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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food robots

Glacierfire’s Ice+Fries Seems Like Everything You’d Want from an Icelandic Robot Bar

Iceland is having a bit of a moment right now, thanks to the success of Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which stars Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams as Icelandic singers. Oh, and also because Glacierfire launched a robotic bar/restaurant called Ice+Fries there a couple months back.

Ice+Fries features two robotic arms, dubbed Tipsy Floki and Ragnar, that can mix up to 100 cocktails per hour and 1,500 cocktails a day without human intervention. It also sports a 3D printer that prints out fancy desserts and garnishes for drinks. There’s even a robotic Aibo dog that wanders the bar. But the automation is woven much more deeply into the very fabric of the restaurant.

I spoke with Glacierfire CEO Priyesh Patel by phone this week, who explained some of the smarts that goes into the restaurant. The robo-bartenders themselves are made by Makr Shakr, but Glacierfire has integrated its own software stack that keeps the bar running, including order management, timesheets, ingredient/temperature monitoring, etc. There is also a healthy amount of artificial intelligence (AI) implemented.

Patel explained how they use the AI with facial recognition for a number of different purposes. The facial recognition will guide people as to where they pick up their orders. It can also be used in determining if there are underaged people trying to order alcoholic drinks (the drinking age in Iceland is 20). The AI+facial recogntion combo is also used to gauge sentiment in the bar. (i.e., Are customers happy?) Your mileage may vary on whether or not you find that kind of monitoring useful or creepy.

Ice+Fries isn’t completely human-less. The food is still cooked by people, and there are technicians on hand to deal with the robots. But in building the automated experience Patel echoed the sentiment of many food robot companies: If you can use robots to lower labor costs, then you can pass that savings on to the consumer. Patel said that cocktails in Iceland are typically $15 per drink, but Ice+Fries can serve them at $10.

Ice+Fries has only been open since April in Iceland, so we have yet to prove that those economics bear out. Here in the U.S., Miso Robotics found that its first generation of Flippy robots were too expensive for many QSRs. Robot barista Cafe X had to shutter its downtown locations, and robot burger joint, Creator, recently closed its restaurant down as well.

To be fair, Creator’s shutdown was more attributable to the global pandemic that closed dine in operations at restaurants around the country. According to Patel, Iceland was able to avoid COVID-induced lockdowns. But as the virus continues to rage on here in the U.S., Ice & Fries might actually model what a restaurant will look like post-pandemic.

Setting aside the close quarters and inside nature of the restaurant for a moment, the Ice & Fries experience is contactless, a key feature in these coronavirus times. While orders can be done on a touchscreen, there is also a mobile app customers can use, and robot bartenders remove one more vector of human-to-human viral transmission.

The first Ice+Fries is located in Reykjavik, Iceland, but the company has plans for expansions into Lisbon, Portugal, and Paris, France. Patel said Galcierfire has a two-pronged go-to market strategy for this robot restaurant concept. The first is to build out and launch its own branded restaurants, and the second it to license the Ice+Fries technology out to third-party restaurant companies looking to create similar concepts.

Who knows? If this takes off, we could all be singing an Icelandic song of Ice+Fries.

Bear Robotics CEO on the Role of Restaurant Server Robots in a COVID (and Beyond) World

For the past couple of years, robots were the shiny new object for restaurants. They could automate cooking, serving and delivering food, and even wash the dishes when all was said and done. But last year’s robots were still first generation tech and more of a novelty as the restaurant industry figured out the cultural and economic costs and benefits of automation.

Then COVID-19 came along and the world turned upside down. Restaurants that haven’t shut down permanently are looking to see what socially distant changes will be mandated in order for them to reopen. With their inability to get sick, robots could move from a novelty in restaurants to a necessity.

To see if there’s been a increase in robot interest from the restaurant industry, I checked in with John Ha, Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics. Bear is the company behind Penny, the autonomous front of house robot that can bring food to tables and carry empty plates back to be cleaned.

“Interest is going up a lot,” Ha said about incoming inquiries of his robot. “Before COVID, [restaurant] operators loved our robots, but employees were fifty-fifty, and customers didn’t really care. Now the changes that I see are on the customer side.”

