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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Robot

Yo-Kai’s Self-Driving Ramen Vending Robot is Heading to the Super Bowl

Yo-Kai Express, a maker of robotic vending machines, debuted its autonomous mobile ramen vending robot this week. Named the Yatai, the robot made its appearance at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington as part of an innovation event put on by the software giant.

When the company first announced the mobile ramen-bot at The Smart Kitchen Summit Japan in December 2020, founder Andy Lin said the machine would be able to navigate specific routes and stop when hailed by a mobile phone. The company also said they were already beginning to work with a manufacturer and had started discussions with the Universities of California at Berkeley and Irvine about having the mobile ramen machine traverse their campuses.

While the final destinations for the first few Yatais have yet to be disclosed, the company knows where its next stop is for its autonomous ramen robot: The Super Bowl. According to Lin, The Yatai will make its general public debut in LA next week at the Super Bowl pre-party.

And what about the Takumi, the home ramen machine the company teased in 2020? Based on our conversations with Yo-Kai, because the company’s primary focus has been the rollout of the Yatai, they hit pause on the rollout of the Takumi. Hopefully, with the Yatai finally making it to market, we’ll see the Takumi making an appearance soon.

CES 2022: Cecilia.ai To Showcase Its Chatty AI-Powered Robotic Bartender

Over the past few years, we’ve seen all sorts of robot bartenders, ranging from simple pod-based drink machines to high-tech robots slinging drinks everywhere from Iceland to the high seas.

What we haven’t seen as much is the combo of a voice assistant and an animated computer avatar as the interface for a robot bartender. That changes with Cecelia.

When the customer orders a drink from Cecilia, they’re greeted by an animated bartender that takes their order via voice commands using conversational AI. Cecilia can serve up to 120 drinks per hour (provided customers don’t get into long conversations or hit on the bartender), is about 8 feet tall and can store up to 70 liters of beverages in the storage area at the bottom of the machine.

In some ways, combining a voice assistant with a robot bartender is a logical evolution of drink-making automation. Anyone who’s ordered a drink from a good bartender knows that friendly conversation is part of the job description. While we don’t expect Cecilia to commiserate with you about your dating life (at least not yet), it’s not hard to envision a future where highly conversational robots chat it up with those huddled around the watering hole.

The company behind Cecilia is GKI Group, a startup based out of Israel. The company has been showcasing its version 1 of Cecilia at corporate functions and other small pop-ups and is showcasing its second-generation Cecilia at CES 2022. You can visit Cecilia at booth 61708 in Eureka Park.

CES 2022 Preview: Carbon Origins Wants to Merge Robot Delivery With the Metaverse

If you’re looking to get a fresh start on a new career in 2022, may I suggest a new occupation as a virtual reality robot delivery driver?

Yes, that’s a job – or at least a new gig – being offered by a startup out of Minneapolis called Carbon Origins. The company, which is building a refrigerated sidewalk delivery robot by the name of Skippy, is looking to assemble a roster of remote robot pilots who will utilize virtual reality technology to pilot Skippy around to businesses and consumer homes.

The company, which launched in early 2021 and participated in Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator this year, will be showcasing the new technology at CES 2022 in January. This past summer, the company started testing an early version of the VR-piloted robot in the above-street skyway system around St Paul, Minnesota and plans to begin testing deliveries to offices and homes in the Minneapolis market starting in January.

You can watch a video of the company’s CEO, Amogha Srirangarajan, piloting a prototype of the Skippy robot using a virtual reality headset below. According to Srirangarajan, the robot uses machine vision to navigate the world using a neural network.

Skippy Demo (04/21)

“What you’re seeing now is Skippy’s neural network, detecting and classifying objects, analyzing the sidewalk, and segmenting safe zones for navigation,” explains Srirangarajan in the demo video.

The Skippy operators – which for some reason the company calls “Skipsters” – use virtual reality headsets to supervise and correct the robot as it navigates through the world.

“Remote human operators, who we lovingly call ‘Skipsters,’ use fully immersive virtual reality headsets to monitor and train Skippy’s neural network in real-time,” said Srirangarajan. “Like an augmented reality PacMan game, Skipsters monitor and correct Skippy’s trajectory, giving Skippy the ability to navigate the human world unlike any other robot on the planet.”

