Last week, robotics delivery company Serve Robotics announced the company had reached level 4 autonomy for its sidewalk delivery robot. We sat down with Ali Kashani, the CEO of Serve, to talk about its latest achievement, how they’ve evolved from the company’s early days, and where he sees autonomous food delivery going from here.
Robotics, AI & Data
Robot U: Bear Robotics Enrolls at UNLV To Give Hospitality Students Hands-On Experience
Suppose you’re an aspiring college student looking to enter the hospitality industry and want an education to get set on the right path. In that case, the Hospitality College at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas has to rank near the top of the list.
And in 2022, a big part of preparing for that future has to be showing prospective hospitality students how new technology like automation will change the industry in the coming years. That’s why this week’s news that the college has begun working with Bear Robotics to give students at the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality experience working with robotics is no big surprise.
According to Bear’s Instagram account, the company sent two Servi robots to UNLV, where students will get experience deploying robotics within various hospitality and casino resort scenarios.
From the post:
We are proud to announce that we are partnering with @unlv to provide the next generation of gaming and hospitality professionals with hands-on experience in curating robotic automation programs! We’ve launched 2 Servi robots to run a variety of casino resort simulations and we are so excited to see creative approaches to operational challenges.
As I wrote yesterday, one of the fastest-growing job categories in the service-industry sector will be that of robotics management. In fact, I expect many in the service industry will embrace learning new skills to help them better understand automation technology as it changes their industry. And while I expect there to be growing tension between labor and management in industries where robotics will no doubt displace some workers, it’s important that both sides – management and employee – have a better understanding of how robotics will integrate into different roles within the hospitality industry.
For Bear, this announcement comes just weeks after the company showed up in Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. While Bear hasn’t struck any deals with one of the big casinos, I have to wonder if this partnership could bring it closer to landing in a casino down the street from UNLV.
Five Food Robotics Predictions for 2022
It’s our second of five consecutive days of food tech predictions for 2022. Yesterday we looked into our crystal ball to predict the future for restaurant tech in 2022 and today we’re looking at food robots.
So, how exactly will robotics change food in 2022?
Front of House Automation Will Shoulder More of the Load for Workers
If there’s an area of dine-in restaurants impacted most by COVID, it’s the front of house. High turnover, social distancing and masking requirements have all put significant stress on staff who interface with consumers.
The good news is there is a new class of food robots ready to lend a hand. In the second half of 2021, we saw both Denny’s and Chili’s begin rolling out front-of-house robots from Bear robotics. Others such as Keenon and Pudu are also building robot servers to handle the load of overburdened workers.
And then there are the fully automated robots making and dispensing food that are being utilized within the confines of an existing restaurant, whether that’s robot bartender with personalities like Cecelia or cookie-making bots in Alabama.
Whether it’s waiter-bots or fully automated task-managers, expect more robots to help shoulder the load in the front of house in 2022.
Restaurants-in-a-Box Start Rolling Out
Get ready for the restaurant in-a-box. There are a number of startups with robo-restaurant concepts already in fully operational pilot tests who are looking to expand with multiple self-contained robot restaurants in 2022.
Hyper-Robotics, which makes fully automated containerized robot pizza restaurants that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour, is beginning to roll out its pizza robot restaurants in Israel. Cala, a French startup that makes fully autonomous pasta-making robots, is already operating a robot in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district. Another startup called Mezli, which is currently running its containerized bowl-food restaurant in Kitchentown, has plans to eventually launch more locations.
These are just a few self-contained robo-restaurants and we expect to see many more rollout in 2022.
Age of the Food Robocorn
One could argue that – at least for a while – that Zume hit unicorn status as it hauled in wheelbarrows of Softbank cash for its robot meets pizza delivery concept. However, the company eventually hit troubled waters and has since pivoted to sustainable packaging.
Since that time, a new wave of food robot startups has launched, but – outside of the warehouse space – we’ve yet to see any of these startups reach the same rarified valuation. I expect that to change in 2022.
As more restaurant and food delivery businesses adopt robotics and automation, we should see which robot startups hit escape velocity. My guess is we’ll see the next food robo-corns in food delivery space and restaurant robotics.
Modularized Robots and the Food Automation Integrator
One of the biggest challenges for rolling out automation tech in high-volume restaurants is how to begin the process of integrating a new robot into a kitchen. Established restaurants have their workflows and processes, which means an operator can’t just drop a robot into a kitchen and expect to see instant results.
