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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

W&P’s Reuseable Silicone Bags Are Quite Useful

I love silicone storage bags.

In some other context, this might seem odd to proclaim in public, but The Spoon is all about kitchen innovation, and the invention of silicone bags to replace plastic Ziploc-style bags is unequivocally great. Along those lines, this month, W&P Design, which makes a variety of food-related goods, released its new line of silicone bags. After using them for a couple of weeks, I can say they are worth picking up (if you don’t mind the higher price).

If you aren’t familiar, silicone storage bags use food-grade silicone instead of disposable plastic. They are reuseable, so after you polish off that leftover chicken breast, a silicone bag can be re-used to store cheese or salad or whatever. They can also be used for sous vide-ing food if the thought of submerging your steak in a plastic bag in a hot bath for hours skeeves you out.

W&P sent me a variety of its Porter line of silicone bags to try out. In addition to being reuseable, the bags are microwave, freezer and dishwasher safe as well as BPA free. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including stand-up bags that can remain upright on their own.

I don’t microwave or freeze a ton of food, so I mostly used the bags for leftover storage. For that, the Porter bags are great. I was able to fill and re-fill the bags, which still worked after multiple dishwasher cycles. The bags didn’t warp or stain and my food stayed fresh.

My only gripe is that the locking mechanism doesn’t stay closed as much as I’d like. (The seal on the Stasher brand of silicone bags seems to work better.) There were a few times where the seal popped back open, though that might have been my trying to stuff an extra leftover pizza slice into an already full bag. Even so, I would stick with using the stand up bags if you are going to store something with a lot of liquid in it, just in case.

The other sticking point for people will probably be price. Like the Stasher brand of reusable silicone bags, W&P’s Porter bags ain’t cheap. A single 10 oz. bag costs $8.00, one 34 oz. bag costs $9.60 and a 50 oz stand-up bag will set you back $16.00. These prices can be a little bit cheaper than Stasher bags, but it really depends on the size/shape/color you get.

While the initial cost is high, you can re-use them for a long time, so the cost per use will turn out to be quite low. Plus, you have the added benefit of not using a storage bag once and then tossing it in a landfill and adding to our already huge plastic waste problem. And that, too, is something I love.

Instacart Expands Curbside Pickup Options for Retailers

Grocery fulfillment service, Instacart, announced this week it is expanding curbside pickup options for its retail partners.

Instacart currently provides curbside pickup services for more than 60 retailers, including ALDI, Food Lion, Publix, and starting this week, three Costcos in New Mexico. Instacart’s curbside pickup is available in more than 3,300 stores across 30 states today.

In its announcement, Instacart outlined the new order fulfillment and curbside pickup options for its retailers:

  • Partner Pick – Retailers use their own employees to pack and fulfill orders that come in through customized Instacart Pickup software
  • Instacart In-Store Shopper Pick – Instacart in-store Shoppers will pick and pack grocery orders for pickup
  • Full-Service – A new pilot program at select retailers where full-service Instacart Shoppers will be able to choose orders to pick, pack and stage for pickup or delivery

Last year, the pandemic pushed record number of shoppers into online grocery shopping, accelerating the need for more delivery and curbside pickup options. Even after the pandemic recedes, online grocery shopping is expected to grow and take up 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025.

Curbside pickup is an attractive option for both retailers and shoppers. For retailers, it only requires setting up designated pickup areas in their parking lot and letting customers come to them. And for shoppers, the pickup option can be more convenient, fitting into their regular errand schedule and not requiring them to stay at home to wait for a delivery driver.

As such, retailers are implementing a number of different ways to get customers their pickup orders more efficiently. Albertsons, for instance, has made a number of moves including the use of robots to automate online order fulfillment at some stores, as well as trialing an automated pickup kiosk and temperature controlled pickup lockers.

With Instacart’s news this week, retailers who can’t afford fancy robotics to fulfill orders will be able to use their own employees to pick and pack, or leverage Instacart’s scalable gig workforce to do so.

It wasn’t all good news from Instacart, however. With some retailers using their own workforce for packing orders, Instacart also announced it would be laying off 2,000 employees, including it’s only unionized labor group.

Imperfect Foods Raises a $95M Series D Round

Imperfect Foods, a national online grocer that specializes in selling surplus and cosmetically “imperfect” foods, announced today that it has raised a $95 million Series D round of funding. The round was led by Insight Partners and brings Imperfect’s total amount of funding to $214.1 million.

