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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

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:

Watch The Cookie Robot by RoboChef

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.

SJW Robotics Demoes RoWok, a Fully Robotic Wok Restaurant Kiosk

This week, SJW Robotics, a maker of robotic kitchen technology, publicly demoed its robotic kitchen prototype for the first time.

When we first covered SJW earlier this year, the company was still keeping the cooking robot under wraps since patents had yet to be filed. With all their patent applications in the mail, I caught up with company CEO Nipun Sharma on a zoom call to get a virtual walkthrough of the Toronto-based company’s first product, a robotic wok-centered kitchen and consumer-facing kiosk called RoWok.

Sharma started by punching in his order on a large touch screen on the front of the large kiosk. Once entered, the robot got to work by dropping pre-cut ingredients such as chicken cubes, green onions and julienne carrots from segmented storage siloes in customized proportions onto a perforated steel tray. The tray shuttled through a steam tunnel via a conveyor belt (“like a car in a carwash.”). Once warmed, the food was dropped into an oiled wok for cooking. After it was cooked, the food was put into a bowl, sauces added, and then the meal was prepped for serving. Currently the robot has a station for humans to put the bowled food on a counter, but Sharma says the plan is integrate cubbies where the prepared meals can be placed for pickup by the customer.

According to Sharma, it takes about 80-90 seconds for each meal to be prepared and cooked. The current prototype has two woks in it, but the plan is to eventually have six woks and reach a throughput of about 60 meals per hour.

The system can hold enough ingredients in the siloes for up to 320 meals total before they need to be refilled. And because the system is entirely autonomous and can operate without a human, it closely monitors the ingredient inventory levels and can even create special promotions if, say, chicken or another ingredient is set to expire within the next 24 hours.

When I asked Sharma how he came up with the idea for a fully autonomous wok-centered kitchen, he told me the idea came to him after he had trouble finding a skilled wok cook for on a restaurant concept he was developing for Canadian grocery chain Loblaws.

“A wok is a specialized skill, and it’s hard to find people to do it,” Sharma said. “So everything I’ve done, this was my bottleneck. I’m like, I wish there was a way to automate the wok system.”

But there wasn’t, so he decided to build one. And the first thing he did was to start to put together a team of experts and they would build one. His first addition was adding a CTO in Brian Walker, who had been a long-time executive at automotive supplies conglomerate Magna International.

Sharma said they are currently in talks with one of the world’s largest airport food service concessionaires and he hopes to have a RoWok in an airport sometime in 2022. He said now that the company has demoed the RoWok, the company will begin the process or raising its Series A and begin engaging with a manufacturer that Sharma says “will mostly likely be in Atlanta.”

RoWok is the latest in a long-line of fully automated robotic kitchens that are in development. Last month we heard about Nommi, and we’ve also been watching as Hyper Robotics, RoboEatz, Mezli, Now Cuisine, Cala and others slowly but surely bring their robotic kitchen concepts to market. With all this activity, it’s looking like 2022 could be the year of the automated robotic kiosk.

Sidewalk Robot Specialist Serve Raises $13 Million From Uber, 7-Eleven & Wavemaker Labs

Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot spinout of Postmates (which itself was acquired by Uber), has announced a $13 million expanded seed round of funding. The new funding round includes several strategic investors, including former parent Uber Technologies, Delivery Hero backed DX Ventures,7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs.

According to the release, Serve plans to use the new funding to accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. The company, which has been trialing its delivery bot in the West Hollywood neighborhood, recently started to expand its executive ranks as it prepares to scale.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Serve CEO Ali Kashani told The Spoon in November. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

For each of Serve’s new strategic investors, an alliance with the sidewalk robot company potentially adds another arrow to their automation quiver. For its part, 7-Eleven has been trialing autonomous automobile delivery with its partner Nuro in the California market, but has yet to partner up with a sidewalk robot partner. It will be interesting to watch if the company begins to trial with Serve in the California market in the coming months as it expands its efforts in autonomous delivery.

European delivery giant Delivery Hero had some early trials with sidewalk delivery startup Starship, but has since been relatively quiet on the sidewalk delivery front. However, the company’s head of special projects for its middle eastern delivery group, talabat, recently hinted that delivery robots and drones could become commonplace in the near future.

“I do see delivery robots being implemented quite soon, in specific scenarios,” said Maria Estevan, Head Of Special Projects at talabat, in a recent article on Delivery Hero’s website. “We can already see it at foodora, it’s already there. We just need to make it bigger, scalable, and adapted to the conditions of each country, its requirements, regulations, and culture. But to me, they are actually already here.”