The company emailed me and asked if I wanted to try out piloting a Skippy while in CES next week, and, of course, I said yes. If you also want to become an, um, Skipster too, you can visit the company’s booth or fill out an application to become a driver here.

A Cookie Robot is Pumping Out That New Cookie Smell in Huntsville, Alabama

If there’s one of our five senses that’s continuously underutilized when getting people to open their wallets, it’s the sense of smell. Anyone who’s been lured into a Subway sandwich shop by that bread(ish) odor wafting in the air knows what I’m talking about.

So naturally, when the company behind a new Smart Cookie cookie-making robot reached out to tell me about their new machine and its deployment at Dipwich sandwich shop in Huntsville, Alabama, my first thought was how great it must smell.

The cookie scent wafting machine robot itself is pretty simple. First, a robotic arm puts a paper-plated par-baked cookie into an oven. Once the cookie is rethermalized to 350 degrees – which takes about two minutes – the robot puts toppings on top of the cookie and then places it in a small cubby for the customer to retrieve it. The robot has two ovens within the kiosk, and working at full-speed can pump out about 60 cookies per hour.

You can watch it in action via the company provided video below:

Watch The Cookie Robot by RoboChef

The customer orders their cookie through an app or an iPad touch screen as an order interface. They have a choice between drizzled chocolate or caramel, and on top of that, they can choose from six different dry toppings. The customer can also choose between three different types of cookies: chocolate royale, the sugar cookie and a lemon cooler. The total combinations of cookie, drizzle, and toppings are 160 variations.

Chicago-based RoboChef is led by Aravind Durai, a long-time robotics executive. Durai, who was founder of Home Delivery Service, a maker of robotic fulfillment solutions for food delivery, and also headed up the America’s group for Mitsubishi robotics, started RoboChef in early 2021.

The company also counts restaurant industry veteran Bill Post as one of its advisors. Post was the founder of Roti Mediterranean Grill and was the long-time COO of Levy Restaurants, a division of Compass. Through his current company, WJP Restaurant Group, Post owns the Dipwich Sandwiches location in Huntsville, where the Smart Cookie robot trial is taking place.

I sat down with Durai to ask a few questions about his company and its new food robot.

You got this robot out to market pretty quickly, which is pretty different from a lot of robot companies. Why and how’d you do it?

“There were two things we needed to be validated right away. One is whether a restaurant will be able to run a fully autonomous system with its own staff. Even if it’s like a small portion of what they are offering, it should not require highly trained roboticists and software engineers to run this machine. So that is fundamental to how to be able to democratize robotics and automation in the food-service arena.

The second thing is we wanted to get validation that consumers will be delighted by two things. One is the ability to personalize their food order. The second is whether the food can be autonomously made by a robot and served to customers in a completely contactless touchless manner. And we wanted to get validation of that right away. Is it possible for us to do that in a lab environment? So we said, ‘let’s just put it out there, make customers pay for it, and see what they say.’

So to answer your question as to the how, we have a team of highly motivated and seasoned engineers with deep expertise in robotics and software tech who can execute rapidly.”

Who manages the cookie robot once it’s in the store?

“We wanted to have an ambassador from the restaurant. But, unfortunately, it is very hard to find people in the foodservice industry and also the restaurant really could not spare anybody from their own staff. So we lowered the qualifications of somebody to be an ambassador. Pretty much the only qualification was that they should like cookies. And we found an amazing ambassador, and she pretty much got trained on it in a couple of hours.”

Do you monitor the robot remotely?

“We have continuous monitoring of every single thing that’s going on. It’s all recorded in our data center for us to be able to keep an eye on things. Our engineers basically can monitor and understand this is how many toppings and how many cookies are consumed at the end of the day. We know how long the customer was on the app. We believe that data itself is going to be so valuable not just to improve our machine, improve our robots, improve our process and whatnot, but also the operators. It is going to give them a deep insight into the behavior in a retail environment of their customers, but it’s also going to give them deep insights into their own operations as well.”

Tell me more about the company.

