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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics, AI & Data

Celcy Opens Beta Testing Program For Its Combo Freezer & Oven Countertop Appliance

While new countertop cooking hardware concepts are few and far between nowadays, every now and then one emerges out of left field that does something new and different. And the Celcy, which combines freezing and automated cooking in a single-self-contained appliance, definitely qualifies as new and different.

Here’s how I described the Celcy when I first wrote about it in June:

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

And now there’s good news for adventurous types who want to get their hands on an early Celcy unit: The company is taking reservations to reserve an early beta unit.

The company is asking for a $150 down payment to apply for an early unit. That will get you access to an early unit and 15 meals (the company is operating a Tovala-ish model of hardware and meal subscriptions). The beta trial, which the company expects to start next spring, will last for three months, after which the user can pay the rest of the price ($150 will be applied) to the cost of the Celcy. While the company doesn’t mention the price of the finished unit (when I first wrote about Celcy in June, founder Max Wieder said the target price would be $549), the price for beta-testers will be 50% of the retail price.

If you want to get in line, you can head over to Celcy and reserve your spot.

From Grad School Project to $115 Million Series B: Afresh’s Matt Schwartz on Building an Operating System for Fresh Food

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany.

At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future.

“That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of eating, to be able to nourish the world sustainably. And those two things converged into saying, I want to accelerate this fresh technology thing.”

The focus on fresh food soon led Schwartz and his eventual cofounder of Afresh, Nathan Fenner, to do a graduate study in which they talked to close to one hundred people involved in the food supply chain. It wasn’t long before they realized that, despite the increasing importance of fresh food for food retailers, there wasn’t any technology optimized for managing it.

Afresh’s Matt Schwartz

“We were going to Safeway, to Trader Joe’s, all these large, mega multibillion dollar chains, and they were all running this process on paper and pen,” Schwartz said. “Some retailers that had taken center store, non-fresh technology, and worked with like an IT consulting shop to customize the hell out of it and bend it into the fresh categories. And in that case, you’d still see lack of adherence and ultimately, at the end of the day, because it wasn’t a fit.”

These findings led Schwartz to create a company that built technology focused on managing fresh food in Afresh. Their first product, a software solution for managing fresh food inventory that Schwartz calls a ‘fresh operating system’, has been adopted by grocers of all sizes, ranging from small regionals to nationwide retailers such as Albertson’s (the Idaho-based grocer plans to install Afresh’s technology in 2,300 stores by end of 2023).

And it’s that growth, in which Afresh went from 200 stores using its technology at the end of 2021 to an expected 2000 installs by the end of this year, that is no doubt one reason the company was able to raise an impressive $115 million series B funding round announced this week. The round, led by Spark Capital, brings the company’s total funding to $148 million.

When I asked Schwartz why so many grocers are eager to better optimize management of fresh food inventories, he pointed to how even a company like Amazon found fresh challenging.

“So you look at Amazon, they bought Whole Foods because their pure-play Amazon Fresh was struggling to make a business out of direct delivery. And they didn’t stop there. They opened up their own grocery chain. But really, it was a play to crack into fresh, which is this huge part of the retail market that they couldn’t get a piece of otherwise.”

According to Schwartz, in a world where more consumers are buying commodity food items online, it’s the fresh department that is becoming an anchor for the physical point of presence in food retail. And, despite fairly low overall waste rates compared to other parts of the food supply chain – roughly 4-6% of fresh food is wasted at the store compared to over a third once it arrives in the home – he believes the 25% or so reduction in fresh food waste grocers experience using their system results in significant savings to the grocer’s bottom line.

While Afresh’s technology – a SaaS product running on an iPad – doesn’t have all the bells and whistles compared to some of the robotics and machine vision systems other startups have rolled out to help grocers with inventory management, Schwartz sees a future where all of the technology will work together.

“Where this is going is that there are robot companies, there are computer vision companies that are counting inventory, there are shelf life extension technologies, there are vertical farms, there are cold chain compliance technologies, and I believe that this is all an interconnected trend of fresh first technologies that are coming together to solve this growing problem that is increasingly strategic.”

