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Robot Bartender Now Serving Drinks in Tokyo Train Station

Just when you thought Tokyo couldn’t get any more futuristic, the city’s subway system has a new robot bartender serving up drinks to commuters.

The Daily Mail reported this week that the Yoronotaki company has launched the Zeroken Robo Tavern in the Ikebukuro train station. The small pop-up opened on Jan. 23 and will run as a pilot to gauge customer reaction to the concept until March 19th.

The robot itself is just an articulating arm with an LED face. Customers enter their order via separate kiosk and then the robot whirrs into action, pouring out a beer in 40 seconds, or mixing up a cocktail for something a little stronger.

The robot is made by QBIT Robotics, which also built the Henn Na robot barista, also in Tokyo. The robot costs $82,000, which is evidently three years’ salary for an average bartender in Japan. Yoronotaki told the Daily Mail that labor shortages in Japan are part of the reason it is trying the robot out.

Japan has a greying population with more than one-third of its people over the age of 65. Many companies are working on robotic solutions to help stave off any potential labor crisis. Sony has teamed up with Carnegie-Mellon University to create food robots and has big ambitions for a robotic home cooking assistant. Connected Robots, which makes the takoyaki-cooking Octochef robot, raised raised a ¥850M ($7.8 million USD) last year to expand its food robot lineup. And in 2018, the Dawn Avatar cafe used robot servers that were operated remotely by people with disabilities.

Given how small the retail spaces in Japan can be, and the volume of people that travel Tokyo’s subway system, there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more robot bartenders pop up across Japan.

Newsletter: Are Restaurant Server Robots Quickly Becoming a Commodity?

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I’ve been reading (and can highly recommend) the book The Passion Economy by former Planet Money-er Adam Davidson. In it, Davidson talks a lot about small companies that thrive because they re-think how they do business by focusing on a narrow slice of the sector they are in.

A lot of it boils down to not having your work become a commodity — that is, something anyone can replicate. In addition to being boring, commoditizing your work is basically a race to the bottom. Someone, somewhere will do it cheaper and of equal quality.

So when I read about LGs CLio ServeBot being deployed at a CJ Foodville in Seoul, South Korea, Davidson’s work immediately sprang to mind. LG’s CLio ServeBot is an autonomous foodservice robot that carries food on four vertically stacked trays from the kitchen to the designated table. The ServeBot then carts empty dishes back to the kitchen.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Both Bear Robotics and PuduTech make almost the exact same thing (though, to be fair, PuduTech’s BellaBot has feline features and purrs when you pet it).

It feels like restaurant server robots are on their way to becoming less of a novelty and will soon be a commodity. They all do the same thing — carry food. They are meant to do the grunt work so humans don’t have to. So the feature set will be the same: Take food to table > carry food without spilling > avoid humans and other obstacles along the way.

Sure, there are enhancements that can be made, or perhaps there’s a unique way to move food from the robot to the table. But there really isn’t much else for the robot to do. Server robots will become a commodity, and whichever company creates the cheapest robot that does a decent job will win.

This doesn’t apply to every food related robot. More complex tasks like cooking will require more skilled robotics, so there is an opportunity for robotic startups to build a moat around those types of businesses through advanced thermal imaging, better manipulation, etc.

Though server robots may be heading towards commodity-ville, there is one bright spot for those that do want to enter/stay in that business — there are a lot of restaurants around the world, so there are plenty of buyers out there.

Either way, server robots would make an excellent chapter in the paperback edition of Davidson’s book.

Photo: GenoPalate

Your best diet life could be in your DNA

Perhaps the question What should I have to eat is more of an existential one than we thought. That’s the gist behind GenoPalate, a startup that uses your DNA to help you figure out what to eat. GenoPalate’s Founder, Dr. Sherry Zhang recently described her startup in a Q&A with The Spoon’s Catherine Lamb, writing:

The GenoPalate platform uses the latest research in metabolic health, genetics and nutrition to provide personalized insights to encourage healthier eating behaviors. From a simple saliva sample, our proprietary technology uses DNA to make personalized recommendations on the ideal intake of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals.

Using your DNA for nutritional purposes is different from using the microbiome (check out the full Q&A for a deeper explanation), but it reinforces a trend towards hyper-personalized nutrition that we are watching here at The Spoon.

