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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Creator

‘It’s Tough for Robotic Companies’: VCs Talk About the Funding Landscape for Food Automation

It’s not a secret that the tech industry is going through a challenging time when it comes to venture capital. The food tech sector is no exception, and, according to Vebu Labs managing partner Buck Jordan, food robotics has been hit especially hard.

“It’s tough for robotic companies,” said Jordan during the venture capital landscape session at this week’s Food Robotics Outlook 2023 event from The Spoon. According to Jordan, the overarching reason is that food robotics startups have an especially long journey to get to that first dollar of revenue.

“The challenge is that robotics is a really expensive sport. It takes two or three years to get to a commercializable major product.”

Arthur Chow, an investor at S2G Ventures, agrees.

“With valuations, the hammer has come down hard on the anvil there in the last couple of months,” said Chow. “These are really capital-intensive businesses. So you’re just looking at a math equation around valuation; how many rounds you have to raise in the future and how much you will get diluted. And then ultimately, an exit value, which there haven’t been a lot of exits.”

The reason for these long journeys to revenue is that, often, the founders of these companies have such big visions for their robotic systems.

“We all start these food robotics companies with like, ‘let’s automate everything, the biggest thing,'” said Jordan, previously a founder of Miso Robotics, the company behind the Flippy restaurant robot. “We devise these like huge, aggressive, big projects, and they’re incredibly valuable, but the capital curve to get there is so steep.”

One potential remedy to these long gestation times is taking a portion of that bigger idea and offering something useful – and quicker to market – than a hugely complicated system that takes years to perfect.

“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.

Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.

Both Jordan and Chow believe that there will be a number of food robotic startups that could get acquired over the next year as well-funded companies look to roll up interesting IP. But beware, says Jordan.

“There’s an opportunity because you can buy this IP for pretty affordable prices, but you need to have a team and expertise in house to do that. And so, woe be to the pure financial investor who starts rolling these things up without having a team on board to do that.”

In the end, both investors still see an opportunity for food robotics, but believe the key will for startups to not only show a path to revenue, but clearly illustrate how they can enable new lines of revenue over time.

“It’s sort of that gradual build we’re talking about,” said Chow. “We start with one use case in revenue and it makes money there, but then you do need to, over time, build and continue to think about the utilization of the robot and an ROI.”

You can watch the full session below.

Venture Capital Food Robotics Outlook 2023

Creator Re-Opens With a New Burger Making-Robot Customers Can Control

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant made famous by its burger-making robot, was among the thousands of restaurants shut down by the pandemic (even though it engineered an awesome germ-free airlock delivery system). But the restaurnt announced today that it is back with a new location in Daly City, California, and that is has a brand new robot that customers can control.

Creator’s new robot is a little different from its first incarnation, offering a new array of functionality. The robot is faster, capable of cooking a burger in less than four minutes (when there are no other burgers in the order queue). It also holds 25 different seasonings and sauces that can be dispensed down to the milliliter. Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will no apply to the burger themselves.

But perhaps the biggest change for Creator’s robot is how customers can interact with it. “We’re going to allow anyone to take control of the robot,” Creator Founder Alex Vardakostas told me via video chat this week. Customers can download the Creator mobile app and tweak the seasonings and sauces to their liking. These settings can then be saved and shared, which allows for someone like a well-known chef to “brand” their own burger program that people can replicate.

Another nice new feature is that when you place an order now, Creator’s system will let you know exactly long your wait time will be before your food is ready for pickup.

In addition to all these front-facing changes, Vardakostas said that there are also a number of back-end improvements to the robot that help with production and growth. “The new system is hyper scalable,” he said, “and way more reliable.” It’s these types of back-end changes that will allow Creator to manufacture robots en masse and expand in different ways. Vardakostas said that Creator’s growth will include a mix of owned and operated locations, licensing deals that still carry the Creator brand, and a white-label approach where the machine is modified for another restaurant’s use.

Despite all this technology, Creator remains a very human-focused eating experience. Vardakostas said his team looked at using ordering kiosks, but decided to stick with human order takers. “For a lot of us, we want to talk to a human,” he said.

