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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Pink Dot Using Postmates’ Serve Robot to Delivery Food in West Hollywood

Residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Hollywood shouldn’t be surprised if they see bright pink robots zipping along its sidewalks soon. Local market Pink Dot is now using Postmates’ Serve bot to make food deliveries in that part of town.

WehoVille reports that Pink Dot started using the robots last Thursday and that it is the only business using robots for deliveries in that neighborhood. Customers ordering food from Pink Dot through Postmates will have the option of choosing either a human or a robot make the delivery. When the robot arrives at a home or building, the customer will get a text message saying its food is there along with a special code to unlock the robot to retrieve their order.

Pink Dot is using three robots (named Pinky, Dotty and Solly), and the whole program is currently a three-month test. A human will still escort robots out on deliveries to help with any problems that arise, but those humans are hanging back to also see how people interact with the robots as they pass by (Pink Dot is giving out hats if you snap a selfie with the robot).

The robot deliveries from Pink Dot are also free of charge, as opposed to the $5 – $10 fee that comes with humans making the deliveries. This free robot service should help kickstart adoption, but we’ll have to see if a fee is implemented if robots delivery becomes more widespread.

It should be noted that this robot delivery program is happening right on the heels of Uber completing its acquisition of Postmates. While Uber has dabbled in drone delivery, it hasn’t really talked publicly about sidewalk robot delivery. But Uber Eats is currently the revenue generator for Uber, and anything that could help bring costs down for burrito deliveries is something Uber will be interested in.

One interesting aspect of this Pink Dot + Postmates delivery deal is that the robots are being co-branded by Pink Dot. So these robots won’t be serving any other restaurants or markets in the area. This also means that they’ll be advertising Pink Dot as they are out and about. Kiwi robots, which started rolling out in San Jose this past summer, have Kiwi branding and serve multiple restaurants in different neighborhoods there. Starship’s robots, which are making grocery deliveries in Modesto, CA, also carry their own Starship branding.

We bring it up because delivery robots are still an emerging business and there are questions around business models that make the most sense. Should robots be part of a third-party delivery fleet serving many restaurants, or leased directly to one restaurant/grocer for its own use?

Whether or not a robot is being leased by a particular establishment is also important because it speaks to the infrastructure needed to implement robot deliveries. If the robots are Pink Dot’s, then they will presumably live at that market, meaning they will wait and be charged there until they leave to make a delivery. If robots serve multiple restaurants, that raises questions about where the robots stay when they aren’t in use and where they are charged. For example, will they clutter city sidewalks?

We sent a note to Postmates with some follow up questions and will update this post when we hear back.

For those in WeHo who want to get a glimpse of the future, Pink Dot’s robots are available for delivery now, but only during daylight hours.

How Alphabet’s AI-Powered Leap in Protein Structure Prediction Could Accelerate New Food Development

This past week Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced that its DeepMind group has solved a long-standing grand challenge in the scientific community around protein structure prediction.

In 1972, scientist Christian Anfinsen predicted that a protein’s structure could be determined by its amino acid sequence. However, figuring out that sequence is immensely difficult since there are near-infinite ways in which a protein can fold. This led Cyrus Levinthal to postulate that calculating all the known configurations would take longer than the age of the known universe if our only way there was brute force calculation (a problem often referred to as Levinthal’s Paradox).

Thankfully, now we won’t have to wait forever (literally) since DeepMind’s DeepFold AI can predict protein structure to the width of an atom within days. My former Gigaom colleague, Darrell Etherington, explained the feat in a post on Techcrunch:

The test that AlphaFold passed essentially shows that the AI can correctly figure out, to a very high degree of accuracy (accurate to within the width of an atom, in fact), the structure of proteins in just days — a very complex task that is crucial to figuring out how diseases can be best treated, as well as solving other big problems like working out how best to break down ecologically dangerous material like toxic waste.

As many in the world of future food development know, AI is becoming an increasingly important tool to accelerate the development of new proteins and other food-building blocks. Companies like Climax Foods are embracing machine learning to help them develop new approaches to making food like plant-based cheese. And now, with DeepMind’s advances in protein folding prediction paths, we can expect AI to become an even more important tool in new food development.

