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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Kiwi

Kiwi Unveils New Name and a New Robot (That Can Get Food From Vending Machines!)

Words matter. That’s a lesson I hope robot delivery startup learned earlier this week when it sent out an email saying “We want to let you know that we will be ending the Kiwibot delivery service, effective December 15, 2019.“

We weren’t sure exactly what that meant, and after a full day of confusion and multiple explanatory emails from the company, it turns out it wasn’t the END end for Kiwi. It was just stopping service for the winter. (Sidenote: Don’t skimp on a copywriter.)

The company then said it would be announcing its reinvention yesterday, which it did towards the close of business with a corporate blog post. Kiwi had already shared some details from this “reinvention” earlier in the week: the company has changed its name to “Kiwibot,” there’s a new, more rugged robot on the way (see video below), and something called Kiwi Express promises to be the “First end to end robotic Food delivery service.”

Yesterday’s blog post added a few details:

In 2020, we will roll out Kiwibot Cloud Pro. A new generation is coming. Refined hardware design, new operations features, and superior human interactions will transform the logistics landscape and yield better service.

We combine sensors of a custom made stereo camera to get more information about the environment. Our Kiwibots will sense the world more accurately and move more precisely. Our Kiwibots are now resilient to dynamic light conditions on different sidewalks.

Kiwibot v3.2 | Nuestro robot más avanzado

In addition to the new technology, this new Kiwibot is also more rugged, which will make it less likely to get stuck (and need a human’s help).

On Kiwibot’s website, the company says that its robots can now interact with vending machines. At first blush, this might seem like overkill to have a robot pick you up a Snickers bar from the lobby vending machine because you are too lazy to walk down there. But vending machines are changing and turning into something more akin to small restaurants. Companies like Yo-Kai Express serve hot ramen from vending machines, and Cafe X is re-classifying its coffee robot as a vending machine. So being early to integrate its robot with those types of systems now makes a lot of sense for Kiwi.

It’s nice to know that Kiwi isn’t shutting down. While there are still a lot of issues to work out, I’m still a big believer in robot delivery. More players in the space means more competition and more innovation.

Now Kiwi just needs fewer wording mistakes.

Updated: Kiwi “Reinvention” Coming This Week

The original headline for this post was “Developing: Is Robot Delivery Service Kiwi Shutting Down in Berkeley or Altogether?”

SECOND UPDATE: Later last night, Kiwi sent out another email with the following:

Hi there ,
In the last 24 hours, we have received thousands of messages from the community, customers, and partners related to an email we sent today with the subject: ⚰️☠️Kiwi no more.

First of all: KIWIBOT IS NOT SHUTTING DOWN. Our aim was to draw attention to the early ending of deliveries for this semester, but the email was incorrectly worded. We are sorry to cause you worry, but are overwhelmed at the amount of Kiwi Love we have received. We plan to release all information regarding our revolutionized Kiwibot technology on December 5th, but here are some teasers:

With that said, I want to tell you about some of the projects/news we are going to announce this Thursday:

  • Kiwibot 3.2 Check out the video(It’s pretty cool) 
  • Kiwi Express (First end to end robotic Food delivery service) 
  • Kiwibot as our only brand name and new website kiwibot.com, (this is the last email you will receive from @kiwicampus.com) So Kiwi no more… 
  • Our new Lab and updates related to our supervisor’s program in Colombia.
  • Details of the next Kiwibot version, and we want YOU to be involved (Food Coupons available, stay tuned this Thursday 5th)
  • Kiwibot’s return on January 21st

Here’s the video:

Kiwibot v3.2 | Nuestro robot más avanzado

UPDATE: We just got a second email from Kiwi this afternoon. Looks like the company isn’t shutting down entirely. The email said:

Our PR team is working on a special announcement regarding Kiwibot’s reinvention for next semester, please keep an eye out for it this Thursday, December 5th

ORIGINAL POST: We received an email this morning from Kiwi, the robot delivery service, saying that it is ending its service as of December 15, 2019. What we don’t know at this point is whether that means it is shutting down the delivery service just at the University of California Berkeley (which is where I originally signed up for and used the service), or everywhere, or if it is pivoting to something else.

