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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Robot Delivery, Eh? Pizza Hut Canada Trials Serve Sidewalk Delivery Robot

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

This week Pizza Hut Canada announced they are partnering with sidewalk delivery robot startup Serve to run a two-week pilot program in Vancouver, B.C.

The trial will send the Serve robot to select customers’ doors when they place an order via the Pizza Hut app. Customers selected for the trial will be able to track the robot’s location via the app and will use a one-time pin to retrieve their order from the Pizza Hut-branded robot. You can see the robot navigating the streets of Vancouver in the video below.

Pizza delivery robots are being tested in B.C.

While various Pizza Hut franchise owners have dabbled in using robotics to make pizzas, this is the first time that we’ve seen the chain use a robotic delivery vehicle. The partnership also marks a first for Serve Robotics as it’s the first time the startup has deployed its delivery bot in Canada.

For now, the two companies are not giving any indication of whether this trial could extend beyond the initial trial. My guess is if things go well, we could see more Pizza Hut locations utilizing the Serve delivery-bot.

Fresh Portal Is a Tech-Powered Take on the Old-Timey Milk Door

Delivery & Commerce

When I first saw the Fresh Portal at CES, I thought it made a whole lotta sense. After all, what food-ordering families wouldn’t appreciate the ability to keep groceries or restaurant-delivered food cold or warm until they arrive home from work?

But the idea behind the Fresh Portal isn’t exactly new. In fact, you can go back as far as the early 1900s to find a predecessor in the milk door. Milk doors were built into homes when the milkman was as common as the mailman, an early version of a storage locker where that weekly delivery of milk could be stored until ready for pickup. Like the Fresh Portal, the milk door was actually two doors, one on both the outside and inside with the storage cavity in between.

Milk doors were built into homes to receive delivery of fresh milk

Fresh Portal founder Jeremy High is aware of the history of home delivery storage lockers. In a recent interview with The Spoon, he said his product is a modern, high-tech take on the old-timey milk locker.

“Fresh Portal is a modern twist on that,” High said. “It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It receives deliveries of the food you’re getting delivered by DoorDash or Instacart, groceries, and even packages.”

Because the Fresh Portal is designed for the modern era of food delivery, it also keeps food hot or cold and has an app that sends notifications to the customer.

“Deliveries stay at the right temperature until you’re ready to get home and deal with them. Fresh Portal is developing a whole new way to interact with the things that you need to live your life.”

High sees the Fresh Portal going into higher-end homes to begin with, not too surprising given High is a home developer. But, over time, he also sees them going into a wide variety of housing types, including condos and apartments.

“We have a multifamily capability as well. If you think about that lobby space where you get deliveries, there’s usually a security door and a second door that’s leading from the lobby to where the residents are. We have a capability that can combine those two.”

While High has taken inspiration from the old-school milkman, he envisions a future world where a more modern version of delivery worker will interact with his product.

“Fresh Portal is going to work with robots and drones,” said High. “As that future is is unfolding, we see that as kind of a future where costs of delivering items to your home will come down because of some new robotic delivery capabilities, and we plan to be on the delivery side of that.”

You can see our full interview with High below. If you’d like to talk to him about Fresh Portal and his ideas for the future of delivery, you can meet him at SKS in just a few weeks. Make sure to get your ticket here.

The Spoon Interviews Fresh Portal

UAE Installs Bread-Dispensing Robots Around Dubai To Help Feed Those in Need

Robotics, AI & Data

LBX Food Robotics (formerly known as LeBread Xpress) announced today they have partnered with The Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI) Foundation to install bread-dispensing robots throughout Dubai to help feed those in food insecure situations. The custom-built Bake Xpress machines will provide a selection of complimentary local breads and pitas and will give customers the ability to make voluntary monetary donations.

The partnership started in 2020 when MBRGI, the charitable foundation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the ruler of Dubai), approached LBX to see if their robotic bread-making robots could be used as a way to get food to people in need. Two years later, the partners have deployed a total of 10 bread-dispensing robots around Dubai as part of the first phase of the collaboration. More robots are planned for the first quarter of 2023.

For those not familiar with LBX’s Bake Xpress machines, the unit holds up to 100 different food items in a refrigerated storage. Once the user selects the item, the machine uses infrared and microwave heat to warm the bread before dispensing.

