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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food robots

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.

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.

As Starship Delivery Robots Hit Ole Miss, Where’s Kiwi?

Starship’s autonomous food delivery robots started rolling out across the University of Missisppi (Ole Miss) yesterday, reports the school’s newspaper. This, evidently, makes Ole Miss the first college in the Southeastern Conference to get autonomous robot delivery, which isn’t a huge deal to us, but is probably a jab at rival University of Alabama somehow.

Starship’s robots are cooler-sized, six-wheeled self-driving vehicles that automatically navigate around people and obstacles. Students and staff wanting food download the Starship app and place an order from participating eateries at that college. They then pay a $1.99 fee to have it delivered to wherever they are on campus.

Starship shows that it is not slowing down the rollout of its robotic services in the new year. The list of colleges using Starship’s robots is getting too long to mention each time we write about them. But in the past few months alone Starship’s bots have begun service at the University of Houston, the University of Wisconsin, and the company re-started service at the University of Pittsburgh.

As the litany of colleges using Starship continues to grow, one has to wonder what’s up with Kiwi, another startup that makes squat food delivery robots for college campuses. The company announced an updated version of its robot with new capabilities back in December, but hasn’t made much noise since then.

There are a lot of colleges out there, so there is still plenty of opportunity for Kiwi. But at the rate Starship is going, its solution looks like it’s becoming turnkey. The more miles and deliveries Starship runs, the more data it collects and the better its service will become, which will beget even more adoption by more schools.

If Kiwi doesn’t start ramping up, it’s going to miss out on more than just Ole Miss.

Bear Robotics Raises $32M Series A. That’s a Lot of (Robot) Pennies

Bear Robotics, maker of the Penny restaurant server robot, announced today that it has raised a $32 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Softbank with participation from LINE Ventures Corp., Lotte Group, Vela Partners, DSC, and Smilegate. Bear had previously raised $2 million from South Korea’s Woowa Bros.

Penny is an autonomous robot built to shuttle food from restaurant kitchens to tables, and carry back empty dishes. The company released the latest version of Penny last year, which we described at the time:

Penny 2.0 is more cylindrical in shape, and can sport up to three tiers of carrying surface. Not only can Penny carry more, a new swappable tray system means it can be configured to carry any combination of food, drinks or bus tub.

Bear Robotics founder John Ha got the idea for Penny after running his own restaurant and seeing the hard work that went into being a server. It’s a lot of walking and carrying for a job that doesn’t pay all that well. Ha’s aim is to let robots do the monotonous back and forth associated with food service so employees and owners can do more customer service.

Penny has yet to go into mass production or full scale deployment. The robot was being used at Ha’s restaurant for a time and at a South Korean Pizza Hut, but there hasn’t been any word on expansion from that pilot.

But Penny isn’t the only serverbot in town. At CES this month, China’s PuduTech showed off its BellaBot, which in addition to carrying dishes, also sported an LED feline face. If customers pet Bella, the cat purrs, though it also gets annoyed if customers keep it from its work.

Bear’s fundraise comes at a time when food robots are having a bit of a tough time. Zume, which used robots to help make pizzas, shuttered its pizza delivery service. Creator, the robot-centric hamburger joint, was left stranded by Softbank, which was going to invest. Cafe X shut down three of its San Francisco locations. And Miso Robotics lost both its CEO and COO last year, and instead of venture funding, is turning to equity crowdfunding to raise more capital.

With its new, bulked up warchest, Bear is better prepared to weather any automation storm, but now it has to deliver a whole bunch of meals.

Soft Robotics Raises $23M Series B for its Gripping Tech

Soft Robotics, which makes grippers for robots so they can handle odd-shaped and delicate items like food, announced today that it has raised a $23 million Series B round of funding. The round was co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact and includes existing investors Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures, and Yamaha.

Also participating in the round was industrial automation solutions provider, FANUC, which had previously formed a strategic partnership with Soft Robotics to integrate the startup’s mGrip gripper system with any FANUC robot through the release of a new controller.

This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $48 million.

As we wrote in 2018, Soft Robotics’ gripping solution for picking up objects mimics an octopus, using rubbery-tipped appendages. In the company’s demo video below, you can see the one gripper picking up all different kinds of items with odd shapes and textures like a loaf of bread, individual cookies, an onion and a package of chicken.

There are two reasons to pay attention to this technology. First, grocery stores like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons are all starting to implement more robotic fulfillment centers. The ability to pick up fresh and delicate items will expand a retailer’s ability to automate fulfillment of online grocery orders. In addition to the CPGs, robots could be used to pack more fresh items like donuts, baguettes or store made bags of soup.

