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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Karakuri

Karakuri Joins The Growing List of Food Robot Startups That Have Shut Down

More bad news on the food robot front.

Karakuri, a startup that made a robotic food kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals, is shutting down, according to founder Barney Wragg.

In a post on Linkedin, Wragg cited the pandemic and the challenging fundraising environment as the reason for the news and included a link to a Google Sheet with Karakuri employees who Wragg said it was “incumbent” on him to assist in finding new roles.

From the post:

It’s with a very heavy heart that I have to report that our journey at Karakuri is coming to an end.

For the past five years, we’ve developed and deployed robotics for the QSR industry. We’ve survived many challenges, including the pandemic and our bank going bust us, but sadly we’ve been unable to find the funding we need to move to the next level.

Most of all I’d like to thank the incredible team we’ve built. They’ve stayed dedicated to the challenge and built incredible technologies in the face of abject uncertainty.

It’s incumbent on me to help these great people find new roles, spread their wings, and share their talents with others.

Attached is a list of the folks who are available and their preferred contact details.

Please feel free to reach out to anybody you think you need or could help find new roles.

I’m also on hand to help in any way I can.

Thanks, Barney

While it’s a bummer Karakuri couldn’t survive, it’s not surprising. Food robotic startups suffer from several disadvantages, including incredibly long development cycles and being capital-intensive.

Ex-Picnic CEO Clayton Wood summed it up well in a Linkedin post where he explained that a food automation startup’s “existential risk is being successful enough at the seed stage and building momentum (and costs) toward your scaling stage, only to find no Series A/B/C investors. Without planning and execution, you will be unable to survive. Progress means spending–and cutting spending to stay alive eliminates progress.”

Clayton says he believes newer startups will benefit from an earlier recognition that they need be frugal from the outset, unlike many of the first-generation food robot startups who launched in what was a more friendly fundraising era.

I also expect more food robot startups will start to look to commercialize a product or a subsystem more quickly in order to get to positive revenue faster. As I wrote a few months ago after our food robotics mini-summit, investors like Buck Jordan see a path to revenue through offering a portion of a founder’s big idea to the market instead of waiting years until the full vision is realized.

“I suspect that some robotics companies who are a little more responsible, or a little more revenue-oriented, are going to start paring down their objectives,” said Jordan.

Jordan pointed to Creator, a maker of fully roboticized restaurants, as an example of a company he believes has valuable technology that could be ‘parted out’ to the market and be successful.

Make that had valuable technology. Creator didn’t ever sell a portion of its systems and instead tried to make a full robotic restaurant. The company shut down in March.

Karakuri Semblr Food Robot To Feed Up to Four Thousand Employees at Ocado HQ

Karakuri announced today that its Semblr food-service robot is being deployed at the headquarters of British online grocery Ocado. Karakuri is partnering with Ocado (who holds a minority investment in Karakuri) and Atalian Servest, a facilities management services company to feed up to four thousand employees at Ocado headquarters in the company’s canteen.

“We are committed to making their vision a reality and that is why our investment in Karakuri goes beyond financial support and sees us opening up our canteen as a living lab for their testing. Plus we get to give our staff an experience of what the future holds for food service,” said Stewart Macguire, ​​Head-Corporate Development at Ocado Group, in the release. 

The Semblr 1 (formerly known as the DK-One) is a 2m x 2m kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals. Like many new generation fast-prep food assembly robots, the Semblr doesn’t cook the food, but instead holds it at a proper temperature in up to 14 enclosed serving chambers and assembles a meal based on a customer’s personalized order. For the Ocado deployment, the Semblr will make Asian fusion bowls and will have 17 different ingredients from which employees can choose. The Semblr can make up to 110 meals per hour, and can make up to 4 meals concurrently

The deployment of a fast-assembly machine like the Semblr (formerly known as the DK-One) makes lots of sense for a corporate cafeteria. Because ingredients are prepped in advance, a corporate catering management company like Angel Hill can restock the machine throughout the day. In addition, the rapid pace of the robot (about 30 seconds per meal) means it can feed a lot of employees in a short amount of time.

“Putting our robot in action in a busy dining room for the first time marks a huge milestone for everybody at Karakuri,” said Karakuri CEO Barney Wragg. “We’ve come a long way in two years and our mission remains the same –   to develop robots that support the hospitality and catering industry and improve the experience for both hospitality operators and customers.

You can see a video of the DK-One in action below.

Karakuri DK-One Demo

Ocado-backed Karakuri Unveils DK-One Meal Assembling Robot, Raises £6.5M

Karakuri, a London-based food robotics company, today unveiled its DK-One meal assembly robot. The company also announced that it has raised £6.5 million (~ $8.68M USD) in new funding led by firstminute capital with participation from Hoxton Ventures, Taylor Brothers, Ocado Group and the Future Fund. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Karakuri to £13.5 million (~ $18.3M USD).

