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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chris Albrecht

When You Think About Food Robots, Consider the Remote Mining Facility

Whenever I talk with a food robot company, particularly a startup building an automated kiosk or vending machine, they always list the same target markets. Those include airports, universities, hospitals, military bases, and basically any location where there are a lot of people coming through at all hours of the day. So my ears perked up when Alex Barseghian, Founder of RoboEatz, said his company was looking to set up its robot in the middle of nowhere.

Specifically, Barseghian mentioned setting up his company’s robot in a “remote mining facility” during the automation panel I moderated at our Restaurant Tech virtual summit yesterday. Barseghian didn’t provide specifics, but it’s not hard to imagine what a “remote mining facility” might look like, and why a robot might be useful there.

RoboEatz makes a 200 sq ft. self-contained robotic kiosk that stores 110 ingredients and uses an articulating arm to assemble a variety of both hot and cold meals. Aside from someone to re-stock ingredients and handle the occasional maintenance, the machine does everything on its own.

This autonomy, and the robot’s ability to make a meal every 30 seconds, makes it perfect for high-traffic places like airports. Busy people on the go can get a hot, restaurant-quality meal served up any time of day or night. But the autonomy also makes it perfect for places where there aren’t a lot of people and not a lot of access. Rather than sending a cook and setting up a kitchen in a remote area, which can be expensive, a robot can take care of that work. Just set the kiosk up once and regularly top off the ingredients, the robot will take care of the rest.

No only do meal-making robots like those RoboEatz and Karakuri and YPC Technologies operate independently, they can serve food across day parts (yogurt in the morning, pasta at night) and around the clock, so they can feed people working odd hour shifts. Additionally, robots can offer a variety of menu options, rather than a cook making one meal for everyone at a facility. People in the remote situation could order the meal they want and get it in minutes.

The broader point to consider is that while remote areas may not be as top of mind or even immediately as lucrative as other high-traffic locales, food robots installed in these locations could have a much bigger impact for the people who live there.

Trademark Filing Indicates Beyond Meat Could Add Milk to its Lineup

Plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat has filed for a trademark on the name Beyond Milk, indicating that the company could be prepping for a move into alternative milk category. Food Dive was first to report the news, writing that Beyond’s application with the US Patent and Trademark Office would cover “making milk shakes; coffee or tea beverages with milk or milk substitutes.”

That Beyond would add a plant-based milk to its lineup is not that much of a surprise. According to the most recent data from the Good Food Institute, the plant-based milk category is worth $2.5 billion and accounts for 35 percent of the total plant-based food market. So there is money to be made milking plants.

Of course, where there is money to be made, there is also competition. The alternative milk space is already crowded with a number of incumbent and up-and-coming players. Big companies like Danone, which owns the Silk soy milk brand, already line supermarket coolers. Oatly recently went public, bulking up its warchest to solidify and expand its market share. But potentially the most interesting competitor is Ripple, which makes a pea-based milk. While we don’t know anything about how Beyond would make a plant-based milk at this point, pea protein is one of the main ingredients in its popular burger. So Beyond leveraging what it knows about pea protein to formulate a new type of milk makes some sense.

Another competitor on the horizon could be Beyond’s plant-based burger rival, Impossible Foods, which revealed last October that it was developing its own plant-based milk. The two companies have to this point been lock step in announcing similar plant-based products including burgers, sausage and chicken. It looks like in the not-too-distant future we’ll be able to wash those foods down with a glass of Impossible or Beyond milk.

Picnic Announces Commercial Availability and Pricing of its Pizza Robot

Picnic announced today that its pizza-assembling robot is now commercially available for pre-orders and that its robot-as-a-service will cost between $3,500 and $5,000 per month, depending on factors such as menu and volume.

Picnic makes a modular system that uses computer vision and robotics to top pizza dough. Pizza crusts are placed on a conveyor belt, automatically stopping under dispensers to be topped accordingly with ingredients such as sauce, cheese, pepperoni and more. Because it is modular, more nodes can be added to add more toppings.

Obviously restaurant labor is a big issue driving much of the discussion around automation and robotics in food tech. Picnic CEO Clatyon Wood told me by video chat this week that while attracting and retaining labor is still a pain point for his customers, another reason for the move into automation is the digitization of ordering. Whether its online, mobile, or via in-house ordering via kiosk, digital experiences are driving more sales. “If you want to produce high volumes of food, automation is the answer,” Wood said. “Doing that with labor just isn’t an option these days.”

