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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food robots

Between Cafe X, Zume and Creator, Are We in a Food Robo-pocalypse? Nah.

Last April, less than a year ago, The Spoon held its first food robotics summit. Not to toot our own horn, but by any measure it was a success. Sellout crowd. All the cool robot startups attended. And major retailer and restaurant chain buyers came to hear about the future of food automation and strike deals. It seemed, at least then, that the robot revolution had begun.

But the promise of food robots has apparently run headlong into the realities of running a startup. The opening week of the new year and new decade has been brutal for food robot startups. Consider:

And while it happened last year, Miso Robotics, which makes Flippy the robot, lost its CEO and COO in September of last year, and when it wanted to raise more money it turned to equity crowdfunding. This was notable given that Miso had raised $13 million in venture funding previously. Were those institutional funding avenues no longer welcoming?

Given this glut of bad news, it’s easy to think that the food robot revolution is over before it has really begun. But I’m actually a bit more bullish, and think this is more of a growing pains phase and there are some reasons to be optimistic.

While Cafe X did close its three downtown locations, the company launched the third generation of its robot and launched two new locations recently at the San Jose Airport and San Francisco Airport (SFO). Additionally, the company is working on getting its NSF certification so it can operate as a vending machine, allowing the robot to be open longer hours and without a human present (which is handy at airports!).

While everyone pegs Zume as a robot pizza company, the robots only did some things like pull crusts out of the oven. The company was really more about data. It’s just as easy to pin the blame on Zume’s lack of focus as it had acquired a compostable packaging company to launch a whole line of packaging last year as well as a mobile ghost kitchen business.

Creator getting stiffed could equally be attributable to Softbank, which has reportedly backed out of more than one startup funding deal as it wades through its WeWork debacle. Softbank, was involved with Zume, investing $375 million in that company in 2018, with a reported additional $375 million to follow at a later date.

Other food robotics startups seem to be doing alright (though we don’t have access to their books). Picnic just raised $5 million and launched its pizza assembly robot, which can crank out 300 pizzas an hour. Chowbotics released its Sally 2.0 salad robot and is rolling out to college campuses. And Briggo opened up its robotic Coffee Haus at its first Whole Foods, as well as a location at SFO and has a deal with SSP America to launch its robo-baristas at 25 additional airport locations.

This rough patch is probably a good time for everyone in the industry to pause and assess what we really want from robots, or even whether or not “robots” are what we really want. Perhaps we should move away from referring to them as robots and call them machines. The term robots carries too much sci-fi baggage (the Terminator, Rosie the robot, etc.) and artificially inflates expectations among consumers and investors.

“Machines,” on the other hand, strip away that baggage. We know they are meant to work all day, consistently, pretty much non-stop. So they can do jobs at odd hours when humans don’t, or do jobs that a more dangerous for a person (working a deep fryer).

We’re soon going to be surrounded by a new wave of vending machines like Chowbotics, Briggo, Blendid and hot ramen dispenser Yo-Kai Express. These companies are all trying to upend what a vending machine is by serving fresh and well crafted food quickly. They won’t replace restaurants, and they aren’t meant to. They are meant to get a lot of people a tasty meal at a reasonable price quickly.

The automated food revolution is coming, it just might not be roboticized.

2019 Was Not the Year We Welcomed Our Robot Overlords

Almost exactly a year ago, I predicted that “2019 Will Be a Breakthrough Year for Food Robots.” Whether I was right or wrong in that prognostication probably depends on how generous you are feeling.

I mean, there was enough interest from startups and investors and buyers from across the food landscape to make our first ArticulATE Food Robot conference in April a sellout success. But 2019 was not the year in which robo-restaurants popped up on every corner.

To be fair, I did hedge my bets last year, when I wrote:

The food robots are coming and while they won’t become ubiquitous next year, 2019 will be a breakthrough year in which more robots go to work, and more money flows into food robot startups.

I may have hedged my bets, but there was still a lot of food robot activity in 2019. When assessing the past year in food robots, I think it’s best to create four buckets: creation, logistics, delivery and vending machines.

For robots that created food, there wasn’t much new activity in 2019. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is still making burger and fries (though the company lost both its CEO and COO), and Creator and Spyce remained single location robo-restaurants (Spyce even temporarily closed down to re-do its menu). But other than Picnic unveiling its assembly style robot, there wasn’t a lot new in the robotic kitchen.

