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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Breadbot

Four Years After CES, Breadbot’s Robotic Breadmaker is Dishing Out Loaves at Grocery Stores

For robot startups seeking to make a splash at CES, there are a few options: holding a large press conference, making it weird and creepy, or serving cocktails. However, one method stands out above the rest for drawing in crowds: wafting the aroma of freshly baked bread (aka ‘the Subway method‘).

That’s what the folks behind the Wilkinson Baking Company did back in 2019, and the end result was their robot, the Breadbot, became a sensation that year at the world’s largest tech event. The smell of fresh bread pulled in journalists, tech nerds, and passersby like a tractor beam, garnering the type of press that big budget brands like Samsung would envy.

The small Eastern Washington-based company, co-founded by brothers Randall and Ron Wilkinson, has been working diligently to bring their product to market since then. Their goal was to transition from a working prototype to a production-ready machine suitable for grocery stores.

As part of the transition, the company also looked to find a new CEO. The Wilkinson brothers, both in their late sixties, wanted a CEO that could take the early-stage startup from a small LLC with a big idea to one that was mature enough to raise funding and bring the first product to market. Paul Rhynard, a former strategy consultant for McKinsey who also had experience raising capital as Chief Strategy Officer for Russell Investments, stepped in for Randall in April of last year and has since helped raise a seed round of $3 million last summer to fund the build-out of the company’s first production run of robots.

According to Rhynard, the new robot was built after testing the early prototype in a small grocery store in Eastern Washington.

“The machine that was at CES has been dramatically updated,” Rhynard told The Spoon. “One of the key differences is we rebuilt the brain of it. We have fully custom chipboards and a custom tech stack that run the machine. It was a huge update from a control and software standpoint of actually operating the machine.”

The company also made significant upgrades to the mechanical system, including adding four hoppers instead of one, which allows the Breadbot to make four varieties of bread throughout the day. The new Breadbot has significant updates to how it bakes and measures bread quality which, according to Rhynard, allows the machine to achieve more consistent results.

“So now we have a machine that we can scale up and start to place in grocers around the country,” said Rhynard.

And that’s what they’re starting to do. The company built 20 robots and so far has placed seven of them in different grocery chains which include Super One Foods, which is operating a Breadbot in a store in Northern Idaho and two more in Montana, and last month the company installed a Breadbot at Akins Fresh Market in eastern Washington. Three more Breadbots are set to be installed in a high-end Milwaukee, Wisconsin grocery retailer this month.

Rhynard says the company’s business model is a lease-plus-fee model, where grocers pay a monthly fee and a small amount per loaf baked. In return, Breadbot provides a turnkey solution, which includes providing bread mix, yeast, bread bags, and ongoing maintenance.

In return, grocers get what is essentially a bakery in a box that sits in full view of the customers on the store floor. The machine, which can produce up to 200 loaves a day, can produce bread throughout the day, with each loaf taking about 96 minutes from start to finish to make a loaf. In the stores it is currently operating, the Breadbot is making three varieties of bread: Nine grain, homestyle, and honey oat.

According to Rhynard, early on stores aligned the baking of the bread with the hours of the baking staff, which meant the Breadbot baked all the bread in the morning. Now, he says, some stores are going to start experimenting with baking bread during peak shopping hours, from four to seven at night, which will allow shoppers to buy hot, freshly made bread (and take in that fresh-baked bread smell).

Rhynard says that while grocery stores are their key target customer, they are also having talks with other potential types of customers, including cafeterias and the military. The company is also talking to potential customers in places where fresh-baked bread is difficult to come by, including Hawaii, which imports the vast majority of its bread from the US west coast.

To fund further growth, Rhynard said the company is now starting to look to raise a Series A. He knows it will be challenging given the current state of the market, but he’s optimistic the company’s current traction will attract new backers.

For now, though,the company is busy finding new customers looking to pull in shoppers with the smell of freshly baked robot bread.

Meet the Breadbot 2.0

Stop & Shop Adds BreadBot to its Store Floor for In-Store Bread Production

Stop & Shop announced today that it has partnered with the Wilkinson Baking Company to install a BreadBot at its Milford, Mass. store, in a move that further illustrates the ways in which food production is moving to the edge, and pushes the grocery chain deeper into automation.

BreadBot was the belle of the ball at this year’s CES. The automated mini-bakery captivated conference goers with its ability to mix, form, proof and bake loaves as you watch. The BreadBot can make up to 10 loaves per hour, 24 hours a day, and can make a variety of breads including white, wheat, whole wheat, sourdough and more. Stop & Shop will sell each loaf for $3.99.