Zhang will be speaking at our upcoming Customize food personalization summit next month in NYC. She’ll be joined by a ton of other great speakers from Nestlé, Kroger, Spoonshot and more. You should definitely join us to see the front lines of a whole new frontier in nutrition. Just use the special Spoon subscriber discount code THESPOON15 for a 15 percent discount on your ticket!

Robot vending machine startups should partner up!

You know what would probably go great with that Briggo robot-made latte you grab at the airport? A pastry. Do you know what Briggo’s robot currently doesn’t serve? Pastries.

I wrote a piece over the weekend spelling out why Briggo should be talking with a company like Bake Xpress (which serves hot pastries) right now. By partnering up, the two can scout new locations to set up shop next to each other so you can get that latte and a treat.

But it’s not just location location location. We’re going to see a lot more vending machine startups pop up making all sorts of higher-end cuisine. This means there will be plenty of opportunity to mix-and-match meals and do cross-promotions (buy a pizza from Smart Pizza and get ten percent off a Chowbotics salad!). The point is, vending machine companies should be talking now to better coordinate, and capitalize on their futures together.

Robots Deliver Food to People Quarantined in China Hotel

One of the most useful things about robots, we are told by the companies developing them, is that they can do the work that is too manual, repetitive and dangerous for humans. That last part is being put to the test in China, where robots have been spotted delivering food to quarantined people amid that country’s rapidly escalating Coronavirus outbreak.

The UK’s Daily Star reports that a hotel in Hangzhou, China, more than 200 tourists were being isolated after a flight arrived carrying some passengers from Wuhan, the epicenter of the viral outbreak.

Staff at the quarantined hotel dispatched 16 robots, one for each floor of the building, to deliver food to people in an effort to limit cross contamination. A video posted to the China Trends YouTube channel two days ago shows the robot, calling itself “peanut,” rolling down the hotel hallway, announcing its presence as people pop out from their rooms to grab food.

#Coronavirus: Robots Deployed to Deliver Meals to Travelers in Isolation #Wuhan

One assumes/hopes that each robot is also getting a good scrubdown after each trip.

There are nearly 6,000 confirmed cases of the Coronavirus in mainland China, and 132 people have died. Roughly 60 million people are on lockdown in China.

The fact that robots are being put to use in this way would be pretty cool if it wasn’t so deadly serious. But it does highlight how robots can be used in situations that are hazardous to humans and help save lives (everyone needs to eat). Hopefully, more robots will be employed to limit human exposure to the virus, and we’ll be able to apply lessons learned here to help curb this and future outbreaks.

The UK’s Small Robot Company Equity Crowdfunds its Precision Ag Robots

Based in the UK, the Small Robot Company is actually making its second trip to the crowd for money, and launched its second such campaign earlier this week on CrowdCube.

Equity crowdfunding is a trend we’re watching closely this year. That’s where instead of traditional venture capital, startups let everyday people (with certain restrictions) invest in and receive an actual piece of the company.

Small Robot makes precision agriculture robots that the company hopes will eventually move farmers away from broad chemical spraying of crops and monoculture of plant species in fields. Small Robot has a multi-part, autonomous robot solution it’s building that includes:

  • Tom uses cameras and computer vision to precisely map a field of its plants and weeds
  • Wilma is the AI that analyzes those images to gather per-plant intelligence and weed identification
  • Dick is an autonomous weed zapper that is armed with an electric wand and information from Wilma to precisely electrocute individual weed without the need for chemicals
  • The company will eventually add a third robot, Harry, to its lineup that will do no-till drilling.

Small Robot’s “Tom” robots are currently in the working prototype phase, and in use on 20 farms in the UK. The company aims to ramp up production and manufacturing this year and go live on more farms by the end of 2020.

I spoke with Sam Watson Jones, Co-founder, Small Robot Company by phone this week, and he said his ultimate goal is to empower farms with precision agriculture to such a degree that it’s done on a plant-by-plant level. Farmers will know where each individual seed is planted and automate custom care for each plant as it grows. This means reducing fertilizer use, and planting a variety of crops next to each other to limit the spread of crop disease, maintain nitrogen levels and pollinate more efficiently.

To help it get there, Small Robot is turning to the crowd, again. Previously the company received £1.4 million in non-equity funding from a UK government innovation fund, and in 2018 raised £1.2 million in equity crowdfunding through the CrowdCube platform.

