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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

How Could Amazon Licensing its Go Technology Impact Other Cashierless Startups?

Bloomberg has a story out today saying that Amazon’s cashierless checkout ambitions are much bigger in both size and scope than its current bodega-sized Go stores. A source told Bloomberg that Amazon is looking to outfit its own larger-sized grocery stores with its checkout tech and also license it out to other retailers.

Bloomberg’s story complements an earlier CNBC report saying that Amazon was looking to license out its cashierless checkout technology, though the licensees listed then were airports and movie theaters. But if we know that Amazon is opening its own larger format grocery stores, developing new Go-like systems that work in larger format stores and is now actively seeking to license out its cashierless technology, what does that mean for all the other startups now in the cashierless checkout space?

As a quick refresher, Amazon Go stores are grab-and-go retail experiences. Shoppers scan their phone as they walk into the store where banks of cameras and sensors keep track of what people grab and what they keep, and charge them automatically upon exiting.

Amazon isn’t the only company working on this cashierless checkout technology, and we cover a number of the other players in the space. Trigo, Grabango, Standard Cognition, Caper, Zippin are all startups looking to retrofit existing grocery stores with cashierless checkout tech.

Many of these startups have even already announced retailer relationships: Trigo is being used by Shufersal in Israel and Tesco in the U.K., Grabango has Giant Eagle, Caper has Sobeys in Canada and Zippin has Lojas Americanos in Brazil.

There are a lot of grocery retailers in the world, so there’s plenty of opportunity to go around, but one has to wonder how Amazon’s 800 lb. gorilla will alter the current playing field.

To be sure, I don’t imagine large, nationwide retailers like Albertsons or Kroger, who are already scared of Amazon’s grocery growth and working overtime to fight them off, would want to then turn around and license Amazon technology. And Amazon’s largest rival, Walmart, has already built out its own Intelligent Retail Lab, which currently uses cameras and sensors to monitor inventory, but seems primed for expansion into cashierless checkout at some point.

However, smaller, regional chains might be interested in adding Go-like capabilities to their stores. And they might be more willing to license Amazon tech, which comes with a brand recognition, world-class technology and a sense of permanence (i.e. they won’t run out of money and shut down).

Amazon would surely be keen to license its Go tech to smaller chains, perhaps even at a discounted rate because it would give the company something just as valuable as money: all that shopping data. By licensing out the means for purchasing, Amazon would still get all that data about what is bought and when, without having to build out stores everywhere in the U.S. This data could then be used to feed the algorithms to make the stores they do build out physical spaces more efficient.

All this is to say that 2019 was a transitional year for cashierless checkout startups with lots of partnerships announced publicly. But with Amazon looking like it’s getting into the game, those startups will need to scale up and lock down even more retailer agreements before it’s too late.

Pizza Party! Picnic Raises $5M for its Food Robotics Platform

Picnic, the food robotics company best known for its automated pizza assembly line, announced today that it has raised $5 million. The funding is part of Picnic’s seed round and was led by Creative Ventures with participation from Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital.

Picnic came out of stealth mode last month to reveal its assembly line style robot where a conveyor carries a crust under dispensers that apply sauce and other toppings. Picnic’s pizza ‘bot is already being used by Centerplate at Seattle’s T-Mobile arena. (Picnic also fed hungry attendees at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October, cranking out hundreds of (tasty) pizzas per hour.)

While its first use is putting together pizzas, Picnic is really creating more of a modular platform that could be used for a number of different types of food. Think assembling Subway style sandwiches, for example.

As I wrote of the time of its unveiling , Picnic sits squarely at the nexus of a number of different food tech trends. First, it’s part of a wave of food automation that is taking over some of the repetitive tasks of food creation and promising to help restaurants deal with high human turnover. Second, among its first venues is a stadium, since stadiums need to feed a lot of people quickly, they are becoming a hotbed when it comes to food innovation. Finally, Picnic says that its machine can help cut down on food waste by precisely applying the same amount of ingredients to each pizza, each time.

