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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Picnic Debuts Its Second Generation Pizza Robot

Picnic, the Seattle based pizza robot company, unveiled their second generation pizza robot this week.

The new system, which you can see in action in the video below, is a fully customizable assembly line pizza topper machine that features four different modules: sauce, cheese, pepperoni and the “granular” module, which dispenses up to three pre-cut ingredients. Like the first generation Picnic robot, the system is focused on toppings and doesn’t include a pizza oven.

The system, which like the first gen robot utilizes a conveyor belt and automatic dispenser modules, has a few noticeable differences. The biggest difference visually is that each module now is visible behind a glass casing and you can see the cheese, sauce, pepperoni and other ingredients containers as they dispense ingredients. The ingredient containers are also easily removable for washing and the tops of the modules are also clear, giving the operator a clear view into the how much of each ingredient remains.

The whole assembly line is also behind the glass unlike the first-generation Picnic. Finally, there’s a big red emergency stop shut off button on the front of each module housing.

As with any new product, actually getting them into the hands of users provides lots of useful feedback. I imaging putting the first-gen Picnic into heavy use at the Smart Kitchen Summit 2019 (where it debuted), CES and at T-Mobile Park gave the designers lots of ideas for improvement.

The new robot comes on the heels of a recent fund raise by Picnic. The company had announced a $3 million round earlier this month which it indicated it would use towards hiring and new product development. The new raise and robot come amidst an increasingly hot market for robotic pizza assembly, as companies like Middleby jump in.

One of the features that Picnic emphasizes in their new video is the solution is highly sanitary and allows for pizza assembly with limited human contact. At Smart Kitchen Summit Virtual earlier this month, Picnic CEO Clayton Wood indicated that interest in their pizza robot has actually increased with the pandemic as restaurants have been disrupted and more operators are looking into how to reduce human contact with food.

You can watch the new Picnic pizzabot in action below.

Picnic Pizza System from Picnic on Vimeo.

White Castle Expanding Use of Flippy the Robot to 10 More Locations

White Castle is adding 10 more Flippy Roars to its roster, Miso Robotics announced today. The expanded order for more Flippy robots comes after a successful pilot at one White Castle location that was announced this past July.

Through a combination of robotics, computer vision and AI, Miso’s Flippy ROAR can operate both grills to cook hamburgers as well as fry stations. The entire system is suspended on rails from above, and White Castle had been using Flippy as a fry cook. According to today’s press announcement, Flippy made an average of 360 baskets of fried food per day during its pilot with White Castle, with a total of roughly 14,580 lbs. of food and more than 9,720 baskets made.

In addition to Flippy making food in a more contactless fashion, something consumers are more aware of than ever during this pandemic, Flippy also creates more social distance among employees in the kitchen, and frees workers up to pay more attention to order fulfillment and delivery. Today’s press release noted that White Castle is open 24 hours a day, which creates its own set of staffing challenges, with late night shifts harder to fill. Because it’s a robot, Flippy can work around the clock without needing a break (or calling in sick).

White Castle’s Flippy expansion comes less than a month after Miso announced the general commercial availability of its robot. In addition to wider availability, Miso is hoping to attract new customers beyond large QSRs with its new financing option, which eliminated the $30,000 up front cost and replaced it with a $2,000 a month subscription.

The pandemic has helped accelerate interest in food robotics, and we’ve seen a flurry of activity even just this month. KFC Korea partnered with Hyundai to develop fried chicken making robots. Walmart added a Blendid smoothie making robot to one of its stores. And Costa Coffee officially took over Briggo and its automated coffee kiosks.

White Castle did not disclose where its new Flippy robots will be located, only saying they will be delpoyed in 2021. For Miso, this new contract — and, by extension, this vote of confidence in its technology — could also help boost the company’s equity crowdfunding efforts. The company is looking to raise a $30 million Series through SeedInvest, and to date has only raised a little more than $9 million.

Briggo’s Coffee Haus Becomes Costa Coffee BaristaBot

It looks like British coffee chain and Coca-Cola subsidiary Costa Coffee has acquired Austin, TX-based coffee automation company, Briggo.

We are still hunting down an official announcement, but the Briggo website is now re-branded as Costa Coffee (hat tip to the Food By Robots Twitter account). Briggo’s CoffeeHaus automated kiosk has been replaced with the Costa Coffee BaristaBot. Briggo also made an announcement on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/DrinkBriggo/status/1320725811633283074?s=20

We have reached out to Briggo to find out more.