We received the following email this morning from Kiwi:

Hey,

When we started Kiwibot a little over 2 years ago, we had a vision for a service that would allow people to send atoms using delivery robots. Since then, over 20,000 people have signed up for Kiwibot, and more than 80,000 orders have been placed. We gave Berkeley an affordable and accessible way of getting food, and we’re honored to have been the ‘first delivery robot’ for so many people.

We want to let you know that we will be ending the Kiwibot delivery service, effective December 15, 2019. The Kiwibot app will remain accessible until December 15th, 2019. After that date, your points and coupons will no longer work, and you will no longer be able to order.

We want to extend a very special thanks to our entire community. We are truly humbled by your curiosity and innovative spirit. It was a great adventure, and we’re proud of what we built – we sincerely hope you enjoyed using Kiwibot.

Kiwi had been using its cooler-sized rover robots to make food deliveries around UC Berkeley and Westwood in Los Angeles, and was in talks with the city of Sacramento about deploying its service there.

Earlier this year, Kiwi announced expansion plans to fifteen more schools, but there seemed to be a couple of snags along the way. Kiwi said it was expanding to both Purdue and Harvard. But Purdue launched robot delivery with competitor delivery robot company Starship this fall, and Harvard was reportedly in talks to bring Starship robots there as well. Starship works with school administrations, while Kiwi was planning on going through student groups.

As mentioned, I used Kiwi at UC Berkeley and while it had its glitches (and caught fire that one time), the experience also felt like a glimpse into the future of on-demand food. So far Kiwi has raised $2 million in funding.

This story is developing and we have reached out to Kiwi to find out more. We will update this post as we get more information.

Newsletter: Are Vertical Farms Ready to Grow More Than Lettuce?

Greetings from the South, ground zero for sweet tea, land of unrelenting humidity, future home of a massive new vertical farming operation.

This week, an Orlando, FL-based company called Kalera (formerly Eco Convergence Group), announced that it has broken ground on a semi-autonomous vertical farming facility that will produce 5 million heads of lettuce each year, supplying Orlando and central Florida restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores with fresh greens and underscoring the growing demand for locally grown produce.

As soon as I got the news, the usual question about vertical farming entered my brain: why is it always lettuce? From Kalera’s new operation to AeroFarms’ 70,000-square-foot New Jersey farm to IGS’ fully automated vertical farm, we hear lots of talk of leafy greens, herbs, and the occasional edible flower. But nobody’s yet growing eggplant, potato, or even carrots.

Kalera’s CEO and cofounder, Cristian Toma, had a lot to say about that when I asked him about this: Unlike lettuce — short plants that can be densely packed together to maximize volume — many other types of produce need lots of space to grow upwards and outwards. In some cases they require multiple harvests. Most of them need human hands to assist with things like pruning, and all of these needs add up to the kinds of space and labor costs vertical farms simply can’t sustain right now. Not at scale, anyway.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see more non-leafy greens in vertical farms at some point in the future. As I noted this morning:

Whether the day ever comes when we’ll see vertical farms growing, say, carrots, depends a lot on developments in plant science in the future. “The varieties we are working with right now over many many years evolved to meet the challenges for outdoor production,” says Toma. “We don’t have varieties bred specifically for indoor production yet. So that’s an area where the industry can develop.”

Image courtesy of Princeton University

Princeton Vertical Farming Project Shutters Its Doors — For Now

More data on growing methods might help. That’s been the credo of Paul P.G. Gauthier, former associate research scholar in plant physiology and environmental plant metabolism at Princeton University and the founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project.

Unfortunately, word got out late last week that PVFP has closed its doors following Gauthier’s departure from the university. We shouldn’t shutter the conversation on his ideas, however, especially those around the use of data in vertical farms. Back in January, Gauthier told The Spoon that the vertical farming industry needs more data on best practices for growing plants that can be shared around the industry in a kind of open-source framework. More data on what’s working and what isn’t could give us a more realistic idea of whether, say, tomatoes are a realistic crop to grow at large scale or if they’re better off in a greenhouse setting.

Gauthier has taken a job as Professor of Plant Science at Delaware Valley University and said he hopes to reproduce the vertical farm model from Princeton on a larger scale, and that there’s a possibility of even reviving the PVFP at Princeton in the future.

Starship’s Autonomous Delivery Bots Land on Another Campus

While vertical farms move closer to automation, more automated delivery bots are also moving onto college campuses. Starship upped the number of food delivery robots this week by announcing that its bots have landed at the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University, joining campuses like George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, both of whom launched delivery programs with Starship earlier this year.

