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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Restaurant Tech

A Robot-Powered Pasta Restaurant in Tokyo is Just the Beginning for Startup TechMagic

Back in 2017, I was in Tokyo for the first SKS Japan and thought I’d look around to see if I could find any robot-powered restaurants. I didn’t have much luck. In fact, about the only one that showed up during my search was a tourist attraction in Shinjuku, which wasn’t so much a robot restaurant as it was a dinner theater show that could only be described as Care Bears meets Mad Max Fury Road

Five years later, things have sure changed. Not only have automated mini-restaurants like Yo-Kai popped up around town, but there’s also a robot pasta restaurant slinging plates of noodles right across from Tokyo Station. That new restaurant, called E Vino Spaghetti, pumps out plates of pasta at a rate of over one per minute with its 3-axis robot.

Called P-Robo, the robot was designed by a Tokyo-based startup called TechMagic. The company spent three and a half years developing the robot, says company CEO and founder Yuji Shiraki.

TechMagic CEO Yuji Shiraki

The restaurant is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Suntory. Pronto has over 300 restaurants around Japan, and TechMagic is working to deploy robots at 50 or so over the next three years. And that’s just one project; according to Shiraki, the company has deals to build robots for several large corporations, ranging from a large and well-known Korean company to Cup Noodle giant Nissin.

As for the P-Robo, I was impressed with how quickly it worked in a fairly small space. The robot preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is put on a plate, and a human worker does final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleans the prep bowls.

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The idea to build a food robot first came to Shiraki when he visited his grandmother. Over 90 years old, Shiraki saw she could not cook for herself and so started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. It wasn’t long before he quit his job as a management consultant and founded TechMagic.

That was five years ago. Since then, the company has raised $23 million in funding (including a $15 million Series B last September), received a patent for its pasta-making robot, and plans to create its own chain of robot-powered franchise restaurants.

At the rate Shiraki and his team are going, Tokyo might just be filled with restaurant robots when I come back for SKS Japan 2023. And who knows, someday soon, I may even see a TechMagic robot closer to home.

Bite Ninja’s New Funding Shows Operational Efficiency Is What’s in for Restaurant Tech in 2022

Despite the constant flood of doomsday headlines as the dark clouds of recession gather overhead and consumer behavior regresses to the mean post-pandemic, not all news is bad news these days when it comes to restaurant tech. In fact, some startups seem to be doing just fine, particularly those whose mission it is to help restaurants save money.

Take Bite Ninja, who this week announced an $11.3 million funding round. The company allows fast food restaurants to outsource their drive-thru through Bite Ninja’s cloud-labor platform. Bite Ninja employees can remotely staff a drive-thru from their home anywhere in the country and can also work multiple drive-thrus during the course of their shift.

The ability to spread a single worker across multiple restaurants and treat drive-thru labor as an “elastic” resource that can be spun or down dynamically during the course of a day is a radical rethink of a core part of a fast food restaurant, coming at a time when most fast food restaurants are struggling to hire employees. According to the announcement, Bite Ninja is currently running trials at five of the top twenty quick-service chains in the US.

Other companies that help restaurants and retail become more efficient and bring cost-savings to operations continue to thrive and get new funding despite what many see as a large-scale downturn in food tech funding. For example, Galley Solutions, a company that helps restaurants more accurately predict and optimize their food inventory, raised $14.2 million this spring. Hyphen, a startup that is building plug & play automated makeline solutions, raised a $24 million Series A in February and saw additional follow-on investment by Chipotle in June. That same month, food waste reduction startup Goodr raised a $8 million funding round in early summer. Last month, Afresh, a company that enables food retailers to optimize their fresh food inventory and reduce waste, raised a $115 million series B.

If 2021’s restaurant tech funding was all about ghost kitchens and digital transformation, the big buzzwords for 2022 are operational efficiency and cost savings. Startups that can help streamline operations using automation, cloud computing, AI, and other transformational technologies will continue to do okay, particularly those that help restaurant operators deal with acute labor shortages and rising costs of doing business during rising inflation and persistent supply chain disruptions.

This Restaurant Tech Founder Thinks The Value of Virtual Brands is Bottom Line Savings, Not Top Line Growth

If you ask Michael Jacobs what he thinks of virtual restaurants, you might expect an enthusiastic declaration of support for the concept. After all, as a co-founder and the original CEO of Ordermark and someone who helped conceive of the idea behind Nextbite, he helped create one of the highest-profile startups powering a wave of virtual restaurant brands launched in recent years.

But in reality, his answer is decidedly more circumspect.

“I don’t think restaurants need virtual brands,” Jacobs told me in a recent phone interview. “It’s a nice to have, and it’s not bad for the restaurant, but it’s not anything that will save a restaurant.”

In other words, Jacobs believes that while restaurants can get ok top-line growth running a virtual brand out of their kitchen, it’s often not a game changer for the overall business.

Where he thinks digital-powered business models can make a difference is by helping restaurants with another part of their P&L: expenses. In particular, the cost of food and materials required to run a restaurant.

