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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Robot Restaurant Creator Now Open Five Days a Week, Adds Plant-Based Burger

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant featuring robot-made hamburgers, announced today that it is now open five days a week, and that it has added a plant-based burger to its menu.

Up until today, Creator had only been open Wednesday through Friday. While its hours are still limited to 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., Creator will now be open Monday through Friday.

In addition to being open more hours, flexitarians can rejoice as the restaurant’s menu will now be open to more types of eaters. Creator is adding a plant-based burger made by Hodo, which, according to the Hodo website, is made from tofu.

Creator is bypassing the whole Beyond Meat v. Impossible discussion by going with a smaller player. Creator’s decision could be driven by the fact that its restaurant is such a small player right now, and didn’t want to deal with any potential shortages that both Beyond and Impossible have experienced. Or maybe Creator just preferred the price and taste of Hodo’s burgers.

The introduction of the plant burger seems like it will disrupt the premise of the robot-powered Creator. For meat burgers, Creator’s robot grinds, forms and cooks the beef patty on the spot. But for plant-based burgers, Creator’s robot will assemble the extras on the bun, but a human will grill up and place the patty. Given the rise in popularity of plant-based burgers, one has to wonder how this will impact Creator’s economics.

We spoke with Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas at our Articulate food robot summit last year and he explained that Creator’s robot is meant to do the repetitive boring work of grilling burgers so employees can do more engaging activities like customer service. For now, it seems like humans will be back working the grill.

Creator’s hours of operation and menu expansion comes on the heels of reports that the company was “totally screwed” by Softbank, which was going to become an investor. Food robots in general have been under scrutiny as fellow San Francisco startup Cafe X shuttered three of its locations and Zume pizza shut down its robot-assisted pizza delivery business.

Will this new move and new menu item keep Creator out of the robot dead pool?

Macco Robotics Beer-Pouring Kime-bot has Big Kitchen Plans

Macco Robotics’ Kime robot bartender probably won’t be able to dispense homespun, sage advice like a human, but it can definitely pour you a beer.

Made by Seville, Spain-based Macco Robotics, Kime is a humanoid food and beverage serving robot. Measuring about 2 square meters, the Kime features a robotic head and torso and has two articulating arms that can be used to grab and dispense beverages.

If you’ve ever worked in a bar, you know you can’t just shoot a beer straight into a glass; there is some subtlety to it. The Kime’s hands pull the tap appropriately and angles the glass properly for a correct pour. Macco Robotics CTO, Kish Renganathan, told me by phone this week that the Kime can pour one beer in 23 seconds.

Portugal gas company, Prio, trialed the Kime at one of its gas stations last year. Why you would want to serve up cups of beer to people getting gas and out for a drive is a little beyond me, but hey, Europeans do things a little differently. Renganathan said that for its next phase of testing, Prio is looking to shuttle the one kiosk between different gas stations and have it serve up other beverages like fountain drinks, milkshakes and even grab fresh made food items.

The Kime is also being used by a Spanish beer brand, though Macco actually switched things up a bit for that trial. Instead of being a stationary kiosk, Kime was attached to a cart and used as a rolling robot beer machine for events like festivals.

What’s interesting about the Kime is that the company is sticking with the humanoid form. When it comes to automation, you typically have something like the Cafe X, which also uses articulating arms to add some theatricality as it pours and serves drinks, or you have something that’s more embedded automation like the Briggo, which uses rails and dispensers hidden inside the machine.

Given that the Kime is being used for events and fast service locations like convenience stores, I would assume that embedded automation would deliver the speed and volume necessary to keep up with orders. But Renganathan laid out a bigger vision for me.

“Our vision is to make a humanoid for cooking,” Renganathan said, admitting that swiveling arms might be less efficient. The kiosk, in this case, is a contained environment in which the robot can learn to manipulate different food and drink. “Our goal is to take the robot outside and leave it in the kitchen to assist the chef.”

That’s a pretty big goal. Huge companies like Samsung and Sony don’t even seem to be thinking that big. While their visions of kitchen assistants do feature robotic arms, they are attached to a cabinet, and not to a free-roaming autonomous humanoid.

Right now, Macco is self-funded, and it’ll have to raise a sizeable chunk o’ change to make that vision a reality. Now we’ll have to wait to see if Macco will be raising a glass in celebration of its success, or pouring one out for another food robot demise.