Stop & Shop adding BreadBot is interesting for a few reasons. First, as mentioned before, BreadBot is part of a new wave of companies pushing food production to the edge. In this case, instead of bread being baked at a central facility and distributed around regions, the loaves are baked on-site inside the store.

This in-store production means that shoppers can pick up fresher bread, anytime of day, without the transportation and carbon footprint costs associated with traditional food production. We’ve seen this type of edge production in the coffee world as well with Bellwether, which makes an electric, ventless coffee roaster that allows grocers and cafes to create their own coffee roasts.

BreadBot is also a notable move for Stop & Shop because it’s the second bit of — pardon the jargon here — paradigm-changing automation the grocer has entered into. In January of this year, Stop & Shop announced that it would be deploying a Robomart in the Boston area. Robomarts are self-driving, pod-like vehicles that are essentially mobile mini-marts that roam the roads. They can be called or stopped by shoppers with the mobile app and open up for people to purchase items on the spot.

Though to our knowledge the Robomart pilot has yet to start running, both it and Breadbot point towards a more automated future for Stop & Shop. This is actually part of a larger automation push from the grocer’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, which is building out back-of-store robotic micro-fulfillment centers and deploying 500 in-store robots to scan for spills and other messes.

All of this automation, however, comes during a year where 30,000 Stop & Shop’s employees went on strike for 11 days over wage and benefits. Automation wasn’t reported as part of that discussion, but one assumes that when this current contract expires in three years, the number and type of human jobs will definitely be a point of negotiation. Especially as Stop & Shop said it plans to install BreadBots in more stores across the region.

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:

ArticulATE Q&A: BreadBot’s Human Boss on What Consumers Crave and Stores Want

Surprisingly, two of the biggest stories out of this years’ Consumer Electronics Show (CES) weren’t about TVs or drones, they were about… food.

On the one hand, you had Impossible impressing with its new meatless burger. And tucked away in the South Hall of the convention center, a bread-making robot was busy baking loaves and grabbing headlines.

BreadBot is basically a mini-bakery that can autonomously make just about any type of dough-based bread (white, wheat, sourdough, etc.). BreadBot makes 10 loaves of fresh bread an hour that consumers take home basically straight out of the oven.

After seeing the BreadBot in action, we knew we wanted them to participate at Articulate, our upcoming food robotics and automation conference in San Francisco. Randall Wilkinson, CEO of Wilkinson Baking Company, the company behind the BreadBot, will in fact be speaking at Articulate. Before he takes the stage, though here’s a recent Q&A The Spoon did with him that will give you a sneak peek at (some of) what he’ll be talking about at the show. (The Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.)

THE SPOON: What is the BreadBot go-to market strategy? How do you see it being deployed?
RANDALL WILKINSON: We see a number of different areas that the BreadBot would fit into. Clearly the greatest volume of bread in the country and worldwide is sold in grocery and retail, and that is our strategy. We have three of the top five grocers in the U.S. that will be starting pilot test projects in the second quarter of 2019. In those stores BreadBot will typically be an installation in the perimeter of the store to engage the customer to give them the fresh bread they are looking for. But foodservice delivers a lot of bread in all sorts of institutions (airlines, etc.), also the military. The U.S. Navy was one of our first customers, using it for service the sailors and soldiers.

What are the advantages of using Breadbot? What is your pitch?
The most important thing for a retailer is that they provide what the customer wants. And forever what the customer has wanted fresh bread at a reasonable cost. More recently, the awareness of the use of preservatives, artificial ingredients, etc., have been a concern and so the healthiness of bread has been important. That includes the concern over the sugar that is added to bread unnecessarily to compensate for the lack of freshness. And there are also concerns that the consumer has about supporting local production, and not congesting the highways with trucking things in and the environmental impact that those things have. So all of those are concerns that consumers have.

But at its core, [consumers] want a lot of taste for value. And so BreadBot first of all delivers on the consumer’s desire for fresh bread, and the engagement of being able to transparently see their bread being made, to take home the loaf of bread they saw come right out of the oven, to engage in the store with the aroma and the tactile senses of taking your own warm loaf home. The halo of that sort of thing extends to the whole store and so stores are very much interested in that.

All of those are good reasons for a store [get a BreadBot], but what makes BreadBot even more compelling for a retailer is that the production in the store eliminates the distribution costs of the light fluffy loaves from central factories to the thousands of store shelves, which turns out to be a very expensive thing to do for merchant bakers. And if you do that production at the store, you save a lot on the production and distribution of that bread and that either becomes dramatically higher profits for the store or a more competitive position for the store being able to sell a premium loaf of ultimately fresh bread at a lower cost than the competition.

