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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

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.

Yo-Kai to Debut Boba Making Robot at CES 2024

In less than two weeks, Yo-Kai Express, a company that’s become synonymous with hot ramen-making robots, will show it has a sweet side with the debut of a boba-making robot at CES in Las Vegas.

Yo-Kai CEO Andy Lin told The Spoon that the company’s new robotic boba maker will be the first boba-bot that incorporates a cooking pot inside the appliance, enabling it to cook boba tapioca pearls as well as other toppings. According to Lin, the machine’s built-in cooking capability will allow it to be more than just a boba-maker, enabling it to create a variety of different hot and cold beverages and meals ranging from instant oatmeal to protein shakes to soups and coffees.

The first machine will be shipped to Netflix’s headquarters in Los Gatos, California. After that, Lin says that distribution will be a phased release with around ten boba-bots shipped to other corporate headquarters in the Bay Area. Another shipment in March will put the Yo-Kai boba machine at college campuses and other locations, and starting in June, the Yo-Kai boba-bot will be widely available to individual operators who want to operate a Yo-Kai.

And it’s with this wider availability that Yo-Kai will begin a new expansion approach that will extend beyond its current operating model. Lin says that in 2024, the company plans to phase its expansion model into one utilizing a partner model where individual operators will pay an initial startup fee to Yo-Kai, and from there, they will be able to take ownership of the boba and begin operating it. Lin says that the model, which is “franchise-like”, will offer new operators a choice of up to 1,500 different locations that Yo-Kai has helped find through a new strategic partnership with a large real estate management company.

“Usually, if a partner wants to open a boba store, they need to find a location by themselves,” said Lin. “But we don’t need them to find a location; we can actually provide a location to them. So it will be a one-stop-shop: Go to the website, select the region you want to have the machine, and we will work together with them.”

While the Yo-Kai boba-bot certainly isn’t the first automated boba-making machine, no other company has had much success in expanding beyond initial pilots and trials. Bobacino, which debuted in 2020, saw its CEO depart last month, and it’s not clear if the company is still operational. Cloutea, which debuted its boba robot at CES 2023, opened a store in Las Vegas this past April but has not expanded beyond a single location.

The new Yo-Kai boba robot will debut at CES, which starts on January 9th and runs through January 12th. The new boba bot will be featured in the food tech area on the show floor in the Venetian Expo Hall at CES.

Stay tuned to The Spoon for more food tech coverage at CES over the next two weeks.

Talking Underground Delivery With Pipedream’s Garrett McCurrach

Food delivery through underground tubes?

Sounds crazy, but it’s already happening today, and Pipedream’s Garrett McCurrach thinks it just may be the future of delivery.

We catch up with Garrett just over a week after they announced their first pilot in the Atlanta suburbs, where they have built a system that delivers food and other items underground for nearly a mile.

During this podcast, we talk about how Garrett came up with the idea, what it was like to showcase the system to Jeff Bezos, how the company is working with fast-food restaurants to rethink drive-thru pickup, and what he sees for the future of underground delivery.

Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just click play below.

 

Pipedream Launches First Underground Delivery Network in Atlanta

Forget drone delivery. The cool kids are taking it underground.

That’s at least the vision of Pipedream, a startup building a system to enable delivery through underground pipes. The company, which is based in Austin Texas, has announced the launch of its first underground delivery network in partnership with Peachtree Corners, a smart city development in the broader Metro Atlanta region.

The new system in Peachtree Corners stretches nearly a mile, linking the development’s shopping center to Curiosity Lab’s 25,000-square-foot innovation hub. The Curiosity Hub is part office park, part event center, and now the employees who work there can order food and select (read smaller) items from local restaurants and stores and have them delivered via Pipedream’s underground delivery robots via the tube network.

With the announcement, Pipeline has released a video showcasing its first deployed delivery network, and it’s pretty cool to watch. As you can see below, the system basically looks like a small underground train network where robots pull the payloads through the pipes to their end destination.

First Ever Underground Delivery

Spoon readers will remember that we’ve covered Pipeline in the past, most recently after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was spotted checking out a demo of Pipeline. At the time, Pipeline CEO mentioned that the company was targeting master-planned communities and was showing off an early system in the Atlanta area. Now, just six months later, their system has been launched in the Atlanta suburbs.

With the launch of the system, this looks to be what may be a first in terms of an actual automation-powered pipe delivery network, and now that it’s launched, it will be interesting to see if other master-planned communities embrace the idea. For its part, Pipeline is also working with brands to build out pilots for its underground delivery where it makes sense, such as with Wendy’s as a way to deliver food to drive-up customers.

