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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Robot

Pizza Party! Picnic Raises $5M for its Food Robotics Platform

Picnic, the food robotics company best known for its automated pizza assembly line, announced today that it has raised $5 million. The funding is part of Picnic’s seed round and was led by Creative Ventures with participation from Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital.

Picnic came out of stealth mode last month to reveal its assembly line style robot where a conveyor carries a crust under dispensers that apply sauce and other toppings. Picnic’s pizza ‘bot is already being used by Centerplate at Seattle’s T-Mobile arena. (Picnic also fed hungry attendees at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October, cranking out hundreds of (tasty) pizzas per hour.)

While its first use is putting together pizzas, Picnic is really creating more of a modular platform that could be used for a number of different types of food. Think assembling Subway style sandwiches, for example.

As I wrote of the time of its unveiling , Picnic sits squarely at the nexus of a number of different food tech trends. First, it’s part of a wave of food automation that is taking over some of the repetitive tasks of food creation and promising to help restaurants deal with high human turnover. Second, among its first venues is a stadium, since stadiums need to feed a lot of people quickly, they are becoming a hotbed when it comes to food innovation. Finally, Picnic says that its machine can help cut down on food waste by precisely applying the same amount of ingredients to each pizza, each time.

With its new funding, Picnic says it will continue product development, as well as ramp up marketing and staffing.

Starship Robots Roll Out to University of Wisconsin-Madison, Can They Survive the Winter?

I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but people from there tell me that it gets cold about this time of year, I mean, it snowed there on Halloween last week, with more expected tomorrow and Wednesday. This type of inclement weather was actually the first thing I thought about when Starship sent me a press release today announcing that its robots are now rolling around the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), delivering food.

Starship makes six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that can carry 20 pounds worth of cargo. UW-M has 66,000 students, staff and faculty, and is getting 30 Starship robots those people can use by downloading the Starship app, ordering from three different markets at the school and dropping a pin on the campus map to set the delivery point. There is a $1.99 delivery fee and at first, the delivery area will be limited to a specific area before expanding across campus.

This is the latest school to adopt Starship’s delivery robots, following George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Purdue, University of Houston and the University Pittsburgh.

Pitt, however, recently suspended its robot delivery program after running into issues with the autonomous robots allegedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

That type of real-world complication makes me wonder how the robots will do when truly nasty Wisconsin weather strikes. On the one hand, I’m sure that Starship and the UW-M have thought about this and come up with solutions. One advantage to delivering on campuses is that they are smaller geographic areas with lots of walkways and dedicated maintenance staffs to keep those walkways safe and clear.

But still, snow and ice could be big obstacles for a robot with little wheels. That’s one of the reasons Refraction.ai is using fat bike tires for its autonomous robots. Not to mention that the performance of lithium-ion batteries, like those in Starship robots, degrades in cold temperatures. We reached out to Starship to see how they will address the cold, and will update when we hear back.

UPDATE: Starship sent us the following statement: “The robots are designed to work in a variety of conditions including snow and rain. There is negligible battery degradation in the extreme cold.”

In the meantime, there are now 66,000 people at UW-M who are more likely to avoid the bitter cold and can stay in and order food thanks to Starship’s robots.

Cala Raises €1M for its Vegetarian Pasta Making Robot

In addition to the coffee, smoothies, cheeseburgers, chicken tenders and pizza robots are making, you can now add pasta dishes to that list. Paris-based Cala has developed a pasta cooking robot, and recently raised €1 million (~$1.1M USD) in angel funding to help bring it to market early next year.

Cala’s pastabot will be the center of a self-contained mini-restaurant that measures 5 square meters (~53 square feet) and can make up to 800 dishes an hour. As you can see from the video below, the Cala bot uses Cartesian approach, rather than an articulating arm. The restaurant will be fully autonomous. Users order via mobile app, meals cost €6 with a drink (~$6.6 USD), and the robot prepares and plates all of the food as well as doing the cleaning.

“We want everything to be sustainable,” Cala CEO Ylan Richard told me in a phone interview this week. And that sustainability runs throughout the company and its robot. First, Richard believes that the only way to sustain a business of bringing healthy food to people quickly while making enough margin is through robotics.

Second, right now Cala bot only serves vegetarian dishes. In addition to being better for the planet, avoiding meat also cuts down on costs and complications associated with storing and cooking all the ingredients inside the machine. Richard says they use “a lot of organic things,” but says his bigger priority is to locally source all of their ingredients.

Cala ran a live test restaurant in Paris for four months and Richard said that from the test the company learned that it’s important for the robot to fade into the background once the meal is served. “If you don’t come just for the meal that means there is something wrong with the way we do things,” Richard said. This mission for the robot to merely be the means and not the star of a restaurant is pretty much the exact same thing that Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas told us at our Articulate Food Robot conference earlier this year.

What’s kind of funny is that France, famous for its hallowed culinary tradition, is now home to not one, but two different robot restaurant companies. Earlier this year PAZZI (formerly EKIM) raised €10 million for its autonomous robot pizza restaurants.

I asked Richard about any dichotomies around French companies building what is quite literally lifeless food preparation. He told me that sure, France is famous for its high-end cooking, but the French are also some of McDonald’s biggest customers. “Sometimes we just want to eat something quickly,” he said.

Cala will use its recent funding to bring its robo-restaurant back to the public at the beginning of next year. The company plans to own and operate its next location, which will be outside a university in Paris. Richard said that as the company grows, it will look at franchising, rather than licensing the technology out to a larger brand, and that eventually Cala will make more types of food beyond just vegetarian dishes and pasta.