Starship is one of a few companies testing delivery programs with these small, wheeled bots. Kiwi, too, has bots on a number of campuses — including, possibly Purdue, a potential overlap that suggests campus is the next battleground for autonomous delivery. It is, after all, the perfect testing ground: as my colleague Chris Albrecht noted when he tested out a Kiwi earlier this year, college campuses are an ideal piloting ground for these companies: “Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night,” he wrote.

Personally, I’m waiting for the day a six-wheeled autonomous bot can deliver a hydroponically grown baked potato to my doorstep, but if the economics of vertical potato farms don’t pan out, I’d always settle for lettuce.

Stay cool,
Jenn

Amazon Starts Testing Autonomous Delivery Bot Scout in California

Scout, Amazon’s autonomous wheeled delivery bot, will start delivering packages today in Irvine, California, according to a blog post published by Amazon.

Scout bots will operate “Monday through Friday, during daylight hours,” according to the blog post. Customers in Irvine will order their packages as normal, including options for same-day delivery for Prime members. The cooler-sized, six-wheeled bots will autonomously follow their delivery route and, for now at least, be accompanied by a human being who can take over in the event of a problem.

Back in January, when Scout debuted near Amazon’s Washington State headquarters, my colleague Chris Albrecht noted that, “If Scout’s trial proves successful, Amazon’s involvement in the space will certainly light a fire under the existing competition and accelerate robot delivery.”

Today’s post from Amazon didn’t specifically mention food delivery, but it’s a realm in which Amazon operates and where, if Scout does indeed prove successful, the Seattle giant would certainly give the competition something to worry about.

And there’s plenty of competition to go around. Postmates’ Serve bot already, eh, serves Los Angeles, Miami, NYC, Chicago, and Phoenix. Kiwi and Starship are available on a growing number of college campuses, and Kiwi also just expanded its program to the city of Sacramento. Pepsi, too, has bots on campus in the form of an autonomous roving device by San Francisco-based company Robby.

Of course, both campuses and city streets contain obstacles for bots, which Amazon said in its blog post it has been testing Scout against for some time: “All the while, the devices have safely and autonomously navigated the many obstacles you find in residential neighborhoods—trashcans, skateboards, lawn chairs, the occasional snow blower, and more.”

Now they have to navigate an even tougher test than a snow blower: the human beings who will be both interacting with the bots as they accept packages and getting used to seeing the wheeled devices roving about the block. How that reception goes will give us a good idea of where Scout is headed — literally and figuratively — in the near future.

Aramark Acquires Campus Food-Delivery Service Good Uncle

Just in time for school to start again, food services provider Aramark announced today it has acquired Good Uncle, an on-demand meal-delivery service that drops food to students at specific pickup points around college campuses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Good Uncle launched in 2016 and has raised a total of $2.2 million. The service, accessible via an iOS or Android app, aims to offer college and university students restaurant-quality meal options at student-friendly prices, including free delivery.

To order food, students first sign up with the Good Uncle app and choose items from a menu that rotates every couple of weeks. Certain campuses also feature 15-week membership plans that theoretically could function as an alternative, or at least a supplement, to a traditional student meal plan purchased from the university.

Good Uncle partners with local chefs to make the food and uses its own fleet of vehicles to deliver meals. All food is delivered at drop points on or around the campus. When a user purchases a meal, they choose one of these designated points, marked in the app, and are given an estimated time for how long the food will take to arrive at that point. The Good Uncle site claims an average of 26 minutes for most orders. Payment and order tracking are available through the app.

Aramark, meanwhile, is a longtime food services provider to universities and currently works with over 400 of them in the U.S., offering everything from dining hall services to convenience stores and coffee shops. But thanks to delivery, restaurant-quality food is easier and faster than ever for students to get their hands on, which means slimy spaghetti and endless bowls of cereal from the dining hall aren’t the only options anymore. For Amarak, acquiring a company like Good Uncle is a way to stay relevant as the campus culinary landscape changes.

And it’s definitely changing — specifically to meet the demands for delivery. In 2018, Grubhub acquired Tapingo, whose platform lets students order ahead at on-campus restaurants, cafes and dining halls. And universities are also a hot testing bed for delivery robots, with companies like Starship and Kiwi sending their bots to roam about the quad delivering meals and snacks to hungry students.