You can see an example of an order and the machine internals in the video below:

“It was a privilege to partner with MBRGI to support their goals of providing a source of food to people who might otherwise go hungry, and we are delighted to see our technology leveraged in this unique way,” LBX founder Benoit Herve said in a release sent to the Spoon. “This initial endowment effort is part of a larger-scale deployment of our technology in the Middle East, in support of the deeply-held cultural traditions of philanthropy and community service.”

According to LBX, they will launch the LBX Bake Xpress machines in the United States in 2023 and will be launching their US efforts next week.

LBX in Dubai

With Connected Stores, Instacart Continues Push to Become Technology Platform Partner for Grocers

Robotics, AI & Data

Today Instacart announced a new bundle of technologies aimed at helping retailers digitally power their storefronts. A mix of existing and new products, the new suite is a sign of Instacart’s continued effort to transform itself from an in-store shopper and delivery services company to an omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

The Connected Store suite of technologies includes the following:

A new and improved Caper cart: The new suite includes a third generation Caper cart. Like the second generation Caper, the new cart allows customers to drop their items in the cart and the Caper adds it to the list without a barcode scan, but is 65% larger, has a longer-life battery, and is designed to work well in inclement weather.

Scan & Pay: For retailers who choose not to deploy Caper carts, Instacart is introducing a new service called Scan & Pay. Scan & Pay allows shoppers to scan and pay for products with their phone. The service looks especially helpful for EBT Snap users, who can scan items to identify whether they are EBT SNAP-eligible.

Lists: Lists syncs up a shopper’s personal shopping list with the the Caper cart app or a grocer Instacart-powered app. Items are imported into the Caper list and checked off when you drop them in your cart.

Department Orders: The Department Orders feature enables coordination between grocery store prepared food departments by enabling them to sync orders. For example, the bakery can coordinate with the deli to enable orders to be ready simultaneously. The new feature is powered by Foodstorm, a food service order management platform the company acquired last year.

Carrot Tags: Maybe the most innovative new feature of the new Connected Stores bundle is Carrot Tags. A customer can find items in-store by clicking them on their phone, which lights up a corresponding electronic shelf label. As someone who often has trouble finding items on his shopping list, I can see Carrot Tags coming in pretty handy.

Instacart Introduces Connected Stores

As I wrote last year, Instacart’s acquisition of Caper and continued development of digital transformation technologies is a sign the company is trying to transition to become an enabling platform player for grocers.

As Instacart grows its enterprise technology solutions, I expect we’ll increasingly see its flagship shopper service decoupled from its technology as it looks to serve larger retailers who want greater control over the customer relationship. Since the start of the pandemic, many grocery retailers have started to roll out and standardize around their delivery services, which means a fast-growing market for technology solutions. My guess is that Instacart is anticipating this as it rolls up some of the best-in-class independent solution providers as it prepares for an IPO soon.

With Connected Stores, Instacart is attempting to integrate what has seemed to this point a loose grab-bag of technologies assembled mostly by acquisition into a cohesive suite of technologies. It’s an evolution that makes sense for the company strategically and for its collection of platform products, even if it does still feel the suite is much a re-naming and branding exercise as it is an actual integration across products. As part of the effort, the company is trying to showcase the full vision with its first partner store in Good Food Holdings’ Bristol Farms store in Irvine, California. According to the announcement, Good Food Holdings will also use Instacart’s Storefront Pro software to power its online store.

The news of the Connected Store platform comes as the company readies for its IPO, which it filed for in May.

Israel’s Profuse Technology Raises $2.5M for Technology That Lowers Cost of Cultured Meat

Foodtech

As the world awaits the arrival of cultured meat, manufacturers and their suppliers strategize to cope with the realities of this potentially mammoth market. Infrastructure and product scaling for growth remain a challenge from the supply side. Still, concerns over the pricing of lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood might be the most significant roadblock to consumer acceptance.

Israeli-based Profuse Technology believes it has a solution to bring manufacturing costs down to a point where a pound of cultured beef could achieve price parity with meat from a live animal. A step forward, the company has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round (and a total of $3.75m since its establishment). The round is led by New York-based investment firm Green Circle and existing shareholders – OurCrowd, Tnuva, and Tempo. Other new investors include Siddhi Capital, a leader in investments in cultivated meat, and Kayma, the investment arm of De-Levie, a meat industry specialist.

