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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

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.

Cafe X COO, Cynthia Yeung, Departs From the Robot Coffee Company

Cynthia Yeung, now the former COO Cafe X, posted on Linkedin yesterday that as of last Friday she was no longer with the coffee robotics startup after having worked there for a year and a half. Normally we don’t write about executive shuffles, but Yeung was high up at the company, and her departure comes at a time when rival robo-coffee company, Briggo, is scaling up.

Yeung posted the following to Linkedin yesterday:

Friday was my last day as COO of Cafe X Technologies. I learned a lot from growing the company (now 35+ people) through our Series A and am grateful to Henry Hu, Jason Calacanis, and David O. Sacks for giving me the opportunity to be in “the room where it happens”. I’m proud of the upcoming SFO launch of our new machine (in addition to a few other locations), bringing on more experienced engineering talent, and having built some corporate infrastructure to help the team scale. I’m looking forward to seeing where the company goes next.

One thing that caught our eye is that Yeung said “through our Series A,” but so far, the $14.5 million Cafe X has raised has been publicly referred to as seed and “Seed-1” money, not Series A. We reached out to both Yeung and Cafe X CEO, Henry Hu to see if the company has raised a new round or if there is some other explanation. Yeung directed all questions to Hu.

UPDATE: Hu told us via tweet that they renamed the Seed-1 as a Series A.

Regardless, as Yeung also indicates, her departure comes as Cafe X is set to launch its first robot barista at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the company’s first location outside of the city of San Francisco.

But Cafe X’s robot will actually be the second automated cafe at SFO. Earlier this summer, Austin-based Briggo opened its robot Coffee Haus at that airport. In fact, Briggo was initially awarded the SFO contract, but Yeung was instrumental in the inclusion of Cafe X. As the San Francisco Business Times reported last November:

“We are striving to be a very, very responsible employer in San Francisco bringing trade jobs back to the city,” Cynthia Yeung, COO of Cafe X, told the SFO commissioners at the Nov. 6 [SFO Airport Commission] meeting. “And I want to understand why, with so little transparency, this trial program was awarded to a Texas based company?”

High-traffic locations like airports are perfect for robotic baristas because robots are fast, accurate and can operate around the clock. While there are plenty of airports around the world, they will be a battleground for automated food services like vending machines and robot coffee makers. Yeung left just days after Briggo announced it had entered into an exclusive agreement with SSP America to put Coffee Hauses in an additional 25 airports around the U.S. and Canada over the next two years.

While this was probably more of a coincidence, as Yeung indicated on Linkedin, Cafe X is entering the scaling phase of its startup lifecycle — a time when having steady leadership at the top is especially important.

Here at The Spoon, we kinda hope Yeung stays in food robotics because she’s a great guest to have on stage at our Smart Kitchen Summit and Articulate conferences.

This article originally stated Yeung worked at Cafe X for a year, it was actually a year and a half and this post has been updated to reflect that.

Newsletter: Are Vertical Farms Ready to Grow More Than Lettuce?

Greetings from the South, ground zero for sweet tea, land of unrelenting humidity, future home of a massive new vertical farming operation.

This week, an Orlando, FL-based company called Kalera (formerly Eco Convergence Group), announced that it has broken ground on a semi-autonomous vertical farming facility that will produce 5 million heads of lettuce each year, supplying Orlando and central Florida restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores with fresh greens and underscoring the growing demand for locally grown produce.

As soon as I got the news, the usual question about vertical farming entered my brain: why is it always lettuce? From Kalera’s new operation to AeroFarms’ 70,000-square-foot New Jersey farm to IGS’ fully automated vertical farm, we hear lots of talk of leafy greens, herbs, and the occasional edible flower. But nobody’s yet growing eggplant, potato, or even carrots.