“We are fairly early stage. We have full-time engineers and technologists working on it, and a few people who are working with us part-time on developing the software and the app and things like that. But we early on recognized that we need to have a complementary skill set within our company with food service, restaurant, and retail industry expertise. So we brought on a few key people in the organization to help us out daily. One of them is a gentleman named Bill Post.”

Have you raised funding yet?

“No, we have not raised institutional funding yet. We plan to do that early next year sometime. But we are in the process of getting some attention of potential customers who want to work with us on doing some pilots.”

What’s the plan for your rollout over the next few years?

“We are hoping to be able to have some pilots I’m talking about with well known national brands. We hope to have some pilots underway early next year. And once that happens, we believe next, whatever the rate within these individual businesses will allow, that’s what we’re doing. In theory, we could be around 100 units with multiple partners in another two to two and a half years.”

If you are near Huntsville, Alabama, you can head on down to Dipwich and both smell and taste the cookies from the Smart Cookie robot through early January. If you do, take pictures and send them our way.

SJW Robotics Demoes RoWok, a Fully Robotic Wok Restaurant Kiosk

This week, SJW Robotics, a maker of robotic kitchen technology, publicly demoed its robotic kitchen prototype for the first time.

When we first covered SJW earlier this year, the company was still keeping the cooking robot under wraps since patents had yet to be filed. With all their patent applications in the mail, I caught up with company CEO Nipun Sharma on a zoom call to get a virtual walkthrough of the Toronto-based company’s first product, a robotic wok-centered kitchen and consumer-facing kiosk called RoWok.

Sharma started by punching in his order on a large touch screen on the front of the large kiosk. Once entered, the robot got to work by dropping pre-cut ingredients such as chicken cubes, green onions and julienne carrots from segmented storage siloes in customized proportions onto a perforated steel tray. The tray shuttled through a steam tunnel via a conveyor belt (“like a car in a carwash.”). Once warmed, the food was dropped into an oiled wok for cooking. After it was cooked, the food was put into a bowl, sauces added, and then the meal was prepped for serving. Currently the robot has a station for humans to put the bowled food on a counter, but Sharma says the plan is integrate cubbies where the prepared meals can be placed for pickup by the customer.

According to Sharma, it takes about 80-90 seconds for each meal to be prepared and cooked. The current prototype has two woks in it, but the plan is to eventually have six woks and reach a throughput of about 60 meals per hour.

The system can hold enough ingredients in the siloes for up to 320 meals total before they need to be refilled. And because the system is entirely autonomous and can operate without a human, it closely monitors the ingredient inventory levels and can even create special promotions if, say, chicken or another ingredient is set to expire within the next 24 hours.

When I asked Sharma how he came up with the idea for a fully autonomous wok-centered kitchen, he told me the idea came to him after he had trouble finding a skilled wok cook for on a restaurant concept he was developing for Canadian grocery chain Loblaws.

“A wok is a specialized skill, and it’s hard to find people to do it,” Sharma said. “So everything I’ve done, this was my bottleneck. I’m like, I wish there was a way to automate the wok system.”

But there wasn’t, so he decided to build one. And the first thing he did was to start to put together a team of experts and they would build one. His first addition was adding a CTO in Brian Walker, who had been a long-time executive at automotive supplies conglomerate Magna International.

Sharma said they are currently in talks with one of the world’s largest airport food service concessionaires and he hopes to have a RoWok in an airport sometime in 2022. He said now that the company has demoed the RoWok, the company will begin the process or raising its Series A and begin engaging with a manufacturer that Sharma says “will mostly likely be in Atlanta.”

RoWok is the latest in a long-line of fully automated robotic kitchens that are in development. Last month we heard about Nommi, and we’ve also been watching as Hyper Robotics, RoboEatz, Mezli, Now Cuisine, Cala and others slowly but surely bring their robotic kitchen concepts to market. With all this activity, it’s looking like 2022 could be the year of the automated robotic kiosk.

Our Ghost Kitchen Future Will Be Automated

Back at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, Adam Brotman, the CEO of restaurant tech startup Brightloom, suggested if he was a young entrepreneur and wanted to start a restaurant business, he’d create a ghost kitchen powered by a food making robot.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment ever since.

