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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Meet PZZA, the Latest Pizza Robot Built by a Rocket Scientist

Robotics, AI & Data

So what’s the deal with rocket scientists and pizza?

No, that’s not a Jerry Seinfeld punch-line setup, but an actual question I have after seeing Andrew Simmon’s recent post on Linkedin about the latest pizza robot he’s stumbled across. Simmons, who’s made a name for himself documenting his learnings as he tinkers with his restaurant chain tech stack, wrote about a new pizza robot named, well, PZZA.

According to Simmons, the PZZA robot, which automates saucing, adding cheese and toppings, and cooking the pizza, was designed by long-time aerospace engineer Omid Nakhjavani. Nakhjavani, who worked on NASA space travel projects for Boeing over a decade ago (and apparently still works for Boeing), has been perfecting his pizza robot for seven years and hopes to ship it later this year.

Readers of The Spoon might remember another pizza robot built by rocket scientist Benson Tsai. After building a combo pizza robot and food truck called Stellar Pizza, the former Space X engineer sold his company this March to Hanwha Foodtech. Hanwha Foodtech, a subsidiary of Korean conglomerate Hanwha, plans to launch a pizza chain built around Stellar’s technology in both the US and South Korea.

Before PZZA and Stellar, rocket scientist Anjan Contractor built a pizza 3D printing robot for NASA in the early aughts as part of a contract awarded to aerospace systems subcontractor SMRC. From there, Contractor went on to launch his own startup, BeeHex, focused on building robotic food printing systems.

That there seems to be a fairly robust rocket scientist to pizza robot founder career pipeline shouldn’t be all that surprising, in that a) the mechanical engineering discipline is foundational to both rocket and robot building, and b) engineers love pizza.

Nakhjavani’s engineering mindset influenced some of the design choices for the PZZA robot, including the shape of the pizzas. His robot makes rectangular and square pizzas, in part because—as Simmons recounts—”round pizzas are not efficient and waste things like boxes by being square.”

You can check out the video of the PZZA in action below and read more about its specs on its website.

Is Kirin’s Electric Spoon an Early Signal of a Tech-Powered Eating Trend?

Foodtech

Japanese food giant Kirin announced this week that it is selling an ‘electric salt spoon’ that amplifies food’s saltiness by applying an electric current to the tongue. According to the product’s co-developer, the product works by using the current to draw more sodium into contact with the tongue, which in turn enhances the perceived saltiness of the food.

Kirin plans to sell 200 of these spoons for 19,800 yen ($127) online this month and will begin selling them at retail in Japan in June. The company hopes to start selling them outside Japan next year and hopes it can reach 1 million unit sales within five years.

A spoon that zaps your tongue to amp up the flavor may seem a bit strange, but it’s not entirely surprising. Researchers have known for years that applying electric current changes how we perceive flavor. Over the past decade, Japanese scientists have been experimenting with using electrical and thermal probes to stimulate muscles and trick the human brain into believing it was tasting food that wasn’t really there. And in 2020, a US-based startup called SpoonTEK released an electric spoon that sent electric currents to the tongue to enhance flavor.

Could a big food company releasing an electric salt-enhancing spoon be an early sign of a trend toward technology-powered eating? Maybe. Assistive technology for helping those who can’t eat independently has been around for decades. Companies like Panasonic have been prototyping devices like the DeliSofter, a pressure cooker-like appliance that softens food for those with eating disorders involving swallowing and chewing, in recent years.

But these tech-powered utensils seem to be taking things in a new direction by using technology to enhance flavor itself. More specifically, this technology connects to our bodies in a way that changes how our minds process flavor and perceive taste. While tech-powered eating today involves only a few early concepts, such as spoons or chopsticks, how long will it be until we see insertables aimed at changing flavor perception, especially if they can encourage behavior changes (like eating less sodium) that could lead to healthier outcomes?

My guess is within the next decade.

Speedy Eats Readies First Unattended Drive-Thru Convenience Store Location for Summer Launch

Delivery & Commerce, Robotics, AI & Data


Speedy Eats, a maker of unattended vending and retail technology, will debut its first location with a customer this summer. The company, which has been showcasing its unattended retail concept at its lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for the past year, will launch with an unnamed food operator in August, according to CEO Speed Bancroft.

As seen in the video below, the customer drives up to the unmanned retail store and scans a QR code to verify their purchase via the Speedy Eats app. Once the items are retrieved by the gantry robotic picker system, they are deposited on a small conveyor belt, which delivers them to the consumer’s pickup window.

Each Speedy Eats unattended convenience store holds up to 276 items, including both fresh food and shelf-stable items such as packaged drinks and chips. According to Bancroft, the company recommends no more than 30% of items be fresh, which translates to 76 items. While the initial systems will not have a built-in microwave oven, Bancroft says the company has patented a packaging system with a degassing valve that will enable them to offer ready-to-heat food items alongside ready-to-eat fresh items.

The company initially worked on developing an automated unattended drive-thru pizza restaurant but pivoted over the past year to build its unattended convenience store system. The company also has unattended vending machines currently in the field in the Baton Rouge market.

Introducing Speedy Eats - An Outdoors Unattended Retail Store.

