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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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After Years of Building His Robot, Stellar Pizza Founder is Having Fun Dishing Pies to USC Students

Robotics, AI & Data

Back in 2019, Benson Tsai decided to attend a food robotics conference. The engineer had spent the last five years working for Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, applying what he had learned about battery technology as a member of the technical staff for electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors to space travel, but now he had a vague idea of launching a new startup that builds food robots.

At the conference, he watched a panel on investing in robotics that featured venture investor Avidan Ross, the founding partner at Root Ventures. The two struck up a conversation and hit it off, and those early conversations led to Ross becoming Tsai’s first investor.

In those early days, Tsai thought maybe he’d build an Asian food robot, mostly because he loved Asian food. Eventually, though, he’d settle on another type of food: Pizza.

“I ended up looking at what made sense to automate,” Tsai told The Spoon in an interview this week.

Benson Tsai

Tsai got to work on his robot, hiring about 30 or so SpaceX engineers in the process. He’d also raise lots more money beyond the initial $9 million investment led by Ross’s Root Ventures, the most recent being a $16.5 million funding round led by Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures.

Four years and over $25 million in investment later, Stellar Pizza‘s food robot is ready for action and, over the past few weeks, has been serving pizza on the campus of USC. The robot heads to campus in a sprinter van, where students order pizza using the Stellar Pizza app.

I asked Tsai if he’s serving food from his robotic mobile food truck, and he answered yes, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I really enjoy going out in the field,” said Tsai. “I spent a lot of time working on the crazy robots, and now I get to see people bite into the pizza, and it’s really fulfilling.”

Tsai says so far, things are going pretty well. The Stellar Pizza van rolls onto campus five days a week, and already he’s seeing lots of return customers.

“We’re at 45-50% return customers,” said Tsai.

I asked him what the long-term vision is for the company and if he plans to license the technology to some of the bigger pizza chains. He told me that may be in the cards in the future, but for now, he’s happy building an end-to-end robotic pizza company.

“Nothing is off the table, but right now, we’re chasing the vision of Stellar Pizza, specifically just selling pizzas because, for one thing, building hardware that can make 100 different pizza recipes is actually quite hard. So we’re dogfooding and building our own brand, and if that’s successful, maybe we’ll chase that.”

Tsai and his company have come a long way from those early days when he first attended that conference back in 2019; Stellar’s first product is in the field and happy customers coming back for more.

Oh, and that first conference? It was The Spoon’s Articulate, the first-ever food robotics conference.

If you’d like to hear Tsai tell the story of building his pizza robot, sign up for The Spoon’s next food robotics event, the Food Robotics 2023 Outlook, a virtual conference taking place next Wednesday.

Is Kiwibot’s Sale & Leaseback Deal a Way For Food Tech Startups to Traverse the Venture Capital Winter?

Robotics, AI & Data

Interesting bit of news today from sidewalk delivery robot startup Kiwibot: The company announced it has signed a $10 million financing deal in the form of a sale and leaseback arrangement with Kineo Finance, an asset financing company based in Switzerland.

According to company founder Felipe Chavez, the deal is structured such that Kineo will make up to $10 million available in financing to Kiwibot, and in return, Fineo will buy the robots built by Kiwi at cost and lease them back to the company. This arrangement enables Kiwi to have ready access to growth capital to build its robots and also limits the equity dilution of a typical growth-round investment.

 “It is a straightforward sale and leaseback,” Chavez told Tech Funding News. “Once we manufacture them and ship the robots to their final destination, we sell them to Kineo at cost.”

While this is the first time that I’ve seen this type of capital agreement in the food robotics space, it could be a sign of things to come. As we’ve seen from this month’s news from Picnic, the food tech hardware market is having challenges as more traditional venture investor appetites for large growth rounds have shrunk in the current uncertain economic environment. By using a sales and leaseback deal, startups can get access to a whole new type of financing and also limit how much of their company they need to give up in the process.