According to the announcement, the company will use the funds to collaborate with cultivated meat producers, obtain FDA regulatory approval, and expand the research and development team and its laboratories. The funds will also position the company to source significant capital raising at the end of the second quarter of 2023 to commercialize its customer collaborations.

Profuse’s solution is based on what it calls “a cocktail” that is added during the period when a harvested animal stem cell begins its proliferation process. As founder and CTO Dr. Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told The Spoon: “You would start with a biopsy, and it could be directly from the muscle tissue or an embryonic stem cell harvested from an animal. The cultivated meat companies would take these cells, bank the most successful ones, and optimize them. They would grow them in bioreactors and expand and expand and proliferate these cells until they have hundreds of millions of cells per milliliter. And then, at some point, they have to differentiate the cells to become muscle tissue or muscle fibers. This is where our media supplement comes in.”

“What we’ve basically found a way was to target this natural biological mechanism of regeneration by understanding the biological pathway that that that’s responsible for that,” Dr. Eigler-Hirsh continues. “There’s one protocol to make muscle, and everybody follows it, and it’s very inefficient. Right now, we’re hearing numbers being reported about between 10% to 30% efficiency in converting stem cells into muscle. And using our technology, we can bump that number up from 30% well to over 90% efficiency in conversion of stem cell to muscle.”

Greater efficiency yields more muscle which in turn leads to cultured meat. The math is simple: a more significant and efficient supply can bring down manufacturing costs, which can be passed on to the consumer.

Profuse founder and CEO Guy Nevo Michrowski goes into further detail on the issue of price parity. . First, you won’t need as many cells to start with because your efficiency of using the cells will be 95%. So instead of going for 30 days, you’re going for only 25 days. And most important, the most expensive days are being saved. So, in the last ten days, where over 85% to 90% of the median cost is consumed, those days are cut by half because you don’t need as many cells. And then also, the differentiation and fusion maturation phase of creating them is now reduced to two days instead of ten. Your overall process is only 27 days versus 40 days, which means your factory can produce 33% more yearly.”

Using technology developed at the Weitzman Institute, the company started in 2021. In 2022 it began collaborating with cultivated meat companies and others who potentially would be our distribution partners. Michrowski said that Profuse is working with the major players in the cultured meat and poultry space” And I would say that of the ten leading companies worldwide, we are working with the vast majority together “to demonstrate and quantify the effects of our cocktail on their specific production environment. We operate with different customers to demonstrate our value in different viable development environments and methods.”

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

Robotics, AI & Data

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.

Autonomous Restaurant Startup Yo-Kai Express Expands in Japan, Announces New Investors

Robotics, AI & Data

This spring, Yo-Kai Express ramen vending machines showed up at Tokyo Station, Haneda Airport, and Shibaura Parking Area. During its Japanese debut, the company worked with Ippudo to sell bowls of the hugely popular ramen chain’s noodles through its automated mini-restaurants.

And sell noodles they did. According to Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin, during the first week, the Tokyo station machine sold a hundred bowls of ramen per day. That strong demand apparently impressed Ippudo enough to not only greenlight more Yo-Kai machines distributing their ramen in the near future, but to also invest in the company.

The news of the expanded relationship was shared as part of a press conference and on-stage session at SKS Japan on Friday in Tokyo. In addition to the news of Ippudo’s investment (through its parent company Chikaranomoto Holdings), Yo-Kai also shared that Japan Tobacco (JT) would be participating in the funding round. JT has a significant processed food business, and Yo-Kai will begin selling the company’s TableMark udon noodles through its vending machines. The total capital invested by the two companies via the Series A round was not disclosed.

According to Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin, both companies see Yo-Kai as a way to connect to new customers in places where they might not otherwise reach.

“We are their extension,” Lin said. “They don’t need to spend the capital. We are their micro-store.”

Yo-Kai’s Japan country manager Keiji Tsuchiya told me that CPG brands like the idea of using Yo-Kai to trial new food concepts. He said while established food companies with well-known brands might be slow to launch a new product through traditional channels, they can trial new products much more quickly and easily with Yo-Kai. Some, said Tsuchiya, even launch a “virtual” brand concept on Yo-Kai to see how consumers respond.

