Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

AiFi to Launch 330 Autonomous Stores by the End of 2021

AiFi, a cashierless checkout startup, announced today that it will deploy 330 new and retrofitted autonomous stores globally by the end of 2021.

AiFi is perhaps best known for its NanoStore, a fully automated pre-fab pop-up retail experience packed inside a small building akin to a shipping container. AiFi’s Orchestrated Autonomous Store Infrastructure and Services (OASIS) tech platform can also be used to retrofit existing retail spaces with autonomous capabilities, allowing shoppers to simply walk in, grab what they want and leave. The system charges them automatically.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, AiFi’s OASIS technology will be powering 330 new autonomous stores that range anywhere between 800 sq. ft. convenience stores to 10,000 sq. ft. grocery stores. The new stores will be primarily located across the U.S. and Europe, with expansion to other parts of the world planned for the future

The COVID-19 pandemic is still raging across the U.S., which could be accelerating the adoption of autonomous or contactless checkout. Fears over the coronavirus have already caused grocery stores to close down salad and hot bars. Automating checkout would remove the necessity of standing in line with other people, limit cashier exposure to the virus, and obviate the need to interact with a payment terminal that lots of other people have touched throughout the day.

To be sure, eliminating the traditional checkout stand would be a huge undertaking, and large grocery chains aren’t exactly nimble when it comes to implementing new technology. Plus cashierless checkout brings up ethical issues around serving populations that are underbanked. Perhaps, however, AiFi will be taking a page out of Zippin’s playbook and only automating part (like one aisle) of a partner’s store rather than retrofitting the entire building.

We won’t have to wait long to see. AiFi says that it is already powering 10 stores in locations around the world including California, Texas, Amsterdam, Paris and Shanghai. AiFi also has partnerships with Albert Heijn, Carrefour, and others it has yet to announce. If AiFi sticks to its schedule, it will be launching an average of 18 stores per month for the next year and a half.

Glacierfire’s Ice+Fries Seems Like Everything You’d Want from an Icelandic Robot Bar

Iceland is having a bit of a moment right now, thanks to the success of Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which stars Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams as Icelandic singers. Oh, and also because Glacierfire launched a robotic bar/restaurant called Ice+Fries there a couple months back.

Ice+Fries features two robotic arms, dubbed Tipsy Floki and Ragnar, that can mix up to 100 cocktails per hour and 1,500 cocktails a day without human intervention. It also sports a 3D printer that prints out fancy desserts and garnishes for drinks. There’s even a robotic Aibo dog that wanders the bar. But the automation is woven much more deeply into the very fabric of the restaurant.

I spoke with Glacierfire CEO Priyesh Patel by phone this week, who explained some of the smarts that goes into the restaurant. The robo-bartenders themselves are made by Makr Shakr, but Glacierfire has integrated its own software stack that keeps the bar running, including order management, timesheets, ingredient/temperature monitoring, etc. There is also a healthy amount of artificial intelligence (AI) implemented.

Patel explained how they use the AI with facial recognition for a number of different purposes. The facial recognition will guide people as to where they pick up their orders. It can also be used in determining if there are underaged people trying to order alcoholic drinks (the drinking age in Iceland is 20). The AI+facial recogntion combo is also used to gauge sentiment in the bar. (i.e., Are customers happy?) Your mileage may vary on whether or not you find that kind of monitoring useful or creepy.

Ice+Fries isn’t completely human-less. The food is still cooked by people, and there are technicians on hand to deal with the robots. But in building the automated experience Patel echoed the sentiment of many food robot companies: If you can use robots to lower labor costs, then you can pass that savings on to the consumer. Patel said that cocktails in Iceland are typically $15 per drink, but Ice+Fries can serve them at $10.

Ice+Fries has only been open since April in Iceland, so we have yet to prove that those economics bear out. Here in the U.S., Miso Robotics found that its first generation of Flippy robots were too expensive for many QSRs. Robot barista Cafe X had to shutter its downtown locations, and robot burger joint, Creator, recently closed its restaurant down as well.

To be fair, Creator’s shutdown was more attributable to the global pandemic that closed dine in operations at restaurants around the country. According to Patel, Iceland was able to avoid COVID-induced lockdowns. But as the virus continues to rage on here in the U.S., Ice & Fries might actually model what a restaurant will look like post-pandemic.