This is why companies like Picnic, Hyphen, Miso and others are creating modularized back-of-house robots to assist workers by taking over a portion of their existing food production workflow. Meanwhile, some operators like Sweetgreen are bringing robotics expertise in-house and are trialing ways to bring food to their customers.
Finally, not only do I expect to see more food robot startups offer up modular-build approaches tailored to operators with locked-in workflows, but I also expect 2022 will see the rise of the ‘food automation integrator.’
Robot Vending Everywhere
Why eat a stale bag of chips when you can have fresh food? That’s what many office workers, university students and travelers will start to wonder as they come upon highly automated fresh food vending machines. Companies like Yo-Kai, DoorDash (with Chowbotics), and Costa Coffee’s Baristabot (formerly Briggo) are already moving towards wider deployment, while others like Basil Street are looking at significant expansion in the coming year.
Bonus Prediction: The Robot Operator Will Be a Hot New Job Category
It may seem like a dream job for a virtual reality nut, but apparently, VR-piloted delivery bots are now a thing. Also now a thing: Hospitality training programs that give prospective hospitality managers experience with deploying robots.
While there is concern among some that robotics could eventually displace workers in many of these spaces, I expect that we’ll also see many food industry employees clamoring to take on robotics operator as part of their job description. We can expect more robot operator jobs to become in demand in 2022, as we see food robots exit the pilot stage and enter full daily operation across restaurants, food service, delivery, grocery, and other food adjacent venues.
That’s it for restaurant robots. Tune in tomorrow for our alt-protein predictions for 2022!
Watch as Serve’s Sidewalk Robot Completes a Delivery With Level 4 Autonomy
This week, Serve Robotics announced that its sidewalk delivery robot can now complete deliveries at level 4 autonomy. According to the company, this makes their robot the first autonomous vehicle to complete commercial deliveries without the need for human assistance.
For those not familiar with autonomous driving parlance, level 4 autonomy means that Serve’s robot can now navigate a trip without the intervention of a human driver. However, as seen in the video below, at level 4, a human driver can choose to intervene to ensure an extra level of safety (as the Serve driver does at a crosswalk light).
According to the announcement, this milestone is the result of a robot built with a highly redundant navigation system employing multiple cutting-edge technologies. The navigation system “includes multiple sensor modalities—active sensors such as lidar and ultrasonics, as well as passive sensors such as cameras—to navigate safely on busy city sidewalks. Serve Robotics’ achievement required development of a wide range of market-leading capabilities, such as automatic emergency braking, vehicle collision avoidance, and fail-safe mechanical braking.”
In the announcement, the company credits a couple of their technology partners in helping to reach this milestone. One of those companies is NVIDIA, whose Jetson platform provides the Serve robot with AI-computing to navigate complex unstructured environments. Serve also gave a shout-out to lidar-maker Ouster, which provides small and power-efficient lidar to help power Serve’s self-driving capabilities.
Up to this point, pretty much all autonomous sidewalk delivery robots employ the help of human drivers to navigate their routes. And even looking forward, even Serve and other bots move to level 4 autonomy, expect remote human drivers to continue to be in demand. That’s because there will always be potential unforeseen circumstances on different routes, and companies (like Serve) will want that extra layer of safety as their bots navigate through dense city environments.
However, with these types of advancements, human robot operators will be able to handle larger fleets over time. While some robot (and drone) delivery services already operate at a multiple-to-one ratio, higher autonomy means humans to robot ratios can increase, allowing pilots to handle more and more robots as they are deployed to the field.
Checkers To Roll Out AI-Powered Voice Tech to 267 Restaurant Drive-Thrus By End of 2022
This week restaurant chain Checkers & Rally’s announced a deal with Presto, a maker of restaurant technology, in which the drive-thru focused chain will roll out Presto’s AI-powered voice assistant technology chain-wide by the end of the year.
The announcement comes after early trials showed a 98% order accuracy for the voice assistant technology. And now, according to Checkers President and CEO Frances Allen, the chain plans to roll out Presto’s voice technology to all 267 store-owned and operated locations by the end of 2022. She also indicated that many franchise locations are expressing interest in the technology.
“We had a vision two years ago that we wanted what I would call ‘Alexa at the drive-thru,'” said Allen.
And now, with Presto, they have it. According to Allen, about 80% of the chain’s total business comes through a drive-thru, so the company’s management felt transitioning to a high-accuracy automated drive-thru could significantly impact the business.
“Anything we can do to improve operations, streamline for our guests and our employees, we wanted to do.”