With its new funding, Picnic says it will continue product development, as well as ramp up marketing and staffing.

Woowa Bros. to Rent Out In-Restaurant Bots that Deliver Food to Your Table

When we’ve written about Korean company Woowa Bros.’ robotic ambitions in the past, it’s been around delivering food from restaurants to your customers’ own homes. But the company announced a new plan on Monday to have its Dilly ‘bots deliver food inside restaurants to your table, too.

The Aju Business Daily reports that Woowa is launching a robot rental program wherein restaurants can pay 900,000 won (~$773 USD) per month with a two-year contract.

Aju Business Daily is light on details, saying only that the Dilly can carry food to four tables at a time and bus dirty dishes back to the kitchen. That sounds a lot like the Penny robot Bear Robotics offers (and tested out at a Pizza Hut in Seoul last year). Woowa is an investor in Bear Robotics, and we’ve reached out to Bear’s to see if its technology is involved in Woowa’s new offering.

As off-premises dining continues to play an increasingly important role for restaurants, many players look to build autonomous robots for food delivery (Postmates, Kiwi, Starship, etc.). There aren’t as many focused on in-store dining, which presents an opportunity for companies like Woowa and Bear.

Woowa Brothers operates the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery app in South Korea, and the company has not been shy about building out its robot fleet. Last December the company received a $320 million investment round in part to help it develop more autonomous robots, and this past July the company formed a partnership with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots.

Takeoff, eh? Canada Grocer Loblaws Testing In-Store Robotic Micro-Fulfillment

Loblaws, Canada’s largest grocery chain, announced this week that it was piloting Takeoff Technologies‘ robot-powered micro-fulfillment center in one of its stores. Supermarket News reports that the two companies have already started building out the center in Toronto and will fulfill orders for Lawlaws’ PC Express pickup service next year.

Typically built into the back of a retailer, Takeoff’s automated fulfillment centers use a series of totes, rails and conveyors to shuttle food items around. Once an online grocery order comes in, totes automatically bring the items to a human who assembles them into bags that go out to the car. According to Supermarket News, Takeoff’s system can gather grocery orders of 60 items in less than five minutes. You can see the Takeoff robots in action here.

Ideally, micro-fulfillment technology like Takeoff’s allows retailers to convert un- or little-used space into more productive and revenue-generating areas for a store while creating a faster, more convenient online grocery shopping experience for customers. Online grocery shopping is still a small percentage of overall grocery spending, but it’s growing, and automated fulfillment (and the holidays!) could help spur more food shopping from home.

This new partnership expands Takeoff’s reach across North America and into Canada and adds another high profile partner for the startup. Here in the U.S., Takeoff already has a number of pilots going on with Sedano’s, Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Wakefern.

While Takeoff has a few partnerships it can point to, there are plenty of automated fulfillment players getting into the game or trying out different approaches to fulfillment. Alert Innovation also builds in-store fulfillment and has partnered with Walmart on a pilot location. Fabric just raised $110 million and moved its headquarters to the U.S. to expand its robotic fulfillment presence here. And instead of inside its stores, Kroger is building 20 standalone robot-powered smart warehouses domestically.

Despite all this, automated fulfillment is still in the early days of testing, and it remains to be seen if and how it will impact a retailer’s bottom line. As more of these systems come online in 2020, we’ll definitely see if they fulfill their robotic promise.

Bossa Nova Unveils New Shelf-Scanning Robot with Fresh Food Inventory Monitoring

Bossa Nova today announced its next-generation of shelf-scanning robot dubbed, appropriately enough, the Bossa Nova 2020, which will make its debut at the National Retail Federation show this coming January.

Bossa Nova’s robot roams store aisles, scanning shelves as it goes to identify any gaps in the inventory so retailers can keep items fully stocked. It does this through a combination of shelf barcode reading, to know what items should be where, as well as computer vision to identify products.

The Bossa Nova 2020 features a smarter camera than the previous version that can see deeper into the shelf, and a lot more computing power. “We dramatically upgraded the onboard edge computing,” Sarjoun Skaff, CTO of Bossa Nova told me by phone this week. “We built our own computer, consolidating three server-like computers into a single board with four CPUs and three GPUs.”