“For a Japanese food company, selling products with their own name brand is a long process,” Tsuchiya said. “They need to get board approval to start something. It takes one to two years. But with a virtual brand, it’s much easier.”

According to Lin, Yo-Kai plans to expand its Japan vending machine footprint from the current total of three to ten in the near future. They also plan to continue to expand in the US and are talking with other large brands in places such as Korea about entering their market.

Mezli’s Containerized Robot Restaurant Opens to Public This Weekend

Robotics, AI & Data

Mezli, a maker of containerized robotic restaurants, is having a grand opening of its first restaurant this Sunday, August 28th, in San Francisco. The restaurant will open at the Spark Social food truck park located in the city’s Mission Bay area and run every weekend from Friday through Sunday.

The opening of Mezli comes after about two years of development after being conceived of by three Stanford graduate students. The three co-founders – Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele, and Maxwell Perham – set up shop at KitchenTown, a food innovation hub and development space based in San Mateo, where they worked on their containerized robot in a large small warehouse area and developed the food across the street in KitchenTown’s commissary kitchen.

Now the company is ready to start taking orders. The way it works is the Mezli refrigerated container houses prepped and pre-cooked food made by humans in a centralized kitchen. Once customers order via a touch screen kiosk on the side of the container or on a mobile app, food is heated and plated, garnishes are added, and plated food is placed into smart lockers on one end of the Mezli container for customer pickup. According to Kolchinski, the Mezli system is able to pump out up to 75 meals per hour.

The Mezli team claims their restaurant is the world’s first fully self-contained robotic restaurant that serves a fresh and customized menu. While we don’t necessarily agree that Mezli is actually the first – after all, we’ve seen startups like Bolk are already serving up simpler bowl food offerings via their robotic kiosks around Paris, and Hyper Robotics has its fully automated robotic pizza restaurants-in-a-box serving up pies for Pizza Hut Israel – we can say that the Mezli is the first self-contained automatic system we’ve seen dishing up these kinds of complex multi-item plates of Mediterranean food.

And for the record, the food is pretty good. When I visited the Mezli team last December and had a falafel platter, I found the portion sizes generous as my meal was larger than what I got at Eatsa or through a Chowbotics-style kiosk, and included a tasty mix of proteins, rice, vegetables, and sauces.

Mezli’s meals start at $7 per meal. If any of our readers in the Bay Area stop by, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

You can watch our conversation with Mezli CEO Alex Kolchinski before last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit below (Mezli was the winner of the SKS 2021 Startup Showcase).

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Suvie Introduces Third Generation ‘Cool to Cook’ Countertop Appliance

Connected Kitchen

Today Suvie, a Boston-based kitchen appliance and food delivery startup, announced its third-generation cooking appliance.

The Suvie 3, which comes just a year and a half after its second generation cooking robot, features four major upgrades according to company CEO Robin Liss:

Smaller footprint. The Suvie 3 is 10% smaller than the previous generation. With its shorter stature, Liss says the Suvie 3 can now fit under most any kitchen cabinet.

Improved aesthetic design. The Suvie 3 features a lot of stainless steel and, compared to previous generations, looks more like a traditional countertop cooking appliance.

Increased cooking capacity. Even with a smaller exterior, Suvie squeezed in more cooking capacity. According to Liss, the new appliance has 36% more cooking volume than the previous generation.

“This means you can comfortably feed four plus adults with one meal cooked in the Suvie,” Liss said.

Cool to Cook is now available on all cooking modes. With previous generations, Suvie users could only schedule cooks with lower-temperature cook modes (sous vide, steam, etc). With the gen 2, the user needed to push a cook button on the appliance itself to initiate a higher temperature cooking mode (bake, broil, etc.). With the third-generation Suvie, users can remotely initiate cooking across all cooking modes.

Liss admits announcing a new generation cooking appliance less than a year and a half after they started shipping the current generation is a short turnaround. According to Liss, one reason is that hardware development cycles take a long time, and they felt they needed to start building the ‘what’s-next’ as soon as the new model ships.

