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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

facial recognition

Piestro Adds Pay-With-Your Face Tech and Cubbies for Pickup

Robotic pizza vending startup Piestro announced today that it has partnered with PopID to integrate pay-with-your face technology into Piestro’s machines.

The integration of PopID’s technology will provide Piestro customers a new contactless ordering and payment system. In addition to paying with traditional credit/debit cards, users can create a PopID account to enable payment via facial recognition. Once that set up is complete, users can choose PopID as a payment method on Piestro’s app or on the machine itself. Orders placed ahead of time via the app can be retrieved via the same facial recognition. This pay-with-your-face option will be extended to Piestro’s white label, co-branded machines as well.

That ability to order ahead and pick up your pizza is also a new bit of functionality for the Piestro device. I spoke with Piestro CEO Massimo Noja De Marco by phone last week, who said that nine automat-style cubbies will be built into Piestro machines. This means you’ll be able to order your pizza ahead of time and have it held in a cubby that you unlock with your phone (or face).

That Piestro and PopID are working together isn’t that much of a surprise. PopID is part of the Cali Group of companies, which also includes Kitchen United, which De Marco founded and was Chief Concept Officer at. On a more existential level, in a post-COVID world, vending machine companies are looking to implement more contactless methods of interaction and reduce the number of physical touchpoints. As a result, other vending machine startups that may have been wary about facial recognition over privacy concerns could be more amenable to the technology now.

Piestro is certainly at the vanguard of a number of different technology trends. In addition to being a fully autonomous, robotic pizza restaurant and adopting a facial payment system, Piestro is also working with Kiwibot to allow delivery robots to pick up and deliver orders from its machine, and is embarking on its second round of equity crowdfunding.

We have to wait for all of this high-tech (and pizza) goodness, however. The first Piestros won’t roll out until early next year.

Restaurants, Retailers Launch a ‘Pay-by-Face’ Network Powered by PopID

At the tail-end of last week, a number of Pasadena, CA-based restaurants and retailers announced they had established the first pay-by-face network in the U.S. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, a growing list of businesses in the Southern California city have deployed tech from PopID to let customers make purchases via facial recognition without even having to touch their own mobile phones.

To use PopID’s facial recognition system, customers create a PopID account, which the company says users can now link their credit or debit card to in addition to their face. Then, at participating restaurants, those customers will be able to log into their account not only on their own mobile devices but also at restaurant-operated kiosks at the counter, drive-thru, and other areas of the business. Once the system scans the customer’s face, it automatically pulls up their account where past orders, loyalty points, and payment information are already stored.

What’s especially noteworthy about this news is that the technology enables some restaurant settings to be more contactless than many offerings out there that claim the same. Practically unheard of six months ago, so-called contactless technologies are now one of the most popular topics in the restaurant biz. Thing is, many of these systems, while they minimize or eliminate human-to-human contact, still require a customer to touch a kiosk, credit card machine, or other device handled by other customers. 

Some of PopID’s new deployments at these Pasadena restaurants will still require customers to touch a public-facing screen. Think walk-up or drive-thru kiosks. Others, however, will eliminate the need for customers to touch any device at all. Today’s press release mentions tableside order and payments that can happen with a server scanning a customer’s face with a handheld device. Creepy? Probably, but it still gets closest to providing actual “hands-free” order and payment methods for restaurant customers. 

PopID said the Pasadena launch of this pay-by-face network is the first of “a city-by-city rollout of the contactless payment service.” CEO John Miller said in each new city, the company initially focuses on college campuses and office buildings — which, given the state of the world, may or may not work as a long-term strategy. “As these communities grow comfortable using PopID to check-in, we enlist area restaurants and retailers to offer PopPay for transactions,” he said.

The popularity of Pasadena’s new pay-by-face network as well as subsequent deployments in other cities will tell us how much biometric data users are willing to swap in exchange for the promise of safety. If it turns out to be a lot, the nature of transactions could change must faster than anyone anticipated before the pandemic hit.

