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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future of Grocery

COVID Could Usher in a New Trend: Frozen Food as Medicine

It seems that Americans are turning to frozen food during the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, the American Frozen Food Institute (AFFI) reported that sales of frozen food jumped 94 percent in March of 2020 compared to a year before, and continued to rise by 30 percent in April.

Granted, considering the source it’s best to take the report’s numbers with a grain of salt. But this growth actually makes a lot of sense. Frozen food keeps for a long time. Americans are wary of grocery stores and worried about feeding their families, so it follows that they’d stock up on staples that can last for months and be ready when needed.

Curious to see if this was an opportunity for more curated frozen meals, this week I spoke to Christine Day, CEO of healthy frozen meal company Performance Kitchen, about how COVID has affected their sales.

“Every week the volume is picking up,” Day told me. While they had to halt their business with Delta Airlines, for whom they provided some meals for first-class passengers, she said that their online business is up over 200 percent.

Day said that when the pandemic first hit, consumers were stocking up with lots of bulk food. Then there was a phase of over-indulgence: there was “a lot of lasagnas,” she said. Now, Day thinks we’re at a phase when consumers are shifting away from bulk and comfort food to seek out healthier choices.

At the same time, consumers are still looking for convenience. Meal kits can offer that to some degree, but they require preparation and also have a relatively short lifespan in terms of how long it takes for the food to go bad. Frozen meals offer more flexibility. “When you buy a frozen meal you have a choice if your plans change,” said Day.

Performance Kitchen has two branches: Performance Kitchen and Performance Crafted (formerly called Eat Local). Both focus on providing nutritionally balanced frozen meals for specific dietary needs: keto, maternity, vegan, etc. Performance Kitchen makes wholesale meals for sale in 10,000 grocery stores nationally and online. Performance Kitchen Crafted, on the other hand, is a physical store where consumers can come and shop for branded frozen meals. It has six brick and mortar locations in Seattle.

Since COVID has forced those stores to shut their doors, Day said that Eat Local has pivoted to D2C sales and curbside pickup. Before the pandemic they only delivered to the West Coast, but they rolled out national shipping three weeks ago.

Performance Kitchen is not only positioned to tap into the rise in frozen food demand, but also new interest in a burgeoning trend: food as medicine. “People are really focused on immunity health, recognizing that issues like diabetes, hypertension, etc. increase our risk,” Day said. She credited this focus with one of the reasons they were seeing so many more sales during the COVID pandemic.

What’s remains to be seen is if the success of frozen meals, specifically those offering a food as medicine angle, will continue post-coronavirus.

With $6.6B in Sales, Online Grocery Hit Another Record in May

The global pandemic and subsequent lockdowns around the country spurred another record month for online grocery shopping. According to a results from a new Brick Meets Click/Mercatus Grocery Survey released today, online grocery sales hit $6.6 billion in May, up 24 percent from April (which was a record month as well).

The online survey was conducted from May 20 – 22 with more than 1,700 US adults, and showed total online grocery orders grew 18 percent month-over-month to 73.5 million in May, up from 62.5 million in April. In the press announcement, Brick Meets Click said that this increase was driven by increased capacity as retailers added more time slots for fulfilling orders to keep up with demand.

The number of households ordering groceries online increased as well, with 33 percent (roughly 43 million customers) saying that they shopped for groceries online during the previous 30-day period, up slightly from 31 percent in April.

Households also increased the number of orders placed and their total spend per order in May. Households placed an average of 1.7 orders for either delivery or pickup, up 10 percent from 1.6 orders in April. And the average order was $90, up $5 from April. Brick Meets Click attributed the spend increase to higher consumer prices that started in April, improvements to product availability and customers getting more comfortable with online grocery shopping.

Despite all that growth and record setting, the question remains as to how permanent these new behaviors are. States are starting to ease their social distancing restrictions, allowing people to be out and about more freely. And Bloomberg reported on a McKinsey survey yesterday that showed 7 in 10 people still shopped at the grocery store during the pandemic. As Bloomberg noted, online grocery still suffers from clunky ordering processes, entrenched habits and the fact that people are fussy and like to pick their own produce.

Given the relaxations of lockdowns, it’s unlikely we’ll see another record month for June. Rather, we should anticipate a drop. How big of one, we’ll have to wait and see.

