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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

bear robotics

Bear Robotics Raises $32M Series A. That’s a Lot of (Robot) Pennies

Bear Robotics, maker of the Penny restaurant server robot, announced today that it has raised a $32 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Softbank with participation from LINE Ventures Corp., Lotte Group, Vela Partners, DSC, and Smilegate. Bear had previously raised $2 million from South Korea’s Woowa Bros.

Penny is an autonomous robot built to shuttle food from restaurant kitchens to tables, and carry back empty dishes. The company released the latest version of Penny last year, which we described at the time:

Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

Bear Robotics founder John Ha got the idea for Penny after running his own restaurant and seeing the hard work that went into being a server. It’s a lot of walking and carrying for a job that doesn’t pay all that well. Ha’s aim is to let robots do the monotonous back and forth associated with food service so employees and owners can do more customer service.

Penny has yet to go into mass production or full scale deployment. The robot was being used at Ha’s restaurant for a time and at a South Korean Pizza Hut, but there hasn’t been any word on expansion from that pilot.

But Penny isn’t the only serverbot in town. At CES this month, China’s PuduTech showed off its BellaBot, which in addition to carrying dishes, also sported an LED feline face. If customers pet Bella, the cat purrs, though it also gets annoyed if customers keep it from its work.

Bear’s fundraise comes at a time when food robots are having a bit of a tough time. Zume, which used robots to help make pizzas, shuttered its pizza delivery service. Creator, the robot-centric hamburger joint, was left stranded by Softbank, which was going to invest. Cafe X shut down three of its San Francisco locations. And Miso Robotics lost both its CEO and COO last year, and instead of venture funding, is turning to equity crowdfunding to raise more capital.

With its new, bulked up warchest, Bear is better prepared to weather any automation storm, but now it has to deliver a whole bunch of meals.

Woowa Bros. to Rent Out In-Restaurant Bots that Deliver Food to Your Table

When we’ve written about Korean company Woowa Bros.’ robotic ambitions in the past, it’s been around delivering food from restaurants to your customers’ own homes. But the company announced a new plan on Monday to have its Dilly ‘bots deliver food inside restaurants to your table, too.

The Aju Business Daily reports that Woowa is launching a robot rental program wherein restaurants can pay 900,000 won (~$773 USD) per month with a two-year contract.

Aju Business Daily is light on details, saying only that the Dilly can carry food to four tables at a time and bus dirty dishes back to the kitchen. That sounds a lot like the Penny robot Bear Robotics offers (and tested out at a Pizza Hut in Seoul last year). Woowa is an investor in Bear Robotics, and we’ve reached out to Bear’s to see if its technology is involved in Woowa’s new offering.

As off-premises dining continues to play an increasingly important role for restaurants, many players look to build autonomous robots for food delivery (Postmates, Kiwi, Starship, etc.). There aren’t as many focused on in-store dining, which presents an opportunity for companies like Woowa and Bear.

Woowa Brothers operates the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery app in South Korea, and the company has not been shy about building out its robot fleet. Last December the company received a $320 million investment round in part to help it develop more autonomous robots, and this past July the company formed a partnership with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots.

Bear Robotics Launches Second-Gen Restaurant Robot, Adds Swappable Tray System

Bear Robotics has officially launched the second-generation version of its Penny restaurant robot. The autonomous robot, which shuttles food and dishes between the front and back of house, now features a versatile tray system for carrying more and different types of items.

With its new design, Penny has lost its bowling pin shape and single carrying surface. Instead, Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

On the inside, Bear updated the smarts of Penny, giving the robot enhanced obstacle-avoidance technology, and while the company didn’t go into specifics, a tablet can now be attached to Penny for expanded customer interaction capabilities.

Penny 2.0 is being shown at the National Restaurant Association trade show this weekend and is available now. While Bear doesn’t disclose actual pricing, Penny is offered on a monthly subscription, which includes the robot, setup and mapping of a restaurant and technical support.

Penny is among a wave of robots coming to restaurants in the near future: Flippy makes burgers and fries up chicken tenders, Dishcraft is still stealthily working on automating tasks in the kitchen, and there are entire establishments like Creator and Spyce built around robotic cooking systems.

Any discussion of automation always involves the loss of human jobs. John Ha, CEO of Bear Robotics, actually owned a restaurant and built Penny after noticing how hard servers work, often for little pay. By automating the expediting of food and bussing, Bear aims to free up humans to provide higher levels of customer service (ideally earning those humans higher tips).

Ha and Linda Pouliot, CEO of Dishcraft recently spoke at our recent Articulate Food Robotics conference about the challenges restaurants face, and how robotics can help. You can watch their session in full right here.

Articulate 2019: Robots in Restaurants

Here’s The Spoon’s 2019 Food Robotics Market Map

Today we head to San Francisco for The Spoon’s first-ever food-robotics event. ArticulAte kicks off at 9:05 a.m. sharp at the General Assembly venue in SF, and throughout the daylong event talk will be about all things robots, from the technology itself to business and regulatory issues surrounding it.