Setting aside the close quarters and inside nature of the restaurant for a moment, the Ice & Fries experience is contactless, a key feature in these coronavirus times. While orders can be done on a touchscreen, there is also a mobile app customers can use, and robot bartenders remove one more vector of human-to-human viral transmission.

The first Ice+Fries is located in Reykjavik, Iceland, but the company has plans for expansions into Lisbon, Portugal, and Paris, France. Patel said Galcierfire has a two-pronged go-to market strategy for this robot restaurant concept. The first is to build out and launch its own branded restaurants, and the second it to license the Ice+Fries technology out to third-party restaurant companies looking to create similar concepts.

Who knows? If this takes off, we could all be singing an Icelandic song of Ice+Fries.

Pudu Tech Raised More than $15M as the Server Robot Space Heats Up

Pudu Technology, which makes autonomous server robots used in hospitality settings, announced yesterday a funding round of more than $15 million, according to VentureBeat.

The Shenzen, China-based Pudu makes a number of self-driving robots equipped with a rack of trays to shuttle food and drinks to and from customers inside a restaurant. Pudu introduced the BellaBot, which sports cat-like features and even makes a cute LED-face when you pet it, at this year’s CES.

Pudu’s funding comes at the right time, as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced restaurants and bars to reduce the amount of human contact during table service. Server robots like Pudu’s provide a way to reduce at least one point of human-to-human interaction while dining out.

But Pudu will also need the funding because the robot server space is getting increasingly crowded. In the VentureBeat story, Pudu claims has 2,000 customers including Sheraton and JD.com, across 20 countries. Rival Keenon Robotics, server bot company based in China, says that it has 6,000 robots in action and that it can produce 30,000 robots a year.

Over in Korea, Woowa Bros. partnered with consumer electronics giant LG to develop and expand its robot waiter program. In Spain, Macco Robotics launched its Dbot modular server robot. And here in the U.S., Bear Robotics, raised $32 million earlier this year for its Penny robot server.

All of this is to say that there are a lot of companies looking to bring robot servers to your restaurant. So much so, that as I wrote back in February, they could become a commodity:

It feels like restaurant server robots are on their way to becoming less of a novelty and will soon be a commodity. They all do the same thing — carry food. They are meant to do the grunt work so humans don’t have to. So the feature set will be the same: Take food to table > carry food without spilling > avoid humans and other obstacles along the way.

Sure, there are enhancements that can be made, or perhaps there’s a unique way to move food from the robot to the table. But there really isn’t much else for the robot to do. Server robots will become a commodity, and whichever company creates the cheapest robot that does a decent job will win.

Given the debate and debacle around re-opening restaurants here in the U.S., and restaurant workers test positive for COVID, we could see a rise in demand for restaurant robots. And it looks like there are plenty of companies ready if that demand comes.

Refraction AI Officially Launches Robot Grocery Delivery in Ann Arbor, MI

Refraction AI, which makes the three-wheeled autonomous REV-1 delivery vehicle, announced today that it is expanding beyond restaurant meals and into grocery delivery.

The company’s robots are delivering around a three-mile radius in Ann Arbor, MI, and today’s announcement is basically an official unveiling of a program that the company has been testing for months.

If you are in the Ann Arbor delivery and want to check out the delivery service, visit this site that Refraction has created. The company is working with a local grocer called The Produce Station, and it looks like the process is a little kludgey right now. Customers need to visit Produce Station’s Mercato store to see what items are available, and then manually enter the items they want into special form on Refraction’s site. The robot is then dispacted to the store where staffers pack the items into the vehicle before it drivers itself to the delivery location.

It’s understandable that Refraction’s process might not be the smoothest. After all, the company is in the robot business, not the e-commerce business. But it makes me wonder how how the company will connect consumers and robots as it grows beyond Ann Arbor? Will restaurants and grocers have their own REV-1s running back and forth? Or will a third-party delivery service like DoorDash have a fleet of them deployed to make deliveries? Or will it be a combination of both?

Autonomous robot deliveries are attracting more attention during this COVID-19 pandemic as they can reduce human-to-human interactions and, hopefully, human-to-human viral transmission.