And naturally, Schwartz sees his technology at the center of it all.

“We think about ourselves as the brain, that software layer that’s going to connect all of those things together,” Schwartz said. “So when the robots know an inventory position, or the computer vision can estimate the quality of the product, or we know whether that a berry was in cold chain compliance or not, all of that data can best fit into our system and drive the best outcomes and decisions for the retailers.”

Some Cities Are Pushing Back on Sidewalk Robots. Here Are Some Possible Ideas For Peaceful Coexistence

While sidewalk delivery robots promise to help reduce carbon emissions and car traffic on cluttered city streets, not everyone is excited about them, including one city traffic administrator in the Yaffa municipality of Tel Aviv.

According to an article published this week in the English-language edition of Israel newspaper Haaretz, Ofir Cohen, the director of transportation, traffic and parking for Yaffa, sent a letter in early July to Israel’s Transportation Ministry to convey his belief that sidewalk robots from Russian tech company Yandex were a nuisance to pedestrians.

From the letter:

“One of the ways we give priority to pedestrians is by limiting bicycle traffic on sidewalks,” Cohen wrote. “It’s understood that the robots, which are about 80 centimeters [31 inches] wide, could be a potential real nuisance for pedestrians on the sidewalks although we have also been impressed by the [robots’] smart-navigation capabilities.”

And then, on Sunday, less than a month after Cohen sent his letter, the municipality notified the Transportation Ministry it was terminating Yandex’s pilot program.

Cohen said he believed the robots should be removed from sidewalks because they made them a much less useable public resource. He also expressed concern about the impact of robot traffic on low-mobility pedestrians as well as the elderly and children.

פלישת הרובוטים לישראל החלה: לראשונה ברחובות תל אביב, רובוט משלוחים אוטונומי. ככה זה פועל.

These are essentially the same reasons that the city council of Toronto decided to issue a ban on the use of sidewalk robots late last year. The city’s accessibility advisory committee proposed the ban, expressing concern that the robots would be hazardous to those with low mobility and impaired vision, as well as elderly people and children.

“Sidewalks are an important publicly-funded public resource, created for pedestrians to safely use,” David Lepofsky, the chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, wrote in a letter to the Council. “Their safe use should not be undermined for such things as private companies’ delivery robots.”

My guess is these rulings – which followed San Francisco’s ban on sidewalk robots in 2018 – will become more and more common as sidewalk robots go from trials to wider deployments. Because of this, it’s probably worth exploring ways to accommodate the increased use of robotic delivery vehicles and pedestrians.

One idea is simply to set limits on fleet size and traffic. In cities with lighter pedestrian traffic, having limits to ensure the sidewalks don’t become overburdened with robots makes sense.

Another is to continue to push for guidelines and safety measures for robot fleets on pedestrian walkways. Guidelines put into place during the Toronto trial included a 6 MPH speed limit, mandatory insurance for robot companies, audible signals, reflectors with lights, brakes, and a requirement that robots yield to pedestrians. I can these being expanded further and putting the legal and financial burden on robotic delivery companies to ensure pedestrians are not obstructed in any way.

Finally, I can also imagine cities exploring robot travel lanes, similar to what you might see for bikes on streets and on the sidewalks themselves. And who knows, beyond that, we might even see some of them consider sending the robots underground into tubes.

What do you think? Are there other ways you can envision pedestrians coexisting with sidewalk delivery bots? Drop us a line and let us know or let us know in the comments.

Ottonomy Debuts a Swervy, Customizable Delivery Robot in Ottobot 2.0 as it Closes $3.3M Seed Round

Today Ottonomy, a maker of autonomous delivery robots, unveiled its second generation robot, the Ottobot 2.0, alongside its announcement of its $3.3 million seed funding round according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new funding, which is led by pi ventures, also has Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures, and Sangeet Kumar (Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies) joining the round.

