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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Eatsa

Sweetgreen’s New Takeout-Only Location Is a Logical Landing Spot For Spyce’s Kitchen Robots

This morning, Sweetgreen announced they are opening their first pickup-only location in Washington DC’s Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood. Opening on August 1st, the new location will not have any dine-in seating, will feature shelves for pickup and delivery, and all food production will be hidden from sight behind the shelving system.

My first thought upon seeing the digital renderings of the new restaurant was it reminded a lot me of Eatsa’s spare tech-forward front-of-house. My second thought was maybe Sweetgreen has robot aspirations for the back of house like Eatsa once did.

A quick refresher to understand my line of thinking. Spoon readers may remember that Eatsa’s original vision included not only an automat-like front of house with rows of cubbies and ordering kiosks, but also included a long-term plan to roboticize the back of house. They even received a patent for a fully-automated food assembly system last year.

And then last year, Sweetgreen made a fairly surprising acquisition when they scooped up robotic restaurant startup Spyce. Surprising because just the year before, the company layed off its technology team, including the company’s head of automation.

Since that acquisition, Sweetgreen has closed the remaining Spyce branded restaurants and redeployed the Spyce team to work on solutions for Sweetgreen’s own restaurants. At the time of the deal, Sweetgreen said Spyce’s automation technology will allow its workers to focus more on customer service, expand its menu into warm foods, and make meal preparation more consistent.

With all that in mind, it makes one wonder if the new restaurant format is a logical landing place for Spyce’s automation technology. With a completely digital order flow, small kitchen footprint, and the design flexibility a completely new store format gives them, it makes sense that Sweetgreen might see its new pickup-only location as the perfect place to deploy Spyce’s kitchen robot technology.

Of course, this is all pure speculation, and there’s a good chance Sweetgreen might just stick with their traditional kitchens with humans doing the bulk of the cooking. But with the company’s founders’ original vision of creating a tech company that serves food, this new restaurant format might provide them just the opportunity they are looking for to put the robot business they acquired last year to good use.

Food Tech Patent Watch: Patent Reveals Eatsa’s Robotic Meal-Assembly Machine

Remember Eatsa?

You know, the automat-like bowl food restaurant that was re-spun as a fast-growing (but more boring) restaurant marketing tech company called Brightloom?

I do, mainly because I loved the place. After I visited one in New York City, I wrote that the restaurant could be the future of fast-casual dining.

As it turns out, some – including maybe Eatsa’s investors – didn’t agree with me. I say that because starting in 2019, they phased out the cubbies, changed their name, took money from Starbucks, and, from the looks of it, dropped big plans for automating the back of house with meal assembly robots.

I say that because Eatsa (now Brightloom) holding company Keenwawa, Inc. was issued a patent last month for a meal-making robot. The patent, a continuation patent for one first issued to the company in 2019, shows a system that assembles meals by dispensing different ingredients stored in canisters into bowls and then shuttles the assembled meals off to the cubbies in the front of house.

Drawing of The Eatsa Meal Assembly Machine From Patent Filing

From the patent:

The automatic food preparation and serving apparatus may also comprise the food dispensing mechanism configured to dispense the ingredient from the plurality of food canisters into the bowl or food receptacle, under program control of the one or more processors.

The patent goes into excruciating detail about the system, complete with dozens of images outlining the canisters, the dispensing system, the conveyor belt, the bowls, and even the touchscreen user interface (which looks a lot like those deployed in the actual Eatsa restaurants for consumers to choose their bowls).

The list of inventors on the 60-page plus patent includes the former automation and engineering team for Eatsa, as well as Dave Friedberg, the one-time Climate Corp founder who incubated the company as part of what would eventually become The Production Board holding company.

I have to wonder if Eatsa-now-Brightloom’s owners are looking to license or sell the technology or even revive their ‘eatsa-inside’ strategy. After all, the recent news that Sweetgreen had acquired Spyce to help do exactly what Eatsa did – make food bowls – shows that some restaurants see a future in automated meal assembly.

