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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Behind the Bot

Miso Robotics Announces Commercial Availability of Flippy ROAR

Miso Robotics today announced the commercial availability of its cooking bot, Flippy Robot on a Rail (ROAR). The company also announced that it is working with TimePayment so restaurants interested in adding Flippy to their kitchens can do so with no upfront cost.

Introduced earlier this year, ROAR literally flipped Flippy upside down. Earlier versions of Flippy were installed on the floor of a kitchen, but the redesign inverted that set up, suspending Flippy on rails above ground, thus adding more mobility and freeing up room for human co-workers.

Flippy ROAR has actually already been hard at work in a pilot program at a Chicago-area White Castle since July, and with today’s announcement Miso is looking to expand its footprint to even more QSRs and beyond.

“We really want to drive Miso to serving mom and pops,” Buck Jordan, President and Chairman, Miso Robotics told me by phone this week, adding that the company has received a lot of inbound interest from restaurants of all sizes. “Now it’s easier,” he said.

It’s easier because Miso isn’t charging $30,000 upfront for Flippy any longer. Through TimePayment’s financing options, restaurants of any size can get their own Flippy for $2,000 a month, which includes the setup maintenance and software.

Still, $2,000 is still a lot for an industry that operates on thin margins, especially when those margins are more uncertain than ever. With the COVID pandemic closing many dine-in options, restaurants have had to rely on delivery. But third party delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats can charge high commission fees that severely eat into any profits a restaurant might see from delivery.

Jordan said the Flippy can help improve the food delivery experience for restaurants. Flippy’s software now integrates with a restaurant’s ordering platform to help process incoming delivery orders from different third party delivery services. So if a restaurant gets orders at various times from DoorDash, Uber Eats and GrubHub, Flippy’s software can look at when orders come in and pickup ETAs to coordinate cook times for each part of each order. The result is that food doesn’t sit for a long period of time under a heat lamp, waiting for the delivery driver, which should result in fresher food for the end customer.

Flippy could also have the ability to alter the labor economics of a restaurant. Yes, $2,000 isn’t cheap, but a robot can work around the clock, won’t get sick, and has the ability to help create more social distance in the kitchen. If a robot can take over the repetitive and sometimes dangerous tasks of operating the grill and fry stations, restaurants might be able to shift human labor to more higher skilled jobs.

In addition to smart cooking workflows, Flippy is now able to learn how to cook more foods faster. Jordan said that it takes roughly a day of data crunching for it to learn to cook a new item. One such new item Flippy added to its roster is the plant-based Impossible Burgers.

Miso’s announcement comes while the company is in the midst of running its equity crowdfunding campaign. The company has so far raised more than $7.8 million from investors so far.

Tennant Debuts New, Smaller Brain OS-based Floor-Scrubbing Bot

Tennant, a company that designs and manufacturers cleaning systems, announced today the debut of its new T380AMR Robotic Floor Scrubber, which is powered by Brain Corp.’s Brain OS. The new robot is smaller than other versions of Tennant’s floor scrubbers, allowing the robot to navigate smaller spaces.

The Brain OS is used by a number of different robot manufacturers for a variety purposes including scrubbing and vacuuming floors. Brain-powered robots can autonomously traverse store aisles cleaning, all while avoiding people and other obstacles.

The COVID crisis is placing a spotlight on store sanitation. According to Brain Robots can provide a more thorough cleaning that is also verfiable (you can check the software to see where the robot has been). Additionally, shifting the dull, repetitive work of floor scrubbing over to a robot frees up humans to do other higher-skilled tasks like customer service.

Floor-scrubbing robots are part of a larger move grocery retail is making towards automation. In addition to floor scrubbers, we’re also seeing robots from Bossa Nova and Simbe Robotics autonomously scan shelves to check inventory, and companies like Takeoff and Fabric build out robot-powered automated fulfillment.

T380AMR Ride-On Robotic Scrubber | Product Overview | Tennant Company

Brain-powered floor scrubbing robots are already being used by Walmart, as well as other retailers like Schnuck Markets, Kroger and Giant Eagle.

The news from Tennant today is interesting because a more diminutive robot is built to work in smaller stores with tighter spaces. While no pricing information was made available, presumably this smaller version — meant for smaller stores — would be more affordable and open up autonomy to more stores.

In other words, be ready to see more robots when you go grocery shopping.