In addition to labor and volume, robot and automation can also provide a number of other benefits for restaurant. Robots consistently dispense the same amount of food every time, resulting in less waste and tighter control over ingredients. Robots can also operate dangerous machinery like a deep fryer or pizza oven without getting injured. And especially important in our ongoing pandemic, not only do robots not get sick, but they create more social distance for other human workers inside a kitchen.

All of these reasons help explain why we are starting to see more food-creation robots come to market. XRobotics and Middleby both make commercial pizza-assembling robots. Last week, Hyphen unveiled its Makeline automated food assembly system for fast casual restaurants like Sweetgreen. And while Miso Robotics’ Flippy is already working the fryer at White Castle, the company recently announced a new automated drink dispenser for QSR drive-thrus.

All of these solutions are still very early on, however, and we don’t yet know if the economics of robotics are truly sustainable. We’ll be seeing more public announcements of robot adoption from restaurant brands this year, so we can start to measure automation’s true efficacy.

For its part, Picnic will manufacture and install existing customer orders throughout the remainder of this year, and new orders will ship in 2022.

New Croatian Restaurant Uses Five GammaChef Robots to Make Meals

Typically when we write about food making robots, they fall into either one of two categories: Smaller countertop devices meant for the home, or larger, more industrial robots meant for restaurant kitchens. But a restaurant called Bots&Pots in Zagreb, Croatia, is combining those two ideas and using a number of GammaChef cooking robots to make meals for its customers.

GammaChef, also based in Croatia (and also a former Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase finalist), makes the eponymous robot capable of creating one-pot dishes such as stews, risottos and pastas. The device stores ingredients, dispenses them into the pot, and stirs the food as it cooks. According to Total Croatia News, customers at Bots&Pots choose their meal via touchscreen at one of five GammaChefs inside the restaurant and they’ll be able to see their meal prepared. According to the story, with five robots running, the restaurant can make up to 60 meals per hour. Human chefs at Bots&Pots are also creating new recipes for the robot to “learn.”

We don’t have a ton of other details about Bots&Pots right now. Based on the restaurant’s Facebook page, it appears as though it is in more of a showroom mode, and not quite open to the public yet. A translation of a Bots&Pots Facebook post on August 14 reads “Soon….Zagreb, then the world 🤟😇.” The restaurant also mentions franchising in earlier Facebook posts, so it appears that Bots&Pots is looking to take the concept to more stores in more locations.

What’s intriguing about Bots&Pots is its robot deployment strategy. The restaurant is foregoing one big, self-contained autonomous kiosk (like the DaVinci Kitchen) in favor smaller consumer appliances. This approach could help save money up front, because there is no big installation or training that needs to happen around a large robot. Not needing to build around a big bulky robot also means that as Bots&Pots franchises out, the concept can adapt to just about any real estate because you just plunk the GammaChefs down on some countertops.

Will this be a strategy other restaurants adopt? Could we see other home cooking robots like the Oliver or Nymble’s Julia be used in bulk at eateries? We’ll have to see how the nuts and bolts of Bots&Pots works out.

Food Tech Goes Back to School

We are preparing for back-to-school in our home. And while there are still questions that remain around what back-to-school will actually mean for my middle-schooler, we are all excited for some return to normalcy (hopefully).

But in addition to educating children, schools are also a target market for emerging food tech sectors, as evidenced by a few announcements last week.

At the college level, both Kiwibot and Starship announced expanded rollouts for their robot delivery services to new schools. Kiwibot partnered with Sodexo to bring robots to New Mexico State University, Loyola Marymount University in California, and Gonzaga University in Washington state. And on that very same day, Starship announced it was deploying its robots to University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), University of Kentucky (UK), University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach, FL campus. For those keeping score, Starship now operates on 20 different campuses across 15 states.

It’s not hard to understand the allure of college campuses for robot delivery. They are small geographic areas with large populations (students, staff, faculty, etc.), typically with wide walkways and not a ton of traffic from larger vehicles. Rather than walking back and forth across campus to a food hall (like we did back in my day) and then back to the library or lab or dorm, students can have meals and snacks brought to them.

And, not for nothing, after schools shut down last year because of COVID-19, having a contactless method for food delivery will probably be welcomed on campus. Students who are sick don’t need to leave their room to infect others in the cafeteria.