Of course, there are also downsides to these types of arrangements. Kiwi has to make sure they can find customers for their leased robots, as they’ll now have a monthly payment to service for the robots in the field. Kineo owns the robots and if Kiwibot can’t make the payments, the financing company can do whatever they want with them. Add in other complicating factors like the loss of tax benefits such as asset depreciation, and the conversation about whether to adopt this new model becomes somewhat nuanced.

That said, I applaud Kiwi for finding a new and creative way to fund their expansion, and I have to think other food robotics vendors might be taking a look at this type of financing arrangement.

This Finnish Company Uses Radio Waves to Monitor and Reduce Dairy Waste

Foodtech, Robotics, AI & Data

Dairy plants around the world are facing a new set of challenges as they grapple with rising raw milk costs and increasing pressure to reduce their carbon footprints as plant-based competitors try to draw a contrast with animal milk. A Finnish startup named Collo wants to help on both fronts using what it describes as liquid fingerprint technology.

According to the company, its technology can detect any type of liquid in pipes in real-time, giving companies a way to optimize production and cut product losses. Collo says its technology can keep track of the liquids in the pipes, showing exactly where the leakage is occurring. This enables dairy plants, breweries, and other liquid processors to address the problem at the point of origin.

Collo’s technology is based on an electromagnetic resonator that emits a continuous radio frequency field into the liquid. The signal reacts to interferences caused by different components, chemicals, and phases in the liquid, and the Collo analyzer immediately warns of any disturbances so that the process can be adjusted.

Collo says its analyzer simultaneously measures eight proprietary parameters from a liquid, which collectively creates the liquid’s fingerprint. If one or more of these characteristics change during processing, the analyzer shows the changes so that corrective measures can be made.

While leakage may not seem like a problem, it can be costly to dairy processors. Sometimes it’s just a small leak that can lead to lost revenue over time, while other times bigger leaks can lead to harmful environmental incidents that can draw the scrutiny of citizens and local governments. Collo says its technology can help avoid both profit-wasting slow leakage and high-profile spillage incidents by alerting processors instantaneously.

“As our technology can supervise all the draining points in real-time, it can keep track of the liquids in the pipes and show exactly where the leakage is,” company spokesperson Mikko Tielinen says. “This makes it possible to address the problem at the point of origin, saving huge amounts of milk and money.”

Do You Have Thoughts on the Impact of Robotics & AI on The Food Biz? Fill Out Our Survey!

Robotics, AI & Data

Last week, The Spoon hosted an insight-filled day talking with founders and operators about how new technology like generative AI will change the food business.

And next week, we’ll bring together investors, restaurant operators, and technology builders to get a pulse on the state of the food robotics market.

One thing we know from running these events is our community is one of the sharpest around when it comes to predicting how these technologies will impact the food business, so we figured why not ask them their thoughts in a Food Robotics and AI industry survey?

If you run a food company or provide technology that uses robotics or AI, or just have a good perspective on where you think these technologies are going, we want to hear from you! If you take a few minutes to fill out our survey and we’ll send you a summary of the results and enter you in a giveaway for a $100 Amazon gift card!

And oh yeah – make sure to sign up for next week’s event to get an early glimpse at the results and hear from some food robotic builders and investors.

Picnic CEO Departs Just Weeks After Pizza Robot Startup Has Significant Layoffs

Business of Food

Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot maker Picnic, is departing the company, according to a post made by Wood on Linkedin.

Wood joined the company – originally named Otto Robotics and Vivid Robotics before it eventually settled on Picnic – in 2019 after it parted ways with its founding CEO, Garett Ochs. Since then, Wood has led Picnic through significant growth and a couple of funding rounds.

The Picnic CEO’s departure comes just weeks after Wood announced on Linkedin that the company was having its first layoffs. At the time, Wood said the company “had to make the difficult decision to reduce our company size and say goodbye to some colleagues” due to the “current economic environment.” Now Wood is saying goodbye to the company he led for over four years.