As you can see in the video below, the second-gen Ottobot introduces several features, including a new swerve-drive capability (which Ottonomy calls “crab mode”) in which the Ottobot’s drive train can turn each wheel independently. This allows the Ottobot 2 to spin in place (aka ‘zero-radius turning’) and swerve as it navigates (vs. the more tank-style mobility of robots without a swerve drive) towards it destination. This type of advanced maneuverability allows robots to weave through tight spaces, something that the Ottobot will need with its emphasis on both indoor and outdoor delivery.

Ottobots 2.0 - Most Accessible #Manoeuvrable #Scalable #AutonomousDeliveryRobots #Ottonomy #Ottobot

Other features of the new Ottobot 2.0 include modular storage locker capability (operators can switch out storage lockers to different configurations), a large front-facing color display screen, contactless delivery access, and uphill/incline travel capability.

Another interesting difference is the gen two doors are opened on the side vs. access via the top of the cabin on the first-generation Ottobot. The side-accessible doors are breadbox-style, meaning they slide open vs. a hatch-style door. Both gen one and two allow users to open the Ottobot after scanning a QR code.

Ottonomy, which began operating its first generation robot in the CVG (Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky) airport in 2021, will use the money to expand to new markets in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Massimo de Marco on Why Piestro Decided to Build a Back-of-House Pizza Robot

This week, Piestro CEO Massimo de Marco announced on Linkedin that his company Piestro is building a back-of-house pizza robot for restaurants.

After seeing the news, I decided to catch up with de Marco to ask him why he decided to diversify his company’s product portfolio beyond the automated pizza vending machine that the company says has $580 million in preorders.

You can read the transcript of my interview with de Marco below.

You’re working on a back-of-house robot. What’s the thinking here?

As we started showing our original machine to some of the big pizza brands, they would say ‘this is great, but what about the back of the house?’ My response was, ‘funny you say that, come and let me show you some designs’. They thought a back-of-house machine makes tons of sense, because clearly labor is not coming back for them. They’re having massive issues with keeping their stores open.

Explain the product.

It’s about three feet wide by about 32 inches deep. And if fits into pretty much any kitchen space because it doesn’t protrude more than a prep table.

Think of a pizza store that has a 110-inch pizza table which acts as an assembly line with all the different ingredients. If you can take that space and make it smaller, say a 68-inch assembly line, for the rest of the ingredients, our machine will add tomato, cheese, and pepperoni. We are also working on an addition for a couple of the top other ingredients. From there, the pizza can be finished on the pizza table where an employee can add the oil, add garlic, etc and then put it into the oven.

So it works with a restaurant’s existing ovens?

Yes. Think about the big pizza companies that have these ovens that cost $55,000. They’re not going to remove those from their back of the house right? These restaurant operators’ big concern is how do they get people to assemble the pizza correctly without any waste and do it very, very quickly. With our new machine, they will be able to assemble a pizza next 45 seconds to a minute depending on how many ingredients. They can consistently get one pizza per minute coming through so that the employee can take it and put it in the oven cook.

What’s the production capacity in terms of ingredients?

We don’t have a set amount, because it’s in the back of the house. Even if you do you 40 To 50 pizzas, you can always refill the machine constantly. You already have a person there that’s finishing up the pizza and putting them into the oven, boxing them. It’s not something our Piestro vending machine. You don’t want to go back to refill the vending machine. That’s why the Piestro Maestro has 80 to 100 pizza capacity ingredients; with our back-of-house machine, 40 is plenty, depending on the ingredients. But regardless, you can make 60-plus pizzas with tomato sauce and cheese without having to refill it.

One of the messages you are pushing is that automating part of the pizza making leads to less waste. Is that resonating with potential customers?

We’ve had interesting conversations with some big brands. One founder of pizza restaurant company said to me, ‘if I can fix just the amount of cheese that we put on our pizza so that we’re not wasting it across my company, I can save at least $70 to $80,000 across the company in cheese alone.’

So that’ll pay for how many machines?

It’s gonna pay for at least a couple of machines. But again, I’m an operator, and I want to get these machines in the back of the house of these restaurants and get them going, and then they will pay us a SaaS fee at the end of the month. And we haven’t figured out what this is going to be, but clearly it’s going to be considerably less than the Piestro (Maestro). Once it’s all said and done, our Piestro automated machine is about three grand a month, and I want to say this is probably going to be two-thirds of that. Which again, is not something that we have defined yet.

