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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Robot

Podcast: How One Operator is Reinventing His Restaurant With Technology

When Andrew Simmons decided to buy a restaurant in January 2020, little did the long-time entrepreneur know that in just a few months, he would be forced to close his doors due to COVID. 

But instead of giving up, he knew he had to get creative to survive. Survive he did, and when he reopened his doors, he kept tinkering, trying to figure out how new technology could make his restaurant more efficient. 

Andrew’s been an open book during the process, open-sourcing his learning as he navigates his journey via posts on Linkedin and a blog. He shares what works and what doesn’t, providing a potential blueprint for other operators thinking about how technology could change their business. 

During this podcast, Andrew and Mike talk about:

  • How the installation of a pizza robot from Picnic completely changed how he does business
  • How one piece of game-changing technology, like a pizza robot, forces other changes and adoption of new technology throughout the restaurant’s workflow
  • The impact of new technology on his unit price for pizzas 
  • How analytics software helped him realize his dine-in business was not profitable and how it changed his thinking about how he ran his restaurant
  • How he was forced to rethink how he used employees through the use of technology and how the employees (and former employees) have reacted
  • His pizza subscription concept and how he believes it can help him pay for opening new restaurants
  • Andrew’s plans to launch a 100-unit restaurant chain built using off-the-shelf restaurant technology

If you are considering using technology such as robotics for your restaurant, this episode is a must-listen! You can listen to the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or click play below.

A Food Tech Case Study: Four Lessons From the Demise of Zume

Late last week, news broke that Zume, the company famous mostly for raising a whole bunch of money for its pizza robot & cook-on-the-road food trucks concept, had shut down. The company’s demise, first reported by The Information, comes after burning through $450 million and a well-documented pivot away from its pizza robot and delivery technology products to sustainable packaging in 2020.

Here at The Spoon, we’ve followed Zume since its inception and even had its CTO speak at our event just months before the company laid off 500 employees and dropped its automation business.

When Zume inevitably shows up in business school case studies in years to come, here are a few lessons we can extract from the company’s journey:

Startups Should Pick One Thing To Be Good At

You always hear startup founders talk about how important it is to focus, partly because their first product needs to be really good, but also because distractions can keep a team from executing the way they need to execute. Zume was trying to reinvent both food making and food delivery, which meant they were basically running two highly capital-intensive startups in one. They were early enough at pizza automation to have a shot at success, but then they made their job infinitely more complicated by also trying to create an entirely new kind of delivery truck complete with built-in ovens. That’s a lot of time and capital to achieve marginally fresher pizza.

Creating Custom-Designed Delivery Fleets (with Built-in Cooking!) is an Expensive Fool’s Errand

We don’t just have Zume to prove this, but also Wonder, a company that decided they would differentiate by creating an entirely custom-built delivery fleet in which the food was cooked after it left the kitchen. Both of these companies burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and, in the end, realized that they probably should not have invested all that investor capital in something other companies are pretty good at (delivery) just to make sure the food was maybe a little fresher by the time it got to the customer’s door.

Pivots Should be Somewhat Adjacent to Core IP

After spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a food automation and delivery tech business, the company pivoted to a completely different business in sustainable packaging. The company, which had developed a fairly interesting realtime delivery intelligence platform in addition to a food automation platform, likely could have pivoted to a less-capital intensive business in either of these areas and continued to maintain momentum. Instead, they started over in a fairly crowded vertical and never got enough traction to make a go of it.

Tech Companies Rarely Succeed in Creating Customer-Facing Restaurant Businesses

Time and time again, we’ve watched as startups try to build the “restaurant of the future” and fail because building a consumer brand requires focus and capital, capital they don’t have because they’ve spent it all developing technology. Zume, Eatsa, Wonder, and others have shown it’s probably best to choose between being a technology company or a restaurant business, but probably not both. Some may point to Sweetgreen as something of an exception, but even they had to acquire a company in Spyce which had tried and failed to build a consumer-facing brand for their own restaurant robot technology.