The Story of Chefee with Assaf Pashut

Robotics, AI & Data

There’s been no shortage of cooking robot startups in the past few years, but most are focused on commercial kitchens. It’s for good reason: consumers tend to like appliances we’re familiar with, and the idea of having a robot make our food seems, well, like something out of a science fiction future.

But these hurdles didn’t scare away Assaf Pashut, who, after years of being a restauranteur, started to think about how robots could help us make better food at home. That ultimately led to Chefee, a home food robot that’s different from any before it. It’s not a countertop appliance or a system with big robotic arms attached to the wall. With Chefee, the robotics recede into the background.

In this conversation, Assaf discusses those early days and how he came up with the idea for Chefee, the choices he made around design, the story of pitching Chefee on Shark Tank, and his vision for the future.

You can listen to the podcast clicking play above or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also watch the video of my interview with Assaf below.

Building a Home Food Robot With Chefee's Assaf Pashut

Assaf will be talking about Chefee at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 5th. If you’d like to hear his story in person, you can get tickets here.

The transcript of our conversation is below.

Michael Wolf
All right, I’m excited to have Assaf Pashut here in the studio today to talk a little bit about what you’re building with Chefee Robotics. Chefee is a really interesting company in that it’s actually making a home cooking robot. That’s a tough category. We’re going to dive into that, but before we do, let’s hear a little bit about your background. Tell people, you know, your journey and how you got to where you are today.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I grew up on food since I was, I mean, my mom cooked for me and my brothers every single day growing up. Homemade foods. I grew up in Israel so food is just a huge part of our culture. And yeah, I ended up going to Berkeley, studied neuroscience, learned a little bit about engineering, some biology, some chemistry, some, a lot of different, a lot of different things. And then I ended up going into the obvious next step, which is open restaurants.

Michael Wolf
I thought you were going to say the obvious next step is making a food robot.

Assaf Pashut
That’s like 14 years later. I opened restaurants, and my parents were surprised, as you can imagine. And so was everyone else. But I just thought that the food industry was broken. I think now there are so many documentaries about that. But back then it was, most people didn’t understand really what was going. And yeah, I wanted to fix it. I wanted to create some healthier brand and sell and just kind of promote that. And really, my dream was to kind of tackle McDonald’s, to compete with McDonald’s. So yeah, pretty ambitious. And then I had that for many years, and did very well in Silicon Valley. And then during COVID, everything just nose dived.

I took a year off and went to live in Israel. My mom was there, a lot of cooking again. You can see a common theme. And then, at some point, I think I was looking at my kitchen and just thought, how freaking cool would it be if I could just talk to it and it can cook for me? That was the crazy epiphany.

Michael Wolf
Right. That was. That was epiphany, and you know, so interesting that you decided to head into the consumer kitchen because you spent so much of your career in restaurants, which, by the way, I think some of the most successful food robotics entrepreneurs have started restaurants and then done that. John Haw with Bear Robotics is a good example of where he created his little mobile waiter robot. But you decided to go into the consumer kitchen, not make a back of house restaurant chef robot. Why did you look at the consumer space?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, so we actually started our V1 was a commercial kitchen. We built this entire commercial kitchen with a robotic arm on a rail. I’ll show you the video, but we basically we saw something that most people don’t see, which is everyone’s going in this direction. Commercial restaurants, fast food. And I hate fast food, personally. I just don’t think that’s something I want to contribute to or help. I don’t think it’s good for people, animals, the world in general. And so I don’t want to contribute my time there. And then, looking at the house, nobody’s touching it. Everybody knows there’s going to be robotics in the home. Everyone knows that.

Michael Wolf
It’s why you wanted to kill McDonald’s.

Assaf Pashut
But no one touched the home. And it’s a hard space, you’re right. It’s at what price point you come in, and there are so many different segments of consumers. But the appeal of one being the first, two, offering people this Jetsons kind of dream where you walk into your house, talk to your kitchen and it cooks for you. That was a sexy idea. That was something worth working for.

And I’ll tell you the first time that Chefee I ever talked to Chefee and it started cooking was just like a mind shift. It was weird. It was really, really cool. And that’s kind of when we knew that this is, this is happening. This is real.

Michael Wolf
No one’s broken into this space because it is, like you said, difficult. There have been some early temps like Moley, which started back in 2015, and the last couple of years, there have been a lot of countertop folks building essentially some level of automation within a self-contained countertop appliance. Your’s is different than what I’ve seen out there in that it’s not this big robotic arm. It’s not something that fits on the countertop. It looks like maybe some of the kind of robotic make lines I’ve seen in a sense for the commercial space, but not quite. Because it does fit into a granite countertop or whatever. It’s embedded essentially into the kitchen. Talk a little bit about that, why you decided to do what you did with your design.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, like I said, we started with a big robotic arm, right? And I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with it. And one, they’re expensive. Two, they’re difficult to maintain. Three, they’re dangerous. This thing, the first time we turned it on, we got it from China, and their safety setting was like the lowest possible safety. So it started grinding itself into the table on which it was standing. Dangerous stuff, man. And you don’t want that in your house with your kids and you’re in. Yeah.

Michael Wolf
That’s not good. o.