Images are processed by the camera itself, and information is then handed over to the onboard computer, which sends data up to the cloud where Bossa Nova’s AI takes over to analyze the images and deliver insights to store managers in real time.

In addition to static product boxes on store shelves, with new attachments, the Bossa Nova 2020 can now scan additional sections of the grocery store like produce aisles and frozen food sections. For something like fruit, Bossa nova doesn’t do a complete count of the products, but rather identifies product gaps in displays.

The Bossa Nova 2020 is also thinner than its predecessor, giving humans in aisles more room to move and allowing smaller format stores to use the robot. Skaff also said that they have added controls on the robot itself so store employees can interact directly with the robot on the spot.

Roaming robots are something that shoppers and store employees will increasingly have to deal with. Earlier this year Walmart, which launched first-gen Bossa Novas in 50 locations back in 2017, announced it would expand that fleet to 300 hundred locations. Giant Eagle started testing Simbe’s Tally robot in stores, and Ahold Delhaize said it ordered almost 500 of Badger Technologies “Marty” robots (though those don’t do inventory management).

One thing Skaff said Bossa Nova won’t do, however, is put googley eyes on its robots, saying that while they want the robot to be approachable, they want to convey that it is an appliance, a tool, and not the work of Hollywood sci-fi.

One thing I’ve wondered about this past year is how much of a stopgap robots are when it comes to inventory management. In April, Walmart unveiled it’s AI-powered Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL) store, which uses banks of installed cameras to monitor inventory all the time in real-time (i.e., no waiting for a robot to come down the aisle).

It seem as though this isn’t lost on Bossa Nova. Though the company hasn’t formally changed its name, Bossa Nova Robotics dropped the “Robotics” part entirely in the press release for this latest news, referring to itself only as “Bossa Nova.” Common Sense Robotics did something similar this year when it changed its name to Fabric.

Skaff even talked about how Bossa Nova is looking ahead post-robot. “I think the future will have a mix of a little bit of everything,” Skaff told me. “Some fixed cameras, robots, perhaps even some flying cameras, crowdsourced cameras, smart shelves. All of these are sources of data.”

Because ultimately, data and AI is what Boss Nova is all about. It doesn’t even charge retailers for the robots, instead making money by having clients subscribe to its data analytics platform.

Robots may be futuristic, but the future belongs to those who collect, comprehend and analyze data.

Uber CEO: “Some Version” of Autonomous Driving for Simple Tasks Coming in 3 to 5 Years

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s comments on Saudi Arabia are rightly grabbing most of the headlines today, following his televised appearance on Axios on HBO this weekend. But during that interview, Khosrowshahi also said some things about Uber’s autonomous driving future which are worth at least noting.

Axios posted an unaired clip from that interview and in it, Khosrowshahi says that full autonomous ride-hailing is probably five to ten years off. However, he thinks that for very simple routes and tasks, there will be some form of autonomous driving going on in just three to five years.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi talks autonomous vehicles

Though he doesn’t mention Uber Eats specifically in the clip, food delivery certainly seems like it could fit the bill when it comes to simple tasks and routes. As Khosrowshahi points out, safety is still a huge issue for autonomous vehicles. On its face, carrying food instead of people is at least a little bit safer, because there is no one inside the self-driving vehicle who can get injured. (Obviously it still needs to be safe for pedestrians and other people out in the world.)

Also carrying food is a much simpler task than carrying a person, who may not be at a pickup point, or might want to get dropped off at a particular spot, or could even barf in the backseat of a car.

Uber could also create simple, autonomous routes for food delivery, similar to the hub and spoke model we talked about with Uber’s upcoming drone delivery. If Uber builds out more centralized ghost kitchens that host a number of different restaurants, food ordered from those restaurants could be bundled together into an autonomous vehicle that drives along a simple route to a drop-off point in a neighborhood where drivers pick it up for last mile delivery. This autonomous middle-mile is something that Walmart is already exploring to move goods between Walmart stores.