Refraction’s REV-1 is a Goldilocks robot, in that its size is right in between the small cooler-sized rover bots of Starship and the big pod-like vehicles of Nuro. This sweet spot of a size, plus the REV-1’s ability to handle inclement weather was one of the reasons we named Refraction AI to our 2020 Food Tech 25 list of innovative companies.

Country Garden Opened a Massive Robot Restaurant Complex in China This Week

You may be debating whether or not you’re ready to go back into a restaurant. But what if that restaurant was operated entirely by robots? Would that make you more inclined to eat out?

Earlier this week, the Qianxi Robot Catering Group, a subsidiary of Country Garden, opened up a robot-powered restaurant complex in the city of Shunde in China’s Guangdong province.

The complex is 2,000 sq. meters (more than 21,000 sq. ft.) and serves Chinese, hot pot and fast food. The restaurant can serve 600 diners at once, offering 200 menu items that can be served up in as little as 20 seconds, according to the press announcement.

The complex has more than 20 robots developed in-house by Qianxi that cook up a variety of different styles including Chinese cuisine, clay pot rice and noodles. Though the press release doesn’t mention them specifically, from the accompanying photos, there is also a small army of pink server robots to bring dishes out to tables. No word on whether these were developed in-house as well, but they don’t look like the server robots make by PuduTech, Keenon or Bear Robotics.

Country Garden’s restaurant certainly isn’t the first to use robots. Spyce Kitchen in Boston uses robots to cook. Caliburger has Flippy grilling burgers. And Bear Robotics’ Penny server bot has been put to work shuttling food in restarants. But Country Garden seems to be among the first putting all of the front and back-of-house pieces together, and doing so at scale.

In addition to a having a bunch of robots, the Country Garden restaurant is also contactless, a factor increasingly important on our pandemic planet. As restaurants re-open here in the U.S., businesses and eater alike are grappling with restrictions like facemasks and socially distant tables. Having a full-on robot restaurant isn’t a guarantee to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but it does remove some human vectors from the equation.

It’s a question I’ve asked before, but what will make people more comfortable inside restaurants: the human touch while wearing a facemask and gloves, or the cold sterility of a robot?

Why I’m All-in on Smart Vending Machines

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Subscribe to get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox!

Vending machines are cool.

No, really! Between robotics, IoT and way better food, today’s vending machines are poised to be a great, pardon the phrase, disruptor in food tech.

To fully understand why I’m all-in on vending machines, you should check out my new report, The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report over on Spoon Plus, our new research and virtual events membership community.

The report covers a ton of players in the space including Chowbotics, Yo-Kai, API-Tech and many, many more. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but here are just a few reasons I’m so excited about the smart vending machine space:

  1. COVID-19. If/when we all emerge from this pandemic, people will want fewer human hands touching their food. Smart vending machines literally keep all their ingredients inside a sealed box and provide automated service.
  2. Small footprint. Because they don’t require much physical space, they can be set up quickly almost anywhere and run around the clock. They also provide a lower-cost way to launch a food brand into new outlets (like existing retail spaces!).
  3. Better food. Robotic arms and fast service don’t amount to much if the food is junk. Thankfully, there is a new wave of machines making fresh food from menus created by actual chefs.

To be sure, things right now aren’t exactly rosy for the smart vending machine space. Cafe X shut down its SF locations, Stockwell shut down and the European Vending & Coffee Service Association said its operators are experiencing losses of up to 90 percent.

It’s not hard to understand why we’re in a dark time. Vending machines are meant to be in high-traffic areas where people want food quickly. Places like airports, offices and dorms. Guess what’s shut down right now? Airports, offices and dorms.

But as I lay out in the report, there’s reason to believe that new opportunities will arise, and with it the whole smart vending sector.

Sign up for Spoon Plus and take a look at the report let me know what you think.

Could Apple Clips Bring Contactless Payments into the Mainstream?

During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, Apple announced App Clips. Basically, it let’s you get can access specific functionality of an app without having to download the full version of that app.

So for example, you could visit a coffee shop and pay with your phone without having to download that coffee shop’s app, set up an account and enter credit card information. Everything is done through Apple Sign In and Apple Pay.