With Moscow Store-Within-a-Store, Zippin Shows New Solution for Grocers to Go Cashierless

Zippin announced today that it has opened its first cashierless store-within-a-store at a Azbuka Vkusa supermarket in Moscow. While this marks further international expansion for Zippin, the bigger story is that Azbuka Vkusa’s implementation could model a half-step into cashierless — and contactless — checkout for big grocery store chains.

Zippin is among the many startups making cashierless checkout for retail, which allow shoppers to walk into a store, grab what they want, and go, getting charged automatically as they exit. Zippin’s approach is similar to Amazon Go’s in that it uses a combination of both cameras and shelf sensors to monitor what people take. Last year, Zippin launched its pre-fab Cube, which has all the pieces and technology to make it easier for a store to open up a pop-up cashierless store-within-a-store.

But real estate in an urban environment like Moscow is at a premium, so rather than carving out floor space for a Zippin Cube, Azbuka Vkusa converted one of its existing aisles into a mini-store. The market cordoned off one end, installed cameras on the ceiling, retrofitted the existing shelves with sensors and installed a special QR code-scanning turnstile. Azbuka did all of the implementation with Zippin managing the process remotely.

What makes this interesting is that it’s a proof of concept for big grocery store chains looking to get into cashierless checkout. Grocery stores are like battleships; they can’t turn on a dime, and retrofitting an entire store takes a lot of time and resources, both of which are in short supply during this COVID-19 pandemic.

But the ability to carve out a small part of an existing store, retrofit existing shelves, and stock it with a mix of popular items people want to grab quickly could split the difference. This would allow bigger stores to start implementing cashierless without massive overhauls.

In addition to providing more convenience for shoppers, cashierless checkout is also contactless, an important word in the time of COVID-19. “Since [the] pandemic broke out, we’ve seen a clear increase in inbound inquiries,” Zippin CEO Krishna Motukri told me by phone this week, “The contactless aspect of it is a huge bonus, and probably the main driver of it now.”

Grocery stores are definitely investing in new ways to protect their frontline workers right now and a cashierless section could be an arrow in that particular quiver.

Zippin’s new Moscow location is the latest news in what has been a busy couple of weeks for the cashierless checkout space. Last week, Shopic raised $7.6 million for its tech solution, and this week, Standard Cognition acquired Italian startup, Checkout Technologies.

It’s a pretty safe bet that there is more news on the way as grocers and other retailers experiment and implement new ways of coaxing a nervous public back into their stores.

Cashierless Tech Consolidation: Standard Cognition Buys Checkout Technologies

Standard Cognition, a San Francisco-based cashierless checkout startup, has acquired aptly named Italian company Checkout Technologies, which also does autonomous retail. TechCrunch was first to report the news. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Standard Cognition has raised $86 million in funding, while Checkout had raised just €1.3M ($1.42 USD). Standard Cognition CEO Jordan Fisher told TechCrunch that the two companies had been talking since the middle of last year and were in the final diligence stage of the deal when the COVID-19 pandemic struck Italy particularly hard.

The global COVID-19 crisis could actually help spur adoption of cashierless checkout at retail. The technology allows shoppers to walk into a store, grab what they want and get charged automatically upon exit. This type of contactless transaction reduces the number of human-to-human interactions happening in a store, which could help protect store workers and put shoppers more at ease with in-store shopping.

Fisher also told TechCrunch that he expects to see consolidation in the autonomous checkout space. There is certainly a bevy of startups bringing their cashierless solutions to market. In addition to Standard Cognition and Checkout Technologies, there is Trigo, Grabango, Zippin, Caper, Shopic, Swiftly, Skip, AiFi, and Accel Robotics. Not to mention Amazon, which is the grandaddy of cashierless checkout and will be licensing out its technology. And while Walmart’s IRL store hasn’t implemented cashierless checkout yet, it has banks of cameras monitoring in-store inventory, and it’s not too huge a leap to think they will roll out cashierless options soon.

We started to see some grocery retailers go public with their cashierless partnerships last year. Trigo is at Tesco and Shufersal, Grabango with Giant Eagle, and Zippin with Lojas Americanas. But the big impediment to implementing these cashierless technologies, at least at large grocery chains, is that they need to work at scale and right away. There’s still a learning curve and workflow adoption of cashierless checkout that needs to happen for most consumers.

But the coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the adoption of certain technologies around food, especially if they help promote the safety of workers and shoppers alike. Cashierless checkout could be here in a meaningful way sooner than we expected.