For Wavemaker Labs, the company has largely been investing and incubating a lineup of different food robots ranging from its back-of-house frybot in Flippy from Miso, an autonomous pizza-making machine in Piestro, and its robotic kitchen robot in Nommi. With Serve, the food robotics-focused venture studio adds a food delivery robot to its portfolio of investments for the first time.

7-Eleven & Nuro Launch California’s First Autonomous Delivery Service

7-Eleven announced today they are launching an autonomous delivery pilot program in Mountain View, California, in partnership with autonomous delivery tech startup Nuro.

While the Golden State has been a hotbed of activity for autonomous delivery for sidewalk bots, California has trailed Texas in the rollout of autonomous on-street deliveries. All that changes today with the launch of the Nuro pilot, which will be the first commercial autonomous delivery service in the state of California. The path for the program was paved late last year when Nuro received the first-ever Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit from the California DMV.

As with other Nuro rollouts, the 7-Eleven deployment will eventually use both the company’s proprietary R2 robot and Toyota Prius’s equipped with Nuro’s self-driving hardware and software. However, according to the announcement, the pilot will begin with outfitted Priuses that include a human driver in the driver’s seat. These “autonomous vehicle operators” will monitor the technology and ensure an optimal delivery experience, but will not bring the delivery to the door of the customer so as to make the service feel as ‘human-free’ as possible. Eventually, the two companies plan to introduce the Nuro R2 bots (without human drivers) into the pilot.

Customers in the Mountain View area who want to try out the service can start by placing an order with the 7-Eleven 7NOW app. After choosing autonomous delivery, customers should see a Nuro-powered Prius pulling up with their Slurpee and cheese dog order within 30 minutes. The service will be available to those nearby the 7-Eleven at 1905 Latham Street in Mountain View. Deliveries will be available from 8AM–9PM, seven days a week.

You can watch a video of how the 7-Eleven/Nuro pilot service below:

7 Eleven and Nuro Pilot Autonomous Delivery in California

The Media Was Fascinated with a TikTok Video of a Robot at Denny’s. Here’s What it Means.

Maybe it was a slow news week. Perhaps it was the sight of pancakes hitching a ride on a robot at America’s late-night diner. Whatever the reason, it seemed like every news organization wrote the same story about a TikTok video of server-robot showing up to dish out breakfast at a Denny’s.

They all had a variant of the same headline: “Viral Video of Robot at Denny’s Sparks Debate.” From there, the authors sifted through comments made by TikTok viewers, some cheering the idea of faster service and lower tips, others angry about a robot stealing a job.

While the sudden interest in a social media post about a server robot may say as much about the modern media landscape as it does about the use of robotics at restaurants, the reality is Denny’s deploying robots is kind of a big deal. After all, as America’s most famous 24-hour diner, Denny’s holds a special place in our collective consciousness, a place where almost anyone can get a cheap meal as well as apply for – and often get – a job.

And it’s these two things that Denny’s represents – a place with affordable food and an employer of everyday Americans – that seemed to be in tension with one another when looking at both the comments on the video on TikTok as well as the framing by the media.

Media coverage of robotics in food service has been evolving over the past year, with news organizations going from gee-whiz articles about a cool new novelty to increasingly viewing the use of robotics as a direct result of hiring difficulties due to the pandemic. Of course, this new framing isn’t altogether wrong, as hiring has been difficult. Still, the reality is a bit more nuanced and has as much to do with fast-changing restaurant industry business models and changing consumer eating patterns as it does with hiring difficulties.

No matter the reason, the wider arrival of robotics at Denny’s and restaurant chains is raising the profile of these solutions and looks to be sparking a broader conversation about the impact of automation on the experience and the livelihoods of those in the service industry. This increased spotlight will also likely mean a more jaded framing of food robotics by the media, much like we’ve seen when it comes to their coverage of social media and privacy. While this isn’t necessarily a wrong reaction – it’s the media’s job to be skeptical – a pendulum swing is something the industry should be prepared for.

For the average consumer, the use of robots remains a curiosity. There hasn’t been – at least not yet – a rise of an organized Luddite anti-automation reaction to food robotics. However, the passion in some of the comments on TikTok could be the canary in the coalmine signaling one may be on the way.

As for companies like Bear Robotics – the provider of Denny’s server robot – business just continues to grow. I checked in with Bear Robotics COO Juan Higueros on how the Denny’s rollout is going.

“They have moved fairly quickly,” he said.

According to Higueros, it’s the operators on the front lines who are looking for answers. “What’s interesting is that this is a bottom-up movement by franchise owners that are really pulling for our solution.”

