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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Tastewise Launches Its AI-Powered Food Prediction in the UK

Tastewise, which uses AI to predict consumer food trends, announced today it has launched its platform in the UK and added more localized data to help restaurants and food producers in that region better anticipate consumer eating habits. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Tastewise has integrated data from 183,000 restaurants and delivery menus, over 2.8 billion social interactions, and 1.2 million online recipes from the UK into its platform.

The Tastewise platform, which launched in February of 2019, helps CPG companies better predict food trends through artificial intelligence (AI). It analyzes consumer touchpoints (think Instagram photos and online recipes) to find not just what foods consumers are eating right now but also their deeper motivations for choosing those foods. When we spoke about a year ago, Tastewise CEO Alon Chen used the example of sauerkraut to illustrate the point: 

“Right now, according to [Chen], it’s a popular food, but the trend is less about raw cabbage and more about the process behind it, which is fermentation . . . Food companies analyzing data via the Tastewise platform can see such data and consider how they might implement fermentation into their offerings.”

Tastewise counts Nestlé, PepsiCo, General Mills, Dole, and other major CPGs among its customers. With today’s launch, UK-based food businesses will also be able to utilize the platform to get more real-time insights into consumer food behavior, which is a must in these pandemic-stricken days, according to Tastewise: “The pandemic has made it clear that it’s imperative to have your finger on today’s pulse each time a decision is made,” Chen said in today’s press release.

Speaking of which: along with the news of its UK launch, Tastewise also released a new report on UK consumer food trends during the pandemic so far. Among them:

  • Sustainable foods are rising 52 percent in popularity year over year, though health and fitness are motivating this trend, not environmental concerns.
  • UK demand for meal kits is up 200 percent.
  • CBD is fading in popularity.

Tastewise is not a sensory platform a la Spoonshot or Climax Foods. However, it is similar in that it leverages AI to help companies bring in-demand products faster by sinking less money into traditional R&D. And given the upheaval the pandemic has caused across the food system, both CPGs and foodservice companies will be leveraging more AI in the future to keep costs down by offering their customers the most relevant items possible. 

Updated: Kiwibot Partners with Sodexo to Roll Out Delivery Robots at the University of Denver

UPDATE: Some details of this story changed after we published this story:

  • The service is now launching in October. 
  • The delivery fee will start at $2.50, or it will be free with a monthly subscription.
  • Delivery will be available from a total of three restaurants.

Original post follows:

Kiwibot announced today that it has partnered with foodservice company Sodexo to bring robot food delivery to students, faculty and staff at the University of Denver.

Starting today, a fleet of 15 Kiwibots will be available to deliver food from Monday to Friday between the hours of 8 a.m and 6 p.m., with deliveries costing a flat $2.50 per order. Delivery will start with one campus restaurant before expanding to four more food options by mid-October. Kiwibot is also working with the city of Denver to enable off-campus deliveries at some point in October, as well.

There are a few things worth noting about this deal. First, this is Kiwi’s second bite at the apple when it comes to college delivery. Last year, the company delivered to UC Berkeley and had big plans to expand to a number of different schools across the U.S. Those plans never came to fruition, however and were abandoned. One reason that growth might not have happened last year was that Kiwibot was going through student groups, and not partnering with a school’s administration.

This time around, Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo, a huge company that provides foodservice to colleges across the U.S. This partnership brings with it more legitimacy for Kiwibot, and also provides an entrée, so to speak, with college administrations and restaurants at potential campuses.

That Kiwibot has partnered with Sodexo is in itself interesting because Sodexo has an existing partnership with Kiwi rival, Starship, for robot deliveries on various colleges like George Mason University. The difference, however, is that Starship’s program requires users to download the Starship app. Kiwibot’s solution is more of a B2B play, and will integrate with a food ordering app from Sodexo. So it could provide Kiwibot with direct access to a greater number of Sodexo-run properties, should the partnership grow.

Kiwibot have been on a bit of a, err, roll lately. In July the company launched a restaurant delivery program in the city of San Jose, CA. Kiwibot is also in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign, which aims to raise $1 million.

Set It & Forget It: Creator of The Oliver Cooking Robot Hopes to Usher in the Era of Unattended Cooking

Forget Top Chef. The most interesting contest in the kitchen in recent years has been the battle to become the all-in-one cooking appliance.

Air fryers, smart pressure cookers, slice and dice multicookers and even stand mixers have been throwing elbows in the fight for countertop space and consumer dollars.

But what if an entirely different category of cooker won the hearts and minds of consumers as the indispensable kitchen helper? That’s the hope of Khalid Aboujassoum, founder of Else Labs, who makes a little device called the Oliver.