Second, as we’ve seen from Sony and Nvidia, the ability for a robot to safely manipulate fragile and odd-shaped objects like eggs and bananas can translate into other sectors of automation like medicine that require a gentle touch.

In today’s press announcement, Soft Robotics said it will use the new funding for its next stage of growth.

Starship Delivery Robots Officially Roll Out (Again) at University of Pittsburgh

As of this week, robot-powered food and drink delivery are fully a part of college life at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). After several months of testing (and stopping tests), Pitt now has a fleet of 30 Starship robots autonomously running around campus feeding hungry students and staff.

To get the robot, users order from seven participating campus eateries through the Starship deliveries app. For a $1.99 fee, a cooler-sized robot will wheel across campus to bring the food directly to the person.

Starship’s robots made their debut on Pitt’s campus last September, but the program was temporarily halted just a month later after two separate incidents of the self-driving robots reportedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

Pitt pulled Starship’s robots off campus for further review. We reached out to Starship to see what adjustments the company made in response to the accessibility incidents and a company spokesperson responded with a terse “Starship reviewed the mapping of that intersection.”

The real world will bring about all sorts of issues for delivery robots that weren’t necessarily foreseeable, and they are issues that society will have to deal with and figure out in real time. But robots will become an increasingly common part of the college experience for students over the next couple of years. In addition to Pitt, Starship’s robots are making deliveries at George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Wisconsin, and other homes of higher education. Elsewhere, Chowbotics has been sending its Sally, the salad making robot, off to a number of different colleges to feed students around the clock.

Though autonomous robot delivery at colleges is very much still in its infancy, it has the power to be a real game changer. The ability to order food on demand and have it brought directly to you wherever you are on campus in undeniably convenient (post-party pizza, anyone?). But it’s also training an entire generation of early tech adopters (read: the youngs) to interact with robots, and perhaps, expect them once they leave school.

Robot Baristas Aren’t Dead Yet. Briggo to Open 5 New Locations This Quarter

Normally we wouldn’t cover a gonna story. Like when a company says they are gonna do something. The Spoon likes to see actual results, not speculation, thank you very much.

But when robot barista company Briggo reached out to share some of their expansion plans for the coming year, I was intrigued. Whether by luck or rapidly assembled intention, Briggos’ announcement today comes on the heels of rival robo-coffee shop Cafe X shuttering three of its five locations.

There has also been a general sense of doom and gloom cast over the food robot industry in general as Zume shut down its pizza delivery business, and Creator was left stranded and unfunded by Softbank.

But you’d be hard pressed to think anything was wrong with the robot food business in talking with Kevin Nater, the Co-Founder and CEO of Briggo. I spoke with him by phone this week and Nater said five new automated Coffee Haus locations will go live in Q1 of this year, which is as many as the company launched in all of last year. Through its partnership with SSP America, Briggo plans to be in a dozen locations by the end of 2020.

One of the reasons Briggo can accelerate its install base is because it has moved its manufacturing to Foxconn. Previously Briggo was building every Coffee Haus by hand, but now Nater says “The Wisconsin facility can knock them out as fast as we can order them.” Depending on the location and permitting, Nater says they can get a Briggo machine up and running in a matter of weeks.

With SSP America doing business development for Briggo, Nater said that airports will continue to be a “huge focus” for the company. There are currently two Coffee Hauses in the Austin-Bergstrom Airport and one at San Francisco Airport (SFO).

As Briggo focuses on airports, and building out more locations, I asked Nater if that means the company will be pulling back on its own coffee creation ambitions. One part of Briggo’s business has been that it is also a coffee company that roasts its own beans. As it has expanded into new locations, it has also started offering coffees from roasters local to those areas (Sightglass in SFO, for instance). Nater said “Nope,” and that in addition to hosting other brands, Briggo will continue to sell its own coffee.

In addition to airports, Briggo opened up its first location inside a Whole Foods in Houston last fall. That Whole Foods happens to have 260 condos above it, and Nater said that condo owners are treating the Briggo almost like a personal coffee machine, ordering drinks with their phone in their condo and then coming downstairs to pick it up.

Given the recent setbacks for food robot-based startups, I asked Nater how he refers to their Coffee Hauses. Are they called “robots” or “machines” or something else, entirely? “We use the term robotic barista,” he said “to convey barista level quality.”

So Briggo is still in the robot business. It may strive to serve quality coffee, but we’re gonna have to watch to see if its automated approach translates into a scalable quantity.