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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Robot U: Bear Robotics Enrolls at UNLV To Give Hospitality Students Hands-On Experience

Suppose you’re an aspiring college student looking to enter the hospitality industry and want an education to get set on the right path. In that case, the Hospitality College at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas has to rank near the top of the list.

And in 2022, a big part of preparing for that future has to be showing prospective hospitality students how new technology like automation will change the industry in the coming years. That’s why this week’s news that the college has begun working with Bear Robotics to give students at the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality experience working with robotics is no big surprise.

According to Bear’s Instagram account, the company sent two Servi robots to UNLV, where students will get experience deploying robotics within various hospitality and casino resort scenarios.

From the post:

We are proud to announce that we are partnering with @unlv to provide the next generation of gaming and hospitality professionals with hands-on experience in curating robotic automation programs! We’ve launched 2 Servi robots to run a variety of casino resort simulations and we are so excited to see creative approaches to operational challenges.

As I wrote yesterday, one of the fastest-growing job categories in the service-industry sector will be that of robotics management. In fact, I expect many in the service industry will embrace learning new skills to help them better understand automation technology as it changes their industry. And while I expect there to be growing tension between labor and management in industries where robotics will no doubt displace some workers, it’s important that both sides – management and employee – have a better understanding of how robotics will integrate into different roles within the hospitality industry.

For Bear, this announcement comes just weeks after the company showed up in Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. While Bear hasn’t struck any deals with one of the big casinos, I have to wonder if this partnership could bring it closer to landing in a casino down the street from UNLV.

Campus Foodservice Giant Chartwells Brings Ghost Kitchens to Colleges and Universities

Chartwells Higher Education, a foodservice management company, announced today it has launched its ghost kitchen program for college and university campuses. Chartwells has already piloted the program at a handful of schools, including Seattle University, SUNY Buffalo State College, the University of Utah, the University of Texas at Dallas, and San Jose State University.

Working with these schools, Chartwells developed several new meal concepts appropriate for delivery. For example, the company worked with Seattle University to open a ghost kitchen that tested 12 rotating entrees and desserts, which students could order via the existing Chartwells mobile app. Since most of Seattle University’s physical campus was closed during Fall semester 2020, the ghost kitchen pilot also served as a test for how colleges and universities can provide students with food even when dining halls are shuttered. Meals were available for both delivery and contactless pickup.

Chartwells said more than 24,000 orders were placed via its mobile app within the first month of the Seattle University test. Terry Conaty, Resident District Manager at Seattle University, said in a press release that the partnership was a “win-win” because it provided students with “lots of new menu options without having to add additional personnel resources or compromise our social distancing guidelines.”

Chartwells serves more than 300 campuses. The company says this ghost kitchen program will add to rather than replace existing dining options. The idea is to take advantage of any underutilized kitchen space on campuses that can be turned into ghost kitchens.

Historically, few would have called college and university campuses hotbeds for food tech innovation. That has slowly started to change over the last few years with the rise of apps like MealMe and Good Uncle (the latter of which was acquired by foodservice giant Aramark), the presence of delivery bots on campus, and Gen Z’s inherent familiarity with a more tech-driven eating experience. 

Nor is Chartwells the only company bringing ghost kitchens to campus. Last month, hospitality platform C3 joined forces with Graduate Hotels to put more ghost kitchens in college towns. 

The ghost kitchen format is an obvious fit for the college and university market. Students eat meals at all hours of the day and night, a schedule the traditional dining room’s hours don’t typically accommodate. And on the note of dining rooms, there’s no telling whether the traditional cafeteria-style setup will exist once classes shift back to the physical campus. Social distancing will have to be considered when it comes to those spaces, and some students may not feel safe eating in a dining room. Colleges and universities will have to provide alternative options, including pickup and delivery.

Schools, too, are brimming with underutilized kitchen space. For smaller campuses, a few would suffice when it comes to serving the entire student body. For larger schools, one can imagine a network of ghost kitchens placed strategically around the campus, each serving different sets of dormitories and apartment blocks. Meals ordered from campus ghost kitchens could even count as part of a student’s meal plan, which would be considerably cheaper than someone having to order from DoorDash every night.

When schools go back in session very much depends on each individual institution. Many are doing hybrid online-offline sessions right now. The many new food options for students seem geared towards both accommodating these fluctuating schedules and a bid by schools to keep pace with the changing times for foodservice. 