This is actually a big move in a pandemic world where contactless payment options will be more important when it comes to getting customers to eat inside restaurants again. Apple greasing the skids like this with its massive footprint could make contactless payments more ubiquitous.

Apple also showed off other potential uses for Clips, including finding a nearby restaurant and even interacting with connected kitchen services like Drop. Perhaps we’ll see micro-transactions for connected devices, like buying a recipe specifically for an appliance, rather than getting a premium subscription.

We’ll certainly be watching to see what kitchen uses Clips comes up with.

Investing into the Future of Restaurant Tech

Restaurants are going through an unprecedented time of flux. What are some of the opportunities and challenges ahead for the industry? Brita Rosenheim, a Partner at Better Food Ventures recently shared her thoughts on “the new normal” for restaurants and what they need to do to adapt. Following is an excerpt of her guest post (you should totally read the whole thing, though):

Convenience reigns supreme: The shift to take-out/delivery will reshape the basic premise of many restaurants

Well before COVID-related shutdowns, the increasing customer demands for convenience had already fueled a major shift from dine-in to take out/delivery. In 2019, we reached the tipping point where off-premise sales (drive-thru, takeout, delivery, catering) represented a majority of U.S. restaurant revenues. Now, intensified by a decimated restaurant industry and an uncertain socially distanced future, the growth of off-premise will only continue.

As restaurant operators increasingly respond to our “new normal”, we have seen many full-service restaurant concepts testing a more “fast casual” off-premise approach, with increased tech-focused integration, minimized employee/customer exposure, and a lot of creativity to inject hospitality into socially-distanced interactions.

The bottom line is that the restaurant experience – from QSR to Fine Dining – will increasingly no longer be confined to the four walls of a restaurant. We have reached an urgent point where the basic premise of dine-in restaurants must evolve in order to generate the sales volume and margins to remain financially viable. 

New AI from Fujitsu Monitors How Well You Wash Your Hands

Hopefully we are all remaining vigilant about washing our hands properly: 20 seconds of scrubbing, lots of lather, getting in between fingers and under nails. Perhaps you have a favorite song you play along in your head or some other tactic to make sure hands are clear of COVID-19.

As restaurants re-open, making sure servers and other employees follow proper hygiene practices will be critical in helping minimize the spread of coronavirus. One potential way restaurants and other foodservice companies could do that is with new handwashing monitor artificial intelligence (AI) developed by Fujitsu.

Reuters reports today that Fujitsu’s AI watches a person’s hands as they are being washed. From that story:

Fujitsu’s AI checks whether people complete a Japanese health ministry six-step hand washing procedure that like guidelines issued by the WHO asks people to clean their palms, wash their thumbs, between fingers and around their wrists, and scrub their fingernails.

While the tech can’t identify someone from their hands, it could be tied in with some other identifier. to monitor whether an individual employee washed up well enough.

Fujitsu’s AI is part of a larger wave of technology being implemented to ensure good hygiene in restaurants. PathSpot’s device visible fluorescent spectroscopy to check employee hands after they wash up to detect pathogens. And last year in the Shaoxing Province of China, restaurants started installing AI systems to look for unsanitary practices.

Whether or not you are ready for restaurants to re-open, they are, and will continue to. Those that do will have to spend almost as much time and resources on sanitation of their establishments as they do on the quality of their food.

Does this Robot-Powered KFC Point to the Future of Fast Food?

Earlier this year, KFC pulled its “finger lickin good” ad campaign because during a global coronavirus pandemic, touching your face, let alone putting your fingers in your mouth, is not such a great idea.

Now it looks like a KFC in Moscow is going one step further and reducing the number of fingers ever touching your food. Bloomberg uploaded a video this week of the inner workings of said KFC, which uses conveyor belts, an articulating arm and cubbies to move food from the kitchen to consumer.

KFC Tests Fast Food of the Future in Moscow

This KFC actually shows off a number of technologies restaurants are implementing as they move towards a more contactless experience. Customers order via self-serve kiosk. Conveyor belts and the robotic arm then move the tray of food out of the kitchen, and an enclosed cubby holds the order and unlocks when the customer enters a code on the touchscreen.

The KFC is not entirely humanless, however. It looks as though there are still people (with masks and gloves) in the back of house preparing and assembling the order. And the process is far from contactless as customers still need to enter their orders and pickup codes on touchscreens with their fingers.

