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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CaliBurger

Watch Flippy Make Fries at CaliBurger’s Newest Location in Washington State

Today CaliBurger announced they’d opened the first restaurant since the onset of the pandemic. The latest addition to the burger chain is in Shoreline, Washington, and to mark the importance of the occasion, the company brought a friend: Flippy the fry robot.

CaliBurger’s use of Flippy at the north Seattle location is the first deployment of Miso Robotics’ fast food robot in the Seattle market. According to the release, Flippy will start at the fry station, but the restaurant expects its new employee to be somewhat versatile:

While the Shoreline store will use Flippy for french-fry cooking initially, Flippy can also cook chicken breasts and tenders, onion rings, sweet potato waffle fries in addition to fries. The system’s image recognition technology allows for real-time quality control to prevent any food quality errors during the cooking process and before any food items reach customers.

The new CaliBurger location is also the first time the chain has deployed PopID’s pay-by-face technology. PopID, which launched its pay-by-face network in southern California last year, allows customers to create an account that ties a debit card to their biometric ID (i.e., their face). The customer can also pull up information such as favorites and loyalty points once ID’d at the point of sale.

As for Flippy, CaliBurger CEO Jeffrey Kalt had the now-standard company line we hear when a new food robot is installed in a new location: the deployment of Flippy will allow the humans to focus on customer-facing jobs and, as a result, will improve the overall guest experience.

“The deployment of Flippy enables CaliBurger to retrain our staff to spend more time tending to customer needs to better improve the guest experience, while supervising the robotic system that’s handling the cooking,” said Kalt. “This results in happier workers, more satisfied customers, and a more profitable business.”

You can watch the video of Flippy in action below:

Watch Flippy the robot make fries at Caliburger in Shoreline, Washington

CaliBurger Adds a Second Flippy Robot to Make French Fries

Fast food chain CaliBurger announced its new “CaliBurger 2.0” restaurant yesterday, which includes new high-tech features like pay-with-your-face kiosks and the addition of a second Flippy cooking robot.

CaliBurger made headlines last year when it first used Flippy to autonomously grill up burgers at its Pasadena, CA location. The burger chain made even more headlines when it took Flippy offline after just one day on the job because it was too fast for its human co-workers. After some re-tooling Flippy went back on the line a couple months later and has been cooking ever since.

CaliBurger and Miso Robotics, which makes Flippy, are both companies in the CaliGroup portfolio.

While Flippy started its robotic life using computer vision and thermal imaging to make burgers, it has also been taught to work the deep fryer. Since last summer Flippy has been frying up chicken tenders and tater tots at Dodger Stadium, and the robot will bring those skills to make french fries at the new CaliBurger 2.0 locations.

As noted, CaliBurger 2.0 locations will also feature the pay-by-face kiosks. This automated payment system records your face (with your permission), and can keep an order history to immediately surface favorites on the touchscreen interface. We used it last year and it worked just fine.

While robots and interactive kiosks were pretty novel last year, they are quickly becoming more commonplace in fast food restaurants. Just this week, Picnic unveiled its pizza making robot, and Creator‘s burger robot is still hard at work. The global kiosk market is expected to hit $30.8 billion thanks to implementations at QSRs like Dunkin, Shake Shack and Wendy’s.

CaliBurger 2.0 will open its first location this month in Fort Meyers, FL, followed by stores in Seattle, WA, Tysons, VA and Pasadena.

Video: A Trip to Caliburger to See Flippy the Robot and Pay with my Face

If you read our newsletter (and you should!), you know that I’m in Los Angeles this week. One of the reasons I was so excited to come down here was to finally meet Flippy, the burger flipping robot.

Flippy is currently online at Caliburger in Pasadena, where it cooks up anywhere between 500 and 1,000 burgers a day, according to a Cali Group representative. Behind a glass wall, the robotic arms swings and swivels to turn meat over, change spatulas for raw and cooked meat, and remove burgers from the heat to set them aside for dressing.

Its movements are faster than I expected, especially when dropping off finished burgers. It’s a quick, precise motion, but almost jerky in its precision.

