Joy Chen

March 23, 2022

The Food Robot Roundup: Zomato Invests in Mukunda, Ramen on Wheels

The last few weeks have been pretty eventful in the food robotics space. Here’s our latest food robot roundup to catch you up on some of the most interesting stories.

Strio.AI Says Goodbye to Agtech With Zoox Acquihire

Strio.AI, a Boston-based robotics company founded by MIT alumnus in 2020, was acquired by Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon. Strio.AI automates the picking and pruning strawberry crops and has been tested on farms in California and Florida.

Automating fruit picking is challenging, which is why Strio.AI’s fast pace of testing is impressive. However, Zoox is looking to utilize Strio.AI’s expertise to bulk up its computer vision team, which means the Strio.AI team will be winding down its agtech business. The Strio team will lead Zoox’s Perception product, the computer vision software that drives Zoox’s automation.

The Strio.AI deal is just the latest in a string of agtech automation acquisitions. Last month, strawberry-picking robot Traptic was acquired by Bowery, a New York based vertical farm, and pivoted from outdoor to indoor farming. Traptic was founded in 2016 and claims to pick 100,000 strawberries a day, preserving the fruit by pulling by the stem and not touching the strawberry directly. The technology will be adapted and integrated into Bowery’s existing hardware and software since the original tractor-like system isn’t conducive in a vertical farming environment. In April 2021, Root.ai, a company with a machine that picks grape tomatoes with a three-pronged robotic gripper, was acquired by AppHarvest, the operator of the largest greenhouse in the U.S. and now uses four- and eight-fingered grippers to pick strawberries and cucumbers. Since acquisition, picking rates have doubled and the next step is to reduce the costs of the robot.

NVIDIA Invests in Serve Robotics

NVIDIA is investing $10 million in Serve Robotics to expand its sidewalk robot delivery service outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco. While NVIDIA is a new investor in the robotic delivery space, the two companies are familiar with one another as Serve utilizes NVIDIA’s synthetic data generation tools for training and testing Serve’s models in simulations as well as robotic fleet management.

Serve is a fully automated and fully self-driving last-mile delivery service and the startup raised $13 million in an expanded seed round in December. Last-mile delivery services, both on the ground and in the sky have seen significant growth in recent years as the pandemic increased delivery orders. As the sidewalks and streets get more crowded, here’s a table to help you understand the little robots you might be sharing the roads within the near future.

Zomato Invests in Mukunda

Indian multinational food delivery company Zomato has acquired a 16.66% stake in Mukunda Foods, a food robotics company that designs and manufactures smart robotic equipment for restaurant automation. The stake comes with a price tag of $5 million. The deal puts Mukunda at $30 million valuation.

Mukunda Foods offers end-to-end kitchen automation solutions for QSR and Cloud brands and their six products have been installed in over 2000 locations. Their unique proposition is Nucleus, kitchen automation as a service (KAAS), which enables brands to expand cloud kitchens to new locations with a fully operational kitchen equipped with automated equipment, no rentals on property, no operational concerns, high consistency of products, and highly scalable profits. They’ve already partnered with several brands in Bangalore and plan to expand to other cities in India.

There are a lot of opportunities for synergy since Mukunda Foods serves ghost kitchens and the ghost kitchens on Zomato have carved niches with loyal customer bases. There’s also a significant market opportunity since the Indian cloud kitchen market is projected to be between $2 and $2.8 billion USD by 2025.

Ramen on wheels

In a commercial that debuted this month, Nissan showcased the e-4ORCE technology on its new Ariya by putting it on a self-driving car that delivers hot bowls of ramen to customers. The technology is designed to reduce abruptness and swaying for passenger comfort which is great for making sure that ramen soup doesn’t spill. On the Ramen Counter, the soup bowl sits on a flat tray and twin electric motors independently control the front and rear wheels.

Unfortunately, it looks like this is more of a concept for advertising the Nissan Ariya and Nissan probably won’t make this available commercially but it’s cool to imagine a fresh bowl of ramen zooming down the counter to you. You can watch the video below.

March 15, 2022

We Tried Next Meats Plant-Based Beef and Steak. Here’s Our Review.

