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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Behind the Bot

Will Amazon’s Scout Help Accelerate Robot Delivery?

Amazon unveiled Scout, its own li’l rover delivery robot via a corporate blog post today. Details are scant, but the cooler-sized, six-wheeled bot will make its debut near Amazon’s (original) HQ in Snohomish County, Washington.

The company’s announcement didn’t mention food or groceries, only saying Scout is “designed to safely get packages to customers using autonomous delivery devices.” But it’s not hard to imagine the rover bot transporting snacks, drinks and possibly even restaurant delivery (if sufficiently temperature controlled).

We don’t know exactly where in Snohomish county Scout is available, or how many robots will be in the initial fleet. Customers just place their Amazon order as they normally would, select a delivery range including “fast” (their word) and same day, and the package will arrive either by delivery partner or by Scout.

Though Scout is autonomous and will eventually roam the streets on its own, it will initially only run during daylight hours and will have a human Amazon handler accompanying it.

We’re not even done with January and it’s already shaping up to be a watershed year for delivery robots. In just this month:

And that doesn’t even include the forthcoming Postmates robot, “Serve”, or the Kiwi bots already making deliveries in Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, or Marble’s robot delivery rolling out across Texas.

If Scout’s trial proves successful, Amazon’s involvement in the space will certainly light a fire under the existing competition and accelerate robot delivery . And it looks like Amazon is putting some muscle behind the program. The Seattle Times pointed out, there are 21 job openings at Amazon related to Scout.

What will be exciting to watch with Scout is how this integrates into Amazon’s overall logistical arsenal. The company is obsessed with efficiency (and getting you to buy more stuff). It’s easy to see why Amazon wants in on delivery robots. Robots can (eventually) scurry around 24 hours a day delivering just about any type of package. They don’t take breaks, and if Bezo’s and company is smart, they’ll follow the Woowa Bros. approach and have these delivery bots do double duty and take away any empty amazon boxes from your home.

In addition to Amazon’s logistical genius, the other thing going for Amazon, which in turn could push the entire robot delivery sector forward, is clout. A company of Amazon’s size has a lot more political muscle than a startup in dealing with city and state lawmakers to get robot-friendly regulations passed.

Of course, as with any robot news, there will be questions of what workers are displaced, and what that means for society as a whole. It’s a topic (among many) we’ll actually be tackling at our upcoming Articulate conference in San Francisco on April 16. It’s a one-day summit that will explore what’s happening with food robots and automation, and where it’s all heading. Get your tickets now!

AutoX Eyes Expanded Restaurant Delivery for its Self-Driving Cars

AutoX, the startup that made a splash last year with its self-driving grocery delivery + mobile-commerce solution, expanded into the hot food delivery space, and is now working with 14 restaurants in the San Jose area.

When it launched its first pilot, AutoX caught our eye because the company wasn’t just making straight grocery deliveries. It also outfitted its self-driving cars with li’l mini-marts in the backseat of the vehicles, so people could make additional purchases on the spot.

AutoX quietly expanded into restaurant delivery about a month ago, and at the recent CES show in Las Vegas, its autonomous cars delivered food from Applebee’s to hungry press and attendees. According to Li, one of the reasons AutoX likes restaurant delivery is that it can easily make multiple deliveries, reducing the amount of time the car spends empty.

Autonomous car delivers burgers at CES

Another reason hot food is appealing is that when a driverless car arrives with your groceries, there is no driver to help you carry them in. Hauling heavy bags of groceries could be a problem for older people or those living many flights of stairs up. You don’t exactly have to lug a burger and fries.

That’s not to say AutoX is abandoning its grocery roots. Far from it. Li says that they will just adapt their platform accordingly. “We’re exploring how to better use our technology,” said Li, “Maybe we don’t deliver to apartment buildings for groceries, or we do some kind of reward for coming downstairs.”

Additionally, the company is bringing its self-driving technology to minivans, which would allow it to make multiple grocery deliveries along one route.

There is increased competition for AutoX, however, on all sides and in its own back yard. On the restaurant front, DoorDash recently started testing self-driving car deliveries in San Francisco. For groceries, Udelv uses autonomous delivery vans to deliver food from Farmstead. And elsewhere in the Bay Area, Robomart just announced a self-driving mobile commerce partnership with Stop & Shop.