Imperfect Foods (formerly Imperfect Produce) aims to reduce waste in our current food system by “rescuing” so-called ugly foods — think misshapen carrots or potatoes — and selling them directly to consumers at a discounted prices. Without these rescues, such food would go straight to the landfill, further contributing to the world’s multibillion food waste problem.

In 2020, Imperfect transitioned from a regional produce delivery service into a national full-service grocer, expanding its catalog to include pantry items, meat, seafood, dairy and other products. Items sold are surplus, cosmetically imperfect, or sourced from sustainable partners. Some examples from last year include buying up allotments of cheese plates going unused by airlines and popcorn kernels from empty movie theaters. Imperfect also released a holiday snack box at the end of 2020 that featured cosmetically imperfect but otherwise perfectly edible snack items.

Imperfect said in today’s press announcement that it has a growing customers subscriber base of more than 350,000 customers. But it’s not alone in the “ugly” food space. Misfits Market, which does much the same thing, has raised more than $100 million in funding.

That money is flowing into Imperfect and Misfits is not too much of a surprise. The global pandemic pushed record numbers of people into online shopping. Even though vaccines are now out, and we may be seeing the pandemic recede, grocery e-commerce is projected to remain sticky with consumers and grow to gobble up 21.5 percent of overall grocery spending by 2025. So having an established grocery delivery infrastructure right now is far from an imperfect business idea.

Cafe X Re-Opens SFO Robot Barista

Those of you still going to airports can once again grab a robot-made coffee at the San Francisco International Airport. Cafe X re-opened its automated barista kiosk in Terminal 3 at SFO earlier this week.

Cafe X had shuttered both of its airport locations (the other one was at the San Jose Airport) last year as the global COVID-19 pandemic decimated air travel. We reached Cafe X Founder and CEO, Henry Hu via Twitter today. He told us that the SFO location was actually closed by the airport because Terminal 3 was seeing so little use. Hu said SFO gave Cafe X the greenlight to re-open recently, as traffic there has ticked back up.

When we last spoke with Hu in August, he said that despite the SFO and San Jose airport closures, Cafe X was still in talks to place its robo-barista at a number of other airports. Airport installations had been a key go-to market strategy for automated vending services and kiosks like Cafe X and Briggo (which is now Costa Coffee). Briggo had even signed a partnership with SSP America to place its robotic baristas in 25 airports throughout 2020 and 2021.

But as noted, the pandemic closed off airports as high-volume locations. Automated food services had to look elsewhere for places where a lot of people want food and beverages quickly.

However, with multiple vaccines beginning to be distributed this year, we could actually see an increase in airport deals for automated vending companies. There will be a lot of pent up desire to travel as the population gets vaccinated, and those returning to the friendly skies will want/need a fresh hot cup of coffee. Cafe X’s robot barista can not only make a mean latte, it also does so in a more contactless way than traditional coffee shops. Perhaps this combination will help Cafe X take off.

Stor.AI’s Software Now Allows Grocers to Accept SNAP Payments Online

Stor.AI (formerly Shelf Point), which makes digital commerce software for grocery stores, announced a new feature this week that allows stores of any size to accept online payment for Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) participants.

The new capability allows stores to accept payments through Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) payment cards, split payments across multiple methods, and add virtual tags to an online store showing which items are EBT-eligible.

Up until a couple years ago, SNAP participants were unable to use their EBT card to shop for groceries online, exacerbating digital inequality. In 2018, a startup called All_ebt helped SNAP participants shop for groceries online through a combination of Facebook Messenger and Virtual Visa cards.

The U.S. government got involved in April of 2019, when the USDA launched a pilot program allowing SNAP participants to grocery shop online. That pilot involved a limited number of states and retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

When the pandemic hit the U.S. last year, people were encouraged to stay home and take fewer trips to the grocery store. The inability for SNAP participants to shop for groceries online and forcing them to shop in stores made the issue not just about inequality, but also safety.

Thankfully, SNAP-enabled shopping online got a big boost in 2020, with Kroger accepting SNAP for pickup, Amazon and Walmart expanding EBT payment acceptance across the country, and Instacart partnering with ALDI for grocery delivery to SNAP participants.

With today’s Stor.AI news, even more SNAP participants will be able to buy groceries online. Smaller, neighborhood stores of all shapes and sizes will now be able to accept EBT payments and serve more customers.

These moves, of course, don’t eliminate the inequalities present in our current food system. They are, however good steps towards bridging the digital divide and allowing more people to benefit from the modernization of grocery retail.