When will I be able to see one of these in a restaurant?

We’re going to put it into the kitchen of a large brand around the beginning of October. But that’s the that’s the first machine, the prototype, that is going to be tested. It’s a pilot is not going into a public restaurant but in a test kitchen. Once we make them happy, then we know that we can mass produce the machines, but we want to make sure that if they have something to say about it, then they can give us all the feedback that they can give.

With the company adding a second product, I know you much of your fundraising through crowdfunding. Are you looking to raise money to kind of scale this?

Well, we are gonna close this current round fundraising. We’ll see how we do, but we are definitely planning on another fundraising coming up in the fall. It’s already been planned. But the beauty is that this product is not very different from our current technology. It’s the same as the dispensing we use at Piestro, so we don’t have to go out and reinvent the wheel.

Thank you for spending time with me.

Thank you.

Else Labs Announces Pro Kitchen Focused Oliver Fleet As It Pauses Rollout of Home Cooking Robot

Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.

The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.

“It might look like the household unit from the outside, but the guts of the Oliver Fleet are different,” Aboujassoum said. “The Fleet units are designed for back-to-back cooking, for that harsh environment in the commercial kitchen compared to the household.”

With the pivot to a food service focused solution, Else is pausing the rollout of the home Oliver. According to Aboujassoum, the decision to make the change was largely driven by the supply chain disruptions and associated component shortages and price changes. While some backers of the Indiegogo campaign eager to get their home Oliver may not be happy with the switch, Aboujassoum said the company would give them the option of a full refund, or they can choose to continue to wait until the company restarts the consumer unit rollout.

While the focus on commercial automated cooking comes after a pandemic where restaurant businesses have faced increasing challenges around labor, Aboujassoum told me the company started hearing interest in developing a commercial version of the Oliver before COVID.

“It was an initial modest conversation at an exhibition late in 2019 where the Oliver got the attention of one of the food service companies,” Aboujassoum said. “The composition of the Fleet was born out of these conversations.”

The pandemic put everything on hold, but eventually, Else Labs started to hear more requests as things began to normalize. “As the dust settled, those conversations revived again,” Aboujassoum said. “We started receiving an influx of inbound requests all the way to the CES participation (earlier this year).”

The way Aboujassoum sees it, the Oliver Fleet can help food service companies move away from centralized food production in a central kitchen by pushing the ability to cook from raw ingredients on-site using automation.

“When I talk to (food service) clients, they’ve set up operations where they may have a huge central kitchen with a production plant, and they are shipping to maybe 50 locations,” Aboujassoum said. “We are talking about decentralizing the central kitchen. How much money can you save by deploying the Oliver Fleet and decentralizing the central kitchen? It’s a very transformational proposal.”

Aboujassoum says the Oliver Fleet system is available now and they will have announcements of deployment partners very soon. You can see a video of the Oliver Fleet system in action below.

PizzaHQ Opens to Public With Plans to Deliver 1,500 Robot-Powered Pizzas Per Day

The robotic pizza chain of the future envisioned by Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija took a big step forward this week as its first location opened to the public.

The company, which The Spoon first wrote about last year, envisions a modern take on the pizza chain by building a network of robot-powered pizza restaurants tailored for delivery. Its founders started working with Picnic last year to optimize the Seattle startup’s pizza robot to work with their new restaurant concept. Earlier this year, they started delivering pizzas to corporate and education customers and, as of this week, started making pizzas for the public.

When we first talked to PizzaHQ’s founder Jason Udrija, he told us the idea was to build a pizza chain optimized around robotics utilizing a hub and spoke production model. They planned to build a centralized hub to create the raw ingredients and fulfill the orders via distributed fulfillment centers outfitted with Picnic’s pizza-making robots. The company opened its first location in Totowa, New Jersey (in a building once occupied by another pizza restaurant) and has plans to build its centralized production hub in the same city in 2023.

