Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Behind the Bot

South Korea: Shinhwa Food Group to Use Woowa Bros. Dilly Plate Server Robots

The Shinhwa Food Group will be rolling out server robots at its restaurants brands in South Korea thanks to a new deal with Woowa Brothers. Aju Business Daily reported yesterday that Shinhwa has agreed to gradually introduce roughly 100 “Dilly Plate” server robots at its restaurants by the end of this year.

Dilly Plates are basically self-driving racks of trays that shuttle plates of food and empty dishes back and forth from a restaurant’s kitchen to its tables. The robots are equipped with sensors and smarts to do things like avoid obstacles and other people. Woowa debuted its first Dilly Plate (made by Bear Robotics, shown in the picture above) at a Seoul Pizza Hut back in 2018. According to the Aju Business Daily, Woowa now has five different Dilly Plate models that are deployed across 305 restaurants in South Korea. Woowa’s deal with Shinhwa is the biggest deployment agreement so far.

Interest in food robotics has accelerated since the pandemic last year. The use of a robot such as the Dilly Plate can reduce the amount of human-to-human contact in a restaurant by removing a human from the equation. Robots can also alleviate some of the hard work associated with being server by carrying heavy loads back and forth continuously without needing a break.

Woowa Brothers has been working on a number of different food robot-related initiatives. The company launched its food delivery robot program last year, and is even working with companies like Hyundai that allow those delivery robots to do things like autonomously access buildings and ride elevators. Additionally, Woowa worked with South Korean electronics giant LG and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement to develop its server bots.

A Woowa Brothers rep told Aju Business Daily that server robots are just the beginning of the company’s automation ambitions. Other plans include developing cooking robots and packaging robots that use artificial intelligence.

Starship Appoints New CEO

Robot delivery company Starship announced today that Alastair Westgarth has been appointed the company’s new CEO, effective immediately.

Prior to joining Starship, Westgarth was CEO at Alphabet’s Loon, which was focused on using high-altitude balloons to deliver internet access to underserved communities around the world. That endeavor was shut down in January of this year. Before joining Loon in 2017, Westgarth was CEO at Quintel Solutions and a Vice President at Nortel.

Starship makes small, cooler-sized autonomous delivery robots. The company really started gaining traction in the U.S. over the past couple of years by providing food deliveries on college campuses. Starship has since broadened it services to include grocery delivery from Save Mart in Modesto, California. In May of this year, Starship started making deliveries from select Costa Coffee locations in the town of Milton Keynes in the U.K.

The appointment of a new CEO comes during a time of growth for Starship. In January, the company raised an additional $17 million in funding (bringing its total fundraising to $102 million). The company’s delivery robots are now available to more than 1 million people on a daily basis, and last month it announced that it had quadrupled deliveries globally since the start of the pandemic. To date, Starship has completed more than 1.5 million commercial deliveries around the world.

The pandemic has accelerated interest in robot delivery, thanks to its contactless nature. Since Starship launched, a number of robot delivery startups have launched around the world including Kiwibot and Postmates here in the U.S., Yandex in Russia, Woowa Brothers in South Korea, and Bizero in Turkey. The question for all of these startups now is whether the building, maintaining and deploying all of these robots can scale in an economical way.

According to the press announcement sent out today, Starship’s co-founder, Ahti Heinla, will now be taking on the role of CTO. The company did not specify what new role, if any fellow co-founder Janus Friis would be taking.

Boston University Researchers Develop Kirigami-Based Gripper for Robots

Researchers at Boston University (BU) have developed a new type of versatile robotic gripper inspired by the Japanese art of kirigami, or paper cutting. In a paper released earlier this month, Douglas Holmes, BU College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering and BU PhD student Yi Yang demonstrated how their new type of flexible gripper can pick up a wide variety of objects including soft, perishable items like raspberries.