To date, Briggo had raised $19 million in funding. Its coffee robot was among a new wave of standalone automated kiosks that were looking to re-invent the vending machine by combining robotics with higher-end food. Part of Briggo’s pitch, when it first started out, was that in addition to building its coffee robot, it was also a coffee company that selected and roasted its own beans.

Briggo had Coffee Hauses up and running in a number of locations around Austin, including two at the Austin-Bergstrom Airport and one at the San Francisco International Airport. Briggo had formed a partnership with SSP America last year to open up new kiosks in 25 airports over the course of this year and next. In January of this year, Briggo’s CEO told me that his company was going to open up five new loations in Q1 of this year.

That, of course, was before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and airline travel was decimated. So how many of those locations went up or are still live is unknown. Rival robot coffee kiosk company, Cafe X, shuttered its remaining airport locations and laid off staff. That said, Cafe X has re-focused and has plans to deploy 150 robots across Asia over the next two years.

With its deep pockets, Costa Coffee has the resources to expand and operate more kiosks than Briggo could have on its own. This story is developing and we will update as we learn more.

KFC Partners with Hyundai in Korea for Chicken Frying Robots

Hyundai Robotics announced today that it has partnered with KFC Korea are to develop robots that can cook chicken, reports The Korea Herald.

There weren’t many details in the story other than that “KFC Korea will provide its stores and cooking know-how under the deal,” according to The Herald.

However, the KFC Korea/Hyundai partnership reinforces two trends we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years. First is the continued partnership between massive automation companies and various food-related entities to develop food-related robots. The second is that — wow — who’d a thunk that KFC companies would be leading the charge into the future of food tech?

We’ve known for a while that food presents an interesting challenge for roboticists. Because it is often oddly-shaped and susceptible to bruising and damage, food is a good test case for robot manipulation. If a robot is sensitive enough carefully handle an egg, it can definitely apply that skill to other fragile materials in more industrial settings.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has added another reason for big companies to get into food robots, as restaurants and eaters seek out more contactless experiences. As a result, restaurant interest in food automation is surging. The reasons are pretty straightforward, robot cooks don’t get sick, can work around the clock, and can create more social distance in the kitchen.

Hyundai and KFC is the latest food company + industrial conglomerate partnership we’ve seen form over the past couple of years. Previously Panasonic teamed up with China’s Haidilao hot pot restaurant chain to open a robot-run kitchen, and LG is working with Korea’s Woowa Brothers to develop server robots.

But just as, if not more interesting are the moves international KFC companies are making when it comes to restaurant tech innovation. In addition to KFC Korea’s forthcoming chicken frying robots, KFC Russia has a Moscow location using a network of devices and conveyor belts to automate meal service, and the company announced in July that it was launching an initiative to use 3D bioprinters to create chicken meat.

KFC may not be able to say it’s finger-lickin’ good any longer (thank you, pandemic), but the company’s finger is definitely on the pulse of food automation.

Simbe Robotics Announces New Tally 3.0 Shelf-Scanning Robot

Simbe Robotics today announced the Tally 3.0, the company’s latest generation of inventory management robot that now features better optical capabilities and more computing power on the edge.

Simbe’s Tally is an autonomous robot that wanders grocery store aisles to monitor product levels and detect misplaced items. By automating this task with robots, Simbe says stores get a more accurate, closer-to-real time snapshot of on-shelf inventory to make more informed stocking decisions.

Improvements to the Tally include added Intel RealSense depth and RGB cameras to help the robot “see” more products on shelves and stacked in coolers. The new camera system can read data from up to 30 inches away, which, according to the press announcement, brings the robot’s recognition accuracy to almost 99 percent without needing to slow down.

The Tally 3.0 has also pushed its computer vision and AI algorithms to the device itself. By running this additional processing on the edge, the new Tally can capture and provide data to store managers more quickly without needing to send as much information to Simbe’s cloud platform. This can be especially helpful for stores that may not have a lot of internet bandwidth at their location.

Simbe claims that its Tally detects up to 10x more out-of-stock items than manual audits, and averages a 20 percent reduction in out-of-stock items at the store level.

Brad Bogolea, Simbe Robotics Co-Founder and CEO,told me by phone earlier this month that his company saw a massive uptick in interest around August and September, spurred in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent panic buying outages. As Bogolea explained to me during an interview in August, stores experienced those outages because of bad supply chain data. As we wrote then:

The bad supply chain data, according to Bogolea, is a result of the manual inventory checks that stores currently carry out. If robots are used, shelf inventory count is more accurate and up to the minute (basically) because the robots can run multiple shelf audits throughout the day. More accurate data means that stores can respond faster when there is a sudden run on particular products to speed up replenishment.