For now, customers can order through their website, an app, and third-party delivery (there is also a pickup area at the front). In the coming weeks, PizzaHQ plans to ramp up the pizza production from about 500 pies per day to 1,500 per day. The company anticipates its next location – with an additional Picnic robot on board – will be able to produce between four and five thousand pizzas per day.

Pizzametry, Pioneering Maker of Pizza-Making Robotic Kiosks, Is Looking for a Buyer

Pizzametry, the maker of the industry’s first pizza-making robot, is looking for a buyer.

In an interview with The Spoon, Pizzametry President Jim Benjamin said that the company, which has been working on its pizza robot for close to two decades, has continued operations for the last few years but has reached the point where they think another owner should take the reins to bring the product to market.

“We haven’t shut down, but we’re in a situation where we’re really looking for someone to take over and bring this to market,” Benjamin said.

According to Benjamin, the company made five Pizzametry units, of which two are currently in operation at an ice arena in upstate New York. The units make each pizza entirely from scratch, slicing and cooking the dough, adding sauce and cheese and toppings, and can go from order to boxed pizza in approximately three minutes. Each unit requires electricity and Internet to operate (but no running water) and has a large video screen for advertising (you can watch a Pizzametry making a pizza here).

The company, which has accumulated several patents around pizza automation, is looking for an interested company or individual(s) who would be open to buying their IP, which includes a license to the patents and the proprietary operating and process know-how, as well as the operating units. According to Benjamin, they would help the company design new machines, including a smaller-footprint machine which he believes is necessary to open up additional operating locations and achieve lower overall hardware costs.

The current machines “are the high volume machines that demonstrate the functionality,” explained Benjamin. “But the sweet spot is, instead of a machine with a 150 pizzas capacity, is a machine more like 50 Pizza capacity per day. Something smaller footprint, able to fit in a convenience store or gas station.”

To develop its pizza machines, the company worked closely with design services and automation service firms in Calvary Robotics and D&K Engineering. The company worked with these firms to understand how to build scaled-up and scaled-down versions of the robot, but at this point, it is looking for a new company to invest in building a smaller-footprint, lower-cost machine.

I had a chance to try a pizza made by a Pizzametry robot when the team flew one up to Seattle for the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2018. The pizza was good, but I can see why they feel they need to build a new version with a smaller footprint. The current unit, which has a refrigerator inside to store the ingredients, takes up about 15 square feet, too big to fit in a typical convenience store on the floor of an airport terminal.

Benjamin agrees and believes they could work with the new owner to build a smaller machine.

“The principles of operation that we would transfer to a buyer would stay the same,” Benjamin said. “The patents that we currently have would be in place, but it would just be a smaller footprint.”

Benjamin explained that they could help with everything from the proper sauce viscosity, the dough formula, and pretty much everything else required to run a pizza robot would be involved in what he described as a “technology transfer” process.

While back-of-house pizza robot startups like Picnic and Hyper Robotic are getting traction, some building robotic pizza kiosks have found the road a little rougher. The news of Pizzametry’s interest in finding a buyer comes just a couple of months after the news of Basil Street selling off its assets. For its part, Piestro, one of the other remaining stand-alone pizza kiosk startups, continues to raise capital and partner with others as they work to bring their product to market.

If you are interested in inquiring about the Pizzametry business, you can contact the company via their website.

Food Robot Roundup: Grubhub & Cartken Head to College, The Story of a Stir-Frying Robot

Happy Monday! We’ve got a round-up of recent food robot news to get your week kicked off right.

This month, Singapore-based food robotics firm Ross Digital announced a $4.2 million ($3 million USD) Series A+ round led by food conglomerate Fraser and Neave. According to the company, which makes robotic arms for serving coffee and cocktails, the new funding will be used for product improvement and expansion into Thailand and Malaysia.

Ross Digital sells unmanned robotic baristas that can serve different types of drinks. An accompanying digital platform called Ross Cloud powers its baristas and provides a suite of restaurant solutions such as mobile app, a point-of-sale system, and an ordering kiosk. The company already has 15 units deployed in Singapore and China and aims to put out 40 robotics arms in the markets by the end of 2022. Some of its clients include Razer (whose venture arm also joined the funding round), CNBC, and Alibaba. 

