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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Automation

Kroger and Ocado Begin to Roll Out Automated Fulfillment Centers

If you’re as fascinated as we are with the idea of robots scurrying around and doing your weekly grocery shop, Kroger and Ocado have some good news for you.

Today the grocery giant announced it would roll out two new Ocado-powered customer fulfillment centers (CFCs) — also called “sheds” — in the Central Florida and Mid-Atlantic regions. This news comes just a few months after Kroger named Monroe, OH (outside of Cincinnati) the location for its first automated robot warehouse.

In May of 2018 Kroger entered into an exclusive partnership with U.K.-based online grocer Ocado, nabbing a 6 percent stake in the company and promising to build twenty automated warehouse facilities across the U.S. over the following three years. We’re seeing that promise come to life.

As resident robo-expert Chris Albrecht pointed out, grocery logistics is hot hot hot right now and big players like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Kroger are all racing to deliver your groceries as fast as possible.

To beat out its competitors, Kroger has invested not just in robotic fulfillment centers but also in self-driving cars, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, and an expanded deal with Instacart.

And that’s just for grocery delivery and curbside pickup. In-store, Kroger also has a number of developments in the works. In this month alone, they partnered with Microsoft to launch two tech-enabled grocery stores (their answer to Amazon Go), and also unveiled new Customize It personalized meal kits. With the company’s brand new innovation lab, which it launched in August in tandem with the University of Cincinnati, Kroger doesn’t seem like it will stop reinventing the grocery space anytime soon.

Curious about how robotics and automation will reshape the grocery business? Join the conversation at ArticulATE, our food robotics summit in San Francisco on April 16th! Early Bird tickets are available now.

Announcing Articulate, our Food Robotics and Automation Summit in SF on April 16

Throughout 2018, we chronicled the rise of food robots and the fundamental ways they are changing how we eat. From the farm, to automated restaurants to doorstep delivery, robots are on the rise and 2019 is poised to be a watershed year for them. Which is why we are excited to announce Articulate, a one-day conference devoted to food robots and automation, happening on April 16, 2019 in San Francisco at the General Assembly event space in San Francisco.

One thing we’ve learned from four years of holding Smart Kitchen Summit is that bringing a community of decision makers together really drives discussion, insight and even innovation. At Articulate, we’ll be discussing broad themes such as:

  • What will be the impact of robotics on front and back of house in restaurants?
  • How robots will transform last mile delivery?
  • How will state and local government regulate robots?
  • How much automation should go grocers go in on?
  • The evolution of business and service models in an age of food robotics
  • The ethics of automation and the impact on labor market

Oh, and you’ll be able to check out some really cool robots up close and in person!

We’ve already lined up a number of great speakers, including:

  • Vincent Vanhoucke, Principle Scientist, Google Brain team
  • Linda Pouliot – CEO of Dishcraft
  • Dave Zito – CEO of Miso Robotics
  • John Ha – CEO of Bear Robotics
  • Deepak Sekar – CEO of Chowbotics
  • Ali Bouzari – Chief of Pilot R&D

And we’ll be announcing more shortly.

Tickets are limited, so be sure to grab yours today to get a sneak peek at the future of our automated meal journey. We hope to see you there! Here’s what you need to know:

Articulate: Food Robotics and Automation Summit
April 16, 2019
San Francisco, CA

Report: Being Cashless Backfires When Payment System Crashes

Customers at the sweetgreen in Hollywood (Sunset and Gower location) reportedly got a nice surprise during lunch time yesterday — a free meal. A social media post yesterday from a customer who was there that said the restaurant’s payment system went down, and since sweetgreen is a cashless establishment, the store wound up giving away lunches to all the people standing in line waiting to order.

We don’t have many details except the one eyewitness (who asked to remain anonymous when we followed up with them) report who said that the Hollywood sweetgreen found itself with a “completely crashed system” during the lunch rush. The restaurant had no way to accept cash and instead of closing, they decided to give away food for free.

If it happened as told, this is probably an isolated incident (we reached out to sweetgreen, see below). But the situation highlights the perils restaurants can experience when going cashless, especially if they don’t have contingency plans in place.

