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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

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

Chef Robotics Hits 10M Meal Milestone in Under Two Years. The Secret? AI-Powered Robots Trained With Lots of Field Data

This week, food automation startup Chef Robotics told The Spoon it had reached the ten million-meal milestone, less than two years after the company’s first robot was deployed in June 2022.

If you think that type of growth is achieved by steady month-over-month increases in production over time, you’re wrong. In fact, according to founder Rajat Bhageria, after taking nearly a year to reach its first million, the company’s been on an up-and-to-the-right full-throttle ride of hockey stick exponential growth ever since. The next million took about one hundred days, the next after that three weeks, and, nowadays, Bhageria says it takes just about two and half weeks or so per additional million food items.

That’s a whole lot of meals made in a short time, which made me wonder what type of customers and food facilities the company serves with its robotics. Bhageria says their typical customers are those running centralized food processing facilities, where Chef Robotics assembles the type of yogurt parfait or protein platter SKUs you might pick up at your local coffee shop. Other end-products include airline meals, hospital food service, and other pre-packed meals. In other words, Chef Robotics’ robots aren’t making salad bowls or pasta from a menu in a restaurant, but instead assembling pre-packed meals at high volume across a wide variety of food types.

“If Tesla’s core technology is batteries, our core technology is food manipulation,” Bhageria said. “Which is to say, we need to be able to go from shredded chicken to diced chicken, to cubed chicken, and from julienne onions to chopped onions to sticky cheese grits in marinara sauce. The whole point of Chef Robotics is to be as flexible as possible.”

Bhageria says their food assembly and manipulation systems differ from traditional dispensing systems, which are limited by a hardware-centric approach and lack sensitivity to the variability in food ingredients. He says Chef Robotics focuses much more on software while leveraging a combination of computer vision, motion planning, and a robotic arm equipped with various utensils. This technology integration mimics the dexterity and intelligence of human food handling, enabling the robots to adapt to different ingredients and recipes rapidly.

Chef Robotics’ CEO says that the company has essentially overcome the infamous AI “cold start” problem by accumulating a massive amount of data by having its robotics in the field enable it to become more flexible over time and understand the different challenges around different types of food manipulation. He says this has resulted in what they call its (what else?) ChefOS.

“ChatGPT can basically just download the Internet,” Bhageria said. “But there’s no training data for food manipulation. You can’t really do it in the lab because the way one customer, julienne’s an onion, is very different than the way another customer, julienne’s an onion. The way to learn how to manipulate food is you have to deploy robots.”

The more robots you have in the field, the more data you have, which makes the AI smarter, which means the existing robots work faster and faster; in other words, it’s the virtuous circle of scaled automation and AI.

When I asked Bhageria the names of his specific customers, he told me they aren’t disclosing who they are because the companies using Chef Robotics technology wish to remain under the radar for now. We do know that the company has robotics in five cities across the US and Canada and plans to triple its fleet of robots this year.

With this type of growth, it won’t be long before Chef Robotics’ robots are pumping out a million meals assembled in just a matter of days.

Chef Robotics Raises $14.75M To Automate Food Assembly in Commercial Kitchens

We’ve been tracking Chef Robotics before it was even called that when the company’s CEO and founder, Rajat Bhageria, spoke at The Spoon’s food robotics conference ArticulATE in 2019.

At the time, Bhageria was still in stealth on what would become his restaurant robot company, but he had hinted that he was up to something when we talked to him and convinced him to come and speak at the conference as an investor for his investment shingle, Prototype Capital. Since that time, Chef Robotics has exited stealth and the company is actually selling its robot (Bhageria says that company revenue has doubled between 2022 and 2023) and, as first reported by Techcrunch, the company has raised a new $14.75 million combo debt/equity round of funding.

From Techcrunch: Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef distinguishes itself from the likes of Miso by focusing on food assembly, rather than cooking specifically. The company is also touting ChefOS, the underlying software driving its robot arm’s decisions. “[F]ood is very highly dimensional: depending on how you prep the ingredients (e.g., julienned onions vs chopped), cook the ingredients (e.g., sauteed, baked, broiled), store the ingredients (e.g., cooked, room temp, frozen), the material properties radically differ,” the company notes. “And these properties change daily based on who is prepping and cooking. To deal with this, Chef uses various sensors – like cameras – to collect training data and then trains models that help Chef learn how to manipulate a large corpus of ingredients.”