Time will tell. For now, however, you can take a look back at the Eatsa ordering and cubby system below.

Food Tech Patent News Roundup

The First Patent Awarded to an AI System is in Food

While I thought that artificial intelligence systems will do most everything at some point, I assumed an AI being awarded a patent was one we could sleep on for a few years more.

I was wrong. In the July edition of the Patent Journal, an AI system named DABUS was awarded a patent for an innovation called “food container based on fractal geometry” for a system with interlocking food containers.

This Quartz Africa article describes DABUS’s creator:

DABUS (which stands for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”) is an AI system created by Stephen Thaler, a pioneer in the field of AI and programming. The system simulates human brainstorming and creates new inventions. DABUS is a particular type of AI, often referred to as “creativity machines” because they are capable of independent and complex functioning. This differs from everyday AI like Siri, the “voice” of Apple’s iPhones.

DABUS’s inventor Thaler submitted the patent application listing DABUS as the inventor since the AI conceived and created the food storage system entirely. He submitted it to patent offices worldwide, including the US, which rejected him because, among other reasons, the US patent office only awards patents (for the time being) to human inventors. However, the South Africa patent office apparently had no such restrictions when it surprised many with an award of a patent.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t be that surprising AI are creating patentable ideas. AIs already write novels and movie scripts, so why not invent novel things like food containers and get them patented?

I’m looking forward to when we see AI start innovating on novel food. We’ve seen what an impact AI had in vaccine development, so it’s not too much of a stretch to see how it could start making a difference on the bioengineering front for foods.

A Patent Awarded for Many Container Within Container Scenarios For Food Storage, Cooking, and More

A fairly wide-ranging patent titled “Multi-function compact appliance and methods for a food or item in a container with a container storage technology” (US011104502) has been awarded to an Edward Espinosa from Spain for a system that enables a variety of container within container use-cases.

One example is a food container within a larger food storage appliance (i.e., a fridge) sending information on status such as freshness, etc. Another is the refrigerator with a microwave oven in one of the compartments.

The patent describes various technologies such as NFC, Bluetooth, voice control, machine vision via an internal camera, and more to enable the container systems to communicate with the appliance. In addition, the system describes the use of smart tags that communicate freshness data from within storage drawers.

I’ve long called for innovations in the core design of the fridge since they’ve largely been the same for the past 100 years, and it looks like Espinosa has definitely given the refrigerator a rethink.

Whirlpool’s Solid State Cooking Patent

Schematic for Cooking System With Directed RF Energy

It’s been a loosely held secret in the appliance industry that Whirlpool has been tinkering around in the solid-state cooking area for a while. This patent describing a system with multi-regional cooking via RF signals shows they are also trying to accumulate IP in the market. At this time, only Miele has commercialized a consumer solid-state cooking appliance, but hopefully, soon, we’ll see a next-generation microwave from a mass-market brand like Whirlpool.

Brightloom’s Adam Brotman on the Vital Role of Data in Today’s Restaurant Industry

“Ordering was becoming something of a commodity,” Adam Brotman, CEO of Brightloom, told me over a recent video chat. Data, he said, is “a bigger, more interesting opportunity than just ordering, so we decided to focus on just the opportunity to design an easy to use affordable data science as a service.”

But information about customers is only one type of data restaurants need to be concerned with nowadays. In this video Brotman also talks about the overall role data will play in advancing the restaurant industry and how smaller businesses can better harness it.

You watch our full conversation below and read along via the transcript. Note that the transcript has been very lightly edited for clarity. 

The following interview is available for Spoon Plus subscribers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Talking 23andMe For Farms, Bioreactors-as-a-Service & Other Crazy FoodTech Ideas With Dave Friedberg

But here’s the thing: most ideas about the future sound a little crazy the first time you hear them.

I had known about Friedberg for some time, in part because was the founder and CEO of agtech’s first unicorn in the Climate Corporation, a company that sold to Monsanto in 2013 for over $1 billion.