The combination of food produced via robots with a ghost kitchen model makes so much sense, in part because both are new approaches that help reduce two of the most significant cost drivers of the legacy restaurant business: real estate and labor.

Consider the real estate costs of starting a new sit-down restaurant. Some estimates put the typical down payment required for the commercial space somewhere between $150 to $350 thousand dollars in a market like LA. And that’s before you even get to the cost of renovation and installing a new kitchen, which can cost up to a quarter of a million bucks.

And then there’s labor. A typical fast-food restaurant has to factor in about 25% of sales will go to labor. A fine dining restaurant will pay even more, often up to 40%. For a spot that generates a million dollars a year in top-line revenue, this translates to $400 thousand annually in labor expenses.

That’s a lot of money, and no doubt a big part of the reason about one-third of restaurants don’t make it in normal times, let alone in an era ravaged by a pandemic.

And so, in 2021, it’s not that surprising to see several groups experimenting with ways to combine the idea of new dark kitchen models with automation. Here are just a few:

Pizza HQ: The founders of Pizza HQ are experienced sit-down pizza restaurant operators, but they are betting the future on a robot-powered dark kitchen model. The company is creating a centralized pizza production facility in New Jersey that will utilize up to four Picnic pizza robots and also develop a network of smaller fulfillment centers around the greater northern New Jersey area.

800 Degrees: Another pizza chain, 800 Degrees, is betting its future on a combination of ghost kitchens and automated pizza production. The company is working with ghost kitchen operator Reef to expand to up to 500 ghost kitchens over the next few years, many of which will include Piestro’s robotic pizza kiosks.

Cala: This French company has created a unique pasta-making robot that enables both customer pick up and third-party delivery of its dishes. This model of automated production via kiosk as well as delivery will be a popular hybrid model that enables operators to tap into multiple customer dining revenue streams.

Hyper-robotics: Hyper has created a containerized robotic pizza kitchen that can plug into a dark kitchen model or be used in a hybrid ghost and delivery/consumer pick-up restaurant.

Kitchen United/Kiwibot: While Kitchen United hasn’t announced any deals automating their food production via robotics, the ghost kitchen pioneer has started experimenting with the use of delivery robots to ship food produced in their kitchens to customers.

Nommi: Nommi is a new joint venture creating a bowl-food robot that can be utilized in a variety of ghost kitchen formats. According to company president Buck Jordan, the company also plans to work on technology that could eventually hand robot-produced food to a delivery robot to create an “end-to-end” food robot model from production to the customer doorstep.

These are just a few examples, and we haven’t even gotten to the dozens of food robot startups building systems that could power food production in a ghost kitchen space. Companies like Beastro, Mezli, Middleby and others are working on self-contained food-making robots that could serve as enabling platforms for an entire new industry built around centralized automated food production made exclusively for digital orders.

One could argue the first company to try a robot-powered ghost kitchen model was Zume. The once high-flying startup raised hundreds of millions to create a roboticized dark pizza kitchen model to deliver pizza around the bay area using its high-tech oven equipped trucks. The company eventually shut down its robot pizza business, in part because like many pioneering startups, Zume never figured out an operating model that works (in retrospect, developing custom-built delivery trucks was probably an unnecessary use of venture funding).

But now, many of the companies following in Zume’s wake are building interesting and what looks like more sustainable businesses, in large part because they are working in partnership with restaurant operators who know the business and are savvy in building virtual restaurant businesses optimized to use third party delivery. While some of these models may eventually fail, it’s pretty clear that robotics and ghost kitchens are a combination that will play a big role in the restaurant industry’s future.

Meet Nommi, a Robotic Bowl Food Kiosk Designed by Wavemaker, C3, and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Today Wavemaker Labs announced the launch of a new startup and bowl-making robotic kiosk concept called Nommi. Nommi will be “a standalone robotic kitchen that is able to produce and dispense any grain-, noodle- or lettuce-based dish through a fully integrated cooking system.”