Autonomous vehicles also eliminate the cost of human drivers, so they would be cheaper to operate than Uber’s current fleet. This displacement of human labor brings up its own societal issues, and Uber is already in the hot seat for how it classifies its drivers. Uber is going to have to sort all this out because three years is not that far away.

Russia’s Yandex Gets Into the Delivery Bot Game

Russia-based company Yandex announced this week that it’s rolling out its own autonomous delivery robot. Dubbed the Yandex.Rover, it’s a squat, six-wheeled cooler-sized robot that can scoot around at a walking pace, delivering packages and food.

Yandex is often referred to as the Russian Google. According to the press announcement, its Rover has already hit the road at the company’s headquarters in Moscow. Similar to other delivery robots like those from Starship and Kiwi, the Yandex.Rover uses lidar and can travel autonomously (with remote supervision), recognize objects, and avoid pedestrians, animals and other obstacles.

Synergy is the name of the game for the Yandex.Rover, as it will eventually be put to use delivering meals from Yandex.Eats, groceries from Yandex.Lavka and goods from the online marketplace Beru.

At first blush, the Yandex.Rover is probably most analogous to Amazon’s Scout rover bot. Scout is currently being tested in Washington state and California for small package deliveries from Amazon. While the company hasn’t made any specific announcements, it’s not hard to imagine the Scout bot being used for food delivery from Whole Foods, Amazon Go or the eventual Amazon-branded supermarket chain.

Other autonomous delivery robots like the aforementioned Starship and Kiwi are focusing on providing food delivery to college campuses, though there is some general expansion into cities such as Sacramento.

Robots like these could drastically alter the food delivery landscape in terms of how people get their meals. Here in the U.S. at least, there are still a number of legal and infrastructure hurdles that need to be overcome before they ever become commonplace. I’m not familiar with the regulatory world of Russia, it’s hard to say if Yandex will face similar scrutiny.

Miso Robotics Aims to Equity Crowdfund $30 Million

Miso Robotics, creator of Flippy the burger grilling robot, announced today that it is looking to raise a $30 million through equity crowdfunding for its next round of financing. The company’s last round was a $10 million Series B back in February of 2018, and Miso has raised nearly $15 million in total to date.

By going the crowdfunding route, individuals can invest in and receive actual equity in Miso Robotics. As with any investment, there is risk involved and no guarantee of financial return. Miso is using SeedInvest’s (by Circle) equity crowdfunding platform, along Wavemaker Labs, to execute the fundraise.

Miso is most famous for its Flippy robot, an articulating arm that can grill burgers as well as fry french fries, tater tots and chicken tenders. Flippy’s first gig was with fast casual chain CaliBurger, and additional robots have since gone on to work at LA Dodgers Stadium and Arizona Diamondbacks Chase Field.

On the crowdfunding page, the company says that it has a pre-money valuation of $80 million and that individuals looking to buy in must make a $1,500 minimum investment. Also, in a move that seems somewhat comedic, given the money involved, the company lists perks available for different investment tiers. A $3,000 investment gets you a Miso Robotics hat and a voucher for 5 free CaliBurgers. Invest $250,000 or more and you get “10 Miso Robotics hats and voucher for 100 free CaliBurgers, 1 PopID facial recognition scanner installed at your home or place of business, Trip to Los Angeles for 4 people to a regular season LA Dodgers game.” Why someone would want a facial recognition scanner meant for restaurant loyalty programs in their house, I’m not sure.

The fact that Miso is crowdfunding its next round is made all the more intriguing since we learned last month that Miso Robotics Co-Founder and CEO, Dave Zito, as well as COO, Melissa Hampton Burghardt, were no longer with the company. Reasons for their departure were not given. However Zito sent us a statement at that time saying he was still the company’s largest shareholder.

Equity crowdfunding seems to be more of a thing nowadays, with companies like GOffee and GoSun both running such campaigns. But we are curious as to why a company with Miso Robotics’ pedigree would go down the equity crowdfunding path, given the complexity of its technology and earlier fundraising achievements.

