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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Robot

Is IdeaLab’s Bill Gross Building a Food Prep and Delivery Robot?

Every now and then, an interesting patent appears in patent searches that make you wonder exactly what someone’s up to. Now, don’t get me wrong. Patents are issued all the time, and most of the time, a real product or business isn’t created. But when it comes to someone like IdeaLab‘s Bill Gross – an inventor known for creating dozens of products and companies – you have to wonder what he’s got up his sleeve.

First, let’s look at the patent. Granted B1 status yesterday, the patent, US 11738466 B1, is titled “Robot For Preparing And Delivering Food Items” The patent description goes on to describe just that:

The automated food preparation and delivery robot comprises a communications system configured to receive a food order and address from a customer, a navigation system configured to automatically drive the vehicle to the address, and an automated food preparation system configured to prepare food in accordance with the food order while en route to the customer address.

The automated food preparation system is configured to determine a drive time to travel to the customer address, and determine a preparation time to prepare the food in accordance with the food order. If the drive time is greater than the preparation time, the robot waits and then begins preparing the food after a delay substantially equal to the drive time minus the preparation time. In this manner, preparation of the food coincides with arrival at the customer address.

We’ve seen lots of crazy ideas that tie together mobility and cooking, but this is the first one that I’ve seen that is a fully autonomous robotic vehicle and food prep all in one:

The invention in the preferred embodiment is an automated food preparation and delivery robot configured to prepare food orders while en route to a customer address, without the aid of a person on the vehicle. The automated food preparation and delivery robot comprises: a vehicle, a communications system configured to receive a food order and address from a customer, a navigation system configured to automatically drive the vehicle to the address; and an automated food preparation system configured to prepare the food in accordance with the food order while en route to the customer address and dispense the food upon arrival.

Here’s a figure from the patent that outlines the sequence of processing a food order:

Definitely ambitious and kinda crazy, especially considering past venture-funded ideas that combines food, automation and mobility haven’t exactly been successful at this point.

On the other hand, this is Bill Gross, a well-known inventor and successful entrepreneur. And since Gross, who runs one of the longest-running Silicon Valley technology incubators around, is listed as the sole inventor on the patent, my guess is this is an idea he’s at least somewhat invested in.

Still, it’s yet to be seen whether or not he’s planning on productizing the concept. Like I said, most patented ideas remain just that, ideas. But given Gross’s history of both founding successful companies and a deep interest in robotics – he was a co-founder of Evolution Robotics, a maker of cleaning robots acquired in 2012 by iRobot – it’s worth keeping an eye on.

I’ve reached out to Gross for comment, and I’ll let you know what I hear.

I Attended a Workshop on the Impact of AI on The Food World. Here’s What We Discussed

Last month, I headed down to San Luis Obispo to participate in a National Science Foundation-funded project analyzing the impact of automation and AI on the food system. I’d been invited to participate in a workshop headed up by Patrick Lin and Ryan Jenkins, professors at Cal Poly and the project leads.

The workshop was the first for the four-year project exploring the social and ethical impacts of automation and artificial intelligence in kitchens. The project endeavors to draw out the wide-ranging implications of this technology, exploring both the impact on commercial environments like restaurants and how automation could impact the longstanding tradition of home cooking and family meals.

“This project will help to draw out the hidden and very broad impacts of technology,” said Lin at the time of the project’s announcement. “By focusing on the trend of robot kitchens that’s just emerging from under the radar, there is still time for technical and policy interventions in order to maximize benefits and minimize harms and disruptions.” 

The two-day workshop included a cross-section of academic types, chefs and food service professionals, journalists, and technology experts. It was the first of three workshops across continents to gather insights and work towards producing a report and academic curriculum centered around the intersection of food and automation and AI.

The workshop, structured as a giant whiteboard session, included expert presentations and facilitated conversations. During and after each presentation, the participants shared their thoughts on potential impacts – both direct and cascading effects – that could result from the introduction of AI in its various forms over time. While much of the conversation focused more heavily on AI in the form of automation – i.e., cooking robots – AI in other forms, such as generative AI, was also discussed.

Below are some of the key themes discussed during the two days, as well as a few of my thoughts now that I’ve had time to think through the issues since the workshop.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this critical topic, so please send them along!

Finally, we’ll be discussing many of these same issues at the Food AI Summit on October 25th. If this is an issue critical to you and your company, make sure to join us!