More recently I’d been tracking his progress at the Production Board, a company that is essentially an idea incubation factory for food, bio and ag tech concepts. The group is run by what Friedberg describes as “operators more than investors”.

The Production Board company portfolio is strung together by something closer to a grand unified theory about how the world should work rather than any sort of single investment theme. This theory, which Friedberg articulates in a manifesto on the Production Board website, reads as much like a science fiction short story as it does an investment guide and is centered around how the world’s existing food and agricultural production systems are antiquated relics of an inefficient industrial production processes that have taken root over the past couple centuries.

I sat down for a (virtual) meeting with Friedberg recently to talk about how the Production Board works and the progress he is making for upending some of the antiquated food and ag systems. We also talk about Friedberg thinks the future of food could look like ten years or more in the future.

You can see some excerpts from our interview below. In order to see the full interview and read a transcript of our conversation, you’ll want to subscribe to Spoon Plus.

Friedberg on how crazy it is we aren’t harnessing the full technology development to address our problems around food and agriculture:

If a Martian came down to planet Earth and they look at the way we’re doing things they would say, “that’s a little bit crazy. Not only that, but it’s crazy that you guys do things the way you do them given all the technology you have. You can do crazy shit as humans. You can like write DNA and you can like ferment things in these tanks and make whatever molecule you want. And you can pretty much print anything anywhere using different chemistry.” It’s ridiculous that the systems of production operate the way that they do.

Friedberg on the idea behind Culture Biosciences, a company he describes as an AWS for Bioreactors:

If you fast forward 50 years, Tyson Foods and these feedlots and cattle grazing, I mean, it’s so fu**ing inefficient it’s just unreal. It’s mind blowing how much energy and money and CO2 is part of the system of producing meat and animal protein. And we have the tools to make animal proteins and fermenters, so if you could have a fermenter in your home, and it just prints meat when you want it, I think that would be pretty cool. Technically the science is there, the engineering isn’t. And that’s the thing: with a lot of these things, the science is proven, but a lot engineering work still to do. But it’s, it’s feasible. All these things are feasible.

Friedberg on how the Production Board germinates ideas that ultimately become one of their portfolio businesses:

We do primary research, we spend a lot of time with scientists and researchers and identify new and emerging breakthroughs in science and technology. We also spend time in the markets we operate in: food, agriculture, human health, increasingly looking at things like energy materials. And then we try and identify what’s a better way of doing this thing in this market?

So using all these new breakthroughs using all this new science, using all this technology that might be emerging, how can we do something that can transform one of these markets and really do a 10x on it? If it’s not a 10x, if it’s just a 5% better model or a 10% better model, it’s not worth doing. If we can 10x the market – reduce cost or energy by 10 times – then it becomes kind of exciting. And so that’s how we kind of think about operating business opportunities.

The full interview and transcript are available for Spoon Plus customers. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here. 