Kroger Building Next Ocado Automated Fulfillment Center in Frederick, MD

Looks like grocery shoppers on the west coast hoping for an automated warehouse to fulfill their grocery orders will have to wait a little bit longer. Kroger announced today that its next Ocadao-style robot-powered fulfillment center will be in Frederick, MD.

Kroger is building 20 of these smart warehouses, but none so far have made it out west. Other cities getting automated fulfillment centers include Monroe, OH, Groveland, FL, Forest Park, GA, Dallas, TX, and Pleasant Prairie, WI. Frederick appears to be the vague “mid-Atlantic” location the company had previously announced.

These automated fulfillment centers use robotic totes on rails to assemble online grocery orders. Kroger, which is an investor in Ocado, is taking more of a standalone approach to automated grocery fulfillment, building out entirely new, separate facilities. Other retailers such as Albertsons are building out automated micro-fulfillment centers in the back of existing retail locations.

Online grocery shopping is still a small percentage of overall grocery shopping, but its growing. Automated fulfillment centers like the ones Kroger is building have the potential to boost online grocery’s slice of the pie by offering faster turnaround of online orders (and thus, create more orders).

All these systems are just coming online over the coming months, so it remains to be seen how people will engage with them. Additionally, we’ll have to see if there is a difference in convenience and shopper adoption between standalone facilities and in-store ones (or some combination of both).

Kroger shoppers living in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia being served by the new Frederick facility won’t actually be that far ahead of the west coast. The new warehouse won’t open until 24 months after groundbreaking.

As Starship Delivery Robots Hit Ole Miss, Where’s Kiwi?

Starship’s autonomous food delivery robots started rolling out across the University of Missisppi (Ole Miss) yesterday, reports the school’s newspaper. This, evidently, makes Ole Miss the first college in the Southeastern Conference to get autonomous robot delivery, which isn’t a huge deal to us, but is probably a jab at rival University of Alabama somehow.

Starship’s robots are cooler-sized, six-wheeled self-driving vehicles that automatically navigate around people and obstacles. Students and staff wanting food download the Starship app and place an order from participating eateries at that college. They then pay a $1.99 fee to have it delivered to wherever they are on campus.

Starship shows that it is not slowing down the rollout of its robotic services in the new year. The list of colleges using Starship’s robots is getting too long to mention each time we write about them. But in the past few months alone Starship’s bots have begun service at the University of Houston, the University of Wisconsin, and the company re-started service at the University of Pittsburgh.

As the litany of colleges using Starship continues to grow, one has to wonder what’s up with Kiwi, another startup that makes squat food delivery robots for college campuses. The company announced an updated version of its robot with new capabilities back in December, but hasn’t made much noise since then.

There are a lot of colleges out there, so there is still plenty of opportunity for Kiwi. But at the rate Starship is going, its solution looks like it’s becoming turnkey. The more miles and deliveries Starship runs, the more data it collects and the better its service will become, which will beget even more adoption by more schools.

If Kiwi doesn’t start ramping up, it’s going to miss out on more than just Ole Miss.

Bear Robotics Raises $32M Series A. That’s a Lot of (Robot) Pennies

Bear Robotics, maker of the Penny restaurant server robot, announced today that it has raised a $32 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Softbank with participation from LINE Ventures Corp., Lotte Group, Vela Partners, DSC, and Smilegate. Bear had previously raised $2 million from South Korea’s Woowa Bros.

Penny is an autonomous robot built to shuttle food from restaurant kitchens to tables, and carry back empty dishes. The company released the latest version of Penny last year, which we described at the time:

Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

Bear Robotics founder John Ha got the idea for Penny after running his own restaurant and seeing the hard work that went into being a server. It’s a lot of walking and carrying for a job that doesn’t pay all that well. Ha’s aim is to let robots do the monotonous back and forth associated with food service so employees and owners can do more customer service.

Penny has yet to go into mass production or full scale deployment. The robot was being used at Ha’s restaurant for a time and at a South Korean Pizza Hut, but there hasn’t been any word on expansion from that pilot.

