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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chowbotics

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.

Chowbotics Deploying 50 New Salad Making Robots to Hospitals Across the Country

Chowbotics announced today that it is deploying 50 new salad making robots to hospitals across the country. The company said that by the end of June, it will have a total of 70 Sally robots in hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, up from 16 at the beginning of February.

The coronavirus pandemic has thrust Chowbotics into a unique position, especially when it comes to feeding healthcare workers. Doctors and nurses are working around the clock and need access to fresh food, and Sally, which can make yogurt, grain and salad bowls, can serve a variety of meals for every daypart , 24 hours a day.

Additionally, open salad bars are being removed from cafeterias, restaurants and grocery stores out of concern that they can spread the coronavirus. So finding and selling a salad will get more complicated. Sally’s 22 ingredients are stored in airtight containers that are held within the robot, providing an added layer of protection from outside contamination.

It’s not a good thing that hospitals represent such a big opportunity for Chowbotics and other robotic vending services right now. The fact that hospitals are busy illustrate a sad and deadly fact about the COVID-19. From a strictly cold, business standpoint, Chowbotics’ ability to sell into the healthcare market right now comes at the same time when colleges, the company’s other big customer segment, have shut down, eliminating those lines of business.

With their ability to reduce human-to-human contact, and inability to actually get sick during this pandemic, robots are starting to play a larger role in our meal journey. Robots like Sally are making meals, while delivery robots like those from Starship and Refraction are bringing meals to our doorsteps. As the effect coronavirus has on social distancing continues to ripple long after the virus has receded, we will be interacting with more robots in our day-to-day lives.

Chowbotics Looks Beyond Robot Salads and Into the Grocery Store Game

Here at The Spoon, we are big fans of breakfast cereal. We’ve written stories about it, and even devoted an entire podcast to it. So when we learned that Chowbotics, maker of the Sally the salad making robot, was looking to expand into cereal, well we just had to give them a call to learn more.

For those not familiar, Chowbotics’ Sally robot is a self-contained robotic vending machine that serves up salads and other bowls of fresh food like grains and yogurts. There are currently more than 100 Sally robots installed in different hospitals, college campuses and other locations across the country.

Chowbotics CEO Rick Wilmer told me by phone today that his company is looking to broaden its appeal by partnering with CPG brands like cereal companies. Wilmer envisions a scenario where shoppers, faced with a wall of different cereals in a grocery store, can sample cereals via a Chowbotics robot (complete with cold milk!).

This is an interesting direction and could turn the idea of Chowbotics on its head. Right now, Chowbotics locates Sallys in high-traffic areas that lack fresh food options. For establishments like hospitals that operate 24 hours a day, Sally becomes the only fresh food choice available since cafeterias and shops close down. In contrast, supermarkets are filled with fresh food choices.

Sally, then, could become more of a branding tool for CPG companies (like those that make cereal) and less of a mini-restaurant. This, in turn, changes the economics of Sally, which is typically bought or leased by the location. Instead of generating revenue by selling bowls, cereal samples (or whatever) would be subsidized, presumably by the CPG company itself.

It’s basically automating the in-store sample system. Instead of a person with a tray of a new-flavored Oreos or manchego cheese, the robot could dispense them either straight as a sample or as part of a larger recipe of ingredients to showcase how that food could be used at home.

This versatility seems to be one area where Sally has an advantage over other fresh food vending services like Farmers Fridge and Fresh Bowl, both of which serve food in closed jars. Sally can hold up to 22 different ingredients that could be swapped out and reprogrammed to make a variety of different meals out of those ingredients — not just pre-packaged salads.

Having said all that, it’s important to note that right now these are just ambitions for Chowbotics. They still have a lot of work do to convince grocery retailers and big brands to hop on its robotic bandwagon. But it shows that Chowbotics is thinking way bigger than salads. And if they get big cereals on board, we at The Spoon are happy to test out a bowl or two.

Chowbotics Rolls Out New Sally 2.0 Robot Salad Maker

Chowbotics announced the release of its new Sally 2.0 robot salad making machine today. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the new machine features a larger tablet display and user interface, wheels for more mobility, and new breakfast menu as well as snack items like açai and yogurt bowls.

As part of today’s announcement, Salad Station, the southern fast casual restaurant chain that already has 11 Sallies in operation, said it would roll out 50 Salad Station-branded Sallies across seven states, though no timeline for that expansion was given.