Right now, Good Uncle is available on eight campuses in the U.S. According to the press release, the company will operate independently of Amarak and maintain its own unique brand identity. Even so, linking up with a larger company like Aramark, which has a long history and wide reach with universities, could enable Good Uncle to expand to new campuses and compete with the plethora of delivery technologies currently headed back to school.

Newsletter: The New All-in-One Restaurant Tech Is Here, Digital Drive-Thru Goes Down Under

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I was in a local coffee shop recently and overheard a rep from a well-known POS company trying to sell his product to the shop’s manager. But for every feature he offered up (“It’ll manage payroll!” “It makes tipping easier!”), the cafe manager had more or less the same rebuttal: more tech would make more work for her staff.

I suspect this conversation is happening all over the world. Tech’s march on the restaurant industry is here to stay, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily making life easier for restaurants. In a growing number of cases, too many digital tools actually make it harder to get work done, particularly as demands for delivery and mobile orders ramp up and those functions have to be integrated into an already chaotic workflow.

But this week, we got a different glimpse into the future of the digital restaurant — namely, one where disparate tech solutions are replaced by a single digital platform that can manage every corner of the restaurant, from the kitchen system in the back to the kiosk out front to the off-premises order on its way out for delivery.

At least, that’s what Brightloom hopes to launch to restaurants this fall. The newly rebranded company, formerly known as Eatsa, announced yesterday that it’s revamped its existing end-to-end restaurant tech platform, into which it’s also integrating Starbucks’ famed mobile technology.

This is a big deal because, while many products claim to be “all-in-one” restaurant management software packs that make it easier for restaurant owners and operators to manage the entire business, no one’s yet managed to seamlessly integrate the mobile aspect of business into their system.

And nobody does mobile like Starbucks. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, it’s hard to deny the mega-chain’s dominance when it comes to offering fast, highly personalized order and pickup functions for customers. Brightloom’s soon-to-be-unveiled system will integrate the Starbucks mobile order, pay, and customer loyalty tech into its own system. We don’t yet know exactly what that will look like, but it will undoubtedly raise everyone’s standards around what restaurant-tech systems should be able to do and put pressure on others to make their offerings just as useful and less of a burden for restaurants to implement.

Good-bye, Crackly Speakerphone. Hello Digital Drive-Thru
Will all these digital developments render the crackly speaker at the drive-thru null and void? Probably, and sooner than we think.

While major QSRs like Dunkin’ and Starbucks have been implementing digital and mobile ordering into the drive-thru experience little by little over the last couple years, KFC took things a step further recently by announcing its first-ever drive-thru-only concept store.

The store, which is slated to open in November, will feature multiple drive-thru lanes dedicated to customers who have ordered their food via the KFC website or mobile app. The idea is to streamline the order process and cut down on how long it takes customers — or delivery drivers — to get their food. But again, it’s all about the implementation. KFC’s concept store could raise the bar on what QSRs are expected to deliver in terms of speed and quality. Or it could just be introducing another digital process that stresses workers out. We’ll know more when the pilot launches in November, in Australia.

Delivery Bots on the Rise
Or you could just let the restaurant come to you in the form of a roving bot. There’s a growing number of these devices delivering food from restaurant to customer, often on college campuses, which hold a lot of people in a relatively small geographic area.

But as my colleague Chris Albrecht pointed out this week, Kiwi announced it will test its semi-autonomous delivery bots on the streets of Sacramento, CA this fall, which suggests we’re coming to a point where these li’l roving machines will start to become a more common sight on regular city sidewalks. Who needs drive-thru when you can have your meal brought to you by a cute little box on wheels? As Chris said, “it was pretty amazing to whip out my phone, order a burrito, have a robot fetch my lunch and bring it to my location.”

For now, roving delivery bots are probably not a priority for most restaurants’ overall digital solutions. But as all-in-one offerings like the Brightloom-Starbucks tech get more commonplace and digital ordering becomes routine for customers and workers alike, there may be room for most restaurants to accommodate a bot or two in their tech stack.

Kiwi Expanding its Robot Delivery to Sacramento in September

Kiwi continues to roll out its diminutive li’l food delivery robots to more cities, with plans to begin operations in Sacramento, CA in September.

