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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Restaurant Tech

Podcast: The Hard Business of Building an At-Scale Restaurant Tech Company

Anyone who’s read Jordan Thaeler’s publication Reforming Retail knows he likes to tell it like it is when it comes to restaurant tech.

No matter whether it’s the business model of payment processors or the difficulties of building an at-scale restaurant tech startup, you can find his no-holds-barred analysis on a wide variety of topics on a website he describes as, “a cathartic output to all the nonsense” he sees in the industry.

We thought it would be fun to have Jordan visit the podcast to talk about some of this nonsense and more. On this week’s show we discuss:

  • The challenges of the restaurant tech market and why there aren’t more publicly traded companies to support a restaurant industry with a total market size of over half a trillion dollars
  • Why point of sale is still the focus and starting point for digital transition in restaurants
  • The ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant market
  • Jack Dorsey’s fixation with crypto and the potential impact of Web3/crypto on restaurants
  • And a whole lot more!

Click play below to listen. As always, if you want more Spoon podcasts you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Picnic’s Pizza-Making Robot Heading To Five College Campuses This Fall

Seattle-based Picnic Works announced today that its Pizza Station robot will be heading to college this fall as part of an expanded pilot program with college food service company Chartwells Higher Education. The pilot will include five colleges: Texas A&M, the University of Chicago, Missouri State University, Carroll University, and Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

The rollout of the pizza robot follows a successful eight-week pilot of Picnic’s Pizza Station at Texas A&M. According to Picnic, during the initial pilot, the robot at Texas A&M made over 4,500 pizzas and enabled the kitchen staff to reallocate 8 hours of kitchen worker time per day to other tasks.

The origin story of Picnic’s enrollment at Texas A&M goes back to COVID when Chartwell’s district executive chef Marc Cruz couldn’t find enough workers to staff the pizza makeline and often found himself in the kitchen making pizza by himself. After someone at food service supplier Rich’s suggested that Cruz and his team check out Picnic, it wasn’t too long before the startup installed its robot in College Station, Texas.

The Chartwell deal is a smart move for Picnic and is another sign that the battle to lock up partnership deals with large food service management companies is heating up. Earlier this year, we wrote about Dexai’s trial with Gordon’s and have been covering Kiwibot’s deployment of over two hundred robots across ten campuses through partner Sodexo. Chartwell operates over 300 college and university “dining environments,” so it’s not hard to see how the business could grow over time for Picnic if they achieve similar results in the new additions under the expanded pilot this fall.

The Chartwell deal follows news of Picnic’s partnership with Speedy Eats, a Lousianna-based startup that builds automation-powered restaurants-in-a-box in parking lots and other locations. The company is working with Picnic to incorporate the Pizza Station as part of their automated kitchen setup.

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

The lift (aka “dumbwaiter”) built into the new Taco Bell Defy prototype

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

The restaurant and kitchen itself are on the second floor, where workers are making food, taking orders, and, now, putting food into their little lifts to drop down to the drive-thru. Customers are also able to walk into the restaurant and order at the counter or pick up mobile orders on a pick-up shelf. Drive-thru workers interact with customers through video and audio intercom.

Not surprisingly, the new location emphasizes mobile ordering. Customers can pre-order food on the Taco Bell mobile app and scan the QR code at one of the three mobile order lanes. Delivery drivers for UberEats and others will also be able to pick up orders for customers through one of the mobile lines. Those who insist on going old-school will have to stick to the one line reserved for non-mobile orders.

Taco Bell is building the new prototype in partnership with long-time franchisee Border Foods. Taco Bell and Border Foods have said the new concept and technology within could be a template for future locations and that they are considering retrofitting existing restaurants to utilize some of the Defy technologies.

Either way, I’m all for the modern arrival of the dumbwaiter. Like with the comeback of the automat in recent years, I love seeing concepts we once thought were extinct now powering our restaurants of the future.

You can watch a customer get their food via the lift at a Taco Bell Defy (including a camera sent up the tube) in the video below.

Whats Up the Tube at First of its Kind Taco Bell?

Tablz Wants to Metaverse-ize Restaurant Reservations and I am on Board With It

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went out for our anniversary dinner.

I’d made reservations for two with OpenTable at a nice little steak place and mentioned it was our anniversary in the ‘special occasion’ field. When we arrived, the staff was friendly and gave us special treatment.

Overall it was a great experience, except for one little thing: the table. We’d have preferred a window seat, not one in the middle of the room near the entrance. Nitpicky, I know, and something the staff had no idea about since I didn’t tell them and I wasn’t able to pick a specific table when I made reservations

But what if I could have? What if I could have picked my table location like I would when buying a ticket on an airplane or for a concert? Better yet, what if I could have walked around a virtual version of the restaurant and seen the table and the view before making the reservation?

