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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Robot

Video: Creator’s Robo-Burger Joint Seems Like a Pretty Cool Place for a Human to Work

Out of all the burger restaurants you could work for, Creator in San Francisco seems like it would be a good choice. First, the burgers there are made by a robot, so duh, awesome. But while a robot may be the center of attention, it’s actually the humans that Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas seems to care the most about.

Vardakostas was on stage at our recent ArticulATE conference, where he explained that Creator’s mission is to create the most human-centric dining experience. Ironically, a giant robot helps them do just that. First, diners can enjoy a nice meal with friends at a fair price ($6 for a burger) in a well-appointed restaurant (with, admittedly, severely restricted open hours).

But using a robot to cook the burgers, Vardakostas also hopes to help free up the creativity of his human employees. With the monotonous “burger flipping” done by the robot, employees can provide better customer service and spend time in more creative ways.

But Varakostas and Co. take it one step further. Creator gives all their employees 5% time. This paid time is for employees to learn about whatever they want. Some take the opportunity to take online classes, or learn console code used on the robot, or study flavors in the hopes of opening up their own restaurant one day. Vardakostas doesn’t want Creator to be a dead-end job where you do the same thing for ten years; he understands that he’s equipping his employees to move on to other, better opportunities. Hopefully it’s something other restaurants implementing robots will learn from.

ArticulATE 2019: Building a Better Burger Joint with Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas

Be on the lookout for even more food robot-related videos from our ArticulATE conference here on The Spoon!

*An earlier version of this post said Creator staff were freed up to do social media campaigns. Creator reached out to say that restaurant staff do not engage in social media campaigns.

Gourmeon Developing Robot for Chipotle-Style Restaurants

Whether it’s the Pazzi, Flippy or Cafe X, the food robots we often write about are articulating arms that swing about to prepare and serve up food. But there are a lot of existing restaurants where that form factor wouldn’t really work given the space and how the food is served. Think of fast casual establishments like Chipotle or Subway, where the food is prepared and sitting in bins behind a glass counter, and you walk down the line telling an employee what to include and to omit.

A nascent startup called Gourmeon is developing a robot that could be retrofitted into these types of restaurants to automate food order fulfillment. The “Giosk” (a portmanteau of Gourmeon and kiosk) is a four-axis gantry style robot, scooping up the already cooked or cold ingredients from bins to assemble food bowls.

The typical restaurant “bench” is 12 feet long, and each Giosk is three feet long, so a restaurant owner would line up three to four of them to assemble the various ingredients. For example, one Giosk would dish up meat selection while another would serve rice and yet another would do other toppings and so on. There would be separate utensils for each ingredient to avoid cross contamination. The Giosk currently doesn’t have computer vision, so it can’t identify food by looking at it. Instead, it uses a coordinate system to select and serve the correct ingredient.

But you won’t be talking directly to the Giosk, telling it you’d like guacamole but not sour cream. Instead, it will be taking and fulfilling orders placed online or via in-store kiosks. Additionally, right now the robot can only make bowl foods, a common capability for today’s food robots (see: Chowbotics and Spyce). But it doesn’t have the finesse required to roll up a burrito.

The Giosk was invented by Shambhu Roy, a mechanical engineer who used to work at Applied Materials. He didn’t start off wanting to build a restaurant robot. “I had built a [home] cooking appliance robot, and then I was trying to raise money,” Roy told me by phone. “One of the people I contacted was a restaurant owner.” That owner told Roy that his robot would actually be good for his bench-style restaurant. Recognizing that the consumer market can be tough, Roy pivoted to adapt his robot to work in restaurants.

Roy says there are a few different ways Giosks can help a restaurant business. The first is in labor costs. Food service is an area that will become heavily automated, since robots can work all day without taking a break and never call in sick. And if Giosk is taking care of online orders, a restaurant won’t need as many employees working at once. But beyond that, Roy says Giosk will help restaurants better control their inventory because the robot will dispense the same amount of food every time (no extra cheese for you!). Additionally it can reduce order errors because it won’t misunderstand a person and can’t be distracted or forget to add something.