Speaking of cafeterias, another recent piece of news from the food tech world is that grade school kids could soon be enjoying more plant-based protein options. During a video chat about the retail launch of Impossible Sausage this week, Impossible reps told me that the new product will carry the USDA’s Child Nutrition label. Having this label basically makes it easier for school districts to buy Impossible products.

USDA data show that schools served 5 billion lunches and 2.4 billion breakfasts in fiscal year 2019. School districts could be a huge source of revenue for Impossible, especially since it will sell a burger, a sausage and eventually (one has to assume), its plant-based chicken nuggets to cafeterias.

There are obviously much bigger issues to watch going into this school year than the market opportunities for food tech companies. But perhaps food tech companies engaging more deeply with the education market can lead to safer and healthier eating at school.

More Headlines

Too Good To Go Partners With Waze to Fight Food Waste – Called Waze for Good initiative, the app’s map will feature 100 Too Good To Go partner businesses where people can rescue food at a discount before it gets thrown out.

Civic Technologies Powers Age Verification Tech in New Vending Machine – If this proof-of-concept works, it could open up new avenues of unattended booze sales.

Shiok Meats Acquires Gaia Foods, Will Add Beef to Its Cultured Meat Lineup – Both companies are targeting markets in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan, India, and South Korea. Shiok Meats hopes to blend cultured beef and shrimp in order to create a product that can be used in a variety of dishes, from dumplings and noodles to spring rolls.

Sama Provides the Data to Fight Food Waste and Power Cashierless Checkout

When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI) in food tech, it’s often about the end result: Cashierless checkout, crop assessment, autonomous vehicles, etc. But one thing that these solutions and any other using AI need is is good data. Sama is a company in the good data business, and it has built a platform that provides training data that other companies can use to speed up the development of their AI models.

I spoke with Wendy Gonzalez, CEO of Sama, this week by video chat. She outlined some of the food tech use cases for her company’s technology, such as fighting food waste. “If you’re in a restaurant or hotel, catering service. A lot of that food gets wasted,” Gonzalez said. Sama is working with a company called Orbisk that provides a device for commercial kitchens that uses computer vision to analyze the food being thrown away. For example, if Orbisk sees a lot of mac and cheese is being tossed because no one is taking it, that kitchen can know not to make as much of it, and by extension save money by ordering less of the ingredients to make mac and cheese. (Winnow is another company that takes this same approach.)

For its part, Orbisk had a thousands of images of different types of food for its system to recognize. Sama came in and provided structure and taxonomy to that data. In other words, Sama labeled all the images of mac and cheese accordingly to train Orbisk’s AI to automatically recognize mac and cheese. The result, according to Sama, is that Orbisk’s system can reduce food waste in commercial kitchens by as much as 70 percent.

Gonzalez said that Sama’s system is also being used in other fields like cashierless checkout. In that setting, Sama is helping train those computer vision systems to recognize packaged goods, which is more complicated than people think. A cashierless checkout system needs to not only recognize a package of Oreos, but a package of Oreos in different lighting conditions, different angles or when the view is partially blocked. Sama provides all of that data.

Sama is also being used to train AI systems on early crop disease detection, automated crop harvesting, and soil condition monitoring.

Sama is among a number of players in the data space including AI.Reverie, which uses synthetic data to create images virtually to train AI models, and Nvidia, which is also using synthetic data to train robots to navigate around a kitchen.

As AI plays a bigger role in our everyday lives, there will be a growing need for more good data to train those AI systems. And the end result is that we’ll all be talking about good data more often.

Civic Technologies Powers Age Verification Tech in New Vending Machine

Something we’ve pondered here at The Spoon is how age verification might work for vending machines that sell beer or booze. We’ve seen other automated alcohol dispensers like Hop Robotics and Rotender rely on the venue where they are installed to have humans do the ID checking (think: a beer garden area at a festival). But Civic Technology announced today a new vending machine that uses blockchain, face mapping and QR codes to verify the age of the purchaser.

The new machine from Civic was developed in conjunction with Black Fire Innovation (a hospitality tech hub created by Caesars Entertainment and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas). It is proof-of-concept only. It currently serves non-alcoholic drinks to Black Fire’s tenants, but it’s meant to show off how Civic’s age verification technology works. Civic wants to show how it can confirm that a user’s ID information is correct and not altered, and that that ID information is being kept private and secure.

To make an age-restricted purchase through the vending machine, a user must first download the Civic Wallet mobile app and register their information. To do so, a user must verify their phone number and email address, and scan their official ID document (Civic works with 4,000 different documents types across 95 countries). Users then must take a 3D selfie to map their face, which Civic then matches with the ID document provided.

