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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Behind the Bot

Yandex Delivery Robots Coming to College Campuses Courtesy of Grubhub

Food delivery service Grubhub announced today that it will be bringing delivery robots to college campuses this fall thanks to a new multi-year partnership with Russian tech giant Yandex.

Yandex’s rovers are squat, cooler-sized robots that can autonomously traverse pre-mapped areas. As yet, there aren’t a ton of public details on the partnership, such as where the the robot delivery will launch or how much it will cost, but in the press announcement, Yandex said it would be deploying “dozens” of its robots for the program.

College campuses are actually a pretty great environment for last-mile delivery robots. Campuses hold large populations that eat at all hours of the day and night. They are contained geographic with ample pedestrian walkways, and they can be difficult for full-sized delivery cars and drivers to navigate. Robots and their contactless delivery can also be of use in these post-pandemic times for students packed in college dorms. Should someone living on campus get sick, they don’t need to leave their room and stand in line with other people in the cafeteria. Instead, they can ring up a robot and have food delivered, reducing their human-to-human contact.

As such, colleges are among the first places to deploy delivery robots. Starship operates at a growing number of colleges throughout the U.S., and Kiwibot is ramping up its own college food delivery programs as well. Grubhub has existing partnerships with more than 250 college campuses across the U.S., integrating student meal plans with delivery from on- and off- campus restaurants.

In addition to giving Grubhub a robotic entrée onto college campuses, this partnership also gives Yandex its first foray into the U.S. market. Yandex has been making meal deliveries around the Russian cities of Moscow and Innopolis since December of last year.

DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk

DaVinci Kitchen, a German startup making an autonomous robotic pasta kiosk, has raised more than €500,000 (~$591,000 USD) through equity crowdfunding. The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating. Combined with a previous Seed round, DaVinci has raised now raised €1.35M (~$1.6M USD).

DaVinci’s pasta station is a self-contained pasta-making kiosk that’s 2.1m wide by 2.5m high and 2.4m long. Customers use an app to place orders and customize their meals, and an articulating arm swings about preparing and plating the dish. The DaVinci can make 40 meals per hour. As company Founder Vick Jorge Manuel explained to me last year, pasta is actually just the beginning for the kiosk, as different components (like a deep fryer) can be swapped into make all manner of cuisines and dishes.

DaVinci is just the latest robot startup to use equity crowdfunding to raise money. Blendid, Kiwibot, and a bunch of companies in Wavemaker Labs’ portfolio (Piestro, Bobacino, Miso Robotics) have all turned to the crowd to raise capital. Part of the allure of equity crowdfunding is that it allows a company to raise money without the pressure to scale that can come with institutional VC funding. Additionally, equity crowdfunding can act as a marketing vehicle and helps build a community around a product. For more, check out this panel from our recent ArticulATE conference all about the ins and outs of equity crowdfunding. (Spoon Plus membership required.)

Through an exchange on Linkedin over this past weekend, DaVinci told me that the company will use the new money to finish its pre-production version kiosk, with the goal of opening up its own test restaurant in Leipzig. DaVinci will also start to raise a traditional round of funding for its Series A starting in September.

Rise of the Beer Robots!

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Beer is the pizza of beverage automation.

Previously, I’ve noted that if you want to see the future of food tech, you should look at pizza. From robot assembly to self-driving vehicle (and drone!) delivery to vending machines, pizza tends to be a vanguard for innovation.

Just as pizza paves the way for interesting food technology, beer appears to be the beverage to watch when you want to know where drink automation is heading.

Consider two news bits we highlighted on The Spoon this week:

Part of what makes these two stories of note is that the companies featured are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Hop Robotics is a small, one-man operation that only has one commercial prototype; Heineken is a giant global using robotics basically as a promotional gimmick. (You can enter to win its Beer Outdoor Transporter.) Regardless of their intentions, both companies are looking to make it easier and faster for you to grab a brew.