You can watch the TikTok video that sparked the conversation last week below.

Watch Nala Robotics’ Robot Chef in Action

A restaurant that can serve millions of different dishes, is open 24/7, and doesn’t close on holidays sounds like a dream, right? After three years in the making, Nala Robotics has made this dream a reality with its fully automated robot kitchen that opened on November 11th in Naperville, Illinois.

The first automated restaurant/kitchen by Nala Robotics is called One Mean Chicken, and it serves wings and fried chicken. It is manned by multiple robots powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, which do not need human intervention to function. Without the need for humans, Nala’s restaurant can operate throughout the day and night, on holidays, and without social distancing considerations.

Watch this video to see the robots preparing food:

Recipes can be uploaded by the user to the recipes catalog, and the robots can learn to make any dish within just a few minutes. This easily gives restaurant concepts the opportunity to offer multiple cuisines under one roof.

Nala’s use of articulating robotic arms to do everything from prep, cook, and more while handling a variety of cookware and utensils is reminiscent of Moley’s chef robot, which the UK-based company announced general availability for last year. Unlike Moley, Nala is exclusively targeted for commercial foodservice applications, whereas Moley is targeted both towards high-end residential installations in addition to commercial applications.

According to Ajay Sunkara, the founder and CEO of Nala Robotics, “Being AI-powered, the robotic chef gets better and better every single day. The more it cooks, the more it’s going to learn and master these recipes.”

Restaurants around the country have been facing major labor shortages in 2021 due to the aftermath of the pandemic, and over 25 percent have reported that they are struggling to hire line cooks. Automated kitchens like Nala, and others such as Mezli, Spyce, and Cala may prove to be a viable solution to these ongoing shortages.

Nala Robotics will soon open two more restaurant concepts in the same location as One Mean Chicken (in Naperville’s Mall of India). The next to be launched will be Nala’s Thai 76 (Thai food) and then Surya Tiffins (South Indian food). In 2022, Nala plans to open 10 restaurant locations, and then 100 locations by 2024.

Carrefour Teams With AiFi to Launch Cashierless Convenience Store in Paris

French retail giant Carrefour announced today the company has teamed up with AiFi, a maker of machine-vision powered checkout tech, to launch a cashierless convenience store called Carrefour Flash.

Unlike Amazon Go or other cashierless platforms that require an app, smart shopping basket, or biometric check-in, AiFi’s technology utilizes a network of cameras on the retailer’s ceiling that monitors a shopper as they move through the store and pick items up off the shelves for purchase. The computer vision’s AI creates a keypoint tracking system that creates a unique digital avatar for each customer. The system identifies each avatar by measuring the unique distance between the customer’s elbow and their hand. Because the system doesn’t require a unique biometric identifier such as a palm, facial or retinal scan, it ensures customer privacy despite using biometric tracking.

As the customer picks up items around the store, the AiFi system creates a virtual shopping cart. The system utilizes a network of 60 HD cameras and over 2000 sensors built into store shelves to track a shopper’s activity and assign it to their avatar. Once done, the customer walks up to a payment terminal to see their shopping basket and total bill within a few seconds.

This move by Carrefour is just the latest example of a retailer embracing tech that frees shoppers of checking out via a cashier. The wave of cashierless shopping formats, which kicked off in earnest with Amazon’s launch of their Amazon Go store in Seattle in early 2018, has only picked up steam over the past year and a half. One reason for the surging interest is the growing expectation from customers for low-contact ways to shop during the pandemic. The other primary driver is persistent labor shortages as food retailers deal with the high turnover of frontline workers; cashierless store concepts give them a way to operate without hiring and training new cashiers.

The Carrefour innovation team incubated and fine-tuned the new concept over the past year at the company’s headquarters in Massy, France. At launch, the new Paris store will have a total of 900 items for sale.

You can get a sneak peek of Carrefour Flash in the video below:

AiFi x Carrefour: Shopping in a flash with Carrefour Flash 10/10

With Food Scan, Snapchat is the Latest Company Trying to Create a ‘Shazam for Food’

Last week, Snapchat became the latest company to add an AI-powered food scanning and recognition feature to their product. Called Food Scan, the new feature enables Snapchat users to scan food items and get recipe suggestions and other information about the food.

Here’s how it works:

Snapchat users can scan food by opening up the AR bar within Snapchat from the main camera menu option. From there, they choose to scan and click a picture of the food item. Snapchat’s AI will process the image and suggest a recipe from partner Allrecipes, as well as serve up other information, such as a Wikipedia page, about with the item.