Four Years After CES, Breadbot’s Robotic Breadmaker is Dishing Out Loaves at Grocery Stores

For robot startups seeking to make a splash at CES, there are a few options: holding a large press conference, making it weird and creepy, or serving cocktails. However, one method stands out above the rest for drawing in crowds: wafting the aroma of freshly baked bread (aka ‘the Subway method‘).

That’s what the folks behind the Wilkinson Baking Company did back in 2019, and the end result was their robot, the Breadbot, became a sensation that year at the world’s largest tech event. The smell of fresh bread pulled in journalists, tech nerds, and passersby like a tractor beam, garnering the type of press that big budget brands like Samsung would envy.

The small Eastern Washington-based company, co-founded by brothers Randall and Ron Wilkinson, has been working diligently to bring their product to market since then. Their goal was to transition from a working prototype to a production-ready machine suitable for grocery stores.

As part of the transition, the company also looked to find a new CEO. The Wilkinson brothers, both in their late sixties, wanted a CEO that could take the early-stage startup from a small LLC with a big idea to one that was mature enough to raise funding and bring the first product to market. Paul Rhynard, a former strategy consultant for McKinsey who also had experience raising capital as Chief Strategy Officer for Russell Investments, stepped in for Randall in April of last year and has since helped raise a seed round of $3 million last summer to fund the build-out of the company’s first production run of robots.

According to Rhynard, the new robot was built after testing the early prototype in a small grocery store in Eastern Washington.

“The machine that was at CES has been dramatically updated,” Rhynard told The Spoon. “One of the key differences is we rebuilt the brain of it. We have fully custom chipboards and a custom tech stack that run the machine. It was a huge update from a control and software standpoint of actually operating the machine.”

The company also made significant upgrades to the mechanical system, including adding four hoppers instead of one, which allows the Breadbot to make four varieties of bread throughout the day. The new Breadbot has significant updates to how it bakes and measures bread quality which, according to Rhynard, allows the machine to achieve more consistent results.

“So now we have a machine that we can scale up and start to place in grocers around the country,” said Rhynard.

And that’s what they’re starting to do. The company built 20 robots and so far has placed seven of them in different grocery chains which include Super One Foods, which is operating a Breadbot in a store in Northern Idaho and two more in Montana, and last month the company installed a Breadbot at Akins Fresh Market in eastern Washington. Three more Breadbots are set to be installed in a high-end Milwaukee, Wisconsin grocery retailer this month.

Rhynard says the company’s business model is a lease-plus-fee model, where grocers pay a monthly fee and a small amount per loaf baked. In return, Breadbot provides a turnkey solution, which includes providing bread mix, yeast, bread bags, and ongoing maintenance.

In return, grocers get what is essentially a bakery in a box that sits in full view of the customers on the store floor. The machine, which can produce up to 200 loaves a day, can produce bread throughout the day, with each loaf taking about 96 minutes from start to finish to make a loaf. In the stores it is currently operating, the Breadbot is making three varieties of bread: Nine grain, homestyle, and honey oat.

According to Rhynard, early on stores aligned the baking of the bread with the hours of the baking staff, which meant the Breadbot baked all the bread in the morning. Now, he says, some stores are going to start experimenting with baking bread during peak shopping hours, from four to seven at night, which will allow shoppers to buy hot, freshly made bread (and take in that fresh-baked bread smell).

Rhynard says that while grocery stores are their key target customer, they are also having talks with other potential types of customers, including cafeterias and the military. The company is also talking to potential customers in places where fresh-baked bread is difficult to come by, including Hawaii, which imports the vast majority of its bread from the US west coast.

To fund further growth, Rhynard said the company is now starting to look to raise a Series A. He knows it will be challenging given the current state of the market, but he’s optimistic the company’s current traction will attract new backers.