But Penny isn’t the only serverbot in town. At CES this month, China’s PuduTech showed off its BellaBot, which in addition to carrying dishes, also sported an LED feline face. If customers pet Bella, the cat purrs, though it also gets annoyed if customers keep it from its work.

Bear’s fundraise comes at a time when food robots are having a bit of a tough time. Zume, which used robots to help make pizzas, shuttered its pizza delivery service. Creator, the robot-centric hamburger joint, was left stranded by Softbank, which was going to invest. Cafe X shut down three of its San Francisco locations. And Miso Robotics lost both its CEO and COO last year, and instead of venture funding, is turning to equity crowdfunding to raise more capital.

With its new, bulked up warchest, Bear is better prepared to weather any automation storm, but now it has to deliver a whole bunch of meals.

Fresh Bowl Raises $2.1M, Plans for 50 Vending Machines Open This Year

Salad and snack vending machine company Fresh Bowl has raised a $2.1 million seed round, reports Restaurant Hospitality. The round was led by Betaworks and Ground Ventures, with Tuesday and Mana Capital also participating.

In addition to being a healthy food vending machine, Fresh Bowl’s hook is that it serves its meals in recyclable glass jars. When the company launched, it charged a $2 deposit for the jar, which could be rolled over into the next purchase upon its return.

But it looks like Fresh Bowl has changed up its model. Fast Company today wrote that instead of tacking on a deposit on top of the price of a meal, Fresh Bowl now offers a discount on the next bowl if you return the jar. With this new approach, Fresh Bowl says its seen an 85 percent return rate.

Armed with more cash, Fresh Bowl is also looking to expand to more places. The company lists six locations on its website right now, and Fresh Bowl co-founder, Zach Lawless, told Fast Company that they are looking to have a total of 50 machines in operation by the end of this year.

To quote Jack White, “I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating now.” We are entering a golden age of food vending machines. Companies like Fresh Bowl, Briggo, Chowbotics, Farmer’s Fridge, and Yo-Kai Express are all working to deliver restaurant quality meals from a teeny-tiny automated footprint. These vending machines can be squirreled away in office buildings, dormitories, factories and airports, operating twenty-four hours a day, serving up delicious meals in minutes for busy people on the go.

Hopefully more of this cohort will be able to take a page from Fresh Bowl’s fresh approach and incorporate recyclable containers into their service.

Soft Robotics Raises $23M Series B for its Gripping Tech

Soft Robotics, which makes grippers for robots so they can handle odd-shaped and delicate items like food, announced today that it has raised a $23 million Series B round of funding. The round was co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact and includes existing investors Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures, and Yamaha.

Also participating in the round was industrial automation solutions provider, FANUC, which had previously formed a strategic partnership with Soft Robotics to integrate the startup’s mGrip gripper system with any FANUC robot through the release of a new controller.

This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $48 million.

As we wrote in 2018, Soft Robotics’ gripping solution for picking up objects mimics an octopus, using rubbery-tipped appendages. In the company’s demo video below, you can see the one gripper picking up all different kinds of items with odd shapes and textures like a loaf of bread, individual cookies, an onion and a package of chicken.

There are two reasons to pay attention to this technology. First, grocery stores like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons are all starting to implement more robotic fulfillment centers. The ability to pick up fresh and delicate items will expand a retailer’s ability to automate fulfillment of online grocery orders. In addition to the CPGs, robots could be used to pack more fresh items like donuts, baguettes or store made bags of soup.

Second, as we’ve seen from Sony and Nvidia, the ability for a robot to safely manipulate fragile and odd-shaped objects like eggs and bananas can translate into other sectors of automation like medicine that require a gentle touch.

In today’s press announcement, Soft Robotics said it will use the new funding for its next stage of growth.

The UK’s Small Robot Company Equity Crowdfunds its Precision Ag Robots

Based in the UK, the Small Robot Company is actually making its second trip to the crowd for money, and launched its second such campaign earlier this week on CrowdCube.

Equity crowdfunding is a trend we’re watching closely this year. That’s where instead of traditional venture capital, startups let everyday people (with certain restrictions) invest in and receive an actual piece of the company.

