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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

From Grad School Project to $115 Million Series B: Afresh’s Matt Schwartz on Building an Operating System for Fresh Food

Robotics, AI & Data

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany.

At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future.

“That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of eating, to be able to nourish the world sustainably. And those two things converged into saying, I want to accelerate this fresh technology thing.”

The focus on fresh food soon led Schwartz and his eventual cofounder of Afresh, Nathan Fenner, to do a graduate study in which they talked to close to one hundred people involved in the food supply chain. It wasn’t long before they realized that, despite the increasing importance of fresh food for food retailers, there wasn’t any technology optimized for managing it.

Afresh’s Matt Schwartz

“We were going to Safeway, to Trader Joe’s, all these large, mega multibillion dollar chains, and they were all running this process on paper and pen,” Schwartz said. “Some retailers that had taken center store, non-fresh technology, and worked with like an IT consulting shop to customize the hell out of it and bend it into the fresh categories. And in that case, you’d still see lack of adherence and ultimately, at the end of the day, because it wasn’t a fit.”

These findings led Schwartz to create a company that built technology focused on managing fresh food in Afresh. Their first product, a software solution for managing fresh food inventory that Schwartz calls a ‘fresh operating system’, has been adopted by grocers of all sizes, ranging from small regionals to nationwide retailers such as Albertson’s (the Idaho-based grocer plans to install Afresh’s technology in 2,300 stores by end of 2023).

And it’s that growth, in which Afresh went from 200 stores using its technology at the end of 2021 to an expected 2000 installs by the end of this year, that is no doubt one reason the company was able to raise an impressive $115 million series B funding round announced this week. The round, led by Spark Capital, brings the company’s total funding to $148 million.

When I asked Schwartz why so many grocers are eager to better optimize management of fresh food inventories, he pointed to how even a company like Amazon found fresh challenging.

“So you look at Amazon, they bought Whole Foods because their pure-play Amazon Fresh was struggling to make a business out of direct delivery. And they didn’t stop there. They opened up their own grocery chain. But really, it was a play to crack into fresh, which is this huge part of the retail market that they couldn’t get a piece of otherwise.”

According to Schwartz, in a world where more consumers are buying commodity food items online, it’s the fresh department that is becoming an anchor for the physical point of presence in food retail. And, despite fairly low overall waste rates compared to other parts of the food supply chain – roughly 4-6% of fresh food is wasted at the store compared to over a third once it arrives in the home – he believes the 25% or so reduction in fresh food waste grocers experience using their system results in significant savings to the grocer’s bottom line.

While Afresh’s technology – a SaaS product running on an iPad – doesn’t have all the bells and whistles compared to some of the robotics and machine vision systems other startups have rolled out to help grocers with inventory management, Schwartz sees a future where all of the technology will work together.

“Where this is going is that there are robot companies, there are computer vision companies that are counting inventory, there are shelf life extension technologies, there are vertical farms, there are cold chain compliance technologies, and I believe that this is all an interconnected trend of fresh first technologies that are coming together to solve this growing problem that is increasingly strategic.”

And naturally, Schwartz sees his technology at the center of it all.

“We think about ourselves as the brain, that software layer that’s going to connect all of those things together,” Schwartz said. “So when the robots know an inventory position, or the computer vision can estimate the quality of the product, or we know whether that a berry was in cold chain compliance or not, all of that data can best fit into our system and drive the best outcomes and decisions for the retailers.”

Some Cities Are Pushing Back on Sidewalk Robots. Here Are Some Possible Ideas For Peaceful Coexistence

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

While sidewalk delivery robots promise to help reduce carbon emissions and car traffic on cluttered city streets, not everyone is excited about them, including one city traffic administrator in the Yaffa municipality of Tel Aviv.

According to an article published this week in the English-language edition of Israel newspaper Haaretz, Ofir Cohen, the director of transportation, traffic and parking for Yaffa, sent a letter in early July to Israel’s Transportation Ministry to convey his belief that sidewalk robots from Russian tech company Yandex were a nuisance to pedestrians.