With Launch of Bowl Food Robot, Cibotica Points to Dispensing Technology and Small Footprint as Differentiators

This week, Canadian food robot startup Cibotica announced that its first food robot is fully operational in a multi-brand ‘digital food hall’ called Food Republic in Vancouver, Canada. According to the company, the fully robotic makeline named Remy can assemble up to 300 salads per hour utilizing the company’s proprietary dispensing technology.

Images of Remy, Cibotica's food assembly robot

Cibotica cofounder Ashkan Mirnabavi says that after he opened his first restaurant in 2019, he experienced the challenges firsthand around finding and training employees to keep his restaurant up and running. The former engineer turned restaurant operator started looking at available automation technology but felt none of the available solutions fit what he was looking for, so he joined forces with his two other cofounders, Darius Sahebjavaher (CTO) and Soroush Sefidkar (co-CEO), to start a food robotics company.

Once they started looking at different technologies, such as robotic arms, Mirnabavi said they knew they had to build a system that integrated with existing restaurant operations. They soon started thinking about building a robotic makeline and focused on a system that had the flexibility to do a variety of ingredients and fit into existing restaurant kitchen spaces.

“We learned that the biggest hurdle is the dispensing and accurately dispensing ingredients,” said Mirnabavi. “All these other solutions that existed, you had to have different technology for different ingredients, which makes your assembly line much bigger. And that’s where we said, ‘okay if we can come up with one solution that is capable of basically all types of ingredients with different characteristics and a different temperature,’ we might be able to solve it.”

With the system now operating in his Food Republic digital food hall, Mirnabavi and his partners are eyeing a variety of future applications and partners that can utilize its robot.

“Quick service restaurants, salad bowls, they were like an entry point for us,” said Mirnabavi. “Fresh produce processing centers, where they go through tons and tons of ingredients. Meal kit companies, there is a lot of manual work. There are markets where there are assembly lines, where people scoop different ingredients into these small, smaller, pre-packaged meals and put everything in a box. Application-wise, the market is huge.”

The market’s getting crowded quickly, with a variety of players such as Hyphen, Lab37, Eatch, and TechMagic offering robotic food assembly for a QSR’s back of house. Cibotica believes their focus on flexibility and small footprint should garner interest from restaurant partners who want to use automation for bowl food assembly in their restaurants.

As for business models, Mirnabavi says, at least for the time being, the company plans to offer a flexible model for its early customers, either through a robotics-as-a-service monthly payment plan or through the purchase of the machines. As time passes, he says they may choose to use one model over the other. The company is currently raising money for their next round of investment.

Scoop: Travis Kalanick is Building Restaurant Robots With Help of Uber’s Former Head of Self-Driving Cars

For the past half-decade, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been endeavoring to reimagine how restaurants operate by building a nationwide network of ghost kitchens under a business called CloudKitchens. That business, which he and his team constructed stealthily under a holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS), was joined at the hip by another technology business called Otter, which sells restaurant order management software.

Now, the Spoon has learned that Kalanick’s CSS is building its own restaurant automation and robotics business under the name Lab37. According to company sources and a blog post quietly published by the company in September, Lab37 has built its first restaurant robot, a bowl-making robot called (what else?) Bowl Builder.

The Bowl Builder, which makes hundreds of hot or cold bowls per day, is fully NSF-certified and its dimensions are 20′ wide by 9′ deep. The system can handle the entire process of making bowl food, as bowls run on a conveyor belt under 18 different dispenser modules for ingredients and sauces before getting sealed, utensils added, and bagged up for pickup.

The Spoon has learned that Lab37 is headed up by Eric Meyhofer, an executive and automation innovator who formerly ran Uber’s self-driving car unit for years (and racked up quite a few patents during that time). Meyhofer, who is listed on LinkedIn as a co-founder of Carnegie Robotics – a robotics development lab that helped to give birth to Uber’s self-driving car unit – also served as a commercialization specialist at Carnegie Melon University, his alma mater and widely recognized as the world’s leading robotics research university. Meyhofer does not list Lab37 on his LinkedIn profile.

Lab37 is located in a warehouse on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The location includes a commercial research and development kitchen, fabrication shop, engineering office, electrical engineering lab, assembly lab, and testing lab.

Lab37 has been trialing the Bowl Builder out through its Hungry Group virtual restaurant division, which is described as a R&D kitchen company building “the future of dining, where diverse options, cutting-edge convenience, and technology unite.” According to the company, the Hungry Group’s R&D kitchen is in the same warehouse where the Bowl Builder food robot was designed, tested, and assembled.