“After an amazing 4+ year ride, I’m stepping down as CEO at Picnic,” Wood wrote. “It’s been an exhilarating adventure, helping to build a new industry of restaurant automation, and I’m very proud of the work I was able to accomplish with the invaluable assistance of an amazing team of leaders and contributors.”

Wood said he does not know where he will end up next but plans to start looking for his next role after some time off. After laying off a big chunk of his team and facing the prospect of trying to raise more capital in the current VC winter, I can’t blame him for wanting to take a break.

So what does the future look like for Picnic and the broader food robotics space?

The near-term prospects for the company are tough, having to look for a new CEO and raise additional money. The company raised a $16.3 million Series A in 2021 and, according to a filing last year, was looking to raise an additional $7.75 million. Despite Wood’s success raising money previously, the company was undoubtedly having difficulty raising a significant Series B in the current funding climate. The company could now be a target for acquisition by a larger company such as Middleby, a food equipment conglomerate that has fueled much of its growth via acquisition. Middleby showed off its own pizza robot in 2020 but hasn’t talked much about it since.

As for the broader market implications, my guess is, unfortunately, we will continue to see some food robotics startups struggle over the next couple of years, given the slowdown in venture capital, particularly those looking to raise larger rounds for scaling. The pizza space is particularly competitive, and we’ve already seen some startups in the space go out of business.

We wish Clayton – who has been generous with his time for Spoon events and podcasts – good luck on his next adventure!

Tovala Debuts 5-in-1 Air Fryer, Its First Non-Steam Countertop Appliance

Next-Gen Cooking

This week Tovala debuted a new countertop cooking appliance, the multifunction Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer. The new appliance is the first new hardware from the company since it unveiled the second-generation smart steam oven in 2018.

Some readers may be thinking, ‘wait, didn’t Tovala release an air fryer last fall?’ Well, they did introduce air frying, but it was as a retrofit upgrade to the gen 2. Because the gen 2 Tovala had convection (a built-in fan for air circulation), they could add air frying through a software upgrade and an air fry basket.

With the new Smart Oven Air Fryer, they’ve built an entirely new appliance designed around its air fry capability.

“Our engineering team redesigned the oven’s airflow system by introducing a 2-speed motor, and a larger fan blade and vent in order to accomplish max air frying power in this oven,” said Maggie Condon, Tovala head of communications, in an email with The Spoon. “These adjustments allow for more air to circulate throughout the oven and around your food faster, creating a stronger, crispier air fry experience. With these changes, we introduced a designated Air Fry setting on the oven and in the Tovala App.”

With the release of the new air fryer, the Tovala gen 2 appliance – with its steam capability and retrofitted air fry function – has been renamed the Tovala Pro.

Interestingly, the new Tovala appliance is the first without steam capability, which has long been one of the most popular features of Tovala ovens. Judging by a recent conversation on a Tovala user group page on Facebook, some are confused about whether the just-announced Tovala has steam built in and how it compares to the now-renamed Pro version.

So why release a new appliance without steam? My guess is the company did it due to the popularity of air frying; even with the upgrade to the second-generation appliance, many customers still probably didn’t realize it had its new function since air frying was not on the function dial. With the new Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer, the steam option goes away, and air fry has been added.

The Latest, But Not The First: Five Ways AI Altered The Food Industry Before ChatGPT

Robotics, AI & Data

Generative AI has shaken the tech industry to its foundations. For the first time, Google’s search dominance looks vulnerable, while ChatGPT has elevated Microsoft’s Bing from second banana to sexy beta. Meanwhile, hundreds of new startups are creating vertically-focused SaaS offerings powered by OpenAI, and tech corporations, big and small, are evaluating how to jump on the generative AI bullet train.

In the food world, we have some early arrivers in spaces like restaurant tech software such as ClearCOGS and Lunchbox leveraging OpenAI to add additional functionality. On the content creator and influencer side, we’re already seeing recipe creators and culinary pros tap into the power of generative AI.