To get a feel for what the impact of this milestone might be, I asked Sudeep Agarwala, a synthetic microbiologist for Gingko, what he thought DeepMind’s work could possibly mean for food:

“There’s so much that can happen with this,” Agarwala told me. “Think about different textures or mouth feels with food proteins that the AI can design. Or even different amino acid contents for the proteins. And that’s just for the end proteins (if you want the protein as the end product).”

“If we’re engineering proteins inside the cell to produce a small molecule (a flavor, a fragrance, a fat) we can think about making completely new enzymes with multiple functionalities. So something like a 5-step process might be condensed. This has the potential to simplify so much of the metabolic engineering we do to produce these products.”

Agarwala also believes that using technology like that of DeepMind’s will also be way more effecient in terms of resources and have a much smaller ecological footprint:

“Even if the proteins aren’t ultimately going to be consumed, being able to rationally design enzymes that are involved in producing small molecules (think fats, fragrances, or flavors) is really exciting to think about,” said Agarwala. “This isn’t small potatoes: think about how much energy and resources goes into making vanilla or saffron, for example. Being able to do this more efficiently will provide a less ecologically expensive way to produce these materials.”

Just as disease and virology experts are buzzing about what this new milestone could mean for their work, it’s clear food scientists like Agarwala are equally as excited.

“It’s such an exciting time to be a biologist!” said Agarwala.

Yes, it is.

Ocado-backed Karakuri Unveils DK-One Meal Assembling Robot, Raises £6.5M

Karakuri, a London-based food robotics company, today unveiled its DK-One meal assembly robot. The company also announced that it has raised £6.5 million (~ $8.68M USD) in new funding led by firstminute capital with participation from Hoxton Ventures, Taylor Brothers, Ocado Group and the Future Fund. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Karakuri to £13.5 million (~ $18.3M USD).

Karakuri first popped on to our radar in May of 2019 after Ocado, a robot-forward grocer based in the U.K., led Karakuri’s Seed round of funding. At the time, we knew Karakuri was working on the DK-One but didn’t know what the machine looked like or what it was capable of.

Meant for QSRs, catering companies and grocery retailers, the DK-One is an all-in-one enclosed 2m x 2m kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals. The DK-One doesn’t cook any food, but rather holds ingredients at proper temperatures until the order is placed.

In its current pre-production version, the DK-One holds 18 ingredients (fruits, yogurts, proteins, veggies, etc.), can make between 6 – 12 bowls at any one time (depending on the complexity of the individual orders), and can make 100 bowls an hour.

Once an order is placed either through a mobile app or accompanying tablet, an articulating arm inside the DK-One grabs a container, fills it with the necessary ingredients and deposits the finished meal into a cubby for pickup. You can see it in action in this video:

The DK-One is arriving, of course during a global pandemic, when restaurants, food retailers and customers are all looking for ways to reduce the amount of human-to-human interaction involved with getting meals to customers. In addition to removing the number of people interacting with an order, the DK-One provides additional hygiene in other ways. The ingredients themselves are individually stored in their own compartments, keeping them away from the outside while preventing cross-contamination. The DK-One also provides temperature monitoring and auditing to ensure that the cold ingredients are kept cold and the hot ones hot.

Karakuri’s robot only takes two to three people to operate on-site, and it’s easy to see the DK-One at a grocer or cafeteria, cranking out meals through out the day: Yogurt bowls in the morning, and switching to hot vegetable or chicken dishes in the afternoon.

Barney Wragg, CEO and co-founder of Karakuri, gave me a Zoom demo of the DK-One last month and told me that inbound interest in the DK-One has changed since the pandemic.

“Pre-pandemic the biggest amount of interest was from the challenger brands, the guys trying to come up with new poke restaurant. They had the least legacy systems,” Wragg said. But the pandemic was a huge wake up call for bigger brands and Wragg said they’ve seen a massive surge of interest from large chains in Europe and around the world.

Wragg wouldn’t say how much the DK-One costs, only that Karakuri is exploring different models for different customers.