According to Snapchat, the feature has access to over 4 thousand recipes and can process up to 1500 ingredients. However, based on my own attempts, the product may need to add a few more items to the list to be helpful.

When I scanned Campbell’s Cream of Celery Soup, it offered up recipes for Campbell’s bacon soup. A scan of Adam’s peanut butter resulted in recipes for tahini. The closest match came from a scan of a navel orange, which resulted in a Wikipedia page for a mandarin orange and recipe recommendations for mandarin orange cake and mandarin orange salad.

Here at The Spoon, we’ve written a lot over the years about attempts by companies to create a ‘Shazam for food.’ Big tech companies such as Microsoft, Pinterest, and Google have been at work at this for some time, as have appliance brands like Samsung and Whirlpool. Part of the reason so many have dedicated resources to building augmented reality and AI products for food recognition is, quite simply, because food is one of the easiest product categories to recognize and create databases around. But it’s also because food recognition unlocks numerous commerce, health and nutrition tracking, and kitchen management scenarios if done right.

Snapchat’s new Food Scan feature, while pretty rudimentary at this point, clearly has designs on building potential revenue through shoppable recipes and product recommendations. However, I can also see it becoming a broader food-related augmented reality recommendation tool that suggests, similar to Alexa’s new What to Eat skill, restaurants, meal kits, and other potential monetizable recommendations.

Walmart’s Had a Big Month When it Comes to Autonomous Robot Delivery

It’s bragging time in Bentonville.

That’s because America’s biggest grocery retailer recently achieved two big milestones in autonomous delivery.

The first milestone is on the autonomous middle-mile front where Walmart and partner Gatik announced they had initiated daily driverless-truck delivery in Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart had started working with the maker of middle-mile autonomous box trucks in 2019 and by last December, the two received approval from the Arkansas State Highway Commission to remove drivers from the vehicles. In August, the two started trialing autonomous delivery runs between Walmart dark stores and local markets. And last week, the companies announced they are doing multiple driver-less truck runs per day, seven days a week.

The Gatik Autonomous Delivery Vehicle Delivering Products for Walmart

The other big autonomous delivery news for Walmart is the launch of the company’s drone delivery service.

This week the retailer’s drone partner Zipline announced the two had launched a drone delivery service in the northwestern Arkansas of Pea Ridge. Zipline’s technology utilizes a 25-foot take-off and landing platform which is located directly behind the Walmart Neighborhood Market location in Pea Ridge. There, a Walmart employee hands a package to a Zipline employee, who will then load the package into the belly of the drone for delivery. Once the drone reaches the delivery destination, the package is dropped over its target, where it will float down to earth thanks to an attached biodegradable parachute. The service area is within a 50-mile radius of the store.

The launch of drone delivery has been a long time in the making for Walmart. The company first started testing drones way back in 2015 and, ever since that time, has been running pilots and inking partnerships. In the meantime, Walmart’s competitors have been investigating drone delivery, which is perhaps why the giant retailer has picked up the pace over the past year.

Zipline Partners With Walmart on Commercial Drone Delivery

So Walmart appears to be making headway in drones and autonomous middle mile delivery, but what about road or sidewalk delivery to consumers? The last time we heard of Walmart making any moves in that space was when the company trialed with Nuro and Udelv in 2019, but they’ve been relatively quiet on that front. And as for sidewalk bots, the company hasn’t really shown any interest publicly, but that’s not to say they aren’t talking to folks.

Serve Robotics Adds Former GoPro Exec To Lead Development of Autonomous Sidewalk Robots

Serve Robotics has hired Euan Abraham to head up the development of the company’s autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, the company has told The Spoon. Abraham, who in the past led the development of GoPro’s Karma drone and has also had stints leading engineering teams at Apple and smart lock company Otto, will become the company’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering effective January 2022.

The new hire is a sign the company is entering a new phase, according to Serve’s CEO, Ali Kashani, who sat down with The Spoon this week to talk about the hiring of Abraham.

A big focus for Abraham will be to take a company that has primarily been focused early on developing a robot and optimizing its capabilities through its initial trials in West Hollywood to one that can deploy large fleets at scale across multiple markets.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Kashani told The Spoon. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

It’s not just about scaling but getting better, according to Kashani. “It’s easy to get distracted with scale where you lose your innovative edge. We want to continue to iterate on our hardware, and we don’t want to stop here. We want to keep making it better.”

The areas where Kashani thinks Serve can get better are areas where he believes the company already stands out from its peer group, the first of which is autonomy. He says Serve’s robots do most of the driving themselves, which has enabled Serve’s human teleoperators to manage more than one robot at a time.

