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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Serve Robotics Partners With Drone Delivery Specialist Wing To Pair Sidewalk With Aerial Delivery

Serve Robotics Inc. and Wing Aviation announced a pilot program this week that will combine their delivery methods to extend the reach of restaurant deliveries across densely populated urban areas. According to the announcement, Serve’s robots will collect orders from restaurant curbsides and transport them to Wing’s AutoLoader hubs, where Wing’s drones will carry the packages to customers up to six miles away.

Serve Robotics spun out of Uber in 2021 and has since worked with the likes of Uber Eats and 7-Eleven. According to the company, its robots have completed tens of thousands of deliveries in urban markets. For its part, Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says it has racked up 400,000 commercial deliveries across three continents, working with food delivery partners like DoorDash.

This announcement is interesting because it represents the first integration of sidewalk and aerial delivery. I’ll be watching if this thing ever moves out of pilot since, as drone delivery has moved significantly slower in terms of rollout than many providers had hoped, and combining it with sidewalk delivery adds another potential complication that could trip up cautious delivery operators and restaurants.

However, if Serve can nail handoffs at Drone pick-up areas as suggested in the video (the choppy editing looks a bit suspect to me), I can see this becoming a real peanut butter and jelly combo for quick deployment of food.

Watch as a Serve Sidewalk Robot Hands Off Food Delivery to a Wing Drone

I’ve Seen The Future of Food Logging Apps, And It’s GPT Food Cam

If you’ve ever tried to log your food intake with an app, you probably have realized the following:

  1. Manual food logging with an app is a pain.
  2. Food logging apps are often inaccurate because they require users to estimate portion size, ingredients, etc.
  3. Food logging apps have cumbersome onboarding processes, ask for a lot of personal info, and usually try to upsell users into premium subscriptions.

For these reasons, I have not used a food-logging app for more than a few weeks, but that may soon change with GPT Food Cam. What is GPT Food Cam? In a few words, it’s a free food-logging app that lets you snap each meal or snack with your smartphone camera and uses AI to estimate calories. The app, which can be downloaded from the iOS App Store, doesn’t ask you to take a survey or require a subscription, and, from what I can tell within a day of use, it is really pretty darn good.

That’s my description, but what does Raj Singh, the longtime entrepreneur who is the visionary behind the app, have to say about it? According to Singh, who posted recently about the app on LinkedIn, GPT Food Cam is different from other food logging apps in three primary ways:

Instant Camera Access: The app opens straight to the camera, allowing users to quickly capture their meals without navigating menus. “I wanted it to be fast and low friction,” Singh said. “In social settings, it’s less intrusive to quickly snap a photo.”

Calorie Ranges Instead of Exact Figures: Singh said that because AI has its own limitations and portion sizes vary, the app provides a calorie range. “By presenting a range, it’s mostly right,” Singh said. “The goal is to build the habit of food logging and become a more mindful eater.”

Free and Unobtrusive: Unlike many apps that require subscriptions or bombard users with ads, GPT Food Cam is entirely free and supported by occasional, non-intrusive advertisements. “Right now, ads are making four times the revenue of the AI costs,” Singh said in a phone interview with The Spoon. “This allows us to keep the app free and potentially expand its features and availability to more countries.”

After working with a food coach who encouraged him to send photos of his meals for feedback, Singh sought a convenient digital solution to continue the practice. However, he found existing apps lacking—either too complex, costly, or both.

“They were designed for the 5% who need precision, but I wanted something simple, free, and for the other 95%,” Singh said.

According to Singh, GPT Food Cam leverages Gemini Flash, a fast and cost-effective AI model, to analyze images and estimate calorie content. Users simply snap a photo of their meal, and the app processes the image to provide an approximate calorie range.

“A lot of this is prompt engineering,” Singh explained. “We use ‘chain-of-thought’ prompting, where we break down the AI’s task into specific steps. The prompt instructs the AI to look at what’s in the picture, consider each ingredient independently, estimate serving sizes based on context—like whether it’s in a bowl or on a plate—and then estimate the calories of each item before adding them up.”

