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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Automation

Albertsons Expanding Use of Micro-Fulfillment with Takeoff

Albertsons is adding more micro-fulfillment centers (MFC) from Takeoff Technologies in an effort to keep up with grocery e-commerce, according to a story in Supermarket News.

Takeoff Technologies’ MFCs use a series of conveyors, rails and totes to help automate the process of fulfilling online grocery orders. When an order comes in, the system retrieves and assembles the various items, which are then packed into bags by a human before being sent out for delivery or curbside pickup.

Albertsons launched the first two of its MFCs with Takeoff in San Jose and San Francisco towards the end of last year. The grocer is now looking to build out a number of new MFCs with Takeoff over the rest of this year and into next. Chris Rupp, chief customer and digital officer at Albertsons Cos., told Supermarket News, “We have a series of new locations we’ll launch over 2020 and 2021 that will help us deliver more groceries, faster, to customers in some of our highly concentrated areas of business.”

Those new MFCs will include both back-of-house facilities — that is, fulfillment centers built into the backs of existing stores — as well as standalone MFCs that are basically dark grocery stores. Last year ShopRite announced it was building out a standalone MFC with Takeoff.

That Albertsons is expanding its use of MFCs is not that surprising. The pandemic has pushed people into record amounts of online grocery shopping. Back in April, at the height of the lockdowns, I spoke with Curt Avallone, the Chief Business Officer of Takeoff Technologies who said that the company had seen demand for online grocery up 80 to 100 percent at its facilities, and that basket sizes had gone up from $150 to $200.

Those levels may have plateaued or even dipped since April, but Albertsons’ committing to building out more automated MFCs is an indication that grocery e-commerce is now a more permanent part of the country’s shopping habits.

Albertsons isn’t alone in adopting more automation to fulfill online orders. During my call with Avallone, he said that Takeoff had six operational units with other partners including Sedano’s and Loblaw’s, with another 20 MFCs being built. Kroger is also hard at work building out its own Ocado-powered smart warehouse fulfillment centers across the country.

Miso Robotics Officially Opens Equity Crowdfunding Campaign to Raise $30M

Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the burger grilling, tater tot frying robot, announced today that it is kicking off its equity crowdfunding campaign to raise a $30 million Series C round.

Equity crowdfunding eschews traditional institutional funding such as venture capital and allows everyday people to invest directly in a company. In the case of Miso, a minimum investment of $1,493 per investor is required in order to participate. (And we should interject that any investment is a risk and this post is not an endorsement of Miso.)

Miso announced the equity crowdfunding campaign back in November, but it still required SEC approval before it could officially begin. According to the press announcement emailed to us, Miso says it has already secured $2.6 million in reservations with a pre-money valuation of $80 million.

Earlier this year, Miso introduced its newest generation of Flippy, the ROAR, which has the robot suspended on rails above a cooking space to make more room for any human co-workers.

This jump into equity crowdfunding comes at an interesting time, to say the least. The world is in the throes of a global pandemic that is costing millions of jobs, has sent the stock market reeling and is creating even new levels of uncertainty. How many everyday people impacted by COVID-19 are going to have the money to plunk down at minimum of $1,500 to own a small part of a robot company?

Not to mention the fact that a big driver of food automation in restaurants was a labor crunch. With an estimated 3 percent of US restaurants permanently closed, there will be a lot of human workers suddenly available once this pandemic passes.

On the other hand, the coronavirus outbreak and fear of human-to-human transmission of the virus is sparking all kinds of change throughout the food system. In a post-corona world, robots that prepare food could be seen as a way to make restaurants more hygienic. This, in turn, could spark a boom in food robotics.

Equity crowdfunding has become a bit of a trend in the food tech world. Other companies like Winc, Small Robot Company, GOffee and GoSun have all turned to the everyday investor for their latest rounds of funding. On one level, it provides them with the flexibility to grow as they like without added pressure from scale-seeking VCs, but it also denies companies the networks and knowledge VCs can provide.

Miso has made its choice, and now we’ll see if everyday investors flip for Flippy the robot.

Amazon Opening Big Robotics Center in Massachusetts

Amazon announced today that it’s going to build a new robotics hub in Westborough, MA outside of Boston. The company is spending $40 million on the 350,000 square foot facility that will open in 2021 and be in addition to the company’s current robotics center in North Reading, MA.