Hop and Heineken aren’t alone in this endeavor to speed up beer service, as we’ve steadily seen other automation startups come to market. In the U.K., EBar makes big, mobile vending machines meant for events and large venues that will pour a pint in under 30 seconds. The Revolmatic comes out of Poland, and is a countertop machine with a rotating tray that can dispense 450 beers an hour. Macco Robotics in Spain is taking a slightly different approach, employing a humanoid robot with arms to pour your beer in 23 seconds.

All of these machines are meant for events and large gatherings (sports, concerts, conferences) and, when set up in age-restricted areas, can act as unattended beer retail operations. This is helpful in a couple of ways. First, these robots can take over the grunt work of just pouring hundreds of beers an hour. These speedy workhorse machines can help customers spend less time in line for drinks and more time at their event. Automation can reduce overages with consistent, perfectly portioned pours, saving money and reducing waste. These robots also free up human bartenders to focus on more complicated drinks and customer service. And finally, while we are coming out of this pandemic (fingers crossed), venues and retailers will still be looking for and adopting contactless technologies that reduce human-to-human interaction.

Beer isn’t the only beverage getting the automation treatment. Both Rotender and Celia robots are making mixed cocktails, and Botrista just raised $10 million this week for its cloud-connected mocktail and fusion drink dispenser. But I think we’ll see the most automation activity in the beer space. I mean, beer is a huge market. According to the National Beer Wholesalers Association, 2020 U.S. retail sales of beer and malt-based beverages was $100 billion, and that was during a pandemic, when restaurants, bars and stadiums were closed. (Sales were $120 billion in 2019.) And for automation startups, a beer machine is just easier to make because it doesn’t require as many mechanical bits and bobs that are needed to make cocktails (ice, different bottles of booze, mixers, etc.).

Perhaps what’s most fun about Hop Robotics is its size. If one guy in South Carolina can build a working beer robot in his garage, imagine what well-funded companies will create. Whatever the future brings, beer and pizza night will never be the same.

Image via Vegano.

More Headlines

Vegano Launches an All-Vegan E-Commerce Grocery Marketplace in Canada – For now, the service operates in the Metro Vancouver area as well as Squamish and Whistler. The company said it plans to expand to Toronto and Montreal by the end of this year in addition to heading Stateside and launching in Los Angeles.

Czech Online Grocer Rohlik Raises $119M, Its Second Nine-Digit Round This Year – This funding comes just months after Rohlik raised a €190 million (~$230 million USD) Series B round in March of this year. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Rohlik to nearly $380 million.

AiFi and Trigo CEOs Weigh in on When Cashierless Checkout Will Go Mainstream – TL;DR, look for most major cities to have at least one next year, with more saturation coming in ten years.

Farm.One Launches a New Vertical Farming Facility in Brooklyn – The space will grow various microgreens as well as herbs and some flowers. All crops are grown using the hydroponic method and artificial lighting, with plants harvested “hours before delivery,” according to the company.

Hop Robotics’ Beer Robot is Ready for Events This Summer

The U.S., it seems, has lagged behind Europe when it comes to automated beer pouring action. There’s EBar in the UK, Revolmatic out of Poland, and Macco Robotics in Spain. But fear not, proud Americans! There’s a homebrewed, as it were, beer robot coming to market courtesy of Hop Robotics in South Carolina.

Dubbed Walter, Hop’s beer robot uses an articulating arm and bottom pouring cups to automate beer dispensing. The robotic arm is built on a kegerator with four dispensers. Walter can take an order, dispense and serve a drink in roughly 25 seconds, and do roughly 140 cups of beer an hour.

Pint 2 Pint Time Trial-Hop Robotics

As Grayson Dawson, Founder of Hop Robotics, explained to me by phone this week, his company is still pretty early on and is in the pre-revenue, commercial prototype phase. Hop Robotics has one robot available that Dawson shuttles to events at cities around the Carolinas and Georgia. Right now, Walter isn’t tied into a payment system, so Dawson manually takes cash or drink tickets and enters the order into the machine himself. Additionally, while Dawson has some age verification capabilities, he is instead relying on venues to do age and overconsumption checks.