Singh emphasized that while AI isn’t perfect—with about 95% accuracy—it’s sufficient for promoting mindful eating. “AI has consistently been 95% accurate,” he said. “It’s great for recommendations and suggestions, but when it comes to critical workflows, it might get things wrong 5% of the time. For food logging, where precision isn’t as critical, this level of accuracy is acceptable.”

The creation of GPT Food Cam came after a serendipitous conversation with a friend. Singh’s friend, Zvika Ashkenazi, mentioned that his son, Ben Ashkenazi, was seeking an unpaid summer internship and wondered if Singh could mentor him. Singh soon began working with Ben, and six weeks later, GPT FoodCam was born.

“Ben is graduating from ASU in Computer Science in December,” Singh said. “He taught himself React, iOS development, and more this summer with minimal help from my network. He built this end-to-end.”

While GPT Food Cam emerged just in the last couple of months after Singh’s epiphany and Ben Ashkenazi’s coding work, Singh has been toying with the idea of a low-friction app to track food intake for a decade. In 2009, he tried to develop a similar application but soon realized the technology wasn’t mature enough.

“In 2009, I tried to create this exact app,” said Singh, who is currently the head of product for Mozilla’s Solo after the browser company acquired his startup Pulse in 2022. “It wasn’t good enough, and so we pivoted into a recipe company, which became Allthecooks.” Allthecooks would go on to become the number one recipe community on Android in 2010, with 30 million users, and would later be acquired by Cookpad.

Unlike then, “the tech is now here, making GPT Food Cam a reality,” Singh said. “Advancements in AI and image recognition have finally caught up with the vision I had over a decade ago.”

With the technology to make friction-free food logging a reality, Singh told me he wants to disrupt the food logging industry by offering a free, low-friction app, but he thinks it can do so with little involvement from him going forward.

“I build some things for fun. At the onset of a new project, I’m like, ‘This is not gonna make money, but the world needs it,’ or, ‘This is gonna be my next business, and I’m leaving where I’m at.'”

Singh made it clear he is happy at Mozilla and, in fact, used the product he conceived of building for Mozilla (Solo, an AI website builder) to create the website for GPT Food Cam. From here, he will let Ashkenazi run with the product, even if he periodically suggests some ideas to make it successful.

“I think it can be very, very disruptive. People are paying $10 a month for apps they don’t need to. This app can encourage better habits without the cost and complexity.”

Singh said he is also considering expanding the app’s capabilities and reach. With the ad revenue already exceeding the AI costs by a four-to-one margin, there’s potential to increase daily usage limits (currently, users are limited to six snaps a day) and make the app available in more countries.

Selfishly, I hope he and Ashkenazi succeed because, from what I’ve seen so far, I think the app is, in fact, potentially disruptive, and I hope to keep on using it. Who knows, maybe Ashkenazi (with a little help from Singh) can put their app on a similar journey we saw with Marco Arment’s Overcast app, which originally was a passion project that emerged from Arment’s annoyance with the current state of podcast apps to become the most user-friendly podcast app (and most popular, outside of Apple’s podcast app) in the world.

A Look at the Vayu One Delivery Robot, Which Navigates Bike Lanes to Deliver Your Food

Ever since the founders of Skype launched Starship over eight years ago, we’ve seen an explosion of small-footprint delivery robots that navigate sidewalks to deliver their payloads to consumers.

While these small robots sidestep many of the challenges and regulatory oversight needed for on-road travel, they are, in general, pretty small and usually only travel short distances.

However, a new company called Vayu, founded by former Apple and Lyft execs, hopes to make the robot delivery market (and our groceries) arrive just a little faster by jumping off the curb and into the bike delivery lane with its new robot. The Vayu One, which was formerly introduced today, is a larger form-factor robot which can carry up to 100 pounds of payload and move at 20 miles per hour.