While Bogolea obviously has a horse in this particular race, we’ve definitely seen broader adoption of robots to help maintain retail inventories. Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robot is being deployed to 1,000 Walmart locations, and Badger Technologies’ robot is being used at Woodman’s Markets across the Midwest.

Schnucks Markets recently announced that it expanding the use of Simbe’s Tally to 62 of its locations, and Giant Eagle is trialing Tally as well. Simbe offers the Tally for a monthly subscription costing between $2,000 and $4,000 a month per store, depending on the number of stores. Though when I spoke to Bogolea this month, he said that through better sensor technology and improved manufacturing, the company is continuing to bring that cost down.

Chowbotics Adds Contactless Features and New Menu Items to Its Salad Robot

In this time of COVID, vending machines are fast becoming a great option for contactless meals. Well, mostly contactless. While the machines are using advanced robotics to make high-end food, many still require users to touch the same screen to place their order — a no-no in today’s hyper hygienic world.

When I talked with Chowbotics for The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report earlier this year, the company knew that this limitation was an issue and was fast-tracking a solution, which is finally here.

Yesterday, Chowbotics announced some new features for its fresh food robot, Sally. Included in the updates are contactless ordering, new menu items and dynamic video advertising, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Sally’s new contactless ordering feature lets consumers order their meals ahead of time through a new, proprietary app. Customers place their order through the app with their nearest Sally. Upon arrival at the machine, a special QR code generate by the app is scanned and the meal is made and dispensed. (The press release did not mention any new contactless payment features.)

Chowbotics also continues to expand Sally’s menu beyond salads with new options. The company today also announced that has added new chef-designed meal items including Thai noodle salad, Poke, and even a smoked brisket bowl.

Finally, Chowbotics also added new video screen to its robot, which means that operators can insert dynamic ads depending on what they want to promote. For example, the screen could display breakfast bowls in the morning and a BBQ bowl in the evening.

Since the pandemic has forced the closure of buffet-style food options like salad bars, Chowbotics and other vending companies have reporting an uptick in interest from grocery retailers. With expanded menu options, the ability to make meals around the clock and custom upsell and marketing messages throughout the day, retailers may not want to go back to staid salad bars.

UPDATE: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the video advertising would be on the touchscreen.

YPC Raises $1.8 Million (CAD) for its Versatile Robot Cooking Kiosk

YPC Technologies announced today that it has raised $1.8 million dollars CAD (~$1.36 million USD) for its robotic cooking kiosk. The round was co-led by Hike Ventures and returning investor Real Ventures, with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, Uphill Capital, and multiple angel investors.

Like others in the food robot space, YPC is building a standalone, autonomous cooking system. But unlike PAZZI, which makes pizza, or DaVinci Kitchen, which makes pasta, or even Flippy, which works a grill or fry station, YPC aims to build a more versatile cooking robot, one that can make up to 20 different types of meals.

“Our business is unique because our system can produce a large variety of meals,” Dr. Gunnar Grass, CEO and Co-founder, YPC Technologies told me by phone this week, listing “Soups, stews, beef bourguignon, rissotto, steamed asparagus” as a sample of what the YPC robot can make.

This desire for variety was borne out of Grass’ time working in in the kitchen of a retirement home. The kitchen made one type of dish per day and Grass saw many plates come back partially eaten or completely untouched, because residents didn’t like the food or couldn’t eat it because of dietary restrictions (or because they lacked teeth).

YPC has been testing its robot out at a co-working facility in Montreal, Canada over the past year. The articulating arm grabs ingredients and does the cooking and can make anywhere from half a dozen to 20 different types of meals, depending on how it’s stocked. The current version of the robot can make 30 meals in an hour, though Grass said the next version will be able to make 100 meals per hour.

Grass said that the company is targeting business customers such as retirement centers, hospitals and commercial high-rises for installations of its robot. The system does not require additional ventilation be built, which could make the decision to install one a little easier for potential locations.

Of course, another appeal of the YPC system is that it’s a robot that can work all day and removes one human (and possible vector of viral transmission) from the meal prep equation. YPC isn’t completely human-less, since people are still required to stock and final presentations, but reducing the number of human hands preparing and touching food has becoming increasingly important during this pandemic. And this type of hygiene is top of mind for the potential customers YPC is dealing with. “Right now, everyone cares about safety,” Grass said.

As we said earlier, YPC’s robot is unique in the restaurant world. Grass said with the new funding, his company hopes to have a production pilot up and running with an unnamed “multi-national” food company by the middle of next year.