On Monday of this week, Small Robot kicked off its second CrowdCube campaign and has already met its goal of raising £700,000. I asked Watson why his company didn’t go with the traditional VC route this time.

“VCs are a bit different in the UK,” he said, “There are very few early stage VCs to fund stuff that requires more development. We knew we had a load of farmers who were excited about what we could develop. ” Crowdfunding, Watson said “allowed us to get angels and people who would put ten quid in. It’s been a good forum for us to capitalize on the branding and PR.”

As with any investment, there are risks involved, and given that this crowdfunding is happening in the UK, there are restrictions around where people can invest from and how much. Check the campaign’s details for more information.

Small Robot Company is actually the second robotics company we’ve covered that has gone the equity crowdfunding app. On the other end of the meal journey is Miso Robotics, the maker of Flippy, which is using SeedInvest to try and raise a $30 million Series C round.

Small Robot will definitely need to beef up its warchest as it looks to expand outside the UK. Other players in the autonomous precision ag and weed-killing robot space include Australia’s Agerris, which raised $6.5 million (AUSD) last year, and U.S.-based Farmwise, which raised $14.5 million in 2019 as well.

For now though, Small Robot Company’s pitch to big crowds for tiny agriculture seems to be attracting big dollars.

Newsletter: Everything We Saw in Kitchen and Food Tech at CES 2020

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The Spoon team descended on Vegas last week to try and find all the food and kitchen tech we could lay our hands on. We also held our second annual FoodTech Live event because, well, we’re lazy and we wanted the food tech to come to us.

And now that we’re back in the snowy foothills of the Pacific Northwest, the Spoon team had some time put our thoughts about the tech expo together, record a podcast, and decipher what it all means. 

So here it is, our CES Food Tech wrapup. I’ve got kitchen tech covered below, then Catherine looks at Impossible Pork and what else she saw on the fake meat front, and finally Chris gives his thoughts on robots and kitchens coming out of what has been an eventful couple weeks in that space. 

Kitchen Tech at CES

Because I’ve gone to CES more times than I could count, I’ve gotten pretty good at searching out what matters to me the most so as to make productive use of my time. That’s always been a challenge in food tech since CES and its exhibitors have largely ignored the category. But that all changed this year because of what happened last year: The launch of the Impossible Burger 2.0. 

And while fake meat is a long ways from a smart oven or a food robot, I think having the food tech unicorn choose CES as its venue to launch its new products has just given momentum to everything food-related, included the future kitchen.

What did I see? Well, I wrote a deep dive full kitchen tech wrap-up report detailing everything kitchen tech at CES this year, but if you’re looking for the short-short of it here are the top takeaways:

Personalization is Impacting Everything, Even Physical Space

There’s no doubt, personalization is impacting everything in food (heck, it’s why we decided to have a dedicated event on it). But when it comes to personalization, we usually are talking recipes or diet plans, not physical space. GE wants to change that, and so they showed off an adaptable kitchen concept that personalizes the space depending on the needs of the individual. 

Of course, there was also lots of meal planning and recipe personalization, as well as a couple startups like DNANudge and Sun Genomics looking to help you build meal journeys based on your personal biomarkers and DNA. 

Food Waste Only Gets A Half-Nod

There were better and more capable smart fridges to help us take better inventory and there were smart pantries to help us keep track of our dry goods, but I didn’t see a whole lot of effort focused on helping us reduce consumer food waste. One company, however, that wanted to help us all get better at composting our food waste was Sepura Home, which had a good solution that integrated with your home disposal to route food waste to a composter and liquids down the drain. 

Focus on Full Meal Journey Rather Than Point Solutions

When it comes to the smart home and connected kitchen, we’re used to seeing standalone technologies that show off a cutting edge new technology rather than a bigger solution tailored towards solving consumer problems. I think that’s starting to change, as companies like GE and Samsung showed off bigger ideas tailored towards helping people solve problems and connect the different parts of the meal journey. 

Drink Tech!

There were so many drink tech offerings at CES it was hard to keep track. We wrote about the Matcha making machine, tried out the Spinn and saw new beer-making robots.  We even checked out a new seltzer machine that is targeting reducing plastic waste in hotels and homes.