Newsletter: Back-to-School Delivery Apps and High-Tech Sushi Burritos

While my colleagues are across the Pacific this week at the SKS Japan show, I’ve been thinking about college. Specifically, how college and university campuses are a lucrative frontier for food delivery. Unless you’re in an urban campus like NYU, where delivery, takeout, and street food options already abound, the average college campus has everything a food-delivery service could want in terms of customers: lots of bodies packed tightly together, pulling late hours in locations where food isn’t always a given (e.g., the library). Third-party delivery services like DoorDash and Grubhub already provide a presence on campuses, along with a much-needed alternative to soggy spaghetti and stale Cheerios. But for bigger corporations who’ve long been a part of the university foodservice world, third-party delivery is a competitive threat to their very relevance on campus. Not surprising, then, that some of these legacy foodservice companies are starting to respond with their own contributions to delivery. This week food services provider Aramark, who works with more than 400 universities in the U.S., announced it had acquired meal delivery company Good Uncle. Via Good Uncle’s app, students can order chef-made meals and snacks that are typically cheaper than the average restaurant and don’t have delivery fees. While Good Uncle’s reach is relatively small right now, serving just eight campuses, its business model makes a lot of sense for an older company like Aramark trying to stay relevant to students in the food delivery era. Exactly how Aramark will leverage this new acquisition remains to be seen, but it’s a smart move to get into the delivery space now. Grubhub has already been working its way onto campuses via its 2018 acquisition of Tapingo, and a growing number of delivery bots on campus brings both new ways to do food delivery for students and more competition for existing players. That includes Aramark rival Sodexo North America, who this year partnered with Starship Robotics to unleash fleets of wheeled bots onto college campuses. An Eatsa-style Empire in Japan But back to Japan. My colleague Chris Albrecht got to experience not one but two awesome food-centric things this week: sushi burritos and high-tech restaurants. Chris headed over to Beeat Sushi Burrito, a Tokyo restaurant that serves sushiritos and is powered by an end-to-end system that automates most of the order, pay, and pickup process for customers. As Chris noted, though, UBO, the company behind the restaurant, is more focused on tech than food: “Instead of selling sushiritos, UBO has developed the entire system from the software platform to the cameras installed in the cubbies that read the special QR codes that identify each order. UBO wants to license its tech stack to other restaurant chains, who can then integrate the automat style of eating into their own locations.” It’s not unlike the Brighloom (nee Eatsa) system here in the U.S., which is an end-to-end restaurant tech stack that automates much of the customer’s restaurant experience and will do so even more now that it’s licensed some of Starbucks’ technology. So while a sushirito empire isn’t the end goal for UBO, Beeat Sushi Burrito is another example of how the restaurant experience is getting automated and suggests we’ll see many more iterations of this in future, on either side of the Pacific. And, most likely, in colleges and universities, too. Until next time, Jenn

UBO is Using Sushi Burritos to Build an Eatsa-Style Empire in Japan

Unless you live in San Francisco, you may not be familiar with the concept of a sushirito. They are exactly what they sound like: sushi wrapped up like a burrito. A Tokyo-based company called UBO is hoping to leverage those delicious portmanteaus to help restaurant chains build out their own Brightloom (formerly Eatsa)-like experience across Japan.

I met with UBO CEO, Takehiro “Indy” Sato, at Beeat Sushi Burrito yesterday. The restaurant opened last December near the Akihabra district in Tokyo. There are no humans to greet you at the door or take your order. There are just two people tucked away working in the kitchen. To place an order, you visit the Beeat web site (no native mobile app yet), make your selection, tell them when you want to pick it up, and pay with a credit card or Amazon Pay (more on that in a second). Then you go to Beeat Sushi where there are some tables and rows of numbered cubby holes. A screen above tells you when your order is ready and which number box to pick it up from.

But UBO’s goal is not to create a Beeat empire; the restaurant itself is more of a proof-of-concept. Instead of selling sushiritos, UBO has developed the entire system from the software platform to the cameras installed in the cubbies that read the special QR codes that identify each order. UBO wants to license its tech stack to other restaurant chains, who can then integrate the automat style of eating into their own locations.

If that sounds like Eatsa Brightloom, well, you’re not wrong, though Sato said there are some differences between UBO and Brightloom. For one, the cubby holes at Beeat don’t have doors — the Japanese public health department wouldn’t allow them. Sato tried telling officials that other countries like the U.S. and China use doors, but the Japanese government said no.

Second, Sato isn’t repeating Brightloom’s mistake of trying to build his own restaurant chain. “We’re a tech company, not a sushi company,” Sato told me when I visited him at Beeat today.

To that end, the company has already iterated on its system and now offers a smaller version of its cubby system. Instead of taking up a wall, it’s more like a countertop display case with a tablet on the bottom. Sato says this diminutive footprint is better for restaurants in Japan, which are usually smaller. Restaurants could alleviate long lines and crowds by having people order ahead, then simply walk up and grab their food from the cubby.