You can see the Vayu One in action in the video provided by the company below:

A Look at Vayu's Bike Lane Delivery Robot

According to the company, the robot uses a transformer-based model (likely a vision language model) combined with a “passive sensor” that enables the robot to navigate without lidar (the laser-light-based navigation technology used by many autonomous automobiles). The company says the robot can navigate roads, and in-store environments, and also drop off the payloads at its delivery destinations unassisted (you can see it do just that in the video).

The video shows a worker using voice commands to control the robot and load packages as it navigates around the store. Unlike the smaller sidewalk robots like those of Serve and Starship, the Vayu One is somewhat sizable, about the length of an e-bike and approximately three feet wide. This makes me wonder how it will navigate within the narrow corridors of some small-format stores.

Interestingly, the company says it has already obtained regulatory approval to operate on some public roads in certain cities. I’m interested to see which cities have greenlit the company, as my guess is that putting a robot onto a public street – even if it’s a bike lane – would require a significant amount of regulatory hoop-hopping compared to sidewalk delivery.

According to the company, they have a deal with a “large e-commerce player” to deploy 2,500 robots to enable ultra-fast delivery. If the deal holds up, Vayu would quickly eclipse the fleet numbers of Serve (which has about 100 robots in the field) and other players in the autonomous bot delivery space.

Vayu is backed by blue-chip VC Khosla Ventures, which recently led a $12.7 million funding round.

Chef Robotics Comes Out of Stealth to Show Off Robot and Reveal Early Customers

This week, Chef Robotics, the San Francisco-based food robotics startup founded by Rajat Bhageria, stepped out of stealth mode and into the spotlight by unveiling its robot and disclosing some of its high-profile partnerships.

In an interview with The Spoon, Bhageria, an investor and technology founder, showcased Chef, a food robot that assembles cooked and ready-to-eat food in high-volume environments. This focus, says Bhageria, is much different from the bulk of robots in the market, most of which focus primarily on prep and cooking in restaurants and food service.

“Restaurants have low volume, making automation difficult because jobs are generalized,” Bhageria explained. “In high-volume operations, jobs become specialized, making automation feasible. We focused on getting robots into the field quickly to gather real-world training data, improving our food manipulation AI.”

Bhageria, a master’s graduate of Penn’s Robotics and Machine Learning Lab, started his first company in high school, a social network for young writers. During college and grad school, he founded Third Eye, a company using computer vision to assist the visually impaired. This project opened his eyes to the immense potential of AI and computer vision. “Computer vision and AI are immensely powerful. Even back in 2014, I saw AI’s potential impact on our lives.”

Along the way, Bhageria started an early-stage venture capital company called Prototype Capital with an investment thesis that helped shape his own company: applying new innovations to old industries. The organizing principle here was that big ideas and proprietary data sets were not just confined to Silicon Valley but seeded in older communities built around these mature industries that would benefit most from technology transformation.

While he and his Prototype partners invested in businesses nestled in rust-belt epicenters and other mature communities, he continued to work on – and crystalize – his idea for Chef. As he interviewed executives from these companies and asked about their pain points, he realized that food preparation is one of the most labor-constrained sectors in the US. As he dug deeper, it dawned on him that food assembly and plating were more labor-intensive than prepping and cooking (which often only needed a single employee for each).

“Prepping and cooking can be done in bulk, but assembly scales linearly with output,” Bhageria said. “Automating assembly can save labor and increase volume and revenue.”

Bhageria believes his approach to food assembly first mirrors that of Tesla, which tackled the high-end, high-performance sector with the Roadster before moving on to mass-market production models.

“Going to restaurants is like trying to build the Model 3 from the get-go,” said Bhageria. “If Elon and Tesla tried to build the Model 3 from the start, it probably wouldn’t have worked.”

However, Bhageria believes that the lowest-volume, most distributed form of cooking robot – a home robot – isn’t in the cards, at least for his company.