AutoX, however, may wind up partnering with some of its competition down the road. Right now the AutoX app serves as the marketplace for users to place restaurant orders, but eventually, Li said, the company’s self-driving fleet could be a delivery option for customers on a different platform like Uber Eats or DoorDash.

AutoX is part of a larger automation trend disrupting and transforming the food industry. If you’re interested in how self-driving technology and other food robotics will shape the meal journey, be sure to attend out Articulate summit in San Francisco on April 16!.

Starship Launches Robot Food Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

Starship Technologies announced that starting today lazy tech-savvy students at George Mason University can get food and drinks delivered via robot anywhere on campus.

A fleet of more than 25 robots will be deployed at launch at the Fairfax, VA school, which, the company says, is “the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services on a university campus.” The program was created in partnership with food facilities management company, Sodexo North America, and allows students and faculty to use the “Starship Deliveries” mobile app to order food and beverages from Blake Pizza, Starbucks and Dunkin’, with more campus eateries to be announced “in the coming weeks.” The new service works with the George Mason’s student meal plans, and charges $1.99 delivery fee to anywhere on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m..

Campuses have been on Starship’s radar screen for a while now. In April of last year the company said that it would be deploying 1,000 robots to corporate and academic campuses by the end of 2018 (Starship has since backed off that number and in an emailed statement said instead they’d been focusing on “new offerings to cater to the needs of our customers and partners including our new package delivery service, and spending more time working with local charities and organizations to ensure every member of the community is confident and comfortable using our technology.”). The company has raised $42.2 million in venture funding and counts Daimler Benz as an investor. Its robots have already been hard at work making deliveries on Intuit’s corporate campus, and roaming the town of Milton Keys, Britain, delivering packages and groceries.

When asked how Starship was making money through this George Mason deal– Was it just through the delivery fee? Was it through leasing the robots or a revenue split?– the company simply replied that it “uses different revenue models depending on location,” and that it “sometimes charge[s] a margin on top of the delivery fee.”

Colleges are becoming a hotbed of robot activity. Kiwi has been making robot deliveries to the University of California Berkeley, and expanded to Los Angeles with an eye towards delivering to UCLA. And more recently, Pepsi enlisted Robby robots for mobile snack commerce at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA.

George Mason and the University of the Pacific programs are a little different however. Starship robots will be making straight point-to-point deliveries of ordered meals and drinks from eateries to anywhere on the GM campus. For its robot run, Pepsi is basically using an autonomous roving mini-mart filled with snacks and drinks that you can pre-order and/or buy on the spot, and will only show up to designated areas on campus.

College and corporate campuses are actually a great place to run autonomous robot delivery pilots. You have a lot of people confined to one general location for an entire day (and they all need to eat). If it’s a private campus, robot companies can sidestep city regulations required to operate on public streets (since, you know, a robot might catch fire). Additionally, for something like a college campus, you can train an entire generation of consumers to use on-demand robot delivery, which they will then presumably still want as they head off into the real world.

We predicted that robots were going to be a big thing this year, and Starship is certainly kicking things off with a robotic bang. If you want to know more about where autonomous delivery is headed, join us at Articulate, our one-day food robot and automation conference on April 16 in San Francisco!

Ahold Delhaize Orders Up Nearly 500 Floor Roaming Robots

The days of hearing “Clean up on aisle 7” on the grocery store intercom are numbered. Ahold Delhaize is bringing nearly 500 robots to roam the aisles of GIANT/MARTIN’s and Stop & Shop stores to identify messes.

Dubbed “Marty,” the Badger Technologies robot has been in tests at GIANT locations where, according to the press release, the robots were “…easily recognized by customers in stores by their friendly appearance where they were tested and used to identify hazards, such as liquid, powder and bulk food item spills and provide reporting that enables corrective action.” So the robot doesn’t clean up any messes at the moment, it just lets us humans know where to go to with the mop.