At the vending machine, Civic uses Identity.com‘s open-source age verification ecosystem. A QR code is presented to the user, which they scan with the Civic Wallet app. The user then shows their face to the phone which matches that with the verified ID information. It’s important to note that no personal information is being exchanged with the machine. A person’s data is stored on their phone and all that is being transmitted to the vending machine is a yes or no. Either the user is an age verified person making the transaction or not. The transaction then becomes an entry and recorded on using blockchain technology.

The ability for an unattended machine to verify ages before purchases could be a boon to venues like hotels and stadiums. For instance, sales of canned beer and hard seltzers could shift over to a vending machine and free up human workers to focus on more complicated (and profitable) cocktails or other aspects of customer service. Normally when I talk about vending machines, I also tout the fact that they can work around the clock, but in the case of alcohol, that might not be a benefit for everyone.

Civic is one of a few verification systems we’ve seen coming to market. In 2019, Pan Pacific debuted the SmartPan Pro beer vending machine that used finger vein biometrics for verification. Prior to that, CLEAR, of airport security fame, had its own biometric, pay and verify your age with your finger technology at stadiums. Though, one has to wonder if the finger biometric has lost its appeal post-COVID, when retailers are looking for more contactless experiences.

The pandemic has accelerated all kinds of interest in automation and robotics and generally removing human-to-human contact during retail transactions. Unattended age verifying vending machines could certainly be a part of that movement.

Bite Ninja Raises $675,000 in Pre-Seed Funding to Virtually Staff Restaurants

Bite Ninja, which allows restaurants to virtually staff drive-thrus and counters, has raised $675,000 in Pre-Seed funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news, writing that the round was led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.

The basic gist of Bite Ninja is that it allows restaurant workers to take drive-thru and counter orders remotely. Instead of managing staffers, restaurants get access to a pool of gig workers (called “ninjas”) managed and scheduled by Bite Ninja. Since these workers take orders remotely (from their own homes, for example), these workers don’t actually show up to the restaurant for their shift.

From the customer’s perspective, little changes about the order-pay-collect process. Someone placing a drive-thru order interacts with a remote worker whose face appears on a screen in the drive-thru lane. The customer may not even know the worker is offsite. Bite Ninja says this method can actually increase order accuracy and upsell rates for restaurants.

Bite Ninja is coming along at a time when the restaurant industry is in the midst of a labor crunch and struggling to find workers. Bite Ninja’s platform can help alleviate this issue by allowing QSRs to staff up on demand without going through the process of hiring and training a worker. Another benefit in these pandemic times is that by shifting some of the order taking to a virtual staffer, more social distance can be created in the back of house because there is one less person on-site. For workers, Bite Ninja opens up new work opportunities because they can pull shifts in different restaurants and time zones from the comfort of their home.

As the pandemic pushed people out of dining rooms and into off-premises meal formats, restaurants have needed to modernize their drive-thru operations. Bite Ninja is among a number of companies that are looking to make drive-thrus both faster and more accurate. Other startups, such as ConverseNow and Valyant AI are building artificial intelligence agents that can take orders from people using natural language.

Bite Ninja Co-Founder Will Clem will actually be speaking about his business and the future of QSRs at our Restaurant Tech Summit next week. And just like one of his company’s ninjas, you can attend virtually from your couch, so grab your ticket today!

Impossible Foods Launches its Plant-Based Impossible Sausage at Retail

Impossible Foods announced today that its plant-based Impossible Sausage is now available at retailers across the country. The new sausage comes in two flavors, Savory and Spicy. The product costs $5.99 for a 14-ounce package,and is rolling out at Kroger, Ralphs, King Soopers, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Albertsons, Wegmens, Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Gian martins, Giant Food, Shoprite, Sprouts Farmers Market and Heinen’s.

This is Impossible’s first new product at retail since the company’s Impossible Burger. Impossible Sausage made its debut at CES in 2020 and went to restaurants such as Starbucks and Burger King last year in the form of sausage patties. The plant-based sausage Impossible is introducing today is a ground product and not pre-formed into a patty shape like Beyond Meat’s retail sausage.

During a video chat this week, Michael Bortinger, Senior Manager of Retail Marketing at Impossible Foods told me why. “We always want to bring more products in different forms,” he said. “There really isn’t a ground sausage form in the segment right now. It’s a white space for us.” Bortinger said that the ground form will give the product more versatility to be used in casseroles, sandwiches and more.