What was especially interesting was watching it interact with the human co-workers, who placed raw patties to the grill, added cheese and dressed each burger. Humans also do a temperature check on each of Flippy’s cooked burgers to ensure food safety. People seem to have figured out the dance they need to do with Flippy and have a rhythm. Flippy even fails sometimes, pushing a burger instead of flipping it, but its human coworkers quickly correct any problems.

For the humans’ safety, there is a taped off area around Flippy. If a someone enters that space, Flippy immediately shuts down until the person walk back outside its designated area.

On a screen above the work area, visitors can see what Flippy “sees” on the grill. It’s a not-quite-Terminator-like view of various burgers, each with a countdown as they near readiness.

Since I was there, I decided to order up some lunch and try out Caliburger’s automated kiosk, which lets you pay with your face. The kiosk and payment system is actually part of PopIQ, which is also owned by Cali Group. PopIQ is aiming to become a universal loyalty program used by different restaurants or gyms or any place else with frequent repeat customers. The idea is that your face becomes your payment system and loyalty card when you shop at participating locations.

The Caliburger rep told me that about 65 percent of Caliburger customers use the automated kiosk to order pay, but most are still wary of storing their face data and credit card information with the company. I too, was a little wary, as Caliburger has locations around the world and I wasn’t given a sufficient explanation as to where my data is stored and what governments of different countries can access. Given recent news about data breaches, this is definitely an issue the company should explicitly address.

Having said that, I was here for a story, so I went through the sign up process and scanned my face into the Caliburger system. The kiosk was straightforward with a clean UI and I found it easy to use. In less than a minute I was up and running. Once in the system I went through the touchscreen menu to order my burger and customize it. When it came time to pay it let me know it was scanning my face and that was it, my order went off to Flippy for preparation.

The payment process, while fast and convenient, could use a little more guidance. Once you pay, there is no clear direction on where to go or what to do next. The order just goes into the ether and you aren’t sure where your food will arrive or where to get your drink. You can sense why some people prefer to stick with people when paying.

Foodservice robots like Flippy are quickly moving from novelty to mainstream. Flippy is expanding its skillset and becoming a fry cook, Penny shuttles food and empty dishes around a restaurant, Ekim’s PAZZI will make you a pizza, and Cafe X’s robot will wave to you after it makes your latté.

And lucky for me, pretty soon I won’t have to travel for my next Flippy-made burger. Caliburger is adding Flippy to its new Seattle (where I’m based) location later this year. Until Flippy comes to your town, you can enjoy these videos of it in action.

The Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

Here at The Spoon, we spend most days writing and thinking about those who are transforming what we eat. No matter whether a startup, big company, inventor, or a cook working on new approaches in the kitchen, we love learning the stories of people changing the future of food. So much so, in fact, that we wanted to share those companies that most excite us with our readers.

And so here it is, The Spoon’s Food Tech 25: Twenty Five Companies Changing the Way We Eat

What exactly is the Food Tech 25? In short, it’s our list of the twenty five companies we think are doing the most interesting things changing the way we create, buy, store, cook and think about food.

As with any list, there are bound to be a few questions about how we got here and why we chose the companies we did. Here are some answers:

How did we create this list?

The editors of the Spoon — myself, Chris Albrecht, Catherine Lamb and Jenn Marston — got together in a room, poured some kombucha (ed note: except for Chris), and listed all the companies we thought were doing interesting and important work in changing food and cooking. From there, we had numerous calls, face-to-face meetings and more glasses of kombucha until we narrowed the list down to those you see here.

Is this an annual list?

No, this is a list of the companies we think are the most interesting people and companies right now, in mid-2018. Things could definitely look different six months from now.

Is this list in a particular order or are the companies ranked?

No, the list is in no particular order and we did not rank the 25 companies.

Why isn’t company X on the list?

If this was your list, company X or Y would most likely be on the list (and that’s ok with us). But this is the Spoon’s list and we’re sticking to it (for now – see above).

And of course, making this list wasn’t easy. There are lots of companies doing interesting things in this space. If we had enough room to create runners-up or honorable mentions, we would. But we don’t (and you don’t have enough time to read a list like that).

So, without further ado, here is the Spoon’s Food Tech 25. If you’re the type that likes your lists all on one page, click here.