When you think about Amazon automation, it’s often in relation to its warehouse robots that autonomously carry around racks of items to be boxed and shipped. But the company has been branching out into other robots such as the Scout delivery robot currently running around in tests in Washington state and California. Amazon also has a patent for a robot that would live in your garage and go out to fetch items for you.

Amazon didn’t mention any specific projects that will be worked on at the new facility, but given our focus on food here at The Spoon, our minds immediately went to how Amazon could continue to apply new robots to groceries. Amazon is reportedly looking to open up its own line of supermarkets apart from Whole Foods, and it’s not hard to imagine the company taking its logistical know-how and applying it to some kind of robot-driven grocery fulfillment center.

Automated grocery fulfillment centers are gaining some traction with grocery retailers. Takeoff Technologies is building out micro-fulfillment centers in the back of existing grocery stores for Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Sedano’s. Fabric (formerly Common Sense Robotics) recently raised $110 million and moved its headquarters to New York City and has plans to build 14 fulfillment centers across the U.S. Meanwhile, Kroger is building out standalone robot-powered smart warehouses for grocery delivery in various locations across the eastern half of the U.S.

If Amazon builds out its own supermarket chain from the ground up, it’s conceivable that it will incorporate automation and robots to make fulfilling online orders more speedy. Plus, having all that robotics talent and research could help the company figure out new technologies to better handle fragile and perishable items like fruits and vegetables.

The company just started offering its Prime members free delivery for groceries, and making that process more efficient as online grocery shopping grows only makes sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McDonald’s is Testing Kitchen Robots and AI-Powered Drive-Thrus. It’s About Time

Last week the Wall Street Journal broke the story that McDonald’s is testing robotic deep fryers and voice-activated drive-thrus at a location in suburban Chicago.

The story didn’t lay out a ton of details. We don’t know what the robotic fryer will look like — whether it’s akin to Miso Robotic’s Flippy, which fries tater tots with an articulating arm, or if it’s more of an automated basket that dips and raises from hot oil. Likewise, all we know about the new drive-thru tech is that it’s a type of voice recognition technology.

But even with those question marks, this is a huge step forward for automation in fast-food. It’s also an inevitable one, since the success of the QSR is predicated on making consistent food at a fast pace. I’m hard-pressed to find a task that robots are more suited for.

The WSJ pointed out that these innovations are part of McDonald’s efforts to quicken the chain’s pace of service to help it edge out fast-food competition. That’s certainly true, but there are numerous other benefits as well. Automating dangerous jobs like frying could lead to fewer employee injuries. In addition to being potentially life-threatening, these injuries can also have a high cost for the restaurant.

As far as the drive-thru goes, adding voice recognition technology can help McDonald’s streamline the drive-thru experience, cutting down on ever-lengthening wait times. It could also pair up with Dynamic Yield, the AI-powered personalization platform that McDonald’s acquired a few months ago, to access customer’s past orders, preferences, and dietary restrictions to better upsell them on targeted add-ons.

Of course there will still be kinks to work out. Voice technology isn’t perfect, and robot fryers still need human employees to help them do things like bag orders. McDonald’s is also already getting blowback from skeptics who worry that automation will take valuable jobs away from humans.

However, speakers at our ArticulATE conference this April pointed out that there’s a growing labor crisis in the restaurant industry. QSR’s especially are struggling to find people to do the more repetitive, boring and dangerous tasks — like frying nuggets and taking orders for hours at a time.

McDonald’s isn’t the first restaurant to try out cooking robots or voice ordering technology. However, it’s by far the largest. It’s hard to argue against the fact that automation in food-service, as with any industry, was always going to happen eventually. But once a giant like McDonald’s starts putting the automation wheels in motion, eventually starts to look a whole lot sooner.

Video: “Food is Very, Very Dumb Compared to Robots.” But Automation Can Still Help It Taste Better

“Food is very, very dumb compared to robots.” Ali Bouzari made his case onstage at our ArticulATE food robotics conference last month. “It’s incredibly complex, it’s cumbersome, unyielding, and frustratingly ornate in a way that does not lend itself to innovation.”

So do we just give up and assume there are no new ways to make food? Not exactly. Bouzari, who founded culinary consultancy Pilot R&D and packaged food company Render, actually thinks that automation can help give us better eating experiences… within reason.