Small Robot makes precision agriculture robots that the company hopes will eventually move farmers away from broad chemical spraying of crops and monoculture of plant species in fields. Small Robot has a multi-part, autonomous robot solution it’s building that includes:

  • Tom uses cameras and computer vision to precisely map a field of its plants and weeds
  • Wilma is the AI that analyzes those images to gather per-plant intelligence and weed identification
  • Dick is an autonomous weed zapper that is armed with an electric wand and information from Wilma to precisely electrocute individual weed without the need for chemicals
  • The company will eventually add a third robot, Harry, to its lineup that will do no-till drilling.

Small Robot’s “Tom” robots are currently in the working prototype phase, and in use on 20 farms in the UK. The company aims to ramp up production and manufacturing this year and go live on more farms by the end of 2020.

I spoke with Sam Watson Jones, Co-founder, Small Robot Company by phone this week, and he said his ultimate goal is to empower farms with precision agriculture to such a degree that it’s done on a plant-by-plant level. Farmers will know where each individual seed is planted and automate custom care for each plant as it grows. This means reducing fertilizer use, and planting a variety of crops next to each other to limit the spread of crop disease, maintain nitrogen levels and pollinate more efficiently.

To help it get there, Small Robot is turning to the crowd, again. Previously the company received £1.4 million in non-equity funding from a UK government innovation fund, and in 2018 raised £1.2 million in equity crowdfunding through the CrowdCube platform.

On Monday of this week, Small Robot kicked off its second CrowdCube campaign and has already met its goal of raising £700,000. I asked Watson why his company didn’t go with the traditional VC route this time.

“VCs are a bit different in the UK,” he said, “There are very few early stage VCs to fund stuff that requires more development. We knew we had a load of farmers who were excited about what we could develop. ” Crowdfunding, Watson said “allowed us to get angels and people who would put ten quid in. It’s been a good forum for us to capitalize on the branding and PR.”

As with any investment, there are risks involved, and given that this crowdfunding is happening in the UK, there are restrictions around where people can invest from and how much. Check the campaign’s details for more information.

Small Robot Company is actually the second robotics company we’ve covered that has gone the equity crowdfunding app. On the other end of the meal journey is Miso Robotics, the maker of Flippy, which is using SeedInvest to try and raise a $30 million Series C round.

Small Robot will definitely need to beef up its warchest as it looks to expand outside the UK. Other players in the autonomous precision ag and weed-killing robot space include Australia’s Agerris, which raised $6.5 million (AUSD) last year, and U.S.-based Farmwise, which raised $14.5 million in 2019 as well.

For now though, Small Robot Company’s pitch to big crowds for tiny agriculture seems to be attracting big dollars.

Starship Delivery Robots Officially Roll Out (Again) at University of Pittsburgh

As of this week, robot-powered food and drink delivery are fully a part of college life at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). After several months of testing (and stopping tests), Pitt now has a fleet of 30 Starship robots autonomously running around campus feeding hungry students and staff.

To get the robot, users order from seven participating campus eateries through the Starship deliveries app. For a $1.99 fee, a cooler-sized robot will wheel across campus to bring the food directly to the person.

Starship’s robots made their debut on Pitt’s campus last September, but the program was temporarily halted just a month later after two separate incidents of the self-driving robots reportedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

Pitt pulled Starship’s robots off campus for further review. We reached out to Starship to see what adjustments the company made in response to the accessibility incidents and a company spokesperson responded with a terse “Starship reviewed the mapping of that intersection.”

The real world will bring about all sorts of issues for delivery robots that weren’t necessarily foreseeable, and they are issues that society will have to deal with and figure out in real time. But robots will become an increasingly common part of the college experience for students over the next couple of years. In addition to Pitt, Starship’s robots are making deliveries at George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Wisconsin, and other homes of higher education. Elsewhere, Chowbotics has been sending its Sally, the salad making robot, off to a number of different colleges to feed students around the clock.

Though autonomous robot delivery at colleges is very much still in its infancy, it has the power to be a real game changer. The ability to order food on demand and have it brought directly to you wherever you are on campus in undeniably convenient (post-party pizza, anyone?). But it’s also training an entire generation of early tech adopters (read: the youngs) to interact with robots, and perhaps, expect them once they leave school.

Robot Baristas Aren’t Dead Yet. Briggo to Open 5 New Locations This Quarter

Normally we wouldn’t cover a gonna story. Like when a company says they are gonna do something. The Spoon likes to see actual results, not speculation, thank you very much.