When you stop and look around the food industry, whether it’s new restaurants embracing automation or companies changing the way we get our groceries, it’s easy to see why the food robotics market is projected to be a $3.1 billion market by 2025.

But there’s no one way to make a robot, and so to give you a sense of who’s who in this space, and to celebrate the start of ArticulAte, The Spoon’s editors put together this market map of the food robotics landscape.

This is the first edition of this map, which we’ll improve and build upon as the market changes and grows. If you have any suggestions for other companies or see ones we missed you think should be in there, let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at tips@thespoon.tech.

Click on the map below to enlarge it.

The Food Robotics Market 2019:

Expect More Robots and Fewer Menus in the Restaurant of 2030

We all know technology is changing the restaurant, but what that looks like varies from business to business. Wired’s Joe Ray dug deep into this hotly debated topic at the Smart Kitchen Summit this week, speaking onstage with a trio of seasoned restaurant vets: Eric Rivera, a master chef who runs addo:incubator in Seattle, Jim Collins, CEO of commercial restaurant space Kitchen United, and Bear Robotics’ CEO, John Ha.

Having watched these four hash it out onstage, it’s clear there’s no simple answer to what kind of role tech should play or how big that role ought to be. That said, the group covered some key areas where this question will play out in the coming months and years:

The Robots Are Coming
Collins had a litany of items that are working for his company when it comes to tech and automation in the kitchen. Among them, he noted POS in the cloud, self-ordering tablets, facial recognition for customers when they order, and predictive kitchen display systems (KDS). He also talked about small changes that make restaurant kitchens more efficient, like major restaurant suppliers like Sysco shipping pre-cut veggies and in the process saving cooks time on the line.

Rivera, on the other hand, disagreed that something like pre-cut veggies was a benefit in the kitchen, noting that Sysco might be capable of sending pre-cut carrots, but as a chef, he himself has far superior skills with a knife. “I just want to find out how I can create something custom for [the guest]. It’s my job to collect all the breadcrumbs and make a meal out of it.” He did, however, agree that using tech to make the kitchen more efficient has a lot of value, particularly for “menial tasks” like taking out the trash.

Ha landed right in the middle on this debate. He may run a robotics company, but as someone who’s also a restaurant owner, he doesn’t believe we can automate the entire restaurant and expect to deliver the kind of experience guests want. “It’s such a dynamic environment and I don’t think a robot can do [everything] yet,” he said. The strength of AI and robotics will come into play in the front of house, he noted, where robots can do simple tasks like running food to tables.

The Delivery Debate Rages On
At one point, Ray steered the conversation towards the restaurant industry’s most hot-button issue right now, food delivery. Here, as elsewhere, panelists had fairly different viewpoints. Rivera, more a chef and artist than cook, pointed out that people come to his restaurant to see him at work, and that experience for the guest should be the number priority in an establishment like his. “[People aren’t] just coming to hang out,” he said of his clientele, who’s paying for things like tasting menus and watching those knife skills.

As someone who operates space for virtual restaurants, Collins was a little less skeptical around the role of delivery. “People can eat anywhere, and they can get good food anywhere, and that’s going to get more and more prevalant.” He added that “delivery is here, it’s radically changing the restaurant landscape.”

2030 Is Around the Corner
On that note, panelists had lots to say in terms of predictions for the restaurant of 2030. Collins believes we won’t see paper menus in 10 years’ time, and that ordering food will be so personal you won’t be shown anything you don’t like or can’t eat. If you hate broccoli, you won’t have to pretend to be allergic to it anymore, for example.

Rivera’s restaurant has already gotten rid of paper menus. Meanwhile, he relies a lot on social media to find out his guests preferences and glean inspiration for his next dish, which he aims to make as personal as possible for each individual guest. His version of the future is far less automated than that of Collins, but the level of personalization he aims for is nonetheless proof of technology’s reach over the whole restaurant experience.

Personally, I think the industry will sit somewhere in the middle, along the lines of Ha’s vision, with robots managing the repetitive stuff and humans focused on providing a personable and personal meal for the guest — whether that’s online or in-house. “I have to make sure they’re happy,” he said of his guests. “If I’m busy running food, I can’t do that.”

Bear Robotics’ Penny Clocks in at Pizza Hut in South Korea

Pizza Hut in South Korea today announced it is rolling out a new robotic employee at one of its Seoul restaurants. While the robot is called Dilly Plate there, Spoon readers might know it better as “Penny,” the self-driving dish busser robot from Bay Area startup Bear Robotics.

Dilly Plate/Penny is a squat, bowling pin-shaped robot with a flat surface that can shuttle food and empty plates around a restaurant (humans still need to load and unload it). Penny is being put to work in smaller restaurants in California such Kang Nam Tofu House in Milpitas and the chain restaurant Amici’s Pizza — but now it’s about to travel the world.

The Korean Herald reports that Dilly Plate’s engagement at the Seoul restaurant is a little more limited, with Pizza Hut “employing” the robot for just a two-week test run.