So what exactly is Oliver?

“It’s a smart cooking robot,” said Aboujassoum in an interview with The Spoon.

The kitchen robot is something we’ve been writing about here at the Spoon since early days and, while we all like to envision science fiction futures with a robotic chef cooking for us every night, the only kitchen robots that have found any success so far are uni-taskers like the Rotimatic.

But according to its inventor, Oliver can do much more than one thing really well.

“It’s a recipe library, meal planner, shopping assistant, and expert chef all in one,” said Aboujassoum,

While you wouldn’t exactly call the Thermomix or other digital powered kitchen multicookers “robots”, these appliances are popular with chefs and home cooks alike because they can do so much. And the thing is, they’re adding more functions all the time. The Thermomix recently added shopping capabilities that allows the user to essentially make meal kits and order them on the fly.

But according the Aboujassoum, the major difference between Oliver and the multicooker is how much they can do during the cooking process.

“They (multicookers) are guided cooking,” he said. “The Oliver can do unattended stovetop cooking.”

What he is talking here about just how much a device can do without the consumer being involved. According to Aboujassoum, Oliver can cook the entire meal while the user goes off to take a nap or watch some TV.

“The user basically browses the recipes, selecting a recipe, loads the ingredients and then walks away,” said Aboujassoum.

This is where it’s worth looking at how the Oliver works. The user preloads the prepped ingredients into dispensing chambers that sit on the lid. Once the user selects the recipe on a connected app and hits cook, the Oliver dispenses ingredients into the single pot cooking chamber where a stirring arm mixes the food.

Ultimately, a conversation about unattended vs guided cooking is one about where and when the consumer gets involved in the cooking process. Multicookers like the Thermomix guide a cook through a meal with step-by-step recipes, and can do pretty much everything including chopping and grinding ingredients.

With the Oliver, the unattended part is true but, because it doesn’t have a built-in blade, the user may need to do a little more up front work to prep ingredients in advance and put into the ingredient chambers.

I do think the concept of a home cooking robot is promising. I’m sure there are many busy folks who would be happy to let a robot do the heavy lifting while they go do chores or relax.

Consumers who want to get their own cooking robot will soon be able to back Oliver via crowdfunding. The device will launch on Indiegogo on September 29th and early backers can get in on the appliance for $530.

For those of you who are wary of backing hardware on crowdfunding sites, you might be assured that folks behind Oliver have been working on the product for a good part of a decade (an early generation prototype of the Oliver was on display at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016) and, according to Aboujassoum, the product is ready to go.

“We could have launched two years ago or three years ago,” said Aboujassoum. “We refuse to sell unfinished product. That’s kind of our story, our strategic execution philosophy. And today we are done with the product.”

Aboujassoum said backers of Oliver should expect to get their cooking robot in June of 2021.

With the Oliver hitting the market and the Nymble on its way as well, 2021 could prove an interesting year for cooking robots. Others, like the Gamma Chef, are still in development and could make an appearance.

So hopefully we’ll know soon if the era of unattended cooking is upon us.

H-E-B to Use Swisslog for Automated Micro-Fulfillment

Even though everything is bigger in Texas, the San Antonio-based H-E-B grocery chain is going small. Today, the chain announced it has partnered with Swisslog to install automated micro-fulfillment centers at an undisclosed number of stores (tip of the hat to Grocery Dive).

According to the press announcement, H-E-B will make use of Swisslog’s AutoStore solution, which will use a combination of bins and robotics to shuttle grocery items around. Swisslog says that it has more than 170 AutoStore installations worldwide. H-E-B has 400 locations across Texas.

Swisslog’s micro-fulfillment centers will help H-E-B speed up the processing of online grocery orders for delivery and curbside pickup. Keeping up with the crush of new e-commerce customers was something retailers across the country struggled with throughout a good part of this year as pandemic fears pushed people into online grocery shopping.

While the first few months of the pandemic saw record amounts of online grocery shopping, recent survey data from Brick Meets Click shows that grocery e-commerce dropped in August to $5.7 billion, down from its peak of $7.2 billion in June. Having said that, August’s online grocery numbers were higher than the the $5.3 billion in April.

Swisslog is among a number of companies angling to bring more automation to grocery e-commerce fulfillment. Alert Innovation is being used by Walmart, Fabric is working with Fresh Direct, Takeoff Technologies has lined up Albertsons, ShopRite, and Loblaw’s, and Kroger is building out its own centers using Ocado.

