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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

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.

 

How Sensory’s Voice and Vision Tech Is Changing the Face of the QSR Kiosk

Self-service kiosks have for some time been a part of the restaurant experience, but the COVID-19 pandemic has called into question one of the device’s defining features: the touchscreen. At a time when more people are avoiding public spaces and restaurants are urged to “go contactless,” do we really want to order our food from a device 20 people had their hands all over before we stepped up to it?

A Silicon Valley company called Sensory believes not, which is why it has recently taken its technology into the realm of quick-service restaurants (QSRs) to outfit kiosks with a new kind of interface: voice.

Anyone with an eye to the restaurant biz could see this trend coming as far back as a year ago. Voice interfaces are part of many consumers’ homes now (roughly 88 million U.S. adults), and the last 12 months have seen QSRs make big strides in the voice-tech realm, most notably with McDonald’s 2019 acquisition of voice-tech company Apprente. But, as with most food tech these days, the pandemic has accelerated the need for voice-enabled tools to improve hygiene and social distancing in the restaurant setting.

Sensory may be new to the QSR space, but the company is Old Guard when it comes to voice. Having worked on voice and vision AI for the last 25 years, Sensory’s technology is already deployed in major industries like banking and automotive. Which is to say, the folks behind the name know a thing or two about making voice tech efficient and easy to use, two things that are a must for today’s beleaguered restaurant industry. 

Sensory’s VP of Marketing, Joe Murphy, said the company is currently in talks with major QSR chains and the technology companies that supply them with kiosks. Once bolted on to a kiosk, Sensory’s tech uses voice and vision AI to create an actual touch-free experience for customers.

The customer first uses a wake word or phrase (“OK, Taco Bell”) much as they would with an at-home Alexa or Google speaker, to trigger the system in the kiosk. That system relies on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) to translate speech to text in real time and process the order. The application then executes the task and places whatever item the customer ordered (e.g., chalupa) into their cart. 

This is the process you might expect for any walk-up or drive-through kiosk equipped with voice, and Murphy went into detail about how Sensory’s approach sets it apart.

For one thing, there’s the combination of voice and vision AI. The latter can roughly assess a customer’s age, gender, and sentiment by collecting biometric data, which it uses to better personalize upsell items. Upselling items to customers is a huge revenue mover for restaurants, and Murphy says the combination of voice and vision make the items far more relevant to each individual customer. (He’s quick to point out that the system does not do full-on identification of individual customers. The biometrics Sensory takes are much more general.) 

And though Sensory’s tech can be cloud-based, for these QSR implementations it is actually embedded into the machine, which is obviously better for data security. Murphy also points out that an embedded system gives restaurants more control over that data. “When you work with a cloud based provider that data is not always yours,” he says. With an embedded solution, the data stays in the restaurant’s hands.

Sensory has also put a lot of effort into making its system customizable for each QSR client it works with. Each implementation of the system is trained for that specific restaurant’s language, from the wake word (“Hey Taco Bell”) to menu items in non-standard English (e.g., chalupa). “We build around your menu,” Murphy says of the system.

Voice tech in general isn’t widely implemented across the restaurant industry yet, but Murphy reckons that will change “sooner rather than later.” As mentioned before, kiosk adoption was already fairly widespread before the pandemic. A bolted-on system like Sensory’s allows major QSRs to retain their investment in kiosk machines while updating them to be more efficient and, importantly, more hygienic.

And Sensory isn’t the only company making moves in this space. Besides McDonald’s and its Apprente acquisition, Orderscape and Sevenrooms have both dabbled in voice-tech for restaurants, though their solutions aren’t specifically focused on the kiosk. But Sensory won’t be the lone wolf in its particular focus area for long. With off-premises orders and more contactless restaurant experiences now the mainstay, QSRs and tech companies alike will soon be rushing to implement alternatives to the old standard touchscreen kiosk.

Mastercard Partners with Accel Robotics for Cashierless Checkout Retail

Mastercard. So worldly, so welcome, and now so contact-free. The global payments company today announced its Shop Anywhere and AI Powered Drive Through tools to help retailers create low-touch shopping experiences for consumers.