“I am kind of of the opinion that at-home robots for food will not be a thing. People don’t want to maintain a robot in their house, buy it, refill it, or take care of it. They prefer having meals made in ghost kitchens by robots and delivered to their homes.”

Bhageria believes in the future, consumers will be touched by food robots, but only in a world where robot-assembled food in centralized kitchens will mean more variety and lower cost food for everyone.

“Cooking will go to people who still cook because they love it,” Bhageria predicted. “But more and more of the world will get their food made in ghost kitchens by robots, delivered by robots.”

In addition to revealing his robot and his company’s approach to food automation to the world, Bhageria also disclosed some of his company’s early clients. He said his customers include Amy’s Kitchen, a well-known frozen prepared meal company, and Sunbasket, a direct-to-consumer meal provider with a substantial contract manufacturing arm. Another company Chef Bombay, a Canadian food company, has integrated Chef Robotics’ into their operations.

Bhageria said his customers span a number of industries, primarily those that need high-volume assembly of ready-to-eat meals. These industries include hospitals, airlines, delivery services, grocery stores, and frozen prepared meals.

“These environments are extremely manual, with people scooping ingredients for long hours in cold rooms. Our robots help automate this process, addressing labor shortages and increasing production volume.”

You can see my full interview with Bhageria below.

Chef Robotics Founder Rajat Bhageria Unveils his Company's Robot and Talks About The Future

A Decade Before The ChatGPT Recipe Craze, a Cooking Show Champ Helped IBM Train Chef Watson

By now, most everyone has tried their hand at prompt engineering ChatGPT or another LLM to create a decent recipe.

But a decade and a half ago, well before the current craze of making recipes with generative AI, IBM was trying to figure out how to make Watson start cooking. The supercomputer-powered AI, which was probably the first real-world AI most of us knew by name, had just broken into the broader American consciousness after it had beaten human players Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a Jeopardy tournament. Now, IBM was looking for ways to showcase how the technology could help people be more creative, and they identified cooking and recipes as the next world to conquer.

Around this time, the Watson team teamed up with the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) to help train Watson. James Briscione, who had won Chopped season 2 a couple of years before and was the ICE’s director of culinary research, remembers those early days when IBM computer scientists filed into his kitchen.

“The first day we set up, the Watson team came to the kitchens at ICE, walked in with a laptop, flipped it open, logged into an interface that IBM was hosting, and we started parsing datasets.”

This meant going through and looking at ingredient combinations based on cuisine style, dish type, and flavor profiles of different dishes, as well as breaking down each type of ingredient into the various flavor and aromatic compounds into building blocks, which allowed Watson to then process millions of flavor combinations and recommend them to ICE chefs. During the process, the Watson team made sure the human chefs remained as ana integral and necessary part of the AI feedback loop.

“For the majority of the project, it did not give us recipes, it gave us ingredient combinations,” said Briscione. “And then I did the work then to translate that into the recipe.”

Briscione said taking Watson’s combination suggestions and combining them into a recipe helped unlock the creativity of him and the other chefs.

“As a sort of a thought experiment, it was even more interesting because then we could take an ingredient output, I would take it and interpret that ingredient output one way. Another chef could take that exact same ingredient output and interpret it completely differently. So in inspiring creativity, it was really, really powerful.”

Nowadays, Briscione is applying what he’s learned to build a new company that helps train large language models to better understand food. He will discuss this new company at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week.

You can watch the entire interview and see the transcript below. .

The Chef Who Helped Build Chef Watson: A Conversation With James Briscione

Transcript

Michael Wolf: I’m excited to have James Briscione who is a chef I’ve been following for a while. James, you do so many things. You’re an author. You’re a Food Network personality. And you’re one of those rare chefs that have been dabbling with AI longer than pretty much most people even working with AI at all. So it’s exciting to have you. Thanks for coming.

James Briscione Yeah, Michael. Excited to chat here excited about SKS coming up in June. This will be a great event and can’t wait to get there.