EMBER
Ember bills itself as “the world’s first temperature control mug,” which basically means you can dictate a specific temperature for your brew via the corresponding app and keep your coffee (or tea or whatever) hot for as long as you need to. The significance here isn’t so much about coffee as it is about where else we could implement the technology and relatively simple concept powering the Ember mug. The company currently has patents out on other kinds of heated or cooled dishware, and Ember has cited baby bottles and medicine as two areas in which it might apply its technology. And yes, it allows you to finally stop microwaving all that leftover morning coffee.

 


INSTANT POT
The Instant Pot is not the highest-tech gadget around, but its affordability, versatility, and speed have made this new take on the pressure cooker a countertop cooking phenomenon. It also has a large and fanatical community, where enthusiastic users share and reshare their favorite Instant Pot recipes across Facebook groups and online forums. By becoming the first new breakout appliance category of the millennial generation, the Instant Pot has achieved that highly desirable (and rare) position of having its brand synonymous with the name of the category; people don’t go looking for pressure cookers, they go looking for an Instant Pot.

 


DELIVEROO
We chose Deliveroo out of the myriad of food delivery services because of their Editions project, which uses customer data to curate restaurant hubs in areas which have unfulfilled demands for certain chain establishments or cuisine types. This model allows food establishments to set up locations with zero start-up costs, and also gives customers in more restaurant-dry areas a wide variety of delivery food options. Essentially, it’s cloud kitchens meets a food hall, with some heavy analysis to help determine which restaurants or cuisines customers want, and where. These “Rooboxes” (hubs of shipping containers in which the food is prepared) show that Deliveroo is a pioneer in the dark kitchen space, and are doing serious work to shake up the food delivery market.

 

AMAZON GO
There are any number of ways that Amazon could have been included in this list, but its Amazon Go stores are what we think will be the real game changer. The cashierless corner store uses a high-tech combination of cameras and computing power, allowing you to walk in grab what you want — and leave. That’s it. At its first location in Seattle, we were struck by how seamless the experience was. As the locations broaden, this type of quick convenience has the potential to change the way we shop for snacks, (some) groceries and even prepared meal kits.

 


INGEST.AI
Restaurants have more pieces of software to deal with than ever. In addition to all the delivery platforms they are now plugged into, there have to deal with payments systems, HR software, and inventory management software. And right now, none of those applications talk to each other. Created by a former IBM Watson engineer, Ingest.ai promises to extract and connect the data from ALL of those disparate software pieces and tie them together to give restaurant owners a holistic, data-powered view of their business. It also helps them have more precise control over their business and automate tasks like food ordering and staff scheduling.

Want to meet the innovators from the FoodTech 25? Make sure to connect with them at North America’s leading foodtech summit, SKS 2019, on Oct 7-8th in Seattle.

NEXT

Flippy Gets Back to Work at Caliburger

After a brief hiatus, Flippy, Miso Robotics’ burger-grilling robot is back online and back at work at the Pasadena Caliburger location.

Flippy famously debuted at Caliburger back in March — only to be “fired” after just one day. Earlier reporting suggested that the problem was the human staffers who couldn’t keep up with the high-tech cook. While human interaction was an issue, a story in USA Today states that there were technical problems as well, with Flippy having trouble keeping up with demand and not putting burgers in the proper trays for co-workers.

Evidently, those glitches have been addressed and Flippy has been quietly back in action since the start of this month, doing a one-hour lunch shift every day, flipping roughly 300 burgers.

Flippy is a tip of the spear of sorts, leading the way for the restaurant robot revolution. In addition to Flippy, Zume has a pizza-making robot, Cafe X has a robot barista, and Bear Robotics has Penny to shuttle food and dirty dishes back and forth. Looking ahead, Sony recently teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to work on food robots for the future as well.

Despite its rocky start, Miso Robotics said that fifty more Flippys will be launched by 2019. Additionally, earlier this year Miso Robotics raised a $10 million Series B round, which included participation from hospitality company Levy. The two companies are working on using Flippy in commercial kitchens at large venues such as sports arenas.

If you love robots, be sure to subscribe to our podcast Automat on The Spoon Feed, which features discussions with those people building our food robot future, today.