Assaf Pashut
And so, and then beyond that, the idea is that I think technology shouldn’t be in our face. It should be hidden, embedded in our walls, kind of like electricity. We have it, it’s the best thing ever. We don’t even realize it because it’s just in the walls, right? And then we use it when we want to use it. That’s kind of the vision.

Michael Wolf
It’s very on trend, by the way. We’re seeing that in the kitchen space. Like a lot of big appliance brands are thinking about this idea of the invisible kitchen, essentially where technology recedes into the background. You thought about it, but in a robotic context.

Assaf Pashut
Blend in. So instead of throwing some big thing at you, it’s more like, no, we’ll blend into your existing kitchen design, which people really, really spend a lot of time and thought into their kitchen designs. So we want to blend in.

Michael Wolf
When will I be able to buy this? When can I go out and say, hey, Chefee, come in and install this? And what does that involve? Does this involve a couple of folks showing up and installing it and tearing apart my kitchen a little bit?

Assaf Pashut
No, no, so not exactly. So, first of all, we’re already taking paid reservations. So there’s a bunch of people that already paid $250 to reserve their Chefee. Late next month, we’re going to be showcasing our Beta 2 model, which is basically what your Chefee would look like, stainless steel, so forth, the beautiful kind of vision. And at that point, we’ll be taking deposits. So 50% down, 50% upon delivery.

And when Chefee arrives at your door, yeah, we install it. But here’s the beauty. It doesn’t require any permanent damage to your kitchen. So the way we do it is we just remove the doors from your upper kitchen cabinet. That’s like four screws. And we slide Chefee in. And that’s it. Basically, within two hours, the whole installation takes two hours. And you have now an autonomous kitchen in your house.

Michael Wolf
What was it like going on Shark Tank? Obviously, going in front of the sharks is like a once in a lifetime experience. I know that some of them are notably robotic skeptical. Mark Cuban, probably being the most so. Tell us a little about that experience going on there and what happened.

Assaf Pashut
The experience, it’s hard to describe, man. It was the hardest day of my life. Most people, you know, a lot of companies, they come with this little app or a little gadget or whatever. We built a kitchen set ourselves. My team and I built the whole set. We’ve never done it before. We had to ship all of our equipment and Chefee to Los Angeles, stayed in our investor’s home, and built it in his backyard. It was wild.

I spent two months practicing the pitch over and over. We have a bunch of videos we’re going to release where I’m like doing push-ups and reciting the pitch. My friend is kicking me and like slapping me in the face literally to get ready for the pressure because you only have one chance. He went to the Israeli army. So he was like, he’s like, we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to do it.

Michael Wolf
It was Shark Tank Bootcamp.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, the moment itself was so stressful. So many things could have gone wrong. We had to ship it from one, we have to move it from one set to another. And then once we were there, they tell you, you only have one shot. It’s the Eminem song, right? You got one shot, don’t blow it. And then like, what if the wifi or the Bluetooth doesn’t work? And everything worked smoothly. The sharks are really, really nice. I think Mark was in a bad mood.

I think he was, he was kind of in disbelief that we could have built something like this that’s actually has some IP in it without spending millions of dollars, which is most, most companies do. And I get it. I mean, I come from the restaurant industry. Who am I? I’m, you know, to him, I’m just like a restaurateur. I’m not an engineer. But yeah, we’ve been able to do it. So it was pretty exciting.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, I mean, he probably saw, I mean, if you look at the track record, right, like the Zumes of the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars from SoftBank, and you’ve seen others race, you know, tons of money to build these things and to they burn through it. So, you ultimately did get a deal with Kevin O’Leary. Talk about that.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, with Kevin. I mean, at the end of the day, he saw what we saw, which is there’s a high end market. So we’re starting at the high end as a high end product. Obviously, our goal is to be in millions and millions of homes. And that’s what’s going to happen, but we’re going to start like this because we don’t want to have thousands of orders right off the bat. We’re not going to be able to deliver, and we’re going to have recalls, and it’s a common mistake that many hardware companies make. Let’s go slow and steady and actually pay attention to each customer. And then as we ramp up production, we’ll lower the prices and so forth. And frankly, there are people lining up to have a Chefee at this price point.

Michael Wolf
It’s the early Tesla strategy.

Assaf Pashut
I mean, we’re actually very, very, very reasonable relative to, let’s say, Moley, for example. Or even just high-end premium appliances in the home. People are spending $50,000 on a range hood. They’re spending $100,000 sometimes on La Cornue, Wolf and Sub-Zero.

Michael Wolf
What will this future channel look like? One of the things I’m trying to conceptualize and think a lot about, as we look 10 years in the future is, ‘hey, I want this cool cooking robot. Maybe I can’t cook, or maybe I’m getting older, and it’s just harder for me. How do I get this thing in the kitchen? Is it a matter of saying, hey, there’s a home system integrator for food robotics? Is it like there’s an appliance, like maybe a GE Whirlpool ultimately acquires Chefee, or builds a competing line, or you become like the next Whirlpool? Does a customer go to a Best Buy, see it and then have someone come and install it? What does this channel look like in the future?

