Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Newsletter: The Drive Thru Matters More Than Ever. So Do Farm Bots and Decaf Coffee

From self-service kiosks to mobile apps to dedicated pickup shelves and portals, there’s no end to new tech trying to speed up the order-pay-collect process for customers at QSRs.

But if the last week has made anything clear, it’s that while those pieces certainly play a role in the future of the restaurant, the drive thru is still the most important area of growth — at least for fast-food. Even as Minneapolis tries to ban drive thrus, companies are pumping enormous amounts of money and energy into improving this area, most notably with last week’s news that McDonald’s, king of all QSRs, had acquired voice-tech company Apprente. It’s the second acquisition Mickey D’s has made in 2019 of a technology company whose offerings can speed up lagging drive-thru lines and move more customers in less time. In March, the mega chain acquired a company called Dynamic Yield and has since installed its AI tech in thousands of McDonald’s drive thrus to make the order experience more personalized for customers.

Others aren’t sitting still. In 2019 alone, Dunkin’ has expanded its “Next Generation” store, which features dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile orders, to other parts of the U.S.; KFC started testing a drive-thru-only concept in Australia; and a slew of new tech companies have emerged offering various digital and AI-powered tools to take orders at the drive thru.

It’s not hard to understand why. As of last check, drive thrus still make up over 50 percent (in some cases closer to two thirds) of all orders for many QSRs. At the same time, bigger menus and more disjointed pieces of tech in the restaurant space have slowed down the order process and made wait times in drive-thru lanes longer. As Apprente CEO Itamar Arel, Ph.D., said back in 2018, “Fast food is not always fast and bottlenecks at ordering stations result in lost sales.” McDonald’s and others can’t afford those lost sales, so anything — whether an extra lane or a full-on tech makeover — to move people through the line faster could give QSRs an edge in the rising competition. You can bet there will be plenty more news from the drive-thru lane as more major QSRs revamp to take a page from McDonald’s playbook and reinvent themselves with tech.

Weeding Out the Labor Shortage Problem
The drive-thru isn’t the only area the food world is looking to speed up production. This week a company called FarmWise raised $14.5 million for its self-driving robots that remove weeds from crops without the need for herbicides or pesticides. (We expect these machines will be able to do much more than pull weeds in future, too.)

For the agtech world, machines like these not only save time, they also pick up the slack left by a major labor shortage in farm production. Farmers and ranchers in the U.S. say this labor shortage is the most limiting factor they face on their farms, and it’s not one that looks like it’ll be solved any time soon.

Hence, the robots. Every farm in America won’t have autonomous bots to pick weeds and harvest produce at the snap of a finger, but these machines are an increasingly appealing solution to the labor issue. Robots don’t need breaks, can work in sweltering heat and humidity, and in some cases can work faster than a human. As we look to solutions for both farm labor and wasted crops on the farm, these bots hold many possibilities.

Photo: Decafino

Disrupting Decaf
Meanwhile, someone wants to reinvent decaf coffee.

Decafino, a startup based out of Seattle, launched a Kickstarter campaign today for a tea bag-like product it claims can remove caffeine from any cup of brewed coffee. As my colleague Catherine Lamb detailed, the biodegradable pouch can be dropped in a cup of coffee (or caffeinated soda, for that matter), and within three to four minutes will remove the caffeine from the beverage.

If the product does as it claims, it could open up many more options for decaf coffee drinkers, who often face very limited selections at stores and coffee shops, and in some cases no options at all.

Personally, I’d have to be told I needed triple bypass surgery to stop drinking caffeinated coffee, and no doubt that day will come. In the meantime, there are plenty of folks out there who love the taste of coffee but for health reasons cannot drink the real thing. If Decafino is successful, these people might find a whole new world of drink choices.

FarmWise Raises $14.5M for Autonomous Weeding Agriculture Robot

FarmWise announced today that it has raised a $14.5 million Series A round of funding for its autonomous agriculture robots. The round was led by Calibrate Ventures with participation from Wilbur Ellis, Xplorer Capital and Alumni Ventures Group. This brings the total amount raised by FarmWise to $20.2 million.