Flippy Clocks in at CaliBurger, Miso Robotics Makes Expansion Moves

Miso Robotics announced yesterday that Flippy, the burger cooking robot, is officially going to work at CaliBurger’s Pasadena location. Additionally, Miso announced that its robot kitchen assistants will soon be coming to sports and entertainment venues, thanks to the company’s partnership with sports and entertainment hospitality company Levy.

According to the press announcement, Flippy will start out working the lunch shift at CaliBurger. Using a combination of thermal imaging, visual recognition and artificial intelligence, Flippy can tell when a raw burger is ready to be flipped, when it’s cooked to the proper temperature, and when to take it off the grill.

Flippy uses two different spatulas — one for raw and one for cooked meat — and can also scrape the grill. Humans aren’t completely cut out of the cooking process (for now), as they are still needed to apply cheese and other toppings. Though, as Flippy gets smarter, its capabilities will expand.

According to TechCrunch, a Flippy robot will set a restaurant back $60,000 plus an annual 20 percent recurring fee for learning and maintenance. That’s pretty pricey for an employee that only works the lunch shift, but Miso says companies can earn that back through decreased wait times and less food waste. Plus, robots can create a more consistent product, won’t call in sick, need a break, or walk off mid-shift in a huff.

Flippy and its robotic brethren will also be expanding beyond CaliBurger. Through its partnership with Levy, Miso’s robotic kitchen assistants will be headed to convention centers and sporting events, with the first appearance coming later this year to an unnamed Levy venue. This expansion follows Levy’s participation in Miso’s $10 million fundraise last month.

Flippy officially going to work means we’re one step beyond “the robots are coming” and more towards “the robots are here!” In fact, the restaurant industry believes robots will become mainstream by 2025.

It addition to Flippy, CaliBurger has also rolled out self-ordering kiosks that let you pay with your face, reducing the need for staff in the front of the house. Elsewhere, companies like Eatsa and Chowbotics are helping automate even more dining experiences.

CaliBurger to Launch Payments using Facial Recognition

CaliBurger announced today that starting on January 30 customers at its Pasadena location will be able to pay for their meals with a smile. The quick service restaurant is expanding the use of facial recognition at that location from just unlocking loyalty accounts to actually paying for meals.

CaliBurger launched the FacePay pilot program towards the end of last year that allowed customers to use facial recognition kiosks to access meal histories, preferences and other bits of information stored in their loyalty accounts. According to a statement from CEO of Cali Group, John Miller, reaction was so positive to that program they fast-tracked payment capabilities.

It appears as though CaliBurger is taking security around facial recognition seriously. During the pilot, customers will be able to initiate payment for their meal with a glance at the camera, but they’ll still need to enter the three digit CVV from their credit card to finalize the transaction. The company says that after people get comfortable with facial recognition payments they will phase out the need for the CVV.

Assuming this new payment pilot goes well, look for CaliBurger to expand how it incorporates facial recognition kiosks into its restaurants. Bite, which provides facial recognition tablets for restaurants, has shown that using a person’s face to unlock their account allows menus to become more dynamic. They can be rearranged on the fly to frontload and upsell items based on a customer’s personal preferences.

In the meantime, those wanting a peek at the future of quick service restaurants can hit up the Pasadena CaliBurger at the end of this month. They can smile at the camera to pay for their meal and wave to Flippy the robot who is flipping their burgers.

Quick-Service Restaurants Are Quickly Turning to Facial Recognition

Once upon a time in the not so distant past, most considered ordering food via facial recognition either a gimmick that was either unrealistic or just creepy.

Times have changed, thanks in large part to technologies like the iPhone X, which you can unlock using your own mug. And while we’re some distance from facial recognition becoming a facet of everyday dining everywhere, there’s a growing number of restaurants now offering customers this option when it comes to ordering.

CaliBurger was the latest to join that group this week when it launched self-ordering kiosks at its Pasadena, California location. If customers like this move, the company said it plans to roll out kiosks to all 40 of its locations in the future.

It’s the quick-service restaurants like CaliBurger where facial-recognition ordering appears to be making the biggest impact. It’s not hard to understand why. Quick service got its name for a reason, and facial recognition can certainly speed up the order and payment process. 