Ross Digital’s expansion is yet another sign of Singapore’s active food robotics landscape. Last August, Stellar lifestyle and Crown Digital teamed up to launch ELLA, another robotic barista that can serve up to 200 cups of coffee an hour. The two companies plan to bring ELLA to 30 Mass Rapid Transit stations by the end of 2022.

The Story of a Stir-Frying Robot

One of my favorite easy meals to cook is stir fry because I just add everything I like in the pan with oil and call myself a chef. It’d be even easier if I could have a cooking robot to do the work, and if researchers from Idiap Research Institute in Switzerland, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Wuhan University have anything to say about it, someday I just might.

That’s because these researchers have taught a robot how to make the stir fry motion. The three labs have been collaborating for about 10 years with a specific interest in teaching robots to prepare food for people. Junjia Liu, one of the researchers, noted that “Food preparation and cooking are two crucial activities in the household, and a robot chef that can follow arbitrary recipes and cook automatically would be practical and bring a new interactive entertainment experience.”

Researchers were able to achieve this feat by decoupling the two arms of the robot into a leader and a follower and teaching them separately through machine learning. The two arms were then combined through general bimanual coordination and movements were subsequently adjusted automatically by giving visual feedback of the contents of the pan. The robot was able to complete the motions of stir-fry, but the paper doesn’t mention whether the robot was successful with heat, which is likely the next step. 

This isn’t the first time robots have dabbled in stir fry. Spyce, the robotic restaurant acquired by Sweetgreen, also served stir fry prepared by robots. Instead of using robotic arms, Spyce stir fry system utilized rotating compartments that cook and dispense stir fry. Spyce later pivoted to a different food robot that involved placing dishes on a conveyor belt that ran underneath dispensers that portioned out warm and cold ingredients. 

Grubhub and Cartken Head to School

Grubhub announced a partnership with Cartken, a maker of self-driving AI-power robotics and delivery operator, to bring robots to college campuses around the US. The partnership will allow Grubhub to leverage Cartken’s artificial intelligence and camera-based navigation and mapping technology. The robots operate at up to 3 miles per hour on campus and can handle various weather conditions including rain and snow, perfect for the Ohio climate they tested in. 

Grubhub and Cartken piloted the robots at Ohio State University this spring and are planning a full rollout in the fall. College campuses are the most saturated area for food delivery startups to test and operate in. Kiwibot announced plans to enroll in 50 college campuses by the end of 2022 and Starship Technologies is already enrolled at over 20 campuses. 

In Grubhub, Cartken finds a partner already well-entrenched on college campuses. The food delivery company already works with more than 250 college campuses across the U.S. where it integrates directly with meal plans so that students can access on and off-campus restaurants for delivery and pickup.

Picnic’s Pizza-Making Robot Heading To Five College Campuses This Fall

Seattle-based Picnic Works announced today that its Pizza Station robot will be heading to college this fall as part of an expanded pilot program with college food service company Chartwells Higher Education. The pilot will include five colleges: Texas A&M, the University of Chicago, Missouri State University, Carroll University, and Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

The rollout of the pizza robot follows a successful eight-week pilot of Picnic’s Pizza Station at Texas A&M. According to Picnic, during the initial pilot, the robot at Texas A&M made over 4,500 pizzas and enabled the kitchen staff to reallocate 8 hours of kitchen worker time per day to other tasks.

The origin story of Picnic’s enrollment at Texas A&M goes back to COVID when Chartwell’s district executive chef Marc Cruz couldn’t find enough workers to staff the pizza makeline and often found himself in the kitchen making pizza by himself. After someone at food service supplier Rich’s suggested that Cruz and his team check out Picnic, it wasn’t too long before the startup installed its robot in College Station, Texas.