Atrophying Cooking Skills

One of the concerns raised during the workshop was the potential loss of cooking skills and culinary knowledge as we rely increasingly on automation and AI to make our meals. While it was generally recognized that robotics could take over repetitive and tedious cooking tasks, some wondered if handing over the cooking process to machines could lead to a general loss of competency in culinary arts and a homogenization of meals produced by highly automated cooking.

It’s easy to see how highly automated food prep would be extremely popular; some would hand the entire process over to the machine. However, there’s a good chance that handing off the mundane parts of cooking would give home cooks, chefs, or food workers more time to focus on creating the special touches that often make a meal great. As we have seen with the advent of digital design and art tools, there’s a possibility that those who love making food could use technology to take their work to the next level.

The Loss of Together Time

Another concern raised across the two days was the impact on shared family time by handing over meal prep and cooking to robots. Parents and other caregivers often use time in the kitchen to share lessons to help children develop motor skills, understand their heritage and develop self-confidence. Over-automation of cooking could disrupt this transfer of knowledge. Cooking has also shown many positive mental health benefits for those involved.

I think these are valid concerns, as there is a real risk of losing some of the benefits of the shared cooking process due to automation. After all, there’s no replacement for a grandchild spending time with their grandma learning how to make her special cookies and the sharing of family history that comes along with such an activity.

However, a few counterpoints. First, no one says the act of hand-making that special recipe has to be a victim of technology, and, in some ways, I think the kitchen will prove to be one of the areas where some families will insist on preserving the art and act of doing the actual cooking themselves.

And as the world becomes more digital and automated, kitchens may be a refuge for many who find the hands-on nature of making food therapeutic and fulfilling. In other words, the kitchen may be the last true ‘maker space’ left in our homes, and many will look to protect and preserve that.

Finally, average meal times shrank 5% between 2006 and 2014, a much smaller decline than we’ve seen in meal prep times as the advent of ready-to-eat meals has become more popular over the past few decades. While automation may result in faster meals, people could spend nearly as much time – or maybe more – sitting around the dinner table.

A Loss of Authenticity, Creativity, and Happy Accidents

With AI, there’s a chance recipe creation algorithms may rely too heavily on existing data patterns and therefore lack originality. There was also the concern that AI systems may limit opportunities for spontaneous creativity and the type of “happy accidents” that often lead to new recipes. One workshop participant gave an example of mistakes leading to important new dishes, like the croissant.

There was also concern that using AI to generate meal plans or recipes could result in over-standardization and homogenization, particularly if the AI systems rely too narrowly on popular recipes, which could also reduce culinary diversity.

It’s a valid concern that AI systems will generalize based on limited data sets, often creating recipes or meal plans based on popular or trending food concepts. Anyone who listens to algorithm-generated playlists by Spotify or Pandora can attest to some off-note song recommendations, and I can see how that could easily be the case with food and recipe generation. However, good technology products allow humans to reject recommendations and fine-tune algorithms, which may allow for more personalized recommendations based on a particular user’s preferences.

There’s also a real possibility that AI could lead to new and intriguing food combinations. Chef Watson and other AIs have been able to create unexpected but interesting recipes based on intelligence built into the algorithms around flavor compounds. If a restaurant or home chef can leverage heretofore inaccessible deep insights based on science and flavor research built into AI systems to create their next masterpiece, the results could be exciting.

As for the impact on cultural diversity, I think it’s important to recognize that AI systems are known to have bias problems, often hewing more closely to the worldviews of their creators and their preferred datasets. Because the world of food is one of the most important pathways for under-represented voices to connect with broader audiences, it will be critical for us to guard against the loss of accessibility and equality in the culinary world as AI and automation tools become more commonplace.

However, food AIs could be built to emphasize unique and emerging food cultures, which could be a savvy move since millennials and younger generations celebrate new food discoveries, often from cultures outside their home markets. Also, many of the creators of new food automation technology are often from markets outside our own, emphasizing food types different from our traditional fare.

This is just a few of the themes discussed during the workshop. Other themes, such as job loss and the economic impacts of automation, were also explored in detail, and I’ll have more thoughts on that later this week.

Kroger Begins Testing Cake Printing Robot From Beehex at Location in Ohio

Late last month, grocery giant Kroger began to trial the use of a cake-printing robot made by Beehex in the Gahanna, Ohio, location, The Spoon has learned.

The new Cake Writer machine, which will allow consumers to input a custom message and watch as the cake is decorated in minutes on the spot, is made by 3D food printing startup Beehex. Depending on the message, the decoration process will take two to fourteen minutes. The machines will be loaded with hundreds of different pre-made designs and fonts for the customer to choose from.