When he spoke at ArticulATE in 2019, Bhageria discussed the importance of better and cheaper computer vision and the growing power of AI to help power useful robots in food service and beyond.

“In my head, computer vision is absurdly important here,” said Bhageria. Now you have better sensors with cameras, better computation with GPUs, cloud computing, and deep neural networks, and better actuation.”

You can watch the food robotics panel with Bhageria and other food tech investors below.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics

Robomart Partners With PIX Moving to Build Mobile Retail Stores On Top of PIX’s Skateboard Chassis Platform

Robomart, a company that helped pioneer the concept of “store hailing” when it first brought its concept of mobile convenience stores to CES five years ago, announced it had signed a deal with autonomous mobile vehicle platform company PIX Moving to utilize PIX Moving’s expertise in autonomous vehicle production to enhance its fleet of mobile retail stores.

PIX is a logical partner for Robomart on which to build its mobile storefronts because the PIX chassis has always been designed to enable functional and end-use design flexibility from the get-go. PIX’s platform allows for custom-designed compartments, which can be optimized for specific needs like size and temperature control. When we first covered PIX here at the Spoon, one of the concepts the company envisioned was a mobile grocery or convenience store on wheels.

Chinese company Pix Moving is taking a bit of a different approach to autonomous vehicles by removing most of the vehicle. The company is building a self-driving chassis platform on top of which its customers can build whatever they like.

So a big restaurant chain could create a mobile pod of lockers for meal delivery, or a grocery store could create a temperature-controlled store on wheels. A large warehouse-type store could just attach a flat base for moving inventory around.

Since then, PIX has expanded its vision towards building its own branded vehicles and has started calling its chassis a “skateboard chassis platform. ” The Robobus model PIX unveiled a couple of years ago looks pretty similar to the original Robomart concept, so building the next-generation autonomous Robomart models on top of the PIX platform looks like a fairly smooth transition.

I asked Robomart CEO Ali Ahmed how he sees the PIX-powered vehicles being rolled out and integrated with the current Robomart fleets, and he says that the PIX chassis-based Robomarts will start to be phased into the fleet starting near the end of 2025. Spoon readers will know that the current-gen Robomarts – which are called the Oasis model – are retrofitted sprinter vans manned by a driver and that Robomart introduced its autonomous version concept (called the Haven) last summer when it announced a funding round of $2M. Now, we know the PIX platform will power the Robomarts of the future, and, according to Ahmed, it will sit underneath both future smaller stores (like the future autonomous versions of the Oasis) and bigger stores in the Haven.

While it may not be a mobile store, you can see a PIX vehicle in action in the video below.

Meet PIX Moving Space at the park

Half a Million Deliveries & Counting: A Five-Year Snapshot of Sidewalk Robot Deliveries at George Mason

This week, sidewalk robot delivery startup Starship Technologies celebrated the fifth anniversary of its first campus deployment in the US and, as part of its announcement, gave us a peek into how its fleet has grown over the past half-decade at George Mason University (Mason).

According to Starship, their robots started rolling around Mason on January 22, 2019. Since then, they’ve grown their fleet from its initial 25 robots to 60 and the number of merchants around campus from 4 to 18. According to Starship, the Mason fleet is the world’s largest sidewalk robot delivery fleet.

Here are some of the stats about the Mason deployment sent to The Spoon:

  • Nearly 500,000 deliveries have been made.
  • The robot fleet has covered over 474,225 miles.
  • A single student has made a record 880 orders.
  • The most popular menu item has been The Original Double ‘N Fries from Steak’ n Shake, ordered 15,779 times.

It’s all interesting and impressive in some respects, but I have to admit the stat I am most curious about is the student who’s ordered using the company’s sidewalk robot 880(!) times. I’m unsure if Starship has a loyalty program, but that’s essentially the sidewalk robot equivalent of the airline million-mile club.

According to the company, since it was first deployed at Mason, the Starship fleet saw its service grow from 25,000 deliveries and 150,000 miles traveled in 2019 to over 2,000 robots, 5 million deliveries completed, and over 7 million fleet delivery miles traveled.

That it’s a university setting where Starship has racked up the most miles and has grown its fleet to its largest single deployment makes lots of sense; not only are university campuses optimized for foot traffic and have relatively predictable delivery destinations (dorms, and student halls), but they also have built-in and receptive customer populations who frequent the same locations.