Kalera’s CEO and cofounder, Cristian Toma, had a lot to say about that when I asked him about this: Unlike lettuce — short plants that can be densely packed together to maximize volume — many other types of produce need lots of space to grow upwards and outwards. In some cases they require multiple harvests. Most of them need human hands to assist with things like pruning, and all of these needs add up to the kinds of space and labor costs vertical farms simply can’t sustain right now. Not at scale, anyway.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see more non-leafy greens in vertical farms at some point in the future. As I noted this morning:

Whether the day ever comes when we’ll see vertical farms growing, say, carrots, depends a lot on developments in plant science in the future. “The varieties we are working with right now over many many years evolved to meet the challenges for outdoor production,” says Toma. “We don’t have varieties bred specifically for indoor production yet. So that’s an area where the industry can develop.”

Image courtesy of Princeton University

Princeton Vertical Farming Project Shutters Its Doors — For Now

More data on growing methods might help. That’s been the credo of Paul P.G. Gauthier, former associate research scholar in plant physiology and environmental plant metabolism at Princeton University and the founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project.

Unfortunately, word got out late last week that PVFP has closed its doors following Gauthier’s departure from the university. We shouldn’t shutter the conversation on his ideas, however, especially those around the use of data in vertical farms. Back in January, Gauthier told The Spoon that the vertical farming industry needs more data on best practices for growing plants that can be shared around the industry in a kind of open-source framework. More data on what’s working and what isn’t could give us a more realistic idea of whether, say, tomatoes are a realistic crop to grow at large scale or if they’re better off in a greenhouse setting.

Gauthier has taken a job as Professor of Plant Science at Delaware Valley University and said he hopes to reproduce the vertical farm model from Princeton on a larger scale, and that there’s a possibility of even reviving the PVFP at Princeton in the future.

Starship’s Autonomous Delivery Bots Land on Another Campus

While vertical farms move closer to automation, more automated delivery bots are also moving onto college campuses. Starship upped the number of food delivery robots this week by announcing that its bots have landed at the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University, joining campuses like George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, both of whom launched delivery programs with Starship earlier this year.

Starship is one of a few companies testing delivery programs with these small, wheeled bots. Kiwi, too, has bots on a number of campuses — including, possibly Purdue, a potential overlap that suggests campus is the next battleground for autonomous delivery. It is, after all, the perfect testing ground: as my colleague Chris Albrecht noted when he tested out a Kiwi earlier this year, college campuses are an ideal piloting ground for these companies: “Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night,” he wrote.

Personally, I’m waiting for the day a six-wheeled autonomous bot can deliver a hydroponically grown baked potato to my doorstep, but if the economics of vertical potato farms don’t pan out, I’d always settle for lettuce.

Stay cool,
Jenn

Starship Raises $40M Series A, Rolls Out its Delivery Robots to U. of Pittsburgh and Purdue Campuses

Autonomus robot delivery startup Starship announced today that it has raised a $40 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from prior investors including Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, MetaPlanet Holdings, as well as new investors including TDK Ventures, Qu Ventures and others. This brings the total amount raised by Starship to $85 million.

That news alone would be worthy of a story, but Starship upped the ante by also announcing that its rover bots arrived today at the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Indiana’s Purdue University in order to prepare to make food deliveries on both campuses in September. These new schools join George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, which launched their own robot delivery programs with Starship earlier this year, and are a step in Starship’s plan (also announced today) to be on 100 college campuses over the next two years.

Students, faculty, staff and whomever else on these school campuses are able to get robot delivery by downloading the Starship mobile app. Users choose from the restaurant and food options, order and pay (there’s a $1.99 delivery fee) to have their snacks, meals or groceries dropped off at any location on campus.

Starship’s robots have proven to be such big ‘bots on campus that the company said in today’s press release emailed to The Spoon that both George Mason and Northern Arizona have increased the number of delivery robots (George Mason actually doubled its fleet), as well as their hours of operation.

Serving colleges is a popular go-to market strategy for delivery robot startups. Earlier this summer, Kiwi announced it was expanding its robot delivery to fifteen colleges including Harvard, Stanford and… Purdue.

