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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Stop & Shop Adds BreadBot to its Store Floor for In-Store Bread Production

Stop & Shop announced today that it has partnered with the Wilkinson Baking Company to install a BreadBot at its Milford, Mass. store, in a move that further illustrates the ways in which food production is moving to the edge, and pushes the grocery chain deeper into automation.

BreadBot was the belle of the ball at this year’s CES. The automated mini-bakery captivated conference goers with its ability to mix, form, proof and bake loaves as you watch. The BreadBot can make up to 10 loaves per hour, 24 hours a day, and can make a variety of breads including white, wheat, whole wheat, sourdough and more. Stop & Shop will sell each loaf for $3.99.

Stop & Shop adding BreadBot is interesting for a few reasons. First, as mentioned before, BreadBot is part of a new wave of companies pushing food production to the edge. In this case, instead of bread being baked at a central facility and distributed around regions, the loaves are baked on-site inside the store.

This in-store production means that shoppers can pick up fresher bread, anytime of day, without the transportation and carbon footprint costs associated with traditional food production. We’ve seen this type of edge production in the coffee world as well with Bellwether, which makes an electric, ventless coffee roaster that allows grocers and cafes to create their own coffee roasts.

BreadBot is also a notable move for Stop & Shop because it’s the second bit of — pardon the jargon here — paradigm-changing automation the grocer has entered into. In January of this year, Stop & Shop announced that it would be deploying a Robomart in the Boston area. Robomarts are self-driving, pod-like vehicles that are essentially mobile mini-marts that roam the roads. They can be called or stopped by shoppers with the mobile app and open up for people to purchase items on the spot.

Though to our knowledge the Robomart pilot has yet to start running, both it and Breadbot point towards a more automated future for Stop & Shop. This is actually part of a larger automation push from the grocer’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, which is building out back-of-store robotic micro-fulfillment centers and deploying 500 in-store robots to scan for spills and other messes.

All of this automation, however, comes during a year where 30,000 Stop & Shop’s employees went on strike for 11 days over wage and benefits. Automation wasn’t reported as part of that discussion, but one assumes that when this current contract expires in three years, the number and type of human jobs will definitely be a point of negotiation. Especially as Stop & Shop said it plans to install BreadBots in more stores across the region.

Move Over Virtual Kitchens, Zume Shows Off Mobile Kitchen Model with &Pizza

Sometimes there is a difference between the news and the story. For instance, the news today is Zume, Inc., the parent company of Zume Pizza, announced that its mobile kitchen technology will be used by the &Pizza chain.

Technically, &Pizza has already been using Zume’s mobile kitchen at one location in Washington D.C., but that is just the beginning of the partnership. According to the press release sent to The Spoon, the mobile kitchens will be used to expand &Pizza’s brand in new markets and test new products before adding them to &Pizza’s brick and mortar location menus.

So that’s the news. But the story here is actually how Zume is creating a new category of kitchen, one that exists somewhere between the traditional restaurant, virtual kitchen and food truck.

To recap: Zume’s mobile kitchens are pretty much what you would imagine: big trucks outfitted with appliances that can be parked in neighborhoods, closer to customers, to ideally make food delivery faster. Place a food order and the WiFi enabled devices on board the mobile kitchen guide the cooks, make the meal, coordinate delivery pickup and keeps you up to date the entire time.

Right now, &Pizza is just using the Zume’s mobile kitchens, but Zume also offers a full-stack solution that includes predictive analytics and packaging. In theory, this should bring a new level of efficiency to a restaurant looking to expand its operations. Here’s how:

A mobile kitchen requires less investment than a traditional brick and mortar restaurant because you don’t have to build out and maintain a permanent location. This is also the pitch of virtual kitchen spaces like Kitchen United, which lease out commercial restaurant infrastructure for delivery-only restaurant concepts. But while virtual kitchens remain static in one location, a mobile kitchen can park out in different neighborhoods for closer proximity to a restaurant’s customers. A food truck has the mobility, but they are based around nearby foot traffic, so their potential market size is limited.

Even with all promised flexibility around its mobile kitchens, the main hook with Zume has always been its predictive analytics. As we wrote previously:

Zume takes into consideration hundreds of data points, such as day of the week, weather, school calendars and more to develop predictions around how much pizza and what types of pizza will be ordered in a given location. From there a food delivery vehicle cooks up the pizza on the move and delivers it with precise timing.

Zume Inc. subsidiary, Zume Pizza, knows which neighborhoods will order pizza (and gets the proper permitting to set up camp), what types and how many pizzas will be ordered. From there, it can pre-make those pizzas in a central facility and store them in the mobile kitchen so when the orders come in, they just need to be baked and delivered. The limited space of mobile kitchens can be stocked efficiently, delivery drivers can make more dropoffs because they aren’t driving around town, and the food arrives fresher for the consumer because it hasn’t traveled very far. Zume even offers special compostable packaging that restaurants can use.

And it’s not just pizza. Zume opened up its data platform to all types of cuisine last year so Thai or Chinese restaurants or whatever can be outfitted with custom mobile kitchens with the necessary equipment to do the same.

Zume already got $375 million from SoftBank last year, with another potential $375 million more as part of that deal. So the company has the money to scale out operations to different restaurants and regions. &Pizza and Zume may have made news today, but the story to watch over the coming year is how many other restaurants license Zume’s technology.

AutoX Drives off with $100M in Funding to Expand its Autonomous Vehicle Fleet

Self-driving vehicle company AutoX closed a $100M Series A funding round earlier this week, reports KrAsia. This round was led by state-owned Chinese car company Dongfeng Motor, with participation from Alibaba, Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play China fund and Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation. This brings the total amount raised by AutoX to $160.1 million.

In addition to building an autonomous driving platform that can be integrated into standard vehicles, the company launched a unique grocery delivery + mobile commerce pilot in San Jose, CA in August last year. While the service allows users to order groceries through the AutoX app on their phone, the delivery vehicle itself is also stocked with items that can be purchased on the spot.

In January of this year, we reported on how AutoX was quietly expanding into more restaurant delivery. Delivering meals allowed for more stops per trip, and helped avoid one of the drawbacks of self-driving grocery delivery–the fact that groceries can be heavy and consumers still need to lug them from the curb to the house or up apartment stairs.

Unlike Nuro or RoboMart which make small, low-speed pod-like vehicles, AutoX is intentionally sticking with full-sized autonomous driving. The company believes the longer distances and faster driving capabilities of full sized cars make them more useful here in the U.S.. Additionally, unlike those self-driving rivals, AutoX is not making its own car and is instead focusing only on the self-driving technology, which can then be applied to different car types like sedans and minivans.

AutoX plans to use its new money to build out its autonomous fleet and hiring up its technical team.

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.