Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Schnuck Markets to Deploy Simbe Shelf Scanning Robot to All of its Locations

Schnuck Markets announced today that it will be deploying Simbe Robotics‘ Tally shelf-scanning robot to all of its 111 locations across the U.S. This builds on the existing agreement between the two companies, which currently has Tally bots in 70 percent of Schnucks stores.

Simbe’s Tally robot is an autonomous shelf-scanning robot used to monitor a stores inventory. The robot traverses up and down aisles, using computer vision and AI to scan shelves and detect when a product is running low or has been misplaced. Tally can also monitor other issues such as pricing to ensure that sales and promotions are being executed properly.

Validating in-store inventory is more important than ever as people continue to shop for groceries online. Stores need to be more aware of what is in stock to accommodate both in-store shoppers, and customers selecting items online (where they can’t physically see store shelves or ask staff if there is more in the backroom). By automating inventory checks, Simbe says that retailers can get more accurate data and act faster to prevent out-of-stocks. In the press announcement today, Simbe said that Tally enables a 20 – 30 percent reduction in out-of-stock items.

Worth noting is that Schnuck Markets is expanding its use of shelf-scanning robots almost a year after Walmart gave up on them. Last November Walmart made headlines when it announced it was no longer using Bossa Nova’s robots to manage inventory. It was reported at the time that Walmart had found what it considered easier ways of managing inventory than using the robots.

Other retailers, however have put in-store robots to use. Giant Eagle was trialing Simbe’s Tally as well, and Woodman’s Markets was testing Badger Technologies’ robot at its stores across the Midwest.

Small Robot Company Crowdfunds £4M for its Ag Robots

British agriculture robot company, Small Robot Company, announced today that it has raised £4 million (~$5.5M USD) through its equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube. This brings the total amount for funding raised by Small Robot to £11 million (~$15.12M USD).

Small Robot Company uses a combination of robotics and artificial intelligence to help farmers manage their fields. Small Robot makes a trio of robots dubbed, Tom, Dick and Harry that map fields, zap weeds, and do no-till drilling, respectively. The whole system is tied together with the Wima AI that uses computer vision to identify weeds and gather per-plant intelligence.

This is Small Robot’s fourth trip to the crowdfunding well, and this particular campaign got off to strong start in July when the company raised £2M (~$2.75M USD) on its first day. Small Robot isn’t the only ag robotics company going the equity crowdfunding route. Future Acres, which makes an autonomous driving platform for a number of farm is crowdfunding as well.

Agriculture is an area that is ripe for automation as the industry faces ongoing labor shortages and extremely harsh working conditions. Robots can work in the fields in extreme heat all day without injury or sickness, and can bring precision to tasks such as weeding to reduce the need for harsh herb and pesticides.

One indicator of the opportunity in agriculture automation is the fact that Bear Flag Robotics, which makes autonomous driving technology for tractors, was acquired by John Deere earlier this month for $250 million.

If you’d like to learn more about the state or agriculture and robotics, watch the video from the “Crops and Robots: How Automation is Changing Agriculture” panel we held at our ArticulATE food robotics conference in May that featured Aubrey Donnellan, Founder and COO of Bear Flag Robotics (Spoon Plus subscription required).

Coco Raises $36M Series A for Teleoperated Robot Delivery

Coco, a teleoperated robot delivery service, announced today that it has raised a Series A round of funding led by Sam Altman, Silicon Valley Bank and Founder’s Fund.

Launched a year ago, Coco makes a four-wheeled, cooler-sized robot that delivers food and beverages. Coco prepositions its robot at merchant locations in dense city environments, and advertises that it completes deliveries in 30 minutes or less.

Unlike other delivery robots like those from Starship and Yandex, Coco’s robots are not self-driving and are instead piloted remotely. As with Tortoise, another teleoperated delivery robot, by foregoing autonomy, Coco can get to market faster because it doesn’t have to deal with the same state and city regulations around self-driving vehicles.