Mastercard’s ShopAnywhere program is using the AI and computer vision of Accel Robotics to create cashierless checkout for stores. According to the press release, Shop Anywhere can be deployed across a variety of physical formats. Mastercard has already lined up several Shop Anywhere customers including Circle K convenience stores in U.S. and Canada; Delaware North, a global hospitality company that operates at entertainment venues, national parks, resorts and more; and at a Dunkin’ location.

Accel Robotics is based in San Diego and raised $30 million in funding at the end of last year. The company has been relatively quiet compared with its cashierless competitors like Zippin, Grabango and Trigo. But what it lacks in showiness it has made up for with a large partner like Mastercard, which can leverage its massive presence to increase adoption of the Accel’s cashierless tech.

Mastercard’s other initiative, AI Powered Drive Through, is being implemented through partnerships with SoundHound Inc. and Rekor Systems. The program promises to help QSRs “transform their drive through or drive in interactions through vehicle recognition, voice ordering, and artificial intelligence.”

Part of that vehicle recognition technology used by Rekor involves the system knowing your license plate as well as make and model of car. Knowing who you are as you pull into the drive-thru lane means that an order can be rushed out to your car faster or a digital menu could offer up a personalized set of options based on your purchase history. That is, if you don’t mind the privacy implications of a restaurant chain knowing all about the car you drive.

Mastercard’s Drive Through builds on a partnership it had with Sonic Drive-In last year, and will being doing on-location pilots at White Castle locations in October of this year. While it didn’t mention Mastercard, KFC has hinted that it could adopt this type of technology as well.

Of course, Mastercard is announcing both of these initiatives during a global pandemic. As a result, many retailers are looking for ways to reduce human-to-human contact, and the number of touchpoints in stores, including things like touchscreens and even payment terminals where consumers swipe their credit cards. In other words, we’re going to see a lot more announcements similar to this in the coming months as we establish a new normal in a coronavirus world.

Simbe Robotics CEO: Robots Help Prevent Empty Grocery Store Shelves

Can robots help prevent the empty grocery store shelves that we saw during the initial panic buying stage of this pandemic? Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, thinks so.

Simbe makes Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot that roams grocery store aisles and uses computer vision and RFID to keep tabs on inventory. Simbe says Tally can spot inventory anomalies and provide analytics about purchasing and re-stocking insights.

Because Tally is a robot, it can spend its day going up and down aisles, giving store managers ongoing updates about product inventory. It is this near-real time snapshot of a store that Bogolea says can help retailers thwart outages during panic-buying sprees like the one we saw earlier in 2020, and also provide a better e-commerce buying experience for consumers.

Tally is currently being used in trials by grocers like Schnuck’s and Giant Eagle, as well as other partners across six countries. “We’ve had insights related to consumption patterns on shelves,” Bogolea told me by phone this week, “Especially in peak panic buying.”

Bogolea said the problem stores experienced during this panic buying was bad supply chain data. “Many of these stores operate on a replenishment system,” said Bogolea. He explained that “if there’s heavy distortion, retailers may assume a positive balance on-hand,” even though the products actually aren’t there.

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.

But robots aren’t just helpful dealing with sudden pandemic buying. As the pandemic pushes people into record amounts of grocery e-commerce, there is a greater need for what the consumer sees online to match the availability in store. Anyone who’s ordered groceries online is familiar with ordering a basket of groceries only to get notifications prior to pickup or delivery that, whoops, that item was actually out of stock.

Bogolea said an additional benefit of using shelf-scanning robots is that they can free up human workers to do other tasks such as picking items for online orders and sanitizing the store and carts.

Simbe is not the only company making shelf-scanning robots. Walmart is expanding the use of Bossa Nova’s robots to 1,000 stores, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies’ robots at its locations throughout the midwest.

Bogolea said that since the pandemic Simbe has seen an uptick in the amount of inbound interest in Tally. But despite all the promises of his company’s technology, Bogolea is the first to admit that adopting it is not like flipping a switch.

“Though there is stronger interest,” Bogolea said, “There’s a lot of work to deploy this type of technology.” As we learned from Albertsons at our Articulate food robotics summit last year, grocery stores, especially big chains, only adopt solutions that are already at scale.

Simbe has its own plans to scale up and build 1,000 robots over the coming year. Between it and all the other robotic players in the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be passing one in the grocery aisle in the not too distant future.