In addition to being useful during a pandemic, the DK-One also aligns with other food-making robots we’ve seen from an operational perspective. Like Picnic’s pizza assembling robot, the DK-One dispenses a specific amount of food each time, helping to eliminate waste during production. Like Spyce’s new Infinite Kitchen system, the DK-One also allows for customization, so people can order a meal more to their dietary or taste preferences.

The first DK-One will be installed this June at an undisclosed location. With its fresh funding, Karakuri says it will accelerate the development of its technologies and develop new products.

Heali Launches its AI-Based Nutrition and Meal Planning App

Heali, a Los Angeles-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create more personalized nutrition advice and meal planning for people, announced today the beta release of its mobile app.

The Heali app helps people adhere to their choice of 30 different diets (Vegan, Low FODMAP, Paleo, etc.) through recipes as well as grocery shopping and restaurant meal selection guidance.

Heali uses a number of features to help people with their nutritional choices. It has optical character recognition (OCR) so a user can take a photo of a menu description or a product’s nutritional label and the app will understand what ingredients are in that item. There’s a barcode scanner for use on products at the grocery store. Heali also has a meal planner, which analyzes the nutritional makeup of hundreds of thousands of recipes, products and meals to provide its nutritional guidance.

But the Heali app isn’t just for people wanting to eat fewer carbs. I spoke with Heali Founder and CEO Kyle Dardashti last month, who explained that his app can also provide guidance for people with certain medical conditions. For example, if a user has Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), they can use the app when grocery shopping to see if products contain certain emulsifiers that exacerbate their condition.

Heali is part of the personalized nutrition/food-as-medicine movement, and there is certainly no shortage of players in that space. There are other mobile apps like Yes Health and Foodvisor, hardware devices like the Mixfit, and meal delivery services like Kaigo. All of these are looking to help you eat healthier.

When asked what separates Heali from all the other competitors in the space, Dardashti told me, “Others have taken 10 diets or so, they have their subset of recipes in their app. They’ve tagged those few hundred recipes for how it adheres to those 10 diets.” He added that Heali has “built the engine that can do it all programmatically. Now it’s not just one of 10 tags. It has been done programmatically with AI.”

This, according to Dardashti, makes Heali, the most personalized dietary engine on the market.

The proof, as always, will be in the (diet-approved) pudding. The Heali app is free on both iOS and Android, and those interested can join the waitlist. Beta users will be admitted in cohorts.

South Korea: LG’s Robots to Ride Elevators and Make Convenience Store Deliveries

Delivery robots are making their way indoors. At least, they are starting to in South Korea. ZDNet reports today that LG has started using its Cloi Servebots to make deliveries from a local convenience store to anyone within the LG Science Park in Seoul.

The Serve bot, which features a series of shelves to hold food and drinks, will be able to get on the elevator at the Science Park and navigate nine above-ground floors as well as the basement to make deliveries to people there.

Typically, food delivery robots stop outside of a building, requiring the recipient to come out to retrieve the order. But robots in South Korea are starting to cross that threshold, as it were, to venture inside office and residential buildings to make deliveries more direct.

Earlier this month, Woowa Brothers announced that it was working with HDC I-Controls and Hyundai Elevator to allow Dilly robots to enter a residential complex and autonomously work the elevator.

As with the Woowa deal, there are still some details left unclear by ZDNet’s report about LG’s machines. To use the Cloibot, a user places an order through the KakaoTalk chat app. A human at the GS25 convenience store packs the order into the robot and sends it off. Then, as ZDNet writes:

The robots will then depart and send their destination information to a nearby elevator wirelessly. Once the robots arrive at their destination, they will call and text the customer to notify them of their arrival.

As with Woowa, which didn’t mention how its robots would navigate to a specific apartment after getting off an elevator, we don’t know how far the LG bot will go. Will it travel to a lobby, or a conference room or to a specific desk? Hopefully we’ll see more details from LG soon.

The bigger point is that delivery robots are gaining the ability to traverse indoor settings at the right time. The pandemic has businesses looking for a way to reduce human-to-human contact to reduce potential virus transmission. Having a robot means that a store or restaurant doesn’t have to send one of its workers out to make deliveries, and office/residential buildings can cut down on the number of different people coming in and out its doors.