2019 has been a pretty big year for Chowbotics. In January, the company announced a partnership with French vegetable company Bonduelle to bring Sally robots to Europe. In March Chowbotics shared sales data showing that hospitals were becoming a lucrative location for its robots, selling up to 120 salads a day (at the time Chowbotics said locations only need to sell 7 bowls a day to break even). In August Sally robots were sent off to a number of colleges across North America including Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; and the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. And then earlier this month, the company named Rick Wilmer as its new CEO as Founder Deepak Sekar moved to become president and head of technology, product and strategic partnerships for Chowbotics.

Sally is part of a larger cohort of food robotics companies that are quietly revolutionizing the concept of what vending machines can be. Briggo is putting its robot-barista in its first Whole Foods, and Yo-Kai Express is set to debut a new iteration of its machine that has two hot ramen dispensers so there isn’t as much wait time. These and other standalone food robots are perfect for busy locations like colleges and hospitals because they can serve fresh food around the clock without the need for staff.

As companies like Chowbotics continue to improve their robots, 2020 is shaping up to be a year where automated food literally levels up from 1.0 to 2.0.

Chowbotics Gets a New CEO as Founder Moves to President Role

Chowbotics, maker of Sally the salad making robot, announced yesterday that Rick Wilmer will be the company’s new CEO (hat tip to FE&S magazine). Founder and former CEO Deepak Sekar will assume the role of president and be responsible for technology, products and strategic partnerships.

Wilmer’s 30 plus year professional background is not in food, but rather in more hardcore technology. Previously he was CEO of Mojo Networks, which he led to an acquisition by Arista Networks, and prior to that he was CEO of Pliant, which he led to an acquisition by SanDisk for $327 million.

This is the second bit of CEO shuffling we’ve reported on this week here at The Spoon. On Tuesday, we revealed and Dave Zito was no longer CEO or with Miso Robotics, the startup behind Flippy, the burger making robot. Though we still don’t know the reasons behind Zito’s departure.

A former boss of mine was fond of saying that there are two types of CEOs: builders and scalers. Builders know how to get the product and company off the ground, and scalers know how to guide the company through its next levels of enterprise level growth.

With this chestnut in mind, Chowbotics’ CEO replacement is probably not the last bit of executive shuffling we’ll see in the near term at a food robotics company, and that’s a good thing. It shows that the industry is maturing beyond the building-a-startup stage and into the scaling-a-business stage.

Sekar stepping down comes following a year where Chowbotics’ Sally has been expanding into Europe, finding success in hospitals, and even going off to multiple colleges. But its early mover advantage in the standalone food robot space is quickly evaporating as a new wave of automated food kiosks come to market. Farmer’s Fridge and Fresh Bowl are fresh salad machines coming to market, while high-end vending machines like like Yo-Kai Express and Basil Street Express offer fully cooked meals like ramen and pizza. All of these player will be fighting for prime square footage to feed hungry students, airline passengers and office workers.

Chowbotics will need to scale in order to tip the scales in its favor.

Chowbotics is Sending Sally the Salad Making Robot Off to College(s)

Chowbotics is packing up Sally the salad making robot and sending it off to college. Well, many colleges actually, as the food robotics startup is set to announce next week a bigger push into the higher education market.

Chowbotics told us that this school year, students at multiple colleges and universities in the U.S. will be able to buy salads and breakfast bowls from Sally the robot. Those schools include: Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; Elmira College in Elmira, NY; the University of Memphis in Memphis, TN; and Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. These schools join Marshall University in Huntington, WV, which installed Sally in 2018.

Students can order from thousands of different custom and pre-made meals Sally can make from the 22 ingredients it stores. Sally will work with campus meal plans and accept credit cards for payment, but unlike the school cafeteria or on-campus restaurants, Sally can fit in the corner of a dorm lobby and feed people 24 hours a day.

Sally is part of two big trends we at The Spoon see accelerating. First it’s emblematic of the golden age of vending machines that we are entering. Advances in robotics and other technologies means that automated vending machines are no longer relegated to sodas and Snickers bars. Machines like Sally and Yo-Kai Express can whip up complex, high-end meals in just minutes and around the clock in high-traffic locations like colleges, hospitals and airports.

But Sally is also part of a bigger wave of robots heading off to college. In addition to the stationary Sally, delivery robots from Starship and Kiwi are rolling around more campuses delivering restaurant made meals to the student masses.

The bottom line is that eating at college is not only vastly different from when I went to school (long ago) — but pretty soon, it will also be a lot different from how people ate at college last year.