Obviously that last one is of interest, given Starship’s announcement today. When asked about Kiwi’s potential presence at Purdue, Starship provided us with the following statement: “Starship is looking forward to launching on Purdue University on September 9. The delivery robots are currently mapping the area and can’t wait to start serving students and staff in September. We look forward to sharing more details shortly.”

We’ve reached out to Kiwi to see if Purdue is still indeed on their rollout roadmap, but regardless of whether Purdue doubles up on robots or has quietly dropped Kiwi, the situation highlights how colleges will be a battleground for delivery robot services. Starship’s fresh $40 million certainly gives it a bigger warchest to woo universities than Kiwi, which has only raised $2 million to date.

Starship says it will use the new funding to “rapidly expand its services to more university campuses,” so a delivery battle is definitely brewing. The company already has a good track record: Starship says its robots have traveled more than 350,000 miles, crossed 4M streets, and have completed more than 100,000 autonomous deliveries.

Chowbotics is Sending Sally the Salad Making Robot Off to College(s)

Chowbotics is packing up Sally the salad making robot and sending it off to college. Well, many colleges actually, as the food robotics startup is set to announce next week a bigger push into the higher education market.

Chowbotics told us that this school year, students at multiple colleges and universities in the U.S. will be able to buy salads and breakfast bowls from Sally the robot. Those schools include: Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; Elmira College in Elmira, NY; the University of Memphis in Memphis, TN; and Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. These schools join Marshall University in Huntington, WV, which installed Sally in 2018.

Students can order from thousands of different custom and pre-made meals Sally can make from the 22 ingredients it stores. Sally will work with campus meal plans and accept credit cards for payment, but unlike the school cafeteria or on-campus restaurants, Sally can fit in the corner of a dorm lobby and feed people 24 hours a day.

Sally is part of two big trends we at The Spoon see accelerating. First it’s emblematic of the golden age of vending machines that we are entering. Advances in robotics and other technologies means that automated vending machines are no longer relegated to sodas and Snickers bars. Machines like Sally and Yo-Kai Express can whip up complex, high-end meals in just minutes and around the clock in high-traffic locations like colleges, hospitals and airports.

But Sally is also part of a bigger wave of robots heading off to college. In addition to the stationary Sally, delivery robots from Starship and Kiwi are rolling around more campuses delivering restaurant made meals to the student masses.

The bottom line is that eating at college is not only vastly different from when I went to school (long ago) — but pretty soon, it will also be a lot different from how people ate at college last year.

Zippin Gets Investment from Lojas Americanas, Announces Ame Go Cashierless Store

Cashierless checkout startup Zippin announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Lojas Americanas S.A. that includes a strategic investment from the Brazilian retailer as well as exclusive use of Zippin’s technology in its Ame Go convenience store chain.

The first such cashierless Ame Go store has been up and open to the public for the past four months. Up until recently, Trigo Vision had been the only cashierless checkout company to publicly named one of its retail partners in Israel’s Shufersal. In July Grabango announced it was working with the Giant Eagle grocery chain here in the U.S.

Zippin had previously only announced its own cashierless checkout store, which was more of a working lab in San Francisco. Unlike Trigo Vision and Grabango, which rely on cameras, computer vision and artificial intelligence to keep track of what shoppers pick up and eventually purchase, Zippin uses fewer cameras as well as shelf-mounted sensors. According Zippin Founder and CEO Krishna Motukuri, this combination of camera and weight sensing gives his company’s solution greater accuracy than its competitors.

While that claim would undoubtedly be debated amongst his rivals, what Zippin’s technology did deliver was this deal with Lojas Americanas. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, so we don’t know how much Lojas invested in Zippin, but Motukuri told me in a phone interview yesterday that future Ame Go stores powered by Zippin will vary in size between 250 and 3,000 square feet and will be located in high-traffic, mostly urban settings. Customers shopping at these Ame Go stores will use the Ame Digital app to make purchases, similar to the way Amazon Go customers use the Amazon Go app.

Additionally, as part of its deal with Lojas Americanas, Zippin will develop new technologies for Ame Go. While Zippin’s own store and Ame Go have smallish footprints, Motokuri said that Lojas Americanas has larger supermarkets and this deal will allow Zippin to test and scale its technology in bigger formats before going out more widely.

