, has strong opinions about food. He's dismissive of anybody who takes shortcuts or uses lesser ingredients. When asked if anybody's copied them yet, Shaul says, "Nobody can do what we do because they don't want to do the work." He singled out burekas as especially painstaking to make. Every morning, his wife gets up before dawn to shape and bake.

Hummus with falafel comes as a plate or in pita. Each plate ($10) hosts six garbanzo bean fritters with delicate crusts flecked with cilantro and garlic. They stay soft for at least 30 minutes, not that anybody in their right mind would let them sit around that long. Shaul said lesser falafel will harden quickly due to bread filler, whereas his wife's version is pure and maintains integrity.

The accompanying hummus was also a revelation, impressively creamy, made with classic chickpeas, tahini, garlic, and lemon juice. She takes the added step of using a chinois to get the hummus so smooth. Tahini lashings, an olive oil drizzle, chopped cilantro and more schug helped to fill out the floral plate.

Sabich ($8) is a signature Israeli sandwich that's particularly good at Burekas Plus. They import thick, fluffy pita from Israeli, slice open the top, and fill to bursting with hummus, tahini, fried eggplant, hard-boiled egg, crunchy cubed cucumber, tart pickles, chopped tomato, and scallions. Add amba, the pickled mango slurry, for kick.

Everybody loves a good off-menu dish, and Burekas Plus serves a secret dessert. The magic word is malabi. The milk-based custard is similar to panna cotta, and particularly creamy at this food truck, topped with crushed pistachios, fluffy shredded coconut, and a fragrant sugar syrup crafted with rose water. Mix to integrate the different flavors and textures. Shaul shuns lesser malabi, which use powdered custard and watery store-bought sauce. Apparently, this sweet secret is out, since Burekas Plus sells 30 to 40 orders per day.

Shaul Rubinstein is a longtime restaurateur who's had success in Israel and on both American coasts, including an Italian restaurant in Jacksonville. He's returned to his roots by teaming with his talented wife. The couple initially parked down Ventura Boulevard at Bank of America, but relocated to a side street next to an Office Depot, still visible to drivers in a space that lets them stay put during rush hour from 4 to 7 p.m., when parking spaces become tow zones.