From the letter:

“One of the ways we give priority to pedestrians is by limiting bicycle traffic on sidewalks,” Cohen wrote. “It’s understood that the robots, which are about 80 centimeters [31 inches] wide, could be a potential real nuisance for pedestrians on the sidewalks although we have also been impressed by the [robots’] smart-navigation capabilities.”

And then, on Sunday, less than a month after Cohen sent his letter, the municipality notified the Transportation Ministry it was terminating Yandex’s pilot program.

Cohen said he believed the robots should be removed from sidewalks because they made them a much less useable public resource. He also expressed concern about the impact of robot traffic on low-mobility pedestrians as well as the elderly and children.

פלישת הרובוטים לישראל החלה: לראשונה ברחובות תל אביב, רובוט משלוחים אוטונומי. ככה זה פועל.

These are essentially the same reasons that the city council of Toronto decided to issue a ban on the use of sidewalk robots late last year. The city’s accessibility advisory committee proposed the ban, expressing concern that the robots would be hazardous to those with low mobility and impaired vision, as well as elderly people and children.

“Sidewalks are an important publicly-funded public resource, created for pedestrians to safely use,” David Lepofsky, the chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, wrote in a letter to the Council. “Their safe use should not be undermined for such things as private companies’ delivery robots.”

My guess is these rulings – which followed San Francisco’s ban on sidewalk robots in 2018 – will become more and more common as sidewalk robots go from trials to wider deployments. Because of this, it’s probably worth exploring ways to accommodate the increased use of robotic delivery vehicles and pedestrians.

One idea is simply to set limits on fleet size and traffic. In cities with lighter pedestrian traffic, having limits to ensure the sidewalks don’t become overburdened with robots makes sense.

Another is to continue to push for guidelines and safety measures for robot fleets on pedestrian walkways. Guidelines put into place during the Toronto trial included a 6 MPH speed limit, mandatory insurance for robot companies, audible signals, reflectors with lights, brakes, and a requirement that robots yield to pedestrians. I can these being expanded further and putting the legal and financial burden on robotic delivery companies to ensure pedestrians are not obstructed in any way.

Finally, I can also imagine cities exploring robot travel lanes, similar to what you might see for bikes on streets and on the sidewalks themselves. And who knows, beyond that, we might even see some of them consider sending the robots underground into tubes.

What do you think? Are there other ways you can envision pedestrians coexisting with sidewalk delivery bots? Drop us a line and let us know or let us know in the comments.

Scoop: Tovala to Roll Out New Steam + Air Fry Smart Oven This Fall

Next-Gen Cooking

Tovala, a Chicago-based smart oven & food delivery startup, will roll out a new oven this fall called the Tovala Steam + Air Fry smart oven.

Technically, Tovala’s second-generation oven, unveiled in 2018, has convection built in (which acts essentially the same as air frying). Even so, the company hasn’t pushed the air fryer functionality in promotions or via specifically designed air fryer recipes up to this point.

Above: The email sent to select Tovala subscribers who received test units of the third-generation Tovala oven

But that looks like it will soon change. According to an email sent out to a limited number of selected beta testers, Tovala has sent out a beta test version of a new model with an enhanced emphasis on air frying. The email says that “a lot of chef brains and engineering talent went behind this latest model,” which potentially hints at some interesting new recipes and features for users of the new Tovala hardware. According to the email, the latest generation of the smart oven will begin shipping to customers this fall.

At this point, it’s unclear if the company intended for word of its third-generation smart oven to get out. After Tovala sent out the test units to backers, they then sent an email calling delivery of the units a “happy accident.” Some Tovala customers were told by the company’s customer support that the new oven is the same as the old one, only that they will be sending out “air fry baskets” for an additional fee.