But if you think the arrival of ChatGPT is the first AI with the potential to have a big impact on the world of food, you’d be wrong. In fact, over the past decade, we’ve watched as artificial intelligence has started to transform significant portions of the food world. Here are five ways AI has changed food over the past decade:

AI-Generated Recipes

Over the past decade, one of the most significant milestones for artificial intelligence in the world of food is the application of IBM Watson’s general AI to recipe creation. About ten years ago, the Watson team figured it needed to do something besides beat human contestants on Jeopardy to demonstrate its AI’s powers. Before long, Watson had its own cookbook of what IBM called ‘cognitive recipes’. Eventually, CPG brands like McCormick partnered up with IBM to see how they could apply Big Blue’s AI to their business.

Novel Food Discovery and Creation

Over the past few years, a new cohort of startups using AI to accelerate the discovery of novel food ingredients or plant-based recipes have emerged, causing ripples through the consumer packaged food market as they present a direct challenge to the more conventional – and slow – way in which food companies traditionally discover new food products. Over five years ago, companies like Gastrograph started to use AI to create predictive modeling around how different consumer cohorts may react to new food products, and more recently, we’ve seen a new generation of food companies like NotCo base its entire roadmap around AI-generated recipes for its plant-forward product lineup. On the novel ingredient discovery side, companies like Shiru and Kingdom Supercultures are using machine learning to find new ingredients that can help replicate the functional and taste properties of more traditional animal-based inputs.

Alexa’s Personalized Meal Planning and Recipes

When Amazon showed off Alexa almost a decade ago, in late 2014, most thought it was a cool home-based voice interface for weather forecasts and kitchen timers. But Amazon’s AI-powered virtual assistant helped launch a new way for consumers to do everyday things, including buying food and checking on that roast in the oven. But it wasn’t long before Amazon started to help me automate and personalize our shopping lists, and eventually started to create personalized recipes based on our past behavior.

Computer Vision Is Everywhere

A little over two years after Amazon debuted Alexa, it opened its first Amazon Go store featuring its Just Walk Out technology. Powered by sensors and computer vision, the new storefront lets shoppers pick up things off the store shelves and walk out without going through checkout. Soon, a whole bevy of human-less retail startups emerged to offer grocery and convenience store operators platforms to create more friction-free shopping powered by computer vision. We also saw computer vision-powered home appliances enabling consumers to identify their food in the fridge or the oven. Computer vision has also taken off in the restaurant back-of-house for solutions that help reduce food waste and help optimize food inventory.

Food Robots

While robotics and AI are not always synonymous, many robots are deploying some form of AI to help feed us. Whether it’s Google Mineral’s farm robot modeling plant traits and phenotyping crop varieties or server robots dynamically mapping the layout of a restaurant dining room, we are seeing a proliferation of AI-assisted food robots up and down the food value chain.

As far as generative AI goes, we’ve only begun to see how it could change the food industry. Initial applications are more likely to be in restaurant marketing (like the image created for this post using DALL-E), operations, and customer service systems. But as the technology becomes more powerful and creative programmers figure out ways to integrate generative AI technology into their platforms, the impact of ChatGPT and similar AI systems holds massive transformative potential for the food industry.

If you’d like to learn more about how generative AI will change the food industry, you’ll want to attend The Spoon’s mini-summit, How ChatGPT & Generative AI Will Change the Food Biz, tomorrow. You can sign up here.

Sourdough Savior: A New Machine Keeps Your Starter Fresh and Alive

Next-Gen Cooking

One of the byproducts of the COVID-19 pandemic was the rise (no pun intended) of sourdough baking. Quicker than you can say, “cabin fever,” a nation of wanna-be bakers turned their homes into warm and crusty boulangeries. Key to the process is what’s known as a sourdough starter, a mixture of flour and water that has been fermented by naturally occurring yeast and lactic acid bacteria.