Assaf Pashut
I mean, honestly, we’ve designed it, like I said, to be installed in existing kitchens. We want this in tiny kitchens, large kitchens, large homes, and small luxury apartments in Manhattan. It doesn’t matter. We fit into existing standard kitchens. Where it’s going to go, I don’t know. I think, I think Chefee can maintain a very high quality of the product. That’s, that’s important to me. That quality is super important. Whether it’s going to be available at Home Depot or Best Buy in the future, only time will tell. But ultimately, it’s probably going to be built in, kind of like standard ovens in microwaves and fridges that you have in every kitchen. You walk into somebody’s home in 15 years, and if they don’t have a Chefee, it’s like they’re in the Stone Age. That’s how I see it.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, people walk into like a modern high-end kitchen today, they see Wolf appliances, they see Jenn Air or whatever. You think that new status symbol 15 years from now will be a Chefee. Is that what we’re talking about?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to be ubiquitous. It just doesn’t make sense that it doesn’t. You have to experience it to kind of feel it. When we started cooking with Chefee, then I went to my mom’s house, and there’s like pans and pots and all these things and like a mess in the kitchen. I’m like, I don’t know, my mind has just shifted. Like this is the old way and now there’s a new way. Obviously there’s a nice hybrid middle ground there where you can still cook.

It’s not like you have to give Chefee every single meal to make. Cooking is fun, I love cooking. It’s just that I don’t have time every single day to do it in a good way, in a high quality way.

Michael Wolf
You said you are starting at the high end. As you guys grow – obviously this is your first product out there – if we look a couple years down the line, five years down the line, is there going to be a range? At some point you have a countertop thing that people would just buy and plop down or take with them? What does that look like?

Assaf Pashut
A lot of things are possible. We want to make sure one, we’re not spreading ourself thin, right? Once you spread yourself thin, quality goes down. And second, is we don’t want to go to the Vitamix, the, the, what are they called? All these little countertop, nimbals and stuff, right? We want to stay, the value proposition of Chefee is it’s restocked once a week and you walk away.

You go to the gym, you go to the office, you go hang out with your kids, you go watch Netflix. That’s it once a week. As soon as you dumb it down and you bring it down the volume and so forth, and now it’s just a countertop, then again, you have to restock every single meal. You have to think a lot more about every single thing, which is, it’s just, it defeats purpose. So, yeah.

Michael Wolf
Great. Hey, well, I’m looking forward to hearing you and connecting with you in Seattle in June at the SmartCat to Summit. And where can people find out more about what you’re doing at chefee.com?

Assaf Pashut
You too.

Chefee.com, yeah, yeah, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re online.

Michael Wolf
That’s easy. And for those of you just listening, it’s chefee.com, right?

Assaf Pashut
That’s it. Thank you.

SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics

Robotics, AI & Data

We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers.

First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

Michael Wolf: I imagine that a lot of startups in the food robotics space are probably wanting to get your advice because you ran one of the early pretty successful food robotics companies with Picnic. Talk about some of the conversations you’re having and maybe some of the, are there early stage entrepreneurs in the space that are coming to you say, hey, we have an idea.

Clayton Wood: Absolutely. I started getting inbound interest in being an advisor as soon as I left Picnic, a little over a year ago. I’ve talked to a large number of companies in the space. Many of them are at the same spot, which, given market conditions, isn’t too surprising, which is they’ve got an idea. They’ve probably got a product or a prototype, having trouble raising their first round, having trouble finding product market fit. And just trying to make that leap into kind of being a more mature company. It’s a tough spot under any circumstances, but in market conditions, the last few years have made it especially difficult.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about food robotics is it’s a long path to getting into market. It’s a lot of capital. And with the venture capital winter that is seemingly lasting forever, it seems like a tough time for food robotics companies.

Clayton Wood: It very much is. I know at Picnic, we started in what I finally refer to as the free money era, where you raised one round just to get to the next round, and raising money wasn’t really that much of a question. Now it’s a huge problem. The challenge that food robotics companies have specifically is that as the market tightened up, it became very conservative, and conservative investors don’t like hardware in general.

Food tech is seen as a challenging category of hardware. So if you’re looking at, you know, show me when you’re cashflow positive, show me when you’re profitable. It’s very, very difficult as a food hardware company to show that because it’s such a new field. Product market fit is elusive and being able to say when that those financial metrics will turn right side up is really challenging. It’s just a really tough time for all startups, but I think food robotics, food hardware is especially a challenging category, and has been for the last two or three years.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about Picnic was I felt like it was a next-generation pizza food robotics company and that it was purpose-built around building pizzas. It wasn’t one of these where someone got a general-purpose robotic arm and would just move things around within a confined space. And you’re still seeing those sometimes. What are some of the if you’re giving advice to a food robotics company in terms of building out a system and thinking it through what ultimately may succeed in the market, what would you tell them?

Clayton Wood: Yes.I think it’s one of those signs, you’re absolutely right about the arms and the big footprints. It’s one of those signs of a new, immature market. People haven’t seen food robotics, they don’t know what to think about it. We had people at trade shows looking at the Picnic robot and they’re in the pizza business, and they’re watching it make a pizza and they’re going, ‘does it make the pizza?’ It’s really hard to just wrap their head around it.