It’s pretty obvious how robots can help deliver food or run orders in a restaurant. They never get sick, they don’t need to take breaks, and they won’t drop a dish or mess up your order. But when it comes to making food taste better, even automation has to work within the confines of food science. As Bouzari put it: “Starch is gonna starch.” And that makes food robotics unique.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of room for robots and automation to shake up the food we’re eating — it just means we have to be really strategic about how we do it. Because in the end, “food is going to call the shots.”

Watch the video below to see Bouzari’s full talk on how robots can work within the limitations of food science, and check back for more of our full sessions from ArticulATE 2019.

How to Make Good Experiences (and Food) with Robots

Video: Albertsons Brings Labor into Automation Decisions on “Day One”

A recurring theme during our recent ArticulATE food robot and automation conference was the issue of human labor. What do you do when machines displace people in the workforce? It’s a tough question employers throughout the food world are grappling with.

On the one hand, automation is coming, and we need to figure out what combination of government and private sector will be responsible to help re/train people put out of work by robots. On the other hand, food-related companies like Albertsons (and restaurants), are having a tough time finding people to work for them.

Trung Nguyen, VP of eCommerce for Albertsons, told the audience at ArticulATE that the grocer is having a hard time filling jobs, especially truck driving jobs. Turns out people would rather set their own hours and work unsupervised driving for Uber than a delivery truck.

Even with a labor crunch, Albertsons is very methodical in its approach to automation. That’s because Albertsons is unionized, and, as Nguyen explained, before any kind of automation is implemented, the company brings in union reps and lawyers on “day one.” This way, Nguyen said that there is clear communication in what the company does.

Check out the full video from the conference to hear more about how the Albertsons grapples with the labor issue, why scale is important to a chain like Albertsons, and how it, too, has started piloting some autonomous vehicle delivery tests in the Bay Area.

ArticulATE 2019, Rethinking Grocery in the Age of Automation

Be sure to check back all through the week for more videos of the full sessions from ArticulATE!

Video: Do Food Robot Startup Founders Need Restaurant Experience to Be Successful?

Say you’re a VC looking to invest in a company that makes strawberry-picking robots. There are three or four companies in the space, all vying for your capital to get off the ground.

How do you choose where to put your dollars?

That’s one of the questions that we tackled last week at ArticulATE, our inaugural food and automation summit. We closed out the day with a lively panel on the opportunities — and challenges — in the food robotics investment landscape. Our speakers were VCs from the foodtech, hard tech and IoT spaces: Brian Frank of FTW Ventures, Brita Rosenheim of Better Food Ventures, Rajat Bhageria of Prototype Capital, and Avian Ross of Root VC.

The Spoon’s Michael Wolf moderated the conversation on what these investors are looking for in a food automation startup pitch specifically — and where they see significant opportunities in the fast-growing market. (Yes, both Frank and Ross have invested in strawberry-picking robots — and Ross claims he made the right choice.)

It’s certainly an exciting time in the food robotics space: there are tons of entrepreneurs out there with lofty plans to build the next robotic sushi restaurant, the next automated food delivery bot, or the next burrito-rolling robot arm (which, apparently, really hard to do).

However, the panelists seemed to agree that food robotics is a trickier investment space than a lot of other tech areas. Sure, the basic building blocks of food robotics — AI, articulating arms, etc. — are pretty democratized. But Ross (who — fun fact — spent a former life building robots for the Food Network) said that “robotics feels special and different.” He pointed out that the food system is incredibly complex and that a whole host of players have to be involved to deliver even the most basic meal to the consumer. And that’s just logistics: getting a robotic system to reach parity with a basic human fast food experience in terms of taste or customer experience is really tricky.

Because there are so many complexities at play it can require more capital than some other tech investments. It can also take longer to bring food automation technology to market. Which isn’t a problem — unless, as Rosenheim pointed out, you’re working with investors who are looking for “the next shiny thing” and aren’t patient enough to be in it for the long haul.

Investors in food robotics have to be especially willing to take risks and play the long game. However, not all the VCs saw eye-to-eye on what it takes for a food automation startup to be successful. The panelists disagreed on whether or not startups need deep restaurant market knowledge to be successful, how high the capital investment has to be in food automation, and what sets one seemingly identical food robotics startup apart from another.

Check out the video below to see the whole conversation — it was a really fun one.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics

Look out for more ArticulATE 2019 videos rolling out on our YouTube channel over the next week! 