While hearty in nature, starters need a bit of TLC to do their thing optimally. Enter Sourhouse co-founders Erik Fabian and Jennifer Yoko Olson, two bakers who brought their skills as marketers and industrial design, respectively, to create Goldie, an appliance built to keep sourdough starters at an ideal temperature. The proper temperature for a sourdough starter is between 75-85°F (24-30°C), and this range provides the warm environment needed for the yeast and bacteria in the starter to thrive. Too hot and the starter may over-ferment, while too cold can slow or halt the fermentation process.

Fabian and Olson’s entry into the world of sourdough baking is called Goldie, as in Goldilocks of The Three Bears fame. Goldie is built to provide just enough warmth to keep a sourdough starter consistently in the “Goldilocks Zone” (as in not too hot, not too cold).

In a recent interview with The Spoon, Fabian explained that the idea for Goldie preceded the pandemic and was born out of his sourdough starter issues. “You know, New York apartment, it was getting down below 60, and it was just too cold for my starter,” he said. “I didn’t really understand the way temperature interacted with my starter at that point. So, I found a warm spot, which became a DIY trick. As I continued to bake, I found that my starter was kind of like always searching for a warm spot.”

Once COVID came along, with the assistance of Olson, an experienced product designer, discovery met opportunity.” We didn’t want to make something like smart technology. We wanted to be like dumb technology for marketing because there’s enough complexity to baking with sourdough, so we wanted to create something simple. My basic idea early on was like a warming base with a transparent dome,” Fabian said.

The next step was Kickstarter, where Goldie was introduced in April 2022. Ending in October, Sourhouse’s offering drew 1,007 backers who pledged $103,948, almost triple the $39,000 original ask. Along with the Goldie apparatus, the Kickstarter kit came with a cooling puck that a baker can keep in the freezer if the starter overheats and needs quick cooling.

With fermentation a thing now, what are the thoughts about the extensibility of Goldie? Would it work for other types of fermented foods? While Fabian wouldn’t be specific about such next steps, it’s clear he and Olson are on to something, given proper fermentation for everything from sauerkraut to kombucha works best with controlled temperatures.

“Our focus on bread is really because, from my point of view is like I think it’s one of the most accessible points to entry into fermentation,” Fabian commented, “probably along with sauerkraut. And you know, I think it’s just easier to launch a brand and a business around a more targeted kind of idea.”

Spoken like a true marketer.

CloudChef Wants to Capture a Chef’s Knowledge in Software to Recreate High-Quality Cuisine Anywhere

Connected Kitchen

What if you could digitally record the best chefs in the world as they make their culinary masterpieces? And what if you took that knowledge and encoded it into software that enabled everyday kitchen workers across the globe to recreate these dishes without specialized training?

That’s the idea behind CloudChef, a new company that wants to create a “Spotify for food” with a cloud software platform that aims to enable culinary teams in remote kitchens to make a meal just as a master chef would.

“We started CloudChef with this whole notion that in the same way that you can record and playback audio and video, you can now record and playback taste,” said CloudChef founder Nikhil Abraham in an interview with The Spoon. “And if you could hypothetically record and playback taste, you could eat from the best chefs and restaurants and literally anyone from the world without having any location constraints.”

So how does it work?

According to Abraham, CloudChef has outfitted its capture kitchens with technology that closely monitors a chef working through a recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from the temperature of a protein to the moisture lost while reducing a sauce to the brownness of an onion and put it all into a machine-readable playback file that can be executed in a kitchen powered with CloudChef’s software.

“With our sensors, depending on what recipe it is, we can codify the intent behind the steps and also codify the intuition of the chef,” said Abraham.

Record & Playback Taste - CloudChef

On the “playback” side, how does CloudChef-enabled kitchen work?

Abraham said a CloudChef-powered kitchen is nothing but a standard kitchen, but the appliances are controlled by software. Modern appliances accessible via an API (like a newer Rational oven, for example) can connect directly and receive instructions from the CloudChef software. For appliances without the ability to interface with external software systems, CloudChef “opens it up, and we put an additional small amount of hardware in there to help us control the appliance with software.”