Update: Tovala responded to our request and confirmed they are unlocking air frying capabilities through a software update and a new accessory in the air fry basket. According to Tovala, it will be the same model oven, but after the software update and the air fry basket is made available they will rename the model the Tovala Steam + Air Fry Smart Oven. The company also confirmed they are updating their scan-to-cook feature and plan to have 100 grocery items optimized for cooking with the basket.

Ottonomy Debuts a Swervy, Customizable Delivery Robot in Ottobot 2.0 as it Closes $3.3M Seed Round

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data

Today Ottonomy, a maker of autonomous delivery robots, unveiled its second generation robot, the Ottobot 2.0, alongside its announcement of its $3.3 million seed funding round according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new funding, which is led by pi ventures, also has Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures, and Sangeet Kumar (Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies) joining the round.

As you can see in the video below, the second-gen Ottobot introduces several features, including a new swerve-drive capability (which Ottonomy calls “crab mode”) in which the Ottobot’s drive train can turn each wheel independently. This allows the Ottobot 2 to spin in place (aka ‘zero-radius turning’) and swerve as it navigates (vs. the more tank-style mobility of robots without a swerve drive) towards it destination. This type of advanced maneuverability allows robots to weave through tight spaces, something that the Ottobot will need with its emphasis on both indoor and outdoor delivery.

Ottobots 2.0 - Most Accessible #Manoeuvrable #Scalable #AutonomousDeliveryRobots #Ottonomy #Ottobot

Other features of the new Ottobot 2.0 include modular storage locker capability (operators can switch out storage lockers to different configurations), a large front-facing color display screen, contactless delivery access, and uphill/incline travel capability.

Another interesting difference is the gen two doors are opened on the side vs. access via the top of the cabin on the first-generation Ottobot. The side-accessible doors are breadbox-style, meaning they slide open vs. a hatch-style door. Both gen one and two allow users to open the Ottobot after scanning a QR code.

Ottonomy, which began operating its first generation robot in the CVG (Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky) airport in 2021, will use the money to expand to new markets in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

‘Late Empire Sort of Stuff’: Wonder Faces Backlash Over Environmental Impact of Vans

Delivery & Commerce

By and large, the residents of the northern New Jersey suburbs where Wonder delivers agree that the well-funded startup’s food tastes great.

What they can’t agree on is whether having hundreds of Mercedes diesel vans idling curbside each night while Wonder employees prep meals is a good idea at a time when most experts agree climate change is fast becoming an existential crisis.

A story published in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal details the bickering that has broken out amongst residents of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, about the omnipresent vans zig-zagging through their towns each night.

On the one hand, some feel the Wonder trucks are an unnecessary and carbon-emitting extravagance.

“There’s a stigma of calling the Wonder truck and having them idle outside your house for the decadent purpose of making you dinner in a truck,” resident Will Meyer told the Journal. “It feels like this is late empire sort of stuff.”

And then there are those who don’t see a problem with the trucks.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Lisa Bressler, who didn’t see the trucks being much different from Amazon and UPS trucks driving around town. “I guess I like unnecessary luxuries.”

For my own part, the trucks seem a bit out of step with efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of food delivery. Serve, a maker of sidewalk delivery robots, asks on their Twitter page why should we use a two-ton car to deliver a two-pound burrito. It’s a legitimate question that makes me wonder if a three or four-ton diesel van sitting outside my home cooking food for 20 minutes is a good idea.

Ok sure, so maybe a couple of hundred vans probably don’t make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but what about a scaled-up, USA-wide Wonder? The company has grand plans to eventually take this to cities across the country and if it’s as disruptive as Marc Lore thinks it is, it could essentially reinvent food delivery. In a scenario like that, we’re looking at tens of thousands of Wonder vans driving around every night and sitting curbside.

Wonder’s Scott Hilton told the Journal they are evaluating electric vehicles, so maybe by the time the company rolls out across the country, they’ll have this thing figured out. But for now and the foreseeable future, residents of this New Jersey suburb will continue to debate the impact of Wonder’s vans on the environment.

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

Robotics, AI & Data

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.