The changes he’s talking about are what concerns customers now have. Before they didn’t care about the robot because they were most interested in the food. But in a pandemic world, customers now want to know who has touched their food and the cleanliness of those hands.

“People come back for the food before, now people are going to pick the restaurant they can trust,” Ha said. “People want less contact in the restaurant.”

Robots are a way of providing one less point of human contact. Kitchen staff can load up the robot tray and the robot then drives itself to its table destination to bring people their order. But then it actually gets a little complicated. When it comes to moving the food off the robot and onto the table, as Ha explained. “Should we allow customers to pick up the food? There’s danger involved with that as well.” It’s not hard to imagine, for example, a customer dropping a bowl of scalding soup as they lifted it off the robot.

“But would you want the servers to touch the food?” Ha continued. “They can’t wash their hands every minute, and even if they could, how do you know?”

One thing Ha does know is that the next version of Penny will be easier to clean. “The next version much easier to clean and food contact safe,” said Ha, “From the materials to design.”

Sterilization is going to play an increasingly important role in food robotics, and could become one of its biggest selling points. It’s much easier to wipe down a robot than it is to constantly monitor all your employees for any sign of illness.

Then there is the question of what do restaurant customers want to interact with? Restaurants in California will reportedly need to have servers wear gloves and masks. Which is less threatening to a customer, a masked human or a robot?

I don’t know. We’re all figuring this out in real time, and robots may not be the answer for every restaurant. “Adopting a robot is an intrusive change for the restaurant,” Ha said. “They have to redefine the workflow for expediters, servers, bussers.”

Despite all that, in a world wary of human contact, robotics could solve at least part of the meal journey puzzle. As Ha noted “Now it’s something everyone will consider.”

From Michigan to Korea, Robots Keep Food Rolling When People Can’t

Prior to this pandemic, the big ethical questions surrounding food robotics and automation was their impact on loss of human jobs. But as COVID-19 has forced us to social distance and rethink our regular activities, replacing humans with robots for food delivery seems like a more ethical choice. Robots, after all, don’t need face masks, can be placed in frontline situations and won’t accidentally cough on your groceries.

As it’s done with many other aspects of the meal journey, the coronavirus is accelerating the adoption of certain types of food tech — like robots — that otherwise would have come to market on a much longer timeline.

The Detroit News posted a story yesterday about the increased demand for Refraction’s delivery robots in Michigan. Refraction makes the rugged, three-wheeled, self-driving REV-1 delivery bot. It’s bigger than Starship’s cooler-sized robots, yet not as big as Nuro’s self-driving pod vehicles.

At the end of last year, Refraction kicked off a beta program to deliver takeout meals from four different Ann Arbor restaurants. The Detroit News reports that Refraction now has more than 400 restaurant partners and the company’s fleet of five robots is running at capacity. Refraction is also working to get into grocery delivery.

The robots are cleaned between deliveries, and Refraction has added UV lights to the interior of the robot to further sanitize the cargo compartment. The robot is also contactless as consumers use their phone to unlock and open the robot to retrieve their food.

Refraction’s robots also, obviously, reduce human-to-human contact for people receiving food while sheltering in place. Our country may regain a certain amount of freedom to move in the coming months, but we’ve had a pretty healthy fear of other people pumped into us for the past couple of months. Robots may be more welcome once we’re past this.

These robotic advantages could also be applied beyond restaurant delivery and into restaurants themselves. The Korea Times reports that this week Woowa Bros. announced it would offer free rentals of its “Dilly” server robot to 50 restaurants in Korea for two months starting in mid-April.

The Dilly is an autonomous robot with a series of racks meant to work the front of house, delivering food from the kitchen to tables and bringing empty plates back.

Woowa Bros. launched the Dilly server program back in November and charged roughly $773 a month (with a two-year contract) for the robot. The Korea Times writes that 164 restaurants applied for the program, and currently Woowa has 23 robots operating in 16 restaurants across Korea.

It’s entirely likely that we’ll see more server robots in restaurants here in the U.S. as well. Though coronavirus has permanently shuttered at least 3 percent of restaurants across the nation, there’s already talk of what restaurants will look like when dine-in rooms re-open. Expect fewer people, disposable menus, and possibly servers wearing masks.