With more people than ever vaccinated in the U.S., activities like sporting events, fairs and concerts are opening back up. Crushes of people with pent up demand for mass entertainment will probably want a frosty beverage during the summer heat, and having an automated system to churn out beer after beer could come in handy. The question is how Hop Robotics could handle any potential surge in demand.

The company has proven out the basics of its technology, but Dawson is currently seeking funding or strategic partnerships to scale the business up beyond just one machine and the one person operating it.

Heineken B.O.T. Follows You Around With Ice Cold Beer in Tow

I live in the Pacific Northwest which, as you may have heard, is experiencing a record-breaking heatwave. It is hot, especially for a region that lives under cloud cover for most of the year. What we really could have used up here over the past few days is the Heineken B.O.T. (Beer Outdoor Transporter), an autonomous little robot that will literally follow you around carrying a cooler full of ice cold beer (or whatever).

Hat tip to Hype Beast for bringing the B.O.T. to our attention. The robot is autonomous and uses motion sensors to follow you around and avoid obstacles. As the promotional video points out, lugging coolers around on a hot day is heavy and no fun. The B.O.T.’s cooler holds 12 cans of beer and ice and since it goes where you go, a frosty beverage is always within arm’s reach.

Heineken B.O.T. (Beer Outdoor Transporter)

The idea of autonomous robots bringing refreshments to people isn’t new. A couple years back, Pepsi was using Robby robots to being snacks to students at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. More recently, Cheetah Mobile in China launched FANBOT, which is like a mobile bodega — though it’s used indoors in places like hotels and malls. And Yo-Kai Express is currently developing an autonomous ramen vending machine for students to hail on college campuses.

But don’t expect to see Heineken B.O.T.s scurrying around public sidewalks anytime soon, however, as this appears to be a promotional play from Heineken. It’s holding a contest in July where you can enter to win your own B.O.T. and stay refreshed through the hot summer months.

Soft Robotics Raises $10M to Add 3D Vision and AI to its Octopus-like Grippers

Soft Robotics, which is best known for making octopus-like grippers for robots, announced today that it has raised a $10 million extension to the $23 million Series B round it raised in January 2020. The round was co-led by Material Impact, Scale Venture Partners and Calibrate Ventures, and adds Tyson Ventures (the venture arm of Tyson Foods) to the syndicate. ABB Technology Ventures and Tekfen Ventures participated as well. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $58 million.

Soft Robotics uses rubber tipped grippers with “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors” that mimic an octopus, allowing robotic arms to pick up odd-shaped and delicate items like eggs and bread without crushing them. The company says the new capital will help Soft Robotics launch its new SoftAI technology, which adds layers of 3D vision and artificial intelligence to its gripping solution.

According to Soft Robotics’ website, “SoftAI will evaluate the pick scene and automatically choose the best grasp and ideal robot trajectory to optimize rate and reduce product damage.” It’s easy to see how this type of automated discernment would come in handy for a company like Tyson Foods (which was already using Soft Robotics before it invested), which needs to pick up and pack all different types of animal products of varying shapes and sizes.

Chicken Wing and Poultry Automation with mGripAI

In addition to its new technology, Soft Robotics said its new funding will go towards commercial expansion to keep up with pandemic-driven demand. Last year COVID-19 exposed shortcomings in our food supply chain, with meatpacking facilities, which were already a dangerous place to work, becoming hot spots for the virus. Implementing robots in a meatpacking or other food-related factory can help add additional safety and social distancing to the work environment. Robotic arms can work all day without fatigue or injury, and placing robots on a line can help space out workers, so people aren’t working right next to each other.

During our first ArituclATE food conference back in 2019, a robotics researcher told me that robotic “grippers all suck.” But that appears to be changing. In addition to Soft Robotics’ octopus approach, new technologies based on origami (paper folding) and kirigami (paper cutting) are creating entirely new types of gripping technology that can be used for odd-shaped and delicate items. The combination of the pandemic and investor interest could help fuel accelerated development and implementation of this new gripper technology and unlock new areas and uses for robots in food production.