You can hear the Presto voice assistant taking an order at a Checkers drive-thru in the video above. The Presto bot sounds, well, bot-like as it says “Welcome to Checkers, this drive-thru microphone is monitored and recorded for quality assurance.” In fact, the entire exchange sounds like something you might hear on an automated customer service line.
Expedite’s Kristen Hawley thought so too and asked during the press briefing if customers could access live humans at any point during the interaction.
“There are 2% of orders where the system says ‘you know, I don’t quite understand that,'” said Presto founder and CEO Rajat Suri. “If the person is insistent on talking to a staff member or operator, the system will escalate to the human in the restaurant.”
When asked if the broader rollout of Presto’s technology will result in a permanent reduction of headcount, Allen said no. Instead, she said, Presto’s technology helps fill roles left empty by the persistent shortage of workers the entire restaurant industry has been experiencing since the pandemic began.
“Our motivation is to fill the gap between the people that are available to us working in restaurants and where we need to focus that human labor,” said Allen. “In an ideal world, maybe we have five people at any shift right now. We probably have three or four available. And so this (Presto’s voice assistant) is like a fifth person that is coming in to help.”
“Our motivation here is not to replace people with robots.”
How Do You Train AI-Powered Checkout To Recognize A Product? In Vegas (& Elsewhere), You Throw It Like Dice
When it comes to training machine vision and AI-powered retail checkout systems, packaged goods and locally created food items are treated very differently.
That’s at least according to Mashgin, a maker of touchless checkout systems. Company spokesperson Toby Awalt said that’s because another store on the network has likely already added that bag of chips or candy bar to their 10 thousand plus item database.
Not so when it comes to locally made food items.
“CPG items, we have to do less and less because there’s enough overlap,” said Awalt, who gave us a walkthrough of the system at CES 2022. “But for dishes, we’ll do every time.”
According to Awalt, adding a new food menu item for a restaurant doesn’t take that since most cafeterias or restaurants only serve between 15 and 50 items.
“You can do that relatively quickly,” he said.
Still, a new packaged good has to be entered into the system now and then. Whenever that happens, the operator has to position the package in several different positions to give the system enough info to recognize the product whenever it shows up under the camera.
“I actually do dice rolls with the product,” said Awalt, throwing a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar onto the tray.
According to Mashgin, the company recommends the system capture 20 to 50 total positions of a product so it can recognize the product from various angles and also distinguish between different variations within the same product line (such as two different flavors of ice cream or potato chips).
You can watch a walkthrough of the Mashgin system below.
CES 2022: Cecilia.ai To Showcase Its Chatty AI-Powered Robotic Bartender
Over the past few years, we’ve seen all sorts of robot bartenders, ranging from simple pod-based drink machines to high-tech robots slinging drinks everywhere from Iceland to the high seas.
What we haven’t seen as much is the combo of a voice assistant and an animated computer avatar as the interface for a robot bartender. That changes with Cecelia.
When the customer orders a drink from Cecilia, they’re greeted by an animated bartender that takes their order via voice commands using conversational AI. Cecilia can serve up to 120 drinks per hour (provided customers don’t get into long conversations or hit on the bartender), is about 8 feet tall and can store up to 70 liters of beverages in the storage area at the bottom of the machine.
In some ways, combining a voice assistant with a robot bartender is a logical evolution of drink-making automation. Anyone who’s ordered a drink from a good bartender knows that friendly conversation is part of the job description. While we don’t expect Cecilia to commiserate with you about your dating life (at least not yet), it’s not hard to envision a future where highly conversational robots chat it up with those huddled around the watering hole.
The company behind Cecilia is GKI Group, a startup based out of Israel. The company has been showcasing its version 1 of Cecilia at corporate functions and other small pop-ups and is showcasing its second-generation Cecilia at CES 2022. You can visit Cecilia at booth 61708 in Eureka Park.
The Walkaround Guide of Food Robot Companies Exhibiting at CES 2022
At CES 2022 this week, there will be a bunch of automated food-making machines on display. So with the big tech show starting in just two days, I thought I’d make a quick walk-around guide for those looking to do the food robots tour at CES 2022.
Beyond Honeycomb
While we don’t know a lot about this Korean-based company and their restaurant robot, we are intrigued by the company’s description: AI-driven kitchen robot that learns to reproduce world-class chef dishes. With its food sensors, the robot digitizes the texture and taste of the original dish and replicates at the molecular level. The company aims to innovate commercial kitchens to create a digital platform.