Countertop Cooking

Being a kitchen tech nerd, I have to admit it was cool have the guy who basically invented the home sous vide circulator give me a walkthrough of the Anova Precision Oven (you can listen along to Scott Heimendinger’s guided tour here.) We also took a look at the Julia multicooker here. 

Once again, check out my full kitchen tech wrapup for CES 2020 here. But first, see what Catherine has to say about fake meat this year at CES…

Impossible Pork at CES 2020 [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

I came into CES especially excited about one thing: Impossible Foods’ press event. The company had teased something major on Twitter, so I guessed we would see a new product — probably pork or chicken. And pork it was!

We got to taste the faux pork in a number of applications and it was juicy and fatty, though slightly more neutral-tasting than traditional pork — a great blank canvas for a number of porky recipes. If you’re feeling FOMO right now, don’t sweat it — you can soon you can sample the faux pork for yourself in the Impossible Croissan’wich, featuring Impossible’s plant-based pork sausage, which is rolling out in select Burger King locations this month.

While eating a bao stuffed with plant-based pork, I couldn’t help but wonder — what will be the next food to make a splash at CES? Last year Impossible stirred up a lot of attention when it won the Best of the Best award from Endgadget, even though it was the first edible food company to show at the tech expo. Now that the company has proven that food is, in fact, technology, it has opened up the door for more food companies to make a splash at CES.

One company to keep an eye on is Dutch startup Meatable. The cultured meat startup, which is growing pork muscle and fat cells outside of the animal, actually had its own small booth at CES this year. They didn’t have any of their actual meat on display, but Meatable’s CEO Krijn De Nood told me that they were hoping to bring cell-based pork samples to Vegas in 2021 for a limited taste test. They plan to start selling the pork on a large scale — pending regulatory approval — by 2025.

I guess that means we’ll have to start building up an appetite for CES 2021.

FlowWaste’s image recognition device. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Other cool stuff I saw (and tasted) on the CES show floor:

Food Robots: Do We Need Them?

While Chris wasn’t able to get around CES this year (save for our event FoodTech Live), he was watching for food robots and saw buzz around quite a few:  

I was unable to attend CES this year, and as such, I missed a bunch of robot stuff. LG showed off a mock restaurant with a robot cooking food and making pourover coffee. Samsung demoed a concept robot that was billed as an “extra set of hands” in the kitchen that could grab items, pour oil and even wield a knife. IRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum announced it too was developing robotic arms to load dishes or carry food to the table. And of course, who could forget the robot that makes raclette melted cheese.

But in the end, he started to wonder: Do we need these more advanced robots in the consumer kitchen? …my initial response to robot arms swerving around a kitchen is why? Are these robotic ambitions the best way to gain greater convenience in the kitchen, or do they just make things more complicated? Let’s acknowledge that there are definite use cases for robotic arms to help those with disabilities or who are otherwise movement impaired. The University of Washington is working on a voice-controlled robot that can feed people who need such assistance. And researching how robots interact with odd-shaped and often fragile objects like food can help the robotics industry overall. That’s one of the reasons Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and why Nvidia built a full kitchen to train its robots. But in our homes, and especially smaller apartments with even smaller kitchens, robot arms seem like more of a menace than a help, taking up space and potentially getting in the way. A case of futuristic form over function.

You can read Chris’s full piece about the robotic consumer kitchen and where he thinks it’s all going here. 

Robot Baristas Aren’t Dead Yet. Briggo to Open 5 New Locations This Quarter

Normally we wouldn’t cover a gonna story. Like when a company says they are gonna do something. The Spoon likes to see actual results, not speculation, thank you very much.

But when robot barista company Briggo reached out to share some of their expansion plans for the coming year, I was intrigued. Whether by luck or rapidly assembled intention, Briggos’ announcement today comes on the heels of rival robo-coffee shop Cafe X shuttering three of its five locations.

There has also been a general sense of doom and gloom cast over the food robot industry in general as Zume shut down its pizza delivery business, and Creator was left stranded and unfunded by Softbank.

But you’d be hard pressed to think anything was wrong with the robot food business in talking with Kevin Nater, the Co-Founder and CEO of Briggo. I spoke with him by phone this week and Nater said five new automated Coffee Haus locations will go live in Q1 of this year, which is as many as the company launched in all of last year. Through its partnership with SSP America, Briggo plans to be in a dozen locations by the end of 2020.