Grab Launched AHBOI Robot to Cover Middle-Meter Meal Delivery in a Singapore Mall

We’ve covered “middle mile” deliveries before, but a new robot in Singapore is covering what we’ll dub the “middle meter.” Last week, Singapore-based delivery service Grab launched its AHBOI robot at the Payar Lebar Quarters (PLQ) mall to speed up delivery orders placed at the restaurants located inside the shopping center.

AHBOI, which stands for Autonomous Handling and Batching Operating Intelligence, is a large, green rectangular mobile locker that acts as a food expediter. According to a Grab corporate blog post, the AHBOI collects delivery orders from different restaurants inside the mall and autonomously brings them to a central collection point where delivery drivers pick them up for the last mile delivery.

By shuttling food from restaurants across these middle meters to central pickup point, Grab says it can shave as much as 15 minutes off of a delivery time because the delivery driver doesn’t need to navigate their way to and inside the mall.

We are starting to see more automation appear over the middle meters and miles for food delivery. QSRs like Burger King and McDonald’s are eyeing conveyor belts at restaurants to speed up the movement of food from the kitchen to drive-thru customers. And companies like Valqari are setting up smart lockers where drones can drop off meals at a central location for delivery drivers or customers to pick up from. Using robots to consolidate orders in a large indoor setting like a mall makes a lot of sense.

As part of its blog post, Grab encouraged users to place more orders from the mall that would use AHBOI. The idea being that the more the robot traverses PLQ, the more AHBOI will learn about its environment and the better the robot will get at driving itself around the mall. Of course, more orders also means more revenue for Grab, which they could use to make more robots.

Botrista Raises $10M Series A for Its DrinkBot Automated Drink Dispenser

Botrista, the company behind the commercial DrinkBot automated beverage dispenser, announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Purestone Capital and La Kaffa International with participation from Sony Innovation Fund, Middleby Corporation and PIDC. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Botrista to $16 million.

Meant for restaurants an other foodservice companies, the DrinkBot is a cloud-connected automated drink maker, dispensing mocktails, infused teas and lattes, iced coffees, lemonades and more without the need for a full bar. Drinks are ordered via an on-board touchscreen, so the experience is contactless, and they are mixed and served in less than 20 seconds.

Botrista is taking a vertically integrated approach as it comes to market. The company provides the hardware for free, charging a monthly maintenance fee and selling the drink ingredients, which as of last year were $1.40 – $1.90 per drink. DrinkBots connect to the Botrista CloudBar for drink recipes, automated inventory management, as well as sales and menu performance analytics.

In a press release sent to The Spoon, Botrista said it experienced 10x growth year-over-year, which isn’t that hard to believe. The pandemic is driving demand for more contactless food and beverage preparation, as well as the need for takeout and delivery-related tech. The Botrista can churn out drinks continuously, quickly and at the touch of a button — perfect for high volume establishments like ghost kitchens and restaurants with high off-premises volume.

Automated mocktail and juice dispensing is becoming a hot little sub-sector of the food and beverage robotic space. Over in Switzerland, Smyze’s robot baristas also make a bevy of juice beverages. And last year, SomaBar, which makes a countertop drink dispenser, pivoted away from Soju-based cocktails to have its machine create juices, teas and regular mixed drinks.

It’s worth noting that both Sony and Middleby participated in Botrista’s latest funding. Last year Sony set up an artificial intelligence unit to work on both recipe creation and robotics. It’s easy to see how DrinkBot’s combination of data and automation fits in with that endeavor. And Middleby, a giant in foodservice automation, could open up a large network of customers for Botrista.

Botrista said it will use its new funding to scale up deployment operations to roll out DrinkBot nationally.