The sweetgreen salad chain went cashless in January of 2017. From that point on, in order to pay for your food you had to either order through the app or use a credit card in-store. As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote last year, going cashless has its pluses and minuses.

The good thing about going cashless is improved safety for workers (nothing to rob), faster service, and improved accuracy. All good things! The downside, however, is that it’s expensive to implement, local governments may make it illegal, and it shuts out the poor and young as customers. All bad things!

Going cashless has also had its ups and downs as a businesses decision, for those who tried it. Shake Shack abandoned its self-service, cashless store in New York. And while Eatsa retreated on its plan to roll out its own automated, cashless restaurants, Wow Bao was so taken with Eatsa’s technology and after an initial test decided to open a second cashless location.

We reached out to sweetgreen asking about the incident and to see what type of back up plans the company has in place if and when outages like these happen. A PR rep for the company wrote us back neither confirming nor denying the outage, simply saying that they were going to pass on the opportunity to answer any of our questions.

Shake Shack Gives Self-Service Kiosks a Second Chance

A little over a year ago, Shake Shack opened its first-ever location powered by self-service kiosks in the East Village. At the restaurant, all ordering and payments were made through digital kiosks — no human intervention necessary.

Except human intervention actually was totally necessary. In a matter of months, customers practically declared mutiny and Shake Shack abandoned the concept. “The kiosks are also supposed to make things go quicker, but the wait is even longer,” one commenter noted.

But it seems the Danny Meyer-backed chain is giving the concept another go. This week Shake Shack announced it will expand its kiosk locations; but with some differences from the pilot.

Most notably, the selected stores will feature a more hybrid concept, offering both cashiers and kiosks. This combo is a wise move on Shake Shack’s part, since kiosks still cause a fair share of confusion and there are many who would benefit more from interacting with an actual person. Guests will also be able to use cash if they prefer, as the card-only payments were a point of grief with the original kiosk-concept location. Right now, Shake Shack currently has five locations that offer this hybrid kiosk-human structure, and plans to open more in areas like San Francisco and Seattle, where labor costs run especially high.

And labor costs will continue to be an issue. On its second-quarter earnings call, Shake Shack reported that those increased year over year by 26.3 percent, partially driven by increases to minimum wage.

That’s where the kiosks come in: “We are learning how the kiosk experience changes the flow in the front-house, the extent to which we are back to speed at service, kitchen throughput, how it best enhances the guest experience, its ability to deliver labor leverage in the future and how ordering behavior may be impacted,” said CEO Randy Garutti.

Automation in quick-service restaurants is becoming more and more commonplace, to make an understatement — and it’s not hard to see why. Analysts say that kiosks could help McDonald’s recoup $2.7 billion in sales. The fast food leader said it plans to add kiosks to 1,000 stores every quarter for the next two years.

And kiosks were all the rage at this year’s National Restaurant Association show, which had products from 365 Retail Markets, Adusa Inc., and Apex. And those are just the first three on the alphabetized list.

Shake Shack stands a somewhat better chance of succeeding with kiosks this time around. That’s partly because they’re still accepting cash and party because people’s perception towards automation has shifted since the first iteration. Consumers in general are more comfortable with kiosk interfaces in 2018 than ever before, whether at the airport or eating lunch.

However, it’s best not to paint too rosy a future at the moment. Shake Shack and others may be touting an ideal solution with these kiosk-cashier hybrid locations, but there are no significant numbers yet on how well the locations will perform. And with labor costs continuing to rise, the pressure to automate more and more restaurant operations will increase. Understanding when and where to do that — and when and where not to — will be key to any fast-casual chain’s success.

Interested in the future of restaurant tech? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit! Use discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

Chowbotics Snaps up $11M to go Big on Robot Food Bowls

Chowbotics, the startup behind Sally, the salad making robot, announced yesterday that it has raised $11 million in a “Series A-1.” This new round follows the $5 million Series A the company raised in March of last year, and brings the total amount raised to $17.3 million.

TechCrunch reports that the company will be using the new money to expand beyond salads and into bowls, writing that Chowbotics is looking into “grain bowls, breakfast bowls, poke bowls, açai bowls and yogurt bowls,” among others.