Just like the Impossible Burger, the new Impossible Sausage uses heme as one of its ingredients. Because heme is derived from genetically modified ingredients, it does not yet have approval to be sold in the European Union. As such, Impossible is currently focused on the U.S. with this launch. Bortinger said that by the end of the year Impossible Sausage will be available in 13,000 stores domestically.

Impossible said its sausage has 30 percent fewer calories, 47 percent less total fat and 43 percent less saturated fat when cooked and “compared to the leading pork ground sausage.” Impossible’s Savory Sausage has 380mg of sodium per serving, and the Spicy version has 370mg, representing 17 and 16 percent of the daily recommended allowance, respectively. A similar sized package of Jimmy Dean pork sausage contains 415mg of sodium. One serving size of Beyond Meat Classic Sausage Patties (two patties) has 270mg of sodium.

In advance of this post, Impossible sent me samples of the new sausage to try out and it is definitely versatile. We made standalone patties, breakfast sandwiches, breakfast burritos and even mixed it in with some mac n’ cheese. The sausage is indeed delicious, though a little watery in its texture. While there is versatility with the sausage, there is also extra work to cook it. A frozen Beyond Sausage Patty is easy to throw in the oven to heat up as you whip up a morning sandwich. The Impossible Sausage is “raw,” so it takes more work and preparation (forming patties, frying up) and is messier. But having said that, Impossible Sausage will definitely be on my shopping list as I try to reduce the amount of meat I buy.

Ono Food Rebrands as Hyphen, Launches Makeline Food Assembly Robot to Work in Tandem with Humans

One of the questions that always comes up when talking about food robots is what will happen to the human workers. Coming out of stealth mode today, Hyphen‘s answer is to have its robot work alongside people. Well, technically, to have the robots work underneath them..

Hyphen launched its Makeline assembly robot today, which is meant to help fast casual restaurants quickly and accurately make meals for pick-up and delivery without taking up any additional space. Perhaps the easiest way to think about the Makeline is to picture a Sweetgreen (Hyphen has not announced a deal with Sweetgreen, I’m just using it as an illustrative example). When you’re physically at a Sweetgreen, you order at a counter, and a worker there goes down the line with you, adding the ingredients you want to your meal.

With Hyphen’s Makeline, that counter of ingredients is still there, as is the person. But the magic happens underneath the counter, where a robotic system dispenses ingredients from the same trays used above the counter to assemble electronic orders. In effect, the Makeline is doubling the output of a restaurant’s counter system with humans taking in-person orders and the robot handling off-prem ones.

In addition to saving space, the Makeline is also modular, so restaurants can lengthen and shorten it as needed. Additional modules can be for more ingredients, and there are beverage dispensing modules, re-heating modules, mixing modules, lid and label modules, and staging modules that hold multiple items for pickup.

Hyphen’s Makeline is able to make 350+ meals per hour, and the initial cost is $10,000 for implementation and integration. After that there is an undisclosed per-use fee. In a video chat last week, Hyphen Co-Founder and CEO Stephen Klein told me that his company has signed deals with eight partners, seven of which are fast casual restaurants and one of which is a co-packer for a grocer.

But it’s not just a new robot that Hyphen is debuting today, Hyphen is actually the new name and direction for what was once Ono Foods Co. Ono made a robotic smoothie making system that fit in the back of a van so it could move to different spots throughout the day. Ono Food also had ambitions to be an owned and operated restaurant brand. But Ono launched in October of 2019 which, of course, was just months before the pandemic hit the U.S. in full force. So Ono retrenched, laid off staff and pivoted.

Klein said Hyphen was able to re-purpose its original technology. “We leveraged the same technology to make smoothies to make plates,” he said. Additionally, the company hasn’t lost those mobile roots, as Klein said Hyphen’s Makeline can still fit in a van. “The technology is still mobile [and] can fit in van or ghost kitchen, it doesn’t matter the environment,” he said. “A lot of our partners want to be in spaces that don’t have four walls. It might make sense to have a mobile kitchen.”

As it moves from smoothies to food assembly, however, Hyphen is facing a more competitive market offering a variety of solutions. Picnic‘s assembly robot offers a similar modular design that will eventually be able to accommodate foods like burritos and sandwiches, but it only works with pizza toppings right now. Karakuri and RobotEatz are more autonomous standalone kiosks, but can be customized to create a wide variety of hot and cold dishes.