That’s the future a startup called Tablz is hoping to make possible. The San Francisco-based company has created a table reservation platform that allows prospective diners to virtually tour a restaurant and pick their table. As you can see in the video below, the experience is not unlike moving through a video game like The Sims or touring a home with a 3D walkthrough on Zillow.

Finding a Table With Tablz Reservation Technology

In other words, the company has shown us what the restaurant reservation experience will look like in the metaverse, and I am here for it. The first description I heard of Tablz was that it allows you to pick a seat like you would on an airplane. That’s accurate, but it doesn’t really do it justice. By being able to walk around the restaurant and pick a table, see where it is on a 3D floorplan or dollhouse view, and look around from your prospective seat with a 360-degree view is a game-changer when it comes to making a reservation.

Tablz’s technology can be plugged into existing reservation sites like OpenTable and Rezy, which makes it a lot more appealing to prospective restaurant owners who have spent years building followings on those platforms. It also makes it more likely that the entrenched platforms themselves will embrace the technology rather than see it as a competitor. I also wouldn’t rule out the incumbents either creating similar technology or acquiring a company like Tablz as restaurant reservations evolve and move into the metaverse.

Tablz was initially incubated as the first product from a company called Transparent Kitchen. The Transparent Kitchen’s founders saw enough potential with the product to sunset the original company and focus full-time on Tablz. The company has raised a small seed round of funding from Branded Hospitality Ventures and a private investor group, including restaurant advisor Steven Kamali and Bbot founder Steve Simoni.

Tablz technology is being used at a handful of restaurants today like Roka in San Francisco and Dog & Tiger Public House in Toronto, but I expect we’ll see more soon as restaurants look for ways to stand out from the crowd as we come out of the pandemic.

We Now Have More Details on Tesla’s Drive-in Movie Theater Restaurant Plans

When Elon Musk said he wanted a drive-in restaurant, apparently he meant a drive-in movie theater restaurant.

As detailed in the plans filed with the city of Los Angeles, the new Tesla drive-in restaurant will have not one but two movie screens that will show ~30-minute movies (about the time it takes to charge a Tesla). The screens will sit on the north and west property lines and be viewable from both the rooftop area and diners’ vehicles.

You can see what the restaurant (and screens and decorative bamboo poles) might look like in the renderings below:

Below is the description of the drive-in theater portion of the new restaurant from the filing:

Finally, there will be two movie screens for viewing by people charging their cars and/or eating in the restaurant. The movies to be shown will be features lasting approximately the same amount of time as it takes to charge a vehicle (~30 minutes). The two screens will be on both North and West property lines of the site to allow people to view the screens from both their vehicles and from the roof top seating area. A decorative bamboo landscape screen will be planted on the property lines to frame both movie screens. The operational hours for the Drive-In movie theatre will be from 7 am-11 pm pursuant to the Commercial Corner standards

There are many more details, many of which were recently shared by Twitter user MarcoRP with some extra reporting by electric mobility blog Elektrek. Here are some of the particulars and questions we have about the project:

The restaurant will have lots of seating – The theater has lots of built-in seating both inside and outside. There will be two rows of theater seating on the top level, a standing bar area behind the theater seating, and multiple table rounds. On the bottom floor, there will be seating both inside and outside the rotunda-style building. There will also be charging stalls in the parking lot where Tesla owners (and I am assuming lots of non-Tesla owners) will be able to park, order food and watch video on the large screens.

You can see the parking lot schematic with the round restaurant and charging stations in the graphic below:

The restaurant will be on the site of an old Shakey’s – The future location of the Tesla restaurant is where an old (but still operational) Shakey’s restaurant stands today. The address is on Santa Monica Blvd in downtown Hollywood, not the original planned location in the city of Santa Monica near Route 66. The plot size is .565 acres with a large parking lot.

The new restaurant will run 24 hours a day – While the movie viewing hours will be restricted (7 am – 11 pm) to no doubt comply with local ordinances, Tesla wants the dining portion of its futuristic drive-in to rock around the clock.

Most parking spots will have superchargers. Who will be able to park there? – The parking lot will have 34 stalls, with 29 of the stalls having superchargers. It will be interesting to see whether Tesla imposes any restrictions on who can park in the restaurant stalls. Since the restaurant will no doubt draw in lots of tourists, parking stall demand will likely exceed availability. While many visitors will no doubt drive Teslas, chances are more likely will not. My guess is that Tesla will restrict most of the parking stalls for Tesla vehicles.