Zippin Cashierless Convenience Store Now Open in Mile High Stadium

Back when they were open and operating at full capacity, stadiums were an excellent way to get a glimpse at the future of food tech. The high-volume, high-speed nature of eating at sporting events and monster truck rallies lent itself to things like robots, AI for line management and mobile ordering.

While the pandemic shut stadiums, arenas and civic centers down for most of the year, some, like Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado have re-opened, albeit cautiously. Only 5,000 fans can spread out across Mile High’s 76,125 seats for Broncos games. And though the crowd size may be diminished, that isn’t stopping Mile High from going high-tech with its approach to concessions.

Earlier this, foodservice operator Aramark tapped Zippin to transform the Mile High’s Drink MKT store into a cashierless checkout experience. Zippin’s technology, which includes cameras and shelf sensors as well as computer vision and AI, allow shoppers to tap their credit card as they walk into the store, grab what they want and leave. Upon exit, customers get charged automatically and receive an itemized receipt. The new Drink MKT opened at the end of September this year.

Not only is the Zippin-powered store contactless, Zippin CEO, Krishna Motukuri told me by phone this week that the entire transaction process is faster. Between grabbing what you want, standing in line and checking out with a cashier, the traditional retail transaction can takes minutes. With Zippin cashierless checkout, Motokuri said “We were able to show that most of the customers checked in, picked their stuff walked out in 45 seconds.”

Mile High Stadium is the second sports venue to house a Zippin convenience store. In September of last year the startup opened one in the Golden 1 Center arena in Sacramento.

For its part, Mile High Stadium is no stranger to high-tech concessions. Last year the stadium used a robot to pour out Bud Lights to thirsty fans.

Motukuri told me that his company has seen an influx of interest from stadiums and office buildings as they look to create more contactless retail experiences when they re-open. For example, office buildings want to replace cafeterias with contactless grab-and-go food options. It will face competition there from Amazon, which has also openly explored the idea of putting small Go stores in offices.

How many more stadiums Zippin builds in is dependent upon how soon those buildings open up. The pandemic is still going strong, but there is a potential light at the end of the tunnel with the forthcoming arrival of vaccines. That said, even when the virus recedes, fans will probably still be a little gun shy about congregating in stores for a long time just to grab a Gatorade, so cashierless checkout could be the big winner at the big games.

With Self-Driving Delivery Vehicles, KFC’s International Brands Keep Pushing Us Into the Future

As with many posts we write about on The Spoon, there is the news and then there is the story.

The news rumbling across Twitter and as reported by Cnet’s Roadshow is that KFC-branded self-driving vehicles were spotted on the road in China bringing fried chicken to people outside. Roadshow reports that this “restaurant on wheels” looks like it’s a partnership between Yum Brands (which owns KFC) and a Chinese company called Neolix (though neither company confirmed that news). From Roadshow’s story:

As for how the little food pods work, it looks like customers make a selection via screens and pay via a QR code and then a door opens to reveal their order. It’s not clear what stops someone from taking more than what they ordered, but surely there’s some sort of system for that. There isn’t anyone inside preparing food as it happens.

Keeping people from taking food that isn’t theirs probably isn’t too big of an issue. This could be addressed either through cameras and computer vision or shelf sensors or both. If a person took more than they had ordered, they would probably just get charged more.

So the news is that China has self-driving cars acting as mobile restaurants. That’s cool. But the bigger story here is what the heck is going on with the international KFC brands? This rolling chicken stand is just the latest example of the company bringing its food into a sci-fi-style future. Consider other moves that KFC has done abroad:

  • A KFC in Moscow is using a system of conveyor belts and an articulating arm to shuttle food from the kitchen into a locker from which customers pick up their order.
  • In July, KFC Russia announced that it was “launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory.”
  • Last month, KFC in Korea partnered with Hyundai to develop chicken frying robots.

I realize the grass is always greener on the other side, but it seems like the only thing KFC in the U.S. is working is… a better drive-thru (womp womp). I mean, that’s important, but come on! Where are our robots?

Autonomous Middle-Mile Company Gatik Raises $25M

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik announced today that it has raised a $25 million Series A round of funding. The round was co-led by Wittington Ventures and Innovation Endeavors with participation from FM Capital and Intact Ventures, as well as existing investors Dynamo Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, AngelPad and others. This brings the total amount raised by Gatik to $29.5 million.