Zippin’s announcement today highlights that even though there is a lot of competition in the cashierless checkout space, there is also a lot of global opportunity. Previously, Motukuri had said that Zippin was working with four “major retailers,” so we expect to hear more announcements from the company soon.

Briggo Partners with SSP America to Open Up 25 Robot Coffee Hauses in Airports

Robot barista company Briggo announced today it has entered into an exclusive agreement with SSP America to open automated Coffee Hauses at an additional 25 airport locations over the next two years in the U.S. and Canada.

SSP America is a division of SSP Group, which operates roughly 2,600 restaurants, bars, cafés and marches in across 500 locations representing more than 500 of its own and licensed brands. The SSP America website says the company is “passionate about bringing cool, authentic restaurants to airports that reflect a taste of place.”

Briggo’s robotic Coffee Haus is definitely cool. It’s a self-contained automated coffee shop in a box that offers a variety of hot and iced coffee and teas that can be ordered via the Briggo app or through a tablet built into the machine. Meant for high-traffic areas (like airports!), Briggo says its Coffee Haus can make 100 cups off coffee an hour.

Details were pretty light in the press release emailed to us announcing the deal with SSP America, but the partnership should result in robot coffee experiences similar to the three Coffee Hauses Briggo has opened in the Austin and San Francisco International airports. As with its SFO location, Briggo said that in addition to its own coffee roast, it will “also work with airport teams to select local brands to showcase in their Coffee Hauses.”

When we first covered Briggo last year, the company was building up to be a full-stack coffee company. It selects and roasts its own beans, and would own and operate its machines. Briggo declined to answer questions about the business arrangement between it and SSP, so we don’t know what the financial or operational terms of this deal were.

Having said that, if Briggo is looking to scale quickly, partnering up with companies like SSP might be the most expeditious way. It can leverage their existing operational chains and relationships to more easily break into new markets.

The robo-barista game is not zero sum one. There are plenty of high-traffic locations for all the coffee robots. Having said that, our eyes now turn to the other barista-in-a-box, Cafe X, to see when it will start announcing more of its expansion plans.

This Chart Explains Why Grocers are Investing in Logistics and Delivery

We write a lot about automation in the grocery industry. Kroger is building out robot-driven smart warehouses and self-driving delivery. Albertsons is testing out micro-fulfillment centers. Walmart is trying out, well, all of the above. If you’ve ever wondered why retailers are investing so much in logistics and fulfillment, the answer is summed up nicely in the following blog post from data analytics firm Second Measure (h/t TechCrunch):

Most Americans regularly shop at just one or two grocery stores, so it’s not surprising that most online grocery shoppers also stick with their favorite service. This is in contrast to the meal delivery industry, where diners frequently hop between apps to get the broadest selection of restaurants.

With the exception of Instacart, no grocery delivery company shared more than 9 percent of another company’s customers in the second quarter of 2019.

Second Measure even provided this handy chart to illustrate how for grocers, maintaining loyalty is the name of the game.

Second Measure also found that 12 percent of grocery shoppers have tried online grocery shopping, and that number is up from 9 percent from June 2018. These results echo other recent market surveys showing that the number of online grocery shoppers is growing.

If grocery shoppers are loyal, and more of them will be shopping for their groceries online, then retailers who want to retain their customers over the coming years need to invest now in logistical systems to fulfill those orders. Hence automated warehouses and micro-fulfillment centers in the backs of stores. As those processes are automated, they can be tied into other investments grocers are making around delivery and curbside pickup. The faster a grocer can get you your order in a manner that fits your schedule (delivery or pickup), the more likely they can keep your business.

Walmart seems to be off to a good start. Second Measure also found that Walmart has already taken a big lead in online grocery shopping. As of June of this year, the mega retailer had 62 percent more online grocery customers than its closest competitor, Instacart.

It’s said that dominance perpetuates itself, in the case of Walmart and online grocery shopping, that certainly seems to be shaping up to be the case.