CBS13 first reported the story last week. While CBS13 didn’t provide many details around the Sacramento program, what caught our eye about the report is that Kiwi is working on this latest expansion directly with the city, which wants to become an urban technology lab. Most of Kiwi’s expansion so far has been through universities. Kiwi started out at the University of California in Berkeley and announced plans to be in a dozen more schools starting this fall including Stanford, UC Davis, Purdue, Cornell, and NYU.

Starting with universities makes sense for the nascent technology as campuses provide a sizeable population in a limited geographic area. Typically campuses have or are surrounded by plenty of restaurants to feed hungry students and faculties, and using a robot could make delivering those meals more convenient. Going the campus route is a strategy also employed by Starship for its delivery robot and Robby’s mobile commerce robot.

For Kiwi, going through schools also provides an infrastructure for running delivery operations, as students will be running operations at each school. We don’t have a ton of details on those programs (like how any money is split) but students will be responsible for robot maintenance and deployments. We reached out to Kiwi to find out more information about how the Sacramento program will work and will update when we hear back.

Kiwi’s robots are “semi-autonomous,” as they still have human operators who monitor a robot’s route and drop GPS waypoints for the robot to follow. I used Kiwi earlier this year at Berkeley and it felt like ordering food from the future. Aside from one glitch, it was pretty amazing to whip out my phone, order a burrito, have a robot fetch my lunch and bring it to my location.

Kiwi will begin testing in Sacramento this fall and hopes to have a fleet of 50 robots running around the streets of the city at some point.

Starship More Than Doubled its Robot Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

High school graduation happened last night in my town, which means in a matter of months, most of those kids will be heading off to college. And maybe, if they are lucky, they’ll be heading off to a college that has delivery robots.

As we’ve covered throughout the year, companies like Starship and Kiwi are bringing their li’l rover robots to college campuses like George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, UC Berkeley, Purdue, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard. These delivery robots scurry about to bring hungry students snacks and meals.

At George Mason in particular, Starship’s robots are proving quite popular. According to an article yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education, George Mason has more than doubled it robot delivery fleet since January, adding 23 robots to the initial order of 20. And GMU is not stopping there: the university plans to add another 15 to the fleet in the fall.

That’s a lot of robots roaming about the quad.

In addition to adding more ‘bots, the popularity of robots also has the school imposing some limits. Starship told me during an interview earlier this year that though the robots could make deliveries 24/7, George Mason limits delivery hours so as not to interfere with students’ sleeping habits.

I used Kiwi’s robot delivery service at Berkeley earlier this year, and while it had its hiccups, the overall experience felt like living in the future. The ability to order food from your phone and have it delivered wherever you have on campus brings news levels of convenience that busy/lazy college students will quickly get used to.

I Used Kiwi’s Robot and it Felt Like the Future of College Food Delivery (Almost)

I live in a rural area, and a lot of the cool food delivery options aren’t available. So I was excited to see Kiwi’s rover bots scurrying around when I attended the TechCrunch Robotics and AI Sessions at UC Berkeley yesterday.

Having these robots on hand came in robot-handy during lunch when all the nearby eateries were choked with conference attendees and hungry students. Rather than waste my limited break standing in a long line, I downloaded the Kiwi mobile app to have a robot fetch me some grub while I did some work. In doing so I glimpsed into the bright future of college food delivery, and it is robots.

Well, almost.

Future college kids won’t know how lucky they’ll have it when campuses all operate fleets of robotic rovers making deliveries day and night. Robot delivery will be easy, fast, convenient and will free up much more time for beer pong studying.

Here’s how it worked.

I downloaded the Kiwi app and set up an account, which was pretty straightforward (though no Apple Pay option yet). After that, Kiwi’s marketplace brings up a list of nearby participating restaurants and alerted me to special offers. I placed two separate orders: a burrito from a local Mexican restaurant, and a boba tea from a different establishment.

On its face, robo-delivery isn’t cheap. There’s a $3.80 fee Kiwi tacks on which brought the total of my burrito to $16 and my boba to a little under $6. Twenty-two bucks for lunch ain’t nothin’, but if you know going into it that you are paying for the convenience of staying in one place and doing what you want (beer pong), while a robot runs across town, goes to two different restaurants and brings all your food back to you, the fee didn’t feel that bad.