As shown in this video below, the new soft gripper is made by laser cutting a specific “shell” shapes out of flexible material. When the shell is placed over an object and both ends are pulled at the same time, the shell contracts, tightening around the object enough to pick it up, but not so hard that the object breaks. In the video you can see the gripper pick up a raspberry, a grain of sand and even rows of marbles.

This Robot's Soft Gripper Was Inspired By Japanese Kirigami

It’s not too hard to imagine different applications for this soft gripper technology in the food world. It could be used for harvesting berries, industrial packaging of food like eggs, or for picking and packing grocery items at an automated fulfillment center.

Food is often a good use case for robotics since it is oddly shaped and can be quite fragile. If a robot can manipulate berries or eggs or bread without breaking or squishing them, then that robo-dexterity can be transferred to other operations involving delicate materials.

There are actually a number of researchers and startups working to bring this level of precision to robotic grippers. Dexterity Robots can figure out how much pressure to apply to an object when picking it up to avoid smushing it. The aptly named Soft Robotics grippers use rubbery-tipped appendage and mimic an octopus to gently pick up objects. And a couple years back MIT researchers turned to origami, another traditional Japanese paper art form, to develop a cone-shaped gripper that acted similar to a Venus flytrap.

For those interested in learning more about Boston University’s kirigami-inspired robot, the full research paper can be found at Science Robotics (subscription required).

Kellogg’s Bowl Bot Cereal Robot, Based on Chowbotics Tech, Debuts at Two Universities

Kellogg’s Away From Home, a division of the CPG giant that works with foodservice operators, announced a joint pilot program with Chowbotics (now a division of DoorDash) that just debuted cereal dispensing robots at two universities. The aptly named Kellogg’s Bowl Bot will dispense a variety of Kellogg’s brand cereals as well as different milks, fruits, yogurts and more.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the Kellogg’s Bowl Bots are now available at Florida State University and the Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison (which also uses Starship delivery robots!). The Kellogg’s Bowl Bot is basically a re-purposed and re-branded Chowbotics Sally robotic vending machine, which started out as a salad-making robot but has since expanded its capabilities to include other types of parfaits and bowl foods.

We’ve known about Chowbotics’ CPG ambitions since last year, when the company told us it wanted to partner with cereal companies specifically. At the time, the cereal bot use case was more about offering free samples at a grocery store, but branding and placing these machines at colleges makes a lot of sense. For one, colleges have long been a target location for Chowbotics. Prior to the pandemic, it had rolled out Sallys to a number of colleges and universities across the country. Second, the Kellogg’s Bowl Bot is perfect for our pandemic times since it doesn’t require human-to-human interaction and all of the ingredients are store inside closed containers that are themselves stored within the machine.

On top of all that, while my college days are long behind me, I assume cereal remains popular with this younger generation (when they aren’t eating avocado toast).

The Kellogg’s Bowl Bot has a special menu programmed for students that includes:

  • About Last Night with Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Kellogg’s Froot Loops, Kellogg’s KraveTM Chocolate, chocolate drops, banana chips, and espresso syrup
  • Hawaii 5-0 with Frosted Mini-Wheats, Bear Naked Fit Triple Berry Granola, pineapple, coconut, and mango
  • Valentine’s Day Vibes with Special K Red Berries Cereal, cocoa nibs, blueberries, strawberries, and whole milk

Or students can create their own custom bowl mixing and matching cereals, milks, nuts, seeds, fruits and more. Prices start at $2.99 and go up to $6.50, depending on selection. Students can even use their campus meal plans to purchase their bowl.

For those interested in checking out the new Kellogg’s Bowl Bots, the one at FSU is located in 1851, an on-campus dining facility and convenience store, and the robot at UW-Madison is situated on Dejope Residence Hall’s main floor, outside The Bean & Creamery.

Wavemaker Labs Working on Nommi, an Automated Kitchen Robot

Corporate product development investor and incubator Wavemaker Labs is adding Nommi, an “automated delivery kitchen” robot to its portfolio. Wavemaker CFO Kevin Morris shared the previously unknown endeavor during a presentation at our ArticulATE food robotics summit yesterday.