While we’re still waiting to see exactly how many people stick with online grocery shopping (FWIW, even Whole Foods’ CEO thinks a lot of people won’t go back into grocery stores), H-E-B’s announcement shows that retailers continue to make big investments in micro-fulfillment. Will these micro-moves yield Texas-sized returns?

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.

Spoonshot Raises $1M for its AI-Powered Flavor Trend Prediction Service

Spoonshot, a company that uses AI to predict new and different flavor combinations, announced today that it has raised $1 million in Seed funding. The round was led by SRI Capital and brings the total amount of funding for the company to $1.8 million.

The thesis behind Spoonshot is that companies looking to develop the next big thing in food need to look ahead. If your company only watches what is trending now, by the time it gets a product into market, that trend will already be over or commonplace.

To get ahead of the curve, Spoonshot’s platform examines data from across a vast number of food-related sources including online menus, food science, CPG ingredients and online food communities. Spoonshot runs this data through its proprietary machine learning and AI algorithms to help companies identify existing and novel flavor combinations.

The company launched its Ingredient Network product last October. At the time, we wrote:

Ingredient Networks lets you search ingredients for recommended flavor combinations and pairings. For example, when you search “banana,” it brings up what might be considered unusual recommendations like coffee concentrate and sunflower seed butter. But remember, what Spoonshot wants to do is surface flavors you probably haven’t considered. So bringing up something like chocolate or strawberries would be useless because you already know about them.

I spoke by phone this week with Kishan Vasani, Co-Founder and CEO of Spoonshot, and he said that the company has taken its Ingredient Network to the next level with its new Concept Generator.

Whereas Ingredient Network was more about exploring different flavor combinations and possibilities, the Concept Generator is more concrete. CPG companies can come to the service with a set idea in mind, like say, a cookie with blueberry as the main flavor. The Concept Generator then takes that information and returns with a blueprints of different blueberry cookies with different flavor combinations as well as all the ingredients that would go into making it.

Spoonshot’s tools are available at a unique time, given the pandemic. The lockdowns have people eating at home more and doing quite a bit of snacking. Giving CPG companies tools to quickly create new types of comfort foods could be quite appealing.

Vasani said that Spoonshot will be using the new money for marketing, something the company hasn’t really done up to this point, as well as hiring out its team.

11 Food Tech Startups Will Join TechStars 2020 Farm-to-Fork Virtual Accelerator

TechStars today announced the 2020 class of its Farm-to-Fork program, which selects and supports companies and entrepreneurs working in the food and agricultural industries. The program is in its third year, with 2020 being the first time it goes 100 percent virtual, thanks to the ongoing pandemic.

But if there’s anything akin to a silver lining in the midst of a global health crisis, it may just be the many tech innovations now coming out of the food industry at a faster pace than ever before. “The food system has changed more in the last six months than it has over the entire five years I have been investing in the space,” Brett Brohl, Farm-to-Fork’s Managing Director, said in a press release. 

The Farm-to-Fork Accelerator looks for early-stage entrepreneurs and companies addressing major issues in the food chain around food safety and security, supply chain management, and ag tech.

The 2020 class includes 11 startups:

  • AgTools, Irvine, Calif.: A real-time data intelligence platform for the food and ag industries
  • Applied Particle Technology, St. Louis, Mo.: A data platform for automating health and safety in mining 
  • Boson Motors, Freemont, Calif.: Electric vehicles for farmers
  • Canomiks, Rochester, Minn.: A genomics, bioinformatics and AI-based platform for functional food and bev as well as skincare
  • FeedX, Madison, Wisc.: An online marketplace for the animal feed industry
  • H20kInnovations, Boston, Mass.: A contaminant management system for industrial water
  • Iamus, Dublin, Ireland: Uses AI and robotics to help poultry farmers with production safety
  • IXON, Hong Kong: Makes advanced sous-vide aseptic packaging that keeps protein stable at room temperature for up to two years
  • Milk Moovement, Halifax, Nova Scotia: A cloud-based platform for the dairy industry
  • Satis.AI, London, England: Develops AI operating systems for autonomous kitchens in foodservice
  • Toolsvilla, West Bengal, India: A digital marketplace for machinery, tools, and equipment in India

All participants to the Farm to Fork accelerator get $20,000 in return for 6 percent equity (on a fully diluted basis, issued as common stock). In addition, they get access to Techstars resources for life, access to mentors and potential investors, and the chance to participate in a demo day at the end of the program.

The 2020 virtual cohort kicks off on September 8.

Birdie Uses AI to Scour Reviews and Help Brands Understand Their Products

Thanks to our connected world, people who either love or hate a product, don’t have to keep their opinions to themselves. There is no shortage of platforms to express their thoughts.