According to the company’s Careers page, those driving the robots are called “Coconauts,” and Coco is currently hiring remote drivers for Hawaii, Nevada, and Texas. Responsibilities include “Remotely drive a robot: carefully and responsibly” and “Follow a map to and from your destinations.” Under Qualifications, Coco asks that you have a “Reliable, high-speed internet connection,” and “Experience playing racing video games” (hopefully not just Mario Kart).

Coco is raising money at the right time as the food and restaurant world is accelerating its interest in robots and automation. Sweetgreen just acquired the robot restaurant Spyce, and 800 Degrees Pizza will launch 3,600 Piestro-powered robot pizza making vending machines over the next five years.

Robot delivery itself is poised to take off. As Ali Kashani, Co-Founder and CEO of robot delivery company Serve likes to say — you don’t need a two-ton car on the road to deliver a taco. With their smaller footprint, delivery robots can help ease congestion on the road by removing unnecessary full-sized delivery cars. With its new funding, Coco will be able to get its robots on the sidewalks (and provide humans with “driving” gigs), and scale up to more cities sooner than some of its competition.

Sweetgreen Acquires Robot Restaurant Spyce

Salad chain Sweetgreen announced today it is acquiring the robot restaurant Spyce. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter, and terms were not disclosed.

Spyce was created by MIT alums and launched its first restaurant in the Spring of 2018, which grabbed headlines because of its use of robots to prepare each meal. The company partnered with chef Daniel Boulud to develop its menu and went on to raise nearly $25 million in funding. In November of last year Spyce re-launched itself, and introduced its new “Infinite Kitchen” robot, which allowed for more ingredient customization and could make 350 meals per hour. Spyce currently operates two locations in Massachusetts, one in Cambridge and one in Boston.

In the press announcement, Sweetgreen said Spyce’s automation technology will allow its workers to focus more on customers service, expand its menu into warm foods, and make meal preparation more consistent.

In June of this year, Sweetgreen confidentially filed to go public. CNBC today speculated that the acquisition of an automation company like Spyce could help Sweetgreen attract investors because the technology could help alleviate some of the labor shortage issues facing the restaurant industry at large.

Labor issues and the pandemic have accelerated interest in restaurant automation. In addition to robots being able to work around the clock without a break, robots don’t get sick and provide customers with a contactless food transaction. Sweetgreen’s acquisition comes less than a week after Creator, another robot-centered restaurant that has raised a fair amount of venture capital, re-opened its doors after being shut down by COVID last year. And just today, robot pizza maker, Piestro announced a partnership to deploy 3,600 units co-branded with pizza chain 800 Degrees over the next five years.

As the pandemic maintains a looming presence in our lives and automation technology matures, expect more announcements like this over the coming year.

800 Degrees and Piestro Partner to Create 3,600 Automated Pizza Kiosks

Piestro, which makes an robotic pizza kiosk, announced today that 800 Degrees Pizza will be using Piestro’s technology to offer a fully automated eating experience. According to the press announcement, the deal will have a projected order volume of 3,600 units that Piestro will produce and sell over the next five years.

Piestro’s machine is an automated pizza making kiosk. It holds the dough and dispenses sauce, cheese and a variety of toppings on demand to make a piping hot pie in three minutes. This is the first American restaurant brand partnership for Piestro.

Licensing out its technology is one of two go-to market strategies for Piestro, which will also own and operate a number of its own machines. Kiosks created for 800 Degrees will be labeled “800 Degrees by Piestro,” and will be placed in high-traffic areas such as airports, universities, hotels, etc. As part of the deal, 800 Degrees will have a number of machines that it operates to determine how customers are interacting with the kiosk. 800 Degrees Founder and Chef Anthony Carron told me by video chat this week that eventually the plan is to franchise out its machines to other owners.

Automated kiosks such as Piestro could have a lot of appeal for established restaurant brands looking to expand. With its small footprint, a kiosk can be installed just about anywhere there is power. This allows restaurants to put their brand in places without building out a full restaurant. Hotels, for example, could install an 800 Degrees pizza kiosk in the lobby to offer fresh hot pizza around the clock.

Carron said that this is his restaurant’s first foray into automation, driven mostly by two main factors. “Labor and consistency have been huge issues in our business,” Carron said. A robot like Piestro’s helps mitigate these issues as the robot can run all day without taking a break and makes the exact same pizza every time.