The BreadBot was a hit at CES. It seems like, pardon the pun, theatricality is baked into the BreadBot, so you want this to be front of the house for people to see?
Yes, absolutely. All of the grocers we’re talking with are facing the challenge of engaging their shoppers. What reason is there to come to the store when they can order online? So the stores are very much interested in what they can do to delight and engage their shoppers.

You know, bread has been dying or stagnant category for retail for decades. And the casual observer would think that for us coming to CES with an announcement about bread would be just about as ho-hum and unremarkable and announcement as one can imagine. Instead, what we had was an announcement that went viral. We think that the reason is not that people have given up on bread, but what they had given up on was that center-aisle bread that had been baked how many days ago and has no real punch or life or pizzazz to it. Knowing that they now have the opportunity to go into their grocer and pick a loaf of bread literally out of the oven apparently was really exciting to millions of people.

When building the BreadBot, how do you combine the art and science of bread making, when designing a robot like this?
The reason that this has never been done before — and we have the patents and intellectual property surrounding it — is that it’s hard. Anybody who’s tried to make bread knows what that means, because you take someone and you give them a recipe and you take three cups of this two teaspoons of that, you mix it up put it in the pan and you take it out of the oven and whoa, this didn’t come out the way grandma made it. So it’s a nuanced production that depends on the age of yeast, conditions yeast was stored under, the ambient temperature, ambient humidity, all of these different things and more. It is typically not something that a machine has the sophistication to do. In fact, we had to mothball the project for years because the sensors, and the kinds of things we needed weren’t available yet, and it’s only recently that they’ve become available.

What we’re now able to do is to monitor on an ongoing basis all of these different parameters and then on the fly continually adjust to changing conditions and whatever is needed to bring about that optimal loaf of bread. It’s a self-adjusting intelligent production system.

What is your favorite fictional robot?
I’ll have to go with Wall-E. He was trying to save people from themselves. In our own way, we think bread ought to be healthier than what it is. We ought to be improving the quality of bread that people get, and helping people end up on the right side of healthy food.

Robots and automation are coming to the food industry, and Articulate is an entire day devoted to the technological and societal implications of these impending changes. Check out our stellar lineup of speakers, get your ticket, and join the conversation at Articualte, April 16 in San Francisco.

The BreadBot Is A Bread Factory for the Corner Grocery Store

Back in college, whenever I rode my bike through the Gasworks Park neighborhood in Seattle, I’d get hit with the smell of bread baking as I passed the local bread factory.

As you can imagine, it was wonderful.

And now, Wilkinson Baking Company hopes to bring the best smell in the world to your local grocery store with its new bread making robot, the Breadbot.

The BreadBot, which made its debut last night at CES Unveiled, is a standalone bread robot that can make up to ten loaves of fresh bread per hour from scratch. The machine is fully automated, so after the store employee adds in bread mix to the mix hopper, the BreadBot mixes, forms, proofs, bakes and cools the loaves of bread.

The bread robot was designed to make bread pretty much anytime during the day (or night), and could be scheduled to start the process up to three hours before a store opens. So when the early rising morning shift worker unlocks a store with a Breadbot inside, not only will the smell of fresh bread waft out, but over a dozen loaves will be waiting to be sold.

“It’s the first time bread can be made in a fully automated fashion, start to finish,” said Dr. Randall Wilkinson, the CEO of Wilkinson Baking Company.

Wilkinson envision the BreadBot going into grocery stores, where the machine can sit in the bread aisle and make bread in front of customers. The company’s been trialing the breadbot in local grocery stores in eastern Washington and the results are basically what you’d expect.

“You see the crowds here at CES, that’s what happens in the store,” said Wilkinson. “The consumer comes in, says ‘what’s this?’, and if you’re a retailer you say, ‘that’s what I want.'”

The BreadBot is part of a larger trend of automation and robotics enabling more localized creation of food types that are normally made in a big factory somewhere. Much like the Bellwether coffee roasting machine can push coffee roasting out to the local neighborhood coffee shop, the Breadbot allows the local grocery to offer fresh made bread made in-store.

“Imagine taking a $150 million bread factory, slicing it up into small pieces, move that out into the grocery store, and make it fresh there rather than in the factory,” said Wilkinson.

You can see my full interview with Dr. Wilkinson and see shots of the BreadBot in action in the video below (bread smell not included):

BreadBot, a bread making robot, debuts at CES