Because of his mechanical engineering background, Roy went ahead and built a full-fledged version of the Giosk. He’s been issued two patents on it and he says he has several more pending. A Giosk with two stations will cost about $80,000, and Roy says that restaurants can earn that back in three years time. Those numbers will get put to the test as the first Giosk will be piloted by a restaurant in Sacramento, where Roy is based.

Right now, the biggest challenge for Gourmeon is software. Roy hasn’t raised any funding yet, so he can’t afford to hire a software engineer, and software is key in order for Gourmeon to survive and scale. The company needs to develop the software that plugs into a restaurant’s ticketing system so it can translate orders received into food prepared.

Ultimately, Roy wants to get back into the consumer market. He’s got a five-station home-cooking robot that works, but first, he has to get Gourmeon up and running and successful otherwise he can wave those dreams goodby (with an automated articulating hand).

Want to know about the future of food robots? Be sure to attend Articulate, our food robotics & automation summit in San Francisco on April 16.

Robots + Connected Kitchen Appliances Can Help Diabetics Manage Diets

Anyone with kids knows that getting them to eat healthy can be a challenge. That challenge is compounded if your child has a disease like diabetes, where their diets must be strictly managed.

That’s where Belgium-based IDLab thinks robots can help, especially for older kids who are a little more independent. In the video below, IDLab demonstrates how a home robot working in conjunction with a connected cooking device like mealhero’s can help people with diabetes watch their carbohydrate intake and regulate their insulin accordingly.

The video shows more of a use case scenario, rather than a full-blown production level solution (it also over-simplifies the carbs in carrots). It’s also pretty complicated, requiring the robot, a mealhero meal plan and steamer, a connected food scale and a calculator to figure out the carb count of a meal to enter into an insulin pump.

But it’s easy to see from this proof-of-concept where the technology could eventually go. The robot provides a “friendly” interface to guide the child or whomever through a meal planning process. A product like mealhero works in this scenario because it has a standardized set of ingredients that are shipped individually and its connected cooking device automatically cooks the food. Similar companies like Tovala, Suvie or Brava could provide the same type of meal+connected appliance.

Given these basic building blocks, there’s no reason the process couldn’t work with any number of diseases that require adherence to a particular diet.

When we write about robots, there are often two big caveats: first is that there will be a human employment cost as automation continues; second, useful robotics applications in the home are still a ways off in the future. What IDLab is demonstrating here is that food-related robots can actually be helpful to people and while clunky, that robotic future is closer to today than some distant tomorrow.

CES 2019 Video: Watch the Rotimatic Make Tortillas

We were excited earlier this week when Zimplistic announced that its Rotimatic flatbread maker would be adding flour tortilla recipes to its repertoire. We were even more excited when the company brought the Rotimatic to our Food Tech Live event so we could try them firsthand.

They did not disappoint. Using just flour, oil and water, the Rotimatic can mix, knead and bake fresh tortillas in just 90 seconds. The result is a warm, fresh-tasting tortilla. They come out a wee bit crispy, so they aren’t like the kind you get at a taqueria, but they would be a nice option for your next taco Tuesday (or any occasion, really).

The flour tortilla recipe hasn’t been released yet into the wild, so existing Rotimatic users can’t make them today, but the update should be arriving soon. Now the question is whether the addition of flour tortillas will entice new buyers to pony up a thousand bucks for the device.

Watch the Rotimatic Make Flour Tortillas

Zimplistic’s Rotimatic Can Now Make Flour Tortillas

Zimplistic announced today that it has added tortilla making and gluten-free functionality to its already immensely popular Rotimatic.

The Rotimatic is a connected countertop device that measures, dispenses, kneads and bakes dough to create ready-to-eat flatbreads in 90 seconds. According to the Zimplistic press announcement, its Rotimatic is “enjoyed by more than 50,000 families across 20 countries.” If we assume that 50,000 families equals 50,000 units sold, that’s an increase of 10,000 units since we last checked in with the company back in October, when it had sold 40,000 units.