The Spoon has learned that the early trials with the Bowl Builder have gone very well, and locations that have tried it out have seen substantial increases in revenue. According to a Lab37 spokesperson, the company plans to trial the Bowl Builder in additional locations in the coming months, including more CloudKitchen locations.

One potential customer of Lab37’s Bowl Builder is Salted, a fast-growing bowl-food startup that has leaned heavily into the ghost kitchen model in recent years. While Salted has several physical brick-and-mortar locations, its CEO, Jeff Applebaum, has indicated that much of the company’s future growth will come via ghost kitchens. The Spoon has learned that Salted is a customer at a number of CloudKitchen’s locations.

Interestingly, this news comes just a few weeks after Spain-based Remy Robotics announced they were also working with CloudKitchens for its US entry. The Remy robot, which uses a robotic arm and looks to have a smaller footprint than Lab37’s Bowl Builder, debuted in the US under Remy’s Better Days virtual restaurant brand in the New York City market.

Stepping back, this latest revelation about Kalanick’s push into food automation shows his current journey is not too dissimilar from the one he took with Uber. As with his former company, Kalanick is moving from a startup concept that rethinks the traditional usage model of a long-standing industry (it was taxis and travel with Uber, and now it’s restaurants with CSS) and is building enabling technology as the second (or third) act to help realize this vision. He’s using the well-worn tech industry playbook of building “picks and shovels” for an industry, but only after spending time showing the industry there’s a way of doing things that’s is much different than the long-standing model.

Cafe X’s Robot Barista is Now Slinging Coffee in Tesla’s Berlin Giga Factory

This week, Cafe X CEO Henry Hu retweeted Elon Musk, who had tweeted out a video showcasing a flythrough video of Giga Berlin. The reason? Tesla’s newest Giga Factory serves coffee and tea using one of Hu’s robotic coffee shops.

While the robot barista’s arms are painted red with the words Tesla printed on them, anyone familiar with the Cafe X robot coffee shops will instantly recognize them.

Cafe X was one of the early arrivers in robot-powered front-of-house food service, but in the last couple of years, the company’s been quiet as it closed most of its San Francisco locations. In recent months, however, Hu has been tweeting about the company shipping out new Cafe Xs and getting Tesla merch, so it’s probably not too surprising one showed up in a Giga Factory. It probably didn’t hurt that one of Cafe X’s original investors is Jason Calcanis, a close associate of Elon, who has been actively pushing the idea.

Cafe X’s last venture round that was disclosed was in 2020, and it recently raised money via the crowdfunding platform Republic. The company’s disclosure on Republic said its robot cafes at SFO generated $700 thousand in 2022 alone and that the company had shipped five robotic coffee shops in 2022. As of early spring, the company said it had orders for ten more in 2023 and expected to ship a total of 50 this year. The company listed the cost for a Cafe X at $285 thousand with an annual software and service cost of $15 thousand.

Meet The Dutch Robotic Kitchen That Makes Five Thousand Meals Per Day

Last month, a Dutch startup named Eatch announced they had built a fully automated robotic kitchen that makes up to five thousand meals per day. The company’s new robot, designed to work in a high-production centralized kitchen, has been making meals in the Amsterdam market for food service and catering giant ISS for the past four months.

The Eatch robotic kitchen platform handles the entire meal production flow. It oils the cooking pans, dispenses refrigerated ingredients, adds spices, plates the food, and cleans the cooking pans when everything is done.

You can watch it in action in the video below:

Eatch - World's First Robotic Kitchen for Large-scale Cooking - Order meals at: maaltijden.eatch.me

Eatch’s robotic kitchen uses a pot system similar to those we’ve seen in the Spyce kitchen, Kitchen Robotics’ Beastro, and TechMagic’s pasta robot in Tokyo. The Eatch’s tilted pans rotate and toss the food inside, using an internal peg to push the food into a rotation and then drop from the top, creating a toss fry cooking motion common in stir fry kitchens.

What’s most impressive about the Eatch is the throughput, creating five thousand daily meals (and the company says it has the potential to produce up to 15 thousand per day), handling the entire production flow. Most robotic kitchens we’ve seen have production volumes much lower than this and often don’t incorporate plating and pot cleaning in the automation flow.

Company CEO Jelle Sijm told The Spoon that the company has approximately 10 employees and has raised €4.5 million. The company expansion plan includes working with partners who can handle the daily operations, and Eatch will provide the automation technology, software, and recipes. Sijm sees Eatch working with partners to produce food in centralized kitchens for contact caterers. Sijm says they are eyeing an American market entry and says the company is currently in talks with some grocery chains and contract caterers in the US.