You can see Sally in action in this video we shot of it making a salad last year:

With Sally, Chowbotics is at the forefront of reinventing the vending machine. Using a combination of robotics, AI and fresh ingredients, Chowbotics is evolving fast, automated food choices in building lobbies and other high volume public spaces beyond Snickers bars and Cheetos.

So we’re curious as to how this bowl building will take shape. Will it be a smaller, vending machine-sized robot like Sally, or the smoothie-making robot, Albert? Or will the cooking element necessitate it being bigger, like the kiosk-sized robots by 6d Bytes and Briggo? Or will it be a full-on restaurant, like Spyce Kitchen, which just opened recently and features its own bowl-based menu?

We reached out to Chowbotics to find out more, and will update this post with any reply. But the company definitely cannot rest on its kale roots and will need to show the flexibility and scalability of its technology in order to stay competitive.

Automation is a hot area right now and food robots in particular. Caliburger recently reinstated Flippy the burger cooking robot, Connected Robotics in Japan is rolling out its Takoyaki robot this summer, Ekim raised 2.2 million euros to build a pizza robot restaurant, Sony has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to build food robots, and during our recent Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe, I drank a fantastic cocktail served up by Foodpairing’s robot bartender.

If you want to know more about the future of food robots and artificial intelligence, subscribe to our podcast, The Automat, which hosts weekly discussions with those people building the future of robotic food today.

Study: Food Workers Do Not Fare Well in Our Robot Future

We’ve known for a while that the robots are coming for our jobs. Now a recent study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sheds some light on how many human jobs run the risk of getting replaced by robots and other automation around the world, and in what industries (hat tip: MIT Technology Review). Spoiler: based on these numbers, the food industry should get set for some major changes.

Overall, the OECD research found that 14 percent of jobs are “highly automatable,” which means that the probability that they will become automatized is more than 70 percent. This translates into more than 66 million workers across the 32 countries covered in the study.

Not every job sector will be impacted the same, and jobs requiring low to basic education will take the brunt of the impact. From the study:

“Automation is found to mainly affect jobs in the manufacturing industry and agriculture, although a number of service sectors, such as postal and courier services, land transport and food services are also found to be highly automatable.”

The study also found that “the risk of automation is the highest among teenage jobs.” Which, if you think back to your teenage years, most likely included a few stints either at a fast food or casual dining restaurant.

The OECD paper adds to the growing debate over exactly how much automation will replace human workers. If there’s good news in this research, it’s that 14 percent automation is far less than the 47 percent predicted by researchers back in 2013. And the OECD paper even couches its own numbers, saying they could change depending on government regulations and the social reaction to automation. It also touches on the fact that automation could create jobs for humans, as well as replace them.

That’s why I’m hesitant to call this OECD study “bad” news. Automation is just… inevitable. As we’ve seen from the likes of Walmart’s shelf-scanning robots, or the cashier-less Amazon Go store, there are some repetitive tasks that machines and computers can do better and more consistently than humans.

The OECD study is, however, another reminder that we need to start thinking of how we will re-shape our workforce — not just fearing how robots will replace it. Until then, perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that Flippy, the burger flipping robot was “retired” (temporarily) after just one day on its job.

Scoop: Little Caesars Has a Patent for a Pizza-Making Robot

It’s hard to fear the robot revolution when they come bearing pizza.

Little Caesars is the latest fast food chain to get in on the robot action. The pizza chain was issued a patent today for what is described as an automated “apparatus provided for assembling pizza,” which includes “a pizza sauce spreading station, a cheese spreading station and a pepperoni applying station.” The robot will have an articulating arm with a gripper attached to grab onto pizzas, as well as a rotary dial system to ensure proper cheese and pepperoni distribution.

The Little Caesar pizza robot in action.

The background and summary section of the patent frames the pizza robot as a tool to help retail workers. By partially automating the “labor-intensive endeavor” of pizza-making, the robot can free workers up to perform “other value added tasks.” It will also help improve efficiency, ensuring a more consistent quality pizza at a faster speed.