What’s not mentioned in this press announcement is any kind of shelf-scanning or inventory management that Marty will perform. Badger’s website lists inventory management and data analytics as part of its suite of products, so it has the capabilities. But from the press release and a Badger corporate blog post, this rollout seems to be more about risk mitigation rather than making sure there are enough rolls of Bounty paper towels available at any given time. Perhaps cleanup and risk management is a more pressing issue for Ahold Delhaize, and more shelf-scanning functionality will be added to the robots at a later date.

Ahold Delhaize seems to be a big believer in robots. In addition to these 500 Martys rolling around its floors, the company also enlisted Takeoff to build out robot fulfillment centers in the back of some Ahold Delhaize locations. Albertsons is piloting a similar system with Takeoff as well, and Walmart is building and testing out its own in-store robotic fulfillment center.

But. As much as I love robots, I have to imagine these are a stop gap measure until cameras and computer vision take over. Cashierless checkout systems like Grabango and Trigo Vision use ceiling-mounted cameras to automatically monitor what people purchase. However, they also provide stores with an always-on inventory system. Robots can roam around the store, but if someone picks up a box of cereal after the robot has rolled by, that won’t get identified until the robot comes back around. Cameras and computer vision can keep an eye out and monitor that in real time all the time. Computer vision might not be as good as identifying hazards like spilled water or milk on a white floor now, but cameras and AI continue to get better and will likely take over for robots like Badger at some point.

What does the future of robots look like? How will they interact with AI systems? If you are curious about the answers to these questions, you should definitely come to Articulate, our first-ever food robot and automation conference on April 16 in San Francisco. Tickets are limited, get yours today!

CES 2019 Video: The Fresh Geoffrey is a Robot Party Butler

Do I really need to say more than “Robot Party Butler” to pique your interest? Because if I do, thankfully I have a video from CES showing Fresh Geoffrey in action.

Fresh Geoffrey is an autonomous robot that can roam around your house serving you and your guests cold beer on tap, snacks, and, because the machine is French — wine. It even has a glass washer so you don’t mix backwash with that fresh pint. Geoffrey responds to your voice command so you can just call out to bring you a beer and voila!

Sadly, Fresh Geoffrey won’t be able to beer you up this Super Bowl, but the company says it should be shipping in time for the next one! You can see Geoffrey scooting around the CES show space here:

The Fresh Geoffrey is a Robot Party Butler

Announcing Articulate, our Food Robotics and Automation Summit in SF on April 16

Throughout 2018, we chronicled the rise of food robots and the fundamental ways they are changing how we eat. From the farm, to automated restaurants to doorstep delivery, robots are on the rise and 2019 is poised to be a watershed year for them. Which is why we are excited to announce Articulate, a one-day conference devoted to food robots and automation, happening on April 16, 2019 in San Francisco at the General Assembly event space in San Francisco.

One thing we’ve learned from four years of holding Smart Kitchen Summit is that bringing a community of decision makers together really drives discussion, insight and even innovation. At Articulate, we’ll be discussing broad themes such as:

  • What will be the impact of robotics on front and back of house in restaurants?
  • How robots will transform last mile delivery?
  • How will state and local government regulate robots?
  • How much automation should go grocers go in on?
  • The evolution of business and service models in an age of food robotics
  • The ethics of automation and the impact on labor market

Oh, and you’ll be able to check out some really cool robots up close and in person!

We’ve already lined up a number of great speakers, including:

  • Vincent Vanhoucke, Principle Scientist, Google Brain team
  • Linda Pouliot – CEO of Dishcraft
  • Dave Zito – CEO of Miso Robotics
  • John Ha – CEO of Bear Robotics
  • Deepak Sekar – CEO of Chowbotics
  • Ali Bouzari – Chief of Pilot R&D

And we’ll be announcing more shortly.

Tickets are limited, so be sure to grab yours today to get a sneak peek at the future of our automated meal journey. We hope to see you there! Here’s what you need to know:

Articulate: Food Robotics and Automation Summit
April 16, 2019
San Francisco, CA

The BreadBot Is A Bread Factory for the Corner Grocery Store

Back in college, whenever I rode my bike through the Gasworks Park neighborhood in Seattle, I’d get hit with the smell of bread baking as I passed the local bread factory.

As you can imagine, it was wonderful.