Nommi is the latest robot startup concept to emerge from Wavemaker Labs, the food automation incubation studio behind Miso Robotics (Flippy, a back-of-house fry and grillbot), Bobacino (boba drinkbot), Future Acres (farm assistant) and Piestro (pizza kiosk). What’s unique about Nommi is the company is a product of a partnership between Wavemaker, C3 and chef Masaharu Morimoto, each of whom hold equity in the new company.

“As we started developing it, we really wanted to get partners to allow this to scale quickly, and really kind of stack the deck before we start playing,” said Buck Jordan, President and Co-Founder of Nommi and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, in a recent zoom interview with The Spoon.

C3, which has made a name for itself over the past couple of years for its aggressive expansion into virtual food haul concepts, has plans to order up to one thousand Nommi units over the next few years. While Jordan and C3 envision the Nommi augmenting some physical restaurant locations, the primary focus for the bowl food robot will be food delivery.

“We’re building this to be really delivery accessible,” said Jordan. “Delivery is going to double over the next five years, and so we want to be part of that.”

According to Jordan, while the initial machine will be designed to assemble food bowls that can be handed off to humans for delivery, Nommi envisions a future that will be roboticized from end to end.

The system is “designed and go through our system to be picked up by the regular delivery apps by human,” said Jordan. “But in the long term, we are trying to figure out a way to have a robotic transfer system to some of these robotic delivery machines out there to make a full end to end.”

Chef Morimoto will run the first Nommi, featuring menu items from his Sa’Moto restaurant brand. According to Jordan, Morimoto’s input had a significant impact on the robot design.

“Chef Morimoto wants really high-quality food,” said Jordan. “There’s no compromising when it when he puts his name on it.”

Because Morimoto wanted to delicately place ingredients in each food bowl, Nommi’s design team endeavored to build a robot capable of such high-fidelity food-making. This resulted in a wheeled cart system that moves around under food dispensing stations and rotates up to 360 degrees for precision ingredient placement. You can watch the Nommi assembling bowls via its wheeled cart system in the video below.

The Nommi Bowl Making Kiosk

Nommi fills a hole in Wavemaker’s portfolio for a fully automated bowl kitchen kiosk. Wavemaker’s most well-known food robot startup, Miso, makes back-of-house robots for fry and grill work. Piestro makes consumer-facing pizza robot kiosks. With Nommi, the company has designed a flexible bowl-food robot that, according to Jordan, is flexible enough to replicate a variety of menus from high-end chefs.

“There will be brands built from the ground up to be automated,” said Jordan. “And so we want to take the best in class food from Michelin star chefs and bring fine dining to the masses. We want to do in a fully automated way and be able to have a grain bowl made by Morimoto cost the same as a Big Mac.”

Each Nommi machine has a capacity for up to 330 bowls and lids. Each kiosk will come with up to 21 food lockers that hold finished bowls. Customers or food delivery workers can pick up the food at the kiosk using a QR code.

According to Jordan, the company hopes to start shipping its production unit in 2023.

A Conversation With Buck Jordan of Nommi

Miso Introduces Second Generation Restaurant Kitchen Robot, the Flippy 2

Today Miso Robotics, a maker of restaurant robots, unveiled the second generation of its flagship robot Flippy, the Flippy 2. The new robot, which was developed in part with feedback from strategic innovation partner White Castle, represents a significant jump forward in capabilities, customizability, and design.

Some of the new capabilities and features of the Flippy 2 include:

  • Takes over more work: The original Flippy requires human help on both sides of the robot to complete a task. The Flippy 2 basically makes the fry station a closed loop system where items are loaded into the fryer, fried and then placed into a hot holding area, all without assistance from a human.
  • Hot Food Transfer: The Flippy 2 transfers hot food items to the holding area, which eliminates a potential danger-spot for human and prevents burns and oil spillage.
  • Customizable Basket System: The Flippy 2 has a new customizable basket management system. Called AutoBin, the new system can be tailored for the specific needs of a kitchen, allowing for specialty items like vegetables and fish to get their own dedicated basket to prevent cross-contamination.
  • Smaller Footprint: The Flippy 2 is smaller than the original, with 56% reduced aisle intrusion, a 13% reduction in height and less surfaces to clean.