Ahold Delhaize Launches Cleaning Bot Challenge to Find a Robot Floor Scrubber

Ahold Delhaize is on the lookout for a floor scrubbing robot, and it wants your help. Well, it wants your help if you’re a small startup that already has an existing prototype or MVP of a floor cleaning robot.

The Dutch grocery giant’s AI for Retail (AIRLab) unit kicked off the Cleaning Bot Challenge today in an effort to automate the process of cleaning store floors. Ahold Delhaize described the problem in a post kicking off the challenge:

In supermarkets, floors are cleaned once a day before each store opens. It takes cleaning personnel an average of two hours every morning to sweep the floors for dirt, mop the hard-to-reach corners, and then go through the store with a ride-on floor scrubber. It is certainly both a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity. 

Ahold Delhaize’s AI for Retail (AIR) Lab is, thus, looking for a partner that can automate this process by creating an autonomous cleaning robot.

To be considered for the Cleaning Bot Challenge, participants must have a team of at least two co-founders and have an existing prototype of the robot. That robotic solution must be able to scale and the founders must be able to pitch their product in Dutch or English.

It’s not surprising that Ahold Delhaize is looking to automate cleaning its floors. Repetitive, manual tasks like floor scrubbing are perfect for robots. And in the age of COVID-19, cleaning is more important than ever, so you want to ensure the process is consistent and repeatable (two more robot attributes).

It’s also not surprising because Ahold Delhaize has basically gone all-in on robots. Last year the company’s GIANT/MARTIN’s and Stop & Shop stores ordered 500 aisle roaming robots to scan for messes on the floor. Ahold Delhaize has also partnered with Takeoff to build robotic micro-fulfillment centers at some of its retail locations. And Stop & Shop even installed a Breadbot at one of its locations.

What is a little surprising, is that given all of these robo-connections and experience, the company is holding a public contest to find a floor cleaning robot, especially since there are already floor scrubbing robots on the market. A year ago, Walmart announced it was deploying Brain Corp.’s autonomous floor scrubbing robots to 1,500 of its locations.

Were none of these solutions sufficient? What was lacking from existing robot partners that spurred a global hunt for something better? We reached out to Ahold Delhaize to find out more.

In the meantime, if you have a cleaning bot up your sleeve, you have until July 7 to complete your application.

Shopic Raises $7.6 Million Series A for its Cashierless Checkout Tech

Shopic, and Israel-based startup that creates cashierless checkout solutions for medium to large grocery stores, announced today that it has raised a $7.6 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by IBI Tech Fund, with participation from existing investor Entrée Capital, and brings the company’s total funding so far to $11 million.

Cashierless checkout systems use computer vision, shelf sensors and artificial intelligence to allow shoppers to walk in to a store, grab what they want and leave, getting charged automatically as they exit.

We weren’t familiar with Shopic before the company emailed us their announcement this morning. Based on Shopic’s website, it appears that unlike other cashierless checkout startups, Shopic’s system does not rely on retrofitting a store with banks of computer vision cameras to monitor what shoppers purchase. Instead, it looks like Shopic uses a shopper’s mobile phone, which they use to scan items as they shop, and there is a component that monitors the shopping cart itself to ensure that there is no shoplifting.

Shopic also allows stores to communicate back to the customer as they shop. So, based on what someone is buying, the store could offer enhanced product information or push customized sales and promotions in real time. Shopic also says its system can also help stores optimize shelf stocking and in-store behavior.

With its fresh round of capital, Shopic says that it will expand deployments of is platform to existing and new customers across Europe and North America, though it will be facing plenty of competition.

Amazon is big pioneer of cashierless checkout with its Go and Go Grocery stores. A host of startups also offer solutions to supermarkets around the world. Trigo, Grabango and Zippin all use Amazon-like systems of cameras and computer vision to keep track of what people are buying. But Shopic seems to be more of a blend between the mobile phone aspect of Swiftly and the cart monitoring of Caper.

Shopic’s fundraise has also come at a unique time. The COVID-19 global pandemic is re-shaping the grocery store experience as retailers attempt to reduce human-to-human contact. As such, preventative measures like facemasks are being worn by store employees and plexiglass shields are going up in front of cashiers.

But at some point, for the people who aren’t too scared to go into the grocery stores themselves, a contactless cashierless checkout might be the best option. You don’t have to interact with a cashier or touch a credit card terminal that potentially hundreds of other people have touched that day.