Still no hard date on opening – The filing doesn’t specify when the new restaurant would be built or open for business. While I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that this project has been gestating since 2018, it is at least encouraging that the company has drawn up plans and looks to have decided on the location.

The first of many? It’s worth wondering if this will be the first of what could be multiple restaurants for Tesla. My guess is that it all depends on how successful this location is. Sure, it’s a showcase location in the middle of Hollywood that will undoubtedly draw in lots of tourists, but I can see Tesla building more of these (or at least a modified version of the concept) as they build out their charging station network.

And Robots? The final question (naturally) is: Will there be robots?

Remy Robotics Unveils Robotic Ghost Kitchen Platform as It Opens Third Location in Barcelona

Remy Robotics, an automated ghost kitchen startup, came out of stealth this week as it opened its third autonomous robotic kitchen.

Remy, based in Barcelona, creates custom-built robotic kitchens tailored for the food delivery industry. For the past year, the company has been operating two dark kitchens, one in Barcelona and one in Paris, and is opening its third kitchen in Barcelona this week.

Until this point, the company has been delivering food under its own virtual kitchen brands – including a flexitarian food brand called OMG – and has cooked and sold 60 thousand meals. Now, with the launch of its third kitchen, Remy is opening up its kitchens to other restaurant brands. According to the company, its system has the flexibility to install a new robotic kitchen and have it operational in about 48 hours.

If a brand is thinking about launching a new delivery-centric virtual brand with Remy, they shouldn’t expect to use their chefs and employees to make the meals. Remy believes that automated kitchens work better when the food is optimized for robotics from the ground up.

“We maximize what robots can do,” Remy CEO Yegor Traiman told The Spoon in a Zoom interview. “The main mistake of most robotics companies is they’re trying to mimic the human and teach robots how to do the things a human would do.”

Instead, Traiman says that they configured the entire process of food making to be done by robots, developing recipes and cooking techniques based on a variety of parameters, including the shape of Remy’s own packaging and how much moisture is lost during the cooking process. The company claims that their robotic systems decide autonomously how and for how long to cook a dish, based on where a customer lives and how long the delivery will take. They also utilize “computer vision and neural networks” alongside “smart ovens and sensors controlling temperature, moisture, weight and other key parameters.”

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman said. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

A Remy robot-powered ghost kitchen can fit up to ten brands into the same space that one human-powered kitchen can operate, and, according to Traiman, it shouldn’t be a problem adding new partners.

“There is huge interest at the moment in Spain and in France,” Traiman said. “Almost every neighbor at these cloud kitchen facilities a knocking on the door asking ‘guys, can we do something together?'”

The Backbar One Is The Robot Bartender Your Parents Would Approve Of

Here at The Spoon, we’ve seen a bunch of bartender bots over the years. From early efforts like the Bartesian to weird animated robot bartenders, we’ve covered pretty much every new product that automates drink dispensing for home or restaurant.

So when the email came into my inbox about the Backbar One, I figured yet another liquor-loving engineering team had programmed a robot arm to pour drinks and decided to start a company.

Boy was I wrong. From the looks of it, someone’s figured out how to create an automated drink dispenser that fits perfectly into the workflow of a restaurant bar and creates drinks at a high enough volume to handle cocktail duties at the busiest of restaurant chains.

As can be seen in the walkthrough video below, the Backbar One integrates with the restaurant’s existing point of sale system. Once a drink order is put in, it is sent to the Backbar One where the bartender looks at the order, clicks the screen to start the process, drops a glass or shaker down on the conveyor belt, and then the machine automatically starts making the drink. Liquor and other ingredients are added, and the drink is ready in about 10 seconds. The bartender adds the garnish and puts the drink on the server’s tray. According to the company, the Backbar One can make up to 300 drinks per hour.

Backbar One Demo Video

The Backbar One has two storage drawers, including a refrigerated top drawer that has room for 12 containers to hold juices, syrups, mixes, and grenadines. The bottom drawer is where the liquor is stored, with room for 28 1 liter or 750-milliliter bottles.

The Backbar One is the most recent example of a trend I’m beginning to see from the latest generation of foodservice robots targeting high-volume restaurants where the design emphasizes seamless integration into existing service industry employee workflows. Much like the automated makeline of Hyphen or the new Sippy drink-dispensing robot from Miso, the Backbar One just feels like the engineers spent time with restaurant operators when putting together the design concepts. In other words, it seems purpose-built, practical, and useful, something an operator of a single independent restaurant or a chain would want to implement if they wanted to increase the productivity and profitability of their bar.