The Herald, however, credits Dilly Plate as being developed by Woowa Brothers Corp., not Bear Robotics. This could be because Woowa invested $2 million in Bear Robotics in April of this year, or it could just be an oversight (we sent a note to Bear Robotics for clarification). On Linkedin however, Bear Robotics Founder and CEO, John Ha proudly exclaimed “Bear Robotics in Pizza Hut in Seoul Korea!”

Regardless of who gets credit, the bigger story here is the relentless march of robots into our restaurant experience. They are becoming ubiquitous. Dilly Plate/Penny expedites front of house service, while robots like Flippy fry up burgers in the back (or chicken tenders at the ballpark). And in restaurants like Spyce Kitchen in Boston, robots do all the cooking.

But it’s not just here in the U.S. — robots are going global. In addition to Dilly Plate in Korea, Ekim has its pizza-making robot restaurant in Europe, Alibaba has its robots scurrying around Robot.he in Shanghai, and MontyCafe will make you a latte in Russia.

All this automation means that traditional human-powered labor in restaurants is going away, or at least transitioning into a different role. Robots like Penny were designed to let humans focus on more high-level tasks like customer interaction. However, what will that transformation look like once the majority of foodservice jobs are taken by the ‘bots (which might happen soon as they’re quickly getting more dexterous)?

Want to learn more? Make sure to get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit this October in Seattle, where you can catch Bear Robotics CEO John Ha speak about the future of food robots. See you there!

Bear Robotics Receives $2M Investment from Woowa Brothers

Bear Robotics, which makes the restaurant robot, “Penny,” announced today that it has received a $2 million investment from South Korean food tech company, Woowa Brothers. ZDNet reports that the money is part of Bear’s seed round and comes in the form of convertible bonds. Bear Robotics had previously raised $3.8 million.

Bear created Penny, the bowling pin-shaped restaurant robot runner, which can autonomously shuttle food from the kitchen out to tables and bring dirty dishes back for cleaning.

Woowa runs Baedal Minjok, South Korea’s largest food delivery app. The company has developed its own delivery robot and is reportedly looking to expand its AI and robotics efforts.

Bear Robotics PennyBot demo

Bear Robotics is co-founded and run by ex-Googler John Ha, who used Penny at his restaurant, Kang Nam Tofu House, in Milpitas, CA. Ha told us previously that Penny was borne out of seeing inefficiencies and difficulties that come along with human restaurant workers.

Penny was built for front of house operations (so no burger flipping) and its functionality is currentlypretty limited. While it can navigate between people and tables, it still requires humans to load its table-top surface, transfer the food onto the tables, and place dirty dishes on back onto it. Penny, however, doesn’t tire out, take breaks or call in sick.

Bear plans on renting out Penny’s to restaurants in a labor-as-a-service business model, and had signed up the Bay Area-based Amici’s Pizza chain as a customer.

Robots and food are a hot topic right now. In addition to Flippy, the burger cooking robot, Little Caesars’ has patented its own pizza making robot, Sony and Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up for food + robot-related research, and who knows — maybe even Amazon’s reported robot will have some culinary skill.

Restaurant Robots Starting to Fill in for Fatigued Staff

Often, when we talk about robots in the food industry, there is a measure of doom and gloom associated with it. I’m guilty of this as well, trying to balance excitement around innovation with the gravitas of millions of human jobs being wiped out.

But it’s also important to remember that robots are really frickin’ cool, and as a CNBC story points out, robots are needed in a country like Japan, which is facing a labor shortages due to a shrinking population.

Tetsuya Sawanobobori started up a restaurant upon completion of grad school. Long story short: long hours made it exhausting and he quit after a year. For sure, owning a restaurant is challenging, but Sawanobori talked to CNBC about the food service industry in Japan more generally, saying “Right now, especially in the food service industry, they have a serious lack of labor because people tend to avoid these kinds of jobs, doing daily, repetitive tasks.”

After exiting the restaurant business, Sawanobori got into robotics and is now the president of Connected Robotics. The company will start selling a robot this summer that can prepare Takoyaki, a Japanese street food consisting of batter balls and minced octopus. Sawanobori said that his robot will take the pressure off of cooking staff who won’t have to stand in front of a hot grill all day.

Takoyaki Robot Demo @Maker Faire Tokyo 2017

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story coming out of Japan. At our own Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year, Hirofumi Mori told our audience that his time performing repetitive, manual tasks at a crêpe shop inspired him to invent his own crêpe making robot.

Here in the U.S., the long hours of restaurant work are spurring our own robot adoption. Bear Robotics created “Penny,” a robot that looks like a bowling pin and shuttles food and dirty dishes around the restaurant. Bear CEO John Ha told us that he built Penny because “[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard.”

Sometimes, however, it seems like our new restaurant robots are working too hard. The most famous example of this is Miso Robotics’ Flippy, the burger flipping robot. Flippy was temporarily “retired” after its first official day on the job, but evidently that’s because it was too fast and the human co-workers couldn’t keep up.

Perhaps the possible Little Caeser’s pizza making robot will fare better.

With the restaurant robot genie out of the bottle, now it’s incumbent upon us a society to keep up, and avoid the doom and gloom.