I think the challenge, it’s common to a lot of technology companies, but especially true in food robotics, you’ve got to start with the customer. What’s the customer’s pain point, and what can they actually use? And unfortunately, not uncommonly, people start with ‘what can my product do?’ and ‘how can I make it do it in a real fancy, impressive way and how fast can it do it or that sort of thing?’

Those numbers are nice and you get people excited, but it’s not really what the customer needs. And ultimately, the real challenge in food robotics is integration. How will your device get integrated into a commercial kitchen so that the kitchen can continue to operate, do what it needs to do, and do it without disrupting the process? And until there are new concepts that are really built around automation and those are starting to emerge. I used to say no one who has a kitchen has a pizza robot sized hole in their kitchen that they’re just waiting to plug it in.

Michael Wolf: You know, there are a couple of founders out there on the smaller side that I think are innovating. They’re not a big chain. So you see like Andrew Simmons, which I think you talk a lot with. You see Lee Kindell up here in Seattle with Moto. And I imagine there are others that are showing how you can be a smaller operator and almost build your new restaurant concept around utilizing kind of off-the-shelf robotics. It’s not like a Zume, where they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Softbank and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build our own robot, do this custom thing.’ These smaller operators are taking a system like Picnic’s and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a new concept that is essentially centered around automation and kind of move forward.’ I feel like they’re pioneering in a sense. Do you think that’s going to be what we’re going to see in the future, more people pioneering concepts that are leveraging automation because they think that can help them scale better?

Clayton Wood: I love to see that. I think Andrew and Lee are brilliant, and I’d say, you know, they’re unfortunately they’re at the far end of the open-minded innovator scale. They’re both kind of willing to move things around and try things, and they’re not just open to innovation, but they embrace it and they seek it out. I don’t think that’s really the persona that I’d use to describe most people in the restaurant business.

If you have that kind of open -minded approach, there’s all kinds of things you could do and you can adapt. If you don’t want to adapt, you say, this is the way I do things. Can you help me? That’s where you run into an integration challenge. But I think what I love about what Lee is doing at Moto and what Andrew is doing with Mama Ramona’s Pizza Roboto is they’re showing how it can work. They’re sharing real world experiences.

Andrew is doing his whole build -in public diary on LinkedIn, which I think is brilliant and super useful because he’s sharing the wins and the losses. But it shows that it can work, you’ve just got to adapt. And I think that’s a lot of the product market fit in these early days is about adapting on both sides. The customer has to be willing to adapt a little bit and the product companies have to go in realizing that regardless of what they may think, they haven’t built a perfect machine and they need to be willing to tweak and change and reconfigure to make the best fit.

Michael Wolf: Okay, you’ve been in this business for half a decade now, you’re advising companies. What are you excited about in terms of food robotics? And are there spaces you think you’d like to see more entrepreneurs or inventors go in terms of building automation around food?

Clayton Wood: I’ve seen some in the home space as well as the restaurant space who are starting out with products that already solve some of the challenges that we’ve seen really block some of the earlier companies. Building devices that are drop-in replacements for a make line, for instance. Acknowledging the fact that if you have the way a restaurant operates, workers are seldom just dedicated to a station standing there all day. The automation needs to work even if the person is only giving intermittent attention. You need to see things like a holding station where if you’re making 10 salads a minute, well, if there’s nobody there to catch the 10 salads, they need to be suitably caught and retained and held there.

And it needs to work around the way the workflow goes in the kitchen, which is multitasking, short staff, and it needs to solve real problems. And the nice thing is you can solve different problems and make it work. I’ve heard people say that, well, the automation didn’t really save me any labor because I only had one person working there anyway. I still need one person working the automation, but the consistency means the cook goes well. The pizzas cook really well because they’re all consistent.

Food waste is another area where food waste is a huge problem, especially in the pizza category, but I think it’s also a problem in other categories as well. If you can eliminate food waste, just food waste alone can pay for the system. So I think if you’re an automation company or product developer, thinking about all the different ways you can add value, but it can only do that if it works with that particular operator.

So you’re going to find the customer who is doing something the way that your machine is designed to do it. If you can make 200 dishes an hour, that’s brilliant and that sounds really impressive, but how many restaurants are making 200 of the same thing every hour? Not that many. And so you may not really have a big market if that’s your claim to fame and that’s really the reason you want somebody to buy it and that’s how your economics work. If people are making 20 an hour, is it still economical? Does it still pay for itself?

Michael Wolf: You mentioned home and you’re seeing some things that are exciting you. And you don’t have to necessarily name names, but home has been really tough to crack for food robotics. And you’re seeing some interesting ones that broke over some of the barriers that were challenging in the past. What are you seeing there that’s exciting?

Clayton Wood: Home is tricky because it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be versatile. Um, it can’t lock you into, you can only do, you can only use it if you buy our packet of pre -packaged food. Um, so I’ve seen one or two players in there who are, who are solving that, who are offering pre -packaged food or recipes, but you can also customize and add your own ingredients, but making a pretty versatile device. So I think that’s a category that has promise, but it’s especially tricky because even if you’ve got something that works brilliantly, you’ve got the whole, it’s a consumer market, and how do you break into consumer markets? You know, got to build a brand and get everybody’s attention. And that’s just, that’s a world that I’m less familiar with. And it’s a pretty daunting challenge to break into that consumer market.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, we’ll be talking about both the restaurant, robotic space, as well as the consumer space at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Lee Kindell will be there. Clayton, you’re going to be there as well, June 4th and 5th in Seattle. And I’m excited to see you there, man.