I dropped a pin to mark the delivery location and placed my order. The Kiwi app did a good job of keeping me up to date on the robot’s progress:

Your robot is going to get your food!

Your robot has your food!

Your robot is ten minutes away!

Your robot is 3 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

Your robot is 0 minutes away!

That’s not a typo, this was when the experience broke down. The app told me the robot was basically at my feet… but there was no robot. The shortcomings of automated service were beginning to come into focus. Because it was stuck on 0 minutes away, there was no action I could take (re-center the map, have it make a ping! sound, etc.) to understand where it was and there was no apparent “Help Me” button I could push.

Thankfully, there was a human Kiwi operative nearby who was able to locate my robot roughly 25 yards away from where the app said it was. A company rep after the fact told me the issue was that there were too many Kiwis in one place (gathered for the conference), and mine got confused/stuck.

Which is too bad. Because the human helped me out, I didn’t really get the full experience, like seeing the live video feed broadcast by the robot, or use my phone to open it up.

Once open, I saw the only other bummer about my delivery (disclaimer: this is THE MOST first world problem in the world): My ice cold boba tea was place on top of the hot burrito. (Wanh-wanh. Please give to my GoFundMe). This is a bit of a nit pick, but robot delivery services are just starting out, they have to show that they can do a just-as-good-if-not-better-job than humans. That means getting restaurants to actually care about how they place food in the robot. There should be a cool side and a warm side.

Minor quibbles aside, it’s easy to see how robots will be a big hit on campuses. Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night. Robots can easily access dorms and labs much more easily than a human driver needing to find a parking spot and still walk the quad to make a delivery. And if you bundle up multiple orders from a single restaurant, the economics make more sense for students.

All these reasons help explain, as Kiwi said from the stage at our recent ArticulATE summit, why the company is quietly expanding from two colleges to fifteen schools including Purdue, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard. Of equal interest is the fact that students will be running the robot programs at these schools, taking care of maintenance and deployments. Kiwi didn’t elaborate on any student payment/financial relationship.

Kiwi isn’t the only rover robot company hip to the college scene. Starship is doing delivery at George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, and Robby is doing mobile commerce at the University of the Pacific.

Robot delivery isn’t perfect yet, but we’re in the first inning of whatever sport college kids will play in the future. Perhaps in ten year’s time my son will be writing me at our rural home to tell me about all the robot deliveries on his campus. He definitely won’t be playing beer pong, right?

Here’s The Spoon’s 2019 Food Robotics Market Map

Today we head to San Francisco for The Spoon’s first-ever food-robotics event. ArticulAte kicks off at 9:05 a.m. sharp at the General Assembly venue in SF, and throughout the daylong event talk will be about all things robots, from the technology itself to business and regulatory issues surrounding it.

When you stop and look around the food industry, whether it’s new restaurants embracing automation or companies changing the way we get our groceries, it’s easy to see why the food robotics market is projected to be a $3.1 billion market by 2025.

But there’s no one way to make a robot, and so to give you a sense of who’s who in this space, and to celebrate the start of ArticulAte, The Spoon’s editors put together this market map of the food robotics landscape.

This is the first edition of this map, which we’ll improve and build upon as the market changes and grows. If you have any suggestions for other companies or see ones we missed you think should be in there, let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at tips@thespoon.tech.

Click on the map below to enlarge it.

The Food Robotics Market 2019:

Blendid’s Smoothie Robot Heads Off to the University of San Francisco

If you want to see the future of robots, go to college. I don’t mean become a student and take classes, I mean just literally head to a college campus as they are quickly becoming the go-to spot for companies to launch robots. Among the latest is Blendid’s smoothie-making robot, which is launching at the University of San Francisco next Monday.

Blendid (a.k.a. 6DBytes) came out of stealth just about a year ago to launch its autonomous smoothie making station at the Plug and Play Center in Sunnyvale, CA. As The San Francisco Chronicle reports, Blendid has partnered with food service operator Bon Appetit to bring the smooth(ie) operator to USF. Chef B, as the robot is called there, can make up to 36 smoothies and hour and will operate 24 hours a day at the Market Cafe on USF’s campus.

USF is just the latest college to test out robots on campus. Northern Arizona University (NAU), George Mason University (GMU), UC Berkeley, and University of the Pacific all now have little rover delivery bots running around, dropping off food and snacks on their campuses.

