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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

boba tea

Watch This Tour of The Yo-Kai Boba Robot at CES 2024

In what seems to be an annual occurrence at this point, this year Yo-Kai introduced a new robotic food kiosk and drew huge crowds at CES. This year, it was the company’s new boba robot, which features the ability to cook boba inside as well as prepare both hot and iced drinks.

The Spoon dropped by the Yo-Kai booth to get a video tour of the new boba-bot with company CEO Any Lin. When we broke the story of the Yo-Kai boba-bot a couple of weeks ago, we revealed that the company planned to open up a new sales channel by embracing small business owners through franchises. According to Lin, one of the reasons this new appliance helps make this possible is, unlike the ramen noodle bots that helped the company make a name for itself, the new boba bot only uses room-temperature, shelf-stable ingredients. That means they can ship ingredients to users without requiring large-scale cold chain logistics networks, a requirement which often necessitates bigger partners.

Whether you’re a small business interested in franchising a Yo-Kai boba machine or just a boba-loving nerd, you’ll want to check out the video below.

Tour of Yo-Kai's Boba Robot at CES 2024

Soon You Will Be Able to Buy Bubble Tea From a Robot and Pay With Your Face

If having a boba drink made by a robot wasn’t futuristic enough for you, soon you will be able to pay for that bubble tea with your face.

That’s because Bobacino, the maker of eponymous boba-making robots, announced today it has partnered up with PopID to let boba lovers pay for their drinks using facial recognition technology.

The way it works is customers can choose to opt-in and register using the PopID app. The app will scan the user’s face during registration, and from there, they can preorder and pay for the boba tea on the app. The customer can also choose to verify their ID once at the Bobacino kiosk to retrieve the drink. Once scanned, the drink is dispensed.

The PopID app integrated with Bobacino

If this all sounds like technology piled on technology, it is. That said, there’s no doubt biometrics as a form of payment has its advantages. Face-pay and other biometrics do add additional security beyond that of the traditional debit card PIN or even NFC-powered mobile payment, since, after all, it’s tough to fake someone’s face (or retina).

The big challenge for face-pay systems will be convincing some customers to use them. The rollout of face-pay in China raised privacy concerns and left some customers confused by the onboarding process. Because PopID’s system is opt-in, it may sidestep privacy concerns, but the two companies will still have work to do educating customers on the benefits of face-pay.

PopID’s move into automated beverage kiosks is a logical evolution given the company’s early traction integrating with payment kiosks as restaurants looked for ways to mitigate consumer fear about COVID. Last year, the company established its pay-by-face network in Southern California and had since taken it nationwide, riding the wave of interest over in contactless payment.

For Bobacino, partnering with PopID adds one more interesting tool in the toolbox for its operator partners when the company rolls out the machines. Last year, the company said it planned to roll out its machines in the second half of 2021, and they are currently raising funds on StartEngine to help fund the rollout. Bobacino is backed by Wavemaker Ventures, the same fund backing Miso, Piestro (who also partnered with PopID), and other food robotics startups.

You can see what the Bobacino looks like in action (face-pay not included) on the video below:

Bobacino Brand FINAL3