Cafe X COO, Cynthia Yeung, Departs From the Robot Coffee Company

Cynthia Yeung, now the former COO Cafe X, posted on Linkedin yesterday that as of last Friday she was no longer with the coffee robotics startup after having worked there for a year and a half. Normally we don’t write about executive shuffles, but Yeung was high up at the company, and her departure comes at a time when rival robo-coffee company, Briggo, is scaling up.

Yeung posted the following to Linkedin yesterday:

Friday was my last day as COO of Cafe X Technologies. I learned a lot from growing the company (now 35+ people) through our Series A and am grateful to Henry Hu, Jason Calacanis, and David O. Sacks for giving me the opportunity to be in “the room where it happens”. I’m proud of the upcoming SFO launch of our new machine (in addition to a few other locations), bringing on more experienced engineering talent, and having built some corporate infrastructure to help the team scale. I’m looking forward to seeing where the company goes next.

One thing that caught our eye is that Yeung said “through our Series A,” but so far, the $14.5 million Cafe X has raised has been publicly referred to as seed and “Seed-1” money, not Series A. We reached out to both Yeung and Cafe X CEO, Henry Hu to see if the company has raised a new round or if there is some other explanation. Yeung directed all questions to Hu.

UPDATE: Hu told us via tweet that they renamed the Seed-1 as a Series A.

Regardless, as Yeung also indicates, her departure comes as Cafe X is set to launch its first robot barista at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the company’s first location outside of the city of San Francisco.

But Cafe X’s robot will actually be the second automated cafe at SFO. Earlier this summer, Austin-based Briggo opened its robot Coffee Haus at that airport. In fact, Briggo was initially awarded the SFO contract, but Yeung was instrumental in the inclusion of Cafe X. As the San Francisco Business Times reported last November:

“We are striving to be a very, very responsible employer in San Francisco bringing trade jobs back to the city,” Cynthia Yeung, COO of Cafe X, told the SFO commissioners at the Nov. 6 [SFO Airport Commission] meeting. “And I want to understand why, with so little transparency, this trial program was awarded to a Texas based company?”

High-traffic locations like airports are perfect for robotic baristas because robots are fast, accurate and can operate around the clock. While there are plenty of airports around the world, they will be a battleground for automated food services like vending machines and robot coffee makers. Yeung left just days after Briggo announced it had entered into an exclusive agreement with SSP America to put Coffee Hauses in an additional 25 airports around the U.S. and Canada over the next two years.

While this was probably more of a coincidence, as Yeung indicated on Linkedin, Cafe X is entering the scaling phase of its startup lifecycle — a time when having steady leadership at the top is especially important.

Here at The Spoon, we kinda hope Yeung stays in food robotics because she’s a great guest to have on stage at our Smart Kitchen Summit and Articulate conferences.

This article originally stated Yeung worked at Cafe X for a year, it was actually a year and a half and this post has been updated to reflect that.

FIBBEE is a Moscow-Based Robot Barista

If I told you that Russian ‘bots were getting more sophisticated and spreading, your first reaction might be one of concern. But what if I told you that those Russian ‘bots served coffee? Well, then you might welcome them with open arms.

Moscow-based Foodtronics has created FIBBEE, a robot barista that serves up all manner of lattes and other coffee drinks. Like Briggo and Cafe X here in the U.S., FIBBEE is an automated kiosk that can be set up in high-traffic areas, and like those American counterparts, the number of FIBBEE locations is expanding.

Moscow is downright hot for robo-baristas right now, as FIBBEE joins another automated coffee service, MontyCafe.

In our quest to chronicle the rise of food robots all over the world, following is an email interview with Foodtronics’ CEO Alexandr Khvastunov about FIBBEE. NOTE: Answers in this post were slightly revised after publication as Foodtronics felt the translations weren’t entirely accurate.

SPOON: What is Fibbee?
Aleksandr Khvastunov: FIBBEE is a robot-barista. We believe that it has a female entity so FIBBEE is her given name. Her personality is bright, easy-going and positive.

Besides the fact that she’s an ideal barista who never fails, FIBBEE may give you emotional recharge. She serves coffee to customer in one of the five colorful cups which are supposed to provoke different moods: boost, energy, balance, insight and fun.

How is Fibbee different from Cafe X, Briggo or even MontyCafe?
We’ve been professionally engaged in coffee for the past 8 years. We’ve opened traditional coffee houses (so-called third wave coffee houses), were engaged in the coffee wholesale and other projects.

At some point we understood that robotic retail may give us an opportunity to grow and scale well our love of coffee as of the lack of human factor – FIBBEE is fast, she’s always in a good mood and ready to meet your needs.

We have developed almost all technical components for FIBBEE, from chips and control systems to our own manipulators (specific system of moving objects).

We also have two coffee machine modules and we can brew two drinks at the same time. One manipulator inserts glasses into the coffee machine and when the drink is ready rearranges it into the waiting buffer. Another manipulator swaps coffee from the buffer to one of the 3 areas of issue.

How many different types of drinks can Fibbee make? Can it do hot and cold drinks?
Current menu includes espresso, americano, lungo, cortado, latte, cappuccino, cappuccino light, and coffee with syrups.

Still our customers can customize any drink. For example, they can add milk to black coffee in the required quantity, adjust the amount of foam and milk in cappuccino and latte, or select milk temperature (cold or hot).

In the nearest future we plan to introduce additional types of milk (soybean, oatmeal), various types of coffee beans and drinks with ice and nitro coffee which are being tested right now.

How many Fibbee’s are there and where are they located? How many more do you plan to roll out?
We have 2 robotic coffee bars now, and in July we’re opening the third. By the end of 2019, we plan to open more than 12 in Moscow. We’re creating our own chain and currently do not sell franchises.

Our ambition is to become the largest robotic chain of coffee houses in Russia and Europe. Because we love coffee and know how to make it delicious.

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.