But when robot barista company Briggo reached out to share some of their expansion plans for the coming year, I was intrigued. Whether by luck or rapidly assembled intention, Briggos’ announcement today comes on the heels of rival robo-coffee shop Cafe X shuttering three of its five locations.

There has also been a general sense of doom and gloom cast over the food robot industry in general as Zume shut down its pizza delivery business, and Creator was left stranded and unfunded by Softbank.

But you’d be hard pressed to think anything was wrong with the robot food business in talking with Kevin Nater, the Co-Founder and CEO of Briggo. I spoke with him by phone this week and Nater said five new automated Coffee Haus locations will go live in Q1 of this year, which is as many as the company launched in all of last year. Through its partnership with SSP America, Briggo plans to be in a dozen locations by the end of 2020.

One of the reasons Briggo can accelerate its install base is because it has moved its manufacturing to Foxconn. Previously Briggo was building every Coffee Haus by hand, but now Nater says “The Wisconsin facility can knock them out as fast as we can order them.” Depending on the location and permitting, Nater says they can get a Briggo machine up and running in a matter of weeks.

With SSP America doing business development for Briggo, Nater said that airports will continue to be a “huge focus” for the company. There are currently two Coffee Hauses in the Austin-Bergstrom Airport and one at San Francisco Airport (SFO).

As Briggo focuses on airports, and building out more locations, I asked Nater if that means the company will be pulling back on its own coffee creation ambitions. One part of Briggo’s business has been that it is also a coffee company that roasts its own beans. As it has expanded into new locations, it has also started offering coffees from roasters local to those areas (Sightglass in SFO, for instance). Nater said “Nope,” and that in addition to hosting other brands, Briggo will continue to sell its own coffee.

In addition to airports, Briggo opened up its first location inside a Whole Foods in Houston last fall. That Whole Foods happens to have 260 condos above it, and Nater said that condo owners are treating the Briggo almost like a personal coffee machine, ordering drinks with their phone in their condo and then coming downstairs to pick it up.

Given the recent setbacks for food robot-based startups, I asked Nater how he refers to their Coffee Hauses. Are they called “robots” or “machines” or something else, entirely? “We use the term robotic barista,” he said “to convey barista level quality.”

So Briggo is still in the robot business. It may strive to serve quality coffee, but we’re gonna have to watch to see if its automated approach translates into a scalable quantity.

The Complete CES 2020 Kitchen Tech Report

At this year’s big tech show in Vegas, there was no shortage of food tech. Everything from Impossible Pork to robot cooking assistants were on display, and so after spending five days in the desert checking out the latest and greatest, here’s my wrap-up of everything I saw in kitchen tech at the show:

Lots of Smart Fridges

It may be hard to believe in 2020, but Internet connected fridges have been showing up at CES for two decades. Of course, with powerful machine vision and food inventory tracking systems, today’s smart fridges are a lot more useful than these attempts from yesteryear even if they’ve yet to be widely adopted.

Some of the companies showing off smart fridge tech at this year’s CES included LG, Samsung, Bosch and GE. Bosch showed off a two-camera smart fridge powered by Chefling, a partnership that shouldn’t be all that surprising given BSH Appliances’ investment in the smart kitchen software startup.

LG’s latest smart fridge, which includes the popular Instaview transparent front door feature, now reorders food when inventory gets low. Samsung’s latest smart fridges use Whisk technology (a company they acquired last year) to suggest recipes based off of your in-fridge inventory. Smarter was also in Vegas at FoodTech Live showing off their retrofit fridge cam.

Home Grow Systems Get a Look

For the first time at CES, big appliance brands showed interest in allowing home grow systems to take root in the kitchen. Both Samsung’s BeSpoke grow system and the LG’s system were evolved proof of concepts that utilized sensors and allowed the home gardener to monitor the status of their plants within the form factor of a standup fridge.

GE’s Home Grown took the home farm out of the fridge and made the entire kitchen a multilayered food grow system. You can watch a video of a booth demo of the concept below:

CES 2020: A Tour of 'Home Grown', the GE Appliances Garden Kitchen Concept

All of the grow systems on display by big appliance brands were more proof of concepts than shipping products. I’ll be interested to see if any of them roll out these products in the next year. Of all the systems, the Samsung Bespoke home grow systems seemed to be the closest to a market-ready product.