Qualcomm Ventures Invests in AiFi for Autonomous Retail

AiFi, a startup that makes cashierless, autonomous retail environments, announced today that it has raised a new round of funding from new investors Qualcomm Ventures and Plum Alley as well as existing investors such as Cervin Ventures and TransLink Capital.

The amount of new funding was not disclosed, but the AiFi press announcement said the total amount raised by the company was now $30 million. As of last Friday, Crunchbase had AiFi’s funding at $15 million and listed Qualcomm Ventures as an investor for an undisclosed sum from back in August. So if we’re reading this correctly, it appears that the new round is $15 million.

But equally interesting as the funding is the investor, Qualcomm Ventures, the venture arm of mobile technology giant Qualcomm. The canned quote from Qualcomm in the press release said

“As intelligence continues to move from the cloud to the wireless edge and demand for contactless shopping grows, we are excited to be investing in AiFi,” said Carlos Kokron, VP Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Managing Director, Americas at Qualcomm Ventures. “We were very impressed with AiFi’s innovative edge-computing solutions and look forward to their technology helping accelerate the deployment of 5G.”

That a Qualcomm entity would invest in AiFi isn’t too surprising. AiFi’s stores rely on a lot of wireless technology, and the startup’s pitch is that it creates a faster retail experience by producing shopping receipts in real time. But Qualcomm is also moving more into computer vision, which is a cornerstone of cashierless checkout. In July, Qualcomm announced a chip cluster that adds machine learning and AI to mid-tier cameras. So investing in a company that gets that tech into more locations makes sense.

In addition to retrofitting existing stores, AiFi makes self-contained, autonomous, shipping container-sized nano-stores. The company says it will be deploying them to 330 locations around the world in 2021, and that it has partnerships with a number of top grocers across the U.S., Europe and Australia.

The pandemic has spurred interest in contactless technologies such as cashierless checkout. Caper just announced a countertop cashierless system for convenience stores. Grabango publicly launched its integration with Giant Eagle’s GetGo Market. Mastercard launched a cashierless checkout partnership with Accel Robotics. And AWM is powering a new cashierless market for a California apartment building.

For its part, AiFi said it will use the new funding to continue to develop its technology.

Trax Launches its Computer Vision-Based Inventory System in the U.S.

Singapore-based Trax announced earlier this week that it has officially launched its Retail Watch computer vision-based inventory management system for grocers here in the U.S.

As we’ve covered previously, Trax retrofits stores with customized camera modules on ceilings and on shelves. These cameras snap a picture of the store’s inventory every hour and send those pics to Trax’s cloud, which uses machine learning to analyze each image to see which products are empty and if any products have been misplaced or mis-priced. A report is then sent to store management, who can then dispatch associates to re-stock and replace items.

According to this week’s U.S. announcement], the company has added autonomous robots to its tech stack, but didn’t specify their use or prominence in the overall offering.

A Trax rep told me last year that stores using its system saw a 1 percent bump in sales through improved item stocking. That 1 percent may not sound like much, but it adds up if used across multiple locations for a single retail chain. Plus, 1 percent promises to just come from better workflow of existing practices (inventory management), not adding new ones.

In addition to retailers, Trax’ also counts CPG companies among its customers. For CPG companies, Trax is more of an auditing tool to monitor shelf presence at stores to ensure they are getting what they paid for.

While keeping a close eye on store shelves may not sound sexy, it is becoming an increasingly competitive field. Walmart has developed its own computer vision-based inventory tool. And Bossa Nova, Simbe Robotics and Badger Technologies all make shelf-scanning robots.

For retailers, having more up-to-date inventory data can translate into more revenue. For consumers, it can mean fewer product outages should shocks to the system like pandemic panic buying occur again.

SKS 2020: Grabango Says its Computer Vision Avoids Biases Because it Doesn’t Use Facial Recognition

Grabango CEO Will Glaser said this week that because his company’s technology doesn’t use facial recognition, it can avoid some of the same types of racial biases found in other computer vision and machine learning algorithms. Glaser’s comments came during my fireside chat with him at our Smart Kitchen Summit this week.

Grabango makes cashierless (or as Grabango calls it, “lineless”) checkout technology for grocery retail. Grabango installs hundreds of cameras in the ceiling of a store, and through a combination of computer vision and AI, keeps track of what people put in their basket (or pocket). When shoppers go to check out, they choose a cashier or use an accompanying mobile app that automatically charges for the items kept.

This type of computer vision-based system is also used by other cashierless checkout companies such as Zippin, Standard Cognition and Amazon, and could become more widespread as demand for contactless retail experiences grows.