Logistical robotics on the other hand, especially in the grocery space, saw some real activity in 2019. Takeoff Technologies, which builds automated micro-fulfillment centers in the backs of grocery stores, raised $25 million and announced partnerships with ShopRite, Loblaw and an expansion of its trial with Albertsons. Common Sense Robotics, which also does robot micro-fulfillment, changed its name to Fabric and raised $110 million. And Kroger has started building out five of it’s planned 20 standalone robot fulfillment warehouses.

As these fulfillment centers come online, and are able to fulfill online grocery orders faster, look for them to spur a virtuous cycle and help give online grocery shopping a boost (which will spur more robot fulfillment).

2019 was also the year delivery robots took to the streets! Well, mostly to the well-groomed walkways of college campuses. Starship’s little rover delivery robots landed on the campuses of George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Purdue, University of Pittsburgh, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Houston and the University of Texas at Dallas. There, they’ve been delivering snacks and other food to students wherever they might be studying.

With Refraction AI’s REV-1, we also saw the launch of a new type of autonomous robot that is ruggedized for inclement weather. And Finally, Nuro’s pod-like car was enlisted by Kroger to do grocery delivery in Houston.

There are still a ton of regulatory and ethical issues that need to be worked out before robots swarm public city streets, but they will continue to be ironed out over the coming year. For instance the California DMV will now be permitting autonomous vehicles under 10,001 pounds for commercial delivery, and California is a pretty good leading indicator for legislation that other states eventually adopt.

Finally, we get to what I think will wind up being the biggest trend in robotics — vending machines. In 2019 we saw the beginning of the transformation of vending machines from coils of packaged snacks to purveyors of high-end cuisine. Yo-Kai Express dishes up delicious hot ramen, Chowbotics’ Sally will make you a healthy salad, and both Briggo and Cafe X are bringing their robo-baristas to airports and other high-traffic locations.

Given their ability to serve people at all hours of the day or night, expect to see even more advancements and more deployments of vending machines across next year.

So as we close out 2019, I don’t think I was wrong about robots — but I wasn’t completely right either. Yes, there were more robots than ever involved with our food this year. But we are still a long ways off from them being mainstream.

Chowbotics Rolls Out New Sally 2.0 Robot Salad Maker

Chowbotics announced the release of its new Sally 2.0 robot salad making machine today. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the new machine features a larger tablet display and user interface, wheels for more mobility, and new breakfast menu as well as snack items like açai and yogurt bowls.

As part of today’s announcement, Salad Station, the southern fast casual restaurant chain that already has 11 Sallies in operation, said it would roll out 50 Salad Station-branded Sallies across seven states, though no timeline for that expansion was given.

2019 has been a pretty big year for Chowbotics. In January, the company announced a partnership with French vegetable company Bonduelle to bring Sally robots to Europe. In March Chowbotics shared sales data showing that hospitals were becoming a lucrative location for its robots, selling up to 120 salads a day (at the time Chowbotics said locations only need to sell 7 bowls a day to break even). In August Sally robots were sent off to a number of colleges across North America including Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; and the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. And then earlier this month, the company named Rick Wilmer as its new CEO as Founder Deepak Sekar moved to become president and head of technology, product and strategic partnerships for Chowbotics.

Sally is part of a larger cohort of food robotics companies that are quietly revolutionizing the concept of what vending machines can be. Briggo is putting its robot-barista in its first Whole Foods, and Yo-Kai Express is set to debut a new iteration of its machine that has two hot ramen dispensers so there isn’t as much wait time. These and other standalone food robots are perfect for busy locations like colleges and hospitals because they can serve fresh food around the clock without the need for staff.

As companies like Chowbotics continue to improve their robots, 2020 is shaping up to be a year where automated food literally levels up from 1.0 to 2.0.

Chowbotics Gets a New CEO as Founder Moves to President Role

Chowbotics, maker of Sally the salad making robot, announced yesterday that Rick Wilmer will be the company’s new CEO (hat tip to FE&S magazine). Founder and former CEO Deepak Sekar will assume the role of president and be responsible for technology, products and strategic partnerships.

