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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

frozen yogurt

Reis & Irvy’s FroYo Robot Kiosk Hopes to Bring in Cool Profit for Grocery Stores

We’ve seen robots in grocery stores before restocking shelves and packing products — but now, robots will be used for perhaps their most important task yet: dispensing frozen yogurt.

Billed as “the world’s first robotic frozen yogurt vending kiosk,” Reis & Irvy launched in 2016 as a subsidiary franchise concept of Generation NEXT Franchise Brands. Starting this spring, they will finally begin deploying their frozen yogurt vending robots to select grocery retailers in 17 U.S. states. Their brightly-colored machines dispense froyo (or gelato, ice cream, or sorbet) within 60 seconds. Customers can choose between 7 flavors and add up to 6 toppings.

Compared to your average strip-mall frozen yogurt store, the Reis & Irvy robot has a pretty limited selection. You can’t spend 10 minutes sampling every one of the sometimes dozens of flavors available, nor can you customize your amounts of froyo or pile on the toppings. But the robotic machines do offer a few things that traditional froyo stores don’t. First of all, there’s none of the guessing or price shock that goes into paying for your yogurt creation, which is often weight-based. With Reis & Irvy’s machines, all you have to do is choose your size, flavor, and toppings, and a robotic arm will dispense it exactly —no surprisingly high price thanks to all those gummy bears you added on.

The main selling point of the froyo robots, however, is convenience. Reis & Irvy froyo vending operations will be franchised to retail areas which already get a lot of food traffic, like grocery stores. Which won’t be too hard to do, since their machines only take up 15 square feet of space.

By installing their froyo robots in retail stores, parent company Generation Next Franchise Brand is hoping to drive impulse snack purchases. So instead of grabbing a guilty pleasure packet of Skittles from the tempting display as you’re in line to check out, you might decide to get a froyo on your way out of the store. After all, it only takes 60 seconds.

Reis & Irvy is also hoping to piggyback off of froyo’s recent popularity. The frozen yogurt market is projected to grow at 20% CAGR; a rise which is driven in large part by the well-publicized health benefits of probiotics. Of course, if you top your low-fat frozen yogurt with mountains of M&M’s, it won’t be much of a step up from a processed packet of junk candy. But consumers perceive froyo as a healthy snack, and by making it convenient and quick, Reis & Irvy hopes to draw in people who wouldn’t go out of their way to stop at a frozen yogurt store.

The machines are an easy way for grocery stores and to add new revenue stream which can be operated 24/7, without the overhead and expenses that come with stand-alone stores. We’ve seen similar food automation in coffee shops with Cafe-X and fast food with Eatsa, but Reis & Irvy ups the ante by integrating it into pre-established retail spaces. By doing this, they hope to offer customers an extra perk which can help keep them shopping longer encourage store loyalty. With the looming threat of Amazon and other grocery ecommerce companies, brick-and-mortar supermarkets need all the appeal they can muster.

As part of the initial rollout, the company anticipates shipping approximately 185 units in May and 250 units in June. Their machines will feature frozen yogurt “consumables” exclusively from Dannon, and will take card, cash, Apple pay, Google wallet, and even some forms of cryptocurrency. Just in case you wanted to pay for your vanilla-chocolate swirl in Bitcoin.

I’m not sure if Reis & Irvy’s robot will necessarily disrupt the froyo industry, since people will probably still hit up stand-alone frozen yogurt stores to take advantage of their variety and DIY appeal. However, I do think they have a chance to disrupt online grocery delivery services like Instacart. Or at least give supermarkets a little firepower (er, yogurtpower?) to fight back.

Fro-No? Wim Yogurt Closes Doors As Team Heads To Walmart

Wim,  the company behind a frozen yogurt machine which utilizes proprietary pods to create fro-yo at home, has suspended operations according to a message on the company’s website.

It was just six months ago that the company announced their product to the public, so it’s a bit surprising to see the company shut things down so soon. While there could be any number of reasons a company decides to call it quits – often the most likely is sales were soft and that they ran out of cash – but with Wim, it looks like the may have found a better opportunity as the core of a new project at Walmart’s innovation hub, Store No 8.

That’s because about the time Wim announced they’d be closing the doors, Walmart announced they’d hired the Wim team to run Project Franklin, a new portfolio company within Store No 8. It’s unclear what exactly Stein’s team will be doing at Project Franklin (we’ve reached out to company CEO Bart Stein for comment), but the post on Walmart’s Store No 8 site may be a cryptic hint. It says Stein’s team has “created some of the most thoughtfully-designed home devices on the market and we’re excited to bring that experience and fresh perspective to Store No 8.”

While it’s too soon to say whether this new group will be working on home hardware, it does make you wonder if Stein and his team could be creating an equivalent to Amazon’s Lab 126.

With Stein and his team off to Walmart, we can only speculate whether Wim would have made it had the team not gotten a better offer. I’d never tasted Wim yogurt, but the early reviews were good. Still, it wasn’t clear that they could prove to the consumer that it was that much better than the kind they could buy at the grocery store.  $299 is a lot to spend on a dessert making appliance.

According to Walmart, they have no plans to continue with Wim’s development.