“We knew people wanted a smaller device, and we knew customers wanted cool to cook in all modes, but we knew it was gonna take us some time to get those features designed and optimized.”

Liss and the Suvie team felt enabling cool to cook across all cooking modes would take some time to get the approval of industry safety watchers, so the company spent much of the past year and a half involved working closely with UL to make sure all-mode cool to cook got greenlighted.

And so now, the first batch of Suvie 3s will leave the factory in China next week. According to Suvie, those who order immediately should get their units within 5-8 weeks.

To start, the company will sell a bundled package that includes both the Suvie 3 main unit and the accompanying starch cooker for $799 (there was no re-design on the starch cooker). The company plans to eventually sell the Suvie 3 on its own for $399 with a subscription to Suvie’s meal delivery service. The company will also offer discounts on the latest model for past Suvie customers.

According to Liss, an “overwhelming majority” of Suvie users subscribe to the company’s meal delivery service. She says the company has sold over 15 thousand second-generation Suvies and the typical customer profile is a dual-income family with kids who are too busy to cook. While Liss wouldn’t disclose exact revenue splits, she told me that the company’s revenue is “roughly” half and half between its hardware and food business.

“We think that it’s good to have a balanced business with a strong appliance business and a strong meal business,” Liss said. “We do that because we think that to deliver some cutting edge technology, we need to have the customer interest to do these advanced features.”

Suvie’s focus on the continuous development of new hardware contrasts with Tovala, another cooking appliance/food delivery startup. While Tovala has done some minor modifications its current generation cooking appliance, the Chicago-based startup is essentially still selling the same oven it introduced four years ago. In about the same time span, Suvie has introduced three different models.

According to Liss, Suvie’s fast pace of hardware development is an essential part of its mission as a company.

“That’s the company we’ve built, which is different than a lot of hardware startups,” Liss said. “A lot of hardware startups at their core are really taking an existing product and maybe changing the design and adding some software to it. We decided that we wanted to change the way dinner was made. So we invented countertop, ‘cool to cook’ multizone appliances.”

It remains to be seen how existing Suvie customers will react to the announcement of a new generation appliance so soon after they received their gen 2 models, many of them over the past few months. Liss says the company will give discounts to existing customers who want to upgrade to the new Suvie model.

Picnic & Minnow Partner to Offer Automated Solutions For Food Service

Robotics, AI & Data

Have you heard about Seattle’s latest supergroup?

No, I’m not talking Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, but a food automation startup collab of Picnic and Minnow.

Picnic, a company that makes automated pizza-making robots, and Minnow, a Seattle-based maker of food-pickup delivery pods, have announced a new partnership to offer customized solutions using the two companies’ technology, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new collab will focus on creating customized solutions for a variety of different food concession scenarios and formats, including at theme parks, stadiums, or schools. The solutions will be tailored towards concepts utilizing mobile ordering and self-service pickup.

From the announcement:

A customer can place a mobile or kiosk order that is made automatically by the Picnic station and then put in a heated or insulated Pickup Pod for the customer to retrieve at their convenience. At universities, students can place mobile pizza orders which are assembled by the Picnic Pizza Station and then picked up from a Pickup Pod.

For Picnic, the deal is the latest in a string of different partnerships and collaborations that will potentially put its pizza assembly machine in new and interesting food service concepts. This year the company also partnered up with PizzaHQ, a New Jersey startup looking to create a chain of automation-powered pizza restaurants. They also are working with Speedy Eats, another startup creating standalone automation powered kitchens in the middle of empty parking lots.

Minnow has also been busy of late. The week the company announced a deal with real estate developer Westdale to put Minnow’s Pickup Pods in multifamily properties in Texas, Florida and Georgia. The winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 Startup Showcase has also been picking up small wins in places like NYC to San Diego.

A new location powered by a Picnic and Minnow solution could automate a large part of the food-making and the consumer-facing aspects of a pizza restaurant, something that could enable pizza restaurant operators to put lower-cost and small footprint concepts.

Robot Butlers & Roombas: Elon and Amazon Are Getting Serious About Building Home Robots

Robotics, AI & Data

Last week, Amazon announced they were acquiring iRobot. The acquisition of the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums comes less than a year after Amazon unveiled its own home robot, Astro.