Unlike other players in the self-driving delivery space, the Palo Alto, California-based Gatik is focused on the middle-mile — that is, the intra-location routes for a business, for example warehouse to store, store to store, etc.

The advantage of this, from a self-driving vehicle perspective, is that these middle-mile routes are fixed and repeated. This reduces the amount of “thinking” that a self-driving vehicle has to do as it carries goods around because it’s not encountering as many new scenarios. These fixed routes can also help put regulators creating laws around self-driving vehicles more at ease because of their limited scope and reach.

From a business’ perspective, like a grocer, a fleet of autonomous middle-mile vehicles could run all day, every day, ensuring that locations are always fully stocked. In its press announcement, Gatik said that its autonomous vehicles are operating up to seven days a week, 12 hours a day, on single routes up to 300 miles.

Along with its funding announcement, Gatik today also announced that Canada’s Loblaw grocery chain will deploy a fleet of five Gatik vehicles for middle mile delivery in Toronto starting in January 2021. Gatik’s cargo trucks feature temperature control, so they can be used for the transport of cold and frozen foods as well.

In the Loblaw press announcement, Gatik said that its autonomous vehicles will run between automated picking facilities and retail stores, and allows for inventory pooling across multiple location, as well as contactless delivery.

November has been a busy month for autonomous delivery. Last week Walmart announced a partnership with Cruise for self-driving grocery delivery. Nuro announced it had raised another $500 million for its self-driving pod vehicle solution. Part of the reason for all of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated interest in contactless delivery options to reduce human-to-human interaction.

Gatik has previously worked with Walmart, and says it has conducted 30,000 autonomous orders for multiple Fortune 500 customers across North America.  

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said Gatik raised $22.5 million. We regret the error.

Kea Raises $10M to Bring its AI-Based Phone System to More Restaurants

Kea, which makes an AI-powered virtual phone assistant for restaurants, has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. TechCrunch was first to report on the round, which was led by Marbruck, with Streamlined Ventures, Xfund, Heartland Ventures, DEEPCORE, Barrel Ventures and AVG Funds, as well as other angel investors participating. This brings the total amount raised by Kea to $17 million.

Basically, Kea is building an automated way for restaurants to answer the phone. The natural language processing software can hold a “conversation” with a customer to take and process their order. You can hear a demo of how it works on the Kea website.

As TechCrunch points out, many restaurants are understaffed and don’t always have a dedicated person to work the phones and take orders. During this time of off-premises eating, not answering the phone can translate into a lot of lost business. Plus, ordering directly from the restaurant instead of through a third-party like DoorDash or Uber Eats helps the restaurant avoid the sky-high commissions those services charge.

Kea is among a wave of natural language customer interaction systems coming to market. Google famously made news a couple years back with its Duplex AI-powered voice assistant for consumers to make automated restaurant reservations that sounded almost too human. Google also developed the CallJoy virtual phone assistant for small business owners. Clinc’s technology brings natural language conversations to the drive-thru, while McDonald’s acquired Apprente last year to add more voice capabilities to its drive-thru.

Kea told TechCrunch that its service is currently live in more than 250 restaurants including Papa John’s. With its new cash, the company is looking to be in 1,000 restaurants in 37 states next year.

PIX Moving Makes a Customizable Autonomous Chassis for Delivery

There are a variety of different autonomous vehicles of all shapes and sizes coming to market: From the cargo vans of Udelv, to the pod-like R2 from Nuro, all the way down to the cooler sized sidewalk robots from Starship.

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.

PIX’s chassis is electric and low-speed, which allows it to sidestep some of the more complex regulations associated with full-sized, full-speed autonomous vehicles. All four wheels of the PIX chassis are steerable, making it highly maneuverable. It’s also 3D printed, so its lightweight and there are fewer parts. And, like any autonomous vehicle, it is packed with an array of sensors and cameras to navigate and avoid obstacles.