One of the reasons Briggo can accelerate its install base is because it has moved its manufacturing to Foxconn. Previously Briggo was building every Coffee Haus by hand, but now Nater says “The Wisconsin facility can knock them out as fast as we can order them.” Depending on the location and permitting, Nater says they can get a Briggo machine up and running in a matter of weeks.

With SSP America doing business development for Briggo, Nater said that airports will continue to be a “huge focus” for the company. There are currently two Coffee Hauses in the Austin-Bergstrom Airport and one at San Francisco Airport (SFO).

As Briggo focuses on airports, and building out more locations, I asked Nater if that means the company will be pulling back on its own coffee creation ambitions. One part of Briggo’s business has been that it is also a coffee company that roasts its own beans. As it has expanded into new locations, it has also started offering coffees from roasters local to those areas (Sightglass in SFO, for instance). Nater said “Nope,” and that in addition to hosting other brands, Briggo will continue to sell its own coffee.

In addition to airports, Briggo opened up its first location inside a Whole Foods in Houston last fall. That Whole Foods happens to have 260 condos above it, and Nater said that condo owners are treating the Briggo almost like a personal coffee machine, ordering drinks with their phone in their condo and then coming downstairs to pick it up.

Given the recent setbacks for food robot-based startups, I asked Nater how he refers to their Coffee Hauses. Are they called “robots” or “machines” or something else, entirely? “We use the term robotic barista,” he said “to convey barista level quality.”

So Briggo is still in the robot business. It may strive to serve quality coffee, but we’re gonna have to watch to see if its automated approach translates into a scalable quantity.

Walmart Boosts Bossa Nova’s Robotic Shelf Scanning to 1,000 Stores

Walmart is adding another 650 Bossa Nova robots to its roster, Bloomberg reported this morning, bringing the total number of the shelf scanning bots to 1,000 by the end of this summer.

Boss Nova’s robots are autonomous, six-foot tall machines equipped with 15 different cameras. As they move down a store aisle, they scan for missing or misplaced inventory and alert store management to take proper action.

The move is part of a bigger robotic push Walmart is embarking on. In April of last year, the company made its initial increase in Bossa Nova’s robots and also put Bain’s floor scrubbing robots in 1,500 locations and doubled the use of automated scan and sort robots to 600 locations.

In November of last year, Bossa Nova announced the newest version of its robot. The Bossa Nova 2020 features a slimmer design, smarter cameras that can see deeper into shelves and a number of attachments to scan other areas of the store like frozen food and produce sections.

When Walmart first started rolling out Bossa Nova’s robots in October of 2017, the retailer said the automated shelf scanners were 50 percent more productive and three times faster than a human doing the same job. Walmart didn’t provide Bloomberg with any update on productivity stats, saying only that they have reduced out-of-stock products.

There will be more robots running around your local grocery store over the next year. In addition to Boss Nova, there is Simbe Robotics, which has a deal with Giant Eagle stores, and which raised $26 million in September of last year.

Of course, there is the whole question of whether robots are just a stop gap for automated inventory management. Walmart launched its Intelligent Retail Lab store last year, which uses banks of cameras to monitor inventory in real time. And Singapore startup Trax says that its camera-based inventory management system has increased sales for its retail partners by one percent. One percent on its own doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you operate at the scale of a national chain, that one percent can translate into sizeable revenue that is just sitting on the table.

Bossa Nova is aware of this potential shift away from robots. When I spoke with the company last year , they said that what they are most interested in is the data, no matter where it comes from: robots, cameras, smart shelves — whatever.

But until those days come, expect more stores to do more with robots like Bossa Nova’s.

Agrisea is Developing Ocean Farms to Grow Rice using Saltwater

Over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. However, only 2.5 percent of that is fresh water, and roughly 70 percent of that is used for agriculture — which also takes up approximately half of Earth’s land. With climate change and soil degradation, the amount of viable cropland is shrinking at an alarming rate.

So why not grow crops using all of that available saltwater? The short answer is salinity — most of our favorite crops can’t grow in such salty environments. But new startup Agrisea is working to change that. The company creates a floating farm ecosystem that grows crops on saltwater, using only . . . saltwater. No soil, no fertilizers, and no fresh water required. The company is currently participating in life science accelerator IndieBio which includes $250,000 in seed funding. 