And now, Wilkinson Baking Company hopes to bring the best smell in the world to your local grocery store with its new bread making robot, the Breadbot.

The BreadBot, which made its debut last night at CES Unveiled, is a standalone bread robot that can make up to ten loaves of fresh bread per hour from scratch. The machine is fully automated, so after the store employee adds in bread mix to the mix hopper, the BreadBot mixes, forms, proofs, bakes and cools the loaves of bread.

The bread robot was designed to make bread pretty much anytime during the day (or night), and could be scheduled to start the process up to three hours before a store opens. So when the early rising morning shift worker unlocks a store with a Breadbot inside, not only will the smell of fresh bread waft out, but over a dozen loaves will be waiting to be sold.

“It’s the first time bread can be made in a fully automated fashion, start to finish,” said Dr. Randall Wilkinson, the CEO of Wilkinson Baking Company.

Wilkinson envision the BreadBot going into grocery stores, where the machine can sit in the bread aisle and make bread in front of customers. The company’s been trialing the breadbot in local grocery stores in eastern Washington and the results are basically what you’d expect.

“You see the crowds here at CES, that’s what happens in the store,” said Wilkinson. “The consumer comes in, says ‘what’s this?’, and if you’re a retailer you say, ‘that’s what I want.'”

The BreadBot is part of a larger trend of automation and robotics enabling more localized creation of food types that are normally made in a big factory somewhere. Much like the Bellwether coffee roasting machine can push coffee roasting out to the local neighborhood coffee shop, the Breadbot allows the local grocery to offer fresh made bread made in-store.

“Imagine taking a $150 million bread factory, slicing it up into small pieces, move that out into the grocery store, and make it fresh there rather than in the factory,” said Wilkinson.

You can see my full interview with Dr. Wilkinson and see shots of the BreadBot in action in the video below (bread smell not included):

BreadBot, a bread making robot, debuts at CES

Pepsi and Segway Enter the Increasingly Crowded Delivery Robot Space

One potential benefit of a city filled with people looking down at their phones is that they might be better able to see all the little delivery robots scurrying around on the ground. The sidewalks will be getting even more crowded as both Pepsi and Ninebot, Segway’s parent company, have announced separate delivery robot initiatives.

Pepsi is starting small, delivering snacks and drinks to students on the campus of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California using a robot built by Bay Area company, Robby. Students with a UoP email address can use the snackbot app to summon Pepsi brand drinks and snacks to be delivered between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to designated areas across campus via the autonomous rover-style robot.

The Pepsi/Robby partnership is reminiscent of Kiwi and Starship’s existing work. Both Kiwi and Starship make small cooler-sized, autonomous rover robots. Kiwi has been delivering food to the University of California at Berkeley, and recently expanded to the Westwood neighborhood of LA, where it is looking to start making deliveries at UCLA. Starship is focusing on academic and corporate campuses as well and is already making deliveries on Intuit’s Bay Area office complex.

Starship may be getting some competition on the corporate delivery front. At CES next week, Ninebot–Segway will show off its new Loomo delivery bot. It looks like a filing cabinet on wheels with a touchscreen and drawers that slide out. The company’s press announcement didn’t provide too many details, but did say “Loomo Delivery is designed to provide a comprehensive autonomous delivery solution for office buildings, shopping malls, and other destinations.”

From that description and accompanying pictures, the Loomo does not look that rugged, and perhaps is meant for indoor delivery only. If true, this indoor-only approach could either be extremely limiting for its adoption, or it could help Loomo stand out in the robot delivery space.

And that delivery space is getting crowded. Pepsi/Robby, Ninebot-Segway, Kiwi, Starship, Marble, Postmates, Woowa Bros., and Alibaba are just some of the big name players. And I expect we’ll see a few more show off their robotic stuff at CES next week. I’ll be keeping an eye underfoot for sure.

DoorDash Is Testing Self-Driving Cars in San Francisco

Third-party delivery service DoorDash just announced it has partnered with General Motors’ Cruise Automation to test autonomous vehicles in San Francisco.