Beyond Honeycomb will be exhibiting at booth CP-29 at CES 2022, and it’s one we have on our list to check out while in Vegas.
Cecilia
Suppose you can imagine Siri fused with a weird Polar Express-like animated character. Then imagine this character served you drinks. In that case, you might have some idea of what the Celicia.ai bartender experience is like. If you want to check out this voice-assistant powered animated robot bartender for yourself, you can do so at booth 61708.
Yo-Kai
Readers of The Spoon may remember that Yo-Kai gave a sneak peak at the Takumi home ramen machine at last year’s Food Tech Live. At this year’s CES, the company will be primarily focusing on its fast-growing autonomous ramen robot for public and retail spaces, the Octo-chef. You can visit Yo-Kai in the food tech exhibition space at booth 53578.
Carbon Origins
As I wrote late last week, not only is Carbon Origins building a refrigerated sidewalk delivery robot by the name of Skippy, the company is also assembling a roster of remote robot pilots who will utilize virtual reality technology to pilot Skippy around to businesses and consumer homes. If you’re at CES, you can visit Carbon Origins and even possibly get adorned in VR gear and drive a Skippy at booth 15883.
Picnic
Picnic made its CES debut in 2020 when it teamed up with convention center catering company Centerplate and made thousands of pizzas to feed hungry trade show attendees. The Seattle-based pizza robot startup returns this year and will be making pies once again at LVCC West Hall #5043. If you want to hear what Picnic CEO Clayton Wood has to say about their robot and the food robotics landscape, you can see him speak at the Food Tech Conference at CES on a panel entitled Welcome to our Food Robotics Future led by yours truly on Thursday, January 6th.
Bear Robotics
After a big 2021 which saw the maker of front-of-house food robots showing up at Chili’s, Denny’s and lots of other places, Bear Robotics is kicking off 2022 by showcasing its Servi robot at CES. You can find Bear at booth 53755 and also hear the company COO, Juan Higueros, on the panel Welcome to Our Food Robot Future on Thursday.
Yummy Future
Yummy Future, which was co-founded by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, makes a robotic coffee kiosk that serves up both hot and cold coffee beverages and can make a cup of joe in about 30 seconds. If you want to check out Yummy Future, they will be at booth 63149 in Eureka Park in the Venetian Expo Center.
Ottonomy
Readers of The Spoon are familiar with Ottonomy, maker of autonomous delivery robots that can navigate through both outdoors and indoor environments. You can check out Ottonomy’s robot at booth 9648.
If we’ve missed any food robots, drop us a line and we’ll put them on the list.
CES 2022 Preview: Carbon Origins Wants to Merge Robot Delivery With the Metaverse
If you’re looking to get a fresh start on a new career in 2022, may I suggest a new occupation as a virtual reality robot delivery driver?
Yes, that’s a job – or at least a new gig – being offered by a startup out of Minneapolis called Carbon Origins. The company, which is building a refrigerated sidewalk delivery robot by the name of Skippy, is looking to assemble a roster of remote robot pilots who will utilize virtual reality technology to pilot Skippy around to businesses and consumer homes.
The company, which launched in early 2021 and participated in Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator this year, will be showcasing the new technology at CES 2022 in January. This past summer, the company started testing an early version of the VR-piloted robot in the above-street skyway system around St Paul, Minnesota and plans to begin testing deliveries to offices and homes in the Minneapolis market starting in January.
You can watch a video of the company’s CEO, Amogha Srirangarajan, piloting a prototype of the Skippy robot using a virtual reality headset below. According to Srirangarajan, the robot uses machine vision to navigate the world using a neural network.
“What you’re seeing now is Skippy’s neural network, detecting and classifying objects, analyzing the sidewalk, and segmenting safe zones for navigation,” explains Srirangarajan in the demo video.
The Skippy operators – which for some reason the company calls “Skipsters” – use virtual reality headsets to supervise and correct the robot as it navigates through the world.
“Remote human operators, who we lovingly call ‘Skipsters,’ use fully immersive virtual reality headsets to monitor and train Skippy’s neural network in real-time,” said Srirangarajan. “Like an augmented reality PacMan game, Skipsters monitor and correct Skippy’s trajectory, giving Skippy the ability to navigate the human world unlike any other robot on the planet.”
The company emailed me and asked if I wanted to try out piloting a Skippy while in CES next week, and, of course, I said yes. If you also want to become an, um, Skipster too, you can visit the company’s booth or fill out an application to become a driver here.