One of the most frustrating aspects of eating at dining halls as a college student is the difficulty of finding a quality protein that will make a filling meal. This is probably why I’ve adopted an almost vegetarian diet and although I’m thinking of going fully plant-based, I still sometimes miss the taste of meat. So when Next Meats sent me samples of their plant-based short rib, skirt steak, and beef bowl, I decided to see if I could fully commit to a diet of less meat.

Next Meats was founded in 2017 in Japan by Ryo Shirai and Hideyuki Sasaki. After three years of research and development, their first products were launched in 2020 and they currently sell plant-based skirt steak, short rib, beef gyudon and chicken. The company, which opened up a new production facility in 2021, launched in the US market early this year and now can be found in supermarkets on the East Coast and California, as well as online for delivery.

*Uncooked* *Next Meat in the frying pan*

I invited a vegetarian friend over to try it because I wanted to get her thoughts on it as well. It was my first time cooking plant-based meat, even though I’ve eaten things like Impossible and Beyond Meat. My friend also doesn’t cook a lot of plant-based meat and typically eats eggs and beans since they’re easier to cook and cheaper.

Next Meats’ products came frozen, and although they can be refrigerated, I kept it frozen and found that it didn’t take long to go from frozen to cooked. We cooked it the way we normally cook meat in a frying pan and ate it with white rice. Since the samples were pre-cooked and pre-seasoned, we didn’t add anything else to the pan except some oil. At first, it was a bit difficult to cook because the product started as a single, unappetizing chunk, and there weren’t any instructions on the packet about how to best cook the meat.

We used a spatula to separate it and it gradually began to look more like meat. Although we were concerned about how long to cook it for and whether it would be better tender or seared, the smell and texture of the meat helped us decide when it was done cooking. Compared to normal meat, the plant-based meat had a similar crispy texture on the outside edges when seared and smelled the same, which is probably because of the way it is seasoned.

The flavor of the short rib wasn’t very meaty and it reminded us of Chinese vegetarian duck which is made from bean curd. In fact, all of the samples Next Meats sent me reminded me of that dish which is likely because they are made from non-GMO soy. I liked the flavor of the skirt steak more because it was sweeter and we could taste the flavor of sesame oil.

My favorite was the beef bowl and it felt easier to cook since the beef was already shredded; even though it still came as a frozen chunk, it was easier to separate and to eat. The flavor was very authentic and reminded me of how my mom prepares beef, which has been hard for me to imitate. It had the perfect balance of sweet and salty, and the pieces of onion were a nice addition.

Overall, we enjoyed trying Next Meats’ meat and thought that they were tasty products, even if they didn’t taste exactly like real meat. And while Impossible and Beyond burgers taste more like regular meat, there aren’t many brands making plant-based meat inspired by Asian dishes which is why I would eat Next Meats’ plant-based meat again. The authentic flavors, combined with the convenience of the frozen packaging, makes it an easy and filling meal.

March 6, 2022

The Food Robot Roundup: Alfred Joins the Military, Wings Hits Milestone

While much has been made about White Castle rolling out the Flippy 2 fry station robot to 100 more of its 350 locations, we thought we’d take this chance to showcase some smaller news stories from the food robot universe in this week’s food robot roundup.

Robot Chefs Enlist in The Military

We’ve seen food robots in restaurants, hospitals, universities, and malls, but placing them on military bases is new. The U.S. Department of Defense is deploying Dexai Robotics’ automated sous chefs to ten military U.S. military bases. The robotic arms use AI and computer vision to interact with their surroundings and use standard kitchen utensils to prepare various meals. The ten robots will cost the department $1.6 million to reduce food waste, improve sanitation, and keep facilities adequately staffed. The first one was deployed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield California at the end of last year in a dining facility that serves around 950 people a day.

For Dexai, the news is just another sign of the company’s momentum. The Boston-based startup also recently made news through a new trial of its robotic system with Gordon, one of the biggest foodservice companies in the country. The two companies are trialing Alfred, the salad-assembly robot at Gordon’s developmental test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Wing’s Flock Grows

Drone service Wing announced this week that it had completed 200,000 commercial deliveries, with a significant amount of them in its primary market of Australia. It makes more than 1,000 deliveries a day and has Australia’sring with Coles, one of Australia’s leading supermarket chains.