Just look at UFood Grill, who earlier this year debuted self-order kiosks in its Owings Mills, Maryland location. According to the restaurant, customers using the kiosks can order and pay in less than 10 seconds. Kiosks use facial recognition to remember customers’ orders for future visits; they’re powered by technology from Michigan-based Nextep. 

Addressing the need for restaurants to increase speed, Nextep president Tommy Woycik recently said, “Imagine visiting your local drive-thru and ordering your favorite customized coffee drink with a quick glance at the camera.” Likewise, if you’re in China, you can pay for your next KFC order just by smiling at the camera.

While it’s not a quick-service restaurant, Dallas’ Malibu Poke opened this past November with the option to order via facial recognition already in place. Talking to the Dallas Observer, owner John Alexis referenced the new iPhone, saying that thanks to the phone, ordering via facial recognition is no longer gimmicky. He was also quick to point out that the system Malibu Poke uses actually prevents him or anyone on staff from accessing the scanned faces from customers: “I literally would not know how to find [a customer’s face] if I wanted to. If you want extra cucumbers, that’s between you and the machine.”

Data—who sees it, where it’s stored—is definitely one of the challenges that has to be addressed in order for facial recognition to become a more widely used way of ordering. (See this year’s lawsuit against Lettuce Entertain You, who owns the Wow Bao quick-service chains.) Just because, for example, Malibu Poke can’t access your facial scan doesn’t mean some ill-humored cyber criminal can’t.

Data will continue to be both a question and a challenge moving forward, but so far, it doesn’t appear to be raising too many concerns for businesses. Restaurants themselves are more likely to be occupied by things like increasing the speed of these kiosks and dealing with some of the reported glitches around lighting and camera angle—basically things that will impact the business’s bottom line today.

CaliBurger Launches Facial Recognition Pilot for Fast Ordering

The Cali Group announced today that it has launched a facial recognition ordering kiosk pilot program at its Pasadena CaliBurger restaurant. The move is another step towards full automation for the quick-service restaurant chain, which debuted Flippy, the burger flipping robot, at that same location earlier this year.

The facial recognition kiosk, which uses NEC’s NeoFace facial recognition software, will identify registered customers and pull up their loyalty accounts without requiring them to swipe a card. From there, customers can place orders or bring up their meal histories for faster re-ordering. According to the Cali Group, if customers like the new system, similar kiosks will be rolled out to CaliBurger’s 40 locations across the global next year.

Here’s a video explainer from CaliBurger:

As of now, the kiosk won’t allow you to pay with your face, a feature that Cali Group says will also be rolled out in 2018.

In a recent survey from Oracle presented at the Global Gaming Expo in October, nearly half of consumers polled said using facial recognition and 3D imaging would make their restaurant experience better, as they liked the idea of not having to present a loyalty card. In that same research, 46 percent of restaurant operators said facial recognition would be mainstream by 2025.

While showing your mug may be more convenient, security is an immediate concern that comes to mind with facial recognition. If 5 million credit card numbers can be stolen from Sonic Drive-In customers, what happens if hackers can access your face?

Today’s news no doubt should concern CaliBurger restaurant employees and, more broadly, quick-service restaurant employees everywhere. As noted, CaliBurger has already been trying out the Flippy burger ‘bot in the kitchen (and food companies overall helped drive record orders of robots this year). McDonald’s and Wendy’s have both rolled out self-service kiosks, and Apple is training a generation of iPhone X users to trust facial recognition.

When asked how tech like the kiosks will impact existing employees and future headcount, a CaliBurger spokesperson replied via email with the following statement. “If customers are pleased with the new ordering experience, we plan to roll out the kiosks to CaliBurger’s locations across the globe. Our goal is to innovate the customer experience by using this technology to help and work alongside kitchen staff to reduce hazardous and tedious tasks and increase productivity.”

Automation however, doesn’t automatically translate into success, as Eatsa recently discovered. It seems though, like CaliBurger is taking a methodical approach, and 2018 is right around the corner, so we should see pretty quickly how well people like coming face-to-face with facial recognition.

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