Grocery Robot Specialist Simbe Robotics Patents System to Detect Produce Freshness
Whether it’s to carry groceries around the store or to deliver them to our front door, it won’t be too much longer before everyday shoppers see robots both in and around the grocery store.
But one potential interesting new use-case for in-store robotics we haven’t heard much about is for detection of produce freshness. That may change soon, as Simbe Robotics, the maker of the Tally 3.0 robot, has just been issued a patent for spectral imaging of produce and meats and detect how fresh they are.
The US patent, which is number 11,200,537 and titled “Method for tracking and characterizing perishable goods in a store,” uses computer vision to record images across a period of time and derive a set of characteristics specific to the type of food. For produce, it can assign a percentage of ripeness, determine whether it is under, over, or at peak ripeness, and determine if there is other biological matter such as a contaminant on the food. It can also determine whether a fruit or vegetable is rotten, damaged, or bruised.
The computer system can access and implement hyper-spectral template histograms or template spectral profiles for “underripe by three days,” “underripe by two days,” “underripe by one day,” “ripe,” “overripe by one day,” “overripe by two days,” “spoiled or rotten”, and “moldy” for specific varietals of fruits and vegetables or for fruits and/or vegetables generally. Similarly, the computer system can access and implement hyper-spectral template histograms or template spectral profiles for “fresh,” “rancid,” “low-fat,” “moderate-fat,” “high-fat,” “low-water content,” “moderate-water content,” and “high-water content” for specific varietals of meats or for meats generally.
For those unfamiliar with the Tally 3.0 robot, the company first unveiled its latest in-store mobile grocery robot in October of 2020. The robot, which wanders grocery store aisles to monitor product levels and detects misplaced items, utilizes computer vision and AI algorithms to capture and provide data to store managers more quickly without needing to send as much information to Simbe’s cloud platform.
This type of mobile inventory checking technology is valuable enough, so much so that grocers like Schnucks have already started deploying the robot across the entire chain of stores. Others, like Hy-vee, are in trials with the Tally 3.0 and likely will expand their fleets over time.
As Simbe’s robots add the capability to help grocers fight food waste – one of the most significant cost drivers for the notoriously thin profit margins in the grocery business – chances are we’ll see more grocers adopt in-store inventory robots en masse.
Food & Retail Drone Delivery Specialist Flytrex Gets FAA Approval For One Mile Deliveries
Flytrex, a startup specializing in on-demand delivery of food and retail items, announced this morning it had received approval from the FAA to expand its delivery radius to one nautical mile across all its operating stations in North Carolina.
According to a release sent to The Spoon, the company, which received approval in May of this year to operate over people, has completed “thousands” of deliveries to customers. With over 10 thousand potential customers within the company’s new expanded delivery radius, expect that pace to pick up further.
Customers interested in a drone-delivered meal can order via the Flytrex app with participating stores and restaurants. The app sends updates to the customer while the package is en route and, once the drone arrives, the package is lowered by wire into the customer’s backyards. Flytrex drones, operated in partnership with drone delivery operator Causey Aviation Unmanned, have a payload of over 6 pounds.
The news comes on the heels of a $40 million Series C funding round announced last month. The funding, which the company is using to develop its hardware further and expand its business development practices, should solidify the company as an early leader in the drone delivery market. The company, which launched its first drone delivery system in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2017, has established partnerships with the likes of Walmart and Chili’s. Flytrex is one of eight companies participating in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) BEYOND Initiative, a program focused on finding solutions for challenges of unmanned air service integration.
Flytrex does have some competition, including the high-profile efforts of Amazon through its Prime Air group. However, nearly nine years after Jeff Bezos first wowed the world when he teased the idea of Amazon drone delivery, the mega e-tailer’s efforts have shown outward signs of potential struggle as of late. On the other hand, Manna, another backyard drone delivery specialist, continues to plug away in Europe, reaching a delivery milestone of 50 to 100 deliveries per day in the spring of 2021.
“Drone delivery is reaching new heights faster than anyone could have expected,” Yariv Bash, co-founder, and CEO of Flytrex, said. “This approval from the FAA will allow us to cater to the growing demand for fast and efficient on-demand delivery in suburban America. We look forward to continuing on this exciting flight path, bringing five-minute delivery to the millions of backyards across the USA.”
A Cookie Robot is Pumping Out That New Cookie Smell in Huntsville, Alabama
If there’s one of our five senses that’s continuously underutilized when getting people to open their wallets, it’s the sense of smell. Anyone who’s been lured into a Subway sandwich shop by that bread(ish) odor wafting in the air knows what I’m talking about.