LG to Develop Food Robots with CJ Foodville

Looks like LG is getting into the dedicated food robot space with the announcement today that it has formed a partnership with Korean restaurant chain, CJ Foodville. According to the AJU Business Daily, LG will build a Flippy-like robot that will begin testing this year.

LG’s move into more dedicated food robotics isn’t that surprising as the company already has its line of CLOi robots to help out the hospitality industry. Plus, all of its main rivals have their own food robot initiatives as well. Samsung has its robotic arm kitchen helper, Sony partnered with Carnegie-Mellon to develop food-related robots, and Panasonic is helping roboticize the Haidilao restaurant chain in China.

LG and CJ Foodville didn’t provide details about the program, a senior official at LG was quoted by the Korean Herald as saying “Robots will help with repetitive chores on behalf of human employees while the employees can provide better service and value for customers.”

This is a common refrain and one we hear whenever robots are introduced into the workforce whether it be behind the grill or roaming the grocery aisle. We talked a lot about the issues of robots and human labor at our recent ArticulATE automation summit this week. One of the issues panelists brought up is that quick service restaurants are facing a labor crunch, with one of the reasons being that a lot of people would prefer the flexibility of driving for Uber rather than working in a kitchen.

Automation in the food business is inevitable, so expect even more robot announcements from LG and other consumer electronics giants throughout this year.

Chowbotics Finds Robot-Made Salad Success in Hospitals

Hospitals, by and large, are places that you want to get in and out of quickly. But they are also places that are open 24 hours a day, with staff and visitors working or milling about throughout the night. This type of always-awake environment, it turns out, is the perfect place for Chowbotics‘ food robot, Sally.

Sally is a standalone salad (and bowl food) making robot. There are currently 50 Sally robots deployed around the world, and Chowbotics Founder and CEO, Deepak Sekar told me in a phone interview that the company has found particular success early on in hospitals.

To give you a sense of how Chowbotics defines success, Sekar said that locations that buy or lease a Sally need to sell 7 bowls a day to break even. At a Sally deployment in Las Vegas last month, Sekar reports that Sally was selling 120 bowls a day, and at a new Sally that came online last week at the North Oaks Health Care hospital in Lousiana, Sekar said they were selling 65 to 70 bowls a day.

One of the reasons for the success of Sally’s North Oaks locations is that the hospital’s cafeteria closes down at 2 p.m., so there is no place for staff or visitors to get fresh (as fresh as a hospital cafeteria is, anyway) food later in the afternoon or throughout the night. Sekar said that though there is a definite lunchtime peak in sales, there are sustained sales throughout the afternoon and evening, and another spike at midnight when shifts change, and people on the hunt for something to fresh to eat instead of vending machine food.

Sekar is so high on hospitals right now that they are an area of focus for the company. “Hospitals in general are doing really well, because they are places where people are hanging around at midnight or early in the morning,” said Sekar, “We find robots are a great fit.”

Because Sally is connected, Sekar can also see what types of salads people are creating. Though each Sally comes with standard recipes that you can order (e.g. Roasted Chicken Chopped Salad), Sekar said that 85 percent of bowls served were customized (Romaine lettuce and chicken were the most popular ingredients, edamame and ham the least).

Chowbotics isn’t stopping at salads, however. The company announced last year that it was expanding into bowl foods and is currently rolling out Indian, Mediterranean and Latin menus options in Sally. Cafeterias could become a thing of the past in places like hospitals as high-tech vending operations like Sally, or Cafe X’s robo-barista, and Basil St. Cafe’s hot pizza oven all come online to satisfy cravings any time of day or night.

If you’re curious about Sally, or have a question for Deepak, both robot and human will be live (and, err, plugged in) at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot summit coming up on April 16 in San Francisco! Get your tickets and get a glimpse of our automated future!

Using AI, the Turbo Clean Robot Can Clear Dirty Dishes Off Trays

Transferring dirty plates from a busbin to a dishrack was my least favorite job when I worked in restaurants. Handling other people’s leftovers. Getting sauce on my hands or clothes. It’s honest work, but blech.

That task, however, may soon be a thing of the past. The Engineer reports that Cambridge Consultants has developed Turbo Clean, a machine that uses computer vision, AI and robotics to automatically clear dirty dishes and glassware off of trays (think: cafeteria style).