Sodexo to Deploy SavorEat’s Plant-Based Burger Printing Robot at the University of Denver

This week, food service giant Sodexo and plant-based 3D printing specialist SavorEat announced they will be rolling out SavorEat’s 3D printing robot at the University of Denver. The deployment of the SavorEat Robot Chef marks the first deployment of the Israel-based company’s 3D printing technology in the U.S.

SavorEat, which went public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 2021, has been building its plant-based 3D printing technology for half a decade. The printer, which both prints and cooks plant-based burgers, was first rolled out in Israel last fall through a partnership with catering company Yarzin-Sella. The printer enables customers to customize their burger, choosing the size of the burger, doneness, protein level, and cooking style.

SavorEat, which initially pushed its product’s plant-based 3D printing angle, started focusing on promoting its burger printer as a robotic chef over the last year-plus with the launch of its second-generation platform. The company has published several blog posts hailing the benefits of automation in restaurants and says it plans to help restaurants reduce costs through back-of-house automation.

The partnership with Sodexo was inked back in 2021, and at the time, the two companies indicated they would deploy the plant-based meat printer in 2022. From the announcement:

Sodexo will examine the robot chef system and the first product developed by SavorEat, a plant-based protein burger, within higher education institutions across the U.S. In parallel, both parties are working on reaching an agreement for the distribution of SavorEat products.

In 2020, SavorEat CEO Racheli Vizman told The Spoon that their plans extend beyond food service and that the company would someday build a home-based 3D meat printer.

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create a variety of products.”

While you may need to wait a while for the home version of SavorEat’s Robot Chef, in the meantime, you can try out a SavorEat printed burger at the University of Denver’s Rebecca Chopp Grand Central Market in Community Commons starting this week.

Food Tech News: Samsung Heads Into the Kitchen, Robot Meets Artisan Pizza

The Spoon is back for another week of food tech news, and this week Michael Wolf and Allen Weiner talk about what’s going on in the smart kitchen, alt protein, CRISPR and more.

Here are the stories we talk about:

  • Samsung and LG play nice in the kitchen, and Samsung launches food app. 
  • MOTO Pizza, where you wait a month for your pizza order, is crazy about Picnic’s pizza robot
  • Pairwise reups partnership with Bayer for CRISPR-based innovation
  • GFI says plant-based meat sales were up in 2022
  • DoorDash is bringing AI to their apps and call centers

As always, you can just hit play below to listen to the podcast, head to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or listen on your favorite podcast app.

As mentioned in the show, the Spoon is once again leading the charge for food tech at CES, the world’s biggest tech show. If you are interested in showcasing your future food or food tech innovation, head over to The Spoon’s CES page for more info.

Also, on October 25th, we’ll be bringing leaders at the intersection of food and AI together for a day of conversation. Please use the discount code PODCAST for 15% off tickets to the Food AI Summit.

With the Launch of Samsung Food, Samsung Hypes AI & Consolidates Food Features Acquired Over the Years

Over the years, Samsung has acquired and launched several products in an effort to become the king of the tech-powered kitchen.

First, there was the launch of the Family Hub refrigerator, the company’s attempt to create a smart fridge built around the company’s own operating system and packed with technology like fridge cams to identify food and help you with your shopping.

Then, there was the acquisition of Whisk, an intelligent food and shopping app that helped pioneer the shoppable recipe space. Whisk had not only amassed an extensive food database, which would ultimately become a foundation for some of Family Hub’s (now Bespoke Family Hub) shopping and recipe capabilities, but it also served up the foundational ‘Food AI’ that is now being pushed to the forefront by Samsung.

Then, there were various attempts to use AI through automation in the kitchen, as the company announced (and never released commercially) different cooking and kitchen-task robots at CES.

And we can’t forget that Samsung also took some of the smart home technology from its SmartThings smart home group (another Samsung acquisition) and paired it with Whisk’s recipe intelligence to create SmartThings Cooking, a guided cooking app.

This leads us to this week, in which Samsung announced what amounts to packaging up this collected knowledge and technology – save for (at least for now) the robotics – into a newly expanded app and platform called Samsung Food. Samsung Food, which the company describes as “a personalized, AI-powered food and recipe platform,” looks like a significant step forward for the company’s efforts to build a centralized digital food management app. It also is a logical move to consolidate much of the collected efforts under the Samsung brand after the company had collected a variety of platforms that served as a foundation for what we see today.

Let’s take a look at precisely what the company unveiled. In the announcement, Samsung detailed four primary areas of activity for Samsung Food: Recipe Exploration and Personalization, AI-Enhanced Meal Planning, Kitchen Connectivity, and Social Sharing.