Abraham said that while CloudChef kitchens have the cooking guided by their software, humans still play a significant role in creating meals. The physical labor of moving food from station to station, taking stuff in and out of the freezer, and plating are all still done by workers without specialized training under the guidance of CloudChef.

“Every workstation in our kitchen is loaded with screens, and people have personal devices on them at all times,” said Abraham. “For example, they get tasks like ‘go to workstation two, and then the task would be to remove contents from this pan onto this other pan and put it inside the blast freezer.’ The physical action of moving stuff around in the kitchen, weighing things out the right way, is done by humans while all the cooking decisions are made by software.”

Abraham believes this ‘co-botic’ balance between software automation and humans is essential. For example, while he could envision a future where more cooking tasks are executed by robotics, he said the best results come when a human is involved.

“And at some point, we’ll have some amount of automation in the kitchen, but there are still a lot of different tasks in robotics that machines are particularly bad at, and humans are just instinctively good at,” said Abraham. “If you tell a human to scrape stirred rice from the bottom of a pan, it’s pretty intuitive. Most humans wouldn’t have a problem doing that. But teaching that to a robot takes time.”

Eventually, the company plans to open up the CloudChef platform to other kitchens via a licensing/SaaS model.

“The vision with that product is that if you’re a kitchen owner, you will give your kitchen spec via a web interface, and we will guide you on what all appliances you need to buy, or what all incremental things you need to put in your kitchen to make it CloudChef ready,” said Abraham. “So just like how Android has guidelines for hardware manufacturers, we will also have guidelines for kitchens that are CloudChef-powered

But for now, Abraham said the company’s current focus is on the “capture” side of things. They are working on recording as many chef recipes to the platform as possible – they currently have about 100 – which can be used in CloudChef-powered kitchens.

CloudChef currently has two company-owned kitchens, one in Mumbai and one in Palo Alto. The Mumbai location is an outsource kitchen for brands and has already served over 50 thousand CloudChef-cooked meals. According to Abraham, the brands have received higher ratings and retention rates compared with other kitchens. The Palo Alto location is operational and delivers meals via third-party delivery services like DoorDash.

While you may be partially correct if you think some chefs would resist the idea of having their cooking know-how put into a system that automates their work somewhere else, the company hasn’t had any problems getting high-profile Indian chefs like Srijith Gopinathan (Ettan), Thomas Zacharias (Bombay Canteen, Locavore), and Manjit Gill to record recipes on their platform. Part of the attraction, no doubt, is the royalty the chef receives each time one of their recipes is made. However, I imagine some may also be attracted to the idea that CloudChef technology could create a more chef-like version of their recipe, which may make them feel better about the idea of lending their name to food sent out via ghost kitchens which, if we’re being honest, don’t always have the best record of creating chef-like food.

CloudChef’s own investors include celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and Roy Yamaguchi, so they clearly also see value in the idea (though they haven’t – at least at this point – put any of their recipes on the platform).

Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurants in Japan Will Soon Use a Fry-Cooking Robot

Robotics, AI & Data

TechMagic, a Tokyo-based restaurant robotics startup, has signed a development deal with Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan to build a robot to automate the entire process of cooking french fries.

According to company CEO Yuji Shiraki, preliminary testing of the TechMagic fry robots is complete and is the company is moving into the development phase, where they will focus on productization and in-store installation. The fry-bot will manage fry-feeding, frying, bagging, storing, and arranging the french fries. The company is also working to reduce the size of the frybot so as to enable deployment into space-contrained spaces of existing Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

Shiraki says they are aiming to introduce the robot in some Japanese locations by this fall.

