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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Basil Street

Basil Street Pizza Taking Final Bids For Assets to Pizza Robot Business

Back in mid-April, The Spoon first started getting tips that Basil Street Pizza was looking for a buyer.

When we emailed the maker of automated pizza-making kiosks, the auto-responder we got back was essentially a for-sale sign: “Thanks for your message. Basil Street Cafe is currently seeking qualified individuals or groups interested in acquiring company assets. If you are interested in purchasing assets of the company, please contact it’s Chief Restructuring Officer, Jeff Klemp”

The news of Basil Street’s liquidation comes just about six months after the company announced its deal with Prepango to put the APK in airports. The company had planned to expand to up to 200 airports in the coming year.

While Klemp had a “no comment” for us, The Spoon has since learned the company has about 30 or so automated pizza kitchens (not all are currently deployed) which it’s looking to sell alongside the rest of its assets, including patents, software source code and more.

All of this makes it worth asking: have we reached peak pizza robot? With Pizzametry, Basil Street, Picnic, API Tech, Pazzi , Hyper-Robotics or Piestro to name a few (not to mention any secret projects the big guys may or may not be working on), the market is certainly pretty crowded.

A counterpoint might be that pizza is one of the world’s most popular foods, and there will always be demand for pizza-making technology, especially with most of the big chains yet to roboticize their operations.

Either way, it looks like Basil Street won’t be one of the brands fighting it out for market share in the future. Anyone looking to join that fight, however, can accelerate their entry by scooping up Basil Street’s assets.

Better hurry though: tomorrow is the last day the company is taking bids.

Basil Street’s Pizza Robot Takes Flight With New Airport Rollout Deal

Basil Street, a maker of automated pizza vending machines, announced this week it has struck a deal with Prepango, a company that specializes in automated retail of food and beverage products in airports, to bring its pizza robot to airports across the US.

Launched this year, the Basil Street pizza smart vending machine – called Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK) – is roughly 20 square feet in size and holds up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the flash-frozen pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Up until this point, the APK has been serving up pizzas in universities, business parks and corporate headquarters. That all changes in a couple weeks when the two companies bring the pizza bot to the San Antonio International Airport. From there, Basil Street and Prepango are eyeing launches of the APK in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Cincinnati/North Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport among others.

For its part, Prepango is no stranger to bringing new food concepts via vending machines to airports. In Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport, the company launched vending machines for Sprinkles cupcakes and Doughp cookie dough (the latter machine is called – not kidding – a ‘Doughp Dealer’). It also launched one of the first automated grind and brew espresso vending machines with Illy Caffè North America earlier this year.

The arrival of Basil Street’s pizza robot is no surprise as travelers return to airports nearly two years after the start of the pandemic. With consumers now accustomed to contactless solutions, the pace of new arrivals for airport smart vending solutions can be expected to accelerate in the next few years.

According to the release, the two companies plan to expand to up to 200 APKs in airports over the next 12-18 months.

You can see the APK in action in the video below:

Basil Street Using Equity Crowdfunding to Raise $20M for its Pizza Vending Machines

Pizza vending machine company Basil Street announced this week that it is raising its Regulation A+ round of financing through equity crowdfunding. The company is looking to raise $20 million on the SeedInvest platform, where reservations to invest in Basil St. are currently open.

Basil Street makes what it calls Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK), which are standalone vending machines that serve up hot pizza. The APKs are roughly 20 sq. ft. and hold 150 frozen 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

That Basil Street is choosing the crowdfunding route isn’t too surprising since the company has yet to take traditional VC funding. According to the prospectus on SeedInvest, Basil Street raised $3.5 million in a convertible note in 2018, followed by three tranches of a Series A round from private investors between Feb. 2020 and Jan. 2021, totaling $8.99 million.

In a video chat this week, I asked Basil Street Chairman and CEO Deglin Kenealy why he’s turning to the crowd for funding instead hitting up VCs. “When you have someone come along and write a big check. It’s too far an advantage for the check writer,” he replied.

But Kenealy also echoed a more intangible sentiment that we hear from other startups like Piestro and Blendid about going the equity crowdfunding route. “We’ll get 7,000 or so investors. Those people will become cheerleaders,” he said, “I’ve got people who are invested in the business and helping us drive it forward.”