If Little Caesars put its new patent to use by employing an army of pizza robots in its restaurants, it will mark yet another step forward for automation in casual dining. We’ve already seen food running and bussing robots in the front of house and burger-flipping robots in the kitchen. Judging from the patent photos, Little Caesar’s proposed robot can handle the entire pizza assembly process, handing off a finished product to a human who could either place it on a buffet or slide it into a box for delivery.

Little Caesar isn’t the first company to create an automated pizza assembly system. Zume Pizza in Silicon Valley uses robots to stretch their pizza dough, add sauce, and shuttle their pies into the oven. However, last we heard, they still needed humans to add the toppings—something that Little Caesar’s robot is able to do on its own.

This patent shows that fast food chains are trying to optimize what customers like—speed and low price point—and reduce what they care less about: who (or what) is cooking their food.

SKS 2016 Flashback: The Cooking Automation Continuum

With Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 just days away, here at the Spoon, we thought we’d revisit some of our favorite session from last year.

This session, “The Cooking Automation Continuum: From Guided Cooking to The Cooking Robot,” was a fun panel moderated by your’s truly that explored the various ways innovators are looking to apply automation and robotics to food and cooking.

There’s no doubt that cooking automation is a continuum. We see basic automation in hugely popular cooking devices today such as the Instant Pot and Thermomix, while there are those exploring the outer boundaries of how to apply automation and robotics to create fully cooked meals.

We talk about all of this in this session.

The panelists for this session are Darren Vengroff, the (then) Chief Scientist of Hestan Smart Cooking, Timothy Chen, CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, and Ehsan Alipour, the CEO of Oliso.

We will be exploring cooking automation and robotics at this year’s Summit. If you’d like to see these sessions, talk to the innovators and become smarter about the future of cooking, you can still get tickets at the Smart Kitchen Summit website. Use the discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

Breville’s New Espresso Machine Is Almost Like A Home Robot Barista

It’s no secret that robots are changing the way the food and beverage industry is creating food, serving its customers, designing products and automating tasks that used to belong to people. Startups like Cafe X are actually staffed with fully robotic baristas who will make you a delightful (and fast) cup of coffee with no real human involvement.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley startups getting in the mix – companies like Breville are thinking about how to automate tasks and deliver appliances that give consumers quality without leaving the house. Enter Breville’s newest invention, the Oracle Touch, which is the closest you can probably get to hiring a barista to come to your house and make you the perfect espresso-based beverage. The Oracle Touch has – you guessed it – a touchscreen and a bunch of advanced technology inside that gives it the ability to create a drink from scratch without much human input at all.

The Oracle will grind the beans, tamp down the ground espresso, infuse and pour a shot and steam your milk of choice to the exact desired standards (without anyone having to hold the wand or container.) In a market where fancy espresso machines usually require some know-how and Keurig-type machines make brewing coffee with a button-push super simple, it makes sense for Breville to try and create the best of both worlds.

The machine, of course, isn’t cheap and not meant to be a hugely mainstream device. But Wired reviewer and food writer Joe Ray has a lot of great things to say about the Oracle, including:

“The Oracle cleverly straddles a line, offering an impressive amount of customization and hands-on time, while automating enough that you’d have to try hard to make a bad drink…for those who are able to plunk down $2,500 on an espresso maker, Breville has created an outstanding machine.”

I took first balked at the price, but when considering my $4.50 a day soy latte habit, I spend about half the cost of a Breville automated espresso machine in a year on barista-created beverages. And I have to leave my house to get them.

Does this type of technology mean we’ll see the downfall of the traditional coffeehouse? Not likely. Robotics and automation are certainly disrupting many areas of the food service industry, but coffee shops still offer a product and an atmosphere that many people can’t or don’t want to replicate at home. While the price points of home automated espresso machines might come down over time, the more likely impact will be to baristas themselves as automation and advancements in robotics are coming close to replacing the job of grinding, measuring, stamping, steaming and combining ingredients to create the perfect caffeinated beverage.

Watch Sally The Robot Make My Salad

Yesterday at the FOODIT event in Mountain View, I had salad for lunch.

Why I am telling you this? Because unlike any salad I’ve had before, this one was custom built for me by a robot named Sally.

We’ve written about Sally before at the Spoon, but this is the first time I got to taste a Sally-crafted salad.  On hand to give me a tour and tell us about Sally was Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar.