Sato said UBO is fully self-funded right now, though the company is looking for venture funding to help scale up operations. Right now, UBO’s business model is to rent out its system at $2 per cubby per day with a two-year minimum contract. The company is currently running and planning tests with some unnamed customers.

I learned a few other interesting tid-bits about Beeat while chatting with Sato. Most surprising is that Amazon Pay is evidently super popular in Japan. Sato said that roughly 40 percent of his customers use Amazon Pay when paying for their meal. Additionally, UBO decided early on to not go with kiosk ordering. Sato didn’t think they were necessary after visiting the U.S. and seeing everyone just order with their phone inside Starbucks.

He also said that though they are connected with Uber Eats, only about 20 percent of their Beeat business is delivery right now. That was surprising to me because sushiritos are actually pretty perfect for delivery. They don’t have to stay hot and they come in a compact form factor that keeps the food in shape even when it’s jostled about. Most of all, they are delicious — you can tell they were developed by a Michelin-starred chef, Mizuguchi Kazuyoshi.

But people wanting to try a sushi burrito in Tokyo should do so soon, because if UBO’s licensing business takes off, there won’t be a need to keep Beeat open.

The Food Tech Show: The Perilous Existence of Bike-Riding Food Delivery Drivers

It’s been a big week in restaurant tech news, so the Spoon gang got together to record a podcast.

In this episode of the Food Tech Show, we discuss:

  • Starbucks deal with Brightloom (formerly Eatsa) and what it means for the restaurant tech market
  • The New York Times piece about a day in the life of food delivery drivers
  • Uber’s all-in-one app for food, bikes and rideshares
  • Mike’s first-world coffee machine struggle with whether he should have waited for the Terra Kaffe, even as the Spinn nears a ship date

As always, you can hit play below or listen to the Food Tech Show podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Audio Player

Pizza Hut Testing Brightloom’s Cubby Technology in Los Angeles

Pizza Hut announced in a statement this week that it is testing out Brightloom’s automated pickup cubbies at its Hollywood location. It’s the same technology currently used in chains like MAC’D and Chicago-based Wow Bao.

The point of Brightloom’s cubby system is to speed up service and give customers a way to order digitally then retrieve their food without every having to interact with a human being. Users can place an order via the Pizza Hut app or website, though Pizza Hut said in the statement they can still order via phone or in-person if they prefer.

Once at the restaurant, users find their designated cubby, which digitally displays their name on the door and is built with a special lining that keeps pizza hot and drinks cold. From there it’s just a matter of grabbing the pie and heading out.

The pilot kicked off yesterday. Pizza Hut says it plans to roll out more iterations of it in West Coast locations in 2020.

The pilot also follows the Brightloom announcement this week that the company formerly known as Eatsa has rebranded, raised $30 million, and is working with Starbucks to license the latter’s mobile order-pay-loyalty technology for its own system. Brightloom will in the near future license this newly revamped tech stack to restaurants.

Linking up with Brightloom is a smart move on Pizza Hut’s part. As my colleague Chris Albrecht said not long ago, “pizza continues to disrupt itself,” and there seems to be no end to national chains throwing new tech initiatives at the process of ordering, retrieving, and delivering pies to customers. Little Caesars’ Pizza Portal is similar to the Brightloom cubbies in that it’s a temperature-controlled, self-service pickup station that also allows users to order and pay digitally. Domino’s, meanwhile, has kept busy releasing everything from in-car ordering functionality to AI-powered scanners that check pizza quality.

But as we mentioned at the time of the Brightloom-Starbucks news, Starbucks is arguably the leader when it comes to mobile order, pay, and pickup technology, and combining it with Brightloom’s already-powerful end-to-end restaurant management platform could seriously raise standards around all restaurant technology. Pizza Hut hasn’t said if its subsequent cubby rollouts will include this new version of Brightloom’s platform, which will be unveiled in October. However, a relationship with Brightloom could help give Pizza Hut the competitive edge it needs when it comes to technology over the long term.

Newsletter: The New All-in-One Restaurant Tech Is Here, Digital Drive-Thru Goes Down Under

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Sign up for it here to get all the best food tech news an analysis direct to your inbox!