Like others in the vending machine space, Basil Street is looking to place its machines in high-traffic areas such as military bases, hospitals, universities, and factories. Basil Street has been running pilot programs and Kenealy said the company is signing deals right now that will put 50 machines in the field this Fall.

During its pilot program, Kenealy said that the company has learned a bunch of information from actual customer interaction. One thing the company learned in particular was about menus. Kenealy said that when the machine is placed in a closed location like a factory, where the same people use the machine every day, menu rotation and adding new items (like a breakfast pizza) is important. But when a machine is in an open location like an airport, where lots of people come and go, menu items can pretty much stay the same.

While Basil Street is turning to the crowd to finance its future, the market itself is getting crowded with competitors. There are a number of pizza vending machines already at market or on their way including API Tech, PizzaForno, Bake Xpress and Piestro. But, given how many locations just in the U.S. alone where a pizza vending machine could work, there’s actually room for plenty of players.

Any investment carries with it risk, but for those interested in plunking down money to own a piece of Basil Street’s pie business, the share price will be $2.82, and the minimum investment is $998.

The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report

Thanks to advances in hardware, the internet of things, and food preparation, vending machines today are basically restaurants in a box. They offer high-end cuisine in minutes, require minimal setup time, and have the on-board computing smarts to manage inventory and communicate any issues that arise.

With these capabilities, it’s no wonder the vending machine category was valued at more than $30 billion in 2018, according to Grandview Research, and was anticipated to have a CAGR of 9.4 percent from 2019 through 2025.

Had this report been written even just a few months ago, the main takeaway would have been that vending machines are perfect for high-traffic areas that operate around the clock: airports, corporate offices, college dorms, and hospitals.

But we’re living in a world continuously being shaped and reshaped by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Right now, some form of shelter-in-place orders blanket most of the U.S. Global air travel volume has plummeted, so airports are not busy. Non-essential businesses are closed and people are working from home, not office buildings. And colleges may not hold in-person classes until 2021.

While on the surface, those factors suggest vending machine companies will be yet-another sector wiped out by coronavirus, there has actually never been a better time for the automated vending machine industry. The small footprint and high-end food these devices offer are perhaps more important than ever at a time when minimizing human-to-human contact in foodservice is paramount to doing business. That makes the vending machine market uniquely positioned to capitalize on a post-pandemic world.

This report will define what the automated vending machine space is, list the major players, and present the challenges and opportunities for the market going forward.

Companies profiled in this report include Alberts, API Tech/Smart Pizza, Basil Street, Blendid, Briggo, Byte Technology, Cafe X, Chowbotics, Crown Coffee, Farmer’s Fridge, Fresh Bowl, Le Bread Xpress, Macco Robotics, TrueBird, and Yo-Kai Express.

This research report is exclusive for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

Basil Street Raises $10 Million for its Pizza Vending Machines

Basil Street announced today that it has raised a $10 million round of funding that will help the company begin a multi-city pilot of its pizza vending machines starting this April.

Basil Street’s machines are roughly 20 square feet in size and hold up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. The machine serves cheese and pepperoni pies as well as a rotating “Pizza of the month,” each costing between $6.95 and $11.95. Pizzas are made fresh, flash frozen for storage in the machine, and reheated using a patent-pending, non-microwave speed oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Like other vending machine companies, Basil Street is targeting high-volume, high-traffic areas such as airports, military bases, hospitals, college campuses or even inside existing locations like supermarkets.

And also like other vending machine companies, Basil Street is part of a wave of high-tech, haute cuisine automated food kiosks coming to market. Other players — Yo-Kai Express with its hot ramen, Chowbotics with its fresh salads, and Bake Xpress with its pastries (and pizza!) — are all vying to revolutionize what a vending machine is capable of.

But for Basil Street, selling pizza is just part of the equation and really just the start for the company. As we wrote last year, all the machines are IoT-enabled, so the company will have a ton of data to work with:

The company will know what people buy, when and where they buy it, and how often. Basil Street could use this data to target new cuisine offerings or new locations. The company started with pizza because it’s easier to ship and cook, but [Basil Street Cafe CEO, Deglin] Kenealy said the oven’s technology could be used to cook just about anything.

But first, Basil Street has to get its machines up and going, which it will do with this cash infusion (the company had previously raised $3.5 million in family and friends funding). Basil Street will be targeting Texas, Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina and Southern California for its first roll-outs.