For now, though,the company is busy finding new customers looking to pull in shoppers with the smell of freshly baked robot bread.

Meet the Breadbot 2.0

Yo-Kai To Debut Desktop Ramen Robot For Space-Constrained Retail Formats at CES 2023

Yo-Kai Express, a startup that makes autonomous ramen robots, will debut its latest model at CES, a desktop ramen-making machine targeted at small-format retailers such as gas stations and co-working spaces.

The new machine, called the YKE Desktop, is a semi-automatic cooking machine that makes a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds. The machine is paired with an RFID-enabled freezer that holds up to 24 bowls of ramen.

“We are pleased to debut our new product : Yo-Kai Desktop, the new terminal with a smaller form factor, which can be installed anywhere – remote office, gas station, convenience stores, co-working space,” said Andy Lin, founder and CEO of Yo-Kai Express. “It’s a semi-automated machine that provides our customers more flexibility.”

In addition to showing off its newest model at CES, the company will demo a new app that enables customers to order ramen remotely. The app, which will be released to the public in the spring, allows customers to earn loyalty points, discounts, and rewards.

The news follows a busy fall for Yo-Kai, in which they expanded throughout Japan, raised additional funding, and partnered with the Japanese robotics giant Softbank to enable an integration with server robot Pepper.

For those interested in checking out the new Yo-Kai machine, they will be in the Food Tech Pavilion at CES at booth 53114.

Picnic Partners With Modular Kitchen Manufacturer To Deliver Pizza Kitchen in a Box

Picnic Works, a Seattle-based maker of food-making robots, today announced a new partnership with ContekPro, a manufacturer of modular kitchens. Under the newly announced partnership, the two companies will deliver custom-built, pre-fabricated kitchens to quick service operators, hotel chains, or anyone else who wants a pizza robot restaurant in a box.

For those unfamiliar with Picnic’s newest partner, ContekPro builds modular kitchens for food service companies, including quick-serve restaurants, ghost kitchens, and resorts. The Portland-based company was founded in 2017 as a modular construction company and pivoted in 2019 to focus exclusively on modular kitchens after it found over half of its orders were for modular kitchens.

The deal marks the second partnership for Picnic over the last few months with a fellow Northwest startup. In August, the company announced an agreement with Minnow to offer its Pizza Station with the fellow Northwest startup’s pickup pods. The company has also been announcing a string of new trials with operators big and small for its pizza robot this year.

The combined solution from Picnic and ContekPro offers something of an answer to one of Picnic’s competitors, Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based startup that builds shipping container food robots. Last year Hyper announced it had made a shipping container-based robot restaurant for Pizza Hut Israel (Hyper’s founder happens to be the master franchise owner for all of Pizza Hut Israel).

Whether it’s for a QSR building a small footprint drive-thru or a ghost kitchen operator expanding into new markets, modular kitchens make a lot of sense in many scenarios. For example, instead of finding land, breaking ground, and going through the often arduous process of zoning a new building, dropping a shipping container kitchen into a parking lot or some other easily accessible location can provide a much easier way to expand.

Typical ContekPro containers range anywhere from 320 square feet up to 960 square feet in size (according to ContekPro, the rendering in the announcement is 320 square feet). And while the announcement doesn’t describe the economics of a pizza-robot-in-a-box, ContekPro told The Spoon that operators can probably expect to pay from $240 thousand up to $400-$500 thousand or so for a restaurant container. As far as the cost of a Picnic, operators can expect to pay Picnic its typical robot-as-a-service monthly fees (which can range from $3,500 to $4,500 a month).

For Restaurant Robots to Succeed, Remy Robotics Believes They Need to Be at The Center of The Kitchen

Ask Yegor Traiman about whether robots or humans are better at making food, and he’ll side with his fellow carbon-based lifeforms.

“What might be super easy for humans is very difficult for robots,” Traiman told The Spoon.