For sure, there are still questions around equity and jobs that go along with widescale adoption of cashierless checkout. But as the virus continues its rampage and even resurges in some areas, grocery retailers could accelerate more contactless options like cashierless checkout to keep shoppers and workers safe.

An earlier version of this story said Shopic had raised a total of $8.45 million, based on data in Crunchbase. Shopic got in touch with us and provided the accurate dollar figure.

PepsiCo Launches Two Sites to Deliver All the Snacks to Your Doorstep

With quarantine keeping us all at home and near our pantries, we’re buying more food staples online — and snacking more, too. So it’s no surprise that PepsiCo announced today that it’s launching two ways that people can buy snacks (and other pantry items) directly.

On PantryShop.com, consumers can order curated bundles of popular PepsiCo products with names like “Family Favorites,” “Workout & Recovery,” or, of course, “Snacking.” These bundles have goods from PepsiCo brands like Gatorade, Cap’n Crunch, and Quaker. The Standard Size for the packs costs $29.95, while the larger Family Size is $49.95.

PepsiCo also launched Snacks.com, which is even more snack-specialized. On the site people can order crackers, nuts, and dips, as well as a whole litany of chips from Lays, Cheetos, Ruffles, and more. Orders over $15 ship free.

According to an email sent to The Spoon, the majority of orders placed on PantryShop.com or Snacks.com will arrive within two business days. Obviously that’s not going to sate any chip cravings happening right now, but in a time when finding a grocery delivery spot is almost as hard as finding the golden ticket, two days is actually not that long. And considering everything that PepsiCo is sending is shelf-stable, speed is not exactly of the essence.

Considering the meteoric growth of online grocery since the coronavirus pandemic began, it’s no surprise that PepsiCo is trying to take advantage by launching its own direct sales platforms. With Instacart orders, PepsiCo is competing with other brands to get in your cart. By taking the process onto their own site, they own your purchase 100 percent.

That is, if consumers will go for it. There may be increased interest in online grocery shopping, but I’m not sure if consumers are willing to add another marketplace to their digital purchasing habits. Do people have enough loyalty to PepsiCo brands to place an entirely separate snack order on Snacks.com, as opposed to just adding a few bags of Hot Cheetos to their regular online order?

I suppose, like so many things right now, we’ll have to wait and see. If PepsiCo does see some healthy interest you can bet we’ll see other Big Food brands like Coca-Cola or Nestlé following suit with their own online marketplaces. What better to go with your PepsiCo Snack Pack then a Coca-Cola Soda Pack to wash it all down?

Survey: Spurred by COVID-19, Online Grocery to Grow by 40 Percent in 2020, Hit $38B in Sales

It seems obvious that mandated sheltering in place because of a global pandemic has been a big driver of online grocery sales. But thanks to a new survey from Coresight Research, we now have some numbers to back that obvious assertion up, and show how big grocery e-commerce is getting.

In its US Online Grocery Survey 2020 (subscription required), Coresight predicted that the online grocery sector will grow by roughly 40 percent this year. The report states “That would equate to almost $38 billion of online food and beverage sales in 2020, or around 3.5% of the total market.” That’s up from 2.6 percent in 2019.

As you can probably guess, the coronavirus has spurred this surge in e-commerce. Coresight’s survey found that 49 percent of respondents said they started buying or were buying more groceries online because of the outbreak. It should be noted that this survey was conducted in mid-March, relatively early on in the mandated shelter in place orders. Those numbers may have actually gone up in April as the virus continued to spread.

In addition to more people buying groceries online, people are buying more types of items (produce, meat, alcohol) online. Coresight found that people are buying across an average of five different grocery categories online, up from 4.4 categories last year. Coresight says this indicates people aren’t just buying one-offs, but doing full-basket shopping online.

And finally, it looks as though demand for online commerce could remain strong over the next year. Coresight found that while 52 percent of respondents said that they had bought online groceries in the past 12 months, 62.5 percent expect to do so in the next twelve months.

Coresight’s numbers add to a growing body of market research that illustrate just how online grocery shopping has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, Brick Meets Click reported that grocery e-commerce sales hit $5.3 billion in April. NPD Group found that third-party grocery delivery sales jumped nearly 300 percent in April alone. And last month, a C+R Research study found that 60 percent of US shoppers were “fearful” of physically going into the grocery store.