One has to wonder what people will prefer interacting with: a server wearing a mask or a robot? To be fair, a lot more of us will probably be wearing masks in public in the near future, but the cold, sterility of a robot may be more appealing to nervous people just starting to come out from sheltering in place.

Refraction and Woowa aren’t the only examples of robots gaining more popularity. Starship recently expanded the use of its food delivery robots beyond college campuses and onto city streets in Arizona and around Washington DC. And Nuro just got the greenlight to test its autonomous delivery vehicles on public streets in California.

But it’s not just the consumer end of the robotic equation that we should be thinking about. While robots may help reduce human-to-human contact when accepting your food, they also relieve some of the new dangers of being a delivery person. Let’s face it, delivery people have worked hard during this outbreak and have often gotten the short end of the gig economy stick. Ideally the food industry can use any savings from automation to help fund new job opportunities for humans.

The ethical questions surrounding the availability of human jobs in an increasingly automated world will remain and need to be addressed in a thoughtful manner after this virus recedes. But in the shorter term, robots may help reduce transmission of a deadly virus and perhaps ease a little bit of anxiety around getting our food delivered.

Miso Robotics Officially Opens Equity Crowdfunding Campaign to Raise $30M

Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the burger grilling, tater tot frying robot, announced today that it is kicking off its equity crowdfunding campaign to raise a $30 million Series C round.

Equity crowdfunding eschews traditional institutional funding such as venture capital and allows everyday people to invest directly in a company. In the case of Miso, a minimum investment of $1,493 per investor is required in order to participate. (And we should interject that any investment is a risk and this post is not an endorsement of Miso.)

Miso announced the equity crowdfunding campaign back in November, but it still required SEC approval before it could officially begin. According to the press announcement emailed to us, Miso says it has already secured $2.6 million in reservations with a pre-money valuation of $80 million.

Earlier this year, Miso introduced its newest generation of Flippy, the ROAR, which has the robot suspended on rails above a cooking space to make more room for any human co-workers.

This jump into equity crowdfunding comes at an interesting time, to say the least. The world is in the throes of a global pandemic that is costing millions of jobs, has sent the stock market reeling and is creating even new levels of uncertainty. How many everyday people impacted by COVID-19 are going to have the money to plunk down at minimum of $1,500 to own a small part of a robot company?

Not to mention the fact that a big driver of food automation in restaurants was a labor crunch. With an estimated 3 percent of US restaurants permanently closed, there will be a lot of human workers suddenly available once this pandemic passes.

On the other hand, the coronavirus outbreak and fear of human-to-human transmission of the virus is sparking all kinds of change throughout the food system. In a post-corona world, robots that prepare food could be seen as a way to make restaurants more hygienic. This, in turn, could spark a boom in food robotics.

Equity crowdfunding has become a bit of a trend in the food tech world. Other companies like Winc, Small Robot Company, GOffee and GoSun have all turned to the everyday investor for their latest rounds of funding. On one level, it provides them with the flexibility to grow as they like without added pressure from scale-seeking VCs, but it also denies companies the networks and knowledge VCs can provide.

Miso has made its choice, and now we’ll see if everyday investors flip for Flippy the robot.

Dexai Robotics Raises $5.5M for its Robot Sous Chef (That Can Scoop Ice Cream)

Dexai Robotics has raised a $5.5 million seed round for its robotic arm sous chef, the company announced yesterday. The round was led by Hyperplane Venture Capital with new investors Rho Capital, Harlem Capital, Contour Venture Partners, and NextView Ventures also participating.

Dubbed “Alfred,” Dexai’s robotic arm is meant to be a flexible food prep assistant that can work in various kitchen scenarios. The company says it can work with a restaurant’s existing set up, utensils and recipes to do things like assemble sandwiches, salads, and even scoop ice cream.

Alfred came about as a result of artificial intelligence for robotics research conducted in collaboration between MIT and Harvard. According to the press announcement, that research led to the software breakthrough that allowed Alfred to control “deformable materials” like ice cream, sushi-grade tuna, pico de gallo, etc.