Intelligent And Adaptive Surfaces

One of the big trends sweeping food tech is personalization, so why not apply the principle of personalization to our physical space as well? GE did just that with a concept called Shift, an adaptable kitchen that, well, shifts to adapt to each person’s specific requirements. The idea isn’t new. The first winner of the Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase, a German startup called Tielsa (now KimoCon), makes an app-controlled, adjustable kitchen platform that adjusts the height of the surface space to the specific user.

The Wireless Power Consortium had a full kitchen built out at CES 2020, showing off how their Ki kitchen standard using induction heating and wireless charging worked. Speaking of induction, one of the most innovative entries in intelligent surfaces at CES 2020 was from design firm GHSP, who showed off technology for a video-enabled induction cooktop. I know Americans are in love with their fire cooking, but hopefully new ideas like this will generate interest in what is clearly a superior (and flexible) technology in induction. You can check out a quick video of GHSP’s concept below:

Drink Tech Was EVERYWHERE

Drinks have always been a little easier to serve up in the future kitchen than cooking technology, and this year was no different as we saw well over a dozen next-gen beer, booze, coffee and tea machines sprinkled around the show floor.

On the booze front, CES 2020 had offerings from Drinkworks and Bartesian, while on the beerbot side, we saw offerings from PicoBrew, BEERMKR, MiniBrew and INTHEKEG to name a few. Noticeably absent was LG’s HomeBrew, the automated beer making appliance concept they debuted a year ago at CES 2019.

When it comes to coffee tech, longtime Spoon readers shouldn’t be surprised at my excitement over seeing a working production model of the Spinn coffee maker, a product I’ve been covering since I pre-ordered one way back in 2016 (we’ll have a video of the Spinn later this week). Terra Kaffe had a TK-01 on hand at FoodTech Live to demo the machine’s grind and brew (and milk frothing) capabilities, while MoJoe Brewing was showing off its portable coffee making system.

You can watch Chris’s interview with Spinn CEO Roderick de Rode and take a look inside the Spinn in the video below:

CES 2020: A Look at the Spinn Grind and Brew Coffee Maker

DNA & Microbiome Driven Diets

With DNA testing now fast and affordable, it’s not all that surprising to see offshoot concepts that capitalize on the information provided by a person’s profile. One of CES’s most buzzy startups in this space was DNANudge, a French company that is offering a wearable that tells a person whether that CPG product they picked up in the grocery store is a good fit for them. On the microbiome front, Sun Genomics was at FoodTech Live to show off its personalized microbiome kit.

Food Waste Reduction & Sustainability

One area that has traditionally lacked innovation is in the management of food waste in the home. While we still didn’t see a whole lot around food waste prevention tech outside of ever-more-advanced machine vision making its way into our fridges, there was a scrappy Canadian startup was showing off a cool new concept for home composting. The Sepura, made by British Columbia based Anvytech, automatically routes your solids into a food compost bin and disposes of your liquids.

You can see CNET’s video tour of the Sepura composter below:

Food Inventory Management

In addition to a number of food recognizing fridges, there are also a few other products on display showcasing how we could better manage our food. The Ovie smart food tracking system was on display at FoodTech Live, while a new entrant into the smart food tracking space, PantryOn, showed off a new dry pantry tracking system that will notify you and reorder an item when the product is low. While the PantryOn is a bit pricey with a retail price of $900, I am glad to see some companies think about innovating in the pantry.

Smart Schnozzes

Long-term, more intelligent sensors – and the software and AI that stitches together all the information gathered from these technologies – are going to make the kitchen truly sentient, which is why I always make sure to check out the new digital nose technologies every year while at CES.

While there was no shortage of electronic noses at CES this year, one digital schnoz that stuck out Cyrano de Bergerac-style was that from Stratuscent. The company’s technology, originally developed by NASA, can be used in a variety of verticals, but the company’s initial focus is food applications. Company CEO David Wu told me they are currently talking to appliance manufacturers about the possibility of including Stratuscent tech in their products.