But this peek inside KFC does point to a direction that we could see more QSRs headed. Fears over the coronavirus are pushing restaurants to create fewer points of human contact inside their stores.

In addition to the steps taken at KFC, a QSR could add Flippy the robot to grill burgers and fry food, and add a PopID kiosk that lets you pay with your face (or bulk up digital ordering options).

This type of automation isn’t cheap, however. Cost was one of the reasons Flippy’s first iteration didn’t make a lot of headway with restaurants. But at least in the U.S., where the pandemic doesn’t show signs of abating, operators may decide that the cost to implement more tech is worth it to keep the business going.

LG, Woowa Bros. and KIRIA to Develop Robot Waiters

Consumer electronics giant LG is teaming up with Woowa Bros and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) to develop robot waiters for restaurants, The Korea Times reported over the weekend.

This deal expands a partnership formed between LG and Woowa earlier this year. According to the Times, the two companies have “joined a project chaired by KIRIA, a Daegu-based state-run agency that supervises Korea’s robot industry.”

LG is developing robots and artificial intelligence that can be used across Woowa Brothers’ food delivery and robot rental businesses. Last November, Woowa launched a program that rents out server robots to restaurants. The Times reports that Woowa currently has 85 robots operating in 68 restaurants across Korea.

The LG robots developed through this program will not carry the LG CLOi branding. In February of this year LG announced its CLOi server robot would be used by Korea restaurant chain CJ Foodville.

Robot servers are gaining new attention during this pandemic because they reduce human-to-human interaction. There are plenty of companies betting on a bright future for server robots. Bear Robotics, Keenon Robotics and PuduTech are all creating similar, autonomous plate carrying robots.

Restaurants are re-opening, but following strict guidelines while doing so, including reduced occupancy, socially distant table setups, temperature checks and masks worn by staff.

Whether or not restaurants can survive under these limitations or whether people will want to dine in at restaurants again in the near future remain to be seen. But a robot server could be a more appealing, contactless alternative for restaurants looking to keep whatever customers they have at ease.

Danone to Use Brightseed’s AI to Uncover New Health Benefits of Soy and Other Plants

Danone North America and Brightseed announced today that they have formed a partnership to use Brightseed’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform to profile and uncover health benefits of key plant sources.

Part of the food as medicine movement, Brightseed is a three-year-old San Francisco startup that examines plants on a molecular level to uncover hidden phytonutrients that can contribute to healthier lifestyles. As it uncovers compounds, Brightseed’s AI platform is then used to predict what impact they will have on the human body.

An example of a phytonutritional compound would be something like the caffeine in coffee or the antioxidants in blueberries.

“We use AI to illuminate the dark matter of nutrition,” Sofia Elizondo, Co-Founder and COO of Brightseed told me by phone this week. “Once you have completed this circle of knowledge. You can transform the food ecosystem.”

Elizondo explained that Brightseed’s platform works for both the sourcing and production sides of CPGs. On the ag side, it can help identify healthy compounds and encourage plant breeding to maximize those benefits. For CPG companies, Brightseed can help source plants that are beneficial and reveal new phytonutrients in existing plant ingredients around which new products can be built.

The partnership with Danone, which owns the Silk and So Delicious Dairy Free brands, will start with Brightseed turning its AI on soy to illuminate the unknown health benefits of soy.

Brightseed, which has raised and undisclosed sum of venture funding, is among a wave of companies using AI to unlock new understandings of our food. Other companies like Spoonshot and Analytical Flavor Systems are using AI to help predict flavor trends and novel food combinations.

But while those companies are looking at existing data, Brightseed is building an entirely new body of data from which entirely new discoveries can be made.

“A lot of technology in our field is built to manipulate nature,” Elizondo said, “There is so much more to learn from what nature has already provided.”

Piestro’s Playful Pizza Robot Gives Equity Crowdfunding a Spin

Automated vending machines were already hot coming into 2020. Companies like Briggo, Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express and Chowbotics were ushering in a new golden age of vending machines. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing us to look at ways of reducing human-to-human contact when serving food, it looks like this golden age of automated vending is just getting started.

