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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Eatsa

Robot Restaurant Eatsa Makes Move Into Personalized Food

Eatsa has gotten lots of press over the past few years for two things:

One, they serve lots and lots of quinoa. This is not surprising since a) quinoa is tasty and healthy and b) the company’s ownership group also runs NorQuin, Canada’s largest producer of quinoa (talk about vertical integration).

Second and perhaps more interestingly, they’re a robot restaurant. Only, they’re not a robotic restaurant in the way you’d expect it – back of house – but instead have created a fully human-less front of house experience where the consumer orders using a touch screen and the food magically appears in a small cubby.

As if that wasn’t enough to make this startup interesting, now they’re adding a third leg to their stool of differentiation with personalized food. That’s right, with a revamped menu and updated software, the company just announced they will start to tailor meals for users based on past behavior.

Here’s how eatsa’s chairman, Dave Friedberg, explains what they are calling the first attempt to create the “world’s first truly personalized food service experience”:

Imagine having your own personal chef. Every day you tell your chef what you’re in the mood for. What you like and don’t like. Over time, your chef learns about your favorites, things you can’t stand, your preferences for sauces and spices, and even how your mood changes based on the weather or what you’re up to on a given day.

Imagine that your personal chef is downstairs from your office or down the street from your home. And your personal chef can make you an amazing meal in 90 seconds or less and do it at a price lower than any other option out there.

That’s the experience we want eatsa to deliver. Today, we are taking the first step towards that vision.

Since launching the first eatsa in September 2015, we have been asking guests what they like and don’t like, where else they eat and why. We’ve listened and we’ve learned.

Turns out, most folks love what we offer (Thank you!). But if eatsa is going to be able to give everyone something that they’ll love every day, truly deliver a personalized experience, guests have let us know that we need to expand beyond quinoa bowls.

So, based on past user behavior and responses to questions eatsa has asked their guests, eatsa will now start to offer personalized plate options. While fast-food restaurants have been touting make-it-your-way for a very long time, those methods were really just the “put in your order” way of ordering food that’s been around since, well, the beginning of restaurants. Instead, eatsa will use data from guest behavior to anticipate and pre-emptively offer up specialized meals that are tailored for the consumer.

In a way, eatsa is tapping into a broader trend towards greater personalization of food and nutrition powered by the explosion in better and bigger data over the past few years. Companies like Habit are creating personalized mealkits based on the personal biological and health profiles of consumers, while others like Innit are pushing heavily towards personalized food with their data platforms.

So while eatsa – a completely automated front-of-house restaurant – can feel somewhat impersonal in terms of user experience, they’re actually looking to become intensely personal when it comes to understanding their guest’s behavior.

I guess robots aren’t so impersonal after all.

Want to meet the leaders defining the future of food, cooking and the kitchen? Get your tickets for the Smart Kitchen Summit today.

Can Tech Completely Automate The Restaurant Front Of House?

While we’ve seen a bunch of news lately about how food robots and automation are gaining momentum in the restaurant world, much of the action has been around ‘back of house’ operations and delivery, where robots and automation can specialize in completing repetitive tasks like making burgers at a lower cost than humans.

But the reality is, front of house is just as susceptible to automation. One of the most obvious places for tech is at the dining table itself, where companies like Ziosk are working to make servers more efficient and, in many cases, help restaurants reduce overall server headcount. Ziosk’s touch screens, which allow consumers to order, ask for refills and pay, are on tables everywhere from Red Robin to Chili’s to Olive Garden. In fact, the company indicated that their kiosks touch 50 million consumers in 3,000 restaurants in the US.

Fast food is even more susceptible to automation. Companies like Panera, Wendy’s and McDonalds are rolling out self-order kiosks nationwide, making fast food one of the fastest growing categories in what some predict will be a $73 billion self-serve kiosk market in 2020.

And then there are those restaurants creating entirely new restaurant concepts which take the front-of-house beyond just the kiosk and make them entirely human-less.

One of these is Eatsa, a San Fransisco based chain that has created a restaurant concept where the entire order and serve flow are done with automation. And if you think Eatsa’s quinoa meals are prepackaged boxes made somewhere off-site, you’re wrong: humans work to fulfill orders, only consumers never get to see them behind the wall of futuristic cubbies where the custom-ordered meals magically appear.

You can see how it all works in the video from Techcrunch below:

Eatsa's High Tech Quinoa To-Go

But do consumers want humans eliminated entirely in the front of house? Are restaurants going to eventually all become Eatsa-like order and pickup joints with nary a worker in sight?

My guess is human-less front of house operations will eat up a small but growing percentage of the overall restaurant mix, particularly in fast-food and casual dining markets where consumers often want to eat fast and affordably. But the biggest impact will be on specific functions. Much like Amazon has re-thought the grocery store in a modern context to use technology to automate a task (checkout), we’ll see restaurant chains starting to focus on those front of house tasks that can be reduced or eliminated with tech (like ordering).

I expect automation to have a much smaller impact in fine dining’s front of house operations. That’s because consumers are willing – and often times expect – to pay more for the experience, and that experience is usually highly dependent on the service of humans.

The ultimate question is how far will automation go and what does it mean for both restaurants and consumers? On the restaurant side, it’s clear a balance must be struck between increased efficiency and creating a compelling user experience.  If consumers see added benefit through expedited ordering and payment through tech like Ziosk, then why not?

But if going to restaurants becomes the equivalent of going to food ATMs, there’s a chance eating out will lose some of its appeal. Unless of course you frequent one of these many robot-restaurants popping up in China.

Then you may want your meal served by a robot waiter.