Michael Wolf Yeah, we’re going to hear you on stage talking about your experiences and what you’re looking forward to with the integration of AI. But for those who don’t know you, tell us a little bit about your background and what you’ve done over your career.

James Briscione As you said, I’m a chef first. I started as a dishwasher at the age of 16, worked my way up to some of the top kitchens in the country. James Beard award winning kitchens that I was at the helm of. Four Star Fine Dining in New York City. Kind of did it all. With that really elevated fine dining background, I moved into education at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan and really was in the right place at the right time when IBM came knocking and said, ‘we’ve got this crazy idea. We’ve got this thing called Watson, that just conquered Jeopardy. And now we want to see if it can help people. We know it can answer questions. We want to see if it can help people be more creative.’

And they thought about music, they thought about visual arts, but you know, felt those were too subjective and culinary arts was a very objective area for this. So when they came to meet with us, they met with all the instructors, kind of talked about the process of development and creating dishes, and how you work as a chef. Having just been the first two-time champion on the show Chopped on the Food Network, the way I sort of process and put together flavors and ingredients was exactly what they were trying to build with Watson. So that started about a four-year relationship working with the core team there at IBM to develop Chef Watson, which I now know was recipe generative AI. Almost 11 years ago, before we started building it, I had no idea what those words even meant. And AI was only something you saw in Will Smith movies.

Michael Wolf So those early days, you’re helping with Watson. Are they bringing you into a kitchen at IBM headquarters? What does that exactly mean? Are they monitoring you with cameras, or are you saying, ‘hey, these are what flavors are trying to tell a computer what a flavor is?’

James Briscione First, as we talked about it, I was still in that Chopped competition mode. So I was like, ‘if I’m going to cook against this computer, I’m going to kick its ass. I’m actually going to prove that this thing can’t do it better than a human. The first day we set up, they came to the kitchens at ICE (the Institute of Culinary Education), walked in with a laptop, flipped it open, logged into an interface that IBM was, was hosting, and we started parsing datasets and going through and generating ingredient combinations based on a number of different factors based on cuisine style. so original cuisine, a type of dish and, and, and a core ingredient to inform, the flavor profile of, of the dish. So we’d say Italian grilled lobster. And then it would generate trillions of possible ingredient combinations that could be used to create a dish that were typical Italian ingredients that kind of fit in with what it knew about a grilled lobster recipe or a grilling recipe and a lobster recipe overlay. And then use that lobster to as kind of the core flavor profile to then build sort of that flavor tree off of that core ingredient, which that process, that’s how I tend to think about creating a dish, but getting down to the molecular level, understanding all of the aromatic compounds in the food, how those flavors relate to one another, why they go well together. I never looked at information that way or understood it in that form. And it was mind blowing to process tens of thousands of aromatic compounds in every dish, just like that.

Michael Wolf So it was essentially building, I don’t know if the right word is ontology, but kind of trying to dissect food at a more atomic level and then understanding what the commonalities are. You know, saying ‘lobster often goes in these types of dishes’ or ‘Hey, maybe it works with these types of dishes.’ So really trying to create the data building blocks so Watson can then say, hey, here’s a unique flavor idea, recipe idea you may not have thought of with your small human brain.

James Briscione Exactly. And, you know, for the majority of the project, it did not give us recipes. It gave us ingredient combinations. And then like, you know, it was kind of, I did the work then to translate that into the recipe. But as sort of a thought experiment, it was even more interesting because then we could take an ingredient output, I would take it, and interpret that ingredient output one way. Another chef could take that exact same ingredient output and interpret it completely differently. So in inspiring creativity, it was really, really powerful. And actually, there were some cool examples of where we would take the same generation, go to separate sides of the kitchen, and come back in the middle with our finished dish. You couldn’t even tell that they started at the same place.

Michael Wolf You’ve watched over the past decade, this expansion of folks trying to use technology to understand the way we cook better. Those early days of watching Watson were pretty seminal and informative, and that was the first time I remember seeing articles, maybe in the New York Times, saying ‘Watson beat Jeopardy, now it’s trying to cook’. So as you’ve watched this evolve over the past decade, what have you been thinking about? And what have you learned maybe about AI and its intersection with food? Is it something now you’re more excited about than ever?