Speaking of humans, unlike other restaurants, Vardakostas said that finding and hiring workers has not been a problem. “Labor has been a slam dunk. It’s been super easy,” he said. Part of that Vardakostas attributes to Creator being as much a tech company as it is a restaurant company. “Overall, a lot of people want to move into tech,” he said. But there certainly other factors at play, such as not having to work over a hot grill (since the robot does the cooking), Creator also helps with professional development by paying for things like Coursera classes (though a lot of QSRs offer something like that now). Creator does provide an upward path into the technology/robotics sector, however. Vardakostas said that Creator recently promoted two restaurant workers into its development lab.

Creator is part of a larger movement towards automation in the food industry, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. Robots can work all day without taking break, don’t get sick or injured, and can help free up space for social distancing in the kitchen. As a result, there are a number of restaurant robots either at market or on their way. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is working the deep fryers at White Castle. Hyphen just introduced its new Makeline robot assembly system for Sweetgreen-style restaurants. And Picnic just announced the commercial availability of its pizza assembling robot.

For those in the Bay Area who have not yet tried Creator’s robot-made burger (ed. note: They are delicious), you can visit the restaurant’s new location in the Westlake Shopping Center at 514 Westlake, Daly City.

Creator Temporarily Closes its Robot Restaurant

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant built around a hamburger-cooking robot, announced last night on Instagram that it was temporarily closing its one physical location tomorrow.

The company wrote:

Our restaurant at 680 Folsom Street in SF is going on a temporary hiatus. The stay at home order, combined with extended work-from-home policies (which we support), have emptied out SoMa – as @Eater_SF captured so poignantly. We haven’t seen a coyote or tumbleweeds on Folsom Street yet but it’s getting there.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Creator launched in the summer of 2018 around the idea that robots could take over the repetitive restaurant task of grilling burgers, freeing up human workers for more creative tasks like customer service.

Up until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 2020 had been a year of growth for Creator. In January the restaurant expanded to being open five days a week, and in March it added dinner service. Even when the pandemic forced its dining room to close, Creator put up a good fight and invented what was basically an air lock for hamburger pickup that aimed to keep workers, delivery drivers and food safe.

We don’t know what this means for Creator, which has raised $18 million in funding. Even though the one location is closed, they have a year and a half’s worth of data and experience that could be useful if they wanted to license out the robot technology to other foodservice operators. As the long-term effects of the pandemic remain unclear, restaurants may be more keen on reducing the number of humans involved in preparing and serving food. Having a robot cook could be one less vector of transmission for a restaurant.

We have reached out to Creator to find out more about any future plans.

On a more personal note, Creator was a highlight for me during my robot food tour of San Francisco last year , and whenever I was in town I made a point of going. Not because of the robot, but because the food was delicious and the experience was always great.

Video: Creator Engineered an Awesome Way to Deliver Germ-Free Burgers

COVID-19 has spawned a lot of new safety protocols in food delivery to help stem the outbreak. Grocery stores are wiping everything down more often. Delivery companies are dropping food off without human contact. But leave it to Creator, which built an entire robot to make (delicious) cheeseburgers, to take who concept of clean food to a whole new level.

During this pandemic, Creator has shifted to a delivery only model, and the company posted a video to Instagram today showing off its high-tech, highly-engineered solution for making sure the food you eat is as germ-free as possible. Creator described the new system in an email sent to us, saying:

Our engineers have worked around the clock to create a transfer chamber that protects the inside of the restaurant from outside air yet still allows us to transport completed meals, in their hermetically sealed bags, out to customers. The chamber uses a positive pressure system combined with a self-sanitizing conveyor.

In addition to this Andromeda Strain-level of prevention, Creator’s robot can also potentially help curb the spread of disease because it removes another human from the equation (though there are still humans involved in assembling your order).

Creator’s solution may seem over-the-top, but honestly, over-the-top solutions are exactly what we need right now.

Creator, the Robot Burger Restaurant, Adding Dinner Hours

Creator, the robot-powered hamburger restaurant in San Francisco, is expanding into dinner service. Starting March 9, Creator will be open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., the company posted on Instagram yesterday.

Creator is kind of a bellwether for the food robot industry. It’s a concept built around the idea of having a robot take over the manual repetition of grilling and assembling hamburgers, so human employees can focus on providing better customer service and learn new skills.