The Rotimatic can already make a host of different flatbreads, including pizza dough, puris and pearl millet flour flatbread. In a statement, Zimplistic said that it’s been getting a lot of requests for tortilla capabilities, especially in the U.S. Adding tortillas to its roster, along with a gluten-free recipe could help ease the sting of the device’s high price tag of $1,000 and get more people to purchase the device.

Zimplistic will be at our Food Tech Live event this evening. We’ll be sure to sample the goods and report back on how they taste. Additionally, you can check out this podcast Mike Wolf did with Zimplistic Co-Founder, Rishi Israni.

Cafe in Japan Uses Robots to Create Jobs for People with Disabilities

When we talk about robots in restaurants, we often talk about the human jobs that will be lost to this impending automation. But a cafe that opened in Tokyo this week is actually using robots to create jobs for people with physical disabilities.

The Japan Times reports that the Dawn Avatar cafe in Minato Ward, Tokyo will feature five robots that are roughly 3.9 feet tall that will take orders and serve food. The robots transmit audio and video over the internet so they can be controlled by people with conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) remotely from their homes. Ten remote workers with ALS will get ¥1,000 (~$8.79) an hour in wages for controlling the robots.

The cafe was formed as a joint project between Ory Lab, which develops the robots, Nippon Foundation and ANA Holdings. This iteration of the cafe is just a trial run and will only be open until Dec. 7. The three companies hope to launch a permanent version of the cafe in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

A shrinking population in japan is creating a labor shortage and robots are being built to do manual, repetitive work like making Takoyaki, a street food made from batter balls and minced octopus, and crêpes (even tri-colored ones!).

As Mike Wolf reported from our last Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan, a lot of innovation in that country comes from R&D departments in larger, established companies. For instance, Sony recently showed off its vision of the home robot chef and has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to develop food robots. And Softbank recently hooked up with Toyota to form MONET, a venture that will build autonomous vehicles to do things like deliver robot-made meals.

What I appreciate about Japan’s robot ambitions is how they are tying these programs into real world needs: aging at home, added mobility and in the case of this new cafe, providing new job opportunities for people who need them.

Video: A Trip to Caliburger to See Flippy the Robot and Pay with my Face

If you read our newsletter (and you should!), you know that I’m in Los Angeles this week. One of the reasons I was so excited to come down here was to finally meet Flippy, the burger flipping robot.

Flippy is currently online at Caliburger in Pasadena, where it cooks up anywhere between 500 and 1,000 burgers a day, according to a Cali Group representative. Behind a glass wall, the robotic arms swings and swivels to turn meat over, change spatulas for raw and cooked meat, and remove burgers from the heat to set them aside for dressing.

Its movements are faster than I expected, especially when dropping off finished burgers. It’s a quick, precise motion, but almost jerky in its precision.

What was especially interesting was watching it interact with the human co-workers, who placed raw patties to the grill, added cheese and dressed each burger. Humans also do a temperature check on each of Flippy’s cooked burgers to ensure food safety. People seem to have figured out the dance they need to do with Flippy and have a rhythm. Flippy even fails sometimes, pushing a burger instead of flipping it, but its human coworkers quickly correct any problems.

For the humans’ safety, there is a taped off area around Flippy. If a someone enters that space, Flippy immediately shuts down until the person walk back outside its designated area.

On a screen above the work area, visitors can see what Flippy “sees” on the grill. It’s a not-quite-Terminator-like view of various burgers, each with a countdown as they near readiness.

Since I was there, I decided to order up some lunch and try out Caliburger’s automated kiosk, which lets you pay with your face. The kiosk and payment system is actually part of PopIQ, which is also owned by Cali Group. PopIQ is aiming to become a universal loyalty program used by different restaurants or gyms or any place else with frequent repeat customers. The idea is that your face becomes your payment system and loyalty card when you shop at participating locations.