James Briscione 100% more excited than ever. I think the potential here to simplify, to streamline, which to me is kind of the ultimate promise of AI, to make our lives better, to organize and streamline. I think where obviously it gets tricky, is one, it’s new. So there’s going to be some inherent distrust of it. One bad recipe, one recipe that doesn’t work and people are going to bail on it as well.

Michael Wolf Right, right. We’ve all done those bad recipes with ChatGPT. Like that just sounds awful.

James Briscione Yeah, and you know, I mean, it’s going to be interesting to watch this landscape too now because the majority of what’s out there are just some, you know, some basic GPT wrappers. And if any of these copyright lawsuits get through, a lot of these datasets, these sources, start to dry up or become more restricted. So one thing I’m starting to work into is building a new dedicated model for recipe generation with nutrition and flavor inputs that really can optimize your food specifically for you. If you want to get down as far as the genome, I think that’s some functionality that is off in the future, but generally, as an active 44-year-old male who lives in a hot climate, AI can tell me exactly what I should be eating on a day-to-day basis to optimize me for what I do.

Michael Wolf That’s interesting. And I think the startup you’re working on is called CulinAI. And so that’s exactly it. And so is this something you’re building your own large language model or you’re building something that can integrate with maybe some of the other large language models? Tell us a little bit about it.

James Briscione Yeah, so, and I’m actually working with the original developer of Chef Watson. It’s kind of a hybrid model where we are going to be employing some large language models, but also some kind of dedicated pieces that would be unique to this model, particularly the flavor science and the nutrition data input. And then, really, kind of the secret sauce is in the selection because, again, we know that the large language models can generate lots of great things that look like good recipes, but training it to then go back through those and select out the ones that are actually right is where it all comes together.

Michael Wolf Well, I’m excited to hear more about that at Smart Kitchen Summit. You are someone who works in a professional kitchen. You’ve been on TV, won awards, you have your own restaurant. But there’s also the consumer, right? Someone who, like me, doesn’t know what they’re doing. And one of the reasons I got interested in the Smart Kitchen in the early days is because I thought that maybe technology can help me become a better cook. How do you think average everyday consumers who aren’t like you can use technology tools like AI to help them cook better?

James Briscione We talked about kind of one of the biggest benefits AI is to make our lives better, to simplify processes and personalization, right? And I think that’s really where it comes in to find the right information. Even just how to get your ingredients organized at the beginning of the week to set up for, hey, ‘here’s what I’m going to, here’s what I’m going to cook for the week’, building out a meal plan that utilizes all of the ingredients that you have so that you don’t, at the end of the week, have half a pint of cherry tomatoes, three quarters of a head of celery, two onions, and half a butternut squash. It’s all just sitting there because you bought it all because you had to have it for that recipe, and now it all is just kind of like laying to waste, and you leave it there until it’s time to finally throw it away. And I think some of those, I think a lot of those things are what discourage people or kind of keep people from cooking. So, AI tools that can teach you to approach that process the way I do as a chef of not just looking at, okay, here’s what I’m gonna do for dinner for Tuesday night, but okay, as I’m doing dinner for Tuesday night, here’s how we get lunch for Wednesday ready.

Michael Wolf Right, right.

James Briscione And another chunk of dinner for Thursday, all kind of set up and set aside so that that’s easier too. And I think a lot of those tools are some of the things we’re looking at building into CulinAI, and I think those are the pieces that I’m excited about.

Michael Wolf Well, I’m excited to hear you in Seattle in June at Smart Kitchen Summit. James, where can people find out more about you?

James Briscione Most social media platforms at James Briscione. That’s probably the best way to find me, LinkedIn, all of the typical places, just right under my name, I’m there. There’s not many Brisciones around, so.