The Chartwell deal is a smart move for Picnic and is another sign that the battle to lock up partnership deals with large food service management companies is heating up. Earlier this year, we wrote about Dexai’s trial with Gordon’s and have been covering Kiwibot’s deployment of over two hundred robots across ten campuses through partner Sodexo. Chartwell operates over 300 college and university “dining environments,” so it’s not hard to see how the business could grow over time for Picnic if they achieve similar results in the new additions under the expanded pilot this fall.

The Chartwell deal follows news of Picnic’s partnership with Speedy Eats, a Lousianna-based startup that builds automation-powered restaurants-in-a-box in parking lots and other locations. The company is working with Picnic to incorporate the Pizza Station as part of their automated kitchen setup.

The Weekly Spoon: Electrolux’s Kitchen of the Future & Taco Bell’s Reimagined Restaurant

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Electrolux Launches GRO, a Kitchen System Designed to Encourage More Sustainable Eating

Can a kitchen’s design help us eat more sustainable, plant-forward diets?

Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux thinks the answer is yes and, to that end, has launched an ambitious new kitchen system concept to help us get there.

Called GRO, the new system is comprised of a collection of interconnected modules that utilize sensors and AI to provide personalized eating and nutrition recommendations. According to the company, the system was designed around insights derived from behavioral science research and is intended to help encourage more sustainable eating behavior based on recommendations from the EAT-Lancet report for planetary health. The company will debut the new system at this week’s EuroCucina conference.

“How can a thoughtful kitchen slowly nudge you to more sustainable choices,” asks Tove Chevally, the head of Electrolux Innovation Hub, in an intro video to the GRO system. “To make the most of what you have, to buy smarter, and eat more diverse?

To see a video of the new GRO and to read the full story, head here.

Do you have the next big idea for the future of food & cooking? Apply to tell your story at SKS INVENT!

Taco Bell’s Vision of the Future Includes High-Tech Dumbwaiters & Lots of Drive-Thru Lanes

I’ve always been fascinated with dumbwaiters. An elevator built specifically to deliver food between floors of a building, the dumbwaiter is an idea that is both ridiculous and fascinating.

And while I can’t be sure that someone like Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos doesn’t have dumbwaiters built into their homes (though Bezos would probably prefer robots and Trump manservants he could yell at), what I am sure of is the dumbwaiter has, for the most part, largely gone extinct as part of modern life.

Until now. That’s because Taco Bell sees them as a potentially integral part of their restaurant of the future. Called Taco Bell Defy, the taco chain’s new restaurant concept includes an elevated restaurant with multiple drive-thru lanes, food lifts, and a lot of digital integrations.

While I wouldn’t, unlike others, claim this new concept possibly “the most ambitious” prototype in restaurant history, I would say it makes a whole lot of sense for a restaurant chain that does most of its business through a drive-thru. While many chains have developed drive-thrus that have multiple order lines, the choke point always comes later when cars zip-up into a single line to get their food. By spreading out the hand-off of food to four lines, the choke point of a single window for food handover is eliminated.

You can read the full post here. 

Smart Kitchen

Meet Celcy, a Countertop Oven With a Built-In Freezer That Will Cook Meals For You

Say you’re leaving for work and want to come home to a fully cooked meal? Or better yet, you want to line up a work week’s worth of meals and just want them prepared when you get home?

You might be a good candidate for the Celcy, an autonomous cooking appliance that combines a countertop oven with a freezer that stores the meals until ready for cooking.

The Celcy, which is currently in development, will store up to four meals in a freezer. Cooking can be rescheduled via an app or on-demand via request. When it’s time to cook, the meal is shuttled from the freezer compartment on the left side into the cooking compartment side on the right. A built-in elevator lifts and deposits the frozen meal in the top upper right cooking chamber where it is cooked for consumption.

You can read the full post here. 

Food Retail Tech

Circle K Planning To Deploy Seven Thousand AI-Powered Self-Checkout Machines

Mashgin, a maker of computer-vision-based self-checkout machines, announced today it has signed a deal with Circle K parent company Couche-Tard to deploy seven thousand self-checkout machines at the convenience store chain over the next three years.