Pudu Robotics Raises $15M in Series B+ Round

Chinese delivery robot company Pudu Robotics (aka Pudu Tech) announced this week that it has completed a Series B+ round of nearly $15 million in funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from existing investors Meituan, Everwin Investment, QC Capital, and Chengbohan Fund.

Pudu makes self-driving restaurant server robots equipped with racks of trays that can shuttle plates of food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen.

This B+ funding comes on the heels of Pudu Robotics’ Series B fundraise of $15 million, which the company announced on July 1 of this year. The B+ round brings the total amount of announced funding raised by Pudu to roughly $30 million. (Crunchbase lists prior Series A, Seed and Angel rounds of undisclosed amounts.)

According to today’s press announcement, Pudu’s robots have been sold to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. Earlier this month, Pudu announced that the Muhguri restaurant is Sokcho, South Korea now had 11 Pudu robots serving food to customers.

Pudu is certainly not alone in creating a new robotic labor force for restaurants. Other players in the space include fellow Chinese company Keenon Robotics, California-based Bear Robotics, and South Korea’s Woowa Bros., which has partnered with LG for server bots.

Pudu said this latest funding would be used to expand its market. The money is coming just as the global pandemic has restaurants reassessing their dine-in businesses. Server robots like Pudu’s remove one possible vector of human-to-human viral transmission, and come with the added benefit of not getting sick themselves.

While that may be good news in terms of not spreading the coronavirus, the increased use of robots means fewer jobs for humans. A recent survey from Aaron Allen & Associates found that more than 80 percent of restaurant jobs could be automated, with the majority of them being server positions.

That stat, of course, brings up a host of other societal issues, but right now, most people are pre-occupied with the more immediate pandemic-related problems.

DaVinci Kitchen Aims to Debut Its Automated Robot Pasta Kiosk This Year

Robots are coming to cook your food, and thanks to COVID, they will be here sooner than you think.

The latest entry in the world of food robotics is Leipzig, Germany-based DaVinci Kitchen. For the past two years the company has been developing an automated robot pasta kiosk, which it hopes to release later this year.

The five sq. meter (~53 sq. ft.) DaVinci kiosk features a fresh pasta extruder, 10 ingredient dispensers, boiling and cooking stations and an articulating arm for mixing. The machine can operate 24 hours a day and can make two dishes in three minutes.

I spoke with Vick Jorge Manuel, CEO and Founder of DaVinci Kitchen, by phone this week. Manuel said that the company currently has one robot up and open for specific tastings, and is scheduled to have its first public installation in December of this year (pandemic permitting, of course).

Manuel said that there are a number of paths forward for the company. Those includeowning and operating its own machines or selling them outright. A DaVinci Kitchen costs €150,000 Euros (~$177,000 USD) for a basic system (for comparison, Cafe X is selling its robot barista for $200,000).

There are actually quite a few automated robot restaurant kiosks coming to market as we enter the golden age of automated vending services. A direct competitor to DaVinci in France is the Cala robot, which makes vegetarian pasta dishes. Robots are also making pizzas for both PAZZI (also in France) and Piestro, which just successfully completed its equity crowdfunding campaign.

Manuel is quick to point out that the DaVinci system isn’t just about pasta, nor is it a vending machine. “Davinci can do a lot of different styles and kinds of food,” Manual said, “We offer this system for customers that you can swap sections out. All we need to do is swap out one section and then add a fryer or whatever.”

While right in the middle of a global pandemic may not be the most fortuitous time to launch a company, the current state of the world may actually work in DaVinci Kitchen’s favor. Manuel said his company has seen a lot of inbound interest because of the coronavirus as restaurant operators are reluctant to cram a number of employees right next to each other into a small kitchen space.

Other COVID-related benefits of the DaVinci system will be the contactless ordering and customization via the accompanying mobile app, as well as full transparency into the (human-less) preparation of each meal. Those are all things cautious eaters will crave when ordering meals.

DaVinci currently has 12 people in the company and has raised €800,000 Euros in venture capital.

Nymble Eyes 2021 Launch For Its Home Cooking Robot

Looking for a little help in the kitchen? Maybe Julia could help.