OrionStar Launched a New Coffee Robot in China

OrionStar, the robotics arm of Chinese company Cheetah Mobile, jumped into the automated coffee making space last week with the debut of its Robotic Coffee Master.

The Robotic Coffee Master combines two six-axis robotic arms, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to replicate the complex brewing techniques of human baristas such as curves and spirals. Right now the robot makes pour over coffees, using its robotic arms to do things like get the grounds into the filter, set the filter on top of the carafe and pour hot water over the grounds. The Robotic Coffee Master can make a cup of coffee in three minutes.

Unlike other robot coffee makers like Cafe X or Truebird or Briggo, the Robotic Coffee Master is not a full-on enclosed kiosk. Rather it is a squat-looking robot that can be set up in more open environments.

Perhaps once seen as more of a novelty, robotic coffee services could find renewed purpose in a post-pandemic world (whenever that will be). Robots can work around the clock without a break, but also remove a human vector of disease transmission to provide a contactless transaction for customer’s morning coffee.

As noted earlier, the automated coffee space already has a number of players like Cafe X, Truebird, and Briggo here in the U.S., but also international competitors such as Rozum Cafe, MontyCafe, FIBBEE, and Crown Coffee.

The good news is that a lot of people drink a lot of coffee all over the world, so there is plenty of opportunity for everyone involved. In China alone, the coffee market is expected to hit roughly $42.3 billion.

In a phone interview this week, Vincent Li, Head of Global Marketing and Sales, Robotic Solution at Cheetah Mobile, told me that his company is focusing on the Asian market right now. The Robotic Coffee Master sells for roughly $50,000 and the company has already sold 200 units.

Schnuck Markets Expands Use of Tally, Simbe Robotics’ Shelf-Scanning Robot

Missouri-based regional grocer Schnuck Markets announced today that it is expanding its use of Simbe Robotics‘ shelf-scanning Tally robot. Tally will be rolled out to an additional 46 stores, bringing the total number of Schnuck locations using the robot to 62.

Tally is a tall, autonomous robot that roams store aisles and uses a combination of computer vision and RFID to analyze on-shelf inventory. Simbe says that Tally is 14x better at detecting out-of-stock items than manual auditing, which results in a 20 percent reduction in out-of-stock items.

Schnucks first started using Tally in the summer of 2017 and expanded that pilot in 2018. It takes Tally about three hours to scan the roughly 35,000 products per store, but it helps give store managers a closer-to-real time assessment of store inventory throughout the day.

In-store inventory accuracy is perhaps more important than ever. The early stages of the COVID pandemic and subsequent panic shopping meant staples were out of stock at stores across the country. Even though those dark times passed and stores are back to being fully stocked, grocers are girding for the holidays and potential a virus resurgence over the coming months by stocking up.

When I interviewed him in August, Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, said that Tally can not only help with shocks to the system like what happened with the pandemic, but can also help provide more accurate inventory data for the increase in online grocery shopping. As anyone who has shopped for groceries online can attest, a big gap in inventory data means what you order may not actually be in stock when you pick it up at the store or it arrives by delivery.

Schnucks isn’t the only market that’s investing automation. Walmart is adding 1,000 Bossa Nova shelf-scanning robots to its workforce, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies robots throughout the midwest.

In addition to Schnucks, Simbe is also working with Giant Eagle supermarkets here in the U.S. After an initial set up fee, Simbe makes its money by charging between $2,000 – $4,000 per month per store, depending on the size and number of stores.

Bear Robotics and SoftBank Debut New Servi Restaurant Robot

Good-bye, Penny. Hello Servi.

Bear Robotics and SoftBank announced their new food service robot, dubbed Servi, at an event in Tokyo today. The new robot is actually a redesigned version of Bear’s Penny, an autonomous server robot that shuttles food and empty dishware between the front and back of house of a restaurant.

SoftBank is actually an investor in Bear Robotics, and led Bear’s $32 million Series A round that closed at the beginning of the year. The two companies have been working closely on Servi, and will focus initially on the Japanese market, where Bear has already lined up Denny’s as a customer.

Servi is coming to market at a time of heightened interest in automation in the restaurant industry. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased scrutiny over the amount and types of human-to-human interactions that happen when dining out. Robots like Servi can also work long hours without a break, won’t call in sick and don’t have to worry about awkward exchanges with customers over wearing their masks (e.g., taking a mask off to eat, putting it back on when ordering).