As trays loaded with dirty dishes pass under a camera, the system can identify the difference between plates, silverware and glasses. It then dispatches the appropriate robotic attachment to lift the targeted item up off the tray and deposit it into the appropriate bin for cleaning. You can see it in action in this video:

Turbo Clean: Tackling the most unloved job in the commercial kitchen from Cambridge Consultants on Vimeo.

Right now Turbo Clean is just a prototype built for a “multinational catering company,” but it’s easy to see how it could be adopted in high-volume eating facilities like hospitals, colleges or military bases.

According to Cambridge Consultants, Turbo Clean can process a tray every six seconds. And since it’s a robot, it won’t ever get tired, call in sick or take a break, so it’s another reminder that robots and automation will be eating human foodservice jobs. Clearing food trays is one of those manual repetitive tasks that are ripe for automation, but hopefully shifting that to robots will create new, more creative jobs for people.

Seeing Turbo Clean in action also makes me wonder what Dishcraft, another startup that has been quietly building robots for commercial kitchens is crating. We’ll have a chance to find out at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot conference, where we’ll be chatting with Dishcraft Founder and CEO, Linda Pouliot. It’s on April 16 in San Francisco and you should definitely clear your calendar to join us.

Slack Chat Recap: The Perils and Promise of the Food Robot Revolution

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver‘s main piece over the weekend was on robots and automation. If you are in the food service industry you can (and should) watch the clip below, but I can also save you a click: Oliver basically says the whole situation around jobs being automated is… complicated.

As we’ve written before, the food service industry in particular is ripe for automation, and it’s one of the topics we covered during our recent Spoon Slack Chat with Megan Mokri, CEO of Byte Technology, Charlie Andersen, CEO of Augean Robotics, and David Rodriguez, Head of Business Development for Kiwi.

Admittedly, all of these companies are working to help bring automation across different segments of the food stack, so they have some skin in the game. But they were still circumspect about its societal benefits and drawbacks. When I asked the panel what the industry should do about the human displacement caused by robots and automation, the response was mostly optimistic (answered copied directly from Slack):

Megan Mokri (Byte): So much to say on this one. The reality is many industries in the US are facing a labor shortage – food and ag is hugely impacted, as is retail. Automation is critical if these industries are to keep pace with growing and shifting consumer behaviors.

Charlie Andersen: Re: automation and the impact on labor, this story is still being written. Certainly, the impact of automation is to enable one person to do far more work, or to remove people from tasks they no longer want to do. But in the process, more tasks are created and new opportunities are unlocked. (in the case of farming, there is way way too much work to do already)

David Rodriguez: The size of the markets we build should increase the total number of human operators! In our case, we need fewer people to do more deliveries, but we do so many deliveries that we need to hire more and more people!

But our Robo-Slack Chat wasn’t all dour news about an impending robot revolution. There are lots of cool things about robots, too!

One is how Byte’s automated smart fridges are stocked. Because the fridges automatically keep track of their contents, Byte has insight into which products are popular and where, and can use that data to power Byte’s demand algorithms and inventory planning, and can even allow for dynamic pricing. Byte also leases out their technologies to CPG and other food service companies, allowing them to more efficiently stock their own Byte-powered fridges.

But you can’t stock those fridges if you don’t have food, and as Charlie Andersen reminded us, agriculture and working on a farm is hard work. Robots can carry out some tasks more safely than a human could. For instance, the Augean Burro can carry 150+ pounds of grapes for hours in 110 degree weather without getting heat stroke or dehydrated. But in addition to labor changes, robots can also push farms towards more organic production because this can also reduce the amount of chemicals needed and the overall environmental intensity needed for fruit and vegetable production.

From that example, it’s easy to see robots as lending a helping hand, but in the city, robots running around underfoot could be seen as more of a nuisance, and become a target for theft or vandalism. One way Kiwi combats this is by designing the robot in a way that creates empathy from people looking at it. For instance, the Kiwi-bot has big eyes, making the robot look “cute.” This cuteness makes mean ole humans reluctant to harm the robot. Rodriguez says that in Berkeley they’ve had zero instances of theft and only a few cases of vandalism.

We are only at the beginning of seeing what robots are capable of and how they will literally change – and complicate – our world. But Slack Chats like this, as well as our upcoming ArticulATE conference in April (get your tickets!) help drive the conversation so we can figure some of those answers out now.

Automation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)