We are starting to more established brands partner with automated vending companies. Yo-Kai Express has already opened up its hot ramen vending machine platform to a number of well-known restaurants. And Chowbotics (part of DoorDash), which makes the Sally robot recently partnered with Kellogg’s to automate cereal and yogurt bowls for students at two different universities.

PMQ Pizza reported sales of pizza in the U.S. in 2020 topped $46 billion, which means there’s a huge opportunity for Piestro and other players in the automated pizza vending space. One big difference between Piestro and its competition right now is that Piestro makes its pizza on the spot. Other machines from API Tech, Basil Street and PizzaForno are storing and re-heating pre-made pizzas.

With the amount of money consumers spend on pizza, the ongoing labor issues and the pandemic still driving interest in contactless food retail experiences, we’re going to see a lot more pizza vending machines pop up, and a lot more co-branding announcements like the one from Piestro and 800 Degrees.

Forget Watching TV. Sony Wants Your TV To Watch You (and Monitor Your Eating)

The couch in front of our TV is a sacred no-judgment zone, the place where we wear sweats, eat pizza, and binge-watch Cobra Kai on Netflix.

But what if the TV watched and, well, judged us? That’s the dystopian future Sony is thinking about, at least if US patent number 11,081,227 is any indication.

Called “Monitoring and reporting the health condition of a television user,” the patent describes a television with embedded cameras and sensors that monitor everything a person while slouched on the couch, including tracking the food they eat. The patent was awarded to Sony on August 3rd of this year.

So why is Sony looking to invade the safe space on our couch? According to the patent, the thinking is a TV like this could monitor the health of the TV viewer by recording activities such and eating habits and look for any signs of a potential impending health problem.

Illustration of Remote with Biometric Sensors from Sony Patent #11,081,227

From the patent:

People spend a significant number of hours sitting in front of a television (TV). They may have a hidden health problem or a diminishing health condition. The system monitors one or more health vitals of the user such as heart rate, etc. While sitting in front of the TV, they may behave in an unhealthy manner. For example, they may eat too much while watching a TV program. The system may also monitor the types of food a person eats while watching TV.

The patent describes a system that would use a camera embedded in the TV to log a person’s food consumption and monitor eating patterns such as chewing speed, posture, and how fast they eat. The system would also identify the type of food, estimate portion size, and take a guess at how many calories are consumed. All that info could be synced with biometric monitoring (the patent suggests a heartbeat sensor in the remote) to paint a profile of a person’s health and how their TV watching habits impact it.

So who needs a TV to monitor their food intake? I guess if one consumes lots of empty calories while sitting in front of the tube, this might prod them to change their habits. But on the other hand, do we really need a TV to tell us we’re eating poorly?

And then there’s the problem of consumer privacy. Some of you may remember the controversy a few years back about a few lines in the terms of service or a Samsung smart TV that suggested the company might capture conversations and sell them to third parties. I can only imagine what people might think about cameras on their TV watching their every move.

In Sony’s defense, this isn’t close to being an actual product. Patents are oftentimes just corporate thought experiments, where R&D managers with budgets to burn ask what if? The likelihood of Sony actually building their big brother TV is probably pretty low.

Probably. But maybe someday they will, and if they do, it’ll be interesting to see if consumers are ok with the idea of a TV watching them, trying to make them better people. But hey, if you’re really watching Cobra Kai and downing whole quarts of ice cream every Friday night, maybe you could use the help of your Sony 70″ 4K OLED TV to help perform a little self-care.

Forthcoming Tesla Humanoid Robot Will Get Your Groceries, But Should it?

Tesla is working on a bipedal humanoid robot that will get your groceries and take over other “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.” Company CEO Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s robotic ambitions yesterday during the company’s AI Day.

The human-shaped robot will be 5 feet 8 inches tall, weigh 125 pounds and capable of deadlifting 150 pounds. Musk also reassured the crowd that “you can run away from it” and “most likely overpower it,” which are a couple of descriptors that are meant to be comforting but are actually just somewhat unsettling.