But Bear is not alone in the robot server space. With players like PuduTech and Keenon Robotics, server robots could quickly become a commodity, with restaurants just opting for the lowest cost option.

John Ha, Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, told me by phone last week that Bear’s robots are different from the competition because of their full autonomous driving (no need for special tags to be placed on ceilings) and easier set up.

Ha was in South Korea at the time because Bear has an office in Seoul and that is where the company will be manufacturing Servi. This scaled up production, Ha said, will be a way Bear can fend off newer startups looking to break into the robot space. “People without mass production won’t be close anytime soon, because mass production is not a joke,” Ha said.

South Korea will also be among the first markets for Bear, with Ha saying that they have received a lot of inbound interest from restaurants there. In South Korea, Bear will go up against Woowa Brothers, which teamed up with LG and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) to develop robot waiters as well.

As noted, the pandemic is accelerating the interest and adoption of food robots. So expect to be saying hello to a lot more robots like Servi in your not-too-distant dining future.

Updated: Kiwibot Partners with Sodexo to Roll Out Delivery Robots at the University of Denver

UPDATE: Some details of this story changed after we published this story:

  • The service is now launching in October. 
  • The delivery fee will start at $2.50, or it will be free with a monthly subscription.
  • Delivery will be available from a total of three restaurants.

Original post follows:

Kiwibot announced today that it has partnered with foodservice company Sodexo to bring robot food delivery to students, faculty and staff at the University of Denver.

Starting today, a fleet of 15 Kiwibots will be available to deliver food from Monday to Friday between the hours of 8 a.m and 6 p.m., with deliveries costing a flat $2.50 per order. Delivery will start with one campus restaurant before expanding to four more food options by mid-October. Kiwibot is also working with the city of Denver to enable off-campus deliveries at some point in October, as well.

There are a few things worth noting about this deal. First, this is Kiwi’s second bite at the apple when it comes to college delivery. Last year, the company delivered to UC Berkeley and had big plans to expand to a number of different schools across the U.S. Those plans never came to fruition, however and were abandoned. One reason that growth might not have happened last year was that Kiwibot was going through student groups, and not partnering with a school’s administration.

This time around, Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo, a huge company that provides foodservice to colleges across the U.S. This partnership brings with it more legitimacy for Kiwibot, and also provides an entrée, so to speak, with college administrations and restaurants at potential campuses.

That Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo is in itself interesting because Sodexo has an existing partnership with Kiwi rival, Starship, for robot deliveries on various colleges like George Mason University. The difference, however, is that Starship’s program requires users to download the Starship app. Kiwibot’s solution is more of a B2B play, and will integrate with a food ordering app from Sodexo. So it could provide Kiwibot with direct access to a greater number of Sodexo-run properties, should the partnership grow.

Kiwibot have been on a bit of a, err, roll lately. In July the company launched a restaurant delivery program in the city of San Jose, CA. Kiwibot is also in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign, which aims to raise $1 million.

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.

Saga Robotics Raises €9.5M for its UV Light Ag Robot

Saga Robotics, which makes an autonomous robotic platform for agriculture, announced this week that it has raised €9.5 million Euros (~$11.35 million USD). Hortidaily writes that the investment was led by Nysnø Climate Investments with ADM Capital Europe and the Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund, with participation from other Norwegian investors.

The Saga Robotics’ platform, dubbed “Thorvald,” is modular and can accomplish a number of different tasks on a farm. We recently wrote about how its UV-light capabilities are being used to kill off mildew on crops without the use of pesticides. According to the Saga Robotics website, Thorvald is also capable of “picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage, spraying and data collection/crop prediction.”

Saga’s funding comes at a time when robotics are poised to play a more central role in our agriculture system. In traditional agriculture, farm workers often have to deal with extreme temperatures and other environmental conditions and hazards. The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated and worsened these issues by impacting the flow of labor and becoming a source of outbreaks because of the cramped working conditions.

Robots can potentially help alleviate some of the stresses on farms. In addition to being able to work around the clock and in extreme heat, robots also also don’t get sick and reduce vectors for human-to-human disease transmission.

Saga is among a wave of robotics companies working on agricultural solutions. Small Robot Company, Farmwise, Advanced Farm Technologies, and Augean Robotics are just some of the companies coming to market with automated farm solutions.

Beastro is a Robot for Ghost Kitchens

As the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more people into ordering delivery from restaurants, the restaurant industry has responded by opening more ghost kitchens. And with more restaurants ditching the front of house for smaller-format, delivery-only operations, the logical next step is to automate as much of that new format as possible, which is now starting to happen.