But this doesn’t mean the CEO of food robotics startup Remy Robotics thinks humans should prepare all our food. In fact, he thinks robots should an integral part of the kitchen. The answer, Traiman explains, lies in creating a world in which the robots can succeed. In other words, we need to build kitchens around the robot rather than force-fitting a robot into human-centered kitchens.

“To really reach mass market adoption and really solve the labor shortage, you need to put the robot at the center.”

For Traiman, that means having culinary engineers build systems with the robots in mind from the start.

“It’s not about a fancy Michelin star chef,” said Traiman. “It’s really about engineers from the culinary side which invent the new cooking methods, frameworks and techniques for the robots to make them as efficient as they can.”

As for the robots, Traimain believes they need to highly flexible, a far cry from what he sees from most of today’s food robotics startups.

“Most of the food robot startups end up automating just a single process like flipping burgers,” said Traiman. “But can you gain mass market adoption with a single process automation?”

According to Traiman, his company also started down that path and tried to automate high-volume processes like burger assembly and pizza cutting, but realized they needed to focus less on high-volume mechanical solutions and instead build systems with software-defined intelligence and flexibility.

“We quickly realized, it’s a short time to market, but it’s not scalable. We immediately switched to more complicated deep tech based on AI, a true smart robotics application.”

That flexibility allows Remy Robotics to cook a wide variety of food types, which is crucial to the bigger vision of the company. Today the company operates its own robot-powered dark kitchens in Barcelona and Paris and creates food under the company’s own in-house virtual brands which is delivered through third party service providers like Deliveroo and UberEats. Longer term, however, Traiman sees his company as a B2B platform for any restaurant operator who wants to leverage automation in a scalable way to use Remy as a kitchen-as-a-service.

“Even though there is hype, no one in this business has found a sustainable business model yet,” said Traiman. “Delivery service providers are struggling. Virtual restaurants are also kind of struggling. Without the help of disruptive technology, there is no way out and I really believe robotics can make it better, cheaper and more reliable.”

You can see Remy Robotics and connect with Traimain at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week (get your ticket here). You can watch our full interview with Traiman below.

The Spoon Interviews - Remy Robotics

The Spoon Weekly: Coffee Balls, Insect-Powered Upcycling & More

Welcome to the Spoon newsletter, online edition. Subscribe to The Spoon to get it delivered straight to your inbox.

SKS Is in Two Weeks! Check out our speakers, workshops, interactive sessions and more!  We’ll also be having our exhibition and networking in a metaverse space built just for SKS! Multi-person tickets available

Does CoffeeB’s Podless Coffee Machine Have a Fighting Chance Against The Keurig?

Swiss retail giant Migros dropped a giant surprise on the coffee world with the debut of the CoffeeB coffee brewing system.

The new machine, which took the company five years to develop, is a single-serve coffee machine that completely does away with the plastic pod. The new system utilizes round balls of coffee called, um, Coffee Balls, instead of old-school plastic or aluminum capsules. Coffee Balls, which are wrapped in a layer of algae that keeps the coffee fresh and protected from flavor loss, can be dropped into a compost bin after they are used.

I always appreciate a complete rethink of a system to correct a shortcoming, and pod system plastic and aluminum waste are definitely problematic. But even if the CoffeeB system makes great coffee and reduces waste, does it stand a fighting chance to displace a significant number of Keurigs or Nespressos?

It will be an uphill battle. A quarter of Americans use single-serve coffee machines daily (and 4 in 10 households have a Keurig or Nespresso type capsule system), and while newer approaches like grind-and-brew coffee machines that do away with the pod have been around for a few years, none have really seemed to take off in any significant way.

If CoffeeB is to become the first new single-serve system in decades to garner any substantial market share, they’ll need to take a page out of Nespresso and Keurig’s playbook. This means creating a “Coffee Ball” ecosystem around their technology, which would include a scalable and licensable system to produce the coffee servings (aka balls), a strong coffee roaster partner program in which roasters produce branded Balls, and getting retailers on board to sell the system.