This high level of autonomy wouldn’t be possible without the Serve’s built-in safety systems, another area where Kashani believes his robots stand out.

“Our robots have a lot of onboard safety mechanisms so that they can be independent. They can be there by themselves.,” Kashani said. “At the same time, they also have people backing them up. So we have the best of both worlds.”

Serve’s other major differentiator isn’t a technical one, but it may be the company’s biggest ace in the hole: its relationship with Uber. Earlier this year, Uber spun out the robot group which it had acquired as part of the Postmates acquisition, and this month, Serve announced that Uber would be the company’s first commercial partner. The two companies plan to roll out a fleet of robots to deliver food to Uber Eats customers across the LA market in 2022.

While Abraham’s hiring is undoubtedly a significant strategic move for the company, Kashani says they aren’t done. With Uber’s rollout of autonomous delivery and Serve eyeing new markets like the Bay area, Kashani says Serve has several areas the company is looking for more talent, including autonomous driving, operations, supply chain, and HR.

“We are always looking for kind of more folks to join,” Kashani said. “It’s a never-ending kind of story.

Starbucks and Amazon Combine Forces to Create a Cashierless Coffee Shop

Wonder Twin powers, activate: Form of a cashierless coffee shop.

That’s right, today two Seattle-based giants, Starbucks and Amazon, announced they’ve combined their formidable superpowers to create a cashierless coffee shop. The new shop, called Starbucks Pickup with Amazon Go, debuts today in New York City.

The new Pickup store uses Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, a system that features a variety of cutting-edge tech like computer vision and IoT sensors, as well as Amazon’s bio-authentication hand-scanning technology, Amazon One.

Here’s how it works: Customers order through the Starbucks app and can check order status on a digital screen. When it’s ready, coffee is picked up directly from the barista. The Pickup store also includes a mini-Go store stocked with snack and lunch items, as well as a lounge area. Access to both the store and the lounge is enabled through a one-time code from the Amazon Go app, a credit card swipe, or checking in via Amazon One’s hand-ID system. Once authenticated, customers can drop items from the store into their cart and will be charged once they leave.

The lounge is slightly different from the usual Starbucks store format in that it features individual work cubbies alongside the standard tables and chairs. Each cubby is equipped with USB ports and power outlets.

According to a company spokesperson, the two companies plan to open two additional Pickups over the next year, with the second one slated to open in the New York Times building. Beyond that, the company isn’t saying, but given Starbucks’ focus on upgrading their formats to enable quicker service and less overall contact post-pandemic, my guess is that if the initial stores work well, the Pickup format will become a go-to for Starbucks moving forward.

You can see the store in the B-roll provided by Starbucks below:

Starbucks Pickup Store, Featuring Amazon Just Walk Out Technology

Let’s Order a Pizza(bot)! Picnic Reveals Pricing, Opens Ordering For Pizza Robot

So you want to deploy a pizza robot? Seattle-based Picnic has you covered (as long as you can cover their monthly fees, that is).

And now we know what that pricing looks like because the pizza robot startup just opened up reservations for their pizza bot on their website.

Starting this week, operators who want to reserve a Picnic pizza robot can choose from two off-the-shelf configurations: “The Essential” or “The Works.” The Essential configuration is your basic pizza workhorse, a robot that can build up to 100 pies per hour with cheese, sauce, and fresh-sliced pepperoni. The Works configuration has additional toppings capability, allowing operators to add sausage, mushrooms, and onions – or whatever toppings they like – up to three total. An additional toppings module is available for The Works for an additional charge.

Both Picnic models can be configured to work with varying dough thickness (up to 2 inches max) and pizza sizes of 12″, 14″, and 16″. The operator can also customize the system to add ingredients in whatever order they prefer, and both models can be configured to have the conveyor system work left to right or right to left.

Those familiar with the Picnic robot know that the system is designed today for solely adding stuff on top of the pizza. Company CEO Clayton Wood has previously told The Spoon that while Picnic robots will someday have the capability to create the dough pies and cook the pizza, the initial focus is on the most “work-intensive” part of pizza-making: adding sauce, cheese, and toppings.

Like many food robotics startups, Picnic uses a robotics-as-a-service pricing model. Baseline pricing for the Essential configuration is $3500 a month for a three-year term, while the Works is $4500 a month for three years. Both models can be reserved with a $250 deposit.

If all that sounds good and you are looking to deploy a Picnic in your restaurant, you’d better hurry. According to Picnic, the systems are sold out for Q1 of next year, and there is extremely limited inventory left for Q2. However, things start to look better in the second half of next year, and both models are widely available for Q4.