“We looked at salt water, and saw a nutrient soup,” Agrisea founder Luke Young told me over the phone on a recent call. He and his co-founder Rory Hornby met while studying plant genetics and tissue regeneration, respectively, at Durham University. They united to develop a way to tap into the natural nutrients that are plentiful in oceans — which already sustain plants like algae — and apply to them to some of the world’s most popular crops.

After two years they developed salt-tolerant rice seeds that could thrive either in oceans or in paddies flooded with seawater. The seeds also don’t produce methane, which is a major climate concern for rice farming. In addition to rice, Agrisea has developed salt-tolerant kale seeds and is working on corn and soy.

Those engineered seeds go into modular floating ocean mini-farms which resemble honeycombs, each roughly a foot in diameter. Each unit contains a double layer of mesh: the top one holds in the plants, while the bottom one acts as a fish nursery. Since they’re not static, the farms can be moved if a major weather event like a hurricane is forecasted.

Initially, the company plans to license out its agriculture platform — including the modular units and salt-tolerant rice seeds — to farming companies and governments on a contract basis. Young said that areas which are experiencing saltwater flooding are, unsurprisingly, the most eager to get their hands on the technology. 

And they might be able to in as little as six months. Young said that companies in some areas struggling with flooding, like Vietnam, are ready to use the saltwater farms as soon as they’re available. However, it’ll likely be two to three years until the tech is available in the U.S., where the farms have to get approval by both the FDA and the USDA. “This is an entirely new technology,” Hornby told me. “It’s not aquaculture, so they’re working to develop a new policy around it.”

With a global population set to reach almost 10 billion by 2050 and a finite amount of land and water, companies are hustling to find more sustainable and economical ways to grow food. Some point to hydroponic farming as a panacea, but it still requires massive amounts of freshwater and energy to function — and some doubt its efficacy. Gene-edited plants (like CRISPR) can be made more drought- or heat-resistant, but they still require water and soil inputs.

That’s why Agrisea’s solution has such potential. Yes, its technology is still chiefly untested — but if successful, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Agrisea’s saltwater farms could massively impact global agriculture. Farmers would no longer have to rely on scarce resources like freshwater and land, and could cut down on methane emissions in the process. In areas that are already dealing with the disastrous effects of climate change, Agrisea’s technology could be a positive sea change for agriculture.

Newsletter: From Plant-based Meat to Ghost Kitchens, the Food Tech Trends that Were and Will Be

Put 2019 in the books! We all made it through another year and are looking forward to the next one. But before we pop open that bottle of bubbly and bring on 2020, we at The Spoon want to take one last look back at the year that was and give you our take on the year ahead.

Image via Unsplash.

Top Trends of 2019
The Spoon writers sat down and pulled a few threads together to sum up the big trends that did (and didn’t) happen this year.

It’s almost undeniable that the biggest trend of 2019 was plant-based meat, which took off like a rocket this year. Catherine Lamb recounts how Beyond Meat’s boffo IPO, Burger King’s Impossible Whopper and just about every meat company jumping on the plant-based bandwagon made this a banner year for alternate proteins.

Air Fryers were definitely hot this year, while the consumer sous vide sector sunk from lukewarm to downright cold, Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf writes in his Kitchen Technology Year in Review. Read more to see what moves Amazon made in the kitchen and how larger appliance makers are innovating.

Of course, another big trend of the year was not even using our kitchens as food delivery continue to grow. But as Jenn Marston points out, all that growth came with its own pain as food delivery got really messy as companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats and Postmates struggled with valuations, regulatory pressures and labor relations.

Finally, while our first-ever food robotics summit was a sold out success this year, as I note, 2019 was not the year we welcomed our robot overlords. It was mostly a quiet year of continued testing for robot cooks and restaurants. The real robo activity was in logistics as automated micro-fulfillment centers in grocery stores gained traction, and delivery robots scurried around a bunch of college campuses.

Photo: Chris Albrecht.

The Spoon 2020 Crystal Ball
But enough living in the past. What’s going to happen next? Thankfully for you, dear reader, we got that covered too.

Anyone who’s read The Spoon knows that ghost kitchens had a big 2019, and will have an even bigger 2020. Jenn Marston doles out three predictions for ghost kitchens including how they will become table stakes for multi-unit restaurant chains, how restaurant brands will compete with kitchen providers, and how third-party delivery will go deeper into the ghost kitchen space.