In short, it’s the bartender bot your parents would approve of, which is probably why food and ag venture firm Finistere Ventures (as well as HAX and others) decided to invest a $3.5 million seed round in the company. From an investment perspective, there are probably lots of drink automation startup pitch decks in circulation right now, but I’m sure the investors saw the market potential for a practical drink-making machine that would likely appeal to the Chili’s and Applebee’s of the world (where, by the way, mom and dad are probably eating right now).

Front Of House Takes an NFT Program to Smaller Restaurants

If you’ve ever taken home a souvenir menu or ashtray from your favorite restaurant, you will understand the role NFTs play in the hospitality industry. The same goes for attending a restaurant theme night or local pop-up of a new dining establishment. As Front of House (FOH) co-founder Phil Toronto eloquently puts it, a restaurant establishing a successful NFT strategy is “a beautiful merging of the digital and physical experience.”

Launching on May 18, Front of House (FOH) is a marketplace for NFTs of digital collectibles and experiences for independent restaurants. Co-founders Phil Toronto (VaynerFund), Colin Camac (former restaurateur), and Alex Ostroff (Saint Urbain) represent a mix of people with backgrounds in digital technology, advertising, and the hospitality industries. Initial clients include Wildair and Dame, with upcoming partners such as Rosella, Niche Niche, and Tokyo Record Bar.

The company’s business model is for the restaurant to keep 80% of the sale of digital collectibles. If an establishment uses a collectible as an invite to a unique dining experience, the restaurant will keep all the money from the food event.

Toronto stresses that FOH’s digital collectibles will be the digital analog to buying swag (such as a sweatshirt or tote bag) from your go-to dining establishment. Over time, he adds, the digital representations can grow to become interactive experiences that can be shared and/or enjoyed as a personal keepsake. “It’s a passport of sorts from your favorite restaurant,” the FOH co-founder told The Spoon in a recent interview.

The early adopters of using NFT as a marketing and sales tool are “scrappy entrepreneurs,” Toronto added, who had to get creative to stay afloat during the pandemic. “The commonality is that every restaurant owner interested in our program is entrepreneurial and looking to go outside the box,” he said.

Marketing and being on the cutting edge are only part of it. The impetus for jumping on board the growing NFT trend is about money. In addition to their regular dining business, an owner can collect revenue from digital collectibles, but the aspect with the most upside is creating memorable dining experiences. A key to all the possibilities is to make it simple for the customer to engage. A key to FOH’s success will be what the co-founder calls creating a frictionless experience, making it a little more than a typical eCommerce check-out experience.

“One of the avenues we’d like to explore is ticketed experiences where Front of House will work with a restaurant to buy it out for the night and have a special ticketed experience,” Toronto said. “That experience is sold through a digital collectible that lives on as a memory and a digital ticket stub you can take.”

Toronto said he is surprised that 65% of the customers he approaches get the idea and understand its value but might have a wait-and-see attitude. Once the pioneers prove NFTs successful and more than a “get rich quick” concept, he believes any reluctance will disappear. Also, Toronto commented that the NFT opportunity for restaurants isn’t limited to New York, Los Angeles, and other coastal towns. Given the hospitality business’s everyday issues, the concept will work just as well for Des Moines or any eatery wanting to explore a new business opportunity.

Wavemaker Launches Wing Zone Labs, a Roboticized Rethink of The Popular Chicken Wing Franchise

Today Wavemaker Labs and Wing Zone announced the launch of Wing Zone Labs, a roboticized rethink of the popular chicken wing franchise.

Under the franchise agreement, Wavemaker will have exclusive rights to the Southern California region and has plans to open up to twenty locations in the coming years. According to the announcement, the new Wing Zone Labs will “focus on driving innovation for the company, helping Wing Zone restaurants unlock their full potential with end-to-end automation.”

It’s an interesting approach, one that goes beyond a traditional franchise agreement but falls short of a joint venture. The deal looks like Wing Zone has largely offloaded the financial risk to Wavemaker, who, in a sense, is offloading their financial risk by raising capital through equity crowdfunding. Wavemaker is no stranger to raising funds through equity crowdfunding, as that’s how it (and spinouts like Miso Robotics) have typically raised capital.

Of course, the ability to launch twenty new restaurants will depend on whether the company can raise the funding. The overall equity crowdfunding market has continued to grow over the past few years, but it’s unclear what persistent inflation and what could be a potential recession on the horizon will do to investor appetites.

Regardless, it will also be interesting to watch if Wing Zone begins to implement automation in stores outside of the Southern California market. The announcement makes clear Wavemaker’s new initiative will be the driving force behind automation efforts at Wing Zone, and if the restaurant chain sees positive results with Labs they may begin to encourage other franchisees to consider the use of robotics.