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

You can hear Clayton at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

Pipedream Raises $13M as It Looks to Build Underground Middle Mile Delivery Network

Delivery & Commerce

Underground delivery startup Pipedream Labs announced it has raised $13 million in funding. Company CEO Garrett McCurrach disclosed the funding, led by Starship Ventures, with participation from Cortado Ventures, Myelin Ventures, and others, in a post on LinkedIn.

The new capital infusion will primarily be utilized to enhance Pipedream’s “Instant Pickup” service and kick-start the construction of an ambitious middle-mile network in an as-yet-unnamed city. This network aims to facilitate quicker, more cost-effective urban deliveries.

What the company calls its Instant Pickup service is when it deploys its underground delivery technology at a grocery store, restaurant, or retail store. According to McCurrach, an Instant Pickup system enables a restaurant or grocery store to hand off an order to a customer in less than 15 seconds. The company says it has 100 preorders for Instant Pickup systems, a number which likely includes its Wendy’s pilot announced last year.

The company says it will also select a city to build its first large-scale middle-mile network installation. While McCurrach doesn’t say in which city they will first break ground, he did include a graphic of a map of the Phoenix metro area with a diagram outlining a “small middle mile network”

McCurrach: “This year, we will be selecting a city to build our first middle-mile network (a large-scale underground delivery network that makes current deliveries faster and cheaper in a city) and collaborating with local government and city officials to maximize the benefits of our low-cost, fast delivery system for all their citizens. Construction is set to begin this year, with plans to start utilizing the network by next spring.”

My guess is the company will likely find a lot more near-term traction for its Instant Pickup business, as extremely short-range delivery within a given plot of land is much easier to deploy than a city-wide installation. It also doesn’t hurt that the company’s push into curbside pickup and fast food drive-thrus comes at a time when grocery stores are growing their pickup business and quick service restaurants are reimagining how they handle drive-thru.

Report: Diners Opting for Restaurant-Specific Apps & Kiosks While Deemphasizing 3rd-Party Delivery

Delivery & Commerce

A new report published by Tillster shows that quick-service restaurant customers are increasingly opting to use restaurant-specific apps over 3rd party delivery apps.

The report, which analyzed the results of a survey of over 1,000 quick-service and fast-casual diners, showed that the number of customers who used restaurant-owned ordering channels over the past three months has increased 25% compared to last year, and 17% of those surveyed say they plan to use third-party apps and websites less in the coming year.

One reason diners are opting for restaurant-specific apps or websites is that they see them as lower cost. 44% indicated they preferred a restaurant’s app or website because it was less expensive. Another reason is the benefits of native restaurant app loyalty programs; over four in ten of those surveyed pointed to the restaurant loyalty rewards and benefits available through a native restaurant app/website.

Another reason third-party ordering apps are losing their shine is the decreasing number of choices as these platforms scale back the number of restaurants they support. According to Tillster, 45% of those surveyed in 2023 pointed to a “variety of options” as the top reason for preferring third-party apps, a number that dropped to 36% of respondents this year.

The survey also asked diners what they thought of in-store ordering kiosks. The report says an increasing number of diners prefer to order using kiosks, with 57% preferring this option compared to 36% last year.

Why are diners growing more enamored with kiosk ordering? According to the report, a growing preference for kiosk ordering is because many diners see them as quicker, more convenient, and a better way to see ordering options. 34% say ordering with a kiosk is faster (up 10% over last year), and 33% believe it’s more convenient (a 22% bump over the previous year). The biggest reason (45%) cited by diners for preferring kiosks is they say kiosks show them all the options, up 10% over 2023.

While newer approaches, such as remote cashiers or AI-voice bots taking orders, have gained an outsized amount of attention (and, in some cases, provoked outrage), the reality is that the most significant transition taking place today is the rapid adoption of restaurant-specific ordering apps and in-store ordering kiosks. The diner largely sees these solutions as an added convenience compared to solutions that are more on-the-nose regarding technology displacing in-venue workers.

Whirlpool Lays Off Entire Team for Cooking and Recipe App Yummly

Connected Kitchen, Education & Discovery

Appliance giant Whirlpool has let its entire Yummly team go. According to industry sources, the company recently laid off all the employees for the recipe and cooking app and website. These sources tell the Spoon that it’s unclear what the company plans to do with the property it acquired in 2017.

The news of the layoffs marks a significant de-emphasis on creating a connected cooking experience tailored around custom-designed recipes with step-by-step cooking.

“Every day, millions of consumers around the world use Whirlpool Corporation appliances to prepare meals for their families. The Yummly acquisition will allow these consumers to dramatically reduce the stress from meal planning by helping answer the age-old question, ‘What’s for dinner tonight?'” the company said at the time of the acquisition.

After Whirlpool acquired Yummly, it beefed up the content team and hired content creators to build a recipe catalog with cooking guidance. It also added features such as built-in food image recognition capabilities and put out a Yummly-connected thermometer (which is still available for purchase). The company announced an update with new features as recently as last fall.