Read the full story here. 

You can hear CoffeeB CEO Frank Wilde talk about the future of single-serve coffee at SKS. Use Code NEWSLETTER for 20% off tickets.  

SKS 2022 is in two weeks. We have interactive workshops on building food tech products, fireside chats from leaders building the future of food & cooking, and a product exhibition in the metaverse. You won’t want to miss it. Get your tickets today!

Asia Pacific Leads in Plant-Based Meat IP According to Report

While many think innovation in plant-based meat is a fairly recent phenomenon, companies, researchers and entrepreneurs have looking for ways to leverage plants as an alternative to animal agriculture since the sixties.

However, there’s no doubt the pace of innovation has accelerated in recent decades amidst a worsening climate crisis and a rising global population, and one way to quantify the innovation is through an analysis of the growth in intellectual property. And now, thanks to a new report published by researcher Roots Analysis, we can do just that.

According to the Roots report, the number of cumulative IP publications for plant-based meat has grown by nearly 3x over the past decade, going from 2,388 in 2012 to 7,126 by 2022. In addition, the growth in patent filings, granted patents, and amended patents (the three of which make up the bulk of IP-related publications) has grown nearly every year over the past decade, with the annual growth of publications going from just over one hundred per year for the decade prior to 2012, to around 900 per year in both 2020 (915 new IP documents) and 2021 (891 new documents).

According to the report, most IP documents in the plant-based meat space are patent applications (77.4%) and granted patents (18.7%). When breaking the documents down by region, Asia Pacific is responsible for over half of all IP (3,717), compared to about 18% for North America (1,277 documents) and Europe (1,310 documents).

Read the full story here.

Food Retail

With Connected Stores, Instacart Continues Push to Become Technology Platform Partner for Grocers

Today Instacart announced a new bundle of technologies aimed at helping retailers digitally power their storefronts. A mix of existing and new products, the new suite is a sign of Instacart’s continued effort to transform itself from an in-store shopper and delivery services company to an omnichannel grocery technology arms dealer.

The Connected Store suite of technologies includes the following:

A new and improved Caper cart: The new suite includes a third generation Caper cart. Like the second generation Caper, the new cart allows customers to drop their items in the cart and the Caper adds it to the list without a barcode scan, but is 65% larger, has a longer-life battery, and is designed to work well in inclement weather.

Scan & Pay: For retailers who choose not to deploy Caper carts, Instacart is introducing a new service called Scan & Pay. Scan & Pay allows shoppers to scan and pay for products with their phone. The service looks especially helpful for EBT Snap users, who can scan items to identify whether they are EBT SNAP-eligible.

Lists: Lists syncs up a shopper’s personal shopping list with the Caper cart app or a grocer Instacart-powered app. Items are imported into the Caper list and checked off when you drop them in your cart.

You can read the full story here. 

Food Retail

Fresh Portal Is a Tech-Powered Take on the Old-Timey Milk Door

When I first saw the Fresh Portal at CES, I thought it made a whole lotta sense. After all, what food-ordering families wouldn’t appreciate the ability to keep groceries or restaurant-delivered food cold or warm until they arrive home from work?

But the idea behind the Fresh Portal isn’t exactly new. In fact, you can go back as far as the early 1900s to find a predecessor in the milk door. Milk doors were built into homes when the milkman was as common as the mailman, an early version of a storage locker where that weekly delivery of milk could be stored until ready for pickup. Like the Fresh Portal, the milk door was actually two doors, one on both the outside and inside with the storage cavity in between.

Fresh Portal founder Jeremy High is aware of the history of home delivery storage lockers. In a recent interview with The Spoon, he said his product is a modern, high-tech take on the old-timey milk locker.

“Fresh Portal is a modern twist on that,” High said. “It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It receives deliveries of the food you’re getting delivered by DoorDash or Instacart, groceries, and even packages.”