No, Julia isn’t your neighbor or a chef matched with you through some online marketplace. In fact, Julia isn’t a person at all.

What Julia is is a robot. A cooking robot.

Developed by an India-based startup called Nymble, Julia creates single pot meals using spice and ingredients chambers that dispense food into the cooking bowl, where a robotic arm mixes the meal within the pot. All of this is monitored by a built-in camera.

You can see a video of Julia cooking rice here:

Fried Rice - Julia in-built camera footage

The camera does more than just capture footage. It’s how Julia becomes a better cook.

“The camera provides us with a thermal image of the food which basically represents the temperature of every pixel in the image,” said Raghav Gupta, CEO of Nymble.

Julia uses precise measurements of temperature and location to closely regulate the heat of the food. It also uses the data to create a better quality cook over time.

“It helps us cook food with a repeatable and consistent quality irrespective of the nature and size of ingredient, geography and other external factors,” said Gupta.

Early on, Julia’s programmers hard coded their cook times for specific intervals depending on the recipe. Over time they’ve gathered more data from the camera and heat sensors, and this has helped Julia become of a feedback driven system. The developer team has also created tools for non-technical users, including a “recipe visualizer” that uses camera and sensor data to help create recipes.

While all this technical work is impressive, it remains to be seen if consumers actually want a cooking robot. It’s easy to envision most of us welcoming a high-end cooking bot like that from Moley, Samsung or Sony, but these concepts are still years off from the mass market. And while there have been systems similar in concept to the Julia, the Sereneti never shipped a finished product and Else Labs’ Oliver has yet to ship.

The only cooking bot that’s sold at volume is the Rotimatic from Zimplistic, which is nearing 100 thousand total units in the field. However, the Rotimatic – a unitasker that spits out flatbread over and over – is a much different type of device than the more complex Julia.

In short, since there hasn’t been a product in the market similar to Julia, it’s hard to say if consumers will embrace the idea. My guess is its success will depend on how well it works and how useful it is and whether it makes consumer lives easier. I am particularly curious about how well these systems with pre-loaded ingredient chambers work and if they are easy to clean.

Nymble will try to figure all of this out for themselves as it eyes a 2021 launch. To help do that, the company recently finished some field tests for Julia and is in the process of rolling out additional prototypes to alpha testers in its home market of India (apply here!).

Hopefully Nymble – and we – should know soon.

Plant Jammer Gets €4M Investment for its AI-Powered Recipe Platform

Plant Jammer, a four-year-old Danish startup building an AI-powered cooking assistant, is one step closer to its goal of reaching one billion people, thanks to a €4 million investment in its AI recipe algorithm and platform. The Copenhagen-based company plans to expand its presence in the digital food space by licensing its API to third parties who can build branded customized experiences for their customers.

The new injection of capital comes from Danish investment firm Vaekstfonden, German food processing company Dr. Oetker, and German appliance manufacturer Miele. Miele had previously invested in Plant Jammer in 2018.

”Plant Jammer’s combination of recipe creation with AI is both unique and functional. We expect that this technology will be a core pillar in the connected kitchen of the future. Therefore, we believe Plant Jammer has great business potential,” says Dr. Christian Zangs, Managing Director of Miele Venture Capital.

Plant Jammer’s application, already in use by 10,000 households in Europe, allows users to build customized recipes by factoring in their individual preferences and what they may have in their home or what may be on sale in the local supermarket. While the app is focused on plant-based and vegetarian creations, partners who license the platform are not limited to those options. The database also contains food choices that include animal products and dairy; the PlantJammer app chose not to surface those results allowing the company to focus its version on a select niche.

In an interview with The Spoon, CEO and founder Michael Haase explained that partners who license the Plant Jammer’s API will pay based on the number of “calls” or accesses by users. For example, a grocery chain in Sweden can use the Plant Jammer API to develop a branded application such as a chatbox, that could include such extras as a link to online shopping. Each time a user of that third-party application builds a recipe, based on ingredients, tastes, diet, or any number of factors, the PlantJammer AI-driven database would work behind the scenes to deliver the results.

“I like to think of the analogy of the gold rush,” Haase adds. “We are interested in being the supplier of the jeans and shovels that enable others to do their jobs better.”