Michael Wolf All right, man, we’ll see you in a bit. Yeah, there aren’t. That’s a great, unique name. All right, James, we’ll see you soon.

James Briscione All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Introducing Speedy Eats - An Outdoors Unattended Retail Store.

The Story of Chefee with Assaf Pashut

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

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

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

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

Building a Home Food Robot With Chefee's Assaf Pashut

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

The transcript of our conversation is below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Wolf
That’s not good. o.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Wolf
It was Shark Tank Bootcamp.

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

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

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

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

Michael Wolf
It’s the early Tesla strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assaf Pashut
You too.

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

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

Assaf Pashut
That’s it. Thank you.

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

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

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

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Simmons’s post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure Status Update - OpenAI Speech-to-Speech Reasoning

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

The Origin Story Behind OMM, the Countertop Egg-Making Robot from Bridge Appliances

A few years ago, Lance Lentini was a year out of college when he started working at DEKA Research & Development, a technology development firm. This wasn’t just any engineering firm; it was the incubation hub for Dean Kamen, one of America’s most renowned inventors, responsible for a plethora of inventions such as the Segway, the iBOT wheelchair, and the dispensing technology used in the Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.

And it was there, while working on projects like self-balancing wheelchairs and delivery drones, that Lentini started to think about how automation could be used to make food production more efficient. He and a couple of coworkers started to discuss the opportunities and started to imagine what it might be like to work on their own project under their own company.

The only question was, where should they start?

According to Lentini, it was in 2020 that the concept for their first product started to come together. Around that time, Lentini and his eventual co-founders were standing in line for coffee and started to wonder what the reason was for the long wait times.

“After watching people just walk away from the line after waiting so long, we were like, ‘let’s poke and prod and see what’s really going on, what’s the biggest problem behind the counter,'” said Lentini in an interview with The Spoon.

After talking to employees at the coffee shop, they learned that eggs were often the bottleneck in the kitchen as a result of how labor-intensive they are to make. It was then they saw an opportunity to innovate.

“That was where we went down the rabbit hole of designing for restaurant owners,” Lentini said.

Lentini took the first leap. He left DEKA and began working on the idea, and within a few months, he received a small investment from a close friend. Before long, he was joined by his other co-founders (Connor White, Keller Waldron, and Chris Plankey) and built their first prototype. This prototype helped them raise a $2 million seed round in 2021 from Steve Papa, a longtime wireless industry executive and one of the original investors in Toast.

After two years of development, the company, now called Bridge Appliances, finalized its first product late last year, a robot designed to automate the preparation of eggs for breakfast sandwiches named OMM. Last month, the company was granted a utility patent for the technology in the OMM, which covers the process of cooking an egg in an end-to-end fashion in a countertop appliance.

The OMM can prepare two eggs in about two minutes, which means a single machine can handle approximately 60 eggs in an hour. The plan is to place the machines in locations ranging from small mom-and-pop shops that might only make fifty eggs on a Saturday morning to higher-volume locations that do three to five hundred eggs in a day. Those higher-volume locations, Lentini says, will have two or three machines working side-by-side.

Bridge Appliances has set up manufacturing in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, area, and they plan on rolling out the OMM to a set of trial customers over the next few months. From there, the company plans to expand into other areas within the US by the end of 2024 and early 2025. The initial business model will be a “cooking-as-a-service” model, and Lentini says Bridge will charge a nominal fee on a per-egg-cooked basis.

With his first products heading out the door, Lentini can reflect on those early days working as a freshly graduated engineer for a technology pioneer like Dean Kamen.

“Part of the reason we wanted to do this is that we just saw such a lack of innovation in this sector,” Lentini said. “And we were inspired by Dean’s interest and willingness to really try to do moonshots, and we really wanted to give this a try to build the first kind of end-to-end robotic appliances.”

“And we went, and we tried it, and it worked out.”

You can get a peak at the OMM robotic egg cooker in the video below.

Introducing OMM, Automated Egg Cooker