With the campaign officially launched, we’ll see if everyday investors will flip over Flippy.

Amazon Opening Big Robotics Center in Massachusetts

Amazon announced today that it’s going to build a new robotics hub in Westborough, MA outside of Boston. The company is spending $40 million on the 350,000 square foot facility that will open in 2021 and be in addition to the company’s current robotics center in North Reading, MA.

When you think about Amazon automation, it’s often in relation to its warehouse robots that autonomously carry around racks of items to be boxed and shipped. But the company has been branching out into other robots such as the Scout delivery robot currently running around in tests in Washington state and California. Amazon also has a patent for a robot that would live in your garage and go out to fetch items for you.

Amazon didn’t mention any specific projects that will be worked on at the new facility, but given our focus on food here at The Spoon, our minds immediately went to how Amazon could continue to apply new robots to groceries. Amazon is reportedly looking to open up its own line of supermarkets apart from Whole Foods, and it’s not hard to imagine the company taking its logistical know-how and applying it to some kind of robot-driven grocery fulfillment center.

Automated grocery fulfillment centers are gaining some traction with grocery retailers. Takeoff Technologies is building out micro-fulfillment centers in the back of existing grocery stores for Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Sedano’s. Fabric (formerly Common Sense Robotics) recently raised $110 million and moved its headquarters to New York City and has plans to build 14 fulfillment centers across the U.S. Meanwhile, Kroger is building out standalone robot-powered smart warehouses for grocery delivery in various locations across the eastern half of the U.S.

If Amazon builds out its own supermarket chain from the ground up, it’s conceivable that it will incorporate automation and robots to make fulfilling online orders more speedy. Plus, having all that robotics talent and research could help the company figure out new technologies to better handle fragile and perishable items like fruits and vegetables.

The company just started offering its Prime members free delivery for groceries, and making that process more efficient as online grocery shopping grows only makes sense.

Starship Robots Roll Out to University of Wisconsin-Madison, Can They Survive the Winter?

I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but people from there tell me that it gets cold about this time of year, I mean, it snowed there on Halloween last week, with more expected tomorrow and Wednesday. This type of inclement weather was actually the first thing I thought about when Starship sent me a press release today announcing that its robots are now rolling around the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), delivering food.

Starship makes six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that can carry 20 pounds worth of cargo. UW-M has 66,000 students, staff and faculty, and is getting 30 Starship robots those people can use by downloading the Starship app, ordering from three different markets at the school and dropping a pin on the campus map to set the delivery point. There is a $1.99 delivery fee and at first, the delivery area will be limited to a specific area before expanding across campus.

This is the latest school to adopt Starship’s delivery robots, following George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Purdue, University of Houston and the University Pittsburgh.

Pitt, however, recently suspended its robot delivery program after running into issues with the autonomous robots allegedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

That type of real-world complication makes me wonder how the robots will do when truly nasty Wisconsin weather strikes. On the one hand, I’m sure that Starship and the UW-M have thought about this and come up with solutions. One advantage to delivering on campuses is that they are smaller geographic areas with lots of walkways and dedicated maintenance staffs to keep those walkways safe and clear.

But still, snow and ice could be big obstacles for a robot with little wheels. That’s one of the reasons Refraction.ai is using fat bike tires for its autonomous robots. Not to mention that the performance of lithium-ion batteries, like those in Starship robots, degrades in cold temperatures. We reached out to Starship to see how they will address the cold, and will update when we hear back.

UPDATE: Starship sent us the following statement: “The robots are designed to work in a variety of conditions including snow and rain. There is negligible battery degradation in the extreme cold.”

In the meantime, there are now 66,000 people at UW-M who are more likely to avoid the bitter cold and can stay in and order food thanks to Starship’s robots.

Video: See Takeoff’s Micro-Fulfillment Center in a Grocery Store in Action

We’ve written a lot about micro-fulfillment as an emerging trend to watch in grocery retail. Micro-fulfillment involves a store building out a robot-driven system in the back of house to help automate the assembly of online grocery orders. But because these micro-fulfillment centers are relatively new and only in a few locations on the East Coast, we at the Seattle-based Spoon, don’t get to see them in action.