Countertop Cooking

On the counterop cooking front, Anova was at CES showing off its Precision Oven, which is slated to appear sometime this year. The company was demoing the benefits of steam throughout the show, including showing off how steam can help make much better bread. You can watch a walkthrough of the Anova oven from food tech innovator Scott Heimendinger below, who has been helping Anova with the oven.

CES 2020: A Look at the Anova Precision Steam Oven

One product that seemed to get lots of buzz at CES was a multicooker called Julia from CookingPal. The device looks and acts in large part like a Thermomix, with the main difference being a separate touch screen interface in the form of a 8.9″ display. The touch screen has a camera on it that, according CookingPal, will recognize food and suggest recipes. From there, the Julia offers video-powered guided cooking, and afterwards has a self-clean mode.

Cooking Robots

Much like big appliance brands caught home garden fever, many also seemed bitten by the food robotics bug. Chris covered much of what was on display, most of which struck me as futuristic visions of how robotics could be implemented in a consumer or professional kitchen to make our lives easier. Not that futuristic or far off is a bad thing – what seemed crazy ten years ago often seems pedestrian in the present, and I expect at some point some of these products will be commercialized.

One that’s worth a look is the Samsung Bot Chef. While a bit reminiscent of the Moley robot arm kitchen robot, the Samsung bot’s fine motor movements and handling of kitchen utensils was impressive, suggesting that maybe a home robot chef isn’t as far off as I might think.

Samsung Bot Chef first look at CES 2020

Key Takeaways

When I was doing my research on what to expect at this year’s CES for foodtech, I was surprised at some of the big ideas that were debuting at the show.

While CES normally is where gee-whiz technology debuts, this year appliance and home brands seemed to thinking bigger with concepts that could potentially solve real-world problems like reduce food waste or help those with special needs.

There also seemed to be a big focus, generally, on the kitchen as a place to employ cutting edge technologies ranging from AI, robotics, virtual reality and more. Big appliance, it seems, has realized what we’ve long believed: the kitchen is the heart of the home.

Finally, it seems personalization is grabbing hold in a big way. Everything from personalized nutrition to physical cooking spaces to meal plans is on the menu, something that I think aligns well with the broader push towards more personalized worlds in this era of data abundance.

We’ll be continuing the conversation about personalization at Customize, our Food Personalization Summit, in NYC on Feb 27th. Join us!

Walmart Boosts Bossa Nova’s Robotic Shelf Scanning to 1,000 Stores

Walmart is adding another 650 Bossa Nova robots to its roster, Bloomberg reported this morning, bringing the total number of the shelf scanning bots to 1,000 by the end of this summer.

Boss Nova’s robots are autonomous, six-foot tall machines equipped with 15 different cameras. As they move down a store aisle, they scan for missing or misplaced inventory and alert store management to take proper action.

The move is part of a bigger robotic push Walmart is embarking on. In April of last year, the company made its initial increase in Bossa Nova’s robots and also put Bain’s floor scrubbing robots in 1,500 locations and doubled the use of automated scan and sort robots to 600 locations.

In November of last year, Bossa Nova announced the newest version of its robot. The Bossa Nova 2020 features a slimmer design, smarter cameras that can see deeper into shelves and a number of attachments to scan other areas of the store like frozen food and produce sections.

When Walmart first started rolling out Bossa Nova’s robots in October of 2017, the retailer said the automated shelf scanners were 50 percent more productive and three times faster than a human doing the same job. Walmart didn’t provide Bloomberg with any update on productivity stats, saying only that they have reduced out-of-stock products.

There will be more robots running around your local grocery store over the next year. In addition to Boss Nova, there is Simbe Robotics, which has a deal with Giant Eagle stores, and which raised $26 million in September of last year.

Of course, there is the whole question of whether robots are just a stop gap for automated inventory management. Walmart launched its Intelligent Retail Lab store last year, which uses banks of cameras to monitor inventory in real time. And Singapore startup Trax says that its camera-based inventory management system has increased sales for its retail partners by one percent. One percent on its own doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you operate at the scale of a national chain, that one percent can translate into sizeable revenue that is just sitting on the table.

Bossa Nova is aware of this potential shift away from robots. When I spoke with the company last year , they said that what they are most interested in is the data, no matter where it comes from: robots, cameras, smart shelves — whatever.

But until those days come, expect more stores to do more with robots like Bossa Nova’s.