Beehex CEO Anjan Contractor told The Spoon that the startup plans to install 10 Beehex Cake Writer machines in the Columbus market next year and has plans to install up to 350 machines in the future with Kroger.

Contractor says that a typical machine costs roughly $10 thousand when produced at scale, and the ongoing costs include $50 a month for cloud database management and about $5-6 for each 20 oz cartridge of frosting.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shorts/yNbBofgCp4s?feature=share

I don’t know about you, but I would gladly pay for a customized cake. We just celebrated a birthday in our family, and I had to buy a tube of frosting and scrawl the name on the top of the cake with my atrophied handwriting. A customized image with legible writing is something I’d pay for.

You can check out the Cake Writer in action below in the video provided by Beehex.

Vebu Scores Deal (and Investment) With Chipotle to Trial Avocado Processing Robot

Last week, Mexican food fast-casual chain Chipotle lifted the curtain on a new avocado processing robot called the Autocado. The new prototype robot, developed in partnership with food robotics innovation studio Vebu, will slice, core, and peel avocados before human hands mash them into Chipotle’s famous avocado dip.

The robot is being trialed at the Chipotle Cultivate Center in Irvine, California. According to Chipotle, the new machine could potentially cut guacamole prep time by 50%, which they say will help restaurant staff concentrate more on customer service and hospitality.

The Autocado works by having an employee load it with a case of ripe avocados, up to 25 lbs at a time. Each avocado is then vertically oriented and moved to the processing device, where it is halved, cored, and peeled. The flesh of the fruit is gathered in a stainless-steel bowl, ready for manual mashing and seasoning.

If Chipotle decides to deploy the Autocado widely across its restaurant locations, it could save a significant amount of person-hours that the chain spends each year producing guacamole. Chipotle expects to use 4.5 million cases of avocados across its US, Canada, and Europe outlets this year, the equivalent of more than 100 million pounds of fruit. The company believes the cobotic’s precision processing could increase yield and reduce food waste, leading to significant cost savings.

For Vebu (formerly Wavemaker), the deal is a nice feather in its hat for a company best known for the Flippy burger robot. Chipotle announced they would invest in Vebu through its Cultivate Next venture fund as part of the deal. This isn’t the first robot-oriented investment for Cultivate Next, which has invested in Hyphen, a maker of automated makelines for restaurants.

You can check out the Autocado in action below.

The Chipotle Autocado Avocado Processing Robot

Karakuri Joins The Growing List of Food Robot Startups That Have Shut Down

More bad news on the food robot front.

Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg.

In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news and included a link to a Google Sheet with Karakuri employees who Wragg said it was “incumbent” on him to assist in finding new roles.

From the post:

It’s with a very heavy heart that I have to report that our journey at Karakuri is coming to an end.

For the past five years, we’ve developed and deployed robotics for the QSR industry. We’ve survived many challenges, including the pandemic and our bank going bust us, but sadly we’ve been unable to find the funding we need to move to the next level.

Most of all I’d like to thank the incredible team we’ve built. They’ve stayed dedicated to the challenge and built incredible technologies in the face of abject uncertainty.

It’s incumbent on me to help these great people find new roles, spread their wings, and share their talents with others.

Attached is a list of the folks who are available and their preferred contact details.

Please feel free to reach out to anybody you think you need or could help find new roles.

I’m also on hand to help in any way I can.

Thanks, Barney

While it’s a bummer Karakuri couldn’t survive, it’s not surprising. Food robotic startups suffer from several disadvantages, including incredibly long development cycles and being capital-intensive.

Ex-Picnic CEO Clayton Wood summed it up well in a Linkedin post where he explained that a food automation startup’s “existential risk is being successful enough at the seed stage and building momentum (and costs) toward your scaling stage, only to find no Series A/B/C investors. Without planning and execution, you will be unable to survive. Progress means spending–and cutting spending to stay alive eliminates progress.”

Clayton says he believes newer startups will benefit from an earlier recognition that they need be frugal from the outset, unlike many of the first-generation food robot startups who launched in what was a more friendly fundraising era.

I also expect more food robot startups will start to look to commercialize a product or a subsystem more quickly in order to get to positive revenue faster. As I wrote a few months ago after our food robotics mini-summit, investors like Buck Jordan see a path to revenue through offering a portion of a founder’s big idea to the market instead of waiting years until the full vision is realized.

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

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

Make that had valuable technology. Creator didn’t ever sell a portion of its systems and instead tried to make a full robotic restaurant. The company shut down in March.

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

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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!