Morris didn’t reveal much about Nommi other than an early rendering of a robotic kiosk and that it was being developed in partnership with a large hospitality company. Judging from the size of the machine in the rendering, Nommi appears to be something in between Chowbotics’ Sally and Spyce’s Infinite Kitchen. It holds a number of ingredients which are automatically dispensed and heated. Other renderings Morris showed illustrated how Nommi could also be installed in the back of a van, making it mobile, and inside a shipping container (a la Mezli).

Nommi is the latest food robot to be added to Wavemaker’s growing roster of automated food machines, which also includes Miso Robotics, Piestro, and Bobacino. As Morris explained during his talk yesterday, Wavemaker begins its process by identifying a problem in the food tech sector and then finds corporate partners to develop a specific solution. This approach helps hedge Wavemaker’s investment bets because there is already a customer for the robot in place once the product is done. In the case of Miso Robotics, for example, a fast food chain (presumably Caliburger) was looking to automate burger flipping and thus Miso Robotics’ Flipppy was born. Nommi is being developed in partnership with an undisclosed hospitality company which will help develop the menu, robotic capabilities and act as a first customer once the robot is done.

While Wavemaker is investing in and helping initially develop the Nommi, history suggests that at some point the bowl food bot will be turning to equity crowdfunding when it comes time to raise capital. Wavemaker companies Miso Robotics, Piestro, and Future Acres have all run equity campaigns over the past year.

Given the scant details that Morris shared with the ArticulATE virtual crowd, Nommi is probably still a couple years out from coming to market. But The Spoon will surely be covering it as it becomes a real thing.

Q1 2021: AppHarvest Bets on Robots, Strawberries and More Data in the Greenhouse

Control ag company AppHarvest is adding more of both crop types and technologies to its budding greenhouse network, according to the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call this week. That includes strawberries, leafy greens, harvesting bots, and lots of data.

The company, which went public in February, is best known at this point for the 60-acre greenhouse facility it operates in Morehead, Kentucky, where it grows beefsteak tomatoes. AppHarvest sent out its first shipment of these tomatoes to grocery stores earlier this year. Customers now include Kroger and Wendy’s.

CEO Jonathan Webb said on the company’s earnings call this week that two more Kentucky greenhouses, one in Richmond and one in Berea, will be operational next year, and that with them, AppHarvest will start growing leafy greens and strawberries. Webb pointed out that while his company may have started with tomatoes — a fairly traditional crop when it comes to greenhouse growing — the eventual aim is to “grow the company into a trusted high-tech sustainable food company.”

As far as that tech goes, AppHarvest’s CTO Josh Lessing said on the investor call that the company is investing in “robotics, artificial intelligence, teleoperation, and proprietary seed genetics.” To date, its biggest move has been the acquisition of Root AI, a startup best known for its crop-harvesting bot Virgo. (Lessing was the cofounder and CEO of Root AI before the acquisition.)

“Presently, we are training our intelligent robot Virgo to manage crops and inform growing decisions,” Lessing said on the call, adding that Virgo could eventually be configured to harvest multiple different crops, including delicate ones like strawberries — hence the company’s announcement to move into the realm of berry growing. 

As a crop, strawberries are highly suited to the controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) realm because they are extremely delicate, perishable, and normally require boatloads of pesticides when grown outside. Moving the grow process indoors, to a fully controlled environment, means better protection for crops from weather hazards, no pests and therefore no need for pesticides, and more consistent temperatures and humidity levels that can ensure better-tasting plants with a more robust nutritional profile. 

Given the amount of sunlight strawberries need for optimal growing, greenhouse settings are obvious candidates, since they rely largely on the sun with only supplemental LEDs. However, vertical farms, which use LEDs to mimic the sun’s light spectrum, are also now growing strawberries. Plenty, Oishii, and SinGrow are just a few of the names on that list. Whether one method will wind up superior to the other will (among other things) depend on what the end product tastes like as well as how much it costs to grow, sell, and buy.