Like the original, the Flippy 2 uses machine vision to aid in the task of operating a cooking station, but just oversees more of the overall process. According to the company, the Flippy2 has increased throughput of 30% compared to the original and can handle up to 60 baskets per hour.

The Flippy 2 makes its debut in the White Castle’s Chicago 42 location. From there, company CEO Mike Bell told The Spoon that they plan to deploy the new robot in as many as 10 White Castle locations in 2022. And while White Castle represents a significant portion of the trials, Bell says the company will also roll out pilots with other partners.

“Currently, we have plans to deploy about a dozen additional pilots in the next few months, and we’re also in talks with several top restaurants and QSRs who are interested in bringing Flippy to their kitchens, both in the U.S. and overseas,” said Bell. 

That Miso is already launching a second generation of its flagship robot is a testament to the company’s stature as a pioneer in what is a fairly new and nascent industry. Miso first debuted the original Flippy in 2017 at the Caliburger in Pasadena, and started working with White Castle last year. All of those trials allowed the company to get data and critical feedback about the robot in real-world, high-volume kitchens, the result of which are the improvements they are debuting today.

“The truth is that Flippy has been in development for more than five years,” said Bell. “We’re truly the only company learning at the level we are learning about real kitchen operations. And Flippy 2 is the result of many conversations and the feedback we’ve received from valuable industry partners, like White Castle, who deployed Flippy for the first time in September 2020.”

You can see the new Flippy working the fry station in the video below.

The Flippy 2 Restaurant Robot Cooks Food

Hyper-Robotics Launches a Robotic Pizza Restaurant-in-a-Box

Hyper-Robotics (previously called Highpper), an Israel-based maker of fully autonomous robotic restaurants, has launched its first fully automated restaurant concept, a containerized robot pizza restaurant that can pump out up to 50 pies per hour.

The restaurant, which you can see in the video below, has a whole bunch of technology packed into one box, including three convection ovens, a conveyor belt system that moves pizzas into the ovens, an automatic slicer, and a boxing system that puts freshly-made pizzas into a box to hand off to the customer to name just a few.

Some other features of Hyper’s robot restaurant:

  • 30 pizza warming cabinets
  • Built-in cold storage that can store up to 240 kinds of dough in different sizes
  • Two robotic dispensing arms
  • Dispensers for up to 12 toppings

The company’s choice of pizza for its first autonomous restaurant isn’t a surprise given the company’s CEO and cofounder: Udi Shamai, the CEO of Pizza Hut Israel. Shamai is the master franchisee for the pizza chain in Israel and operates a total of 90 Pizza Huts across the country. Shamai is also the non-executive chairman of Dragontail Systems, a company that makes computer vision and AI systems to help automate food quality assessment for clients such as Domino’s.

With the launch of its robotic pizza restaurant, Hyper-Robotics joins an increasingly crowded pizza robot space that includes the likes of Picnic, Piestro, Basil Street, Bancroft, Middleby, and Pazzi to name just a few. While the unit is the first restaurant from the company, Hyper has plans for other autonomous robots that will also serve up bowl food, burgers and even ice cream.

SKS 2021: Meet Mezli, Maker of Robotic Containerized Restaurants

Over the next couple of weeks, The Spoon is featuring interviews with leaders from the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase, and this time up we have Alex Kolchinski, the CEO of Mezli.

Mezli builds containerized robot restaurants they call auto-kitchens. The company’s fully autonomous restaurants-in-a-box offer a menu of Mediterranean grain bowls, sides, and drinks. Mezli’s version 2 auto-kitchen is complete and the company is getting ready to launch v3 publicly next year.

If you’d like to connect with Alex at the Smart Kitchen Summit, hop on over to Hopin where we are hosting our virtual event and pick up your ticket today!

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Watch Flippy Make Fries at CaliBurger’s Newest Location in Washington State

Today CaliBurger announced they’d opened the first restaurant since the onset of the pandemic. The latest addition to the burger chain is in Shoreline, Washington, and to mark the importance of the occasion, the company brought a friend: Flippy the fry robot.