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:

Chowbotics Finds Robot-Made Salad Success in Hospitals

Hospitals, by and large, are places that you want to get in and out of quickly. But they are also places that are open 24 hours a day, with staff and visitors working or milling about throughout the night. This type of always-awake environment, it turns out, is the perfect place for Chowbotics‘ food robot, Sally.

Sally is a standalone salad (and bowl food) making robot. There are currently 50 Sally robots deployed around the world, and Chowbotics Founder and CEO, Deepak Sekar told me in a phone interview that the company has found particular success early on in hospitals.

To give you a sense of how Chowbotics defines success, Sekar said that locations that buy or lease a Sally need to sell 7 bowls a day to break even. At a Sally deployment in Las Vegas last month, Sekar reports that Sally was selling 120 bowls a day, and at a new Sally that came online last week at the North Oaks Health Care hospital in Lousiana, Sekar said they were selling 65 to 70 bowls a day.

One of the reasons for the success of Sally’s North Oaks locations is that the hospital’s cafeteria closes down at 2 p.m., so there is no place for staff or visitors to get fresh (as fresh as a hospital cafeteria is, anyway) food later in the afternoon or throughout the night. Sekar said that though there is a definite lunchtime peak in sales, there are sustained sales throughout the afternoon and evening, and another spike at midnight when shifts change, and people on the hunt for something to fresh to eat instead of vending machine food.

Sekar is so high on hospitals right now that they are an area of focus for the company. “Hospitals in general are doing really well, because they are places where people are hanging around at midnight or early in the morning,” said Sekar, “We find robots are a great fit.”

Because Sally is connected, Sekar can also see what types of salads people are creating. Though each Sally comes with standard recipes that you can order (e.g. Roasted Chicken Chopped Salad), Sekar said that 85 percent of bowls served were customized (Romaine lettuce and chicken were the most popular ingredients, edamame and ham the least).

Chowbotics isn’t stopping at salads, however. The company announced last year that it was expanding into bowl foods and is currently rolling out Indian, Mediterranean and Latin menus options in Sally. Cafeterias could become a thing of the past in places like hospitals as high-tech vending operations like Sally, or Cafe X’s robo-barista, and Basil St. Cafe’s hot pizza oven all come online to satisfy cravings any time of day or night.

If you’re curious about Sally, or have a question for Deepak, both robot and human will be live (and, err, plugged in) at our upcoming ArticulATE food robot summit coming up on April 16 in San Francisco! Get your tickets and get a glimpse of our automated future!

Chowbotics to Bring its Salad Making Robot to Europe

Chowbotics will be bringing a version of its salad making robot to Europe, courtesy of a new partnership with French vegetable company Bonduelle.

While here in the U.S. Chowbotics‘ ‘bot is named “Sally,” the forthcoming French version will go by “Cabaletta.” From the press release:

Like Sally the Robot, Cabaletta can operate 24/7 and will offer custom salads from any combination of 20 ingredients selected by Bonduelle, in addition to chef-crafted, pre-programmed recipes. Users can also fine-tune the calorie total by adding or subtracting ingredients, as well as view full nutritional details for each recipe. The robot’s proprietary technology reduces the risk of foodborne illness, as ingredients are kept sanitary and separate.

The agreement calls for Cabalettas to be deployed across mainland Europe, but the first robots will be installed in several offices and businesses around Lille, France. Though the partnership will kick off with salad robots, Chowbotics raised $11 million last year to fuel expansion into robot-made food bowls with ingredients like grains, yogurt and even poke, so perhaps we’ll see some of those put into circulation as well.

Robots are beginning to take hold around Europe. Based out of Belgium, Alberts is rolling out its Albert smoothie-making robot. Elsewhere in France, Ekim is building its tiny pizza-making robot restaurants. And over in Moscow, MontyCafe‘s robot arm is serving up coffee.

We’ll be sure to ask Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar about his company’s European strategy at our upcoming Articulate conference on April 16th in San Francisco. He’s among the many luminary speakers we’ll be chatting with about all things food robot and automation. You can be a part of the conversation too, get your ticket today!

Want a Tricolor Crepe? This Robot From Japan Can Make You One

This week, I had a chance to visit wine country to check out what the world of fine dining is thinking about things like food robots. I was down in Napa Valley at the reThink Food conference, where I spent three days talking to chefs, restaurateurs and food execs about how tech will change the culinary world.

Near the end of the conference, I caught up with some familiar faces (or maybe I should say buttons and batter dispensers) to see the latest capabilities of some of my favorite food robots.