Farmwise builds self-driving robots that use a combination of computer vision and AI to identify weeds among crops and precision mechanical tools to remove them without the need for herbicides. According to the press release sent to The Spoon, FarmWise says its robots have removed weeds from more than 10 million plants. The company will use the new funding to scale up its robotics engineering and operations team and further develop its R&D efforts on “plant-level detection and actuation capabilities.”

Agricultural applications are ripe for automation. The industry is facing a labor shortage, and even when running at full employment, farm work is hard work involving long days out in the hot sun. Robots can run all day without needing a break or suffering heat stroke. To help fill in the human labor gap, there are plenty of agbots getting funding and currently making their way to market, including Augean’s Burro, Advanced Farm Technologies‘ strawberry-picking robot and Bear Flag Robotics‘ autonomous tractors.

Robots like those from FarmWise can also accelerate the move towards more organic farming. With mechanical weed removal, there’s no need for spraying herbicides and pesticides. And it’s pretty safe to assume that FarmWise isn’t just in the business of pulling weeds. If it’s, err, wise, it would build out its robots to be a more versatile platform with a broad array of applications that can be used across a farm.

Trigo Vision Raises $22M A Round for Cashierless Checkout Tech

Trigo Vision, the Israeli startup that builds cashierless checkout tech for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $22 million A round of funding. The round was led by Red Dot Capital with the participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures Israel and Hetz Ventures. This brings the total amount raised by Trigo to $29 million.

Trigo retrofits supermarkets with cameras and computer vision to create a line-free checkout, Amazon Go like shopping experience. The company has a partnership with Israel’s largest grocer, Shufersal, which will use Trigo’s technology in all of its 280 stores. It has also been reported that Trigo is also working with UK-based grocer, Tesco. Trigo says that its technology is currently installed in stores as large as 5,000 square feet (the largest Amazon Go store is 2,100 sq. feet).

Funding wasn’t the only news from Trigo today. The company has a new name, well, a shortened one anyway. The company announced it was lopping off “Vision” from its name and going by just Trigo.

This has been a pivotal year for cashierless checkout startups, many of which have received sizable rounds of funding. Since January:

Of these however, only Trigo, Zippin and Grabango have publicly named their retail partners: Shufersal, Ame Go and Giant Eagle, respectively. Being able to publicly announce customer names is almost as important as the money being raised at this point because it shows the retailer is willing to go on record about a specific technology solution. Once a retailer has committed with a particular cashierless solution, it’s less likely they will it out and replace it with something else.

FutureProof Retail to Add AI-Based Grocery Recommendations From Halla

FutureProof Retail, which provides mobile checkout technology for grocers, announced today that it will incorporate Halla’s AI-based product recommendations into its service.

FutureProof Retail uses mobile phones to create a line-free checkout process for supermarkets. Unlike other cashierless checkout solutions that install cameras and use computer vision to identify what you purchase, FutureProof moves everything to a whitelabeled app from the retailer on your phone. You scan barcodes to add items to your cart, and when you’re done, you hit a checkout button and a store employee does a quick check of your bag to make sure you aren’t shoplifting. You can see it in action in this video:

Express Checkout El Rancho Awareness Video from FutureProof Retail on Vimeo.

With today’s announcement, when people scan an item Halla’s recommendation engine will kick in to suggest a complementary product right there on the phone’s screen. So if you scanned a bag of Tostito’s chips, the app would recommend salsa. But Halla’s recommendations are also dynamic and adapt as you shop. As we wrote when the company raised $1.4 million in May of this year:

…if you are using a grocer’s app with Halla I/O built in, the app will serve up intelligent recommendations as you continue to shop online. Buy salt, it could recommend pepper. By salt and noodles and beef, and it might guess that you are making a bolognese and recommend tomato sauce.

Halla developed its recommendations based on data from anonymized grocery transactions to see what items are typically purchased at the same time, as well as restaurant and menu items (menu descriptions are, after all, typically a list of ingredients). Halla had initially started off making recommendations for restaurants as well, but pivoted away from that to focus on grocery.

