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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

CJ Foodville

LG’s CLoi ServeBot Picks Up Shifts at CJ Foodville in Seoul, South Korea

The restaurant CJ Foodville has a new server clocking in at its Cheiljemyunso location in Seoul, South Korea — though this one probably won’t accept tips. ZDNet writes that LG’s CLoi ServeBot is now autonomously shuttling food to tables and taking away empty dishes.

The CLoi ServeBot is self-driving robot with four vertically stacked trays that can navigate around tables and people (even playing music to give bystanders a heads up that its approaching). The ServeBot also features an LED screen that shows facial expressions.

It’s not a surprise that these ServeBots are working at CJ Foodville. The restaurant chain formed a partnership with LG last year to develop a number of different food robots. This past November, CJ Foodville installed an LG ChefBot at its Veeps buffet restaurant to cook up noodles.

The CLoi ServeBot is among a wave of server robots hitting restaurants in Asia and beyond. Bear Robotics just raised $32 million to scale up its Penny server robot. And PuduTech’s BellaBot, which sports LED feline features instead of human ones, showed off its server robot at CES this year.

All of them, however, do basically the same thing — cart plates around. That’s not to denigrate the engineering feat that a self-driving, dish-carrying robot is. It’s more that these robots are on a path from being a novelty to becoming a commodity. What features can a company add that will really set their robots apart from the competition?

Thankfully for those in the server robot space, there are plenty of restaurants in the world, so there’s plenty of potential robot business to go around.

LG to Develop Food Robots with CJ Foodville

Looks like LG is getting into the dedicated food robot space with the announcement today that it has formed a partnership with Korean restaurant chain, CJ Foodville. According to the AJU Business Daily, LG will build a Flippy-like robot that will begin testing this year.

LG’s move into more dedicated food robotics isn’t that surprising as the company already has its line of CLOi robots to help out the hospitality industry. Plus, all of its main rivals have their own food robot initiatives as well. Samsung has its robotic arm kitchen helper, Sony partnered with Carnegie-Mellon to develop food-related robots, and Panasonic is helping roboticize the Haidilao restaurant chain in China.

LG and CJ Foodville didn’t provide details about the program, a senior official at LG was quoted by the Korean Herald as saying “Robots will help with repetitive chores on behalf of human employees while the employees can provide better service and value for customers.”

This is a common refrain and one we hear whenever robots are introduced into the workforce whether it be behind the grill or roaming the grocery aisle. We talked a lot about the issues of robots and human labor at our recent ArticulATE automation summit this week. One of the issues panelists brought up is that quick service restaurants are facing a labor crunch, with one of the reasons being that a lot of people would prefer the flexibility of driving for Uber rather than working in a kitchen.

Automation in the food business is inevitable, so expect even more robot announcements from LG and other consumer electronics giants throughout this year.