MealMe’s App That Compares Food Delivery Services Is Set to Expand Across College Campuses

MealMe, a company known for its app that aggregates and compares all the major restaurant delivery apps, is headed to the college market. It will soon launch at Syracuse University and is currently available at Indiana University. 

The MealMe app, which the company calls “search engine for food delivery,” compares the various delivery apps like Grubhub and Postmates as well as some smaller, more regional services. Upon opening the app, users can search for a restaurant or food type and compare pricing, delivery times, and other elements across the different services.

The app aims to streamline the process of comparing pricing, wait times, and other elements across the different delivery apps, and to connect users with the best deals in their area. In the last year, the MealMe team has also added a checkout function to their app, so that a user doesn’t actually have to leave the MealMe interface to order from, say Grubhub.

That said, MealMe is strictly an aggregator and does not charge people for use of the app, although users can add a “MealMe” tip to their order. The company has deals with the major third-party delivery providers.

The app originally launched in 2016 as a kind of social network for food. The idea struggled to gain much traction, and MealMe reinvented itself in March of 2020 right after the pandemic struck the U.S. and subsequently forced restaurants to shift to delivery and takeout orders. That same year, the company was accepted to the TechStars Atlanta accelerator program.

While the MealMe app is running across the country, the college market is an area the company’s founders are specifically targeting. It launched at George Washington University in January, and has since added Syracuse and Indiana Universities to its roster. “Although we are live, technically, we want to form relationships with individuals at every university and do a hard launch at every school so that people know about MealMe,” MealMe president Matthew Bouchner told Syracuse-centric news site The Daily Orange.

MealMe joins a number of companies developing different ways to bring more food delivery to the college and university sector. Recently, hospitality platform C3 announced a deal with Graduate Hotels to bring virtual food halls to many a college town across the U.S. Starship, maker of the autonomous six-wheeled rover bot, has been delivering food to students for a couple years now. Even legacy players are involved, the best example being Aramark and its 2019 acquisition of order-ahead app Good Uncle.

College campuses have long been an important market for the food delivery sector. Having a presence at a university means potential exposure to tens of thousands of people from the student body population. Additionally, the major delivery services already deliver to college campuses, so MealMe’s new audiences will most likely already be used to getting their meals via digital- and delivery-centric channels. 

Is the College Market Back in Session? Yo-Kai Express Installs Machines at U. of Arizona

Yo-Kai Express is heading off to college to feed hot ramen to hungry students. Over the weekend, company founder and CEO Andy Lin posted a picture on Linkedin of Yo-Kai’s newest vending machine installation at the University of Arizona.

In a follow up email sent to The Spoon, Yo-Kai COO Amanda Tsung said that the company now has 25 machines live. The hot ramen vending kiosks are located across corporate campuses, hotels, retail locations, airports and now, colleges. The University of Arizona will actually be getting two additional Yo-Kais once students and faculty return.

In addition to the University of Arizona, Yo-Kai has installations going in at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center Parnassus and the University of San Diego. Machines will accept student dining programs as a form a payment.

College campuses were becoming quite the hot spot for automated vending machines like Chowbotics and Blendid prior to the pandemic. Colleges are a good target location for unattended vending machines because they have a sizable population of students that don’t necessarily constrain their mealtimes to normal daylight hours. Vending machines can operate around the clock, and have the ability nowadays to serve up pretty complex food like ramen and grain bowls.

Yo-Kai could be a canary in the coalmine — a sign that the college campus market could be back in play for automated vending companies. With overall infection rates in the U.S. declining (knocks on wood) and vaccine efforts ramping up, students going back to college in the fall could mark a return to “normal” (whatever that will actually mean).

Relatedly, last month the San Francisco Airport gave the go-ahead to Cafe X to reopen its robot barista in the Terminal 3 location as foot traffic there ticked back up. Airports, too, could once again be a more thriving location for vending machines as travel increases.

For those vending startups that have successfully weathered the COVID-19 storm thus far, this should be welcome news that more opportunities lie ahead.

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.

I Used Kiwi’s Robot and it Felt Like the Future of College Food Delivery (Almost)

I live in a rural area, and a lot of the cool food delivery options aren’t available. So I was excited to see Kiwi’s rover bots scurrying around when I attended the TechCrunch Robotics and AI Sessions at UC Berkeley yesterday.