Karakuri first popped on to our radar in May of 2019 after Ocado, a robot-forward grocer based in the U.K., led Karakuri’s Seed round of funding. At the time, we knew Karakuri was working on the DK-One but didn’t know what the machine looked like or what it was capable of.

Meant for QSRs, catering companies and grocery retailers, the DK-One is an all-in-one enclosed 2m x 2m kiosk that assembles various cold and hot ingredients into prepared meals. The DK-One doesn’t cook any food, but rather holds ingredients at proper temperatures until the order is placed.

In its current pre-production version, the DK-One holds 18 ingredients (fruits, yogurts, proteins, veggies, etc.), can make between 6 – 12 bowls at any one time (depending on the complexity of the individual orders), and can make 100 bowls an hour.

Once an order is placed either through a mobile app or accompanying tablet, an articulating arm inside the DK-One grabs a container, fills it with the necessary ingredients and deposits the finished meal into a cubby for pickup. You can see it in action in this video:

The DK-One is arriving, of course during a global pandemic, when restaurants, food retailers and customers are all looking for ways to reduce the amount of human-to-human interaction involved with getting meals to customers. In addition to removing the number of people interacting with an order, the DK-One provides additional hygiene in other ways. The ingredients themselves are individually stored in their own compartments, keeping them away from the outside while preventing cross-contamination. The DK-One also provides temperature monitoring and auditing to ensure that the cold ingredients are kept cold and the hot ones hot.

Karakuri’s robot only takes two to three people to operate on-site, and it’s easy to see the DK-One at a grocer or cafeteria, cranking out meals through out the day: Yogurt bowls in the morning, and switching to hot vegetable or chicken dishes in the afternoon.

Barney Wragg, CEO and co-founder of Karakuri, gave me a Zoom demo of the DK-One last month and told me that inbound interest in the DK-One has changed since the pandemic.

“Pre-pandemic the biggest amount of interest was from the challenger brands, the guys trying to come up with new poke restaurant. They had the least legacy systems,” Wragg said. But the pandemic was a huge wake up call for bigger brands and Wragg said they’ve seen a massive surge of interest from large chains in Europe and around the world.

Wragg wouldn’t say how much the DK-One costs, only that Karakuri is exploring different models for different customers.

In addition to being useful during a pandemic, the DK-One also aligns with other food-making robots we’ve seen from an operational perspective. Like Picnic’s pizza assembling robot, the DK-One dispenses a specific amount of food each time, helping to eliminate waste during production. Like Spyce’s new Infinite Kitchen system, the DK-One also allows for customization, so people can order a meal more to their dietary or taste preferences.

The first DK-One will be installed this June at an undisclosed location. With its fresh funding, Karakuri says it will accelerate the development of its technologies and develop new products.

Ocado Leads $9M Seed Round in Food Robotics Company, Karakuri

U.K. based online grocer Ocado announced today that it has acquired a minority stake in London-based food robotics company, Karakuri. Ocado’s investment led a $9.1 million seed round in Karakuri, which also included Hoxton Ventures, firstminute Capital and Taylor Brothers.

Karakuri makes two different food robots: The DK-One, a more industrial robot that can assemble (not cook) 48 ingredients into ready-to-go meals on a mass scale in commercial kitchens; and the Marley, which is a smaller scale machine meant for applications like candy stores and frozen yogurt dispensing and topping.

Ocado is no stranger to robots: the company uses them to power its smart, automated warehouses, where totes on rails bundle up grocery orders for delivery. With the minority stake in Karakuri, Ocado appears to be setting itself up to expand this robot-powered automation into other forms of food delivery. From Ocado’s press announcement:

The [DK-One] can be used in the assembly of all boxed meals, using a configurable, modular design which can easily be installed in-store or in “dark kitchens”, and can aggregate up to 48 food items to create a wide range of food-to-go options.

Dark kitchens (restaurants that are delivery only) in particular are an interesting avenue for Ocado/Karakuri. Not only could a dark kitchen automate order assembly quickly, but the restaurant could then subscribe to Ocado’s logistics and delivery service to manage and optimize getting those orders to customers. This would mean more revenue for Ocado and also more data, giving the company insight into what, when and where people are ordering different restaurant meals.

Ocado also said it would tie Karakuri’s robots into its existing grocery service, which makes me wonder they will be used for something akin to customized meal kits, or even prepared food that customers could shop for as part of their daily or weekly shopping.

As we saw at our ArticulATE conference last month, automation is invading almost every part of the food stack. Here in the U.S. companies like Takeoff, Alert Innovation and Common Sense Robotics are creating robot-powered micro-fulfillment centers for grocery stores to speed up online order processing. Kroger, which is an investor in Ocado, is building out Ocado-powered smart fulfillment centers here in the U.S. to speed up its own grocery fulfillment and delivery. Will that now include Karakuri robots?

Ocado said that it would take delivery of its first Karakuri robot in the second half of this year. For its part, Karakuri said it will use the new money to further develop its technology, “strengthen its IP base,” and expand its team.