Dexai was actually among the companies in our Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase, back in 2018. You can see the company’s brief pitch here.

SKS 2018 Startup Showcase: Dexai Robotics

With some QSRs reporting worker turnover rates as high as 150 percent, food robots and automation are one solution to the labor shortage restaurants are facing. Robots can work around the clock without a break and can take over repetitive, sometimes dangerous work in the kitchen, allowing humans to focus more on customer service.

Dexai is among a cohort of startups applying robotics to the kitchen. Miso Robotics‘ Flippy can grill burgers and fry foods, and Picnic’s modular robots can assemble 300 pizzas in an hour.

Dexai says that it will use this round of funding to expand its engineering, sales and product teams with the goal of serving new and different types of cuisines and scaling up.

Creator, the Robot Burger Restaurant, Adding Dinner Hours

Creator, the robot-powered hamburger restaurant in San Francisco, is expanding into dinner service. Starting March 9, Creator will be open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., the company posted on Instagram yesterday.

Creator is kind of a bellwether for the food robot industry. It’s a concept built around the idea of having a robot take over the manual repetition of grilling and assembling hamburgers, so human employees can focus on providing better customer service and learn new skills.

But up until this year, the Creator restaurant has had limited hours, operating only Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Then this past January, the restaurant expanded service to five days a week (and added a plant-based burger option) but was still only open for lunch.

View this post on Instagram

Next Monday, March 9. Hours expand again … to 8pm. We'll be open after school and after work! Yes, we'll have HAPPY HOUR specials. The bigger the group you bring, the better the beer, wine & burger deals. 🍻🥂🍔🍔🍔⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ .⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ We can't wait for curious kids and families to stop by after school and for dinner! Many of you work far from SoMa during our lunch hours but live or play in SF at night. Now is your time.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ .⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Reservations allow large parties to beat the line, but we welcome walkups too. For group reservations and robot tours email events@creator.rest. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ —————————–⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ HAPPY HOUR⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ $30 pitcher + 3 burgers⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ $10 burger + beer, add fries for $2

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Those limited hours meant that really the only people who could enjoy Creator were office workers in downtown San Francisco. More specifically, those office workers in San Francisco within walking distance of the restaurant’s location at 3rd and Folsom. By opening up dinner hours, Creator should be able to attract a different clientele and really put its robot through its paces in terms of volume and uptime.

Food robotics is at an interesting point in its evolution. Robots that make food and drinks are still relatively new and remain more of a novelty than a common feature of restaurants. Even then, how those robots are being implemented is undergoing big changes.

In January, Miso Robotics unveiled the next iteration of its Flippy robot, which is no longer stationary and will be suspended on a rail to move back and forth as it grills burgers and fries tater tots. That new version of Flippy won’t be available until the end of this year, and in the meantime, Miso is turning to equity crowdfunding, not traditional VCs, to raise its next round of financing.

Other food robots have fallen on harder times. Cafe X shuttered its three downtown robot barista locations in order to focus on airports, and Zume closed its robot-assisted pizza delivery operations.

It looks like Creator’s slow, methodical approach is paying off, at least for its first location. Instead of trying to scale too quickly, Creator has seemingly been intentional in its addition of service hours. As it expands into dinner, the next challenge for Creator will be growing beyond one location.

Chowbotics Looks Beyond Robot Salads and Into the Grocery Store Game

Here at The Spoon, we are big fans of breakfast cereal. We’ve written stories about it, and even devoted an entire podcast to it. So when we learned that Chowbotics, maker of the Sally the salad making robot, was looking to expand into cereal, well we just had to give them a call to learn more.

For those not familiar, Chowbotics’ Sally robot is a self-contained robotic vending machine that serves up salads and other bowls of fresh food like grains and yogurts. There are currently more than 100 Sally robots installed in different hospitals, college campuses and other locations across the country.

Chowbotics CEO Rick Wilmer told me by phone today that his company is looking to broaden its appeal by partnering with CPG brands like cereal companies. Wilmer envisions a scenario where shoppers, faced with a wall of different cereals in a grocery store, can sample cereals via a Chowbotics robot (complete with cold milk!).