Will Smart Carts Accelerate Automated Checkout?

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When you go grocery shopping today, the only reason you might even pay attention to your cart is because of a bum wheel that is either stuck or keeps turning around and around as you push it up and down the aisles.

But given the pace of announcements lately, there’s a good chance that when you go grocery shopping later this year, you might notice your shopping cart has a touchscreen, or a ring of cameras, or that it automates the checkout process for you.

In other words, your shopping cart is getting smart.

There is a wave of companies developing cashierless checkout systems by moving the entire process to your shopping cart or basket. Caper, Veeve, Tracxpoint, Storewide Active Intelligence, Imagr, and a scrappy young startup called Amazon.

Some systems use computer vision to recognize items, others use a barcode scanner, but these smart carts all basically do the same thing: keep track of the items you place in them and automatically tally up your bill for you to pay when you exit the store.

The use of smart carts can be appealing to retailers for a number of reasons. The COVID pandemic has grocers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human interactions. Smart carts could not only remove cashiers from the checkout equation, they might also free up cashiers for other labor, such as picking and packing, which is needed to keep pace with the growth in online grocery shopping.

For the shopper, smart carts can create a more frictionless experience because you don’t need to stand in checkout lines. And smart carts equipped with touchscreens can serve as revenue generators through new advertising and promotional space, as well as present recipes and guide customers through stores.

But smart carts can also be an easier way for retailers to get into automated/cashierless checkout because there is no retrofitting that needs to happen with existing stores. Cashierless checkout solutions from companies like Zippin and Grabango require the installation of cameras and sensors in stores, which can be time consuming and costly. A smart cart just requires the buying/leasing of new shopping carts.

Smart cart adoption got a shot in the arm this week when we learned that grocery giant Kroger is testing out Caper’s smart carts at a location in Cincinnati, Ohio. The KroGo carts feature a touchscreen, barcode scanner and built-in scale to weigh fresh items. There’s no app to download or account to set up, and KroGo users get their own separate station for a speedy checkout.

Caper’s announcement follows a story we wrote last week about New Zealand-based Imagr, which is bringing its smart baskets to Japanese retailer H2O.

And of course, Amazon is rolling out its own smart Dash cart tech as it expands its real world grocery empire.

There’s still a ways to go before smart carts scale up to become an everyday occurrence, but expect to see more smart cart pilots roll out with different grocers throughout this year.

Now if only these smart carts could fix those bum wheels.

The Kitchen Robots of CES (and Food Tech Live)

Is it just us, or was CES a little lacking this year? I mean, it’s totally understandable, given the pandemic, that fewer hardware companies would race to announce/show off a product for a show no one is physically going to. It’s just that normally we’re up to our eyeballs in new gadgets, gizmos and smart appliances this time of year.

That’s not to say there was nothing worth noting at this year’s CES. Spoon Founder Mike Wolf rounded up the kitchen robots that were at the show the year, including:

Moley – The high-end, full robotic system with an articulating arm that you basically build your kitchen around.

Oliver – The countertop single-pot device that you fill with fresh ingredients and it does the rest.

Takumi – From Yo-Kai Express, the Takumi countertop device that automatically re-heats and re-constitutes containers of Yo-Kai’s frozen ramen.

Samsung Handy Bot – A robot that does the dishes and pours you a glass of wine? Sign us up.

Hopefully the world returns to normal this year, so we can get back to the craziness of being in person for CES next year. Or maybe we’ll just have to send robots in our place.

More Headlines

UK Researchers Kickstart a New Project to Study and Fight At-Home Food Waste Behaviors – Researchers will examine consumer behavior around food waste both during and after lockdown periods in the UK, and use those findings to develop new ways to help consumers fight food waste and change their behaviors in the home.

Spanish Government Funds BioTech Foods’ Cultured Meat Project – The project will investigate the health benefits of cultured meat, and determine if cultured meat lacks the common health concerns associated with animal meat, such as increasing the risk of high cholesterol and certain cancers.

Controlled Ag Company AppHarvest’s First-Ever Crop Arrives at Grocery Stores This Week – The Morehead, Kentucky indoor farm clocks in at about 2.76 million square feet, and AppHarvest says the facility is expected to produce about 45 million pounds of tomatoes annually.

Glovo Lands Real Estate Deal to Expand Its Ghost Convenience Stores – Stoneweg will build and refurbish these real estate locations in key Glovo markets to help the delivery service expand its reach with these delivery-only convenience stores.