Wilmer’s 30 plus year professional background is not in food, but rather in more hardcore technology. Previously he was CEO of Mojo Networks, which he led to an acquisition by Arista Networks, and prior to that he was CEO of Pliant, which he led to an acquisition by SanDisk for $327 million.

This is the second bit of CEO shuffling we’ve reported on this week here at The Spoon. On Tuesday, we revealed and Dave Zito was no longer CEO or with Miso Robotics, the startup behind Flippy, the burger making robot. Though we still don’t know the reasons behind Zito’s departure.

A former boss of mine was fond of saying that there are two types of CEOs: builders and scalers. Builders know how to get the product and company off the ground, and scalers know how to guide the company through its next levels of enterprise level growth.

With this chestnut in mind, Chowbotics’ CEO replacement is probably not the last bit of executive shuffling we’ll see in the near term at a food robotics company, and that’s a good thing. It shows that the industry is maturing beyond the building-a-startup stage and into the scaling-a-business stage.

Sekar stepping down comes following a year where Chowbotics’ Sally has been expanding into Europe, finding success in hospitals, and even going off to multiple colleges. But its early mover advantage in the standalone food robot space is quickly evaporating as a new wave of automated food kiosks come to market. Farmer’s Fridge and Fresh Bowl are fresh salad machines coming to market, while high-end vending machines like like Yo-Kai Express and Basil Street Express offer fully cooked meals like ramen and pizza. All of these player will be fighting for prime square footage to feed hungry students, airline passengers and office workers.

Chowbotics will need to scale in order to tip the scales in its favor.

Starship Delivery Robots Heading for the University of Houston

You can add the University of Houston to the growing list of colleges and universities that will have Starship‘s small delivery robots scurrying around its campus this coming school year. According to ABC 13 University of Houston (UH) president Renu Khator made the announcement during her fall address.

Starting this fall, students will be able to order and have food delivered to their location on the UH campus via Starship’s squat, six-wheeled, cooler sized robots. We don’t have a ton of details about the program, such as whether Starship has partnered with a foodservice operator like Sodexo to enable meal delivery from campus restaurants that ties into student meal plans. We reached out to Starship for more information.

News of the UH expansion comes after Starship raised a $40 million Series A round of funding this summer. Starship has also been accelerating it college campus program in the back half of this year. The company kicked off 2019 by making deliveries at George Mason University in January. It then added Northern Arizona University in March and the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University in August. In September The Harvard Crimson reported that students there were working to bring Starship robots to its campus, too.

College campuses are proving to be fertile ground for food robots. In addition to Starship, Kiwi makes its own delivery rover bots for colleges like the University of California at Berkeley. And Chowbotics has sent Sally, its salad-making robot, off to multiple colleges this year. Colleges make a lot of sense for robots, as they have concentrated populations of students, faculty and staff that are around at all hours and automated food systems can work around the clock to make or deliver food.

As robots enter more colleges and make more types of food available more often, sociologist departments on campus should watch how this automation changes an entire generation of students’ relationship with dining.

CaliBurger Adds a Second Flippy Robot to Make French Fries

Fast food chain CaliBurger announced its new “CaliBurger 2.0” restaurant yesterday, which includes new high-tech features like pay-with-your-face kiosks and the addition of a second Flippy cooking robot.

CaliBurger made headlines last year when it first used Flippy to autonomously grill up burgers at its Pasadena, CA location. The burger chain made even more headlines when it took Flippy offline after just one day on the job because it was too fast for its human co-workers. After some re-tooling Flippy went back on the line a couple months later and has been cooking ever since.

CaliBurger and Miso Robotics, which makes Flippy, are both companies in the CaliGroup portfolio.

While Flippy started its robotic life using computer vision and thermal imaging to make burgers, it has also been taught to work the deep fryer. Since last summer Flippy has been frying up chicken tenders and tater tots at Dodger Stadium, and the robot will bring those skills to make french fries at the new CaliBurger 2.0 locations.

As noted, CaliBurger 2.0 locations will also feature the pay-by-face kiosks. This automated payment system records your face (with your permission), and can keep an order history to immediately surface favorites on the touchscreen interface. We used it last year and it worked just fine.

While robots and interactive kiosks were pretty novel last year, they are quickly becoming more commonplace in fast food restaurants. Just this week, Picnic unveiled its pizza making robot, and Creator‘s burger robot is still hard at work. The global kiosk market is expected to hit $30.8 billion thanks to implementations at QSRs like Dunkin, Shake Shack and Wendy’s.