CaliBurger to Launch Payments using Facial Recognition

CaliBurger announced today that starting on January 30 customers at its Pasadena location will be able to pay for their meals with a smile. The quick service restaurant is expanding the use of facial recognition at that location from just unlocking loyalty accounts to actually paying for meals.

CaliBurger launched the FacePay pilot program towards the end of last year that allowed customers to use facial recognition kiosks to access meal histories, preferences and other bits of information stored in their loyalty accounts. According to a statement from CEO of Cali Group, John Miller, reaction was so positive to that program they fast-tracked payment capabilities.

It appears as though CaliBurger is taking security around facial recognition seriously. During the pilot, customers will be able to initiate payment for their meal with a glance at the camera, but they’ll still need to enter the three digit CVV from their credit card to finalize the transaction. The company says that after people get comfortable with facial recognition payments they will phase out the need for the CVV.

Assuming this new payment pilot goes well, look for CaliBurger to expand how it incorporates facial recognition kiosks into its restaurants. Bite, which provides facial recognition tablets for restaurants, has shown that using a person’s face to unlock their account allows menus to become more dynamic. They can be rearranged on the fly to frontload and upsell items based on a customer’s personal preferences.

In the meantime, those wanting a peek at the future of quick service restaurants can hit up the Pasadena CaliBurger at the end of this month. They can smile at the camera to pay for their meal and wave to Flippy the robot who is flipping their burgers.

Bite Says Face-Recognizing Kiosks Improve Customer Experience

Jack in the Box CEO, Leonard Comma, made news this week when he said “it just made sense” for his fast-food chain to consider switching from human cashiers to machines. To be sure, there are big societal implications if every restaurant made such a shift, but what if automated kiosks provide a better customer experience?

That’s a belief driving the startup Bite, which creates facial recognition kiosks for quick service restaurants (QSRs). Using a combination of iPads, proprietary software and machine learning, Bite’s tablet kiosks can recognize your face to unlock loyalty programs, bring up food preferences and provide opportunities for restaurants to upsell.

“We think facial recognition can offer a better experience than a cashier who doesn’t know your name or your preferences,” said Steve Truong, Co-Founder and Head of Product for Bite. For customers, this means having food history and preferences automatically presented onscreen for faster, more efficient ordering. This efficiency can also translate into more throughput for the restaurant.

Additionally, Bite’s machine learning develops an understanding of a particular customer’s habits over time and can rearrange the restaurant’s menu accordingly. For example, vegetarians will be presented with vegetarian items first, without having to scroll through pages of options they can’t eat.

The use of facial recognition in QSRs is a growing trend. A recent study from Oracle suggests that both consumers and restaurants are on-board with the idea, and restaurants like CaliBurger, UFood Grill and Malibu Poke are all rolling out facial recognition kiosks for faster ordering.

Based in Toronto and New York City, Bite actually started as a digital-menu company. Using tablets, it created media-rich interactive menus for restaurants to replace paper ones. The company soon learned it couldn’t scale that business as fast as it wanted to. Seeing that automated ordering kiosks in restaurants were basically interactive menus, and that facial recognition was becoming more available and accessible, Bite pivoted into this new direction a year ago.

Truong says that Bite’s solution stands apart from others in the market because it’s facial recognition is fast and doesn’t require much of the user. Additionally, the Bite system can easily be customized to plug into whatever point-of-sale payment and printing system a restaurant is already using.

When asked about the privacy and security concerns with using facial recognition, Truong says that those issues are top of mind for the company. Bite takes a “lot of care” when explaining and obtaining the opt-in consent from customers: All data is encrypted, in transit and at rest. Bite also holds the data, so restaurants only have access to broad statistics, not granular bits of information.

Right now, Bite has just three full employees, is bootstrapped and graduated from the Food-X accelerator program last year. Truong says the company has about a dozen kiosks in pilot programs, with bigger clients rolling out this year, but declined to offer specifics.

If the point of a quick-service restaurant is to be, well, quick, then using automated facial-recognition kiosks as cashiers just make sense.