The bot I was most excited to see was the Morirobo. The crepe making robot first debuted in the US at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit, so it was good to see Morirobo (and its inventor and namesake, Hirofumi Mori) back stateside to show off its new multicolor crepe making capability.

As is almost always the case with robots, it’s better to show than tell, so here’s a video of the Morirobo making a large tri-colored crepe:

Morirobo shows off crepe robot making tricolor crepes

World-changing? Maybe not, but I have to say a gigantic multicolored crepe is a crowd pleaser. I can already see the lines forming at fairs and festivals across the US (or even in hotel lobbies as the cool new replacement for that breakfast bar waffle maker) for giant multicolored crepes.

Then there was the latest version of Sally the Salad Robot from Chowbotics. I caught a video of Carnegie Mellon professor of robotics (and inventor of crazy snake monster robots) Howie Choset ordering a salad from Sally:

Sally the salad robot @ reThink Food

After years of development, Sally finally started selling to customers in January of this year. Since its release, Sally has updated software that enables it to make non-salad food like grain bowls, yogurt bowls and more. That’s good news for Sally owners since more meals per day means recouping the foodbot’s $30 thousand price tag much faster.

Since going on sale, there are currently about 40 or so Sallies in the wild. According to a company representative, while corporate cafeterias are the most common location for a Sally, universities (two at Stanford) and airports (Buffalo airport in NY) are other places you can now get a salad (or yogurt bowl) from Sally.

Chowbotics Snaps up $11M to go Big on Robot Food Bowls

Chowbotics, the startup behind Sally, the salad making robot, announced yesterday that it has raised $11 million in a “Series A-1.” This new round follows the $5 million Series A the company raised in March of last year, and brings the total amount raised to $17.3 million.

TechCrunch reports that the company will be using the new money to expand beyond salads and into bowls, writing that Chowbotics is looking into “grain bowls, breakfast bowls, poke bowls, açai bowls and yogurt bowls,” among others.

You can see Sally in action in this video we shot of it making a salad last year:

With Sally, Chowbotics is at the forefront of reinventing the vending machine. Using a combination of robotics, AI and fresh ingredients, Chowbotics is evolving fast, automated food choices in building lobbies and other high volume public spaces beyond Snickers bars and Cheetos.

So we’re curious as to how this bowl building will take shape. Will it be a smaller, vending machine-sized robot like Sally, or the smoothie-making robot, Albert? Or will the cooking element necessitate it being bigger, like the kiosk-sized robots by 6d Bytes and Briggo? Or will it be a full-on restaurant, like Spyce Kitchen, which just opened recently and features its own bowl-based menu?

We reached out to Chowbotics to find out more, and will update this post with any reply. But the company definitely cannot rest on its kale roots and will need to show the flexibility and scalability of its technology in order to stay competitive.

Automation is a hot area right now and food robots in particular. Caliburger recently reinstated Flippy the burger cooking robot, Connected Robotics in Japan is rolling out its Takoyaki robot this summer, Ekim raised 2.2 million euros to build a pizza robot restaurant, Sony has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to build food robots, and during our recent Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe, I drank a fantastic cocktail served up by Foodpairing’s robot bartender.

If you want to know more about the future of food robots and artificial intelligence, subscribe to our podcast, The Automat, which hosts weekly discussions with those people building the future of robotic food today.

Watch Sally The Robot Make My Salad

Yesterday at the FOODIT event in Mountain View, I had salad for lunch.

Why I am telling you this? Because unlike any salad I’ve had before, this one was custom built for me by a robot named Sally.

We’ve written about Sally before at the Spoon, but this is the first time I got to taste a Sally-crafted salad.  On hand to give me a tour and tell us about Sally was Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar.

You can watch the video of Sally making a salad above, but here are a few takeaways from my conversation with Sekar and Chef Kelly Olazar:

  • Sally allows the user to choose “chef salad” mixes or build their own using the twenty types of ingredients.  Users can also use an app to do greater customization of the salad.
  • The list price on a Sally is $30 thousand, but the company does offer discounts
  • Sally herself weighs in at 400 pounds
  • The product is targeted towards office cafeterias, universities and restaurants
  • Sally can make about 40-50 salads before she has to be refilled. Yesterday at the FOODIT event, they had to once and served 90 salads. Chef Kelly Olazar told me people were coming back for second salads later in the day (cheapsters).

Overall, I like the salad and was impressed with how quick Sally worked. While the robot’s price seems high, I figured that if could replace a worker and generate $500-$1000 a day in a busy cafeteria, the product makes sense financially in a high-volume food service location.