Tesla’s decision to go with a human-shaped robot bring up a question I asked last year — “Should food robots be humanoid?” If we are looking towards automation to make our lives easier and create more convenience, wouldn’t more distributed, industrial type machines be better? For example, is it faster to have an android wash dishes individually by robotic hand, or to have a dishwasher appliance clean them all at once? (Obviously the best solution is to have the robot load the dishwasher, but you get my point.)

Think about the grocery example Musk specifically called during his presentation. Fetching your groceries quite honestly seems like it would take longer for a bipedal robot that only moves at 5 miles per hour. Why not just autopilot a Tesla car to the grocery store to curbside pickup the food you ordered online. Sure, Tesla Bots could be useful in loading your trunk, but the car would drive itself back home. To be fair, Musk is a smart guy, so perhaps he meant the humanoid would act more like a house servant and bring your groceries from the car into your house.

But creating a humanoid robotic labor force is certainly more on-brand for the sci-fi inspired Tesla, which is also developing the Cybertruck, which looks like it was pulled from the movie MegaForce. There is theatricality to a humanoid robot, which is the reason some robot startups choose to go with the slower articulating arms. The robotic arms are part of the attraction. Watching an autonomous arm swivel about to make us drinks and meals scratches some basic itch we have to live in the future.

As part of his robot presentation, Musk envisioned a world where robots take over most of the everyday manual jobs that humans currently do. He also said that in doing so, we basically build an infinite labor force. He quickly added that if such a vision were to come to pass, there would need to be a universal basic income for displaced workers. The societal implications of an increasingly automated workforce are complex and need to be addressed sooner than later, but at least Musk is thinking of them now.

Of course, the bigger issue right now is if and when Tesla bots will actually make it to market. Sure, robots can do parkour now, but developing a smart useful robot assistant will take massive amounts of work. But, if anyone can will such vision into existence, it’s probably Musk.

Singapore: Crown Digital Installing Robot Baristas at 30 MRT Train Stations

Singapore-based Crown Digital announced yesterday that it will be installing its robotic baristas at 30 Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations in that country by the end of 2022.

Dubbed “Ella,” Crown Digital’s robo-coffee kiosk is 5 sq. meters, serves a variety of coffee and tea drinks, and can make up to 200 coffees per hour. While Ella uses an articulating arm to make and serve drinks, one of its standout features is its transparent screen that can display information about drinks, orders and even full-motion videos and graphics.

For these MRT installations, Crown Digital has collaborated with Stellar Lifestyle, which has “expertise in property and retail management, media and digital advertising solutions,” according to the Crown Digital announcement blog post. Crown Digital also wrote that Stella Lifestyle has invested an undisclosed sum in Crown Digital’s pre-Series A round of funding.

This is the second rail network that Crown Digital has partnered with, following a pilot deal with Japan’s JR East‘s train stations signed at the end of last year. With their high-traffic audiences looking for refreshment on-the-go, transit hubs like MRT stations and airports are popular target markets for robotic coffee kiosk companies that are just now coming market such as Crown Digital, Smyze, and Cafe X.

Another benefit to robotic coffee baristas in these pandemic times is that they are contactless. Robots don’t get sick, and don’t act as a vector of viral transmission the way that humans do.

While there are a number of robot baristas coming to market, we have yet to see big coffee chains jump into automation. The exception is Costa Coffee, which bought Briggo last year and re-branded those Coffee Hauses into Costa Coffee BaristaBots. Though I suspect that as more deals like Crown Digital’s start popping up, we’ll soon see other big coffee brands like Starbucks and Dunkin add their own robots as well.

Creator Re-Opens With a New Burger Making-Robot Customers Can Control

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant made famous by its burger-making robot, was among the thousands of restaurants shut down by the pandemic (even though it engineered an awesome germ-free airlock delivery system). But the restaurnt announced today that it is back with a new location in Daly City, California, and that is has a brand new robot that customers can control.

Creator’s new robot is a little different from its first incarnation, offering a new array of functionality. The robot is faster, capable of cooking a burger in less than four minutes (when there are no other burgers in the order queue). It also holds 25 different seasonings and sauces that can be dispensed down to the milliliter. Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will no apply to the burger themselves.