Sweetgreen’s New Takeout-Only Location Is a Logical Landing Spot For Spyce’s Kitchen Robots

This morning, Sweetgreen announced they are opening their first pickup-only location in Washington DC’s Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood. Opening on August 1st, the new location will not have any dine-in seating, will feature shelves for pickup and delivery, and all food production will be hidden from sight behind the shelving system.

My first thought upon seeing the digital renderings of the new restaurant was it reminded a lot me of Eatsa’s spare tech-forward front-of-house. My second thought was maybe Sweetgreen has robot aspirations for the back of house like Eatsa once did.

A quick refresher to understand my line of thinking. Spoon readers may remember that Eatsa’s original vision included not only an automat-like front of house with rows of cubbies and ordering kiosks, but also included a long-term plan to roboticize the back of house. They even received a patent for a fully-automated food assembly system last year.

And then last year, Sweetgreen made a fairly surprising acquisition when they scooped up robotic restaurant startup Spyce. Surprising because just the year before, the company layed off its technology team, including the company’s head of automation.

Since that acquisition, Sweetgreen has closed the remaining Spyce branded restaurants and redeployed the Spyce team to work on solutions for Sweetgreen’s own restaurants. At the time of the deal, Sweetgreen said Spyce’s automation technology will allow its workers to focus more on customer service, expand its menu into warm foods, and make meal preparation more consistent.

With all that in mind, it makes one wonder if the new restaurant format is a logical landing place for Spyce’s automation technology. With a completely digital order flow, small kitchen footprint, and the design flexibility a completely new store format gives them, it makes sense that Sweetgreen might see its new pickup-only location as the perfect place to deploy Spyce’s kitchen robot technology.

Of course, this is all pure speculation, and there’s a good chance Sweetgreen might just stick with their traditional kitchens with humans doing the bulk of the cooking. But with the company’s founders’ original vision of creating a tech company that serves food, this new restaurant format might provide them just the opportunity they are looking for to put the robot business they acquired last year to good use.

Jack in the Box Pilot Testing Fryer & Drink Station Robots

Today Miso Robotics and Jack in the Box announced a pilot test of robotic fryer and drink fulfillment systems. The new trial, which will take place in the San Diego market, will utilize the Flippy 2 and the Sippy product lines from Miso Robotics.

“This collaboration with Miso Robotics is a steppingstone for our back-of-house restaurant operations,” Jack in the Box COO Tony Darden said in the release. “We are confident that this technology will be a good fit to support our growing business needs with intentions of having a positive impact on our operations while promoting safety and comfort to our team members.”

The Flippy 2 will be used to automate the fryer station to cook up curly fries, tacos, chicken nuggets, and other fried food. The Sippy will automate cup dispensing and beverage filling and top the drinks with an airtight drink seal (think boba drinks) rather than the typical plastic lid.

While most coverage of Miso focuses on the Flippy, the addition of the Sippy robot could also bring significant changes to a chain like Jack in the Box. Not only would the robot drink dispenser speed up drive-thru operations (how many times have you waited for your drink to be filled sitting in your car?), but the Sippy could help get rid of all those plastic drink lids. With a wider deployment, Jack in the Box could eliminate tons of waste annually.

You can watch a demo video of how the Sippy works below:

The chain’s addition of robotics isn’t all that surprising since the Jack in the Box CFO tipped his hand last November. Addressing the stress that labor costs are putting on the business, Tim Mullany said that Jack in the Box is exploring the use of automation as a potential solution.

“We’re working on robotics, particularly at the fry station, and we’ll have a test underway shortly and we’re optimistic about what that has for us in the long term. We’re also looking at automated drink machines as far as pulling labor out of the system. These technologies are things that, in our analysis, could be fairly meaningful when we look at the economic model in the long term and across the system,” he said.

While today’s announcement is just the latest in a steady stream of news about major chains launching robotics pilots, the fact that it’s Jack in the Box makes it particularly noteworthy. We’ve seen White Castle and Caliburger dabbling in robotic back of houses, but with over two thousand locations in North America, Jack is by far the biggest fast-food chain to run a robotics trial. I am sure both Burger King and Mcdonald’s are watching closely to see how the trial goes and whether Jack decides to implement a phase 2 wider rollout.

And no matter what such a phase 2 looks like – whether it’s adding automation to new stores only or a wider chain-wide rollout – going beyond the pilot stage would be a significant admission by one of the country’s most recognized burger chains that automation will play a big role in their future.