The partnership will involve Wing making deliveries in Canberra, Australia’s capital, and sparks debate of the efficacy and viability of drone deliveries in rural vs. urban areas. In some cases, such as when Australian-based drone company Swoop Aero has delivered Pfizer vaccines to Malawi, drones have been used to deliver critical supplies (like medicine) to hard-to-reach areas. Vaccines require ultra-cold chain conditions, and the Swoop Aero drones can bypass global supply chain bottlenecks to distribute vaccines in remote communities. In the case of a city-based delivery like with Wing, drone delivery can reduce traffic congestion, accidents, and greenhouse gas emissions.

In general, last-mile delivery has been rapidly growing and this week multicultural grocery delivery service Weee! announced $425 million in funding. We also covered Kiwibot’s $7.5M pre-series A funding a few weeks ago and the global last mile delivery market size is projected to be $128.54 billion USD this year.

The Turnkey Robotic Restaurant

You’ve heard of software-as-a-service and even robots-as-a-service, but have you heard of restaurants-as-a-service? This week Nala Robotics debuted Nala Marketplace, a network of customizable robotic chefs that can prepare recipes from various cuisines and enable restaurateurs to launch a new digital restaurant in a day. The marketplace goes hand-in-hand with the robot kitchens Nala produces, which involve a system of multiple robots using articulating arms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to prepare, cook, and serve food.

Restaurant chefs and owners will be able to upload recipes and menu items to the secure database and create a virtual storefront. From there, customers will be able to access these menu items and place orders sent directly to the chefs in the robot kitchen. It all sounds very futuristic, but the first Nala Marketplace location opened last month in Naperville, Illinois, where several other restaurants by Nala Robotics are operating.

According to Ajay Sunkara, cofounder and CEO of Nala Robotics, Nala Marketplace reduces labor expenses by 60 percent, and restaurants can be set up in less than 24 hours. This has significant benefits for restaurant owners since upfront costs and labor costs can make it difficult to start a restaurant. Additionally, the flexibility of the robots to make food from many cuisines expands the options beyond the capabilities of human chefs and could also enable restaurateurs to start ghost kitchens.

Meet Dashbotics

After acquiring robotic bowl food vending machine startup Chowbotics last year, it seems that they’re expanding their food robot plans internally as well. Doordash filed trademark applications in December and early February for the names Dashbotics, Tex-Mess, and Queso Your Way. The first could indicate a plan to integrate Chowbotics into Doordash and position the platform as a white-label offering for other restaurants to launch their own consumer-facing kiosks, or it could be a sign of Doordash looking to leverage their own brand for the robotic kiosks.

February 21, 2022

Food Robot Roundup: Delivery Bots Explore New Areas, Yum China’s Robot-Powered Expansion

It’s been a busy few weeks for restaurant robots. In this edition of the food robot roundup, we’ve got updates on the expanding map for a couple of food delivery bots, Jamba & Blendid’s growing relationship, Yum China’s increasing reliance on robots, and more.

Let’s get to it.

Coco delivery bot expands beyond California

Coco has spread its wings. The food delivery robot startup has expanded to Austin, Texas, the first city outside of its home state of California. This expansion is thanks in part to the Series A funding round of $36 million that it raised last August. Coco launches with ten partners in Austin, including Arpeggio Grill, Bamboo Bistro, Clay Pit, DeSano Pizzeria, Tuk Tuk Thai, and Aviator Pizza.

Coco makes a four-wheeled, cooler-sized robot that delivers food and beverages. Coco prepositions its robot at merchant locations in dense city environments and advertises that it completes deliveries in 30 minutes or less. The company has indicated Austin is only its first stop in Texas as it has plans to expand to other cities in the Lonestar state.

Kiwibot, another robot delivery service, announced that they’ve raised $7.5M pre-series A funding and closed an expansion deal with Sodexo, a food services and facilities management company. They currently have 200 robots operating in 10 campuses and are on track to expand to 1200 robots and 50 locations by the end of 2022.

Kiwibot, which was founded at the University of California, Berkeley, has long-targeted college campuses, ideal locations for food delivery robots with their dense populations of hungry college students, and protected pedestrian walkways. Besides the slew of robots making deliveries on campuses, consumer-facing food kiosks (more on that later) and autonomous retail shopping have also been moving in.