The news came the same week we got a sneak preview of Optimus, Tesla’s robotic humanoid. After the preview, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he thinks the impact of the Optimus could someday exceed that of the company’s hugely popular electric vehicles.

“I’m sort of surprised that you know people are like analysts out there are not really understanding the importance of the Optimus robot,” Musk said. “My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term.”

While Musk has suggested his company’s robot will someday provide a nearly inexhaustible amount of “labor” (of the mechanized, non-human variety), he also outlined how the robot will also help us at home with everyday tasks.

“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” he said.

For Amazon, much of the early hot takes on the company’s purchase of iRobot frame it as part of a larger effort by the online giant to better understand its customers. And no doubt, adding the home mapping capability of the Roomba to the already rich data profiles Amazon has through our purchase history and Alexa voice interactions will give the company an even better contextual understanding with which to sell us even more stuff.

But I also think Amazon is serious about becoming a leading platform builder in home robotics. Robotics are just a natural evolution of the smart home – something us old-timers used to call ‘home automation’ – and I expect the roboticization of the home will ultimately lead to a multi-hundred billion dollar market. Today’s consumer robot market – mostly products like the Roomba – is forecasted to be a $9 billion market next year. One can only imagine how big it will be once multipurpose, life-assisting robots that can do more than just clean our floors are widely available.

Astro was Amazon’s first toe in the water, and with Roomba’s huge patent portfolio and in-house expertise, I expect we’ll start to see much more interesting new products roll out from the company in coming years. One obvious product idea would be something like Labrador Retriever by Alexa Fund-backed Labrador Systems, a robotic beast of burden for everyday tasks.

One advantage both companies have is they can develop and amortize their robotic investments across both their industrial and consumer-facing markets. Industry has and always will lead in terms of automation adoption, and that’s partly why both companies have invested so much over the past decade in building out their robotics platforms; it gives them a strategic advantage in manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and other parts of their core business.

Now, with all of the in-house IP and automation know-how, both are turning their eyes toward the consumer market. Amazon and Tesla – companies well known for having much longer-than-average time horizons when it comes to product road maps – have already gotten their first products ready for market. In Amazon’s case, they’ve just added North America’s biggest home robotics company to their portfolio and can now bulk up its home robotics lab launched a few years ago as part of Lab 126.

My biggest fear isn’t Amazon mapping my home, but instead that the home robotics market will be yet another duolopy dominated by a couple of technology giants. While others like Labrador and Hello Robot have exciting projects they are working on, do we really think Amazon or Tesla won’t be able to buy them or, in the case of Hello’s $20 thousand home assistant, beat them on price?

My guess is the two companies’ biggest competition will come from Asia, where Samsung, LG, Sony and a number of Chinese companies have been working hard on building robot platforms. Sony is particularly interesting to me given their interest in the intersection of cooking and robotics, which Samsung has also shown interest in.

Bottom line, with two of the world’s biggest technology companies – along with a lot of other big consumer product companies – finally getting serious about the home robotics market, we should all be prepared for the coming wave of home robot assistants – be their souped-up Roombas or robotic butlers – in the coming years.

Celcy Opens Beta Testing Program For Its Combo Freezer & Oven Countertop Appliance

Next-Gen Cooking, Robotics, AI & Data

While new countertop cooking hardware concepts are few and far between nowadays, every now and then one emerges out of left field that does something new and different. And the Celcy, which combines freezing and automated cooking in a single-self-contained appliance, definitely qualifies as new and different.

Here’s how I described the Celcy when I first wrote about it in June:

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.

Celcy - The Automated Nespresso of Food

And now there’s good news for adventurous types who want to get their hands on an early Celcy unit: The company is taking reservations to reserve an early beta unit.

The company is asking for a $150 down payment to apply for an early unit. That will get you access to an early unit and 15 meals (the company is operating a Tovala-ish model of hardware and meal subscriptions). The beta trial, which the company expects to start next spring, will last for three months, after which the user can pay the rest of the price ($150 will be applied) to the cost of the Celcy. While the company doesn’t mention the price of the finished unit (when I first wrote about Celcy in June, founder Max Wieder said the target price would be $549), the price for beta-testers will be 50% of the retail price.

If you want to get in line, you can head over to Celcy and reserve your spot.