So I really appreciate that Stewart Samuel of IDG Supply Chain Analysis took some video footage during his recent visit to a working Takeoff facility at a Sedano’s Market in Miami, Florida. In it, you can see the tote boxes scurry around and up and down on rails bringing items to a human who packs each order.

What’s nice about this video is that it is not some slick, soft-focus, fluffy marketing piece produced by the company. It’s a raw, unfiltered look at how these machines operate, and the result is very… mundane. I actually mean that in a good way. Everything just seems to work, albeit at a rapid clip. The totes move around on a conveyor in precise movements with a human pulling and packing items as they are dropped off. Though I can’t tell how happy or not the person pulling items from the fast moving boxes is. That human seems to be doing the kind of manual, repetitive labor robots were supposed to save us from.

Automated fulfillment is just starting to make its way to the market. In addition to Sedano’s, Takeoff has agreements with Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Wakefern. Fabric just raised $110 million for its automated micro-fulfillment system. Elsewhere, Kroger is opting for a larger footprint by building out full-on standalone robot-driven warehouses. As these automated fulfillment centers come online, we’ll have to see if they fulfill the promise of faster grocery delivery and pickup and help grow online grocery shopping.

You Know You Want to Read a Story About a Cocktail Robot Called SirMixABot

It’s hard coming up with a name for a product. It has to be catchy, memorable, and ideally give you some kind of inkling as to what the product does. With that in mind, I’m going to go ahead and declare SirMixABot to be a Hall of Fame product name.

Aside from scratching any 90’s nostalgia itch, SirMixABot is a pretty fantastic name for a cocktail making robot. Load up to six bottles on the top and then use the built-in touchscreen (or accompanying app) to see all the drinks you can make. Set your glass in the machine and SirMixABot does the rest.

Sadly, you can’t get a SirMixABot at this time. The company had been selling DIY kits where you assemble the robot at home but the stopped making and shipping that version. As Brendan Stiffle, Co-Founder and CEO of SirMixABot told me by phone this week: “Selling DIY was great because it let us bootstrap [our] first iteration.” However, he went on to add that “the market is much larger when you have a plug-and-play unit.”

Plug-and-play is just a fancy way of saying Stiffle and Co. want to sell a straight up countertop device, no assembly required. To help with that endeavor, Stiffle, who is currently a student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, got SirMixABot into the MIT Delta V accelerator, which provided some funding as well as access to engineering resources at the school.

Stiffle’s plan is to roll out SirMixABots around Boston to discover and work through any issue before taking it out more broadly in 2020. The company is actually going after multiple target markets: home use, offices, and even event services. As such Stiffle wouldn’t provide any pricing information as it will change depending on whether someone is leasing it or buying the machine outright. FWIW, the DIY version of the six-bottle SirMixABot cost $499 plus shipping.

SirMixABot is stepping into a market that is already pretty crowded with established cocktail bots. Bartesian (made by Hamilton Beach) sells for $350, though that uses flavor pods to make drinks. The Barsys uses a similar bottle system as SirMixABot, but costs close to $1,000. DrinkWorks (a joint venture of Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch) is slowly rolling out its countertop drink maker, which also makes beer and cider, and costs $299. And of course, let we forget the MyBar, which you can buy assembled for $399 or as a DIY kit for $299.

Then there is also the issue of scaling production. Right now, SirMixABot is bootstrapped with six students and other part-timers working on the project. As we’ve seen from crowdfunded hardware projects that have gone bust, moving from a prototype to a full-on mass produced appliance is not easy. But Stiffle doesn’t seem daunted by the task. “Hardware is hard,” he said, but “it doesn’t scare us.” Students on the team will be graduating with in a year and after MIT the company will shift into fundraising mode.

We’ll have to check in on SirMixABot next year to see if Stiffle’s baby got greenbacks. (ed. note; SORRY!).