Last week, Tel Aviv-based Kitchen Robotics unveiled the Beastro, a robotic ghost kitchen. The Beastro is an industrial-looking standalone kiosk that acts as a fully automated kitchen. The Beastro is 11 ft. 6 in. by five ft. 10 in. wide and 7 ft 2 inches tall, weighing in a 1,790 lbs. It can make 45 dishes an hour including Italian and Asian cuisines, as well as soups, salads and more. The Beastro starts at $5,990 a month.

As you can see from this promotional video, the Beastro is reminiscent of the Spyce Kitchen, with a series of grippers, conveyors and dispensers. The machine places all ingredients in a bowl, then mixes and heats the dishes, presumably through induction.

Beastro™ by Kitchen Robotics

The smarts of the Beastro is in Kitchen Robotics’ cloud-based Cuismo software. Cuismo manages the programming and monitoring of each dish made, allows for customization and, according to the company, uses deep learning and predictive analysis to reduce operational costs, though it doesn’t say exactly how. Cuismo also integrates with third-party delivery services. The base Cuismo software package is free for a single site. Prices jump to $249/month for up to five different sites and $999/month for an unlimited number of sites.

Beastro is arriving at an opportune time. Euromonitor recently predicted that the ghost kitchen market will hit $1 trillion by 2030 (read our Spoon Plus deep dive market report on ghost kitchens to learn more). Because ghost kitchens are built around delivery, the whole point of them is to get meals prepped and ready quickly, something a robot like Beastro can do around the clock, without taking breaks or, more relevant for our times, calling in sick.

Of course, automating ghost kitchens also brings up the societal issues around labor. If a prolonged pandemic means that ghost kitchens become the dominant venue for restaurants to exist, where will those line and prep cooks go once robots are installed? Not every restaurant brand or ghost kitchen will adopt automation, but what we do with displaced restaurant workers is something we need to deal with.

Kitchen Robotics’ told The Spoon that has received more than $1 million in funding from various investors and CEOs in the industry and that Beastro will be deployed in two major U.S. cities by mid-December of this year.

 

Simbe Robotics CEO: Robots Help Prevent Empty Grocery Store Shelves

Can robots help prevent the empty grocery store shelves that we saw during the initial panic buying stage of this pandemic? Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, thinks so.

Simbe makes Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot that roams grocery store aisles and uses computer vision and RFID to keep tabs on inventory. Simbe says Tally can spot inventory anomalies and provide analytics about purchasing and re-stocking insights.

Because Tally is a robot, it can spend its day going up and down aisles, giving store managers ongoing updates about product inventory. It is this near-real time snapshot of a store that Bogolea says can help retailers thwart outages during panic-buying sprees like the one we saw earlier in 2020, and also provide a better e-commerce buying experience for consumers.

Tally is currently being used in trials by grocers like Schnuck’s and Giant Eagle, as well as other partners across six countries. “We’ve had insights related to consumption patterns on shelves,” Bogolea told me by phone this week, “Especially in peak panic buying.”

Bogolea said the problem stores experienced during this panic buying was bad supply chain data. “Many of these stores operate on a replenishment system,” said Bogolea. He explained that “if there’s heavy distortion, retailers may assume a positive balance on-hand,” even though the products actually aren’t there.

The bad supply chain data, according to Bogolea, is a result of the manual inventory checks that stores currently carry out. If robots are used, shelf inventory count is more accurate and up to the minute (basically) because the robots can run multiple shelf audits throughout the day. More accurate data means that stores can respond faster when there is a sudden run on particular products to speed up replenishment.

But robots aren’t just helpful dealing with sudden pandemic buying. As the pandemic pushes people into record amounts of grocery e-commerce, there is a greater need for what the consumer sees online to match the availability in store. Anyone who’s ordered groceries online is familiar with ordering a basket of groceries only to get notifications prior to pickup or delivery that, whoops, that item was actually out of stock.

Bogolea said an additional benefit of using shelf-scanning robots is that they can free up human workers to do other tasks such as picking items for online orders and sanitizing the store and carts.

Simbe is not the only company making shelf-scanning robots. Walmart is expanding the use of Bossa Nova’s robots to 1,000 stores, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies’ robots at its locations throughout the midwest.