It’s important to note that Halla will only provide one recommendation per item. “As of today our recommendations are focused on complementary products with one goal in mind, what is most likely to be purchased,” Halla Co-Founder and CEO, Spencer Price, told me by phone this week. Price said that this focus on a single product is important because shopping is a very emotional experience for people, and one that can’t be junked up with lots of pop-ups on a phone screen with lists to scroll through.

FutureProof works with Fairway Markets in New York and other regional grocery chains, though Price was unable to provide a timeline or location for where its recommendations will go live through this partnership.

Almost as important as the news itself is the fact that FutureProof has publicly named Halla as a partner. There are other AI-based food recommendation engines out there like Spoonshot and Analytical Flavor Systems, but they are pretty quiet about their clientele.

I’m not fully convinced about the broad adoption of FutureProof’s cashierless implementation. Manually scanning products and having a human check your bag before you leave a store seems to bring friction into a process that is supposed to be frictionless. Regardless, for those who do use it, FutureProof’s app requirement seems like a good vehicle for Halla’s technology because of its immediacy and visual cues. I imagine the company will look towards announcing partnerships with smart shelf displays like AWM Smart Shelf in the near future.

Tally ho! Simbe Robotics Raises $26M for its Inventory-bot

Simbe Robotics, which makes the autonomous Tally inventory robot for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Venrock with participation from Future Shape, Valo Ventures, and Activant Capital. Additionally, Simbe also announced today that it is expanding its existing partnership with SoftBank Robotics America to include inventory financing to scale the manufacturing of an additional 1,000 Tally robots over the next two years.

Tally is an autonomous robot that roams store aisles using computer vision and RFID to scan shelves to check on inventory. It’s part of a suite of services from Simbe that provides analytics about purchases and insights about re-stocking management. Simbe provides the hardware for free and charges a monthly subscription for the software and analytics. So far, Tally has been put to work in trials at Giant Eagle and Schnuck’s grocery store chains.

Tally is just one of the robots coming to a grocer near you. Earlier this year, Walmart announced it would expand Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robots to 300 locations, and Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 “Marty” floor roaming robots from Badger Technologies.

While retailers may like the fact that robots are faster and more precise than humans (and the fact that they don’t take breaks or call in sick), there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out with robots. As we’ve written before, robots can make their human co-workers enjoy their jobs less, and shoppers don’t know how to interact with a cold, silent, sentinel (even if they have googley eyes).

Additionally, how long will robots be necessary for things like inventory management? Walmart debuted its IRL store earlier this summer which features banks of cameras installed and computer vision to keep a real-time eye on what’s in stock.

However, retrofitting a store with the cameras, software and sensors needed to keep track of inventory in that way is expensive and will take a long time. So until then, robots like Tally will probably find a place among the produce at plenty of retailers.

McDonald’s Acquires Voice Ordering Tech Startup Apprente, Will Form New Tech Lab

McDonald’s announced today that it will acquire Apprente to bolster the fast food giants voice-based ordering capabilities. This is the second tech startup acquisition for Mickey D’s this year, and the Apprente team will form the basis of a new tech lab for the chain.

In the press announcement, McDonald’s described Apprente and how it will use the startup’s technology:

Apprente was founded in 2017 in Mountain View, California, to create voice-based platforms for complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering. In McDonald’s restaurants, this technology is expected to allow for faster, simpler and more accurate order taking at the Drive Thru with future potential to incorporate into mobile ordering and kiosks.

The Apprente acquisition is part of McDonald’s ongoing evolution into more of a tech company. Back in March of this year, McDonald’s acquired personalization platform Dynamic Yield for $300 million to make its menus more Netflix-y with recommendations based on factors like the weather or current purchases. That technology is now deployed into more than 8.000 McDonald’s locations. Additionally, the chain was reported in June that McDonald’s was experimenting with robot-powered deep fryers and voice-activated technology at its drive thrus.