The move follows the initial deployment of Mashgin systems at nearly 500 Circle K stores across the United States and Sweden since 2020. The move by the second-largest convenience store chain in North America with almost seven thousand stores will represent one of the largest ever deployments of self-checkout systems to date.

For Mashgin, the deal represents its biggest customer win yet and is yet another sign of why the company was able to recently raise a $62.5M Series B round at an impressive $1.5 billion valuation. The move represents a 700% total increase in deployments over its current installed base.

The Mashgin self-checkout system is installed at the checkout counter and enables customer checkouts without scanning barcodes. As seen in the video interview from CES in January, customers can essentially toss their items onto the small checkout pad, and the system will automatically recognize and tabulate the products.

To read the full story, head here.

Future Food

Cocuus Raises €2.5M to Scale Industrial 3D Food Printing for Plant & Cell-Based Meat Analogs

According to a release sent to The Spoon, 3D food printing startup Cocuus has raised €2.5 Million in a Pre-Series A funding round to scale up its proprietary 3D printing technology platform for plant-based and cell-cultured meat analogs. The round was led by Big Idea Ventures, with participation by Cargill Ventures, Eatable Adventures, and Tech Transfer UPV.

Founded in 2017, the Spanish startup has developed a toolbox of different 3D printing technologies under its Mimethica platform to enable the printing of different types of foods. These include Softmimic, a technology targeted at hospitals and eldercare facilities that transforms purees into dishes that look like real food (think of a vegetable or meat puree shaped into a “steak”), LEVELUP, an inkjet printing technology that prints images on drinks like coffee or beer (like Ripples), and LASERGLOW, a laser printer platform that engraves imagery onto food.

Read the full post at here.

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

Read the full interview with Joshua March here.

Food Robots

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To read the full story, click here!

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To fund the manufacturing and rollout of their kiosks, the company has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding from a group that includes deep tech fund SRI Capital, India-based micro-VC Pitchright Ventures, investor syndicates from Letsventure and WeFounderCircle, tech accelerator Techstars, and a handful of angel investors. 

According to the Xook, their first kiosk – the Xook Primus – will be able to make salads and meal bowls across a variety of cuisines. The unmanned kiosks have a 3’x3′ footprint and can make a meal in two minutes. Xook’s current pilot in Bangalore has made 60 different types of meals and is currently offering 25 of the most popular dishes.

Unlike other robotic kiosk startups, Xook plans to utilize a business model in which they provide the kiosk to a customer at no cost, and the company makes money through the sale of meals. The meals, which can be paid for by the employer or employee (or resident in a multifamily housing unit), will be replenished daily by a Xook employee located in each city.

Natarajan and Roy told me they believe this model will work, in part, because of the low cost of their machines, which will each cost about $15 thousand to manufacture. This, they say, compares to a cost of up to $70 thousand for other robotic kiosks. The founders told me they could achieve a lower cost per unit due to their custom-built robotics and easy access to the technical talent and manufacturing in India, where most of their employees are located.

Interestingly, while most of Xook’s employees are in India, the company is based in Singapore. According to the cofounders, the reason for that was they had initially planned on trialing their robots in the island country due to the business-friendly environment and the country’s embrace of high-tech options like robotic vending kiosks.

For now, though, the company is planning to launch its first pilot in the US by the end of this year and has lined up two food brands to help them enter the market. These partners, which include a salad brand and bowl meal brand, will “use Xook as a channel to market” for different locations like offices and apartment buildings.

When it launches in the US, Xook will be joining others like Doordash’s Chowbotics, SJW, Nommi, and RoboEatz, each fighting for market traction with their kiosks. Some, like Basil Street, have found the going pretty rough and have had to call it quits.

In addition to its lower cost and unique business model, Xook’s founders believe they can find a path into an increasingly crowded market for automated food kiosks by relying on food brand partners. In addition to its initial two partners, they think the Xook’s ability to handle a variety of foods will allow them to add additional partners as they grow.

“There could be multiple brands who could be serving food in the same vending machine at the same time,” said Roy. “The Xook is like a multi-brand food court in a box.”