Throwing its hat into the ring is Piestro, a new robotic pizza making vending machine that just launched an equity crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.

A portmanteau of pizza + maestro, Piestro is a colorful standalone automated kiosk. Inside, a robotic arm spins the dough under dispensers that pour sauce and apply cheese and other toppings. Then the pizza is run through a heater before being boxed up and popped out in 3 minutes. No word on the variety of pizzas (the video below shows pepperoni, peppers and mushrooms), but pizzas can be ordered via touchscreen on the machine or mobile app.

https://vimeo.com/425483855

Piestro is actually entering a market that is already pretty competitive. Basil Street recently raised $10 million for its pizza vending machine, API Tech has more than 200 pizza machines in operation in Europe, and earlier this year Le Bread Xpress launched the Bake Xpress, which makes pizzas. Additionally, there’s Picnic, though its robots only do pizza assembly (not cooking), and PAZZI’s robot pizza maker is more of a micro restaurant than a vending machine.

Of these, Piestro seems to be most like the API Tech in that it’s not re-heating frozen pizzas, but the machine has the assembly elements of Picnic and the theatrical flair of Cafe X.

Piestro is just in a prototype phase right now, so it’s not currently available on the market. It looks like Piestro launched its equity crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine over the weekend and has gone on to raise more than $82,000 dollars. And if we are reading the terms outlined on the campaign page correctly, Piestro is aiming to raise close to $1.07 million. We’ve reached out to Piestro to find out more details.

Another thing of note about Piestro is the team behind it. Piestro CEO Massimo De Marco was a co-founder of ghost kitchen company, Kitchen United. Piestro’s COO is Kevin Morris, who is also the CFO of Miso Robotics. Buck Jordan, CEO of Miso Robotics and partner at Wavemaker Labs, which made a lead investment in Piestro, is on the Board. FWIW, Miso is also running an equity crowdfunding campaign of its own.

I’m a big believer in the vending machine space, and I do think that the global pandemic will accelerate the trend. First and foremost, the food that vending machines create is higher quality than ever, and the cuisines served will continue to diversify. Second, the small physical footprint of vending machines means that they can be placed just about anywhere for convenient food on the go. And finally the humanless aspect could carry more importance as people are more concerned about who is touching their food.

From the campaign, Piestro has a dual go-to market approach. In Phase 1 it will be making its own pizzas and selling directly to consumers. In Phase 2 it will license out the technology to existing pizza companies. Though it doesn’t provide a ton of details, Piestro says that its machines can be up and running in two weeks for a cost of $50,000.

If Piestro’s crowdfunding campaign is successful, pizza and vending machines could be a hot combination to watch out for.

Kroger to Build Three Robot-Powered Fulfillment Centers in the Pac. Northwest, Great Lakes and West Regions

Kroger announced today that it will be building robot-powered fulfillment centers in the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes and West regions of the U.S. This expansion marks the first such robot warehouses to be situated on the west coast.

These smart warehouses use technology from U.K. grocer Ocado to automate the process of online grocery order fulfillment. Kroger is taking a centralized approach to such fulfillment, building out 20 robot centers in various locations across the U.S. to serve as hubs for customer delivery.

Other retailers are taking a more localized approach to automated order logistics, choosing instead to build out micro fulfillment centers in the backs of existing neighborhood supermarkets. Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize both have partnerships with Takeoff Technologies to build these types of centers, while Walmart is using Alert Innovation for a similar experiment.

The speed of online grocery order fulfillment has definitely become more of a priority during this pandemic. Quarantining has driven record online grocery sales over the past few months, but retailers were ill equipped to handle the deluge of new orders. The result has been out of stock items and massive delays in delivery windows.

The question, however, is, will those online grocery shoppers remain after the pandemic recedes. Companies like Kroger and Albertsons are making big investments in automated fulfillment, but once we get back to “normal,” which definitely won’t be the old normal, will people want to go back into the grocery store to pick out their own food?

Kroger’s march towards automation predates the pandemic by a long shot, so current fluctuations driven by the coronavirus probably aren’t driving too much of its implementation. Besides, the first of Kroger’s robot warehouses isn’t even scheduled to open until early 2021, so there is time for grocers and shoppers to figure out any new preferences to grocery shopping.