Major QSRs see over half their orders come via the drive thru, so it’s no surprise that area of fast food is a hotbed of tech activity. Both Clinc and Valyant AI are working on their own voice-tech solutions, and 5thru uses AI to that involves scanning a customer’s license plate. And while McDonald’s has certainly made the biggest strides of all QSRs in terms of adding tech to the drive-thru experience, others, including KFC and Dunkin’, are also experimenting with ways to speed up order times and upsell more customers.

Seeing this type of competition is most likely spurring McDonald’s decision to ramp up its own tech efforts internally. As such, the company also announced today that the Apprente team will be the founding member of a new group within McDonald’s Global Technology team called the McD Tech Labs based in Silicon Valley. The new lab will be going on a hiring spree to bring on engineers, data scientists and other technology related positions.

Common Sense Robotics De-Emphasizes Robotics with “Fabric” Re-Branding

Common Sense Robotics announced today that it is changing its name to Fabric in a move that emphasizes the company’s focus on overall logistics and puts its robotic origins on the back burner.

Up until now, Fabric had been best known for building out automated robot fulfillment centers that could be built into dense urban areas to facilitate fast delivery of online grocery shopping orders. The hook for the company was its ability to build its robotics vertically to make more efficient use of the spaces it built into. In July, the company announced it was breaking ground on an 18,000 sq. ft. facility in an underground parking structure in Tel Aviv.

In today’s press announcement, Elram Goren, CEO and co-founder of Fabric, provided a statement about the rationale for the name change and the removal of robotics from its name, saying “For us, our robots and software are critical to what we do, but at the end of the day, they’re a means to an end. What we’re really here to do is to be the fabric that binds retailers and their customers together, enabling goods to be fulfilled and delivered faster and cheaper within cities.”

We reached out to Fabric to find out more about the impetus for the name change, and was told that all of the messaging could be found in the press release.

Fabric is part of a wave of companies looking to automate and subsequently speed up online grocery order fulfillment, which is a small-but-growing slice of overall grocery shopping. Takeoff Technologies, which builds similar fulfillment centers in-store, is working with Sedano’s, Ahold Delhaize and Albertsons, and recently announced a standalone fulfillment center in New Jersey for ShopRite. Kroger is building out robotic fulfillment centers using Ocado’s technology. And Walmart is using Alert Innovation for its own back-of-house automated fulfillment.

In addition to the re-brand, Fabric also announced today that it will move its corporate headquarters from Tel Aviv to New York City. So now we’ll have to see if a new name and a new town can help Fabric weave itself into the U.S. grocery business in a meaningful way.

Having Nearly 100% (or More!) Worker Turnover Per Year is Common for Panera and Other QSRs

A big reason we write about food robots so much (and built an entire conference around them), can be summed up in this stat: Panera loses nearly 100 percent of its workforce over the course of a year — and that number is actually considered pretty good for the QSR industry.

CNBC has a fascinating and in-depth look at how it’s not uncommon for fast food restaurants to lose more than 100 percent of its workers in a year. From that article:

The official Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover rate for the restaurant sector was 81.9% for the 2015–2017 period, but industry estimates are much higher, reaching 150%, and the problem has gotten worse in recent years.

How is it possible to lose 150 percent of a workforce? Because QSRs are losing not just one worker, but also the person that comes in to replace them.

CNBC outlines lots of reasons that turnover is so high: fast food jobs are so routinized as to make them disposable, low pay, no real career path, the societal reputation of having a “McJob,” and how gig economy jobs allow people to set their own schedules. You should definitely read the full article.

We wanted to highlight it here on The Spoon because in our previous coverage and fireside chats with restauranteurs and food robotics startups, we often hear these same sentiments about fast food labor — but they are delivered in pretty vague terms. Basically we are told that restaurants have a hard time hiring and keeping people, nobody wants to work at a restaurant, more people would rather drive for Uber. What CNBC’s piece does quite well is it provides some hard context around those issues with hard numbers.