This is an interesting direction and could turn the idea of Chowbotics on its head. Right now, Chowbotics locates Sallys in high-traffic areas that lack fresh food options. For establishments like hospitals that operate 24 hours a day, Sally becomes the only fresh food choice available since cafeterias and shops close down. In contrast, supermarkets are filled with fresh food choices.

Sally, then, could become more of a branding tool for CPG companies (like those that make cereal) and less of a mini-restaurant. This, in turn, changes the economics of Sally, which is typically bought or leased by the location. Instead of generating revenue by selling bowls, cereal samples (or whatever) would be subsidized, presumably by the CPG company itself.

It’s basically automating the in-store sample system. Instead of a person with a tray of a new-flavored Oreos or manchego cheese, the robot could dispense them either straight as a sample or as part of a larger recipe of ingredients to showcase how that food could be used at home.

This versatility seems to be one area where Sally has an advantage over other fresh food vending services like Farmers Fridge and Fresh Bowl, both of which serve food in closed jars. Sally can hold up to 22 different ingredients that could be swapped out and reprogrammed to make a variety of different meals out of those ingredients — not just pre-packaged salads.

Having said all that, it’s important to note that right now these are just ambitions for Chowbotics. They still have a lot of work do to convince grocery retailers and big brands to hop on its robotic bandwagon. But it shows that Chowbotics is thinking way bigger than salads. And if they get big cereals on board, we at The Spoon are happy to test out a bowl or two.

Dishcraft Publicly Rolls Out Dishes as a Service to the Bay Area

Since Dishcraft Robotics, the robot dishwashing startup, came out of stealth last year, we’ve known that its business model would be dishes as a service. In a Linkedin post yesterday, Dishcraft Founder and CEO, Linda Pouliot talked publicly for the first time about the roll of that service, dubbed Dishcraft Daily.

Dishcraft Daily quietly launched in September of last year and is currently being used by a number of unnamed corporate campuses, cafeterias and other high-volume eating venues. Each day, Dishcraft arrives at the end of lunch service, picks up all the dirty dishes that have been stacked into special carts, and drops off clean ones. Dirty dishes are taken back to the Dishcraft facility and loaded into the cleaning robot.

As we wrote last year at the time of the company’s launch:

[Dishcraft’s robot] grabs each dish individually and inserts it into a rotating wheel. The wheel spins the dirty plate face down and into position where it’s sprayed with water and scrubbed clean in seconds. The scrubbed plate is then rotated again where cameras and computer vision software inspect it for any debris left on the plate before exiting the machine into a dishrack or going back in for another scrub.

Once outside the robot, dishes are sent to be sanitized and stacked to be shipped back out the next day.

I spoke with Pouliot by phone this week and she said since the company’s launch last year, its robot is now faster and has improved the AI function that detects dirt and other matter that might linger on the dishes. The company is opening up a new facility next month that will be able to handle dishes from up to 50,000 diners a day.

When writing about robots and automation, there is always the question of the human cost. Dishcraft’s robot is automating a job that is not only done by a person but also serves as a good entry-level job that doesn’t require a high degree of specialization.

However, restaurants are currently facing a labor shortage, with turnover as high as 150 percent. Restaurants are also grappling with increased pressure from the current administration that is cracking down on undocumented workers, a labor pool restaurants rely on.

While Pouliot wouldn’t provide specific pricing, she said that Dishcraft Daily is comparable to existing dishwashing solutions currently available to dining operators. Additionally, Pouliot claims that the Dishcraft robot’s computer vision and AI are more accurate and impartial (i.e., what constitutes “clean”) than a human to create consistently cleaner dishes.

In her post, Pouliot also said that Dishcraft can help companies with zero-waste initiatives. A corporate office feeding employees probably doesn’t have dishwashing facilities or a place to store hundreds of plates on-site. Rather than setting out single-use plates (even compostable ones may have forever chemicals in them), companies can offer reusable, clean plates.

Right now, Dishcraft is only servicing customers between San Francisco and San Jose. We’ll have to see if the land that brought us software as a service will embrace dishes as a service.

