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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ford

McDonald’s and Ford Are Turning Coffee Beans Into Car Parts

The concept of upcycling food waste has brought us things like snacks, beers, and flour, and now it’s about to make fuel more efficient in cars.

At least, that’s what McDonald’s and Ford Motors are aiming for with their new partnership. Today, Ford announced it is working with the mega-QSR to turn coffee bean chaff into headlamp parts for its luxury Lincoln cars. 

Chaff is the dried skin of a coffee bean that comes off naturally during the roasting process. According to a press release from Ford, the two companies have been working together for more than a year, and during that time discovered that chaff can be converted into durable material to reinforce certain car parts. In the case of the Lincoln headlamps, it replaces talc and, thanks to its higher heat performance and it being a lighter material, makes the vehicle more fuel efficient. 

From the press release:

“The chaff composite meets the quality specifications for parts like headlamp housings and other interior and under hood components. The resulting components will be about 20 percent lighter and require up to 25 percent less energy during the molding process.”

The partnership will use coffee chaff from Canadian company Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee Inc., who supplies coffee to McDonald’s in North America. McDonald’s told Nation’s Restaurant News that “a significant portion of its coffee chaff in North America” will be used for the car parts.

Upcycling food waste is common enough for things like snacks. As the McDonald’s-Ford news highlights, companies are now looking beyond edible goods to give food leftovers a second life. For example, a company called Agraloop turns crop food waste (think sugarcane bark) into natural fibers for clothing and is developing partnerships with retailers like H&M and Levi’s. In the UK, Chip[s] Board is making sustainable plastic for eyeglasses out of discarded potato peels. These are but two of the many ways in which we’ll see manufacturers putting unused food parts to good use in the coming years.

Ford says this is the first time it has used coffee bean skins for vehicle parts. The company said in the press release that it plans to continue its partnership with McDonald’s, where the two companies will explore further ways to use coffee chaff and other food waste for car parts. 

 

Ford Developing Bi-Pedal Robot to Carry Deliveries from Driverless Cars to Your Door

Plenty of companies are bringing robot-powered delivery of food and other household goods to the last mile, but most stop at the last few feet. Autonomous cars park at a curb and little rover bots typically can’t climb the front steps of a house.

Which is why Ford is working on a bi-pedal robot that literally walks deliveries from driverless cars right up to your front door(h/t to Bloomberg). Dr. Ken Washington, Vice President, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer published a post on Medium today outlining the program, writing:

Enter Digit, a two-legged robot designed and built by Agility Robotics to not only approximate the look of a human, but to walk like one, too. Built out of lightweight material and capable of lifting packages that weigh up to 40 pounds, Digit can go up and down stairs, walk naturally through uneven terrain, and even react to things like being bumped without losing its balance and falling over.

Like something straight out of an Asimov novel, Digit folds up and sits in the back of a driverless delivery van. When a package needs to be delivered, it emerges from the vehicle, stands up and carries the package to a person’s doorstop. Digit doesn’t have a ton of autonomy gear and processing power on it. Instead, the driverless car, which is packed with sensors and mapping equipment, sees the surrounding area and sends Digit the best path to the door. If Digit needs help, or encounters something unexpected, the problem can be sent up to the cloud where another system (perhaps even a human) can assist.

Though the Ford post didn’t mention groceries specifically, they are a good use case for this type of robot delivery. Groceries are heavy, and even if a driverless car brings them to a house, a person still needs to go out to the street to retrieve and lug them back inside. The weight of groceries is one of the reasons self-driving delivery company, AutoX moved more into (the much lighter) restaurant food. For most, this walking to the curb is a minor inconvenience, but for those who have trouble moving, a robot walking packages to the door would be a big help.

Ford isn’t alone in getting goods up directly to your front door. Earlier this year, FedEx unveiled a its own delivery robot that can climb stairs (though it uses wheels, not legs), and Amazon received a patent for an autonomous robot that would live in a home’s garage and would venture out to fetch packages from delivery trucks.

There’s no word on when or if this particular version of Ford’s delivery vision will be coming to a neighborhood near you, there are still a lot of regulatory hurdles for self-driving vehicles to get through. But with the pace of innovation, robots are bound to be bounding up your walkway to deliver a package someday soon.

CES: Toyota and Ford Push Autonomous Delivery Vehicles

If two recent announcements at CES live up to their promise, you could soon have self-driving cars pulling up to your driveway to deliver pizza, groceries and more.

Yesterday, Toyota announced its futuristic “e-Palette” autonomous electric vehicle. Think of it as a white label mobility as a service. The e-Palettes are basically sleek, see-through, self-driving containers that companies could customize to deliver everything from food to fountain pens to flu shots. While this concept may seem fantastical now, the carmaker showed it is very real and announced it was working with the likes of Amazon, Pizza Hut and Uber.

Then today at CES, Ford announced a partnership with delivery service Postmates to test out self-driving deliveries. The two will do a pilot program throughout this year to see how well the technology works. Postmates joins existing Ford partner, Domino’s Pizza, and was a chance for the car company to show how it’s pivoting towards being a “mobility” company and how autonomous vehicles can be used to generate revenue.

When any of these dreams of autonomous delivery will become a reality remains to be seen. There are tons of technological, logistical and legal hurdles to overcome before roaming wood fired pizza or self-driven Slurpee deliveries arrive at your doorstep.

But all of this news points to a delivery-driven (pun intended) future of food retail. Amazon, Walmart, Albertsons and Target are all ramping up same day deliveries, and even smart-lock makers are creating in-home delivery platforms for when you’re away.

Drones can’t deliver big boxes, and smaller robots work better in dense, urban areas. Autonomous cars will have greater reach into the ‘burbs, and can get there fast. Plus if all a person in a self-driving delivery car has to do is run packages to and from the car to the front door (until the robots can do it), that shaves seconds and even minutes off of each delivery. Those small bits of time translate into much bigger efficiencies for a company with Amazon’s scale.

While the technology races headlong into achieving an autonomous delivery future, there are still big hurdles, not the least of which being municipal governments. Just look at San Francisco, which recently put the brakes on sidewalk robots. Creating safe spaces for speedy self-driving delivery cars will be a challenge.

Hopefully it’s a challenge we can all get behind and resolve quickly. Toyota hopes to have e-Palettes scurrying around town in time for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.