To read the full story here.

You can meet Fresh Portal CEO Jeremy High at SKS in two weeks. Get your 20% off ticket with discount code NEWSLETTER today!

Future Food

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

You can read the full story here.

Food Robots

UAE Installs Bread-Dispensing Robots Around Dubai To Help Feed Those in Need

LBX Food Robotics (formerly known as LeBread Xpress) announced today they have partnered with The Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI) Foundation to install bread-dispensing robots throughout Dubai to help feed those in food insecure situations. The custom-built Bake Xpress machines will provide a selection of complimentary local breads and pitas and will give customers the ability to make voluntary monetary donations.

The partnership started in 2020 when MBRGI, the charitable foundation of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (the ruler of Dubai), approached LBX to see if their robotic bread-making robots could be used as a way to get food to people in need. Two years later, the partners have deployed a total of 10 bread-dispensing robots around Dubai as part of the first phase of the collaboration. More robots are planned for the first quarter of 2023.

To read the full story here!

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To fund the manufacturing and rollout of their kiosks, the company has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding from a group that includes deep tech fund SRI Capital, India-based micro-VC Pitchright Ventures, investor syndicates from Letsventure and WeFounderCircle, tech accelerator Techstars, and a handful of angel investors. 

According to the Xook, their first kiosk – the Xook Primus – will be able to make salads and meal bowls across a variety of cuisines. The unmanned kiosks have a 3’x3′ footprint and can make a meal in two minutes. Xook’s current pilot in Bangalore has made 60 different types of meals and is currently offering 25 of the most popular dishes.

Unlike other robotic kiosk startups, Xook plans to utilize a business model in which they provide the kiosk to a customer at no cost, and the company makes money through the sale of meals. The meals, which can be paid for by the employer or employee (or resident in a multifamily housing unit), will be replenished daily by a Xook employee located in each city.

Natarajan and Roy told me they believe this model will work, in part, because of the low cost of their machines, which will each cost about $15 thousand to manufacture. This, they say, compares to a cost of up to $70 thousand for other robotic kiosks. The founders told me they could achieve a lower cost per unit due to their custom-built robotics and easy access to the technical talent and manufacturing in India, where most of their employees are located.

Interestingly, while most of Xook’s employees are in India, the company is based in Singapore. According to the cofounders, the reason for that was they had initially planned on trialing their robots in the island country due to the business-friendly environment and the country’s embrace of high-tech options like robotic vending kiosks.

For now, though, the company is planning to launch its first pilot in the US by the end of this year and has lined up two food brands to help them enter the market. These partners, which include a salad brand and bowl meal brand, will “use Xook as a channel to market” for different locations like offices and apartment buildings.

When it launches in the US, Xook will be joining others like Doordash’s Chowbotics, SJW, Nommi, and RoboEatz, each fighting for market traction with their kiosks. Some, like Basil Street, have found the going pretty rough and have had to call it quits.

In addition to its lower cost and unique business model, Xook’s founders believe they can find a path into an increasingly crowded market for automated food kiosks by relying on food brand partners. In addition to its initial two partners, they think the Xook’s ability to handle a variety of foods will allow them to add additional partners as they grow.

“There could be multiple brands who could be serving food in the same vending machine at the same time,” said Roy. “The Xook is like a multi-brand food court in a box.”

Remy Robotics Unveils Robotic Ghost Kitchen Platform as It Opens Third Location in Barcelona

Remy Robotics, an automated ghost kitchen startup, came out of stealth this week as it opened its third autonomous robotic kitchen.

Remy, based in Barcelona, creates custom-built robotic kitchens tailored for the food delivery industry. For the past year, the company has been operating two dark kitchens, one in Barcelona and one in Paris, and is opening its third kitchen in Barcelona this week.