Spoon readers may recall that TechMagic has already been working with restaurant operators to deploy its back-of-house food robots in restaurants in Japan. I had a chance to visit one, the P-Robo, last September when I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. The robot is a multi-function robot that automates nearly the entire process of creating pasta. It 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 plated and a human does the final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleansthe prep bowls. The entire process takes less than two minutes.

You can see the P-Robo in action below:

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

The Tokyo restaurant where P-Robo slings pasta is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan food and beverage conglomerate Suntory. When I interviewed Shiraki last summer, he indicated that they were also working with a large well-known Japanese food brand (presumably KFC Japan) and noodle giant Nissin.

For those wondering if this move means we’ll see KFC deploy robots stateside, I wouldn’t hold your breath, mainly because KFC Japan is operated by Mitsubishi, whereas the U.S. fried chicken chain is operated by the holding company Yum Brands.

Samsung Wants You to Put Generative Art on Your Refrigerator

Connected Kitchen

Today Samsung launched a new line of custom refrigerator art produced by generative AI. According to Samsung, the new collection was created by Matt Jacobson, an artist who “uses computer code as his paintbrush.” Jacobson used computer algorithms to create 100 generative art prints designed for Bespoke refrigerators.

Generative art – art created using an algorithm or, more recently, with artificial intelligence – has generated lots of buzz lately as new tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E have people creating visually stunning artwork with a few lines of text. While we’ve seen many artists and companies jumping on the AI-powered art bandwagon, Samsung is definitely the first appliance brand to tap into the generative art zeitgeist.

For Samsung, the move is an interesting – if on-brand – way to tap into the latest technology trends. The Bespoke line allows customers to create custom refrigerator designs using mix-and-match panels, whether with off-the-shelf designs or personalized designs with a customer’s artwork or photos. The Bespoke line has been getting lots of promotional love from Samsung over the past year-plus, while the company has let its tech-forward Family Hub line recede into the background. The release of the new generative art collection seems to be another tacit admission by the company that while cutting-edge technology may be a fine way to enhance its design-forward lineup, making it the central focus of a refrigerator’s feature set wasn’t a winning proposition.

The collection is available for a limited time and free to download from today until February 13, 2023.

You can hear Jacobsen describe the project in the video below:

Samsung Bespoke - Generative Art by Matt Jacobson

Flytrex & CAU Plot Nationwide Roll Out Drone Food Delivery After Getting FAA Approval

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

Drone delivery startup Flytrex and partner Causey Aviation Unmanned (CAU), announced today they had received Standard Part 135 Air Carrier Certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. According to the FAA, Part 135 “certification is the only path for small drones to carry the property of another for compensation beyond visual line of sight.”

With this notch in its belt, Causey and Flytex become just the fifth group to receive Part 135 certification, joining Amazon/Prime Air, Google/Wing, UPS, and Zipline. According to the company, this certification will allow Flytrex to complete long-range commercial drone deliveries across the U.S. and expand its delivery service to all eligible back and front yards nationwide.

“We live in an era of instant gratification, where consumers want to get their food or goods faster, more reliably, more economically and more sustainably – and drone delivery has risen to the occasion,” said Yariv Bash, Flytrex CEO. “Flytrex’s continued success delivering to customers throughout North Carolina and Texas has put us ahead of the curve. With this certification, we look forward to bringing our super swift, sustainable and safe airborne delivery systems to every backyard across the U.S.”

Flytrex and CAU currently have five operational delivery stations in North Carolina and one in Texas, delivering tens of thousands of items to hundreds of thousands of homes. Flytrex says it has worked closely with regulators, including participating in the FAA’s UAS Integration Pilot Program and BEYOND initiative, to ensure the highest safety standards for drone delivery.

In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to order food delivery via a Flytrex drone, it’s a somewhat involved process that factors in a safety and viability analysis of each customer’s backyard. First, the company analyzes available space in a given backyard, whether there are power lines, and once a safety review is passed, the address is added to the Flytrex flight network.

You can watch the drone (and an explanation of the customer onboarding process below):

Delivery Process | Flytrex