Personalized data from commercial partners will not be shared with Plant Jammer, but those partners can pass on generalized information via tags to allow the Haase’s company to continue to innovate on its platform. There are several areas Haase hopes to develop focused around food waste and the increased use of the excess capacity of local farmers and vendors.
Initially, the company founder says, the goal is to focus on food waste in the home. Haase says that 50% of all food waste takes place in the home, so we want people to build recipes based on what they already have in their refrigerator or cupboard.

“Our declared purpose is to empower one billion people with food habits that increase their health and the health of the planet,” Haase added.

That said, Haase admits his goal is a lofty one. “Right now, we are in a world of what I would call ‘trickle-down gastronomy’,” he says. “There is a huge divide between those whose world is focused on things such as molecular gastronomy and the masses. If we can show people that you can make something great in 25 minutes with simple ingredients, that would be great.”

Woowa Bros. Launches Robot Food Delivery in Korea

Woowa Brothers, which owns the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery service in Korea, announced yesterday that it started using robots for delivery on public streets just outside of Seoul.

Woowa’s “Dilly Drive” robots will have a very limited run at first, only making deliveries to Gwanggyo Alley Way, a multipurpose housing complex in Gwanggyo, Suwon city.

The Dilly service can be used by any of the 1,100 residents of the housing complex, or the public at large. To place an order, customers use the Baemin mobile app and the robot will either arrive at the first floor of the Gwanggyo Alley Way, or to tables outfitted with special QR codes in the complex’s plaza.

The Dilly Drive robots sport six wheels, move at a speed between 4 – 5 kilometers per hour (roughly the speed of a person walking) and can carry roughly 6 lunch boxes. The self-driving Dilly Drives can detect and avoid objects, people, and pets, and the robots now come equipped with remote control, presumably so a human can take over should one get stuck or incapacitated.

According to the press release, this is the first public use of food delivery robots in Korea. Woowa had previously tested the Dilly robots at Konkuk University in a pilot program back in November 2019.

While this may be the first public use of delivery robots in Korea, chances are good that it won’t be the last. The global COVID-19 pandemic has sparked the acceleration of contactless methods of delivery. Robots like the Dilly Drive, as well as those from Starship and Kiwibot, remove at least one human from the delivery equation. Robots also bring the added benefits of being able to work long hours without a break and never getting sick.

With the launch of the Dilly Drive, I’m curious to see if Woowa Founder and CEO Kim Bong-Jin will follow up on an idea he had a couple years back. During a press interview back in July 2018, Bong-Jin expressed an interest in having robots not only deliver food but also take away recycling. As more people have ordered delivery during this pandemic quarantine, single-use plastics have become a bigger problem. If a delivery robot could drop off food in a recyclable/re-usable container and then pick it up on its next trip, that could really help put a dent in the waste created by restaurant delivery.

Saladworks to Use Chowbotics’ Salad Making Robot for Market Expansion

Fast casual restaurant chain Saladworks announced today that it will be using Chowbotics’ Sally robot to expand into hospitals, universities and grocery stores. According to the press release, the Sally machines will feature Saladworks’ branding and exclusively carry menu items from Saladworks’ menu.

This deal actually makes a lot of sense. First, Sally is compact, coming in at only 3 ft. x 3 ft. This means the robot can be installed almost anywhere, and that Saladworks can extend its brand into high-traffic areas without needing to build out a full store. Plus, vending machines like Sally can run 24 hours a day.

Second, during this pandemic, restaurants (and consumers) have been looking for ways to reduce the amount of human-to-human contact involved in day-to-day foodservice operations. Not only does the Sally robot make the salads sans humans, it also keeps all of its 22 fresh ingredients sealed away in chambers which are themselves sealed up behind glass. Customers can literally see where their order is coming from as it is dispensed.

Finally, and some might say this is the most important thing, Sally makes a good salad. All the convenience and COVID-19 protections in the world don’t make a difference if no one wants to eat what you’re making.

One item of particular note in the press announcement is how Saladworks is targeting grocery stores in its go-to market. Prior to the pandemic, retailers were not too keen on robotic vending services like Sally because they were redundant to what grocery stores already offered. But as the coronavirus has grocery stores removing things like salad bars, those vending machines become more attractive. Just last month, ShopRite partnered with Chowbotics to put a Sally in its Carteret, NJ store. Having the Saladworks brand, which is probably more well known in certain geographic areas than Chowbotics, on the machine and the Saladworks menu could entice more people to try it out.