Dragontail Systems and Pizza Hut Deploy Pizza Delivery Drones in Israel – The delivery drones won’t be dropping pizzas off at people’s front doors, however. Rather, they will fly pizzas to remote designated landing zones where delivery drivers will pick them up for last mile of the delivery.

MIT Research Opens Up Potential of Lab-Grown Plants

By now Spoon readers are most likely familiar with the idea of lab-grown meat. After all, there are a number of companies around the world tackling the issue. But lab-grown plants? That’s something we haven’t heard as much about. However, it’s an idea that got a little boost this week, thanks to new research from MIT (hat tip: TechCrunch).

MIT News reports today that researchers at that university grew wood-like plant structures in a lab from cells extracted from Zinnia leaves. The process is akin to the way meat is grown in a lab: starter plant cells were placed in a growth medium, and then engineers added different hormones and compounds to “tune” the final structure created.

While still very early on, the results from MIT and continued research could have a potential impact on agriculture and the way food is produced. Just as lab-grown meat looks to create actual meat without the environmental strains of raising animals, lab-grown plants could be raised anywhere at anytime, and require less land and fewer inputs.

This new research is actually coming out at a fortuitous time in the agriculture industry. Indoor farms, or controlled ag facilities, are popping up across the country, changing the way our produce is grown. For instance, the first tomatoes grown in AppHarvest’s 60-acre indoor farm in Kentucky hit store shelves this week. The facility is projected to grow 45 million pounds of tomatoes every year.

What if, instead of just controlling the growing conditions of a plant, they could also control the “manufacturing” of the plant as well, reducing the growth time, or developing different nutritional strains on the cellular level. Those controlled ag companies could truly “control” the entire process of growing food from the ground up.

That is still a ways off, but as we’ve seen with cultured meat, innovation in lab-grown food happens quickly.

Kroger Using Smart Shopping Carts Powered by Caper

With the news last week that grocery giant, Kroger is using Caper’s technology, smart shopping carts are now officially a thing to watch out for.

Winsight Grocery Business broke the news last week that Kroger has quietly started testing its new “KroGo Powered by Caper” smart shopping carts at a store in Kroger’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. The high-tech shopping carts feature a touchscreen, barcode scanner and scale that allow for a more automated checkout process.

Shoppers scan the barcode of items they place inside the cart, which automatically keeps track of everything being purchased (there are safeguards in place is a user tries to put something in without scanning it). Produce and other fresh items are weighed on the built-in scale on the cart. If an item is removed, the user manually deletes it from the running list on the touchscreen. KroGo users have a separate checkout station that communicates with the cart to automatically tally up the total bill shoppers pay.

Interest in this type of automated checkout has accelerated thanks to COVID-19 pandemic. Automated checkout removes the cashier from the grocery shopping experience, eliminating a vector of human-to-human interaction. This is particularly important when it comes to keeping the spread of germs in check, given how many different people a cashier interacts with on a daily basis.

But Caper Co-Founder and CEO, Lindon Gao, told me by phone this week that his company’s smart cart technology got a boost from another source: his competition. “Amazon Dash has really brought this concept more to the market,” Gao said, speaking of Amazon’s own smart cart tech, “It has validated what we have done all along.”

In addition to adapting to new pandemic realities and the shot of validation from Amazon, the retailers Caper are working with also want to enhance the shopper’s experience. And according to Gao, Caper’s built-in touchscreen on the cart does just that.

“The screen is the holy grail,” Gao said. That’s because shoppers don’t need to download an app in order to use the automated checkout. Everything is there on the cart. Additionally, Gao said that people most people don’t shop while looking at their phones, but the on-cart screen travels with them up and down the aisles.

The screen also provides new advertising and promotional real estate for the retailer. A store can advertise specials, upsell companion items (frozen pizza + ice cream!), and push out possible recipes based on what’s in the cart.

Moving automated checkout to the cart can also mean faster adoption by retailers. Other cashierless checkout solutions like those from Grabango and Zippin require stores to be retrofitted with cameras and sensors. That can take time and be costly, especially for larger stores. A retailer adopting smart carts just needs to deploy new carts and don’t require shoppers to download an app to make the automated checkout work.

As such, there are actually quite a few players in the smart cart space. In addition to Caper, Veeve, Storewide Active Intelligence, Tracxpoint, and Imagr, all have various takes on the technology coming to market.

Given all this activity, smart shopping carts are definitely a thing we’ll be watching out for this year.