You can watch the video of Sally making a salad above, but here are a few takeaways from my conversation with Sekar and Chef Kelly Olazar:

  • Sally allows the user to choose “chef salad” mixes or build their own using the twenty types of ingredients.  Users can also use an app to do greater customization of the salad.
  • The list price on a Sally is $30 thousand, but the company does offer discounts
  • Sally herself weighs in at 400 pounds
  • The product is targeted towards office cafeterias, universities and restaurants
  • Sally can make about 40-50 salads before she has to be refilled. Yesterday at the FOODIT event, they had to once and served 90 salads. Chef Kelly Olazar told me people were coming back for second salads later in the day (cheapsters).

Overall, I like the salad and was impressed with how quick Sally worked. While the robot’s price seems high, I figured that if could replace a worker and generate $500-$1000 a day in a busy cafeteria, the product makes sense financially in a high-volume food service location.

I Ate At Eatsa. Now I’m Convinced It’s The Future of Fast Casual Dining

Like most everyone, one of the reasons I love going to New York City is the food.

And after all, why not? The variety is endless, and every meal brings a chance to eat somewhere (and something) amazing. In just one three-day trip to the Big Apple this week, I got to eat  dinner at America’s best pasta restaurant, have lunch in the middle of Grand Central Station, and grab breakfast at one of the city’s best cafes with longtime former editor of Food and Wine, Dana Cowin.*

But the meal I got most excited about was a $10 Bento Bowl I had at eatsa. That’s because while I’d written a bunch about the quinoa-centric, tech-heavy restaurant startup, I’d yet to eat there, so I was intrigued to see what it was like to eat with a completely automated the front-of-house experience.

I ate @eatsarestaurant this week. Here’s a quick video recap of the experience.

A post shared by Michael Wolf (@michaelawolf) on

Here’s a quick recap of my experience:

The Walk-In Experience:  When I walked into the Madison Avenue eatsa, it was moderately crowded. At 3:30 in the afternoon it was late for lunch, so I’d expect even bigger crowds during lunch hour.

This location was loud. Of course, everything seems to be bustling in the middle of Manhattan, but this eatsa location was definitely louder than most fast food or fast casual restaurants I’ve been to, in no small part due to the loud music playing over the speakers.

I also noticed an eatsa employee in the lobby. I found this interesting because I wasn’t sure if anyone ever saw an employee when dining at eatsa.

The Order Experience: The order experience is straightforward. Before I could peruse the menu on one of the 8 or kiosks, I was asked to swipe a credit card. I was then given a choice of pre-made bowls or the option to build my own custom bowl.

Ordering food at eatsa

I found the menu simple and easy to understand. Once I chose a Chef’s bowl, I added a beverage and paid. The total price for my bowl was under ten bucks.

Wait and Pick Up: After checkout, my name soon appeared on a big screen above the wall of cubbies.

After ordering, my name appeared on a big screen under ‘Current Orders’

When my food was ready, the screen told me which cubby from which to pick up my meal. The total wait time was less than five minutes. When I picked my meal up, both my bowl and drink were there. However, my dining companion’s drink was missing, so he had to ask the eatsa employee to radio to the back and have them put a drink in the cubby.

How Was The Food?: You should know this: the food at eatsa is really good. I have to admit I wasn’t sure how much I would like a quinoa-centered meal, but the bento bowl I ordered was fresh, crispy and most of all, delicious. My friend Aaron Cohen ordered the hummus and falafel bowl and found it equally tasty.

Closing Thoughts

After eating at eatsa, here are my takeaways:

The whole experience was very low friction: Eating at eatsa is  just really, really easy to do. I walked in, ordered and started eating in about 5 minutes.  I think for lunch customers in busy cities or corporate dense suburbs, eatsa is perfectly optimized for quick pick-up-and-go lunches.

Price-value exceeds most restaurants. The food quality and taste are extremely high for the price. My meal was under ten bucks, lower than average when compared to pretty much any chain restaurant.

It’s not all robots…yet. In a way, I was happy to see a human employee in the lobby of eatsa. It became apparent with my friend’s missing drink why eatsa would need to have someone in the front of the house to answer questions and solve problems.