The Caliburger rep told me that about 65 percent of Caliburger customers use the automated kiosk to order pay, but most are still wary of storing their face data and credit card information with the company. I too, was a little wary, as Caliburger has locations around the world and I wasn’t given a sufficient explanation as to where my data is stored and what governments of different countries can access. Given recent news about data breaches, this is definitely an issue the company should explicitly address.

Having said that, I was here for a story, so I went through the sign up process and scanned my face into the Caliburger system. The kiosk was straightforward with a clean UI and I found it easy to use. In less than a minute I was up and running. Once in the system I went through the touchscreen menu to order my burger and customize it. When it came time to pay it let me know it was scanning my face and that was it, my order went off to Flippy for preparation.

The payment process, while fast and convenient, could use a little more guidance. Once you pay, there is no clear direction on where to go or what to do next. The order just goes into the ether and you aren’t sure where your food will arrive or where to get your drink. You can sense why some people prefer to stick with people when paying.

Foodservice robots like Flippy are quickly moving from novelty to mainstream. Flippy is expanding its skillset and becoming a fry cook, Penny shuttles food and empty dishes around a restaurant, Ekim’s PAZZI will make you a pizza, and Cafe X’s robot will wave to you after it makes your latté.

And lucky for me, pretty soon I won’t have to travel for my next Flippy-made burger. Caliburger is adding Flippy to its new Seattle (where I’m based) location later this year. Until Flippy comes to your town, you can enjoy these videos of it in action.

Flippy Fires up a new Job at Dodger Stadium, Will it be a Home Run?

Flippy, Miso Robotics‘ fast food robot assistant, has a new job and some new skills: frying up tater tots and chicken tenders at LA’s Dodger Stadium.

The pilot is a collaboration between Miso, data analytics company E15 Group, and hospitality company Levy, who participated in Miso’s Series B funding round earlier this year. Miso and Levy had announced a plan to put Flippy in sports venues back in March.

The first Flippy works at the Pasadena Caliburger location, flipping burgers. When the ‘bot first came online in March, it ran into a few technical snafus as well as some issues with human counterparts keeping up. After a brief hiatus, Flippy returned to CaliBurger in May; it now cooks up thousands of burgers a day.

This stadium gig will be an intriguing test for Flippy. First, Miso is adding a new skill to the robot, moving it from the grill to the fryer, pushing Flippy’s artificial intelligence, HD cameras, thermal sensors and grippers all into a new food type and cooking technique. Second, it’s working at Dodger Stadium, which seats 56,000 people, so there will be high volume of work over a shorter period of time.

Having said that, baseball seems like the perfect sport for Flippy to start with. The slow and leisurely place means customers coming throughout the game, rather than high bursts of activity between quarters or halves.

As Mike Wolf pointed out earlier this week, robot restaurants are all the rage, and Flippy’s move to the majors is a perfect example of why. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive work more precisely, and leave us humans to do higher level work. By one 2017 estimate, foodservice accounted for 12,000 burns to employees per year. If Flippy can run the fryer properly, fewer employees could get hurt (saving people from pain and restaurants money).

If you’re in the LA area, take yourself out to the ball game, buy yourself some peanuts and robot-cooked chicken tenders and tell us how they are.

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?

Let’s start with the obvious question you probably have after reading this story’s headline. Is it pronounced:

Peet-ZAH-metry, like Geometry?

or

PEETZA-me-try, like Cookie Monster would say it if he switched his favorite food?

The answer, according to Jim Benjamin, President of APM Partners, the company that makes Pizzametry is… both. It doesn’t matter how you slice the name; the Pizzametry is a vending machine will bake up a hot, fresh personal pizza any time of day or night.

“It’s for the consumer that’s looking for a meal replacement,” Benjamin told me by phone, “And needs more than just a bag of potato chips or a muffin.”

The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

The Pizzametry, like so many automated food vendors, is meant for high-traffic areas like airports (which are starting to fill up with robots) or dorms or anywhere people want to grab a very quick bite to eat. Each machine can make 150 pizzas and accepts credit cards, bills and online payment services like PayPal and Apple Pay. The Pizzametry is also internet connected for self-diagnosis and can alert the homebase should any maintenance be needed.