Grocery stores have been considered essential since the start of this pandemic, so they have remained open the entire time (thank you, grocery store workers!). But even though some states are relaxing their stay at home restrictions, grocery stores are implementing new measures to help curb the spread of the virus. Going forward, grocery shopping isn’t going to be what it was just a few months ago. Plexiglass shields at checkout, fewer people in the stores, masks worn by employees and customers. The in-store experience may just make shopping at home online more attractive.

Walmart Launches Two-Hour Express Delivery as Grocery E-Commerce Surges

Walmart announced Express Delivery, the company’s zippy new two-hour delivery service for food and other goods, yesterday. The new service comes in the middle of a global pandemic that has spurred a drastic wave of demand online grocery shopping.

According to the press announcement, Express Delivery was being tested in 100 stores since Mid-April. In early May, the service will broaden to nearly 1,000 stores before rolling out to 2,000 total stores in the ensuing weeks. Express Delivery costs an additional $10 on top of the initial delivery fee.

The obvious motivation for Express Delivery is simply that more people than ever are shopping for groceries online. In fact, a survey out this week from Brick Meets Click found that online grocery sales hit $5.3 billion in April, up 37 percent over March (which was its own record-setting month). Order number, size and frequency are all up as well.

In March, a market research study from Gordon Haskett Research Advisors found that Walmart was the top destination for those shopping for groceries online. So the company has been bearing the brunt of this crush of online shoppers.

Walmart, as well as every other grocery retailer, has been struggling to keep up e-commerce demand. It was looking to bring on an additional 150,000 workers this Spring to keep up. In addition to delivery and now Express Delivery, the retailer also expanded its contactless curbside pickup options.

Back before the dark times, Walmart was in the midst of working on Walmart+, its answer to Amazon Prime. Walmart+ reportedly would expand on Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited subscription service as well as offer perks on things like prescriptions and gas.

Speaking of Amazon, Walmart’s Express Delivery also brings it up to speed, as it were, with the two-hour delivery Amazon offers for free to its Prime members. Once this pandemic recedes, it’s not too hard to imagine Walmart’s Express Delivery, having been scaled and battle-tested by COVID-19-driven demand, would be a benefit of Walmart+.

For those interested in trying out Express Delivery, visit walmart.com/grocery or the Walmart app and search for your ZIP code to see if Express Delivery is offered in your area.

Online Grocery Sales Hit $5.3 Billion in April, Up 37 Percent from March

April was a record-setting month for U.S. online grocery sales, which reached $5.3 billion, according to new research released by Brick Meets Click and Symphony RetailAI earlier this week (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive). This represents a 37 percent growth over March, which was its own record month with $4.0 billion in sales.

The Brick Meet Click survey found that over the last 30 days, 40 million people shopped for groceries online (up from 39.5 million in March), with the total number of orders hitting 62.5 million in April (up from 46.9 million in March), and a slight increase in spending per order at $85 in April (up from $82 in March). Consider, for comparison, that a Gallup survey in August of last year showed that only 11 percent of respondents shopped for groceries online once a month.

All of this record-setting action, of course, is driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders enacted across the country starting in March. This isolation and social distancing spurred droves of people online to shop for groceries to be either picked up curbside or delivered.

Among the motivating factors for grocery e-commerce was fear. Brick Meets Click found that 47 percent of households surveyed had a “high level” of concerns about catching the novel coronavirus. This echoes a recent survey from C+R Research that found 60 percent of respondents were “fearful” of actually shopping at the grocery store.

These record months of online grocery shopping have put a tremendous strain on the grocer retail infrastructure. Amazon, Walmart, Kroger Instacart and others have all ramped up hiring and added additional measures to try and keep up with the sudden uptick in demand.

But despite two record months in a row, there are bigger, more existential troubling signs on the horizon. In addition to all the boomtown data Brick Meets Click found, its survey also gave us a sobering glimpse at the economic hardship data that lags behind the big sales numbers: 39 percent of surveyed households indicated that their monthly income has dropped 25 percent or more since January and February of this year. Less household money, sadly, means less spent at the grocery store.

Though grocery stores have remained opened during this pandemic, some states are starting to ease their shelter-in-place restrictions. We look forward to seeing Brick Meets Click’s May scorecard to see if and how online grocery shopping behavior has changed.