Until this point, the company has been delivering food under its own virtual kitchen brands – including a flexitarian food brand called OMG – and has cooked and sold 60 thousand meals. Now, with the launch of its third kitchen, Remy is opening up its kitchens to other restaurant brands. According to the company, its system has the flexibility to install a new robotic kitchen and have it operational in about 48 hours.

If a brand is thinking about launching a new delivery-centric virtual brand with Remy, they shouldn’t expect to use their chefs and employees to make the meals. Remy believes that automated kitchens work better when the food is optimized for robotics from the ground up.

“We maximize what robots can do,” Remy CEO Yegor Traiman told The Spoon in a Zoom interview. “The main mistake of most robotics companies is they’re trying to mimic the human and teach robots how to do the things a human would do.”

Instead, Traiman says that they configured the entire process of food making to be done by robots, developing recipes and cooking techniques based on a variety of parameters, including the shape of Remy’s own packaging and how much moisture is lost during the cooking process. The company claims that their robotic systems decide autonomously how and for how long to cook a dish, based on where a customer lives and how long the delivery will take. They also utilize “computer vision and neural networks” alongside “smart ovens and sensors controlling temperature, moisture, weight and other key parameters.”

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman said. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

A Remy robot-powered ghost kitchen can fit up to ten brands into the same space that one human-powered kitchen can operate, and, according to Traiman, it shouldn’t be a problem adding new partners.

“There is huge interest at the moment in Spain and in France,” Traiman said. “Almost every neighbor at these cloud kitchen facilities a knocking on the door asking ‘guys, can we do something together?'”

Food Robot Roundup: Delivery Bots Explore New Areas, Yum China’s Robot-Powered Expansion

It’s been a busy few weeks for restaurant robots. In this edition of the food robot roundup, we’ve got updates on the expanding map for a couple of food delivery bots, Jamba & Blendid’s growing relationship, Yum China’s increasing reliance on robots, and more.

Let’s get to it.

Coco delivery bot expands beyond California

Coco has spread its wings. The food delivery robot startup has expanded to Austin, Texas, the first city outside of its home state of California. This expansion is thanks in part to the Series A funding round of $36 million that it raised last August. Coco launches with ten partners in Austin, including Arpeggio Grill, Bamboo Bistro, Clay Pit, DeSano Pizzeria, Tuk Tuk Thai, and Aviator Pizza.

Coco makes a four-wheeled, cooler-sized robot that delivers food and beverages. Coco prepositions its robot at merchant locations in dense city environments and advertises that it completes deliveries in 30 minutes or less. The company has indicated Austin is only its first stop in Texas as it has plans to expand to other cities in the Lonestar state.

Kiwibot, another robot delivery service, announced that they’ve raised $7.5M pre-series A funding and closed an expansion deal with Sodexo, a food services and facilities management company. They currently have 200 robots operating in 10 campuses and are on track to expand to 1200 robots and 50 locations by the end of 2022. 

Kiwibot, which was founded at the University of California, Berkeley, has long-targeted college campuses, ideal locations for food delivery robots with their dense populations of hungry college students, and protected pedestrian walkways. Besides the slew of robots making deliveries on campuses, consumer-facing food kiosks (more on that later) and autonomous retail shopping have also been moving in.

Jamba and Blendid expand to two more campuses

Jamba and Blendid have expanded their reach to two more college campuses, Georgia College and Kennesaw State University. The co-branded Jamba by Blendid smoothie kiosks offer a quick and convenient way to pick up a healthy smoothie and will be located in each school’s student union. 

University campuses are a great way for Jamba by Blendid to tap into a market that is open to using technology and usually doesn’t have easy access to healthy food like smoothies. Blendid has plans to expand its kiosks into other locations such as gyms, hospitals, and airports, which means the company will need to adapt to different customer buying behavior and preferences. At universities, Blendid offers flavors of the week or theme-based drinks to keep students engaged and coming back. 

Hyphen Raises $24 Million Series A

Hyphen, a startup that automates the back-of-house food assembly for restaurants, just announced a $24m Series A funding round led by Tiger Global.