I spoke with Chase Cao, PIX COO, by phone this week and he explained that his company is currently navigating the rules and regulations both in China and the U.S. to get its self-driving platform running on public roads. In the meantime, its chassis is being used on some private corporate campuses in both countries. Right now, PIX sells its chassis outright, though Cao said they may look at more of a leasing model in the future.

PIX is worth watching, especially as it relates to food delivery, because of the flexibility of its platform. By pushing the design of the compartments that carry the cargo to its customers (restaurants, grocers, etc.), those compartments can be tailored to a specific set of needs (size, temperature, etc.). This can then create more efficient delivery, and thereby generating even more demand for autonomous delivery.

In other words, there will be even more variety of self-driving vehicles coming to our roads.

Meet Bobacino, the Boba Tea Making Robot

Let’s just get this out of the way: “robo-boba” is fun (if slightly difficult) to say out loud. But it’s a phrase you could be saying it a lot more if Bobacino has its way. Today the company took the wraps off its eponymous boba tea-making robot kiosk and launched an equity crowdfunding campaign to help bring it to market.

Bobacino is currently in the prototype stage, and uses an articulating arm to mix one recipe of tea, sweetened milk, syrup and tapioca balls over ice to make its boba tea. Future versions of the machine will be able to create multiple recipes.

That’s where the equity crowdfunding campaign comes. Bobacino is looking to raise $3 million from everyday investors starting in January of 2021. Money raised will help the Santa Monica, CA-based company further develop its robo-boba and bring it to market in the second half of 2021.

Bobacino is backed by Wavemaker Partners and Embark Ventures. Sharp-eyed Spoon readers will recognize Wavemaker from its backing of Piestro, which makes a standalone robotic pizza vending machine. (For more on the future of vending machines, check out The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report.)

Like Piestro, Bobacino has a two-pronged business model that involves both owning and operating its own machines as well as co-branding with existing boba tea brands.

In addition to the assist from Wavemaker, Bobacino has its own pedigree in automated drink vending. Bobacino Founder and CEO, Darian Ahler, previously co-founded and was head of operations at Truebird, the NYC-based robotic coffee kiosk company.

The fact that Bobacino exists shows how the robotic vending space is maturing and already becoming thinly sliced. Unlike previous robot beverage companies like Cafe X and Briggo (which was acquired by Costa Coffee) that made a wide variety of coffee and tea drinks, Bobacino is only making boba tea drinks. Add Blendid’s robot smoothie maker to the mix and it’s pretty easy to envision hospital lobbies, airports (you know, after the pandemic), and even grocery stores installing a variety of these machines to offer a bevvy of different beverages (which is also fun to say out loud).

Merlot-M-G! The WineCab Wine Wall is a Robot+AI Sommelier

What do you get for the person who has everything? How about an artificially intelligent robot sommelier that can securely store, manage and suggest wines from your collection?

The Winecab Wine Wall does all that (hat tip to Boss Hunting), acting kinda like a very expensive automated wine vending machine that you’d find in only the poshest 7-Eleven.

Wine Walls come in a variety of sizes, from the more modest Curio Classic model, which holds 130 bottles ($139,000) to the 15 ft. Wine Wall, which holds 600 bottles ($249,900). Each system features:

  • An articulating arm, calibrated with a gentle touch for handling delicate bottles of wine
  • A label scanner to automatically catalog bottles you add
  • An AI assistant to recommend wines and food pairings
  • Security features to gate access to certain bottles

OK. So the Wine Wall might be a bit of pricey overkill for your average oenophile. But, it’s possible to see the Wine Wall in a restaurant or hotel or even a grocery retailer that wants to add high-tech wine recommenation to their offerings without bringing on a full-time sommelier. (Though, admittedly, the interaction with a human sommelier is part of the fun of ordering fancy wine.) Winecab even has a smaller six-foot version of its wall “coming soon” that basically looks like a wine vending machine.

The idea of a vino vending machine isn’t that far fetched. Last year PanPacific unveiled a beer vending machine that could verify the buyer’s age before dispensing. Combine that type of technology with the higher end cuisine vending companies like Yo-Kai Express, Chowbotics and Piestro are trying to create and suddenly the idea of a robot wine sommelier doesn’t seem so silly.

Hmmmm… perhaps I’ll put one on my Christmas list for next year.