But up until this year, the Creator restaurant has had limited hours, operating only Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Then this past January, the restaurant expanded service to five days a week (and added a plant-based burger option) but was still only open for lunch.

Those limited hours meant that really the only people who could enjoy Creator were office workers in downtown San Francisco. More specifically, those office workers in San Francisco within walking distance of the restaurant’s location at 3rd and Folsom. By opening up dinner hours, Creator should be able to attract a different clientele and really put its robot through its paces in terms of volume and uptime.

Food robotics is at an interesting point in its evolution. Robots that make food and drinks are still relatively new and remain more of a novelty than a common feature of restaurants. Even then, how those robots are being implemented is undergoing big changes.

In January, Miso Robotics unveiled the next iteration of its Flippy robot, which is no longer stationary and will be suspended on a rail to move back and forth as it grills burgers and fries tater tots. That new version of Flippy won’t be available until the end of this year, and in the meantime, Miso is turning to equity crowdfunding, not traditional VCs, to raise its next round of financing.

Other food robots have fallen on harder times. Cafe X shuttered its three downtown robot barista locations in order to focus on airports, and Zume closed its robot-assisted pizza delivery operations.

It looks like Creator’s slow, methodical approach is paying off, at least for its first location. Instead of trying to scale too quickly, Creator has seemingly been intentional in its addition of service hours. As it expands into dinner, the next challenge for Creator will be growing beyond one location.

Robot Restaurant Creator Now Open Five Days a Week, Adds Plant-Based Burger

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant featuring robot-made hamburgers, announced today that it is now open five days a week, and that it has added a plant-based burger to its menu.

Up until today, Creator had only been open Wednesday through Friday. While its hours are still limited to 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., Creator will now be open Monday through Friday.

In addition to being open more hours, flexitarians can rejoice as the restaurant’s menu will now be open to more types of eaters. Creator is adding a plant-based burger made by Hodo, which, according to the Hodo website, is made from tofu.

Creator is bypassing the whole Beyond Meat v. Impossible discussion by going with a smaller player. Creator’s decision could be driven by the fact that its restaurant is such a small player right now, and didn’t want to deal with any potential shortages that both Beyond and Impossible have experienced. Or maybe Creator just preferred the price and taste of Hodo’s burgers.

The introduction of the plant burger seems like it will disrupt the premise of the robot-powered Creator. For meat burgers, Creator’s robot grinds, forms and cooks the beef patty on the spot. But for plant-based burgers, Creator’s robot will assemble the extras on the bun, but a human will grill up and place the patty. Given the rise in popularity of plant-based burgers, one has to wonder how this will impact Creator’s economics.

We spoke with Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas at our Articulate food robot summit last year and he explained that Creator’s robot is meant to do the repetitive boring work of grilling burgers so employees can do more engaging activities like customer service. For now, it seems like humans will be back working the grill.

Creator’s hours of operation and menu expansion comes on the heels of reports that the company was “totally screwed” by Softbank, which was going to become an investor. Food robots in general have been under scrutiny as fellow San Francisco startup Cafe X shuttered three of its locations and Zume pizza shut down its robot-assisted pizza delivery business.

Will this new move and new menu item keep Creator out of the robot dead pool?

Video: Creator’s Robo-Burger Joint Seems Like a Pretty Cool Place for a Human to Work

Out of all the burger restaurants you could work for, Creator in San Francisco seems like it would be a good choice. First, the burgers there are made by a robot, so duh, awesome. But while a robot may be the center of attention, it’s actually the humans that Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas seems to care the most about.

Vardakostas was on stage at our recent ArticulATE conference, where he explained that Creator’s mission is to create the most human-centric dining experience. Ironically, a giant robot helps them do just that. First, diners can enjoy a nice meal with friends at a fair price ($6 for a burger) in a well-appointed restaurant (with, admittedly, severely restricted open hours).

But using a robot to cook the burgers, Vardakostas also hopes to help free up the creativity of his human employees. With the monotonous “burger flipping” done by the robot, employees can provide better customer service and spend time in more creative ways.