For AppHarvest, though, the real win with technology will be not so much about the crops it can grow but the data Virgo and other tools can collect. That data can in turn get analyzed and turned into actions and insights applicable across the AppHarvest greenhouse network. “Granular plant level data from each fruit means we can learn exactly how to optimize quality, production, sales and logistics,” said Lessing. “This foundation will give us the opportunity to restructure the world’s food supply in order to mirror the hyper efficient e-commerce landscape.”

Along those lines, the company will expand beyond these first three facilities in the future. Two more projects will be announced this summer and are slated to be operational in late 2022. Webb said on this week’s call the company is on track to operate 12 greenhouses by 2025. By then, one imagines those facilities will grow a whole lot more than greens, strawberries, and tomatoes.

Pizza Robot Company Picnic Raises $16.3M Series A, Adds Strategic Partners

Picnic, which makes pizza assembly robots, announced today that is has raised a $16.3 million Series A round of funding. The new round was led by Thursday Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creative Ventures, Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital (and includes the $3M bridge funding from October of last year). This brings the total amount of funding raised by Picnic to $34.2 million. At the same time, Picnic also announced new strategic partnerships with with food service industry company Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing.

Seattle, Washington-based Picnic makes modular pizza assembly robots capable of topping hundreds of pizzas an hour. These automated machines can be placed in a row, with each one dispensing their own ingredients. Pizza crusts are place on a conveyor belt, which runs under the dispensers which dish out the proper amounts of sauce, cheese and other toppings. Picnic announced its second generation robot in October of last year, which featured a switch to transparent walls and containers so operators could see in real time when toppings need to be refilled.

Interest in food robots and automation has accelerated thanks largely to the pandemic. Not only can robots work 24 hours a day and not call in sick, they also reduce human contact with food and create more social distancing in kitchens. But Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, told me by phone last week that the pandemic has ushered in entirely new thinking about foodservice. “What we really see as we come out of the pandemic is the foodserice industry has been reimagined,” Wood said. “It’s divorced the idea that the kitchen has to be attached to a dining room.”

As such, there are new opportunities for Picnic and other food automation companies where there are high volumes of takeout and delivery. Wood cited ghost kitchens and even grocers as two examples.

In addition to adapting to new post-COVID workplace realities, Wood is quick to point out that Picnic also helps food operators with ingredient cost. “There’s a lot of denial about food waste, even though the industry average is 10 percent,” Wood said. Robotic systems like Picnic’s can help lower waste and cost because they dispense the exact same amount of toppings every time without any overages.

Pizza is becoming a popular food for robotics. In addition to Picnic, xRobotics has its own take on automated pizza assembly, and Middleby launched its PizzaBot 5000 last year. In addition to pizza making robots, we’re also seeing a number of pizza vending machines come to market like Piestro, API Tech and Basil Street.

“It’s a sign of the industry maturing,” Wood said of all his competition. For its part, Picnic will use its new funding and partnerships to separate itself from the pizza pack. The company says it will use its new money to hire out its team and expand commercial operations, which will most likely be made easier by the company’s new strategic investors. Orion Land Mark is one of the biggest suppliers of pizza and pizza supplies to convenience stores around the world and Ethan Stowell Restaurants operates a number of eateries in the Seattle area.

EBar Automates Beer Pouring at Events, Aims to Equity Crowdfund £275,001

As people return to sporting and live events, they won’t have to wait as long for a beer. Well, they won’t have to wait as long in Europe, because a number of robotic beer-pouring solutions are coming to market there.

The latest entrant to the robo-beer pouring space is EBar, a startup based in Aberdeen, United Kingdom, which makes what is essentially a beer dispensing vending machine. From the video description (see below), the EBar is more about volume than variety. There are just two kegs plugged into the back of the machine, so don’t expect an extensive menu of artisanal beer choices. Customers order via on-board touchscreen, take cups from the built-in dispenser and place them in the machine. The EBar then pours out what looks like a pretty perfect cup of a beer, complete with appropriately-sized foamy head, in under 30 seconds.