This steady stream of opining is actually a source of fuel for Birdie, a company that uses AI to comb through product reviews and discussion forums (written in English) to surface product insights for CPGs and other other product brands.

For instance, by applying its AI to customer reviews of V8 juice, Birdie was able to show that people were often using the vegetable drink as a hangover remedy. By uncovering this data, V8 could then choose to create a specific line of drinks or marketing campaign that reaches this particular type of indulgent adult. The same idea applies to those pouches of pureed foods for toddlers. Birdie discovered that athletes and outdoors people carried these with them because they were easy to carry and loaded with nutrition.

Birdie is not a social media listening tool. It’s not just tallying up social mentions of a brand and analyzing timelines to see what is trending. Instead, the company is more focused on consumer product reviews on Amazon, Google and other places where purchases can be verified and are filled with more details about how the product arrived, how it was used, how long it lasted, etc.

“Our main differentiator is the fact that we chose to be very focused on products, and built a deep dictionary that relates to the buying journey of consumer products,” Patrícia Osório, CMO of Birdie told me by phone this week. “We capture the data related to a product attribute, or usage of the product, how they bought the product. With that, we can show our clients a detailed and easy to find view about how consumers are interacting with their brand.”

According to Osório, the number of product reviews in the U.S. has been growing quickly, with an increase of 60 percent year over year. She said there is an average of 621 new reviews written per day on food products, with an average of 342 reviews per SKU.

In a way, Birdie is like a distant cousin to Spoonshot, which applies its AI to vast datasets on food to uncover novel flavor combinations. Only in Birdie’s case it is uncovering novel uses for existing products.

Founded two and a half years ago, Birdie has raised $1.6 million in Seed funding and counts Procter & Gamble among its clients.

Birdie’s technology actually fits in with the larger hacker culture that we live in today. In addition to expressing their opinions, people love deconstructing and re-purposing existing products to fit their own needs, and sharing their findings with other people online. All this adds up to a never-ending source of data for Birdie’s algorithms, and more product insights for brands.

Galley Solutions’ Founders Talk Recipes, Data, and What It Will Take to Build a Better Food System

In the food world, San Diego-based tech startup Galley Solutions is perhaps best known for its software system that uses recipe-level data to automate the restaurant back of house. But founders Benji Koltai and Ian Christopher have much bigger plans for the role they want their company to play in creating a more efficient, accurate, and safer food system overall.

I recently hopped on a Zoom chat with Koltai and Christopher — who also happen to be brothers-in-law — to talk about their vision for the future food system, how a system like Galley’s can contribute, and what foodservice businesses can do right now to make their operations more efficient.

You can watch the full video below. Some highlights include:

  • The definition of “food business” is changing as we speak, from college dining halls now offering grab ’n’ go meals to ghost kitchens operating out of grocery stores.
  • Moving forward, restaurants must learn to leverage their recipe-level data to make operations more efficient, cut overall costs, and save on labor and time to accommodate these new formats.
  • Technology is everywhere in the foodservice world, yet for all the different devices and solutions, there is no common dataset to bring those disparate pieces together.
  • A truly efficient back-of-house system will use one source for all the business’s data. For example, a centralized data source could populate the digital order forms sent to vendors and at the same time tell the kitchen robot how long to leave a burger on the grill.

Saga Robotics Raises €9.5M for its UV Light Ag Robot

Saga Robotics, which makes an autonomous robotic platform for agriculture, announced this week that it has raised €9.5 million Euros (~$11.35 million USD). Hortidaily writes that the investment was led by Nysnø Climate Investments with ADM Capital Europe and the Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund, with participation from other Norwegian investors.

The Saga Robotics’ platform, dubbed “Thorvald,” is modular and can accomplish a number of different tasks on a farm. We recently wrote about how its UV-light capabilities are being used to kill off mildew on crops without the use of pesticides. According to the Saga Robotics website, Thorvald is also capable of “picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage, spraying and data collection/crop prediction.”

Saga’s funding comes at a time when robotics are poised to play a more central role in our agriculture system. In traditional agriculture, farm workers often have to deal with extreme temperatures and other environmental conditions and hazards. The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated and worsened these issues by impacting the flow of labor and becoming a source of outbreaks because of the cramped working conditions.

Robots can potentially help alleviate some of the stresses on farms. In addition to being able to work around the clock and in extreme heat, robots also also don’t get sick and reduce vectors for human-to-human disease transmission.

Saga is among a wave of robotics companies working on agricultural solutions. Small Robot Company, Farmwise, Advanced Farm Technologies, and Augean Robotics are just some of the companies coming to market with automated farm solutions.