Personalization, as Catherine Lamb notes, will be another big trend in 2020. Well, sort of. She says that between advancements in food science, data and AI, companies are getting better at creating customized food tailored specifically to our tastes and needs. Completely customized meals may not go mainstream next year, but we’ll get a lot closer. In fact we’re hosting a one day conference devoted to the topic in February in New York, get your (personal) ticket now!

Finally, two trends I think folks in food tech need to pay attention to are pop-up stores and equity crowdfunding. Companies like Zippin and AiFi are creating infrastructure for easily assembled retail experiences that brands will use to create small, physical stores practically anywhere. And speaking of anywhere, it looks like equity crowdfunding will take off next year as startups that are located anywhere (i.e. not in VC hubs like SF or NYC), can tap into moola from the masses to retain more control over their own destinies.

Thank you
Finally, we want to say thank you to all of you. You helped make this the biggest and best year ever for the Spoon. We look forward to bringing you all the food tech news you need to know throughout 2020 and beyond.

Take care and be well.

-The Spoon Team

Trax Uses Shelf Cameras and Computer Vision to Track Grocery Inventory

For grocery retailers that operate at scale, small improvements can have a big impact on the bottom line. One of the ways to boost that bottom line, according to Trax, is better shelf inventory management.

Based in Singapore, Trax uses a combination of shelf and ceiling cameras, along with computer vision, to give retailers and CPG companies a more accurate reading of what’s on store shelves.

Trax installs customized camera modules on store shelves to keep tabs on products. Trax also augments these shelf cameras with ceiling mounted cameras for monitoring fresh sections of stores. The cameras take a picture of the every hour, and those images are sent to the cloud, where they are analyzed to ensure that products are available, on the correct shelf and price compliant. Based on what the system reports back, store associates can be dispatched to address any issues.

I spoke with Mark Cook, Head of Retailer Solutions for Trax, by phone this week, and he told me that retailers using the Trax inventory management system have seen a 1 percent bump in sales by just ensuring that more product is in stock. One percent may not sound like a lot, but again, when multiplied across all the shelves in a store, and across all the stores in a chain, that small percentage can represent big money.

In addition to grocery retailers, Trax also counts CPG companies like Coca-Cola and Henkel as customers. CPG companies use Trax basically for auditing. With the system, they can monitor their shelf presence in stores and ensure they are getting what they are paying for in terms of promotion.

Trax has a SaaS business model where the hardware is provided and the customer pays a subscription fee for the analytics.

If Trax’s solution sounds familiar, that’s because other companies are taking similar approach to automating shelf management. Walmart is deploying Bossa Nova shelf-scanning robots to roam it store floors, and the mega-retailer also launched its IRL store this year, which uses banks of cameras to monitor store inventory in real-time.

Trigo is another company using cameras to help stores with inventory management, though Trigo is mostly focused on using computer vision to help create cashierless checkout systems for stores. I asked Cook if cashierless checkout was on Trax’s roadmap and he said the company is more focused now just on shelf management. “There’s money on the table with inventory.”

Founded in 2010, Trax is headquartered in Singapore and has roughly 800 employees. The company has CPG customers in 70 different countries. Cook wouldn’t disclose retail partners, but said it is working with retailers in the U.S., U.K. and Israel.

2019 Was Not the Year We Welcomed Our Robot Overlords

Almost exactly a year ago, I predicted that “2019 Will Be a Breakthrough Year for Food Robots.” Whether I was right or wrong in that prognostication probably depends on how generous you are feeling.

I mean, there was enough interest from startups and investors and buyers from across the food landscape to make our first ArticulATE Food Robot conference in April a sellout success. But 2019 was not the year in which robo-restaurants popped up on every corner.

To be fair, I did hedge my bets last year, when I wrote:

The food robots are coming and while they won’t become ubiquitous next year, 2019 will be a breakthrough year in which more robots go to work, and more money flows into food robot startups.

I may have hedged my bets, but there was still a lot of food robot activity in 2019. When assessing the past year in food robots, I think it’s best to create four buckets: creation, logistics, delivery and vending machines.