New Bake Xpress Robot Vending Machine Makes Croissants and Pizzas

One of the big surprises from my food robot tour of San Francisco last year was just how delicious the bread from the Le Bread Xpress’ eponymous vending machine was. For $4 and a 90 second wait, you got a light and buttery baguette warmed to perfection.

So I’m excited to (eventually) venture back down to the Bay Area to try out the company’s brand new Bake Xpress machine, which doles out between 15 and 18 different items, including croissants, turkey and brie sandwiches and pizzas.

The original Le Bread Xpress machine launched roughly three years ago, and while there were only three locations in the U.S., there were more than 120 in Europe. Baguettes, understandably, are more popular in France than they are here.

While the bread was indeed delicious, the problem with the original Le Bread Xpress was proximity. The one I visited was in the Stonestown Galleria, which, if you’re not familiar with San Francisco, is way out of the way. Far outside the city core, it’s not really imaginable that someone would travel to use it, and even then, that warm loaf of bread would be cold by the time you got home.

Benoit Herve, CEO and Founder of Le Bread Xpress, told me by phone this week that the new machine is meant to offer a more complete meal solution. “We have the ability to provide a food menu from breakfast to dinner,” he said. Croissants in the morning, turkey sandwiches at lunch and pizza for dinner.

The Bake Xpress can hold and refrigerate up to 80 items. Each item is in a box with a special barcode that the machine scans to know exactly where each croissant, sandwich and pizza is located. The food is all parbaked, so when a customer places an order for a hot item, the machine grabs the box and heats the item using a combination of microwave, infrared and convection heating, depending on the item. Food takes anywhere from 60 seconds to three minutes to heat up.

Right now there are eight Bake Xpresses operating. Of those, however, only one at the University of California at Berkeley is available to the public. A second one is coming online next month, either replacing the old machine at Stonestown or going into a unnamed hospital facility, according to Herve.

Bake Xpress has partnered with an undisclosed food service provider to help with the placement and operation of its machines. Le Bread Xpress gets its revenue by renting out the machines and taking a cut of sales.

Bake Xpress is emblematic of the golden age of vending machines that we are entering. Companies like Le Bread Xpress, Chowbotics, and Yo-Kai Express are all looking to level up automated food service by offering high quality fare at a reasonable price that’s available 24 hours a day. All of these companies are targeting college campuses, hospitals, airports and other high-traffic areas where people want something more than chips and soda at odd hours of the night.

What’s more, because these machines have a relatively small footprint, it’s less of a zero sum game. There’s no reason you can’t have Chowbotic’s Sally next to a Bake Xpress if you want a sandwich and a salad.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see co-location/marketing deals between complementary vending robots pop up as they all gain more traction. Something to look for on my next food robot tour of San Francisco.

Robots Deliver Food to People Quarantined in China Hotel

One of the most useful things about robots, we are told by the companies developing them, is that they can do the work that is too manual, repetitive and dangerous for humans. That last part is being put to the test in China, where robots have been spotted delivering food to quarantined people amid that country’s rapidly escalating Coronavirus outbreak.

The UK’s Daily Star reports that a hotel in Hangzhou, China, more than 200 tourists were being isolated after a flight arrived carrying some passengers from Wuhan, the epicenter of the viral outbreak.

Staff at the quarantined hotel dispatched 16 robots, one for each floor of the building, to deliver food to people in an effort to limit cross contamination. A video posted to the China Trends YouTube channel two days ago shows the robot, calling itself “peanut,” rolling down the hotel hallway, announcing its presence as people pop out from their rooms to grab food.

#Coronavirus: Robots Deployed to Deliver Meals to Travelers in Isolation #Wuhan

One assumes/hopes that each robot is also getting a good scrubdown after each trip.

There are nearly 6,000 confirmed cases of the Coronavirus in mainland China, and 132 people have died. Roughly 60 million people are on lockdown in China.

The fact that robots are being put to use in this way would be pretty cool if it wasn’t so deadly serious. But it does highlight how robots can be used in situations that are hazardous to humans and help save lives (everyone needs to eat). Hopefully, more robots will be employed to limit human exposure to the virus, and we’ll be able to apply lessons learned here to help curb this and future outbreaks.