This realization dawned on Jacobs over time, first as the founder of Tapin2, a company that made software running multi-brand digital restaurants at stadiums, and later as the CEO of Team Kitchens, a facilities-based ghost kitchen company he started after selling his shares in Ordermark/Nextbite in 2019 (after his separation from Ordermark, he and the company engaged in a round of litigation that, according to Jacobs, has since been settled).

During these stints, Jacobs realized that while there are some benefits to tapping into a collective brand to gain customers and garner incremental sales a la a traditional virtual restaurant, the real power in a collectively powered brand lies in the cost savings of pooled purchasing.

“While working with some of the enterprise brands, I realized that they were saving as much as 50 to 60% on every item they were purchasing,” he said.

In contrast, independently owned restaurants and smaller chains utilizing a virtual brand concept aren’t getting the same scaled purchasing savings as large enterprise restaurant brands. But according to Jacobs, if these smaller organizations leverage pooled purchasing through a virtual collective, it can make a huge difference to margin-constrained businesses.

“The important thing is like during this time where restaurants are hurting from inflation, we have a solution where they can save 15 to 25% give or take on what they’re purchasing right now,” Jacobs said. “And as we scale, I think the numbers will get even better.”

“What I wanted to build was a network of restaurants that work together,” Jacobs said of his new company KitchData. “Where it’s a bunch of small to medium-sized businesses who collaborate through these virtual brands on their purchasing.”

By doing this, Jacobs believes the restaurants can collectively work together to create a virtual brand with a purchasing power similar to that of an enterprise business. Sure, it’s a virtual restaurant, only one where the focus is on the bottom line rather than the top.

KitchData also pairs its technology with concept and brand development consulting, where it helps operators develop a brand they fully own, something Jacobs sees as another significant differentiator.

“It’s theirs to do with as they wish,” Jacobs said. “Ric Flair owns Woo Wings (the virtual chicken wing brand the famed pro wrestler launched recently). Powerbomb Pizza is owned by Pro Wrestling Tees. DaMandyz Donutz is owned by (pro wrestlers) Daria and Amanda.”

KitchData is getting going just as some in the broader restaurant tech space – including Jacob’s former employer – are restructuring as part of a broad pullback of the easy money invested into the space over the past few years. Jacobs, who managed to raise $3 million in seed funding for KitchData despite investor cooling, has high hopes for his company.

“I think it’s the best thing invented for the restaurant industry itself in decades,” Jacobs said. “And we’re going to do a good job at saving the bottom line for restaurants.”

Massimo de Marco on Why Piestro Decided to Build a Back-of-House Pizza Robot

This week, Piestro CEO Massimo de Marco announced on Linkedin that his company Piestro is building a back-of-house pizza robot for restaurants.

After seeing the news, I decided to catch up with de Marco to ask him why he decided to diversify his company’s product portfolio beyond the automated pizza vending machine that the company says has $580 million in preorders.

You can read the transcript of my interview with de Marco below.

You’re working on a back-of-house robot. What’s the thinking here?

As we started showing our original machine to some of the big pizza brands, they would say ‘this is great, but what about the back of the house?’ My response was, ‘funny you say that, come and let me show you some designs’. They thought a back-of-house machine makes tons of sense, because clearly labor is not coming back for them. They’re having massive issues with keeping their stores open.

Explain the product.

It’s about three feet wide by about 32 inches deep. And if fits into pretty much any kitchen space because it doesn’t protrude more than a prep table.

Think of a pizza store that has a 110-inch pizza table which acts as an assembly line with all the different ingredients. If you can take that space and make it smaller, say a 68-inch assembly line, for the rest of the ingredients, our machine will add tomato, cheese, and pepperoni. We are also working on an addition for a couple of the top other ingredients. From there, the pizza can be finished on the pizza table where an employee can add the oil, add garlic, etc and then put it into the oven.

So it works with a restaurant’s existing ovens?

Yes. Think about the big pizza companies that have these ovens that cost $55,000. They’re not going to remove those from their back of the house right? These restaurant operators’ big concern is how do they get people to assemble the pizza correctly without any waste and do it very, very quickly. With our new machine, they will be able to assemble a pizza next 45 seconds to a minute depending on how many ingredients. They can consistently get one pizza per minute coming through so that the employee can take it and put it in the oven cook.

What’s the production capacity in terms of ingredients?

We don’t have a set amount, because it’s in the back of the house. Even if you do you 40 To 50 pizzas, you can always refill the machine constantly. You already have a person there that’s finishing up the pizza and putting them into the oven, boxing them. It’s not something our Piestro vending machine. You don’t want to go back to refill the vending machine. That’s why the Piestro Maestro has 80 to 100 pizza capacity ingredients; with our back-of-house machine, 40 is plenty, depending on the ingredients. But regardless, you can make 60-plus pizzas with tomato sauce and cheese without having to refill it.

One of the messages you are pushing is that automating part of the pizza making leads to less waste. Is that resonating with potential customers?