You can see the letter from Stein in its entirety below:

Dear Wim customers and partners,

We’ve worked on Wim for almost 3 years making countless people smile with the combinations of technology and food. But, today, we’ve decided to temporarily suspend operations. We’re eternally humbled and grateful for your support over these last few years. Our team is prepping for our next adventure, and while we’ll no longer be at Wim Yogurt, that doesn’t mean that Wim is shutting down forever.

During this temporary suspension, Wim’s board of directors is going to think about the company’s future and will update you on any material developments.

If you’re a Wim customer, we are offering a full refund ($299) for your appliance. Please check your email for instructions on how to process your refund.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. If you have any additional questions on what this means, please don’t hesitate to contact my personal email address below.

Sincerely,
Bart Stein, CEO and Co-Founder

Fresh Or Frozen, These Startups Aim To Create A Keurig For Home Yogurt

With everyone nowadays seemingly trying to get their daily fill of probiotics, yogurt has become a go-to for a daily snack, tasty dessert or healthy way to start the day. For most of us, that means buying it at the store or heading out to get a sugar-filled frozen yogurt at the local froyo stand.

And while some are adventurous enough to create at home using one of the many home yogurt makers on the market, none of these devices offer make-at-home yogurt with Keurig like simplicity.

Until now. That’s because two new startups are coming to market with pod-based yogurt systems. And the good news for yogurt eaters? They will have our choice of fresh or frozen.

Yomee 

If you like fresh yogurt and want to make it at home, you will be interested in the Yomee from Food-X alumni, Lecker Labs. The original concept for a pod-based yogurt maker came to the company CEO Ashok Jaiswal when he and his wife started feeding their young daughter yogurt and were looking for an easy way to make it at home.

“When we found out that she loves yogurt, we wanted to buy good ones for her, but almost all yogurts sold in Hong Kong are expensive,” Jaiswal told the Loop. “They’re also often imported and therefore not fresh, and can contain lots of sugar and other ingredients.

When his wife asked him if he could make a device to make yogurt, he started researching the idea.

“I thought that there must have been so many in the market already, but when I Googled and checked on Amazon, I found that there were no fully automatic yogurt makers in the market.”

Jaiswal teamed up with cofounder Tu-Hien Le and soon raised $325 thousand in seed funding. The two were accepted into Food-X, a well-known food startup accelerator based in New York, and from there they went on to create Yomee.

To make yogurt with the Yomee, you put in milk and a Yomee pod (which will make approximately two servings of yogurt). The Yomee hardware stirs the milk, heats it to 185 degrees Fahrenheit and adds the cultures from the Yomee pod. Six hours later the yogurt, chilled to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to my conversation with Tu-Hien Le at June’s Food IT event in Silicon Valley, the device will be for sale initially via Kickstarter at the end of August starting at $99, which is significantly lower than $800 to $1,200 retail price range that the two founders told the Loop  (ed note: Tu-Hien Le clarified via email that the price quoted to The Loop was in Hong Kong dollars).  According to Hien Le, the company will offer a subscription for its pods for $15 a month.

Yogurt for Dessert? Meet Wim

If you fancy a froyo instead, you’re in luck. The Wim, announced this week, makes single-serve frozen yogurt in about 10 minutes.

The product is the brainchild of Google alum Bart Stein. Stein, who sold his first startup Stamped to Yahoo in 2012, came up with the idea for a frozen yogurt maker while on vacation in the Catskills in 2014.

“There was an appliance for everything from coffee, to waffles, to soda,” Stein told Bloomberg. “We realized there was no appliance for frozen dessert.”

How To Frozen Your Yogurt

Stein went on to secure funding, build a team and over the next two years create a system that includes the Wim appliance and yogurt bowls. The system makes frozen yogurt when the user adds milk into the Wim bowl and presses a button on the Wim appliance. The Wim appliance stirs and chills the mixture of milk and ingredients to negative 10 Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) in about 90 seconds.

The Wim bowls, which include a powder that activates when mixed with the milk, cost about $3 a bowl in bulk. Currently, the company offers ten flavors, ranging from strawberry to ‘brownie batter’ to ‘banana bread’. The Wim appliance will set you back $299.

Unlike the Yomee, the Wim is available today.

Bloomberg’s Kate Krader tested out the Wim and liked what she tasted. “So what does it taste like? The dessert is luxuriously creamy and airy, with a tangy bite,” she wrote.

Are We Ready For Keurig For Yogurt?

Will pod-based yogurt take a bite out of store bought or the traditional home yogurt makers on the market?

Maybe. There is an obvious advantage to having long-shelf life dry yogurt pods that you can mix fresh on demand.  For those who want fresh yogurt daily, something like the Yomee may make sense, particularly if the product is in the lower end of the price range.

Of course, the Yomee will need to compete with older, less smart yogurt makers on the market. One such product is the Euro Cuisine, which costs about $30 and makes yogurt using yogurt starters.  But systems like this require more cleaning and the user to put yogurt into jars.

The Wim will face competition from both the local froyo stand and devices like the Cuisinart ICE-21, a popular home frozen yogurt maker that sells for about $50, but takes anywhere from 16 hours to 24 hours to make a batch of froyo.

For both potential users of the Yomee and Wim, the clear advantage is increased convenience and rapid-serve small portions.  If the companies can get the price right while perfecting pod systems to work well, I think will be a subset of consumers who find the convenience of Keurig-like simplicity, speed and clean up the right mix for their yogurt fix.