The move to let the Yummly team go is indicative of appliance brands de-emphasizing apps with human-powered editorial-driven content, especially as some start to investigate how they can leverage generative AI to power new features and content. The Spoon has heard rumblings that other appliance brands are starting to build generative AI-powered content libraries and consumer-facing UI with mixed results. My guess is this trend will only continue, even as appliances begin to revisit their smart appliance strategies after lessons from the first wave of product build-out.

Watch as This Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process

Robotics, AI & Data

For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

That’s because Simmons, who I wrote about last year as he experimented with utilizing pizza automation technology in his San Diego area restaurant, has open-sourced his learnings as he continues experimenting with various forms of technology. And boy, is he experimenting!

And it’s not just automation (though that’s a big part). He’s constantly tinkering with every part of his restaurant tech stack as he expands beyond his original restaurant and looks to create a nationwide chain of tech-powered pizza restaurants. Add in the fact that he’s utilizing a crowdfunding model in which he sells subscriptions and a share of future pizza profits, and Simmons has created a live in-process testing lab for how to build a next-gen pizza chain that everyone can learn from.

One example of his highly detailed learnings that I found fascinating is his post today detailing the cost-per-pizza after allocating the costs of the different pizza-making automation he’s deployed in one of his restaurants. The video, seen below, shows how much each part of the process — dough making, doughball prep, dough-pressing, toppings allocation — costs and how he arrives at a 2024 price-per-pie of $1.91.

Simmons details how he’s tinkered with different automation systems over the past year and how they’ve impacted the price. One change he’s tinkered with is switching out the Picnic pizza robot for a Middleby Pizza Bot, which is more expensive but handles more of the pizza-making process and requires less human intervention.

From Simmons’s post:

Last year, the financial model was built using the Picnic Pizza Station. It was more expensive last year than it is today. This year, I’ve incorporated The Middleby Corporation Automation tool into the equation, but either unit could work. Middleby is a little more costly, adding about 60¢ to the per pizza estimate, but it takes the pizza from dough blank to cooked, whereas the Picnic requires some intervention to cook it. Picnic runs about 38¢ per pizza this year.

Simmons points to recent changes in California’s employment laws as one motivator for his becoming an early adopter of these solutions, saying that the changes will lead to more restaurant chains experimenting with automation.

“Thank you to the pioneers in this space that have tried, adopted, succeeded or failed, equipment manufacturers and restaurateurs alike; and to Governor Newsom, for accelerating adoption of automation,” wrote Simmons.

You can (and I suggest you do) follow Simmons’s posts about his journey to build a robotic restaurant chain on Linkedin.

Is The US Power Grid Prepared For The Transition To Induction Cooking?

Next-Gen Cooking

In case you haven’t heard, electricity demand is shooting through the roof.

After more than two decades of flattened usage due to more efficient lightbulbs, appliances, and factories, the growing adoption of EVs and the explosion in new data centers for compute-intensive applications such as AI over the last few years has resulted in skyrocketing demand for electricity, according to a new report in the New York Times. In fact, forecasters estimate that peak demand in the summer will grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, which is akin to adding another California to an already overburdened grid.

Above: Electricity Demand Over Time and Forecasted Demand. Source: New York Times

The Times report does a good job highlighting how EVs and higher usage air conditioning in homes are two of the biggest culprits for reversing the trend, but largely omits any discussion of another potential big driver of electricity usage in the future: induction cooking.

And from the looks of it, induction could significantly impact the overall electricity usage of a family home. While it’s more energy efficient in general, a household switching from gas to electric induction cooking will use more electricity. How much? According to some sources, an hour of induction cooking will use between 1.4 kW and 2 kW per day. That compares with about 2.5 kW per day in charging for the typical EV.

So, not quite as much as EV, but still enough to translate to a significant draw on the grid once we’re talking tens of millions of induction stoves. All of which begs the question, will the grid be ready?

It’s something that’s definitely on the mind of some in the appliance world. One appliance executive recently told me that grid readiness is one of the microenvironment variables they are factoring in when evaluating their own induction cooktop strategy. Add to that various local restrictions around gas cooking (and pushback against said restrictions), and the calculation as to how much they push electric appliances gets somewhat nuanced depending on a given market’s grid readiness and regulatory environment.

My own guess is that while we’re finally seeing induction making inroads in the US, the adoption isn’t moving at such a rate that it will make matters significantly worse than other factors, such as EV and data center growth. In fact, it’s because those other reasons have grabbed the attention of those responsible for forecasting and building out our electricity infrastructure that the industry will more than likely be ready for when we hit tens and even hundreds of millions of induction cooktops in homes.

Watch The Figure 01 Robot Feed A Human, Sort The Dishes, And Stammer Like Us Meatbags

Robotics, AI & Data

While much of the startup funding for food-centric robots has been for task-specific fast-automation from the likes of Picnic Robot and Chef Robotics, some of the more intriguing – and creepy – action is happening with humanoid robots.

The latest entry into the “watch a humanoid robot handle kitchen tasks” files is from Figure, which just showed off the latest capabilities of the Figure 01 robot by showing how it can identify food and sort through kitchen tasks.