Having these robots on hand came in robot-handy during lunch when all the nearby eateries were choked with conference attendees and hungry students. Rather than waste my limited break standing in a long line, I downloaded the Kiwi mobile app to have a robot fetch me some grub while I did some work. In doing so I glimpsed into the bright future of college food delivery, and it is robots.

Well, almost.

Future college kids won’t know how lucky they’ll have it when campuses all operate fleets of robotic rovers making deliveries day and night. Robot delivery will be easy, fast, convenient and will free up much more time for beer pong studying.

Here’s how it worked.

I downloaded the Kiwi app and set up an account, which was pretty straightforward (though no Apple Pay option yet). After that, Kiwi’s marketplace brings up a list of nearby participating restaurants and alerted me to special offers. I placed two separate orders: a burrito from a local Mexican restaurant, and a boba tea from a different establishment.

On its face, robo-delivery isn’t cheap. There’s a $3.80 fee Kiwi tacks on which brought the total of my burrito to $16 and my boba to a little under $6. Twenty-two bucks for lunch ain’t nothin’, but if you know going into it that you are paying for the convenience of staying in one place and doing what you want (beer pong), while a robot runs across town, goes to two different restaurants and brings all your food back to you, the fee didn’t feel that bad.

I dropped a pin to mark the delivery location and placed my order. The Kiwi app did a good job of keeping me up to date on the robot’s progress:

Your robot is going to get your food!

Your robot has your food!

Your robot is ten minutes away!

Your robot is 3 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

That’s not a typo, this was when the experience broke down. The app told me the robot was basically at my feet… but there was no robot. The shortcomings of automated service were beginning to come into focus. Because it was stuck on 0 minutes away, there was no action I could take (re-center the map, have it make a ping! sound, etc.) to understand where it was and there was no apparent “Help Me” button I could push.

Thankfully, there was a human Kiwi operative nearby who was able to locate my robot roughly 25 yards away from where the app said it was. A company rep after the fact told me the issue was that there were too many Kiwis in one place (gathered for the conference), and mine got confused/stuck.

Which is too bad. Because the human helped me out, I didn’t really get the full experience, like seeing the live video feed broadcast by the robot, or use my phone to open it up.

Once open, I saw the only other bummer about my delivery (disclaimer: this is THE MOST first world problem in the world): My ice cold boba tea was place on top of the hot burrito. (Wanh-wanh. Please give to my GoFundMe). This is a bit of a nit pick, but robot delivery services are just starting out, they have to show that they can do a just-as-good-if-not-better-job than humans. That means getting restaurants to actually care about how they place food in the robot. There should be a cool side and a warm side.

Minor quibbles aside, it’s easy to see how robots will be a big hit on campuses. Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night. Robots can easily access dorms and labs much more easily than a human driver needing to find a parking spot and still walk the quad to make a delivery. And if you bundle up multiple orders from a single restaurant, the economics make more sense for students.

All these reasons help explain, as Kiwi said from the stage at our recent ArticulATE summit, why the company is quietly expanding from two colleges to fifteen schools including Purdue, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard. Of equal interest is the fact that students will be running the robot programs at these schools, taking care of maintenance and deployments. Kiwi didn’t elaborate on any student payment/financial relationship.

Kiwi isn’t the only rover robot company hip to the college scene. Starship is doing delivery at George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, and Robby is doing mobile commerce at the University of the Pacific.

Robot delivery isn’t perfect yet, but we’re in the first inning of whatever sport college kids will play in the future. Perhaps in ten year’s time my son will be writing me at our rural home to tell me about all the robot deliveries on his campus. He definitely won’t be playing beer pong, right?

Blendid’s Smoothie Robot Heads Off to the University of San Francisco

If you want to see the future of robots, go to college. I don’t mean become a student and take classes, I mean just literally head to a college campus as they are quickly becoming the go-to spot for companies to launch robots. Among the latest is Blendid’s smoothie-making robot, which is launching at the University of San Francisco next Monday.

Blendid (a.k.a. 6DBytes) came out of stealth just about a year ago to launch its autonomous smoothie making station at the Plug and Play Center in Sunnyvale, CA. As The San Francisco Chronicle reports, Blendid has partnered with food service operator Bon Appetit to bring the smooth(ie) operator to USF. Chef B, as the robot is called there, can make up to 36 smoothies and hour and will operate 24 hours a day at the Market Cafe on USF’s campus.