Dragontail Systems and Pizza Hut Deploy Pizza Delivery Drones in Israel

Restaurant tech company Dragontail Systems announced today that it has joined up with Pizza Hut for pizza delivery by drone in Israel.

To make this type of airborne delivery happen, Dragontail is integrating drones into its Algo Dispatching System, which uses AI to manage food preparation and delivery workflow. The delivery drones won’t be dropping pizzas off at people’s front doors, however. Rather, they will fly pizzas to remote designated landing zones where delivery drivers will pick them up for last mile of the delivery.

This remote drop-off hub approach is gaining traction with delivery companies around the world. IFood is using this model in Brazil, and here in the U.S., Uber is taking this approach with its drone delivery program.

There are actually good reasons to use this multi-step approach when delivering by drone. First, it simplifies the regulatory issues around flying commercial delivery drones because it reduces the number of flight paths that need to be created and cleared with appropriate government entities. Second, even if there is a last mile that needs to be driven, a drone still zooms overhead bypassing a lot of ground traffic on its way to customers for a speedy delivery. Finally, a remote hubg can keep delivery drivers closer to the delivery neighborhoods, rather than having them go back and forth to a restaurant.

Regardless of approach, the drone food delivery space is heating up. Walmart is using Flytrex for a groceries-by-drone delivery pilot in North Carolina. Rouses Market is testing deliveries in Alabama. In Ireland, Manna is making deliveries in around Dublin. And Google’s Wing has been making drone deliveries in Australia.

Drone delivery could become a much more viable option for restaurants and other food retailers here in the U.S., as the Federal Aviation Administration released its final safety and nighttime flying rules for commercial drone operators at the end of last year.

Report: Uber Looking to Spin Off Postmates X Delivery Robot Biz

As part of its acquisition of Postmates last year, Uber got into the delivery robot business. Now, according to a report in TechCrunch, Uber is planning to get out of the robo-biz by spinning off Postmates X (the robotics division of the company) into a separate company.

From TechCrunch:

Postmates X, the robotics division of the on-demand delivery startup that Uber acquired last year for $2.65 billion, is seeking investors in its bid to become a separate company, according to several people familiar with the plans.

The new spinout is being called Serve Robotics, named after the companies’ autonomous, cooler-sized Serve robot, which was making deliveries in Los Angeles throughout much of 2020. More recently, Postmates Serve was enlisted by the Pink Dot market to make deliveries in West Hollywood.

TechCrunch reports that Serve Robotics would retain the IP and assets, and Uber would keep a 25 percent stake in the company.

Given how the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing restaurants and grocers to adopt more contactless delivery methods, it may seem like an odd time for Uber to get out of the delivery robot business.

As we’ve been chronicling, autonomous delivery robots are popping up all over the globe. Starship has been doing deliveries on college campuses for more than a year, and expanded to grocery delivery in Modesto, CA. Kiwibot partnered with the City of San Jose for robot restaurant deliveries there. Then there’s Yandex in Russia, Delivers AI in Turkey, and Woowa Brothers in Seoul, South Korea.

But as Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently explained on Kara Swisher’s Sway podcast, his company is in the networking business. Khosrowshahi doesn’t think Uber needs to create the technology uses, it just needs access to the best technology that allows it to facilitate deliveries and ridesharing. That’s one reason Uber offloaded its autonomous driving unit at the end of last year.

While the use of robotics is definitely on the rise around the world, there are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before they become mainstream. Regulations and production scale are two biggies. Right now there are a patchwork of rules around autonomous delivery that vary from city to city and state to state. Even as those get ironed out, scaling robots to a number where we see them across the country is still a huge undertaking.

Uber pushing those issues off on to a separate company means Uber can focus more on its own delivery and ridesharing businesses. Uber can then just license the robot technology to facilitate its food delivery.

What Does Weber Acquiring June Say About the Smart Oven Market?

When Weber announced this week that it was acquiring smart oven maker, June, my first thought was — phew.

There was relief in knowing that June, the company, wasn’t going under any time soon, so my family will continue to enjoy June, the oven, for the foreseeable future. Instead of being a scrappy startup and dealing with issues like funding, scaling and exits, June now enjoys the deep pockets and vast sales network of grilling giant, Weber. In other words, June lives on and my smart oven won’t get bricked.

At least I hope not.

Acquisitions can get weird and who knows what Weber has in store for June, or how those plans will change. An old saw in business acquisitions is that companies don’t fully realize what they’ve bought until six months after the deal is closed.