I was in a local coffee shop recently and overheard a rep from a well-known POS company trying to sell his product to the shop’s manager. But for every feature he offered up (“It’ll manage payroll!” “It makes tipping easier!”), the cafe manager had more or less the same rebuttal: more tech would make more work for her staff.

I suspect this conversation is happening all over the world. Tech’s march on the restaurant industry is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily making life easier for restaurants. In a growing number of cases, too many digital tools actually make it harder to get work done, particularly as demands for delivery and mobile orders ramp up and those functions have to be integrated into an already chaotic workflow.

But this week, we got a different glimpse into the future of the digital restaurant — namely, one where disparate tech solutions are replaced by a single digital platform that can manage every corner of the restaurant, from the kitchen system in the back to the kiosk out front to the off-premises order on its way out for delivery.

At least, that’s what Brightloom hopes to launch to restaurants this fall. The newly rebranded company, formerly known as Eatsa, announced yesterday that it’s revamped its existing end-to-end restaurant tech platform, into which it’s also integrating Starbucks’ famed mobile technology.

This is a big deal because, while many products claim to be “all-in-one” restaurant management software packs that make it easier for restaurant owners and operators to manage the entire business, no one’s yet managed to seamlessly integrate the mobile aspect of business into their system.

And nobody does mobile like Starbucks. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s hard to deny the mega-chain’s dominance when it comes to offering fast, highly personalized order and pickup functions for customers. Brightloom’s soon-to-be-unveiled system will integrate the Starbucks mobile order, pay, and customer loyalty tech into its own system. We don’t yet know exactly what that will look like, but it will undoubtedly raise everyone’s standards around what restaurant-tech systems should be able to do and put pressure on others to make their offerings just as useful and less of a burden for restaurants to implement.

Good-bye, Crackly Speakerphone. Hello Digital Drive-Thru
Will all these digital developments render the crackly speaker at the drive-thru null and void? Probably, and sooner than we think.

While major QSRs like Dunkin’ and Starbucks have been implementing digital and mobile ordering into the drive-thru experience little by little over the last couple years, KFC took things a step further recently by announcing its first-ever drive-thru-only concept store.

The store, which is slated to open in November, will feature multiple drive-thru lanes dedicated to customers who have ordered their food via the KFC website or mobile app. The idea is to streamline the order process and cut down on how long it takes customers — or delivery drivers — to get their food. But again, it’s all about the implementation. KFC’s concept store could raise the bar on what QSRs are expected to deliver in terms of speed and quality. Or it could just be introducing another digital process that stresses workers out. We’ll know more when the pilot launches in November, in Australia.

Delivery Bots on the Rise
Or you could just let the restaurant come to you in the form of a roving bot. There’s a growing number of these devices delivering food from restaurant to customer, often on college campuses, which hold a lot of people in a relatively small geographic area.

But as my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out this week, Kiwi announced it will test its semi-autonomous delivery bots on the streets of Sacramento, CA this fall, which suggests we’re coming to a point where these li’l roving machines will start to become a more common sight on regular city sidewalks. Who needs drive-thru when you can have your meal brought to you by a cute little box on wheels? As Chris said, “it was pretty amazing to whip out my phone, order a burrito, have a robot fetch my lunch and bring it to my location.”

For now, roving delivery bots are probably not a priority for most restaurants’ overall digital solutions. But as all-in-one offerings like the Brightloom-Starbucks tech get more commonplace and digital ordering becomes routine for customers and workers alike, there may be room for most restaurants to accommodate a bot or two in their tech stack.

Eatsa Unveils New Features for Virtual Restaurants, Powers Deliveroo’s Food Hall

Restaurant automation company eatsa announced yesterday a new suite of products aimed specifically at virtual restaurants and delivery-only restaurant concepts. Third-party delivery service Deliveroo is the first to use the technology, at its new food hall in Singapore.