The mystery is part of the allure. Since we’re early in the robot-restaurant revolution, people are naturally curious about how the restaurant works. When I asked the young woman working up front what went on in the back of house, she said, “some people say it’s robots” with a twinkle in her eye and left it at that.

This is the future of fast food and fast casual. As CEOs from fast casual chains like Buffalo Wild Wings wring their hands about the future, eatsa is busy creating a new template that leverages automation to bring a high-quality, low-friction food experience to the consumer. While I don’t think all restaurants will automate the front-of-house like eatsa – after all, no one can replace a great maître d’ or the ambiance of a cool coffee shop with touch screen kiosk – I have no doubt that what eatsa has created is a glimpse into the future.

*Yes, that’s a humble-brag, as I’m a fan of Dana’s and you should be too (you can check her podcast here). And no, a Dana Cowin is not included with every meal at High Street on Hudson.

Whirlpool Buys Yummly In Effort To Bolster Smart Kitchen Strategy

This week Whirlpool announced their intention to acquire Yummly, one of the Internet’s biggest food and recipe sites.

The acquisition comes as part of Whirlpool’s effort to accelerate its development for the smart kitchen of the future. At CES this year, the company announced new cooking automation features for its lineup of smart appliances, including new Alexa skills, scan to cook and guided cooking. This just a year after the company showed off a number of connected kitchen efforts at CES 2016, including Amazon Dash integration.

The guided cooking feature announced in January is particularly interesting in light of the Yummly deal.  The new feature enables users of the Whirlpool Smart Kitchen Suite app to send a recipe directly to a Wi-Fi powered appliance such as an oven, which will then follow the cooking instructions. It’s easy to envision how this cooking automation capability could be coupled with Yummly’s massive database of recipes.

This Is About Smart Kitchen Self-Sufficiency

Making the deal more interesting is the fact that Whirlpool recently parted ways with Innit, a smart kitchen platform company that had started working with the company’s Jenn-Air division in 2016. As I wrote in March, the breakup was in part due to Whirlpool’s decision to start forging its own technology path as it saw the smart kitchen becoming a reality over the past year:

With 2017 rolling around and the company viewing the market for connected kitchen products as more viable, it decided to more actively develop and expand their own connected product technology.  As one source told me, “if a startup can do with a few million dollars, why can’t the world’s biggest kitchen brand do it?” 

In other words, Whirlpool had decided it wanted to determine its own technology destiny rather than relying too heavily on external partners to forge a path forward. What the Yummly deal shows is that the company will not hesitate to acquire others as part of its effort to realize smart kitchen self-sufficiency.

And this deal does just that by bringing Yummly’s smart kitchen technology platform in-house. As Brett Dibkey, Whirlpool’s vice president of Integrated Business Units, said: “Yummly brings an outstanding platform on which to begin building our digital product offering.”

A Year Of Change For Yummly

For Yummly, the acquisition by Whirlpool comes after a year of management change. In October of last year, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer Santiago Merea left to start a baby food startup, and then in November the company’s head of product, Ankit Brahmbhatt, left to become Innit’s head of product (yes, Innit, the company who parted ways with Whirlpool this year).  Yummly also saw its CEO David Feller step back and hand the reigns to Brian Witlin, who in a previous life was the cofounder of Shopwell, a company recently acquired by…you guessed it…Innit.

Both Merea and Brahmbhatt came to Yummly through Yummly’s acquisition of Orange Chef, a smart kitchen company who had built it’s own connected scale, and had started to build  smart kitchen operating system and platform for appliance companies. For whatever reason, Yummly never partnered with any appliance companies, which could in part explain the departure of Merea and Brahmbhatt last year. It looks as though the Yummly-powered connected kitchen will finally be built, only now as part of the world’s biggest appliance company.

Whirlpool Becomes A Content and Community Company With Yummly Deal

Lastly, one important aspect of this deal is that it gives Whirlpool a massive infusion of cooking content and community. As newer companies in the connected kitchen like ChefSteps have shown, having strong recipe content and an associated community can create fertile soil upon which to launch new hardware products. With Yummly, Whirlpool now has a built-in community to tap into as it expands is smart kitchen product lineup in the coming years.

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