This is the second such restaurant partnership for Chowbotics, which previously partnered with SaladStation to roll out 50 Sally robots across seven states.

It’s not hard to imagine that Chowbotics has a steady pipeline of similar co-branded restaurant deals in the works. As noted above, the small footprint, low-cost and relatively low-touch aspects of robotic vending machines could make them attractive platforms for restaurants looking for growth opportunities during this pandemic.

I’ve written before that I’m all-in on robotic vending machines and even wrote a comprehensive report on the market landscape for our Spoon Plus premium service.

Root AI Raises $7.2M for Its Harvest Robots and AI

Root AI, which makes an automated solution for harvesting crops grown on indoor farms, announced today that it has raised $7.2 million in seed funding. PJC, First Round Capital, Outsiders Fund, Accomplice and AgFunder all participated in the round, as well as Jason Calacanis. This brings the total amount raised by Root AI to $9.5 million.

Root AI’s robots use a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence to identify when a crop like tomatoes or stawberries need to be picked. Part of the Root AI pitch is that it’s a “cross crop” harvester, so it can use different grippers to pick different shaped fruit. The robot’s AI helps the grippers pick crops with just the right amount of pressure to remove the food, without damaging it.

Root AI - Going Cross-Crop

Root AI sits in the nexus of a number of different societal and market changes. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, robots were being eyed as a way to keep farms working even through dangerous heat and other conditions. With the pandemic still raging across the country, farms have reported outbreaks among its workers while the federal government has provided no rules to protect them. On a broader level, the pandemic has accelerated the potential for robot adoption because robots do not get sick and reduce the amount of human-to-human contact during the meal journey.

Root AI is also coming during a growth period for indoor farming. AppHarvest is building a massive indoor farm in Kentucky. Wilder Fields is converting an old Target in Chicago into and indoor farm. Even UK grocer, Ocado, has gotten into the indoor farming game with its Infinite Acres venture.

One key to making those indoor farms successful will be the economics of indoor farming. Will they be able to produce as much food as those high-tech systems cost? Robotics like those from Root AI, which will offer its robots as a service could help. In addition to not getting sick (or spreading sickness), robots like Root AI can run 24 hours a day.

Root AI is not the only harvesting ‘bot in town. Other players in the indoor farming robot space include MetoMotion, and outside on the farm, Traptic and Advanced Farm Technologies each have harvesting robots.

iFood and Speedbird Aero Bringing Drone Food Delivery to Brazil

Latin American food delivery service iFood announced today it has received full regulatory approval from Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) to operate two drone food delivery routes in the city of Campinas.

IFood is working with drone company Speedbird Aero, and according to the announcement materials, this is the first time drone-assisted food deliveries have been okayed in Latin America.

The drone deliveries are set to start this October, but the food won’t be going directly to customers’ front door. IFood will use a hybrid approach that includes both drones and last-mile ground transportation. For the first route, drones will fly from a food court in Igautemi Campinas, a large shopping complex, to an iFood Hub roughly 400 meters away. It will take the drones two minutes to fly and drop off the food at the hub, which will then be picked up by drivers for final delivery.

This combination of drone + ground transport is the same approach that Uber is taking with its drone delivery here in the U.S. The advantage of flying drones between two set points is that it is just one flight path, so you don’t have to jump through as many regulatory hoops to ensure drones don’t fly over things like schools or first responder facilities.

It’s been a busy year for drone delivery as this type of service moves from theoretical to more realistic. Manna started making food deliveries by drone in Dublin, Ireland. Flytrex has been doing similar work in Iceland and making its first moves into the U.S. And drone delivery of groceries is coming to Rouses Market in Mobile, Alabama.

To be sure, we are still a ways off before we see (and hear) drones buzzing overhead bringing us our daily lattes. But with the COVID-19 pandemic still surging and re-surging in the U.S. and elsewhere, off-premesis restaurant eating is only going to get more popular as dining rooms are shunned or forced to close down.

A combination of technology advancements and societal conditions means that the sky could soon be the limit for food delivery by drone.