This is eatsa’s first foray into virtual restaurants, also called ghost kitchens, which are basically restaurant-grade kitchen spaces with no dining area and, most of the time, not even a pickup area. More and more restaurants are using these to offload delivery orders from the main kitchen or test out new food concepts. Some restauranteurs also use them to kickstart a brand in a cheaper, less risky way than would be with a full-service operation.

To that end, eatsa’s new tech suite is all about making the prep, pickup, and delivery of food more efficient. New software, called the Omnichannel Intelligent Queue Software, calculates the exact status of an order based on kitchen throughput. With that capability, the eatsa app can give a customer a minute-by-minute status update. For drivers, this more precise ETA helps them know exactly when to get to the restaurant to pick up the food, so it doesn’t sit for too long.

Drivers also get some directional help via the new features — literally. Eatsa’s already known for its digital status boards it has up in restaurants. A version of these will be in the virtual kitchens, along with pickup stations. Eatsa’s shelf-like surfaces that are controlled by sensors and can display the name on the order as well as branding for the third-party service delivering the order.

The first customer for eatsa’s new features is Delveroo, who just opened another Editions site, at Alice @ Mediapolis in Singapore. Customers can order delivery or pickup from the food hall, which features 10 kitchens serving Korean, Vietnamese, Greek, and Japanese food (among other types). In the case of pickup, customers order at self-service kiosks in the hall and retrieve it from one of eatsa’s cubbies, which function much the same way as the aforementioned shelf system.

Companies across the delivery chain are now involved in virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens, from companies like Kitchen United, who rents out kitchen space, to Uber Eats, who might start peddling its own restaurants and food concepts via ghost kitchens.

Eatsa has already teamed up with a few notable names over the last couple years, for traditional restaurants, including Wow Bao in Chicago and MAC’D in San Francisco. The eatsa tech’s popularity is said to be soaring, and expanding overseas and teaming up with a high-profile company like Deliveroo seems to prove that point.

It’s smart for the company to move into the virtual kitchen space, where it’s tech could help it stand out quite a bit. As CEO Tim Young told me a while back, the company’s system is designed to make restaurant operations easier and more efficient, and it’s end-to-end, which means you can roll up every step of your operation into a single system. As restaurants large and small adjust to a world where mobile order and delivery needs to be as efficient as in-house dining, an all-in-one automated platform like eatsa’s could solve several problems at once.

Eatsa Shuts Most Locations & Shifts Towards An ‘Eatsa-Inside’ Model

It looks like eatsa bit off more than it can chew.

The company known for its (mostly) human-less front-of-house restaurants and tasty quinoa bowls is rejiggering its strategy to deemphasize its own retail restaurant footprint in favor of an “eatsa-inside” strategy of enabling other restaurants with their technology.

In a blog post published today, the company said it had expanded too quickly, making it difficult to test and iterate their product.  Under their new strategy, eatsa would focus on powering other restaurants with its technology and, as a result, shut down the five eatsa locations in the three markets outside of its home market of San Francisco.

From the eatsa blog:

First, we’re going to increase our focus on enabling other restaurants to use the eatsa platform. We’re already in discussions with a number of companies to do this. We believe that partnering with established brands will allow us to get the eatsa experience people love into more restaurants, faster. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

We’ve also decided to close the five eatsa restaurants in New York, D.C., and Berkeley. Our two San Francisco locations will remain open so we can continue to test, iterate, and build out our retail brand. We hope that with fewer locations, we can experiment and innovate faster, and resume our retail expansion in the future.

I ate at one of the NYC locations back in June and thought the food and experience was good.  At the time I proclaimed that the eatsa model of fast, cheap and tasty enabled by technology was a glimpse into the future of fast casual dining. I still think that’s the case, only now we’ll likely see this vision realized through restaurants other than eatsa, even if many of these locations still utilize the company’s technology.

I Ate At Eatsa. Now I’m Convinced It’s The Future of Fast Casual Dining

Like most everyone, one of the reasons I love going to New York City is the food.