Switzerland: Smyze’s Robot Barista Makes Coffee and Mocktail Drinks

Switzerland-based robots startup Smyze is a lot like other robot baristas already out on the market. It’s eponymous robot is a self-contained kiosk installed in high-traffic areas, users order drinks from an on-board touchscreen or via a web app to order and an articulating arms swing and swivels around to make those drinks.

So far, this sounds a lot like other robo-ristas on the market from the likes of Cafe X, Crown Digital and Blue Hill coffee. What makes Smyze a little different is that it also offers a variety of mocktail-type drinks, making it more of a full beverage station rather than just a high-tech, sci-fi latte machine. Measuring 2 meters by 2 meters, the Smyze station has a menu of 60 drinks, split 50/50 between coffee drinks and mocktails, and can churn out 120 drinks per hour.

“We didn’t want to just be a robot barista,” Daniel Adamec, Co-Founder of Smyze told me by video chat this week. “We have a broad range of drink possibilities, you don’t want to restrict yourself to just coffee.”

I asked Adamec why his company went with an articulating arm for its design, as it might not be as fast as more of an industrial machine type of approach. “We want the robot experience,” he said, highlighting the arm’s theatricality. “We don’t want to have a vending machine. It doesn’t add a huge cost, and it’s just an experience. People love it.”

There are currently three Smyze robots up and running in Switzerland with two more set to go online in that country in the next couple of months. The robots are owned and operated by Smyze, so it is responsible for stocking, cleaning and maintenance (which Adamec said happens once a day). When they install in a new location, Smyze negotiates a revenue sharing deal with that location rather than renting space or leasing the machine outright. Adamec said that Smyze will continue that owner/operator model as the company grows across Europe, but will also use more of a franchise model for its forthcoming customers in the middle east and Asia, where Smyze is not physically located.

As noted, there are currently plenty of robot baristas coming to market in different places around the world. But Smyze is part of a larger movement of startups looking to automated all kinds of commercial beverage experiences. Blendid and Alberts make smoothies. Rotender and Celia make actual cocktails. And Drinkbot makes a variety of juice-based mocktailers. Right now, Smyze sits somewhere in the middle of all these, offering a broad array of drinks, which just might help its robot stand out in an increasingly crowded field.

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop

South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Technically, Brown Bana is more of a co-botic setup, as the articulating robot arms just move cups and capsule-based ice cream around while a human adds the toppings (see the video below) and serves the finished product. But based on the information Lounge Labs sent to The Spoon, the robots are equal parts labor and entertainment.

From Lounge Labs’ press announcement:

Brown Bana’s ice cream robot Aris provides an interactive experience in which customers and robots communicate through emotional motion functions and animated characters that express various emotions with faces. A total of seven motion contents, including ‘greeting,’ ‘calling,’ ‘rest,’ ‘drowsy,’ and various dance movements, are applied, as well as facial expressions suitable for each motion through a mounted display with character animation.

로봇이 아이스크림을?! 한국 최초의 로봇 아이스크림 스토어 '브라운바나' 오픈!

Theatricality is certainly part of a food robot’s appeal, especially since the technology is still novel for most audiences. Watching a robot make you food is still enticing enough to make passers-by stop and watch. Cafe X added waving and other gestures to its articulating robotic barista arms, and even set up its see-through kiosk on a busy downtown San Francisco street corner (though, those locations later shut down).

Lounge Labs believes Brown Bana’s robot hook will be appealing to both millennials and gen z customers, and is targeting cafes, amusement parks and pop-up spaces as target installation locations.

Brown Bana is just one of the automated experiences that Lounge Labs has developed. The company also makes the LOUNGE’X robot barista that makes pourover coffee, as well as the MooinSangHoei AI-powered vending machine.

Refraction AI Launches Robotic Delivery Service in Austin, Texas

Refraction AI announced today that it is expanding its delivery robot service outside of Michigan and into Austin, Texas. This is the second location for Refraction’s robots, which will offer restaurant delivery in the South Congress, Downtown and Travis Heights neighborhoods.