Newsletter: Should Food Robots Be Humanoid?

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Say you’re in a college dining hall. In front of you are two smoothie making machines. Both make equally delicious and fresh smoothies, but one is a vending machine, where you watch a cup move on a rail back and forth as ingredients are dispensed into it, and the other features a robot with smiling LED face and two arms that swirl about to make your drink.

Which one would you choose? The one with embedded automation, or the one that looks like a robot?

I ask because just weeks ago I pondered whether food automation startups should even use the term “robot” any longer. Robot comes with inflated sci-fi expectations and baggage, and as Cafe X shuttered some locations and Zume shut down its robot-assisted pizza delivery business, it seemed like articulating arms had fallen out of favor.

But in just the past week, I’ve written about not one but two different startups that are all-in on building humanoid-looking food service robots. Macco Robotics’ Kime (key-may) has two arms that have been used mostly for pouring beer, and Robojuice just yesterday announced the upcoming launch of its first robot-made juice and smoothie station.

The Co-Founder and CEO of Robojuice told me that his company went with a humanoid because “People are more used to ordering from people.” Plus, as Robojuice’s website touts, there is an “entertainment twist” to having a face and arms.

For its part, Macco isn’t stopping with just arms. Macco’s CTO told me that while a humanoid shape may not be the most efficient, his company’s ultimate goal is to build a freestanding, autonomous robot kitchen helper. In essence a Rosey the robot from the Jetsons.

Using robotic arms does have a certain theatricality built into it. Cafe X built its kiosk to almost be a stage for its robotic arms that would do things like wave to customers.

But how quickly does that novelty wear off? If I’m in a hurry and I just want a smoothie or a latte, I don’t need theatrics. I need caffeine, now.

Then there is the cost. Robotic arms aren’t cheap, so there is a question around scale. (Robojuice says its robotic arms will be cheaper because they use hydraulics instead of motors).

Like so many things, the answer to whether you want to build a human-looking robot for food service is probably that it depends on the scenario. Tourist traps and even places like grocery stores might want that added entertainment value since there is a steady stream of new people who won’t get bored by it, while airports might be better served by a literal machine cranking out food and drinks.

At the end of the day though, what really matters is the food. No amount of LED smiles and swirling arms can save a bad drink.

Delivery of Made-to-Order Food from Grocers Could Be Huge

Last week, Instacart announced that in addition to grocery, it was rolling out delivery of made-to-order foods from supermarkets. Think: deli made sandwiches and such.

As someone who often grabs a rotisserie chicken or a handmade flatbread pizza from my local grocery store, the expansion of delivery into made to order food could be a big boon for grocers and delivery services alike. If I’m doing my online grocery shopping for same day (or two hour even) delivery, why not throw in a prepared meal so I don’t have to cook that night?

For delivery services like Door Dash, Postmates and Uber Eats that are currently flirting with grocery delivery, this could open up a path to a deeper relationship, it’s a cooked meal, just from the market instead of a restaurant. And for food retailers, this could not only act as another source of revenue, but provide a halo to sell other goods along with a dinner order. You know, maybe add a pint of ice cream to that rotisserie chicken order.

You Should Attend Customize, Our Food Personalization Summit

I’m going to turn this part of the newsletter over to my colleague, Catherine Lamb, who is chairing our upcoming Customize conference on food personalization. She has a lovely writeup on the event perfectly encapsulating why you should attend!

This week UBS published a report that personalized nutrition could generate annual revenues of $64 billion, and that companies large and small should take note. But how are companies capitalizing on the personalization trend across the food system, from CPG to restaurants to the home kitchen?

That’s exactly the question we’ll explore at Customize, The Spoon’s NYC summit on food personalization coming up on February 27. We’ve recruited an amazing list of speakers to discuss some of the most cutting-edge topics in the future of personalization.

Spoon readers can get a 15 percent discount if they use code SPOON15. If you’re media and would like to attend drop us a line.

The Food Tech Show: Are We Ready to Eat Bugs?

The Spoon team got together talk about the most interesting food and kitchen tech stories of the week, including:

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, download direct to your device or just click play below.