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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Robot

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

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