CaliBurger 2.0 will open its first location this month in Fort Meyers, FL, followed by stores in Seattle, WA, Tysons, VA and Pasadena.

Vivid Robotics Changes Name to Picnic, Unveils Assembly Line Pizza Making Robot

Picnic, formerly Vivid Robotics (and before that, Otto Robotics), came out of stealth mode today and announced its first product, an assembly-line-style food production robotic platform that will initially focus on making pizzas.

Unlike the pizza robots used by Zume and PAZZI, the Picnic robot has no articulating arms, but is a series of modular, customizable food dispensers. With pizza, an empty crust (frozen or handmade) is loaded into the machine where computer vision determines what size it is. When an order comes in, the crust moves onto a conveyor system which dispenses the sauce, cheese and toppings as the crust passes underneath. Once topped, the pies are move by a human into a pizza oven (Picnic believes pizza ovens are already good and didn’t need to be roboticized).

Picnic is in the Robotics as a Service business. As such, the company doesn’t charge clients for the robot, but rather works with each of its clients to create a customized monthly fee based on how many modules are needed, usage, etc.

Picnic’s robot can make 180, 18-inch or 300, 12-inch pizzas per hour. Because it is modular, the number of ingredients can be added or customized by placing another dispenser module in the lineup. As part of today’s announcement, Picnic also revealed two of its first customers: Centerplate, an event hospitality company with more than 200 locations at sports and entertainment venues, and Zaucer pizza, a Washington state pizza company. Centerplate has been using the Picnic robot for pizzas at T-Mobile Park in Picnic’s hometown of Seattle.

I went to Picnic HQ to check out the robot last week, and CEO Clayton Wood explained that pizza is just one use case for its robot. Because of the linear, modular nature of the platform, it could be used for any assembly style eatery. Think: Subway style sandwiches or burritos, with the dispensers layering on customizable toppings.

With its release, Picnic is sitting at the nexus of a few trends happening in the food world right now. Obviously, Picnic is automating traditional, entry level human jobs, a big topic in the world of robotics. But Wood told me that the clients he is speaking with are looking to automation because they have a hard time filling those jobs. Even when they do, there is high-turnover, and each time a person quits (or just doesn’t show up), their replacement has to go through the whole (expensive) training process.

There is a broader economics discussion to be had about why that’s happening, but it echoes what we’ve heard from other restaurant owners, and is even borne out in the research. Industry estimates peg the turnover rate for restaurants as high as 150 percent. So even those human replacements are getting replacements.

But it’s not just that Picnic is automating food production, it’s also where that’s happening. By going into T-Mobile Park, Picnic is reinforcing the idea that if you want to see the future of food tech, go to your local stadium or arena. These high-traffic, high-volume locations are hotbeds for food innovation and automation. At Dodger Stadium you can have Flippy fry you up some chicken tenders, at Yankee Stadium you can use Postmates to order food and skip the line, and at Golden 1 Center arena in Sacramento, you can shop at Zippin’s cashierless checkout convenience store.

Picnic’s robot can also potentially help fight food waste. Because the process is automated, each pizza is topped with the same amount of ingredients each time, every time. The robotic delivery also reduces spillage and mismanagement. (So no extra cheese for you!)

Picnic will be cooking up pizzas at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit next week(!). As if you needed another reason to attend, but if a pizza making robot won’t draw you in, I don’t know what will.

Starship Raises $40M Series A, Rolls Out its Delivery Robots to U. of Pittsburgh and Purdue Campuses

Autonomus robot delivery startup Starship announced today that it has raised a $40 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from prior investors including Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, MetaPlanet Holdings, as well as new investors including TDK Ventures, Qu Ventures and others. This brings the total amount raised by Starship to $85 million.

That news alone would be worthy of a story, but Starship upped the ante by also announcing that its rover bots arrived today at the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Indiana’s Purdue University in order to prepare to make food deliveries on both campuses in September. These new schools join George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, which launched their own robot delivery programs with Starship earlier this year, and are a step in Starship’s plan (also announced today) to be on 100 college campuses over the next two years.