Panasonic’s DishCanvas Uses AR to Put Moving Images on Your Dinner Plate

They say that before you even take a bite of your food, you eat first with your eyes. Panasonic seems to be really taking that idiom to heart with the new product from its innovation incubator GameChanger Catapult.

DishCanvas is a smart plate (no, not that kind of smart plate) equipped with a display which can project moving images. It’s controlled through a smartphone app, through which you can select your desired pattern, texture, and movement to be projected on the dinnerware, as well as any desired transition effects. The dynamic image loop is then “played” on the DishCanvas plate.

We got to check out DishCanvas’ prototype in Tokyo this week at SKS Japan. The plate is made up of a glass top, a display, and batteries. Eventually the display technology will be built into the plate itself, but for now it’s pretty low-tech — essentially just an iPad slide underneath a corresponding dish. The GameChanger Catapult team who showed off the DishCanvas told me that they’re also hoping to make the images interactive, so you could theoretically rearrange images or even play games while you eat.

As I noted, DishCanvas is currently just a prototype. But the team member I spoke with told me that Game Changer Catapult is already in early talks with Disney to use the plates in their parks for children.

Which, to me, is a pretty smart use case. What kid wouldn’t be more likely to eat their veggies if they placed on a plate displaying life-like versions of their favorite Disney characters?

I could also imagine DishCanvas being used in fine dining. For example, a fancy Michelin star restaurant could create custom plate displays to communicate more information about the ingredients used in each dish. Maybe a rare steak would be served on a plate bearing a moving image of rustling grass in a field where the cow once grazed, or a grilled fish could be placed atop a display of ocean waves.

DishCanvas corresponds to a new movement of augmented dining which tackles not just the taste of food, but the entire eating experience. From scotch tastings enhanced with VR to leveraging sounds  to change the flavor of food, companies are experimenting with ways in which technology can enhance our meals by appealing to all five of our senses.

Here at the Spoon, we cover lots of technology aiming to optimize the way your food tastes. But it’s good to remember that smell, sound, touch, and sight play a role in how we eat, as well.

Henn Na Cafe is Tokyo’s Robot Barista. Here’s What It Looks Like

Growing up, UHF TV stations would run Japanese anime cartoons that featured giant robots. Fast forward a few decades to when I finally got the chance to visit Tokyo, and I thought the city would be lousy with robots. But sadly, that turned out not to be the case. In fact, I could only find one coffee robot in Tokyo — which is a bit surprising, given that San Francisco has three, plus another one at its airport.

Nestled in the heart of the H.I.S. travel agency in the Shibuya part of Tokyo sits the Henn Na Cafe (fun fact, Henn Na means weird in Japanese). “Tom,” the autonomous articulating arm that serves up hot and iced coffee, matcha tea and other assorted drinks and snacks. Tom is akin to Cafe X, but doesn’t offer the same variety, and, at least from my viewing, sadly doesn’t perform any theatrics for customers. Tom does, however, sport a pair of bright eyes and a dapper chapeau for a more personal touch.

Tom and the Henn Na Cafe were installed in H.I.S. in February of last year because the travel agency thought that as people plan their vacations, they would like to discuss them in a cafe-like setting. But it wasn’t feasible for the company to dedicate staff to making lattes, so it brought Tom online.

Tom is actually two robots: the articulating arm, which shuttles cups and coffee grounds around, and the PourSteady, an automated pour-over coffee machine. Place an order for hot or iced coffee at the nearby kiosk and Tom whirrs into action. Three to four minutes later, Tom pulls your finished coffee and sets it in a small case for people to pick up. Though unlike other coffee robots, this is just a plain case with no screen or anything to indicate whose drink is up. But that probably isn’t as necessary, given H.I.S. is a travel agency first, and the cafe is more of a, pardon the pun, perk.

Since I was in town, and Grendeizer wasn’t flying overhead, I popped to make a quick video for you to see Henn Na Cafe’s Tom for yourself.

Tokyo's Henn Na Cafe Robot Cafe in Action