Based in Rochester, NY, APM Partners is bootstrapped and has three employees. The Pizzametry has gone through field tests at the University of Rochester and the company is now taking orders and looking to deploy on a wider scale over the next six months. APM plans to own and operate the Pizzametries at first, handling all the stocking and cleaning of each machine.

In addition to straight sales, APM also has the ability to license out what is effectively ad space on the front of each Pizzametry. In Rochester, for instance, the company partnered with local pizzeria Salvatore’s, using their sauce on the pies. The effect, Benjamin said, is giving Pizzametry a recognizable neighborhood brand in each location.

Pizzametry is actually coming along at a good time to ride a wave of automation that’s sweeping the food industry. From fully autonomous restaurants like Spyce, to co-botics fast food from Flippy at Caliburger, to the smoothie making Blendid, to the salad dispensing Sally — food robots are becoming de rigueur.

I can’t speak to the quality of Pizzametry’s pizza, but if you think about hungry college students staying up late to study or a harried family needing just a quick bite before embarking on a plane, Pizzametry makes sense.

Now people just need to make sense of its name.

Smart Kitchen Startup Else Labs Raises $1.8 Million

While no one has quite figured out what the robot cook of the future looks like, it’s not for lack of trying.

While some labor to create a fully functional transformer-meets-home-chef like Moley, others see a path filled with single-function robots spitting out tortillas and mixing drinks.

And then there’s Else Labs, which sees a future for cooking automation that fuses timeworn cooking concepts like a slow cooker with modern advances such as a smart dispenser system and app control.

Else founder Khalid Aboujassoum first presented the concept for his automated cooker on Stars of Science, a Qatar TV show similar to Shark Tank. At the time, he only had a rough working prototype of the product that would eventually come to be known as Oliver, but he received enough encouragement to start working with a San Francisco design firm and keep on developing the product.

Illustration of a user preparing food for the Oliver cooking chambers. Source: Else Labs

After participating in last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase, the team continued to work on Oliver’s development. They created another early prototype and started doing one-on-one cooking sessions with consumers in their homes to refine the experience. And now, with the company’s goal of bringing the product to market in spring of 2018, they have raised a seed round of $1.8 million.

I emailed Aboujassoum to ask him a few questions about the funding and the company’s product:

Wolf: Who were your investors?

Aboujassoum: Yellow Services, a wholly owned subsidiary by Qatar Development Bank, is the institutional investor. YS manages a $100M fund dedicated to innovation startups and SMEs that can contribute in diversifying Qatar’s economy.

Wolf: How much total has Else Labs raised?

Aboujassoum: $1.95 million. (ed note: The company raised an angel round of approximately $150 thousand)

Wolf: Where is Oliver in terms of development and expected ship date? 

Aboujassoum: We have an advanced working prototype that we are using to conduct 1-to-1 sessions with early adopters in their homes. Those sessions are helping us in refining the user experience and prepare for the pilot program that we are working on launching soon.

The pilot will inform our crowd-funding and overall launch strategy. Our target launch date is Q2 2018.

Wolf: Who are the key members of your team?

Aboujassoum: myself (ed note:Aboujassoum is founder & CEO), Tariq Maksoud (cofounder & lead mechanical engineer, and Abdulrahman Saleh Khamis (cofounder & lead electrical engineer).

Wolf: There hasn’t been a successful product in the robotic/automated cooking category yet. Why will Oliver be different?

Aboujassoum: We believe that the main reason it’s been difficult to crack the market is because the cost has been too high or the product has been simply too intimidating or different from what a user is accustomed to in a kitchen appliance.

We were determined to keep lasersharp focus on engineering Oliver to be cost effective and enhancing what is already familiar to the user in what to expect from a kitchen appliance. With Oliver, we were able to build the necessary functions of automated dispensing, mixing, and heating that meets its futuristic robotic function, but yet familiar in its form to the user.