Sloughing off more than 100 percent of your workforce each year is a crazy way to run a business. But this deep turnover is the reason we see so many robotics companies looking to fill that void. Brightloom (formerly Eatsa), Miso, Creator, Bear Robotics, Dishcraft, and Cafe X are just some of the companies looking to automate different parts of the restaurant workforce.

Creator is actually a good example of what could be possible for automating jobs in a QSR. It’s a restaurant built around a (delicious) cheeseburger making robot. As Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas told us, the idea is that if you take away the menial, repetitive work of flipping a burger, you can free up human workers to be more creative and ideally more fulfilled at their jobs.

Creator is just starting out and its thesis has yet to be proven at scale, but it could be a model for future QSRs. Vardakostas realizes that his employees won’t work at his restaurant forever, but he wants to make their time at Creator enriching and fulfilling. Creator employees even get “5 percent” time to learn a new skill.

While food robots and automation are going to take a certain number of human jobs in the fast food industry. Hopefully it can work to make those remaining jobs more attractive so people will stay in them longer.

Cala Raises €1M for its Vegetarian Pasta Making Robot

In addition to the coffee, smoothies, cheeseburgers, chicken tenders and pizza robots are making, you can now add pasta dishes to that list. Paris-based Cala has developed a pasta cooking robot, and recently raised €1 million (~$1.1M USD) in angel funding to help bring it to market early next year.

Cala’s pastabot will be the center of a self-contained mini-restaurant that measures 5 square meters (~53 square feet) and can make up to 800 dishes an hour. As you can see from the video below, the Cala bot uses Cartesian approach, rather than an articulating arm. The restaurant will be fully autonomous. Users order via mobile app, meals cost €6 with a drink (~$6.6 USD), and the robot prepares and plates all of the food as well as doing the cleaning.

“We want everything to be sustainable,” Cala CEO Ylan Richard told me in a phone interview this week. And that sustainability runs throughout the company and its robot. First, Richard believes that the only way to sustain a business of bringing healthy food to people quickly while making enough margin is through robotics.

Second, right now Cala bot only serves vegetarian dishes. In addition to being better for the planet, avoiding meat also cuts down on costs and complications associated with storing and cooking all the ingredients inside the machine. Richard says they use “a lot of organic things,” but says his bigger priority is to locally source all of their ingredients.

Cala ran a live test restaurant in Paris for four months and Richard said that from the test the company learned that it’s important for the robot to fade into the background once the meal is served. “If you don’t come just for the meal that means there is something wrong with the way we do things,” Richard said. This mission for the robot to merely be the means and not the star of a restaurant is pretty much the exact same thing that Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas told us at our Articulate Food Robot conference earlier this year.

What’s kind of funny is that France, famous for its hallowed culinary tradition, is now home to not one, but two different robot restaurant companies. Earlier this year PAZZI (formerly EKIM) raised €10 million for its autonomous robot pizza restaurants.

I asked Richard about any dichotomies around French companies building what is quite literally lifeless food preparation. He told me that sure, France is famous for its high-end cooking, but the French are also some of McDonald’s biggest customers. “Sometimes we just want to eat something quickly,” he said.

Cala will use its recent funding to bring its robo-restaurant back to the public at the beginning of next year. The company plans to own and operate its next location, which will be outside a university in Paris. Richard said that as the company grows, it will look at franchising, rather than licensing the technology out to a larger brand, and that eventually Cala will make more types of food beyond just vegetarian dishes and pasta.

ZMP’s CarriRo Rover Robot Aims to Make Food Deliveries in Japan

One of the things that struck me during my recent trip to Tokyo was the lack of robots. I figured a town so futuristic would be filled with them. But if Japanese robotics company ZMP has its way, I could spot a few scurrying around by the time I attend the Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan next year.

The Japan Times reports that ZMP has developed an autonomous, four-wheeled rover robot called the CarriRo Deli, which the company wants to use for food deliveries. The CarriRo is nearly fully autonomous, meaning it can navigate to its destinations and avoid obstacles on its own. If it gets stuck in an unfamiliar situation, a robot teleoperator can intervene.