For recipe exploration, Samsung looks like it’s essentially using what was an already somewhat evolved feature set in Whisk. Samsung says that it can save recipes to a user’s digital recipe box anytime and from anywhere, create shopping lists based on their ingredients, and is accessible via Family Hub. In addition to mobile devices, users can access Samsung Food with their Bespoke Family Hub fridges, which will provide recipe recommendations based on a list of available food items managed by the user and shoppable recipe capabilities.

With the Personalize Recipe function, Samsung Food looks like it builds on the personalization engine created by Whisk and plans to take it further through integration with Samsung Health. According to the announcement, by the end of this year, Samsung plans to integrate with Samsung Health to power suggestions for diet management. This integration will factor in info such as a user’s body mass index (BMI), body composition, and calorie consumption in pursuit of their health goals and efforts to maintain a balanced diet.

The AI-Enhanced meal planning feature looks like a longer-view planning feature that consolidates personalized recipe recommendations, and it will no doubt similarly benefit from the integration of Samsung Health.

With Connected Cooking, Samsung has rebranded and extended the features of the SmartThings Cooking app, adding new devices like the BeSpoke oven and incorporating some of the same guided cooking features.

And, of course, a consolidated food-related platform from Samsung wouldn’t be complete without a social media component. My guess is the Social Sharing feature – which will allow users to share with their community – is the least necessary addition to the app and will ultimately not be all that successful, as consumers will continue to use mainline social apps (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook) for their food-related social sharing.

The company also teased expanded computer vision capabilities in 2024 in the announcement. The company’s Vision AI technology “will enable Samsung Food to recognize food items and meals photographed through the camera and provide details about them, including nutrition information.”

Overall, I’m impressed with the overall cohesiveness and trajectory of what I see in Samsung Food. I think it’s a sign that Samsung – despite having the occasional misstep and strategic vagueness around their food vision – looks like they remain committed to becoming the leader of the future kitchen, something that they started way back in 2016 with the launch of the Family Hub line.

Is IdeaLab’s Bill Gross Building a Food Prep and Delivery Robot?

Every now and then, an interesting patent appears in patent searches that make you wonder exactly what someone’s up to. Now, don’t get me wrong. Patents are issued all the time, and most of the time, a real product or business isn’t created. But when it comes to someone like IdeaLab‘s Bill Gross – an inventor known for creating dozens of products and companies – you have to wonder what he’s got up his sleeve.

First, let’s look at the patent. Granted B1 status yesterday, the patent, US 11738466 B1, is titled “Robot For Preparing And Delivering Food Items” The patent description goes on to describe just that:

The automated food preparation and delivery robot comprises a communications system configured to receive a food order and address from a customer, a navigation system configured to automatically drive the vehicle to the address, and an automated food preparation system configured to prepare food in accordance with the food order while en route to the customer address.

The automated food preparation system is configured to determine a drive time to travel to the customer address, and determine a preparation time to prepare the food in accordance with the food order. If the drive time is greater than the preparation time, the robot waits and then begins preparing the food after a delay substantially equal to the drive time minus the preparation time. In this manner, preparation of the food coincides with arrival at the customer address.

We’ve seen lots of crazy ideas that tie together mobility and cooking, but this is the first one that I’ve seen that is a fully autonomous robotic vehicle and food prep all in one:

The invention in the preferred embodiment is an automated food preparation and delivery robot configured to prepare food orders while en route to a customer address, without the aid of a person on the vehicle. The automated food preparation and delivery robot comprises: a vehicle, a communications system configured to receive a food order and address from a customer, a navigation system configured to automatically drive the vehicle to the address; and an automated food preparation system configured to prepare the food in accordance with the food order while en route to the customer address and dispense the food upon arrival.

Here’s a figure from the patent that outlines the sequence of processing a food order:

Definitely ambitious and kinda crazy, especially considering past venture-funded ideas that combines food, automation and mobility haven’t exactly been successful at this point.

On the other hand, this is Bill Gross, a well-known inventor and successful entrepreneur. And since Gross, who runs one of the longest-running Silicon Valley technology incubators around, is listed as the sole inventor on the patent, my guess is this is an idea he’s at least somewhat invested in.

Still, it’s yet to be seen whether or not he’s planning on productizing the concept. Like I said, most patented ideas remain just that, ideas. But given Gross’s history of both founding successful companies and a deep interest in robotics – he was a co-founder of Evolution Robotics, a maker of cleaning robots acquired in 2012 by iRobot – it’s worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve reached out to Gross for comment, and I’ll let you know what I hear.