The biggest selling point for Hyphen, however, will most likely be the space it saves restaurants. By adding a robotic layer to existing dish assembly workstations, Hyphen not only answers the question of what to do with human workers (keep them), but also solves the problem of where a new robotic system would go.

WoodSpoon Raises $14M to Expand its Home Chef Marketplace

WoodSpoon, the New York City-based online marketplace where home chefs can make their food available for ordering and on-demand delivery, announced today that it has raised a $14 million Series A round of funding. Restaurant Brands International (RBI) led the round with participation from World Trade Ventures, Victor Lazarte and other individual investors. This brings the total amount of funding raised by WoodSpoon to $16 million.

WoodSpoon is part of a slowly but steadily rising movement of startups such as DishDivvy and Shef that enable home cooks to sell their wares online. WoodSpoon vets potential home cooks for safety, sanitation and food quality before admitting them on to the platform. Once a chef is onboarded, WoodSpoon takes care of the logistics like insurance and delivery, and even helps with things like food photos and videos to better tell chefs’ stories. WoodSpoon currently operates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, where users download the WoodSpoon app or visit the website, order a meal and have it delivered in 30 to 40 minutes.

Oren Saar, Co-Founder and CEO of WoodSpoon told me during a video chat last week that the company currently has 150 active home chefs on its platform (“active” means they’ve cooked meals for sale two times in the past month). Saar also said that 35 percent of customers who buy their first meal on WoodSpoon buy an additional three meals on the service within 17 days.

Selling home-cooked meals is still very much a new idea, and regulations are still being worked out on a state-by-state basis. Because of this, Saar said that WoodSpoon puts a lot of effort into educating potential customers about the idea of buying your neighbor’s home cooked meals. Part of that process, Saar said, was putting the chefs front and center, highlighting the home cooks themselves and the kitchens where meals are made. “You can read everything about the chef making your food,” Saar said, “That should reduce the automatic bias.”

WoodSpoon’s funding is the second big raise we’ve seen from a home cook marketplace this summer, as Shef raised $20 million in June. Shef is a little different from WoodSpoon however, as Shef isn’t on-demand. It delivers prepared meals cold that are then heated up by the customer.

With its new capital, Saar said that WoodSpoon will expand to cover all of New York City before moving on to be in up to 15 different markets across the U.S. Worth noting about this funding round is that it’s led by RBI, which owns the famous QSR brands Burger King, Popeye’s and Tim Horton’s. RBI’s involvement could possibly help accelerate regulatory clarity and acceptance of legalized home cooking across the country, and perhaps it could even help create mini home cook moguls go from neighborhood business to national brand.

Kiwibot and Sodexo Bringing Delivery Robots to Three Colleges

Kiwibot and Sodexo are expanding their existing relationship to bring food delivery robots to three new college campuses this month. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Kiwibots will be rolling out to New Mexico State University, Loyola Marymount University in California, and Gonzaga University in Washington state.

Founded in 2017, Kiwibot makes a squat, rover-sized robot that scurries along sidewalks to securely deliver food and drinks to consumers. Kiwibot first partnered with Sodexo in September of 2020 to bring delivery robots to the University of Denver campus. For these new school delivery programs, students will be able to use their meal plans to pay for food through the local delivery app Bite+. Each campus is getting between 25 and 30 robots, and there will be a $2 delivery plus 10 percent of the order size fee.

That college campuses are getting food delivery robots is nothing new. Starship has been steadily rolling out its robot program to schools across the country for the past couple of years (and announced this morning it has added four more colleges). But Kiwibot and Starship are taking two different approaches. Starship requires users to download the Starship app in order to make deliveries. Kiwibot initially started out using a similar marketplace model, but then abandoned that approach when it pivoted to more of a B2B play and partnered with Sodexo.

Interest in robot delivery was accelerated by the pandemic as contactless food delivery became more important to stop the spread of the virus. Even outside of the COVID pandemic, robots could find more use at colleges, which are packed with kids in dorms. The ability to get food delivered by a robot so a sick person doesn’t have to leave their room and go to the food hall is probably a good thing all around.

In April of this year, Kiwibot announced v4.0 of its robot, along with a manufacturing agreement with Segway. In addition to its college campus program, Kiwibot is now making deliveries in San Jose and Santa Monica in California, Dallas, Texas, Taipei, Taiwan and Medellin, Colombia.