Jamba and Blendid expand to two more campuses

Jamba and Blendid have expanded their reach to two more college campuses, Georgia College and Kennesaw State University. The co-branded Jamba by Blendid smoothie kiosks offer a quick and convenient way to pick up a healthy smoothie and will be located in each school’s student union.

University campuses are a great way for Jamba by Blendid to tap into a market that is open to using technology and usually doesn’t have easy access to healthy food like smoothies. Blendid has plans to expand its kiosks into other locations such as gyms, hospitals, and airports, which means the company will need to adapt to different customer buying behavior and preferences. At universities, Blendid offers flavors of the week or theme-based drinks to keep students engaged and coming back.

Hyphen Raises $24 Million Series A

Hyphen, a startup that automates the back-of-house food assembly for restaurants, just announced a $24m Series A funding round led by Tiger Global.

The company’s flagship product is the Makeline, a modular robotic food assembly line. Workers focus on taking the orders and the machine combines ingredients and can generate 350+ meals per hour. KitchenOS, the software powering the Makeline, utilizes data from the robotic assembly line and other inputs to optimize workflows, recipe development, and food scheduling.

Hyphen’s modular system means that restaurants can add or take away modules and choose ones that precisely fit their needs, such as dispensing, reheating, and mixing. According to company CEO Stephen Klein, the company currently has 11 customers who have pre-ordered the Makeline.

You can catch the Spoon’s interview with Hyphen’s CEO and co-founder Stephen Klein here.

Yum China expands stores without workers

Yum China, a Chinese restaurant group that spun off from U.S. parent Yum Brands in 2016, has expanded its number of stores while keeping its labor force the same, in part by increased use of AI and robotics. The group operates restaurants such as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell and has increased the number of stores by 56% from 7,652 in 2016 to 11,788 in 2021. However, the company has kept the same number of employees during the same period at 420,000 full and part-time staff.

Yum China has managed this by leveraging a variety of restaurant technology. The company has installed touch screen panels to automate the ordering process and has installed robots in its KFC to serve soft-serve ice cream in several Chinese cities. Yum has installed digital lockers store takeout orders in other locations.

Yum China’s increased reliance on automation is just one sign of the rapid adoption of restaurant technology adoption in the Chinese fast food sector. Other examples include this restaurant in Foshan, a city in Guangdong’s southern province, where a robot prepares and serves fast food dishes. Robotic arms prepare the food and then robot waiters and a conveyor-belt system deliver the food.

In case you missed it, I discussed cultural differences in openness to technology adoption in the last roundup, where I discussed the robots serving food to Olympians in Beijing. It’ll be interesting to see if the high profile of robots at the Olympics will lead to more acceptance of food robots in the United States or more hesitation.

February 9, 2022

The Food Robot News Roundup: China’s Olympic Foodbots, Nuro Gen 3

As Spoon readers know, food robots are everywhere nowadays. So to keep you current on all the goings-on in this fast-moving market, we’re launching a weekly roundup of the top stories at the intersection of food and automation. Let’s get to it.

Metal and medals

Photo: NBC Sports

This video from Reuters shows the futuristic robotics used at the Winter Olympics this year. In an effort to minimize human contact and reduce the spread of the coronavirus, China has installed robot waiters and bartenders to prepare and deliver food in the main media center. Food can be ordered by scanning a code with your phone, but perhaps the most futuristic is the tracks running along the ceiling, where orders are lifted straight from the automated kitchen and lowered to tables.

It’s been interesting to see how the rest of the world has reacted to the robots in China. Eastern cultures tend to be more accepting of robot technology while some western media outlets have covered it with a more dystopian perspective. But having robots at the Olympics isn’t a new concept. The mascots for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics were robots and the Games utilized robots in several ways to make events more efficient and safe. So as the Winter Olympics kick off, I’ll be watching the athletes compete but thinking about the robots behind the scenes that make their lives easier.

Apples and Oranges

Wavemaker Labs acquired Abundant Robotics’ IP last year, adding to its portfolio of seed to fork robotics that also includes the likes of Miso Robotics, Future Acres, and Nommi. The company is now incorporated as Abundant Robots, Inc and is part of the Wavemaker Labs portfolio.