The EBar is built for large venues like stadiums and outdoor festivals, where people want their drinks quickly and don’t care as much about whether the beer they are getting is an IPA or a Stout. Additionally, since there is no server, the machine reduces the amount of human-to-human contact when getting a drink — an important factor in this emerging post-pandemic world.

EBar calls its business model Beer as a Service. Rather than installing and leasing machines in a single location, they move the machines around from venue to venue and charge a commission on all the sales. This is a smart play for the company because potential venues don’t have to spend money up front for the machine, and EBar can look at the data to determine which are the best events/times/locations to set up their machines to maximize revenue.

EBar is in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign and aiming to raise £275,001 (~$387,827 USD). The company says that despite the pandemic shutting most events down in 2020, its machines were still being used by thousands of customers. As venues re-open and people return to sporting events and concerts, it’s easy to see how having multiple EBars on-hand could come in handy. (This news post should not be considered investment advice.)

Europe appears to be a hotbed of automated beer pouring activity. In Poland, the Revolmatic is a smaller, counterop machine also built for large events that cranks out cups of beer. And over in Spain, Macco Robotics’ humanoid Kime robot pours beer, but isn’t really built as much for speed and volume.

Large events are actually good use cases for automation because attendees are at a venue to see a concert or a game, not stand in long lines for drink.

If you want to know more about the future of vending machines, then be sure to attend ArticulATE, our food robotics and automation summit on May 18. We’ll have speakers from smart vending companies like Yo-Kai Express, Rotender and Calvary Robotics. Get your ticket today!

Announcing the ArticulATE 2021 Agenda: FedEx, Manna, Gatik and More

Our second ArticulATE food robotics and automation summit is just a little more than a week away, and at the risk of sounding immodest, we have put together a stellar show. The speakers are all lined up and the agenda has been set. And we’re excited to share both with you today!

The show is May 18 and being held virtually on the Hopin platform (so you can attend from the comfort of your own home in your pajamas, if you like). Check out the lineup and get your ticket today.

ARTICULATE 2021 AGENDA

Crops and Robots: How Automation is Changing Agriculture
Farm work is hard work. Learn how autonomous robots can take over dangerous jobs and AI can help bring more efficiency to our food supply chain.
Speaking:
Louisa Burwood-Taylor, Head of Media and Research, Editor, AgFunder
Suma Reddy, CEO, Future Acres

A Conversation with FedEx
There is perhaps no name more synonomous with reliable delivery than FedEx. We’ll hear how the storied brand is using robotics to automate the last mile.
Speaking:
Aaron Prather, Senior Technical Advisor, FedEx

A Demonstration of Moley’s Kitchen Robot
The house of the future is here, at least in the kitchen, thanks to this fully autonomous cooking robot
Speaking:
Mark Oleynik, Founder, Moley Robotics

Look! Up in the Sky! Drone Delivery is Getting Real
Drone delivery promises to be the fastest way to get your hot meal delivered. What have we learned from initial trials, and what can we expect when drones become mainstream?
Speaking:
Bobby Healy, Founder and CEO, Manna
Ryan Walsh, Co-Founder and CEO at Valqari

Order Up! The Future of Restaurant Robots
From commercial kitchens to standalone canteens, commercial kitchen robots can whip up hundreds of different meals. This will change not only restaurants but will enable any retailer to become their own restaurant.
Speaking:
Barney Wragg, Founder and CEO, Karakuri
Dibyananda Brahma, Vice President Growth at Mukunda Foods

No Register? No Problem. A Deep Dive on Cashierless Checkout
Why stand in line when you can walk into a store, grab what you want and leave? We take a look at the tech powering the new wave of cashierless checkout.
Speaking:
Stacey Higginbotham, Stacey on IoT
Trinh Le-Fiedler, Founder and CEO, Nomitri
Motilal Agrawal, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, Zippin