The CarriRo is 65.4 cm wide × 96.2 cm long × 95.6 cm high, goes 6 kilometers per hour and can carry 50 kg. For comparison, Starship’s rover bots are 56.9 cm wide x 67.8 cm long x 55.4 cm high, go 6 km per hour and can hold 10 kg. The CarriRo comes in various configurations with either a single storage compartment or smaller four and eight storage bin options. Additionally, the CarriRo also features LED eyes to make it more lifelike (like the Kiwi-bot!).

ZMP has held trials at various universities in Japan (that sounds familiar!). But Japanese law currently prohibits autonomous vehicle travel on public roads, though the government is looking at opening up public roads for unmanned robot trials before April 2020.

Here in the U.S., there are a number of companies looking to use rover robots for last-mile delivery including the aforementioned Starship, as well as Marble, Refraction AI, Kiwi and even Amazon. Though companies need to deal with various local and state laws here as well before delivery robots become commonplace.

Japan is an interesting test case for robot-driven food delivery as the country faces a greying population, which is causing a labor crunch. Robots are seen as a way to ease that labor shortage and help the elderly. But in a bit of refreshing forethought, ZMP doesn’t want its robots to be too convenient because as The Japan Times notes “this could discourage people from going out and interacting with others — a real and worsening problem as rural parts of Japan continue to depopulate.”

Advanced Farm Technologies Raises $7.5M Series A for its Strawberry Picking Robot

Advanced Farm Technologies (AFT), an agtech robotics startup, has raised a $7.5 million Series A round of funding led by Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley (“YMVSV”), the strategic business development and investment arm of Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd., with participation from Kubota Corporation, Catapult Ventures, and Impact Venture Capital. This brings the total amount raised by AFT to $9.2 million.

Based in Davis, CA, AFT creates robots as a service for farmers. It has developed the T-6 robotic strawberry harvester which operates on farms in the Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Salinas-Watsonville areas of California.

Agriculture is a hot area for robotics companies and automation. In addition to the fact that farms are facing a human labor shortage, farm work is hard work. It entains repetitive, manual labor often in hot conditions. Automating some of those tasks would help save people from getting heat stroke or dehydration after being out in the fields all day. Robots can also pave the way towards more efficient farming with precision application of water and pesticides.

Despite their potential benefits, robots haven’t had the best track record when it comes to picking strawberries. Even with the aid of computer vision, ripe berries can be hard to spot. They’re also fragile, so plucking them has to be done with the right amount of robotic care.

Perhaps this is why so many companies are tackling the problem. In addition to AFT, CROO Robotics, Traptic, and Agrobot are all working on robotic strawberry harvesters.

For its part, AFT says it will use the new funds to further expand its robotic strawberry harvesting program and “innovate in other areas.” If the company can nail robotic strawberry picking, that will indeed be pretty sweet.

Ai Palette Raises $1.1M in Seed Funding for its Food Trend Prediction Platform

Ai Palette, a Singapore-based startup that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to predict trends for food companies, announced it has raised $1.45 million Singapore dollars (~$1.1M USD) in seed funding. The blog e27 reported the news first, writing that the funding round was led by Decacorn Capital with participation from the Singapore government’s SGInnovate and AgFunder as well as existing investor Entrepreneur First.

According to Ai Palette’s website, the company uses “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to draw insights from millions of data points to identify consumer needs in real time and combine it with the brand personality to create winning food product concepts.”

Using machine learning and AI to help food and CPG companies capitalize on emerging trends is an already crowded field. Companies like Spoonshot, Analytical Flavor Systems, Tastewise and Halla all use various implementations of machine learning and AI in this capacity.

The goal for all of these companies is to speed up the R&D process for food producers. The sooner a food trend can be spotted, the faster the process can be to get it to market. Additionally, AI allows companies to suck up even more data to provide more granular predictions based on things like regional preferences, or even come up with new flavor combinations that might not ordinarily be tried.

Ai Palette says it will use its new funding to scale up development and grow out its customer base across multiple markets.