For robots that created food, there wasn’t much new activity in 2019. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is still making burger and fries (though the company lost both its CEO and COO), and Creator and Spyce remained single location robo-restaurants (Spyce even temporarily closed down to re-do its menu). But other than Picnic unveiling its assembly style robot, there wasn’t a lot new in the robotic kitchen.

Logistical robotics on the other hand, especially in the grocery space, saw some real activity in 2019. Takeoff Technologies, which builds automated micro-fulfillment centers in the backs of grocery stores, raised $25 million and announced partnerships with ShopRite, Loblaw and an expansion of its trial with Albertsons. Common Sense Robotics, which also does robot micro-fulfillment, changed its name to Fabric and raised $110 million. And Kroger has started building out five of it’s planned 20 standalone robot fulfillment warehouses.

As these fulfillment centers come online, and are able to fulfill online grocery orders faster, look for them to spur a virtuous cycle and help give online grocery shopping a boost (which will spur more robot fulfillment).

2019 was also the year delivery robots took to the streets! Well, mostly to the well-groomed walkways of college campuses. Starship’s little rover delivery robots landed on the campuses of George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Purdue, University of Pittsburgh, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Houston and the University of Texas at Dallas. There, they’ve been delivering snacks and other food to students wherever they might be studying.

With Refraction AI’s REV-1, we also saw the launch of a new type of autonomous robot that is ruggedized for inclement weather. And Finally, Nuro’s pod-like car was enlisted by Kroger to do grocery delivery in Houston.

There are still a ton of regulatory and ethical issues that need to be worked out before robots swarm public city streets, but they will continue to be ironed out over the coming year. For instance the California DMV will now be permitting autonomous vehicles under 10,001 pounds for commercial delivery, and California is a pretty good leading indicator for legislation that other states eventually adopt.

Finally, we get to what I think will wind up being the biggest trend in robotics — vending machines. In 2019 we saw the beginning of the transformation of vending machines from coils of packaged snacks to purveyors of high-end cuisine. Yo-Kai Express dishes up delicious hot ramen, Chowbotics’ Sally will make you a healthy salad, and both Briggo and Cafe X are bringing their robo-baristas to airports and other high-traffic locations.

Given their ability to serve people at all hours of the day or night, expect to see even more advancements and more deployments of vending machines across next year.

So as we close out 2019, I don’t think I was wrong about robots — but I wasn’t completely right either. Yes, there were more robots than ever involved with our food this year. But we are still a long ways off from them being mainstream.

Millo, Maker of the Apple-like Cordless Blender, to Debut “MAD” Kitchen Table at CES

For tech reporters, late December is the best of times and the worst of times. The holidays are the best and give us a couple days off from the daily grind. But right after the holidays is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), so our mailboxes are now inundated with thousands of pitches touting new gadgets.

Yesterday Millo, makers of the eponymous cordless blender (and Innovation award winner at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit), posted a picture on Linkedin of its new product — a smart kitchen table — that will debut at CES next month.

It appears to be a wireless power table, capable of powering kitchen appliances without the need for cords, plugs or adapters (though obviously they’d need a wireless power capable device).

We reached out to Aivaras Bakanas, Millo’s Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, to find out more, but he only offered a couple additional, vague details, like that the table uses magnetic air drive (MAD) technology.

Wireless power is something of a holy grail for the kitchen. The ability to power a device like a coffee maker simply by setting it on a countertop would reduce clutter (no more cords) and allow for more efficient use of space because you can use that counterspace for food prep when not powering devices.

The Wireless Power Consortium has been working on this problem for years and in September announced the Ki wireless power standard for powering kitchen countertop appliances. From that press release:

The Ki Cordless Kitchen standard works with any non-metal countertop or table surface, including marble, slate, granite, laminates, wood and many others. Enabled appliances communicate with the transmitter through near-field communication (NFC), a safe, inexpensive and pervasive technology currently used around the world in bankcards, door locks, passports, transport tickets, and more.

Based on a comment Bakanas left on Linkedin, it doesn’t seem like Millo is hopping on board with this Ki standard, saying that his company’s MAD drive was “much better” because it “can have any kind of rotation, and induction in this table.”

While that may be true, the Wireless Power Consortium is the incumbent with a ton of industry partners and track record with the widely adopted Qi wireless standard.

Regardless of whether this will be an uphill struggle for Millo, it’s cool to see the company has bigger ambitions beyond blending you a morning smoothie.