A Live Demonstration of Alberts’ New Soup Robot
Yes, soup for you! Anytime you want it, thanks to Alberts new automated soup vending machine.
Speaking:
Glenn Mathijssen, Co-Founder and CEO, Alberts

Forget Last Mile, Let’s Get to Last Meter Delivery
There are plenty of robots that can get food to your front curb, but how about finding you inside an airport or mall? We get granular with the next phase of autonomous delivery.
Speaking:
Ritukar Vijay, Founder and CEO at Ottonomy.IO
Sven Mesecke, CEO, Sojourn

How Should Robots Roam City Streets? A Discussion with West Hollywood’s Mayor
There is a push and pull between innovation and implementation. West Hollywood has been a leader in autonomous delivery, and its Mayor will share what local governments consider as these robots roll out.
Speaking:
Lindsey Horvath, Mayor, West Hollywood

What Do VCs Like (and Dislike) in Food Robotics?
What stage of investment are food automation startups in right now? Where is the money headed? Have any investment bets paid off? Hear from the people who are cutting the checks.
Speaking:
Brita Rosenheim, Partner, Culterra Capital
Maggie Sprenger, Managing Director at Green Cow Venture Capital
Brian Frank, General Partner at FTW Ventures

Ruggedizing Robots for Imperfect Conditions
Right now, self-driving vehicle startups test their tech in sunny places like Arizona and Texas. But eventually autonomous vehicles will encounter stormy weather, literally. Here’s how they’ll handle it.
Speaking:
Ram Vasudevan, Co-Founder, Refraction AI
Richard Steiner, Head of Policy and Communications, Gatik

xRobotics Pizza Robot in action
Watch the xPizza One robot assemble the toppings on a pizza in real time.
Speaking:
Alena Tikovah, CMO xRobotics

The Ins and Outs of Successful Crowdfunding
Equity crowdfunding is a new path for startups to raise capital, but there’s no guarantee of success. Hear firsthand what it takes to run a successful equity crowdfunding campaign from startups who’ve done it.
Speaking:
Covahne Michaels, VP of Marketing, Blendid
Massimo Noja De Marco, CEO, Piestro

Restaurants in a Box. The New Smart Vending Machines
Armed with advanced robotics and smarts, vending machines are reshaping where, when and how we get fresh food and drink.
Speaking:
Andy Lin, Founder and CEO, Yo-Kai Express
Ben Winston, Co-Founder and CEO, Rotender
Mark Chaney, President and CEO, Winecab

Pick, Pack, Deliver. Grocery Ramps Up Robots
The pandemic caused grocery e-commerce to skyrocket. Check out the new automated systems that will get you your grocery orders faster than ever before.
Speaking:
Andrew Benzinger, Business Development Manager, AutoStore
Dmitry Shevelenko, Co-Founder and President, Tortoise
Jeff Wells, Senior Editor, Industry Dive

To Co-Brand or Not to Co-Brand Your Robot
Are you a food company, or a technology company? The answer will determine your best go-to market strategy.
Speaking:
Mara Behrens, Head of Marketing and Design, Chowbotics (now DoorDash)

What to Know When Rolling Out Self-Driving Vehicles
Autonomous pods, cars and trucks are coming to our public streets. But it will take a combination of technology and policy before they can become widespread.
Speaking:
Nancy Lee, Community Manager, PIX
Manuela Papadopol, CEO, Designated Driver

In addition to the great cast of speakers, we also want to thank all of the sponsors who are helping make ArticulATE 2021 possible: Wavemaker Labs, Sojourn, Picnic, RoboEatz, Gastronomous, YPC Technologies, Karakuri and Le Bread Xpress.

All that’s missing from our awesome day is you. So get your ticket today and be a part of the future of food automation!

More Headlines

Trigo Partners with German Grocer REWE for Cashierless Checkout Stores – The new store will be located in downtown Cologne, Germany.

Hwy Haul Raises $10M Series A to Modernize Produce Trucking – The startup’s cloud-based startup helps connect shippers with carriers without all the paperwork.