What really stands out to me is the weirdly human voice of the robot, which includes very human-like pauses and slight stammers. As an example, in one exchange, a human interviewer asks Figure 01 to explain why it handed over an apple. Figure 01 responds with a quick “On it” and then goes on to explain, complete with an “uh” pause that makes you almost think there’s an actor behind the curtain spitting out the lines.

You can watch for yourself below. The exchange I am talking about happens 48 seconds into the video.

Figure Status Update - OpenAI Speech-to-Speech Reasoning

According to Figure, the latest release showcased in the video illustrates how it has put OpenAI’s large language models to work to provide high-level visual and language intelligence, while its neural networks are responsible for powering the almost human-like dexterity of the robot. The company has raised an eye-popping $754 million in funding.

Why a Small Startup in the Middle of Valencia May Be Leading the Wireless Energy & Invisible Cooktop Trend

Connected Kitchen, Next-Gen Cooking

About a decade ago, IKEA famously released a concept video laying out its vision for the kitchen of the future. The central concept for their envisioned future kitchen was a kitchen table that not only made the experience of cooking and eating interactive with a touch interface, but also had built-in induction transmitters under the table’s surface that transmitted energy to power appliances and powered invisible-to-the-eye heating zones.

It was a compelling peek into what could be. While induction cooktop hob technology was and is a somewhat mature technology, the idea of using an induction transmitter to provide both wireless power and heating in everyday kitchen countertop surfaces fired up our imaginations in the same way Tom Cruise’s John Anderton character did about gesture interfaces more than two decades ago in Minority Report.

Since IKEA released its video, the futuristic idea of using an ordinary surface as a source of power and cooking heat has been inching slowly toward becoming a reality without ever seeming to make it to market. While there have been some efforts in standards-building by the same organization that brought us wireless phone charging standard Qi, actual product introductions of kitchen surfaces with built-in wireless power and heating have been pretty much non-existent.

But that’s changed over the twelve months thanks to a company named Cloen. Nestled on the east coast of the Iberian peninsula, this small Spanish startup has begun to pull back the curtain on the technology they’ve been developing for the better part of a decade. The company’s technology, which it calls Cloen Cordless Technology (CCT), is built around a dual induction plate system that provides heating to cook zones and wireless energy transmission to countertop appliances.

The company’s patented technology is on display in New York City at the flagship showroom of Spanish tile maker Porcelanosa. For Porcelanosa, another (and much older) company that also makes its home in the Valencian Community of Spain, Cloen built a custom-designed set of kitchen countertops and furniture with the CCT technology under the Spanish tile and furniture company’s Gamadecor brand.

You can watch a demo video of the CCT-powered Gamadecor product below:

Cloen Cordless Technology by Gadgets

In addition to building their own countertop kitchen products and those of partners (like Porcelanosa) with built-in transmission systems, Cloen is also working on a new line of countertop small appliances under the BeCordless brand, a joint venture between Cloen and cookware company Bergner. These countertop cooking appliances, which you can see in usage in the video above, include blenders, toasters, and air fryers.

The company is working with Porcelanosa on the cooking surface roadmap to build modular kitchen cooktops with up to five invisible cooking and power transmission zones. It also works with other manufacturers to build kitchen tables with dual-cooking and power transmission zones.

Above: Rendering of a 5 dual induction modular system being developed for 2025 release

The company has also worked with TV show producers in Spain and South Korea to build custom products for chef-centric cooking programs. In fact, you can see the Cloen-powered cooktop on Netflix in the reality TV show Lady Tamara, which is about Spanish aristocrat and chef Tamara Falcó.

For its product in Korea, the company is developing a table similar to the one in the IKEA concept video. However, if you expect to cook on a wood-only kitchen table, you might be slightly disappointed. According to Cloen, the table will have both power zones on the wood surface and induction heating in an in-laid glass area.

The company, which was founded by Pablo Cerra, an engineer by training, has grown to around 20 people, over half of them engineers. The focus on engineering is due to Cerra’s intention of building everything needed for the system. Cloen owns not only the core technology concepts but also develops the software and provides the SoC circuit boards to build into its partners’ systems.

“The secret is the software algorithm and the chip (microprocessor),” Cerra told The Spoon. “That’s secret to the whole technology.”

Cerra and his team decided to build a full-stack company to be an ingredient technology for their own and other brands’ wireless power kitchen technology because he felt the foundation needed to be laid for the market.

“This technology has to be for everyone,” Cerra said. “If you buy a mobile phone now, you can charge it with a normal charger or wireless charging. The thing is, wireless power and induction for the kitchen have to be the same.”

But Cloen isn’t alone. As mentioned, the Wireless Power Consortium is working on its Ki standard, and we’ve heard from multiple appliance brands that they are investigating and actively building products that will include wireless power. Other startups and tile companies are also looking at building wireless power systems.

Stepping back, the arrival of wireless power and invisible cooking zones is also part of a broader trend towards technology and functionality in the kitchen receding into the background. Sure, it’s part of the invisible kitchen design trend, but it’s also bigger than that, part of the megatrend that has technology disappearing before our eyes, fueled by AI, voice and gesture interface platforms, technology miniaturization, and the influence of companies like Apple and, well, IKEA over the past decade.