Now, they are seeking equity crowdfunding to raise money to leverage existing technology to build a new apple-picking robot. The goal is to use the computer vision and machine learning technology that was acquired to build a cheaper and more efficient apple-picking robot.

Many of Wavemaker’s other portfolio companies have also used equity crowdfunding to raise capital (Piestro just launched its third campaign). Equity crowdfunding can serve as a way to give consumers a vested interest in the success of the venture and can be used as a way to market the company as well. Outside of Future Acres, most of Wavemaker’s companies have been more consumer-focused than Abundant Robots. Since Abundant Robots is a highly technical venture and consumers won’t be interacting with it directly, it’ll be interesting to see how Wavemaker applies the same funding strategy they use for consumer-facing products.

Share the roads

Founded by two ex-Google Car/Waymo employees, Nuro announced that they have finalized the development of their third-generation driverless delivery vehicles, called “Nuro.” Nuro is 20% smaller in width than the average passenger car and designed to operate on the roads, unlike other delivery robots like Starship and Serve Robotics that operate on the sidewalks (more on those later).

However, unlike autonomous vehicles like Waymo, Nuro doesn’t house any passengers. Instead, it contains two modular cargo compartments that hold food and can be changed between heating and cooling what’s inside. Because Nuro doesn’t hold any passengers, it’s cheaper to build and the company recently announced that they are building factories to begin production. Additionally, Nuro doesn’t have to sacrifice passenger comfort for safety and even features an external airbag to protect pedestrians and cyclists.

While the hybrid between autonomous vehicle and delivery robot is unique, perhaps the most fascinating use case for Nuro is as a roving grocery store. A photo in the announcement video shows Nuro stocked with fresh produce. It’ll be interesting to see if this new technology is leveraged by grocery stores as they implement their dark grocery store strategies.

Starship to the moon

Starship Technologies, the San Francisco based autonomous delivery robot company, just received €50 million from the European Investment Bank, the funding arm of the European Union. Although the company launched in 2017, demand skyrocketed (no pun intended) during the pandemic when customers were staying at home or minimizing their contact with other people. Since then, it’s made more than 2.4 million commercial deliveries and traveled over 3 million miles globally.

In case you missed it: Food robotics coverage from the Spoon

Bolk, a French robotics startup that makes bowls, announced on Friday that it has raised €4 million in funding.
Yo-kai’s self-driving ramen vending robot will be making an appearance at the Super Bowl pre-party in LA next week.
Pizza Hut and Hyper Robotics teamed up to launch a fully automated containerized pizzeria in the parking lot of a mall in Bnei Dror, a city in central Israel.
Serve Robotics recently announced that the company’s sidewalk delivery robot has reached Level 4 autonomy.

January 22, 2022

Armored Fresh Debuted Its Vegan Korean Mochi at CES. Here’s Our Review

Armored Fresh is the U.S. subsidiary of Yangyoo, the Korea-based food tech company behind Korea’s first vegan cheese and other food alternatives aimed at helping the environment. This January, Armored Fresh was the first Korean company to showcase at the convention’s first “Food Technology” section at CES and is preparing to enter global markets.

I visited the Armored Fresh booth at CES and tried a couple of their products: the vegan cube cheese and the vegan cheese cream dduk. The plain cube cheese had a very mild cheese flavor and a crumbly texture that I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t really like it because I expected it to be either soft and spreadable or hard and firm when I bit down, and it was neither.

Although I wasn’t a big fan of the vegan cube cheese, I thoroughly enjoyed the vegan cheese cream dduk. Dduk is a type of Korean rice cake made with steamed rice flour that resembles mochi, and Armored Fresh’s contains cream made from coconut oil. While there are some vegan mochi ice cream products on the market in the United States, few product lines are entirely dedicated to vegan mochi and none are as traditional as Armored Fresh.