Anyway, after the initial wave of relief, my thoughts turned to the countertop smart oven market in general, a category that still quite young. After all, June launched its first gen oven in December of 2016, which isn’t that long ago. But Weber buying June is the second major acquisition in the space since then. Brava, which started shipping its oven that cooks with light in November of 2018, was acquired by Middleby in November of 2019. Even Anova, which only launched its first smart oven last year, is owned by Electrolux.

That pretty much just leaves Tovala and Suvie as the remaining independents in the countertop smart oven space. But how long with they last?

Suvie positions itself more as a kitchen robot, in part because it doesn’t just re-heat food, it also keeps it cold and times the cooking to fit your schedule. Tovala raised $20 million and saw its business accelerate last year, thanks in part to the pandemic keeping people at home. It also doesn’t hurt that the company has has a low price point ($300) for its oven.

Anova is certainly pushing its steam-sous vide cooking as a differentiator rather than any “smart” capabilities as it enters the market. At $599 it’s not cheap per se, but Anova is promising more professional grade cooking than it is high-tech, connected bells and whistles.

A couple of years back, I wondered which companies would survive the kitchen countertopocalypse. There were so many multi-purpose (June) and single-purpose (Rotimatic) smart countertop devices coming to market that the average kitchen just doesn’t have the space to support them all. The field would winnow down, especially because some of these countertop ovens are big and take up a lot of space.

At the same time the countertop oven space is consolidating, we’re starting to see key smart features being added to traditional built-in ovens from the big players. At CES 2019, Whirlpool showed off its KitchenAid Smart Oven+, which featured automated cook programs. LG debuted an oven at CES this year that featured an Air Sous Vide setting.

The countertop smart oven space won’t disappear completely. The smaller size and cooking cavity can make preparing meals easier than firing up the gigantic built-in oven. And because they are cheaper than built-ins and don’t require installation, countertop ovens can be fertile territory for innovation. So the field is ripe for a new wave of startups to create and launch new cooking technology on a smaller scale. If that tech catches on with consumers, a bigger appliance company will acquire that startup and the cycle continues. And the industry as a whole can find relief in that.

RoboEatz Shows Off Ark 03 Autonomous Robotic Meal Making Kiosk

It’s pretty remarkable to think of how much food robots have evolved over the three years I’ve been covering them. At the start of that time period, we had Flippy the robotic arm that could grill up burgers, and even that required human help. Fast forward to 2021, and RoboEatz is showing off its fully autonomous robotic meal-preparation system that can put together 1,000 meals on its own before a human is needed to refill its ingredients.

RoboEatz Ark 03 is a 200 sq. ft. standalone kiosk featuring an articulating arm, 110 fresh ingredients (30 of which are liquids like soups and salad dressings), an induction cooker and a number of cubbies that hold orders for pickup. After an order is placed (via mobile app or tablet), the robot arm grabs ingredients, places them in the rotating induction cooker, and puts the finished meal container in a cubby. You can see it in action in this video:

RoboEatz creates both cold and hot food, can produce a meal every 30 seconds, cleans and sanitizes itself, and only needs a human for refilling any ingredients that run out. Food can also be customized to meet certain taste and dietary preferences.

You won’t be seeing RoboEatz-branded robo restaurants, as the company plans to license out its technology to third-party restaurants. As I’ve said before, this type of co-branding makes a lot of sense for food robot companies. Hungry consumers won’t know what a “RoboEatz” restaurant would serve, but they would know what to expect from a robot kiosk with “Olive Garden” branding (or whatever, I’m just naming a random.

There is more interest in food robots now, thanks to the global pandemic. A fully robotic kitchen/restaurant means a truly contactless meal creation and pickup experience.

But food robots have the potential to help with the operational costs of running a foodservice operation. There’s the aforementioned savings from not employing a human (a bigger, ethical and societal issues to be sure), but robots can also dispense ingredients with precision and consistency, reducing ingredient waste. Robots can also keep ingredients out of the open keeping them away from outside germs and preventing cross-contamination. Plus, they can run 24 hours a day without a break, eliminating any downtime.

All of the above is why we’re seeing so many fully autonomous robot restaurants coming to market right now. Karakuri, YPC and Highpper all have various versions of fully autonomous robot restaurant kiosks in the works.

All of those companies are also eyeing the same high-traffic locales when placing their robo-restaurants: hospitals, transportation hubs, schools, etc. RoboEatz says it will be opening its first location “soon” in Latvia (where the company is headquartered), with another location at an undisclosed airport opening as well as a prototype store in the U.S. later this year.