Refraction is a little different from other robot delivery players in the space. Unlike Kiwibot or Starship, which make cooler-sized sidewalk robots, Refraction’s REV-1 robot is bigger, faster, and meant to drive in city bike lanes. The REV-1 is meant for suburban areas with a sizeable population in a relatively contained geography. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Refraction originated, the REV-1 has a delivery radius of roughly 3.5 miles.

That Refraction chose Austin as its second location is really not a surprise. Though the company was founded in Michigan, Luke Schneider, who was brought in as Refraction CEO last fall, is based in Austin, TX. When Refraction raised $4.2 million earlier this year, Schneider told me that part of that money would go towards building up operations in Austin.

Southside Flying Pizza will be the first restaurant offering Refraction’s robot delivery option. The Austin pilot will debut with a fleet of 10 robots with the possibility of more being added as more restaurant partners join the program. Customers in the service area will place orders directly through participating restaurants and choose robot delivery. Text messages are sent to the customer with delivery updates, notification when the robot arrives and a unique code to unlock the robot.

Worth noting is that in the press release announcing the Austin expansion, Refraction only mentions restaurant partners at launch and not grocery delivery. With its rather sizeable cargo hold, groceries are a good fit for the REV-1, and during the pandemic last year Refraction quickly added grocery delivery in Ann Arbor as people looked for contactless ways to get their food. I presume we’ll see grocery partners added to the list should REV-1’s delivery catch on with consumers.

Print a Drink 3D Prints Designs Inside a Cocktail, Develops Smaller Machine for Corporations

We’ve seen 3D printers create cake decorations, personalized vitamins, and even cultured beef. And now, thanks to Print a Drink’s robot, we’ve seen custom designs printed inside a cocktail. You might think such beverage witchcraft would be impossible. I mean, how could a design be suspended and hold its shape in anything other than a jello shot? Turns out it just takes the right drink, the right droplet and the precision of a robotic arm.

Based in Austria, Print a Drink has actually been around for three years. It was started by Benjamin Greimel as a university research project. Since that time, Print a Drink has created two working robots (one in the U.S. and one in Europe) that up until the pandemic would travel to special events and conferences printing out custom designs inside drinks at parties and such.

So how does it work? Print a Drink uses a robotic arm with a custom-made printer head attached to it. The robot uses a glass needle to inject a food-grade, oil-based liquid inside a drink. The drink itself needs to be less than 40 percent alcohol and can’t be a straight shot of something like vodka or whiskey because the injected beads won’t hold and will float to the surface. Greimel explained to me via video chat this week that the combination of liquid density, temperature and robotic movement allow the designs to last for roughly 10 minutes before dissipating.

Coordinating all those puzzle pieces is complicated to say the least. In addition to setting up the robot at an event and operating it, there are specific requirements around drinks that can be used, and designs need to be uploaded into the robot. Plus, there are safety concerns because the robotic arm does move about pretty quickly. Because of all those reasons, Print a Drink’s business has been around renting the robot ($2,500 – $5,000, depending on the event) and not selling them outright. In addition to all of the complications above, staff would need to be trained properly on how to use the machine, and chances are good that the people operating the devices are not roboticists who can troubleshoot.

To make Print a Drink more accessible, Greimel and his partner (the only two people at the company) have developed a smaller, self-contained version of the robot that is roughly the size of a countertop coffee machine. But don’t expect a consumer version for your next backyard soirée. This smaller version is still complicated, and still requires training, so the company is targeting large corporations like Disney or a hotel chain like Hilton where it could be installed and used for special events or promotions. Greimel said the first prototype of this smaller Print a Drink will be available in the next week.

Though more specialized, Print a Drink is part of a bigger automation movement happening with booze right now. In addition to robot-powered bars like Glacierfire popping up, we’re also seeing automated drink dispensing vending machines from Rotender and Celia start to hit the market. It’s not hard to see all of these types of robots working in tandem, however, with a robo-bartender pumping out standard cocktails, while Print a Drink prints up specialty drinks customized for special occasions. We’ll drink to that.