The company’s flagship product is the Makeline, a modular robotic food assembly line. Workers focus on taking the orders and the machine combines ingredients and can generate 350+ meals per hour. KitchenOS, the software powering the Makeline, utilizes data from the robotic assembly line and other inputs to optimize workflows, recipe development, and food scheduling. 

Hyphen’s modular system means that restaurants can add or take away modules and choose ones that precisely fit their needs, such as dispensing, reheating, and mixing. According to company CEO Stephen Klein, the company currently has 11 customers who have pre-ordered the Makeline.

You can catch the Spoon’s interview with Hyphen’s CEO and co-founder Stephen Klein here. 

Yum China expands stores without workers

Image credit: Associated Press

Yum China, a Chinese restaurant group that spun off from U.S. parent Yum Brands in 2016, has expanded its number of stores while keeping its labor force the same, in part by increased use of AI and robotics. The group operates restaurants such as KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell and has increased the number of stores by 56% from 7,652 in 2016 to 11,788 in 2021. However, the company has kept the same number of employees during the same period at 420,000 full and part-time staff. 

Yum China has managed this by leveraging a variety of restaurant technology. The company has installed touch screen panels to automate the ordering process and has installed robots in its KFC to serve soft-serve ice cream in several Chinese cities. Yum has installed digital lockers store takeout orders in other locations.

Yum China’s increased reliance on automation is just one sign of the rapid adoption of restaurant technology adoption in the Chinese fast food sector. Other examples include this restaurant in Foshan, a city in Guangdong’s southern province, where a robot prepares and serves fast food dishes. Robotic arms prepare the food and then robot waiters and a conveyor-belt system deliver the food.

In case you missed it, I discussed cultural differences in openness to technology adoption in the last roundup, where I discussed the robots serving food to Olympians in Beijing. It’ll be interesting to see if the high profile of robots at the Olympics will lead to more acceptance of food robots in the United States or more hesitation.

CES: Welcome to our Food Robot Future (Video)

Last month, The Spoon got on the technology industry’s biggest stage to talk about the state of food robotics with leaders building food robot companies for the restaurant, retail, agriculture and food service.

Panelists on the first-ever food robot panel at CES include Clayton Wood (Picnic), Suma Reddy (Future Acres), Andy Lin (Yokai Express), Juan Higueros (Bear Robotics) and yours truly as moderator.

During the conversation, we discussed business models, the evolution of technologies, policy and much more.

You can watch the full session entitled Welcome to our Food Robot Future below.

Meet Bolk, a Robotic Bowl Food Canteen Company That Just Raised €4M

Bolk, a maker of bowl-making robotic canteen, announced today that it has raised €4 million in new funding.

Founded in 2020, the French startup is using the capital to build prototypes which it has already started to deploy around Paris and surrounding areas.

The Bolk canteen bot, which is reminiscent of Chowbotics’ Sally robot, takes up 2 square meters of floor space and can produce up to 60 meals an hour. The Bolk is completely autonomous and can make a variety of foods, using a mix of sweet, savory, cold or hot ingredients that can make up to 300 total combinations.

The company supplies food ingredients to each robot. Ingredients are pre-cooked in local kitchens in Paris, and Bolk re-stocks each robot twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday.

The company plans to expand in 2022, looking to deploy up to 40 Bolk-bots around France. The initial rollout will be into corporate offices, but the company also has plans to explore other potential venues such as public spaces or retail environments.

The company was founded by Nicolas Jeanne, who like many in this space point to a mission of democratizing fresh food through the use of robotics.

“The catering sector is constantly evolving and we are building a new self-service food experience, offering companies and their staff a daily menu of delicious and eco-responsible meals at the best possible prices; meals that are made to order and produced in 45 seconds flat, therefore ultra-fresh,” said Jeanne.

You can get a sneak peek at the Bolk in the video below.

BOLK - pionnier de la cantine robotisée