College campuses are popular destinations for robots because there is a large population centralized in one contained geographic area, and everyone there has to eat. A robot like Blendid works well in that type of high-traffic environment because smoothies are typically something people want to grab quickly, and the robot can just sit and churn them out literally around the clock.

Blendid offers a franchise option for food service companies like Bon Appetit, allowing them to install the $70,000 robot with a lower up-front cost. Given the work Sodexo is doing with Starship’s robots at NAU and GMU, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was exploring a similar arrangement.

One interesting bit about the rollout of USF’s new robot smoothie maker; Blendid put this tidbit on its FAQ page:

Q: Does Blendid eliminate any jobs for existing Bon Appétit workers?
A: No. Blendid kiosk is an added bonus. It brings another food option in the Market Cafe without adding more stress on existing staff. It won’t eliminate any jobs. We hope this will help alleviate load on staff and reduce wait lines during busy hours.

The role of robots in the workforce is an ongoing debate, and it looks like Blendid and Bon Appetit are trying to get ahead of any controversy. The impact of automation is a big issue and it’s one that we’ll be tackling at our upcoming ArticulATE conference on food robotics in San Francisco on April 16th. You should definitely get a ticket and join us for the discussion!

Slack Chat Recap: The Perils and Promise of the Food Robot Revolution

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver‘s main piece over the weekend was on robots and automation. If you are in the food service industry you can (and should) watch the clip below, but I can also save you a click: Oliver basically says the whole situation around jobs being automated is… complicated.

As we’ve written before, the food service industry in particular is ripe for automation, and it’s one of the topics we covered during our recent Spoon Slack Chat with Megan Mokri, CEO of Byte Technology, Charlie Andersen, CEO of Augean Robotics, and David Rodriguez, Head of Business Development for Kiwi.

Admittedly, all of these companies are working to help bring automation across different segments of the food stack, so they have some skin in the game. But they were still circumspect about its societal benefits and drawbacks. When I asked the panel what the industry should do about the human displacement caused by robots and automation, the response was mostly optimistic (answered copied directly from Slack):

Megan Mokri (Byte): So much to say on this one. The reality is many industries in the US are facing a labor shortage – food and ag is hugely impacted, as is retail. Automation is critical if these industries are to keep pace with growing and shifting consumer behaviors.

Charlie Andersen: Re: automation and the impact on labor, this story is still being written. Certainly, the impact of automation is to enable one person to do far more work, or to remove people from tasks they no longer want to do. But in the process, more tasks are created and new opportunities are unlocked. (in the case of farming, there is way way too much work to do already)

David Rodriguez: The size of the markets we build should increase the total number of human operators! In our case, we need fewer people to do more deliveries, but we do so many deliveries that we need to hire more and more people!

But our Robo-Slack Chat wasn’t all dour news about an impending robot revolution. There are lots of cool things about robots, too!

One is how Byte’s automated smart fridges are stocked. Because the fridges automatically keep track of their contents, Byte has insight into which products are popular and where, and can use that data to power Byte’s demand algorithms and inventory planning, and can even allow for dynamic pricing. Byte also leases out their technologies to CPG and other food service companies, allowing them to more efficiently stock their own Byte-powered fridges.

But you can’t stock those fridges if you don’t have food, and as Charlie Andersen reminded us, agriculture and working on a farm is hard work. Robots can carry out some tasks more safely than a human could. For instance, the Augean Burro can carry 150+ pounds of grapes for hours in 110 degree weather without getting heat stroke or dehydrated. But in addition to labor changes, robots can also push farms towards more organic production because this can also reduce the amount of chemicals needed and the overall environmental intensity needed for fruit and vegetable production.

From that example, it’s easy to see robots as lending a helping hand, but in the city, robots running around underfoot could be seen as more of a nuisance, and become a target for theft or vandalism. One way Kiwi combats this is by designing the robot in a way that creates empathy from people looking at it. For instance, the Kiwi-bot has big eyes, making the robot look “cute.” This cuteness makes mean ole humans reluctant to harm the robot. Rodriguez says that in Berkeley they’ve had zero instances of theft and only a few cases of vandalism.

We are only at the beginning of seeing what robots are capable of and how they will literally change – and complicate – our world. But Slack Chats like this, as well as our upcoming ArticulATE conference in April (get your tickets!) help drive the conversation so we can figure some of those answers out now.

Automation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)