We’ve had interesting conversations with some big brands. One founder of pizza restaurant company said to me, ‘if I can fix just the amount of cheese that we put on our pizza so that we’re not wasting it across my company, I can save at least $70 to $80,000 across the company in cheese alone.’

So that’ll pay for how many machines?

It’s gonna pay for at least a couple of machines. But again, I’m an operator, and I want to get these machines in the back of the house of these restaurants and get them going, and then they will pay us a SaaS fee at the end of the month. And we haven’t figured out what this is going to be, but clearly it’s going to be considerably less than the Piestro (Maestro). Once it’s all said and done, our Piestro automated machine is about three grand a month, and I want to say this is probably going to be two-thirds of that. Which again, is not something that we have defined yet.

When will I be able to see one of these in a restaurant?

We’re going to put it into the kitchen of a large brand around the beginning of October. But that’s the that’s the first machine, the prototype, that is going to be tested. It’s a pilot is not going into a public restaurant but in a test kitchen. Once we make them happy, then we know that we can mass produce the machines, but we want to make sure that if they have something to say about it, then they can give us all the feedback that they can give.

With the company adding a second product, I know you much of your fundraising through crowdfunding. Are you looking to raise money to kind of scale this?

Well, we are gonna close this current round fundraising. We’ll see how we do, but we are definitely planning on another fundraising coming up in the fall. It’s already been planned. But the beauty is that this product is not very different from our current technology. It’s the same as the dispensing we use at Piestro, so we don’t have to go out and reinvent the wheel.

Thank you for spending time with me.

Thank you.

Podcast: A Challenging Time for Restaurant Tech

In this episode of The Spoon, we are joined by long-time restaurant and restaurant tech journalist Nancy Luna of Insider to compare notes about what’s been a challenging few months for restaurant tech startups.

Some stories we discuss on the show include:

Click play below or find The Spoon podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

BurgerFi Begins Rollout of the Samsung Kiosks powered by GRUBBRR (Sponsored Post)

In December 2021, BurgerFi launched a pilot program with GRUBBRR to test the effectiveness of self-ordering technology to decrease operating costs, minimize the dependency on labor, increase revenue, and provide customers with a better overall experience.

Together, the GRUBBRR and BurgerFi teams worked to develop a project plan, including a curated customer journey and operational process, to optimize efficiency and automate BurgerFi’s front of house. The teams met weekly to monitor successes and challenges and ensure BurgerFi had a phenomenal experience implementing the kiosks. GRUBBRR created an optimized solution designed to create operational efficiency, drive incremental revenue and give customers a better experience.

Throughout the pilot, the Samsung Kiosk powered by GRUBBRR showed a significant lift in sales, with average ticket sizes increasing by 18.5% and 52% of customers opting into upsells. The Kiosk also absorbed up to 133 orders per day on average, accounting for 75% of total orders placed in the store and 78% of net sales.

Following the successful pilot, BurgerFi selected GRUBBRR as its exclusive self-ordering technology provider. The kiosks are currently being deployed across all of BurgerFi’s corporate locations, while franchisees will have the opportunity to opt-in, as well.

GRUBBRR’s self-ordering solutions are in high-demand and have demonstrated an immediate impact on businesses in three material ways: GRUBBRR increases revenue through algorithmically programmed upselling technology, decreases operating costs by streamlining efficiency and reducing the dependency on labor, and improves the customer experience by expediting average transaction time, eliminating order inaccuracies, and implementing loyalty integrations.

According to BurgerFi’s CTO Karl Goodhew, “From an operator perspective, we like the upsell features of the kiosk. From a technology perspective, we like the ability to offer our entire menu, have real-time 86’ing tied into the POS, and enterprise control of multiple units.”

“Samsung’s Kiosk powered by GRUBBRR’s software solution with Samsung’s MagicInfo Cloud, provided an all-in-one solution for BurgerFi that delivered stronger business results and signaled a best practice when it comes to the future of QSR dining trends,” said Harry Patz Jr., Senior Vice President and General Manager, Display Division, Samsung Electronics America. “The pilot program was pivotal to BurgerFi’s decision to standardize Samsung’s kiosk solution so that they could deliver a seamless customer experience, eliminate ordering errors, and allow for easy integration of loyalty programs and discount codes.”

The one-time cost of a kiosk is significantly lower than the price of carrying an employee. On average, a cashier at a quick-service restaurant open 15 hours per day will cost more than $6,000 per month (with all associated carrying costs). In contrast, the Samsung Kiosk powered by GRUBBRR performs all of the functions of the cashier at a fraction of the price. In addition, kiosks always show up, don’t call in sick, and are ready to work 24/7. Replacing cashiers with the Samsung Kiosk powered by GRUBBRR can move that staffer to the production line or other areas, increasing throughput and driving more revenue.

This post is sponsored by GRUBBRR. To learn more about Samsung’s self-ordering kiosks powered by GRUBBRR, click here.

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?