Students, faculty, staff and whomever else on these school campuses are able to get robot delivery by downloading the Starship mobile app. Users choose from the restaurant and food options, order and pay (there’s a $1.99 delivery fee) to have their snacks, meals or groceries dropped off at any location on campus.

Starship’s robots have proven to be such big ‘bots on campus that the company said in today’s press release emailed to The Spoon that both George Mason and Northern Arizona have increased the number of delivery robots (George Mason actually doubled its fleet), as well as their hours of operation.

Serving colleges is a popular go-to market strategy for delivery robot startups. Earlier this summer, Kiwi announced it was expanding its robot delivery to fifteen colleges including Harvard, Stanford and… Purdue.

Obviously that last one is of interest, given Starship’s announcement today. When asked about Kiwi’s potential presence at Purdue, Starship provided us with the following statement: “Starship is looking forward to launching on Purdue University on September 9. The delivery robots are currently mapping the area and can’t wait to start serving students and staff in September. We look forward to sharing more details shortly.”

We’ve reached out to Kiwi to see if Purdue is still indeed on their rollout roadmap, but regardless of whether Purdue doubles up on robots or has quietly dropped Kiwi, the situation highlights how colleges will be a battleground for delivery robot services. Starship’s fresh $40 million certainly gives it a bigger warchest to woo universities than Kiwi, which has only raised $2 million to date.

Starship says it will use the new funding to “rapidly expand its services to more university campuses,” so a delivery battle is definitely brewing. The company already has a good track record: Starship says its robots have traveled more than 350,000 miles, crossed 4M streets, and have completed more than 100,000 autonomous deliveries.

Chowbotics is Sending Sally the Salad Making Robot Off to College(s)

Chowbotics is packing up Sally the salad making robot and sending it off to college. Well, many colleges actually, as the food robotics startup is set to announce next week a bigger push into the higher education market.

Chowbotics told us that this school year, students at multiple colleges and universities in the U.S. will be able to buy salads and breakfast bowls from Sally the robot. Those schools include: Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA; the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada; Elmira College in Elmira, NY; the University of Memphis in Memphis, TN; and Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. These schools join Marshall University in Huntington, WV, which installed Sally in 2018.

Students can order from thousands of different custom and pre-made meals Sally can make from the 22 ingredients it stores. Sally will work with campus meal plans and accept credit cards for payment, but unlike the school cafeteria or on-campus restaurants, Sally can fit in the corner of a dorm lobby and feed people 24 hours a day.

Sally is part of two big trends we at The Spoon see accelerating. First it’s emblematic of the golden age of vending machines that we are entering. Advances in robotics and other technologies means that automated vending machines are no longer relegated to sodas and Snickers bars. Machines like Sally and Yo-Kai Express can whip up complex, high-end meals in just minutes and around the clock in high-traffic locations like colleges, hospitals and airports.

But Sally is also part of a bigger wave of robots heading off to college. In addition to the stationary Sally, delivery robots from Starship and Kiwi are rolling around more campuses delivering restaurant made meals to the student masses.

The bottom line is that eating at college is not only vastly different from when I went to school (long ago) — but pretty soon, it will also be a lot different from how people ate at college last year.

Briggo Partners with SSP America to Open Up 25 Robot Coffee Hauses in Airports

Robot barista company Briggo announced today it has entered into an exclusive agreement with SSP America to open automated Coffee Hauses at an additional 25 airport locations over the next two years in the U.S. and Canada.

SSP America is a division of SSP Group, which operates roughly 2,600 restaurants, bars, cafés and marches in across 500 locations representing more than 500 of its own and licensed brands. The SSP America website says the company is “passionate about bringing cool, authentic restaurants to airports that reflect a taste of place.”

Briggo’s robotic Coffee Haus is definitely cool. It’s a self-contained automated coffee shop in a box that offers a variety of hot and iced coffee and teas that can be ordered via the Briggo app or through a tablet built into the machine. Meant for high-traffic areas (like airports!), Briggo says its Coffee Haus can make 100 cups off coffee an hour.

Details were pretty light in the press release emailed to us announcing the deal with SSP America, but the partnership should result in robot coffee experiences similar to the three Coffee Hauses Briggo has opened in the Austin and San Francisco International airports. As with its SFO location, Briggo said that in addition to its own coffee roast, it will “also work with airport teams to select local brands to showcase in their Coffee Hauses.”

