Shake Shack is getting in on the crypto game. It’s doing so by offering cashback rewards in the form of Bitcoin for those paying with Block’s CashApp. Block is of course the new corporate name for Square, the company founded by noted crypto bro Jack Dorsey.
According to press reports, the program runs through mid-March. It’s designed to test consumer interest in getting little bits of Bitcoin as a reward for scarfing down their admittedly delicious burgers.
The company’s CMO Jay Livingston took a clearly cautious tone when describing the initiative to the Wall Street Journal last week.
“You’re always trying to place your bets on those things that truly will be meaningful and not waste resources on the ones that won’t,” he said.
This isn’t the first time a QSR restaurant chain has toyed with using cryptocurrency as a reward mechanism.
According to PYMNTS, Burger King partnered with Robinhood Crypto to run a three-week crypto rewards promo last November. We’re confident that the Burger King Bitcoin didn’t taste as good as Shake Shack’s.
Virtual Dining Halls
If we broaden the discussion to include NFTs and the metaverse, there is a fair amount going in the intersection between face-stuffing and blockchain technology.
For example, we recently wrote about McDonald’s filing several patents to launch a food and beverage operation in the metaverse. That’s not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. The concept involves ordering food in the metaverse (for example inside of a game). But the food arrives at your real-world front door.
We also wrote about a Dubai-based food tech company called Grubtech that plans to build a food hall platform for the metaverse. It would be similar to what McDonald’s is envisioning, just with a wider variety of more upscale food choices.
We imagine that every company in the cloud kitchen/virtual restaurant space is working on their metaverse play as we speak.
DAOs and NFTs
Turning to NFTs (non-fungible tokens), there is a local dining play here as well. NFTs are basically unique digital assets that exist on a blockchain. People can buy and sell NFTs on exchanges. And many a small (and not so small) NFT fortune has already been made.
The earliest popular NFT application was digital art. But innovators are finding new NFT applications every day.
Hustle culture guru Gary Vaynerchuk, an early NFT enthusiast, is working on an NFT-based restaurant in New York called the Flyfish Club. We wrote about this back in August.
The concept is that membership in the club will come in the form of NFTs paid for in ETH. Each Flyfish Club NFT is unique. As is any NFT. However, you can purchase the actual food at the Flyfish Club with old-fashioned fiat currency.
Others are following Gary Vee’s lead, apparently. According to a recent piece in Eater, the NFT dining space is booming.
For example, there is CHFTY Pizzas. This operation from noted chefs Tom Colicchio and Spike Mendelsohn states its mission as “bridging the gap between the Food & Beverage community and Web3.”
The graphic below helps explain what CHEFTY Pizzas has in mind. It feels more like a community than a pizzeria.
The company’s website frames the initiative as inspired by the dining industry wake-up call that was Covid-19.
“In 2020, the restaurant community had to adapt and evolve in major ways. In order to reimagine how this space could survive and flourish, a new community of forward-thinkers had to be formed. Enter CHFTY. CHFTY will position itself as an ecosystem to help chefs, foodies, and brands integrate into Web3… and CHFTY Pass holders get premier access to it all!”
The initiative also involves Elon Musk’s brother Kimball, who created something called the Big Green DAO. So in case you have heard of a DAO, it stands for decentralized autonomous organization. Basically, it can be any kind of organization formed for a common purpose. A DAO has no leader. But the members are bound together by smart contracts and make decisions through voting.
Big Green DAO is a not-for-profit entity.
Here is how they explain the DAO’s role. “CHFTY wants to make an impact in the fight for Food Justice. So we decided to team up with Kimbal Musk’s Big Green DAO and embed their wallet directly into our smart contract. As the First Non-Profit led philanthropic DAO, we are excited to help fund their members with a % of our project as they vote on how to help donors.”
Yep, it’s all a bit confusing. But we all need to get up to speed. Every day a new startup is finding a new everyday application for NFTs. They’re not just for bored apes anymore. And they’re not going away.