And after all, why not? The variety is endless, and every meal brings a chance to eat somewhere (and something) amazing. In just one three-day trip to the Big Apple this week, I got to eat  dinner at America’s best pasta restaurant, have lunch in the middle of Grand Central Station, and grab breakfast at one of the city’s best cafes with longtime former editor of Food and Wine, Dana Cowin.*

But the meal I got most excited about was a $10 Bento Bowl I had at eatsa. That’s because while I’d written a bunch about the quinoa-centric, tech-heavy restaurant startup, I’d yet to eat there, so I was intrigued to see what it was like to eat with a completely automated the front-of-house experience.

I ate @eatsarestaurant this week. Here’s a quick video recap of the experience.

A post shared by Michael Wolf (@michaelawolf) on

Here’s a quick recap of my experience:

The Walk-In Experience:  When I walked into the Madison Avenue eatsa, it was moderately crowded. At 3:30 in the afternoon it was late for lunch, so I’d expect even bigger crowds during lunch hour.

This location was loud. Of course, everything seems to be bustling in the middle of Manhattan, but this eatsa location was definitely louder than most fast food or fast casual restaurants I’ve been to, in no small part due to the loud music playing over the speakers.

I also noticed an eatsa employee in the lobby. I found this interesting because I wasn’t sure if anyone ever saw an employee when dining at eatsa.

The Order Experience: The order experience is straightforward. Before I could peruse the menu on one of the 8 or kiosks, I was asked to swipe a credit card. I was then given a choice of pre-made bowls or the option to build my own custom bowl.

Ordering food at eatsa

I found the menu simple and easy to understand. Once I chose a Chef’s bowl, I added a beverage and paid. The total price for my bowl was under ten bucks.

Wait and Pick Up: After checkout, my name soon appeared on a big screen above the wall of cubbies.

After ordering, my name appeared on a big screen under ‘Current Orders’

When my food was ready, the screen told me which cubby from which to pick up my meal. The total wait time was less than five minutes. When I picked my meal up, both my bowl and drink were there. However, my dining companion’s drink was missing, so he had to ask the eatsa employee to radio to the back and have them put a drink in the cubby.

How Was The Food?: You should know this: the food at eatsa is really good. I have to admit I wasn’t sure how much I would like a quinoa-centered meal, but the bento bowl I ordered was fresh, crispy and most of all, delicious. My friend Aaron Cohen ordered the hummus and falafel bowl and found it equally tasty.

Closing Thoughts

After eating at eatsa, here are my takeaways:

The whole experience was very low friction: Eating at eatsa is  just really, really easy to do. I walked in, ordered and started eating in about 5 minutes.  I think for lunch customers in busy cities or corporate dense suburbs, eatsa is perfectly optimized for quick pick-up-and-go lunches.

Price-value exceeds most restaurants. The food quality and taste are extremely high for the price. My meal was under ten bucks, lower than average when compared to pretty much any chain restaurant.

It’s not all robots…yet. In a way, I was happy to see a human employee in the lobby of eatsa. It became apparent with my friend’s missing drink why eatsa would need to have someone in the front of the house to answer questions and solve problems.

The mystery is part of the allure. Since we’re early in the robot-restaurant revolution, people are naturally curious about how the restaurant works. When I asked the young woman working up front what went on in the back of house, she said, “some people say it’s robots” with a twinkle in her eye and left it at that.

This is the future of fast food and fast casual. As CEOs from fast casual chains like Buffalo Wild Wings wring their hands about the future, eatsa is busy creating a new template that leverages automation to bring a high-quality, low-friction food experience to the consumer. While I don’t think all restaurants will automate the front-of-house like eatsa – after all, no one can replace a great maître d’ or the ambiance of a cool coffee shop with touch screen kiosk – I have no doubt that what eatsa has created is a glimpse into the future.

*Yes, that’s a humble-brag, as I’m a fan of Dana’s and you should be too (you can check her podcast here). And no, a Dana Cowin is not included with every meal at High Street on Hudson.