Cruise has been testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco over the last three years. Equipped with Lidar and radar sensors, as well as cameras that take pictures at 10 frames per second, the vehicles can see more of their surroundings at once than a human being would be able to, making it (theoretically) easier to navigate a crowded, complex metropolis like San Francisco. Cruise currently has DMV permits for testing 180 vehicles in the state of California. For the DoorDash partnership, cars will be based on the Chevy Bolt EV.

The pilot program starts in early 2019. Cruise’s vehicles will do the driving, but humans aren’t completely out of the equation: one DoorDash “dasher” will be in the car, to walk the order to the customer’s door. And though DoorDash hasn’t disclosed names of businesses who will participate, a report by Nation’s Restaurant News notes that the pilot will include restaurant meals and groceries.

That said, DoorDash already had a good bit of competition. Domino’s and Ford Motors were testing delivery via autonomous vehicles last year in South Beach, Miami. Postmates was in on that pilot, too. Self-driving car startup AutoX, meanwhile, is piloting autonomous grocery delivery around the Bay Area, and Farmstead has also been running a grocery delivery pilot with Undelv’s autonomous vehicles.

Still, DoorDash raised a total of $785 million in 2018, and gave a call to hire for so-called “moonshot initiatives” like drones, bots, and self-driving cars. All of which is to say, DoorDash clearly has big plans for tech-driven delivery in 2019.

Delivery in 2019 Will Be About Ghost Kitchens, Drones, and Boone, North Carolina

The food delivery craze will normalize at some point, but not soon. Right now, it’s a segment projected to be worth $365 billion by 2030, and even companies with inherently undeliverable foods are delivering. All of which is to say, food delivery holds a well-earned spot on the list of 2019 hot topics.

Major delivery services — Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc. — will continue to compete for your appetite. At the same time, there are some developments currently discussed less that will get a whole lot more attention over the next 12 months. They’ll even impact who gets first place in the race to be America’s top delivery service.

A New Battleground for Third-Party Delivery
To quote the wizard Saruman, “a new power is rising.” Only this one’s not bent on destroying the world; it’s actually trying to help build up the economies of small- to mid-size U.S. cities by introducing more food delivery services to them.

While the major third-party delivery services cater to the major cities, a smaller service called Bite Squad has been quietly expanding across the rest of the country. In 2018, they did a 100-city expansion that included acquiring over a dozen companies. And just last month, Bite Squad was acquired by Waitr, another smaller delivery service that had previously focused in the Southeastern U.S.

Together, the duo’s reach spans from Honolulu to Virginia and everywhere in between, with a focus on smaller towns and cities where third-party delivery services have yet to set up shop. That’s not an automatic guarantee they’ll win the smaller markets — folks like Grubhub are still aggressively expanding — but it does give us the underdog story every good competition needs. And it’s possible these smaller cities will be key battlegrounds in the war to win the delivery market.

More Ghost Kitchens
Food delivery is projected to grow 12 percent over the next five years. But as we often discuss here at The Spoon, the demand means restaurants are having to change the way they do business, and many struggle with the disparate order channels, lack of space, and general operational hell that happens when you try to accommodate all those new orders.

One answer to the problem is the ghost kitchen. Also known as virtual restaurants, these kitchens exist solely for the purpose of getting delivery food made and into the hands of delivery drivers everywhere. There’s no storefront branding or front-of-house space, and often they’re shared by multiple different restaurants.

There are plenty of restaurants that exist only inside these ghost kitchens. But where the concept could really shine in 2019 is by taking on delivery orders for existing businesses, so the brick-and-mortar locations of those restaurants don’t have to shoulder the entire burden. Kitchen United is one such company. Having secured a $10 million investment this year, the company plans to expand its ghost kitchens to NYC, Denver, Seattle, and several other cities in 2019. A similar endeavor, Cloud Kitchens, was started by Uber’s ex-CEO Travis Kalanick this past year. In Hong Kong, third-party delivery service Deliveroo just opened a food hall, which is part of the company’s network of virtual kitchens. And Indian delivery startup Swiggy just closed $1 billion in funding.

Delivery Via Drones
Aside from the much-publicized Slurpee stunt in 2016, food delivery via drones has remained more or less a fantasy for most of us. That’s starting to change, though, as new companies join the game (of drones) and third-party services like Uber Eats experiment with the concept.