Bogolea said that since the pandemic Simbe has seen an uptick in the amount of inbound interest in Tally. But despite all the promises of his company’s technology, Bogolea is the first to admit that adopting it is not like flipping a switch.

“Though there is stronger interest,” Bogolea said, “There’s a lot of work to deploy this type of technology.” As we learned from Albertsons at our Articulate food robotics summit last year, grocery stores, especially big chains, only adopt solutions that are already at scale.

Simbe has its own plans to scale up and build 1,000 robots over the coming year. Between it and all the other robotic players in the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be passing one in the grocery aisle in the not too distant future.

Pudu Robotics Raises $15M in Series B+ Round

Chinese delivery robot company Pudu Robotics (aka Pudu Tech) announced this week that it has completed a Series B+ round of nearly $15 million in funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from existing investors Meituan, Everwin Investment, QC Capital, and Chengbohan Fund.

Pudu makes self-driving restaurant server robots equipped with racks of trays that can shuttle plates of food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen.

This B+ funding comes on the heels of Pudu Robotics’ Series B fundraise of $15 million, which the company announced on July 1 of this year. The B+ round brings the total amount of announced funding raised by Pudu to roughly $30 million. (Crunchbase lists prior Series A, Seed and Angel rounds of undisclosed amounts.)

According to today’s press announcement, Pudu’s robots have been sold to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. Earlier this month, Pudu announced that the Muhguri restaurant is Sokcho, South Korea now had 11 Pudu robots serving food to customers.

Pudu is certainly not alone in creating a new robotic labor force for restaurants. Other players in the space include fellow Chinese company Keenon Robotics, California-based Bear Robotics, and South Korea’s Woowa Bros., which has partnered with LG for server bots.

Pudu said this latest funding would be used to expand its market. The money is coming just as the global pandemic has restaurants reassessing their dine-in businesses. Server robots like Pudu’s remove one possible vector of human-to-human viral transmission, and come with the added benefit of not getting sick themselves.

While that may be good news in terms of not spreading the coronavirus, the increased use of robots means fewer jobs for humans. A recent survey from Aaron Allen & Associates found that more than 80 percent of restaurant jobs could be automated, with the majority of them being server positions.

That stat, of course, brings up a host of other societal issues, but right now, most people are pre-occupied with the more immediate pandemic-related problems.

Saladworks to Use Chowbotics’ Salad Making Robot for Market Expansion

Fast casual restaurant chain Saladworks announced today that it will be using Chowbotics’ Sally robot to expand into hospitals, universities and grocery stores. According to the press release, the Sally machines will feature Saladworks’ branding and exclusively carry menu items from Saladworks’ menu.

This deal actually makes a lot of sense. First, Sally is compact, coming in at only 3 ft. x 3 ft. This means the robot can be installed almost anywhere, and that Saladworks can extend its brand into high-traffic areas without needing to build out a full store. Plus, vending machines like Sally can run 24 hours a day.

Second, during this pandemic, restaurants (and consumers) have been looking for ways to reduce the amount of human-to-human contact involved in day-to-day foodservice operations. Not only does the Sally robot make the salads sans humans, it also keeps all of its 22 fresh ingredients sealed away in chambers which are themselves sealed up behind glass. Customers can literally see where their order is coming from as it is dispensed.

Finally, and some might say this is the most important thing, Sally makes a good salad. All the convenience and COVID-19 protections in the world don’t make a difference if no one wants to eat what you’re making.

One item of particular note in the press announcement is how Saladworks is targeting grocery stores in its go-to market. Prior to the pandemic, retailers were not too keen on robotic vending services like Sally because they were redundant to what grocery stores already offered. But as the coronavirus has grocery stores removing things like salad bars, those vending machines become more attractive. Just last month, ShopRite partnered with Chowbotics to put a Sally in its Carteret, NJ store. Having the Saladworks brand, which is probably more well known in certain geographic areas than Chowbotics, on the machine and the Saladworks menu could entice more people to try it out.

This is the second such restaurant partnership for Chowbotics, which previously partnered with SaladStation to roll out 50 Sally robots across seven states.

It’s not hard to imagine that Chowbotics has a steady pipeline of similar co-branded restaurant deals in the works. As noted above, the small footprint, low-cost and relatively low-touch aspects of robotic vending machines could make them attractive platforms for restaurants looking for growth opportunities during this pandemic.

I’ve written before that I’m all-in on robotic vending machines and even wrote a comprehensive report on the market landscape for our Spoon Plus premium service.