Red to Green Ep 3: Breaking Through Resistance to Cultured Meat – One the ways of getting people to accept lab-grown meat is by making the pitch personal.

Impossible Foods Granted Child Nutrition Label, Opening Up Public School Market – The volunteer authorized by the USDA will make it easier for schools to buy Impossible products.

Miso Robotics Launches CookRight to Automate Restaurant Cooking (Without the Robot)

Miso Robotics today announced CookRight, a new software product for restaurants that delivers the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cooking of its Flippy robot — without the robotic hardware.

The new CookRight platform uses cameras mounted above a grill along with a tablet computer. The cameras look down at the food being prepared and use a combination of computer vision, thermal detection and AI to identify a cut of meat, its thickness and cooking progress. It’s the same software system used by Flippy, only instead of a providing instructions to a robotic arm, its guides a human cook. A display on the accompanying tablet shows what CookRight is “seeing” and gives instructions for each item on the grill. Miso says that CookRight currently works with burgers, chicken, fish, steak, sausage, hot dogs, and more.

Miso Robotics Chairman and President, Buck Jordan, told me by phone last week that using CookRight can help reduce foodborne illnesses by ensuring food is cooked properly, and with the guided cooking, turn just about any cook into an expert griller with no extensive culinary training.

Additionally, CookRight integrates with a restaurant’s POS and ordering systems to automate coordination of meal prep. So if an order comes in for delivery through an app like GrubHub, CookRight will know when the driver is on their way and be able to time the grilling accordingly.

With CookRight, Miso is aiming to expand its market base with a lower cost automated cooking solution than Flippy. Though the price of Flippy has steadily come down from $60,000 upfront to $2,000 a month, that’s still a lot of money for hardware that needs to be installed in existing kitchen spaces, maintained and have workers be trained on. Additionally, smaller mom n’ pop restaurants may not have the space necessary for a Flippy installation. The biggest customer for Flippy at this point has been White Castle, which will be operating the robot at 11 of its locations.

With its minimal hardware setup and a subscription cost of $100 a month, CookRight is a much more affordable option for smaller and medium-sized restaurants looking to automate some of their processes. This, in turn, will allow Miso to scale to more restaurants more quickly.

There are other players in the restaurant tech space like Dragontail Systems, which uses AI to coordinate and optimize order workflow in the kitchen. But with CookRight, Miso is taking that automated integration and optimization a step further into the actual cooking of the food.

If you want to see the future of automated cooking, then you should definitely check out Articulate, our food robotics and automation virtual summit happening on May 18. Buck Jordan will be speaking as will execs from restaurant robot companies like Karakuri, Blendid, Piestro and Mukunda Foods. Get your ticket today!

Beyond Burgers and Fries, Br5’s Robot Cooks Up Paella

Paella has an almost mythic quality about it. Making paella signifies some sort of special event. The dish has its own pan, for goodness sake. I addition to the technical aspects of making paella, there’s an emotional component to it. I mean , just read this bit from Fine Cooking’s paella recipe:

… paella perfection comes about when the person who is cooking it has an almost tangible affection for the dish itself, for the process of making it, and for the people who will be eating it.

If this is true, what happens when there is no person making paella. I don’t mean in a if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest philosophical kind of way. I mean that literally a person isn’t making the dish — is a robot. The Guardian has a story up today about just that — a paella making robot from the startup be robot 5 (br5) and paella stove maker, Mimcook.

The robot automates everything a human cook would do. It adds the rice and stock, mixes, lays in the shrimp and even gets that nice crust good paella is supposed to have. All without, presumably, any tangible affection for what it is making because, well, it’s a robot.

The folks at br5 told The Guardian that its robot is merely an automated assistant. Like other food robots, br5’s machine is meant to take over some of the mundane work associated with restaurants and making food. In fact, the br5 robot is only making paella because it is hooked up to the paella stove. It can work a grill or a fryer just as easily.