USF is just the latest college to test out robots on campus. Northern Arizona University (NAU), George Mason University (GMU), UC Berkeley, and University of the Pacific all now have little rover delivery bots running around, dropping off food and snacks on their campuses.

College campuses are popular destinations for robots because there is a large population centralized in one contained geographic area, and everyone there has to eat. A robot like Blendid works well in that type of high-traffic environment because smoothies are typically something people want to grab quickly, and the robot can just sit and churn them out literally around the clock.

Blendid offers a franchise option for food service companies like Bon Appetit, allowing them to install the $70,000 robot with a lower up-front cost. Given the work Sodexo is doing with Starship’s robots at NAU and GMU, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was exploring a similar arrangement.

One interesting bit about the rollout of USF’s new robot smoothie maker; Blendid put this tidbit on its FAQ page:

Q: Does Blendid eliminate any jobs for existing Bon Appétit workers?
A: No. Blendid kiosk is an added bonus. It brings another food option in the Market Cafe without adding more stress on existing staff. It won’t eliminate any jobs. We hope this will help alleviate load on staff and reduce wait lines during busy hours.

The role of robots in the workforce is an ongoing debate, and it looks like Blendid and Bon Appetit are trying to get ahead of any controversy. The impact of automation is a big issue and it’s one that we’ll be tackling at our upcoming ArticulATE conference on food robotics in San Francisco on April 16th. You should definitely get a ticket and join us for the discussion!

Starship Launches Robot Food Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

Starship Technologies announced that starting today lazy tech-savvy students at George Mason University can get food and drinks delivered via robot anywhere on campus.

A fleet of more than 25 robots will be deployed at launch at the Fairfax, VA school, which, the company says, is “the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services on a university campus.” The program was created in partnership with food facilities management company, Sodexo North America, and allows students and faculty to use the “Starship Deliveries” mobile app to order food and beverages from Blake Pizza, Starbucks and Dunkin’, with more campus eateries to be announced “in the coming weeks.” The new service works with the George Mason’s student meal plans, and charges $1.99 delivery fee to anywhere on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m..

Campuses have been on Starship’s radar screen for a while now. In April of last year the company said that it would be deploying 1,000 robots to corporate and academic campuses by the end of 2018 (Starship has since backed off that number and in an emailed statement said instead they’d been focusing on “new offerings to cater to the needs of our customers and partners including our new package delivery service, and spending more time working with local charities and organizations to ensure every member of the community is confident and comfortable using our technology.”). The company has raised $42.2 million in venture funding and counts Daimler Benz as an investor. Its robots have already been hard at work making deliveries on Intuit’s corporate campus, and roaming the town of Milton Keys, Britain, delivering packages and groceries.

When asked how Starship was making money through this George Mason deal– Was it just through the delivery fee? Was it through leasing the robots or a revenue split?– the company simply replied that it “uses different revenue models depending on location,” and that it “sometimes charge[s] a margin on top of the delivery fee.”

Colleges are becoming a hotbed of robot activity. Kiwi has been making robot deliveries to the University of California Berkeley, and expanded to Los Angeles with an eye towards delivering to UCLA. And more recently, Pepsi enlisted Robby robots for mobile snack commerce at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA.

George Mason and the University of the Pacific programs are a little different however. Starship robots will be making straight point-to-point deliveries of ordered meals and drinks from eateries to anywhere on the GM campus. For its robot run, Pepsi is basically using an autonomous roving mini-mart filled with snacks and drinks that you can pre-order and/or buy on the spot, and will only show up to designated areas on campus.

College and corporate campuses are actually a great place to run autonomous robot delivery pilots. You have a lot of people confined to one general location for an entire day (and they all need to eat). If it’s a private campus, robot companies can sidestep city regulations required to operate on public streets (since, you know, a robot might catch fire). Additionally, for something like a college campus, you can train an entire generation of consumers to use on-demand robot delivery, which they will then presumably still want as they head off into the real world.

We predicted that robots were going to be a big thing this year, and Starship is certainly kicking things off with a robotic bang. If you want to know more about where autonomous delivery is headed, join us at Articulate, our one-day food robot and automation conference on April 16 in San Francisco!