Quick-Service Restaurants Are Quickly Turning to Facial Recognition

Once upon a time in the not so distant past, most considered ordering food via facial recognition either a gimmick that was either unrealistic or just creepy.

Times have changed, thanks in large part to technologies like the iPhone X, which you can unlock using your own mug. And while we’re some distance from facial recognition becoming a facet of everyday dining everywhere, there’s a growing number of restaurants now offering customers this option when it comes to ordering.

CaliBurger was the latest to join that group this week when it launched self-ordering kiosks at its Pasadena, California location. If customers like this move, the company said it plans to roll out kiosks to all 40 of its locations in the future.

It’s the quick-service restaurants like CaliBurger where facial-recognition ordering appears to be making the biggest impact. It’s not hard to understand why. Quick service got its name for a reason, and facial recognition can certainly speed up the order and payment process. 

Just look at UFood Grill, who earlier this year debuted self-order kiosks in its Owings Mills, Maryland location. According to the restaurant, customers using the kiosks can order and pay in less than 10 seconds. Kiosks use facial recognition to remember customers’ orders for future visits; they’re powered by technology from Michigan-based Nextep. 

Addressing the need for restaurants to increase speed, Nextep president Tommy Woycik recently said, “Imagine visiting your local drive-thru and ordering your favorite customized coffee drink with a quick glance at the camera.” Likewise, if you’re in China, you can pay for your next KFC order just by smiling at the camera.

While it’s not a quick-service restaurant, Dallas’ Malibu Poke opened this past November with the option to order via facial recognition already in place. Talking to the Dallas Observer, owner John Alexis referenced the new iPhone, saying that thanks to the phone, ordering via facial recognition is no longer gimmicky. He was also quick to point out that the system Malibu Poke uses actually prevents him or anyone on staff from accessing the scanned faces from customers: “I literally would not know how to find [a customer’s face] if I wanted to. If you want extra cucumbers, that’s between you and the machine.”

Data—who sees it, where it’s stored—is definitely one of the challenges that has to be addressed in order for facial recognition to become a more widely used way of ordering. (See this year’s lawsuit against Lettuce Entertain You, who owns the Wow Bao quick-service chains.) Just because, for example, Malibu Poke can’t access your facial scan doesn’t mean some ill-humored cyber criminal can’t.

Data will continue to be both a question and a challenge moving forward, but so far, it doesn’t appear to be raising too many concerns for businesses. Restaurants themselves are more likely to be occupied by things like increasing the speed of these kiosks and dealing with some of the reported glitches around lighting and camera angle—basically things that will impact the business’s bottom line today.

CaliBurger Launches Facial Recognition Pilot for Fast Ordering

The Cali Group announced today that it has launched a facial recognition ordering kiosk pilot program at its Pasadena CaliBurger restaurant. The move is another step towards full automation for the quick-service restaurant chain, which debuted Flippy, the burger flipping robot, at that same location earlier this year.

The facial recognition kiosk, which uses NEC’s NeoFace facial recognition software, will identify registered customers and pull up their loyalty accounts without requiring them to swipe a card. From there, customers can place orders or bring up their meal histories for faster re-ordering. According to the Cali Group, if customers like the new system, similar kiosks will be rolled out to CaliBurger’s 40 locations across the global next year.

Here’s a video explainer from CaliBurger:

As of now, the kiosk won’t allow you to pay with your face, a feature that Cali Group says will also be rolled out in 2018.

In a recent survey from Oracle presented at the Global Gaming Expo in October, nearly half of consumers polled said using facial recognition and 3D imaging would make their restaurant experience better, as they liked the idea of not having to present a loyalty card. In that same research, 46 percent of restaurant operators said facial recognition would be mainstream by 2025.

While showing your mug may be more convenient, security is an immediate concern that comes to mind with facial recognition. If 5 million credit card numbers can be stolen from Sonic Drive-In customers, what happens if hackers can access your face?