But perhaps the biggest change for Creator’s robot is how customers can interact with it. “We’re going to allow anyone to take control of the robot,” Creator Founder Alex Vardakostas told me via video chat this week. Customers can download the Creator mobile app and tweak the seasonings and sauces to their liking. These settings can then be saved and shared, which allows for someone like a well-known chef to “brand” their own burger program that people can replicate.

Another nice new feature is that when you place an order now, Creator’s system will let you know exactly long your wait time will be before your food is ready for pickup.

In addition to all these front-facing changes, Vardakostas said that there are also a number of back-end improvements to the robot that help with production and growth. “The new system is hyper scalable,” he said, “and way more reliable.” It’s these types of back-end changes that will allow Creator to manufacture robots en masse and expand in different ways. Vardakostas said that Creator’s growth will include a mix of owned and operated locations, licensing deals that still carry the Creator brand, and a white-label approach where the machine is modified for another restaurant’s use.

Despite all this technology, Creator remains a very human-focused eating experience. Vardakostas said his team looked at using ordering kiosks, but decided to stick with human order takers. “For a lot of us, we want to talk to a human,” he said.

Speaking of humans, unlike other restaurants, Vardakostas said that finding and hiring workers has not been a problem. “Labor has been a slam dunk. It’s been super easy,” he said. Part of that Vardakostas attributes to Creator being as much a tech company as it is a restaurant company. “Overall, a lot of people want to move into tech,” he said. But there certainly other factors at play, such as not having to work over a hot grill (since the robot does the cooking), Creator also helps with professional development by paying for things like Coursera classes (though a lot of QSRs offer something like that now). Creator does provide an upward path into the technology/robotics sector, however. Vardakostas said that Creator recently promoted two restaurant workers into its development lab.

Creator is part of a larger movement towards automation in the food industry, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. Robots can work all day without taking break, don’t get sick or injured, and can help free up space for social distancing in the kitchen. As a result, there are a number of restaurant robots either at market or on their way. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is working the deep fryers at White Castle. Hyphen just introduced its new Makeline robot assembly system for Sweetgreen-style restaurants. And Picnic just announced the commercial availability of its pizza assembling robot.

For those in the Bay Area who have not yet tried Creator’s robot-made burger (ed. note: They are delicious), you can visit the restaurant’s new location in the Westlake Shopping Center at 514 Westlake, Daly City.

SJW Robotics Aims to Franchise Its Automated Asian Meal Kiosk

One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in food robotics is the fully automated restaurant-in-a-box-style kiosk. These are big, standalone devices that store ingredients and cook up a variety of dishes. Already we’ve seen announcements for such machines from Hyper, Mezli, and Wavemaker Labs with its Nommi. Now you can add SJW Robotics to that list, as the company has plans to franchise its automated restaurant-in-a-box that serves Asian food.

SJW has yet to officially name its automated restaurant concept, but the kiosk itself is 100 sq. ft, holds 36 different ingredients, and uses induction heating. While the outside doesn’t have branding yet, the internal robotics system is referred to as the “RoWok” (robot + wok). It can make one meal in about a minute and a half, though as the machine gets up to speed it can make six meals concurrently, dispensing each one in under a minute. It can make 250 meals before it needs to be refilled.

Nipun Sharma, CEO of SJW Robotics, explained to me by videochat this week that he’s interested in building his own restaurant brand through franchising. People interested in installing one of these kiosks will need to buy the robot for $200,000, pay a $25,000 franchise fee and pay 5 percent royalty.

SJW’s model is different from the approach other players are taking. Hyper plans on licensing its automated pizza technology to bigger brands, while Mezli says that it is more of a food company that plans to open up a number of its own restaurants (which could involve franchising, but Mezli didn’t mention that when I spoke to them earlier this year). SJW’s robot is also a little different in that it appears to be more of an indoor-based system, rather than the ruggedized shipping containers Hyper and Mezli are using that can be installed outside in places like parking lots.