Climax Foods Raises $7.5M for its Machine Learning Approach to Plant-Based Cheese

Climax Foods announced today that it has raised a $7.5 million seed round of funding to fuel its data science-driven approach to creating new types of plant-based foods, starting with aged cheese.

Investors in the round include At One Ventures, Mata Ray Ventures, S2G Ventures, Prelude Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Index Ventures, Luminous Ventures, Canaccord Genuity Group, Carrot Capital and Global Founders Capital as well as other angel investors.

Unlike other companies in the non-animal cheese space that build their product around a specific base ingredients like cauliflower, legumes or recombinant protein technology, Climax Foods is creating cheese out of… data.

This idea of starting with data makes more sense when you realize that Oliver Zahn, Climax Foods’ Founder and CEO, was previously Head of Data Science for Google and formerly a lead data scientist with Impossible Foods.

“Food science is just like cosmology,” Zahn, a former astrophysicist as well, told me during a phone interview this week. “An area with rich and complex and confusing datasets growing in size every year.”

In a nutshell, Climax Foods is in the machine learning business. As Zahn explained it, the company uses a series of machine learning frameworks that crunch data sets to figure out what a set of particular raw ingredients and isolates will yield. In other words, Ingredient X + Ingredient Y will give you Z product with this type of texture and this kind of flavor and will cost this much.

By running these complex models, Climax Foods can do a lot of the heavy lifting with the research before starting work in the lab. Climax is using this approach on a number of different applications. “We are prototyping a bunch of animal products,” Zahn said. “But our focus is on aged cheeses.”

Zahn didn’t specify which cheeses his company was working on, though he did say, “Our approach is to start with people, and what they expect when they hear the word ‘cheese.’ Gouda, cheddar. Blue cheeses.”

Right now, Climax is in the prototype stage. The company will use the seed round to create a dedicated lab to study food chemistry with the goal of having some type of early go-to market product in a year. How it actually comes to market remains to be seen because of the pandemic. One path for Climax could be introducing the products to restaurants first (like Impossible did), but who knows what eating out will look like a year from now. Perhaps Climax will need to train a new algorithm to figure out where to sell its cheese.

Beastro is a Robot for Ghost Kitchens

As the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed more people into ordering delivery from restaurants, the restaurant industry has responded by opening more ghost kitchens. And with more restaurants ditching the front of house for smaller-format, delivery-only operations, the logical next step is to automate as much of that new format as possible, which is now starting to happen.

Last week, Tel Aviv-based Kitchen Robotics unveiled the Beastro, a robotic ghost kitchen. The Beastro is an industrial-looking standalone kiosk that acts as a fully automated kitchen. The Beastro is 11 ft. 6 in. by five ft. 10 in. wide and 7 ft 2 inches tall, weighing in a 1,790 lbs. It can make 45 dishes an hour including Italian and Asian cuisines, as well as soups, salads and more. The Beastro starts at $5,990 a month.

As you can see from this promotional video, the Beastro is reminiscent of the Spyce Kitchen, with a series of grippers, conveyors and dispensers. The machine places all ingredients in a bowl, then mixes and heats the dishes, presumably through induction.

Beastro™ by Kitchen Robotics

The smarts of the Beastro is in Kitchen Robotics’ cloud-based Cuismo software. Cuismo manages the programming and monitoring of each dish made, allows for customization and, according to the company, uses deep learning and predictive analysis to reduce operational costs, though it doesn’t say exactly how. Cuismo also integrates with third-party delivery services. The base Cuismo software package is free for a single site. Prices jump to $249/month for up to five different sites and $999/month for an unlimited number of sites.

Beastro is arriving at an opportune time. Euromonitor recently predicted that the ghost kitchen market will hit $1 trillion by 2030 (read our Spoon Plus deep dive market report on ghost kitchens to learn more). Because ghost kitchens are built around delivery, the whole point of them is to get meals prepped and ready quickly, something a robot like Beastro can do around the clock, without taking breaks or, more relevant for our times, calling in sick.

Of course, automating ghost kitchens also brings up the societal issues around labor. If a prolonged pandemic means that ghost kitchens become the dominant venue for restaurants to exist, where will those line and prep cooks go once robots are installed? Not every restaurant brand or ghost kitchen will adopt automation, but what we do with displaced restaurant workers is something we need to deal with.

Kitchen Robotics’ told The Spoon that has received more than $1 million in funding from various investors and CEOs in the industry and that Beastro will be deployed in two major U.S. cities by mid-December of this year.