Ireland Grocery Delivery Startup Buymie Raises €2.2M

Buymie, a grocery delivery startup based in Dublin, Ireland, announced this week that it has raised €2.2 million (~$2.39M USD) and extended its partnership with German supermarket chain Lidl for another two years. The Irish Times first reported the news on Tuesday. ACT Venture Capital led the round, with participation from Sure Valley Ventures and Eamonn Quinn Buymie’s chairman. This brings the total amount raised by Buymie to €4.8 million (~$5.21M USD).

Like Instacart here in the U.S., Buymie’s workers go into Tesco and Lidl stores to shop for items then deliver them to customers’ homes in as little as an hour. Buymie is available to more than 490,000 households in the greater Dublin area, and the company will use its new funds to build out its service and expand into a second city.

Demand for grocery delivery in Ireland has skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic. Buymie told the Irish Times that the number of monthly active customers is growing up 39 percent month over month, and that there’s been a 300 percent increase in the number of downloads for its app.

However, all this rapid growth has a downside as customers are now facing weeklong delays before delivery windows open up. Hence the need for Buymie’s fresh capital raise to scale accordingly.

The need to scale quickly is a situation U.S. grocers are all too familiar with. Shelter in place orders have resulted in a surge in online grocery shopping, forcing even the biggest grocery companies to scramble in an effort to keep up. Amazon has put new Fresh and Whole Foods customers on a waitlist before they can get deliveries. ShopRite has put customers in a virtual waiting room before they can even shop. And delivery service Instacart is swelling its ranks of Shopper gig workers to 750,000 to keep up with demand.

Here in the U.S., some states are starting to relax shelter in place orders, which raises the question of whether or not the desire for online grocery shopping will remain. A recent survey showed that 60 percent of American shoppers are “fearful” of actually going into the grocery store. So while grocery e-commerce may not be full throttle, it probably won’t disappear completely once people are allowed to leave their homes.

I’m not sure what the situation is like in Ireland, but everyone eats, and it looks like Buymie’s funding is coming at the right time.

Refraction’s “Goldilocks” Size Could Make it Pretty Great for Robot Grocery Delivery

Contactless delivery as a concept, didn’t exist prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The phrase describes the way of delivering food and other goods without humans having to interact with or touch one another.

Delivery robots hold the promise of taking contactless delivery one step further, by removing humans from the equation altogether. Over in Ann Arbor, MI, Refraction.ai launched its robot fleet for restaurant lunch delivery earlier this year, and this month started piloting a grocery delivery service.

Refraction builds the REV-1, an autonomous three-wheeled delivery robot that is ruggedized so that it can handle inclement weather. The company has eight robots rolling through a 3.5 mile radius around Ann Arbor right now making deliveries , with another 15 robots being manufactured.

I first came across Refraction’s grocery work in a WIRED article about the delivery fees Refraction was charging. So I hopped on the phone with Refraction Co-Founder, Ram Vasudevan, to find out more about its grocery program and catch up with the company.

According to Vasudevan, Refraction has partnered with a local grocery store called the Produce Station and has another grocery partner coming online soon. The program is currently being tested and is not yet open to the public, but for now, customers are directed to a special website created by Refraction where they can shop online for food items just as they would from any retailer. A robot is dispatched to the store where a worker there packs it with the order (a REV-1 can hold six grocery bags). The robot is then sent off to the house for delivery with a text message alerting the shopper when the robot has arrived.

The Refraction robot isn’t completely contactless, however. Recipients still need to touch the robot to unlock it, something Vasudevan says the company is working on. Refraction is also looking to add UV lights to the cargo cavity to help with sanitization.

Refraction isn’t the only company that is doing robotic food delivery. Starship’s cooler-sized robots have been doing grocery delivery in Milton Keynes, England, and are now doing restaurant delivery in U.S. cities like Tempe, AZ and Fairfax, VA. And Nuro was given the greenlight by California to start testing its autonomous pod vehicles, which about half the size of a regular car, for deliveries as well.

But one advantage Refraction’s robot may have is its “Goldilocks”-like size. It stands five feet tall and is narrow enough to travel in the bike lanes on roads . This could potentially make it more friendly to city regulators who don’t want their sidewalks clogged with robots. It could also prove more attractive than a pod, because the robot can skooch off to the side to make way for traffic, and have an easier time finding enough space to park.

Vasudevan said that Refraction was “overwhelmed” with interest from restaurants when it launched that delivery option earlier this year. As the company moves past the testing phase, it’s going to have quite a bit of contact with grocers as well.