Today’s news no doubt should concern CaliBurger restaurant employees and, more broadly, quick-service restaurant employees everywhere. As noted, CaliBurger has already been trying out the Flippy burger ‘bot in the kitchen (and food companies overall helped drive record orders of robots this year). McDonald’s and Wendy’s have both rolled out self-service kiosks, and Apple is training a generation of iPhone X users to trust facial recognition.

When asked how tech like the kiosks will impact existing employees and future headcount, a CaliBurger spokesperson replied via email with the following statement. “If customers are pleased with the new ordering experience, we plan to roll out the kiosks to CaliBurger’s locations across the globe. Our goal is to innovate the customer experience by using this technology to help and work alongside kitchen staff to reduce hazardous and tedious tasks and increase productivity.”

Automation however, doesn’t automatically translate into success, as Eatsa recently discovered. It seems though, like CaliBurger is taking a methodical approach, and 2018 is right around the corner, so we should see pretty quickly how well people like coming face-to-face with facial recognition.

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Unilever Uses AI, Facial Recognition to Find Lovers and Haters of Marmite

Whether you love or hate its product, Unilever wants to know, and they can tell by the look on your face.

The makers of Marmite, a savory spread popular in the U.K., is one of those products consumers either love or hate. Capitalizing on this binary reaction, Unilever has begun a scientific project in the guise of a clever marketing campaign—The Marmite Gene Project. Unilever has developed many components to this work include a web/smartphone app and a DNA kit used to determine whether a given person is a lover or hater. That is, presumably regarding its condiment—however, the concept has taken on a life of its own thanks to a viral TV/video.

With the ability to capture a video via smartphone or desktop, the giant CPG company is hoping to elicit trials of its product just so eager consumers can learn whether they are lovers or haters. The facial-recognition part of the app is serious business based on Microsoft’s Emotion API  which can detect a range of emotions including sadness, contempt, anger, happiness and surprise.

“Marmite has always divided the nation between love and hate. It’s a cultural phenomenon,” Simon Richings, creative partner at digital agency AnalogFolk, the creative brains behind the campaign, told AdFreak. “But all this time Marmite have been questioning: Why? Is it fate? With TasteFace we wondered: What if we could use the emotion-reading capabilities of facial recognition technology to discover, in real time, whether you were born a lover or a hater?”

The broader and very real test, which was part of the Marmite Gene Project, involved consumers taking a DNA swab sample which was sent to the company for analysis. The object was to determine whether an individual had the proper amount of single nucleotide polymorphisms which indicates the likelihood of liking the salty breakfast spread.

On a more scientist level, the project hopes to understand how genetics contributes to taste perception of Marmite and/or taste preference of Marmite. The secondary aim was to discover whether there was a predisposition to liking/ or hating the product (and presumably other products) based on existing genetic markers. A number of companies are rushing into an arena in which DNA and special analysis if bloodwork can be used to personalize diets for optimal health.

Of course, one of the byproducts of this use of AI was to have Marmite lovers and haters share their results on social media. To date, that goal appears to be a success--#marmite gene has more than 55k followers on Twitter.

The use of facial recognition is being used by product companies in many ways including KFC using it as a means to pay for food. Apple is hoping to deploy the technology as a means for users to lock and unlock their phones. Sephora is using facial recognition to show customers how makeup would look on their faces and L’Oréal has an AI-based virtual facial recognition app that performs a similar function.

Your Face Is Your Key: Exploring Facial Recognition with TrueFace’s Shaun Moore

Back in 2014, Shaun Moore and his cofounder Nezare Chafni started selling a consumer video doorbell called Chui with facial recognition technology. They eventually realized the future of the company was not in doorbells, but in developing robust facial recognition and detection technology that could be applied to a variety of scenarios.

TrueFace.ai was born.

In the podcast, Shaun and I talk about those early days, the hyper competitive video doorbell market, the decision to pivot to becoming an enterprise facial detection technology provider and how this technology will eventually be applied to nearly any situation where personal authentication  is required.