CaliBurger’s use of Flippy at the north Seattle location is the first deployment of Miso Robotics’ fast food robot in the Seattle market. According to the release, Flippy will start at the fry station, but the restaurant expects its new employee to be somewhat versatile:

While the Shoreline store will use Flippy for french-fry cooking initially, Flippy can also cook chicken breasts and tenders, onion rings, sweet potato waffle fries in addition to fries. The system’s image recognition technology allows for real-time quality control to prevent any food quality errors during the cooking process and before any food items reach customers.

The new CaliBurger location is also the first time the chain has deployed PopID’s pay-by-face technology. PopID, which launched its pay-by-face network in southern California last year, allows customers to create an account that ties a debit card to their biometric ID (i.e., their face). The customer can also pull up information such as favorites and loyalty points once ID’d at the point of sale.

As for Flippy, CaliBurger CEO Jeffrey Kalt had the now-standard company line we hear when a new food robot is installed in a new location: the deployment of Flippy will allow the humans to focus on customer-facing jobs and, as a result, will improve the overall guest experience.

“The deployment of Flippy enables CaliBurger to retrain our staff to spend more time tending to customer needs to better improve the guest experience, while supervising the robotic system that’s handling the cooking,” said Kalt. “This results in happier workers, more satisfied customers, and a more profitable business.”

You can watch the video of Flippy in action below:

Watch Flippy the robot make fries at Caliburger in Shoreline, Washington

Flippy The Fast Food Robot Has Its Own National TV Commercial

Flippy’s about to hit the big time.

That’s because the fast food robot from Miso that’s in service in places like White Castle is going to be the focus of a new nationally televised commercial.

The commercial, which can be seen below, is a 30 second ad that introduces Flippy to a TV audience.

Introducing Flippy | National Television Commercial from Miso Robotics on Vimeo.

The ad opens with Flippy making fries in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant while a voiceover actor proclaims “Nothing hits the spot quite like good food, made fast.”

From there the 30 second spot toggles back and forth between a mother and daughter happily eating food and Flippy making fries back in the kitchen.

The voiceover continues: “The taste you grew up on, now made more consistent, more efficient, and dare we say, more delicous. Introducing Flippy, the world’s first AI kitchen assistant.”

The narrator brings the pitch home with the tag line, “Let the robots do the robotic work, so people can do the people work.”

I’m not sure where the ad will play and what the audience will be – I reached out to the folks at Miso and haven’t heard back – but it’s interesting to me that they have decided to pay for a national TV spot introducing a food service robot to a general audience. It’s certainly a new direction for a company that has largely stuck to programmatic social media ads for their crowdfunding campaigns.

Here are a few thoughts as to why the company went in this direction.

The company wants to reach a new audience outside of it traditional marketing campaigns. Miso traditionally uses programmatic cookie-driven web advertising on social media and websites to appeal to potential investors. The TV spot ends with a call to action to visit Meetflippy.com, where visitors get a general overview of the robot, can get on a mailing list, and can hit a “Become a Customer” button for more info. My guess is the company believes they will reach a new audience that is less tech-savvy, but could be potential customers or even potential new investors.

Miso is beginning the “robots are our friends” messaging. There’s no doubt that as robotics become more mainstream in food service and other jobs, there will be some pushback from those that see them as job-stealers. The tagline, “Let the robots do the robotic work, so people can do the people work” seems intended to possibly get in front of the anti-robot trend.

The company is looking to time ad to coincide with its Hulu spotlight. If you watch the hero reel preview of the upcoming David Chang Hulu food show that is heavily focused on food tech, Wavemaker – the robot-focused investment vehicle closely affiliated with Miso – gets a star turn on the show. The preview features Miso Robotics Chairman Buck Jordan talking to Chang while it shows the Flippy in action. This ad spot might even be intended to play during Chang’s Hulu show.

Whatever the reason, you got to give Miso credit. The launch of a national TV commercial to push a fry-making robot is definitely a first.

Editor Update: Miso Robotics CFO Kevin Morris responded to my inquiry the following comment: “We want to make Flippy as well known to the masses as possible and doing a commercial increases its national exposure exponentially. The more eyeballs that see the commercial, the greater likelihood we can attract additional innovation partners.”