Right now SJW is still developing its prototype. Sharma said that the company has raised an undisclosed round of funding and will be debuting a fully working version of its kiosk this October.

When You Think About Food Robots, Consider the Remote Mining Facility

Whenever I talk with a food robot company, particularly a startup building an automated kiosk or vending machine, they always list the same target markets. Those include airports, universities, hospitals, military bases, and basically any location where there are a lot of people coming through at all hours of the day. So my ears perked up when Alex Barseghian, Founder of RoboEatz, said his company was looking to set up its robot in the middle of nowhere.

Specifically, Barseghian mentioned setting up his company’s robot in a “remote mining facility” during the automation panel I moderated at our Restaurant Tech virtual summit yesterday. Barseghian didn’t provide specifics, but it’s not hard to imagine what a “remote mining facility” might look like, and why a robot might be useful there.

RoboEatz makes a 200 sq ft. self-contained robotic kiosk that stores 110 ingredients and uses an articulating arm to assemble a variety of both hot and cold meals. Aside from someone to re-stock ingredients and handle the occasional maintenance, the machine does everything on its own.

This autonomy, and the robot’s ability to make a meal every 30 seconds, makes it perfect for high-traffic places like airports. Busy people on the go can get a hot, restaurant-quality meal served up any time of day or night. But the autonomy also makes it perfect for places where there aren’t a lot of people and not a lot of access. Rather than sending a cook and setting up a kitchen in a remote area, which can be expensive, a robot can take care of that work. Just set the kiosk up once and regularly top off the ingredients, the robot will take care of the rest.

No only do meal-making robots like those RoboEatz and Karakuri and YPC Technologies operate independently, they can serve food across day parts (yogurt in the morning, pasta at night) and around the clock, so they can feed people working odd hour shifts. Additionally, robots can offer a variety of menu options, rather than a cook making one meal for everyone at a facility. People in the remote situation could order the meal they want and get it in minutes.

The broader point to consider is that while remote areas may not be as top of mind or even immediately as lucrative as other high-traffic locales, food robots installed in these locations could have a much bigger impact for the people who live there.

Picnic Announces Commercial Availability and Pricing of its Pizza Robot

Picnic announced today that its pizza-assembling robot is now commercially available for pre-orders and that its robot-as-a-service will cost between $3,500 and $5,000 per month, depending on factors such as menu and volume.

Picnic makes a modular system that uses computer vision and robotics to top pizza dough. Pizza crusts are placed on a conveyor belt, automatically stopping under dispensers to be topped accordingly with ingredients such as sauce, cheese, pepperoni and more. Because it is modular, more nodes can be added to add more toppings.

Obviously restaurant labor is a big issue driving much of the discussion around automation and robotics in food tech. Picnic CEO Clatyon Wood told me by video chat this week that while attracting and retaining labor is still a pain point for his customers, another reason for the move into automation is the digitization of ordering. Whether its online, mobile, or via in-house ordering via kiosk, digital experiences are driving more sales. “If you want to produce high volumes of food, automation is the answer,” Wood said. “Doing that with labor just isn’t an option these days.”

In addition to labor and volume, robot and automation can also provide a number of other benefits for restaurant. Robots consistently dispense the same amount of food every time, resulting in less waste and tighter control over ingredients. Robots can also operate dangerous machinery like a deep fryer or pizza oven without getting injured. And especially important in our ongoing pandemic, not only do robots not get sick, but they create more social distance for other human workers inside a kitchen.

All of these reasons help explain why we are starting to see more food-creation robots come to market. XRobotics and Middleby both make commercial pizza-assembling robots. Last week, Hyphen unveiled its Makeline automated food assembly system for fast casual restaurants like Sweetgreen. And while Miso Robotics’ Flippy is already working the fryer at White Castle, the company recently announced a new automated drink dispenser for QSR drive-thrus.

All of these solutions are still very early on, however, and we don’t yet know if the economics of robotics are truly sustainable. We’ll be seeing more public announcements of robot adoption from restaurant brands this year, so we can start to measure automation’s true efficacy.

For its part, Picnic will manufacture and install existing customer orders throughout the remainder of this year, and new orders will ship in 2022.