When we first covered Briggo last year, the company was building up to be a full-stack coffee company. It selects and roasts its own beans, and would own and operate its machines. Briggo declined to answer questions about the business arrangement between it and SSP, so we don’t know what the financial or operational terms of this deal were.

Having said that, if Briggo is looking to scale quickly, partnering up with companies like SSP might be the most expeditious way. It can leverage their existing operational chains and relationships to more easily break into new markets.

The robo-barista game is not zero sum one. There are plenty of high-traffic locations for all the coffee robots. Having said that, our eyes now turn to the other barista-in-a-box, Cafe X, to see when it will start announcing more of its expansion plans.

Woowa Brothers Partners with UCLA to Develop Cooking Robots

Woowa Brothers Corp., the company behind South Korea’s popular food delivery app Baedal Minjok, is partnering with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots, according to a story today in The Korea Times.

The Times writes, “Under the project name ‘Yori,’ Woowa Brothers will develop cooking robots that can perform various tasks, from placing orders and preparing meals, to bring an innovation to the dining culture.” As the article points out, the move with UCLA helps expand Woowa Brothers beyond food delivery.

But robots have been on the brain for Woowa Brothers for a while. In April of 2018, the company invested $2 million in Bear Robotics, which makes “Penny,” the robot that shuttles food and empty plates about on restaurant floors. And in December of last year, Woowa received $320 million in funding, some of which was going towards developing its autonomous delivery robot program.

Adding cooking robots to its arsenal would give Woowa Brothers a more full-stack solution and is in line with the broader, 360 degree view the company has about robots. In an interview last July, Kim Bong-jin, CEO and Founder of Woowa Brothers, talked about how food delivery robots could be more useful with less idle time. One idea Bong-jin floated was in addition to dropping off food, having a delivery robot take away a customer’s recycling.

Woowa Brothers is just the latest company to partner with a university for robotics research. Last year, Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and Nividia has a robotic kitchen lab set up with researchers from the University of Washington.

Food is a great application for robotics for a number of reasons. First, everyone eats, so there will always be a market for developing systems that help prepare, cook or deliver food faster. Second, food is oddly shaped, with varying sizes and degrees of fragility, making it difficult to work with. Overcoming the idiosyncrasies of food can make working with more uniform materials easier.

Kroger and Common Sense Robotics Each Announce New Grocery Robotic Fulfillment Centers

I get that it’s supposed to be three of something to make a trend, but the fact that two different companies a world apart made robot-fulfillment center opening announcements on the same day is totally indicative of a broader move towards grocery automation.

Here in the U.S., Kroger announced that Forest Park, GA, just outside of Atlanta, will be the next home of its Ocado-powered customer fulfillment center. Kroger will spend $55 million on this “shed,” as Kroger calls the centers, which will feature automated, robot-driven fulfillment of grocery orders. This is the third such shed of a planned 20 that the company plans to build. Other announced sheds are in Monroe, OH and Groveland, FL, with another one coming to the Mid-Atlantic region.

Over in Tel Aviv, Venture Beat reports that Common Sense Robotics has broken ground on a completely underground automated fulfillment center for an unnamed grocer. The new facility will be in a parking structure under the Shalom Meir Tower and will be 18,000 sq. feet. One of Common Sense’s selling points is that its vertically-oriented systems can better maximize available space and thus deliver full grocery store levels of product fulfillment in a fraction of the space.

That both of these stories happened on the same day is a coincidence, but it also highlights the moves grocery stores are making towards automation. Robotic fulfillment centers like these use totes on rails to quickly assemble items from online orders and hand them off to a human who puts them into bags for pickup or delivery. Robots can move faster than humans, they don’t get tired or need breaks, all of which can reduce the order fulfillment time down from hours to as little as a half hour for some systems.

This faster fulfillment is why so many grocery retailers are trying out robots. Takeoff Technologies has partnered with Ahold Delhaize and Albertsons, and Walmart is testing out automatic fulfillment through Alert Innovation. In each of those cases, robot-powered fulfillment centers are being built into the back of existing stores rather than off-site locations like Kroger and Common Sense’s.

These robotic fulfillment centers are very much in the early stages, but you can expect to see more of them over the next year as more grocers test and implement automation to get you your groceries faster.