We’ve covered plenty of robots that will make you all types of food such as pizza, burgers, tokoyaki and more in the development. But those are all examples of food that is meant to be cooked quickly in high-traffic areas. They can all pump out lots of food consistently around the clock. Br5’s paella bot helps illustrate how sophisticated cooking robots are getting. This arm is doing more than flipping burgers or dunking frozen fries, it’s coordinating a complex, multi-ingredient dish.

Cooking robots are only going to get even more sophisticated. Take Blue Hill Coffee’s robot, for instance. It uses computer vision to “watch” and learn from human baristas. The robot can replicate the same motions as a human and even make latte art. Whether its through computer vision or motion capture, it’s not too long from now that cooking robots will be able to download the movements of famous chefs. This means they will be able to execute more advanced techniques and make even more complex meals. This automated chef replication may be great for our eventual home cooking robots, but how will they play in restaurants?

I think it will ultimately boil down to context and quality. People at the airport probably won’t care if a robot whips up a pizza for them as they rush to make their plane. They just want sustenance. But someone paying top dollar at a fine dining establishment is shelling out that premium for a more individual experience — something that can’t just be replicated the exact same way 400 times in an hour.

Superseding all of this, of course, is whether or not the food is good. People won’t eat bad food, no matter who or what makes it. The robot may not put love into it — but if the food is good people will love eating it.

We’ll be discussing these types of weighty questions around automated artistry and convenience at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics virtual summit on May 18th. Companies like Karakuri, Yo-Kai Express, Piestro, Mukunda Foods and more will explain their approach to food robotics and what that means for the future of restaurants. Get your ticket today to be a part of the discussion!

Bear Robotics Now Serving Houston Rockets Fans at Toyota Center

NBA fans heading to Toyota Center to see the Houston Rockets now have the option of getting drinks and snacks served by a robot. Bear Robotics announced on Linkedin yesterday that it has partnered with Levy Restaurants and the Houston Rockets to use its Servi bot at games.

The Houston Rockets posted a promotional video to its official YouTube channel, showing the Servi robot in action along with a caption saying this was the “first-ever robot-assisted food and beverage service at a stadium or arena.”

Rockets Launch First-Ever Robot-Assisted Arena Food And Beverage Service

No further details were posted either by Bear Robotics or the Houston Rockets, so we don’t know where in the stadium the robot is serving or how a person can get the robot service. UPDATE: a Levy Restaurants rep emailed us the following:

During the Rockets remaining games of the 2020-21 season, hospitality team members at Toyota Center will be assisted by an autonomous food service robot. This pilot program will start in Toyota Center’s premium all-inclusive Suite Club to allow team members to focus on providing industry-leading service to fans while the robot performs more routine and physically demanding tasks.

The robot will circulate dining spaces inside the premium space while carrying pre-packaged food and beverage items for guests to pick from. This pilot program will allow Toyota Center staff to learn more about the robot and how it could be potentially utilized in more areas next season.

While this may be the first robot server at a stadium, it is not the first time stadiums — or Levy Restaurants — have employed food-related robots. Both Dodger Stadium and Diamondback’s Chase Field used Miso Robotics’ Flippy robot to fry up chicken tenders and tater tots. And Centerplate Pizza at Safeco Park used Picnic’s pizza assembling robot.

Prior to the pandemic, stadiums were actually a great place to employ automation. Stadiums are packed with lots of people who want good (not necessarily artisanal) food quickly. Robots are able to crank out a steady stream of food made consistently, without taking a break. And as vaccines roll out and stadiums cautiously re-open, robots have another benefit — contactless delivery. Removing a human server eliminates another point of human-to-human transmission, which some wary fans might find more comforting when venturing back out into the world.

If you’re a Rockets fan going to the game, see if you can spot the robot and take a picture for us! If you’re just a fan of food robotics, then you should definitely attend our ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18. It’s a full day devoted to discussing the most cutting-edge innovation in the robotics space. Get your ticket today!