The latter wants commercial drones available in multiple cities by 2021, and is moving aggressively to accomplish that goal. Meanwhile, Amazon’s filed a patent for energy-generating drones, which would solve the battery issue that’s hindered development up to now. And in Reykjavik, Iceland, Israeli tech company Flytrix is already delivering food from the sky.

So it seems fairly obvious who will win the prize of being at the top of the ongoing competition for delivery dominance: whoever can cook up an order in a virtual kitchen and deliver it, preferably via drone, to little-known spots like Boone, North Carolina. It’s at least something to strive for.

South Korea’s Woowa Bros. Gets $320M Investment to Build More Robots

South Korean company Woowa Bros., which runs the Baedal Minjok food delivery app, announced yesterday that it has received a $320 million from Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital and GIC. This brings the total amount raised by Woowa to $482.8 million.

According to Reuters, Woowa says it will use the new funding to expand internationally and, (more excitingly, from my perspective) develop more autonomous delivery robots like its Dilly (pictured above).

Robots are so hot right now, and there’s a wave of li’l rover bots that will be hitting the streets next year. In addition to players like Kiwi, Starship and Marble, Postmates recently introduced its own delivery robot. Postmates is actually the most apt comparison as both Woowa and Postmates offer delivery businesses. Adding robot transport to their existing businesses gives them more control of deliveries further up the stack.

As I wrote back in July, Kim Bong-jin, CEO and Founder of Korean company Woowa Brothers is actually quite thoughtful and forward thinking when it comes to delivery ‘bots. In addition to making delivery cheaper and more secure, Bong-jin wants Woowa robots to double up their work. In addition to dropping off food, the robots would then take back your recycling. Taking that one step further, it’s not too hard to imagine restaurants employing re-usable food containers that could be retrieved, cleaned and loaded up with another delivery meal to cut down on waste.

Woowa isn’t just interested in delivery robots. Earlier this year, the company invested $2 million in Bear Robotics, which makes Penny the front of house restaurant robot. Penny got a job shuttling food and empty dishes at Seoul Pizza Hut location, and was a big hit on-stage at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle.

Spyce Gets a Patent for its Robot Restaurant

Spyce received a patent this week for its robot-run restaurant. Patent number US 10,154,762 B was awarded to Spyce on December 18 for “Automated Meal Production System and Apparatus.”

The patent is filled with the requisite mechanical drawings and legalese, but there were a couple of things that stood out. From the patent filing:

The invention provides a fast food restaurant/kitchen concept or kiosk with drastically reduced overhead costs. This is possible by automating the entire meal production system, therefore eliminating the need for onsite employees and reducing the space required for the restaurant.

As my colleague, Mike Wolf, found out earlier this year, the Spyce restaurant in Boston still relied on humans to help explain the newfangled automated concept to customers as well as finish up the food once it was cooked by the robot. Since this is the first such Spyce restaurant, it’s understandable that they would have a few people on hand as they worked out any kinks. But if the patent is any indication, future locations won’t have such people power:

The inventive apparatus can be configured to autonomously cook and serve up to 300 meals or more per day with no human involvement. The automated restaurant will preferably be restocked and serviced by employees once every 24 hours.

According to their patent filing, Spyce believes that by reducing/eliminating the human costs associated with running a fast food type restaurant can free up resources to create better food. It’s a solid argument, now we’ll just have to see how it plays out in real life.

There are plenty of robot-powered restaurants coming online. From Creator and Flippy here in the U.S. to the thousands of locations JD.com and Haidilao plan to in China, and you can expect more throughout next year.

But it looks like Spyce may have ambitions beyond its own restaurant and may expand into other applications:

Alternatively, the inventive apparatus and system can be used in industrial applications for the automated production of ready-to-eat food products or entrees in bulk.

Perhaps Spyce is thinking about going all Wolfgang Puck and creating its own line of pre-packaged Spyce meals that could be sold in grocery aisles. Or maybe it will offer its robot as a white-label food maker for grocery stores or other CPG companies to create their own customized and branded prepared meals.

Spyce, which raised $21 million in funding this year, seems to be setting itself up to scale beyond the restaurant biz.