So naturally, when the company behind a new Smart Cookie cookie-making robot reached out to tell me about their new machine and its deployment at Dipwich sandwich shop in Huntsville, Alabama, my first thought was how great it must smell.
The cookie scent wafting machine robot itself is pretty simple. First, a robotic arm puts a paper-plated par-baked cookie into an oven. Once the cookie is rethermalized to 350 degrees – which takes about two minutes – the robot puts toppings on top of the cookie and then places it in a small cubby for the customer to retrieve it. The robot has two ovens within the kiosk, and working at full-speed can pump out about 60 cookies per hour.
You can watch it in action via the company provided video below:
The customer orders their cookie through an app or an iPad touch screen as an order interface. They have a choice between drizzled chocolate or caramel, and on top of that, they can choose from six different dry toppings. The customer can also choose between three different types of cookies: chocolate royale, the sugar cookie and a lemon cooler. The total combinations of cookie, drizzle, and toppings are 160 variations.
Chicago-based RoboChef is led by Aravind Durai, a long-time robotics executive. Durai, who was founder of Home Delivery Service, a maker of robotic fulfillment solutions for food delivery, and also headed up the America’s group for Mitsubishi robotics, started RoboChef in early 2021.
The company also counts restaurant industry veteran Bill Post as one of its advisors. Post was the founder of Roti Mediterranean Grill and was the long-time COO of Levy Restaurants, a division of Compass. Through his current company, WJP Restaurant Group, Post owns the Dipwich Sandwiches location in Huntsville, where the Smart Cookie robot trial is taking place.
I sat down with Durai to ask a few questions about his company and its new food robot.
You got this robot out to market pretty quickly, which is pretty different from a lot of robot companies. Why and how’d you do it?
“There were two things we needed to be validated right away. One is whether a restaurant will be able to run a fully autonomous system with its own staff. Even if it’s like a small portion of what they are offering, it should not require highly trained roboticists and software engineers to run this machine. So that is fundamental to how to be able to democratize robotics and automation in the food-service arena.
The second thing is we wanted to get validation that consumers will be delighted by two things. One is the ability to personalize their food order. The second is whether the food can be autonomously made by a robot and served to customers in a completely contactless touchless manner. And we wanted to get validation of that right away. Is it possible for us to do that in a lab environment? So we said, ‘let’s just put it out there, make customers pay for it, and see what they say.’
So to answer your question as to the how, we have a team of highly motivated and seasoned engineers with deep expertise in robotics and software tech who can execute rapidly.”
Who manages the cookie robot once it’s in the store?
“We wanted to have an ambassador from the restaurant. But, unfortunately, it is very hard to find people in the foodservice industry and also the restaurant really could not spare anybody from their own staff. So we lowered the qualifications of somebody to be an ambassador. Pretty much the only qualification was that they should like cookies. And we found an amazing ambassador, and she pretty much got trained on it in a couple of hours.”
Do you monitor the robot remotely?
“We have continuous monitoring of every single thing that’s going on. It’s all recorded in our data center for us to be able to keep an eye on things. Our engineers basically can monitor and understand this is how many toppings and how many cookies are consumed at the end of the day. We know how long the customer was on the app. We believe that data itself is going to be so valuable not just to improve our machine, improve our robots, improve our process and whatnot, but also the operators. It is going to give them a deep insight into the behavior in a retail environment of their customers, but it’s also going to give them deep insights into their own operations as well.”
Tell me more about the company.
“We are fairly early stage. We have full-time engineers and technologists working on it, and a few people who are working with us part-time on developing the software and the app and things like that. But we early on recognized that we need to have a complementary skill set within our company with food service, restaurant, and retail industry expertise. So we brought on a few key people in the organization to help us out daily. One of them is a gentleman named Bill Post.”
Have you raised funding yet?
“No, we have not raised institutional funding yet. We plan to do that early next year sometime. But we are in the process of getting some attention of potential customers who want to work with us on doing some pilots.”
What’s the plan for your rollout over the next few years?
“We are hoping to be able to have some pilots I’m talking about with well known national brands. We hope to have some pilots underway early next year. And once that happens, we believe next, whatever the rate within these individual businesses will allow, that’s what we’re doing. In theory, we could be around 100 units with multiple partners in another two to two and a half years.”
If you are near Huntsville, Alabama, you can head on down to Dipwich and both smell and taste the cookies from the Smart Cookie robot through early January. If you do, take pictures and send them our way.