Finding the balance between performance, form, and cost was a challenge that we were able to overcome with the technology we have developed. Overcoming this challenge was the key to opening the door to designing a user centred product in this space. This is what makes Oliver different.

We know that we still have a long way ahead of us, but we believe Oliver is the perfect balance that will be inviting to users in and will bridge that gap between traditional kitchen appliances and the future of cooking.

Else Labs was one of 15 startups selected for the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. To find the next big thing in cooking, you won’t want to miss the Startup Showcase at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of any ticket.

Breville’s New Espresso Machine Is Almost Like A Home Robot Barista

It’s no secret that robots are changing the way the food and beverage industry is creating food, serving its customers, designing products and automating tasks that used to belong to people. Startups like Cafe X are actually staffed with fully robotic baristas who will make you a delightful (and fast) cup of coffee with no real human involvement.

But it’s not just Silicon Valley startups getting in the mix – companies like Breville are thinking about how to automate tasks and deliver appliances that give consumers quality without leaving the house. Enter Breville’s newest invention, the Oracle Touch, which is the closest you can probably get to hiring a barista to come to your house and make you the perfect espresso-based beverage. The Oracle Touch has – you guessed it – a touchscreen and a bunch of advanced technology inside that gives it the ability to create a drink from scratch without much human input at all.

The Oracle will grind the beans, tamp down the ground espresso, infuse and pour a shot and steam your milk of choice to the exact desired standards (without anyone having to hold the wand or container.) In a market where fancy espresso machines usually require some know-how and Keurig-type machines make brewing coffee with a button-push super simple, it makes sense for Breville to try and create the best of both worlds.

The machine, of course, isn’t cheap and not meant to be a hugely mainstream device. But Wired reviewer and food writer Joe Ray has a lot of great things to say about the Oracle, including:

“The Oracle cleverly straddles a line, offering an impressive amount of customization and hands-on time, while automating enough that you’d have to try hard to make a bad drink…for those who are able to plunk down $2,500 on an espresso maker, Breville has created an outstanding machine.”

I took first balked at the price, but when considering my $4.50 a day soy latte habit, I spend about half the cost of a Breville automated espresso machine in a year on barista-created beverages. And I have to leave my house to get them.

Does this type of technology mean we’ll see the downfall of the traditional coffeehouse? Not likely. Robotics and automation are certainly disrupting many areas of the food service industry, but coffee shops still offer a product and an atmosphere that many people can’t or don’t want to replicate at home. While the price points of home automated espresso machines might come down over time, the more likely impact will be to baristas themselves as automation and advancements in robotics are coming close to replacing the job of grinding, measuring, stamping, steaming and combining ingredients to create the perfect caffeinated beverage.

Watch Sally The Robot Make My Salad

Yesterday at the FOODIT event in Mountain View, I had salad for lunch.

Why I am telling you this? Because unlike any salad I’ve had before, this one was custom built for me by a robot named Sally.

We’ve written about Sally before at the Spoon, but this is the first time I got to taste a Sally-crafted salad.  On hand to give me a tour and tell us about Sally was Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar.

You can watch the video of Sally making a salad above, but here are a few takeaways from my conversation with Sekar and Chef Kelly Olazar:

  • Sally allows the user to choose “chef salad” mixes or build their own using the twenty types of ingredients.  Users can also use an app to do greater customization of the salad.
  • The list price on a Sally is $30 thousand, but the company does offer discounts
  • Sally herself weighs in at 400 pounds
  • The product is targeted towards office cafeterias, universities and restaurants
  • Sally can make about 40-50 salads before she has to be refilled. Yesterday at the FOODIT event, they had to once and served 90 salads. Chef Kelly Olazar told me people were coming back for second salads later in the day (cheapsters).

Overall, I like the salad and was impressed with how quick Sally worked. While the robot’s price seems high, I figured that if could replace a worker and generate $500-$1000 a day in a busy cafeteria, the product makes sense financially in a high-volume food service location.