But the problem with some computer vision + AI systems is that their algorithms can contain the human biases of their creators. As TechCrunch wrote earlier this year, “MIT researchers reported in January 2019 that facial recognition software is less accurate in identifying humans with darker pigmentation.” In a busy retail environment where a lot of people are grabbing a lot of different items all throughout the day, it’s not hard to see how this type of bias could adversely impact people of color.

Glaser recognized some of the problems that can arise when algorithms are only developed or trained on white men in a lab. He made a point of saying that Grabango’s technology does not use facial recognition, and that it has a 99.6 percent revenue accuracy rate. Grabango’s system does follow a person around store, but doesn’t personally identify them (it can, however, stay with a person even after they have put on or taken off a jacket).

Grabango’s system is also being used in real world conditions, so it continues to train its algorithms in a diverse setting. Last month, Grabango announced that it’s integration with Giant Eagle’s GetGo Market in the Pittsburgh area went live. So now we’ll be able to see in a more open environment if Glaser’s claims hold true.

Caper’s New Counter Device Gives Cashierless Checkout to Convenience Stores

Caper, the startup best known for making smart shopping carts for cashierless checkout at supermarkets, today announced its latest product, the Caper Counter.

Meant for convenience and other small store formats, the square-shaped device sits on a counter and shoppers place items in it. Using five built-in cameras along with computer recognition and artificial intelligence, the Counter recognizes all of the items and tallies up the cost. Customers then use a mobile payment system or credit cart to purchase the items and go.

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven demand for more contactless payment options to reduce human-to-human contact in retail. Caper’s pitch to retailers is that its cashierless solution is easier to set up and running than other players on the market. While competitors like Grabango and Zippin require cameras and sensors to be installed around a store, Caper moves all of its cashierless smarts into smaller devices like shopping carts and now the Counter, so there’s no need for an expensive full store retrofit.

Caper’s move comes at a time when the smart shopping cart space is getting crowded. Companies like Veeve, Tracxpoint, and SAI all offer similar functionality to Caper’s cart. And, not for nothing, Amazon recently announced that it has developed its own Dash smart shopping cart and is looking to license out its cashierless checkout tech to other retailers.

When I spoke with Caper Founder and CEO Lindon Gao last week about the Counter and competition in the smart cart space, he was not that concerned. “A couple of main advantages is that we have a hardware and supply chain in China,” Gao said. “We’re already integrated with a lot of these retailers, and being not Amazon certainly helps.”

The Caper Counter is also indicative of the ways technology is making convenience stores more convenient. C-stores are actually a nice proving ground for technologies like cashierless checkout because they are smaller and stock fewer items. They are also stores that people don’t want to spend a lot of time in, so technology that gets people in and out quickly will find a receptive audience.

Gao said that right now the Caper Counter is already in use at several locations with an undisclosed national-level convenience brand partner. Caper wouldn’t reveal specific pricing for its Counter, saying that there is one model where the store pays for the hardware as well as a software fee, with costs dependent on the size of deployment.

Kiwibot will Pick up and Deliver Pizza from Piestro’s Robot Vending Machine

Human-free, contactless delivery is going next-level, thanks to a new partnership announced today between Piestro and Kiwibot.

In a word, this new deal is all about robots. Piestro makes a robot-powered pizza making vending machine , and Kiwibot makes little rover-style food delivery robots. As Piestros come to market, they will feature an integrated mechanism that allows Kiwibots to pluck those pizzas from the machine and cart them directly to your door.

The program isn’t live yet, and there isn’t a specific timetable for when it will happen. Piestro just successfully closed one equity crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $1 million, and is launching a new one with the hopes of raising $5 million more.

But when Piestros do come to market, those living in a Piestro/Kiwibot market will be able to order a pizza from the comfort of your couch through an app, and the Kiwibot will retrieve it and bring it to you. The exact process/app through which you order depends on if the Piestro is one owned and operated by the company, or if it is one that’s branded and licensed by a third-party.

Given the global pandemic, the desire for contactless food delivery is accelerating technologies that power both robotic vending machines and robot delivery services. Not only can robots work around the clock, they also remove a vector of human-to-human transmission. The Piestro/Kiwibot deal takes this concept even further by having a robot interact with the machine so there is no human in the transaction.

The ability to get items from vending machines was a feature that Kiwibot added last year, though being able to hold a boxed 12-inch pizza requires more space than picking up a Snickers bar. I spoke with Massimo de Marco, Piestro CEO by phone this week, who explained that Piestro is working with Kiwibot on a new version of its robot that can carry pizzas.

As noted, there wasn’t any indication of when or where Piestros will be hitting the streets. And even though Piestro and Kiwibot are the first to announce such a daisy chain of robot delivery, you can bet that similar deals will soon follow.