The dduk was perfectly soft and had a light chew, and the texture of the cream inside tasted similar to ice cream since the dduk is meant to be stored frozen and eaten slightly thawed. I tried three flavors: corn, rice milk, and injeolmi. The corn flavor was very subtle and fresh, which I liked because I’m not fond of the artificial taste of some corn-flavored products. The rice milk was my favorite because it had a smooth sweetness and reminded me of the mochi I grew up eating. The injeolmi had a unique flavor that was nutty and fragrant. For those that haven’t tried injeolmi before, it is a Korean sweet rice cake made with glutinous rice flour and covered with powdered dried beans and often roasted soybean. The Armored Fresh injeolmi flavor reminded me of roasted soybean or sesame. The cream inside each flavor that I tried had a smooth consistency and texture that didn’t make it obvious that it wasn’t made from real milk.

Armored Fresh will enter the U.S. market with several different cheese products, including vegan cream cheese in 8 different flavors, vegan cube cheese (also available in 8 different flavors), sliced cheese, and shredded cheese. Armored Fresh also plans to use this vegan cheese on its other brands, Young Man dduk, and Spaceman Pizza. Spaceman Pizza will feature flavors such as margherita, meatball, and kimchi with vegan meatballs made from soy-based meat. The company is also developing almond milk-based yogurt and ice cream.

Armored Fresh will be attending various food-centric shows in the coming months in Anaheim, Orlando, New York, and Chicago and plans to work with both national and local distributors to make their products available nationwide.

As alternative dairy gains traction in global markets, it will be interesting to see how ethnic products embrace innovation without compromising their foods’ traditions and cultural significance. Armored Fresh’s dduk balances both forces well, creating a product that honors tradition while adapting to changing times to be more sustainable. Above all, it’s delicious.

December 12, 2021

We Tried Kokada, a First-of-Its-Kind Sugar and Nut-Free Alternative Coconut Spread

Breanna Atkinson first stumbled upon a coconut spread while traveling in London for work a few years ago. She fell in love with it but couldn’t find anything like it in the United States. So what’d Atkinson do? She decided to make her own.

Atkinson worked on her vegan spread for 16 months before she began selling it under the Kokada brand in farmer’s markets in mason jars in October of 2020. It was a hit, and eventually, Atkinson began selling the spread in stores in North Carolina (Atkinson and her co-founder and fiance, Jared, both attended Duke). It’s now available online at Kodada’s website and Amazon and in 14 retail stores across the Mid-Atlantic region.

Kokada is made with less than 5 ingredients and without refined sugar, using mainly coconut and coconut treacle as a natural sweetener. What makes Kokada different from other spreads – other than its natural ingredients – is that it’s sold in the nut butter category even though coconut isn’t a nut. Coconut treacle is a healthier alternative to refined sugar and is ideal for people trying to avoid sugar spikes, such as parents of young kids or those who are diabetic.

In fact, most of Kokada’s customers are parents of young kids since they can’t pack their kids peanut butter because of allergies in schools. Their other target customer segment is people with nut allergies because their main alternative on the market is sunflower butter.

Kokada originally started with an original flavor, but people soon began asking for a flavor similar to Nutella (which is not vegan). Atkinson told me that their goal is to eventually have five different flavors, four permanent and one seasonal.

My roommates and I have at least five different dips or spreads in our room at a time, so when Atkinson offered me a sample, I had to try it out. Before Kokada, I had never heard of coconut spread (probably because Kokada is the first on the market in the US), so I was excited to try it.

We tried the original flavor, which is made with only coconut and coconut treacle as a sweetener, on top of a banana. The spread has a mild coconut flavor and a smooth texture with a few small pieces of coconut in it. I was surprised by the coconut flavor since I’ve never had it in a spread, and it was a bit sweeter than I expected. I also tried it as a sweetener in my matcha latte, and I liked the subtle coconut flavor it added but was a bit caught off guard by the coconut pieces in my drink.

We tried the brownie flavor, which I liked more than the original flavor. It had a very realistic brownie flavor without the overly artificial sweetness of Nutella. I added IT on top of a waffle and on top of some pancakes. A little bit goes a long way, but it complemented the pancakes and fruit very well. It’s since become one of my breakfast staples as I like the way the sweetness doesn’t give me a sugar overload in the morning.

Kokada will be focusing on developing their flavors and launching in major retailers in the next year, so keep an eye out for a jar on a shelf near you soon!

Joy Chen

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