But Varakostas and Co. take it one step further. Creator gives all their employees 5% time. This paid time is for employees to learn about whatever they want. Some take the opportunity to take online classes, or learn console code used on the robot, or study flavors in the hopes of opening up their own restaurant one day. Vardakostas doesn’t want Creator to be a dead-end job where you do the same thing for ten years; he understands that he’s equipping his employees to move on to other, better opportunities. Hopefully it’s something other restaurants implementing robots will learn from.

ArticulATE 2019: Building a Better Burger Joint with Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas

Be on the lookout for even more food robot-related videos from our ArticulATE conference here on The Spoon!

*An earlier version of this post said Creator staff were freed up to do social media campaigns. Creator reached out to say that restaurant staff do not engage in social media campaigns.

Take an Instagram Food Robot Tour of San Francisco! Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express, Creator, Blendid and Le Bread Xpress

One of the reasons we hosted our ArticulATE food robot conference in San Francisco this week is because, well, it’s where most food robots are. So it only made sense while I was in town to go on a Food Network-esque trip around town, enjoying all the robot repasts I could.

My tour did not disappoint. I spent the day walking (and Ubering) around SF visiting Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express, Creator, Blendid and Le Bread Xpress. Because it’s better to show than to tell, we created a Spoon Instagram (follow us!) to give you a glimpse at all the cool food robotics happening right now.

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:

Video: We Check Out Creator, the Burger-Making Robot

When I was in San Francisco last week I had the good fortune to visit Creator, the restaurant that cooks their burgers via robot.

Creator‘s 14-foot robot creates custom burgers from scratch. It splits and toasts the bun, adds condiments and toppings (like ketchup, lettuce, and pickles), drops and melts freshly-shredded cheese, and grinds and cooks beef patties — all to order. The process takes roughly 5 minutes and can make approximately 120 patties per hour.

Unfortunately, Creator doesn’t have a vegetarian option (yet), so I didn’t get to taste anything made by the burger-bot. But I did get to see it in action! Check out the sped up video below to see the whole process from start to finish.

A Visit to Creator Burger in San Francisco

Are you a huge food robot nerd? (Same!) Join us on April 16th in San Francisco for Articulate, the food robotics and automation summit! Tickets are available here, but they’ll go fast — snag yours now.

No Ticket Required, Robot-Powered Creator Restaurant Fully Open in SF

Creator, the restaurant that uses robots to cook up hamburgers, opened to walk-in customers San Francisco this week, as automated restaurants continue to pop up across the country.

Creator features a 14-foot long kiosk-like machine that grinds, cooks, buns and tops burgers. The restaurant actually had a bit of a soft opening back in June, during which it required a ticket to eat there. Since that time, according to Eater, the company has been learning customer preferences and adapting its burger design.

At Creator’s full opening this week tickets aren’t required, but service is first-come first-served, and the restaurant is only open from 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Wednesday through Friday.

Creator’s burger-making robot is different from Flippy, the burger-making robot that works at Caliburger further south in Pasadena, CA. Flippy uses an array of cameras and thermal sensors to cook the burgers, but still requires humans to dress them.

But the two are part of a larger trend in using robots in quick service restaurant settings. In addition to Caliburger, Flippy also learned how to fry up chicken tenders for its pilot at Dodger Stadium this summer. Another Flippy will also be deployed at an upcoming Seattle Caliburger location later this year. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, Zume Pizza uses robots to pull pizza crusts out of the oven, and over in Boston, Spyce uses robots to make delicious (according to our own Mike Wolf) bowls of food.

As we’ve noted, food robots are great for high-volume restaurants where customers want to get in and get out. Robots work quickly and precisely, they don’t take breaks and they never get injured. The results, however, may need a little fine-tuning. We aren’t in SF, so we haven’t tried it ourselves, but friends of The Spoon have told us that the burger was fine to above average (especially for a burger in downtown SF that only costs $6). Commenters on Yelp echoed those sentiments. People like the robot and the experience, but the burgers are “pretty good,” and “slightly underwhelming.”

Robots are becoming commonplace in restaurants, so their novelty and ability to attract customers in and of themselves will start to diminish. Once that happens, the food will need to be good to keep people coming back. That’s why even though I’m anxious for Flippy to make its Seattle debut, I’m more excited about the Crowd Cow burger coming to our first Shake Shack.