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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Miso Robotics

Walmart Gives Flippy the Frying Robot a Shot

Flippy, the burger flipping, fry cooking robot, is auditioning for a new gig in Walmart’s deli department, according to Yahoo Finance. The retail giant has been testing Flippy out at its Culinary Institute and Innovation Center, where the robot fries up items like potato wedges, mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders.

This wouldn’t be the first time Miso Robotics‘ Flippy worked a fryer. The robot got a gig this past summer at Dodger Stadium, where it helped cook up more than ten thousand pounds of chicken tenders and tater tots, churning out up to 80 baskets per hour.

As we wrote earlier, there are three core technologies powering Flippy’s fry capabilities:

At the fryer, Flippy uses the Miso See, Miso Serve and Miso Move technologies to fry up the aforementioned tenders and tots. Miso See allows Flippy to identify food, cookware and utensils. Miso Serve helps the robot make real-time cooking decisions. Miso Move controls Flippy’s movements to make sure it is working safely and efficiently. All together, Flippy can put full baskets in the fry oil, monitor the cooking time (and gently shake the baskets while cooking), remove the baskets to drain the oil, and set the food at a designated location for serving.

It should come as no surprise that Walmart is mulling over adding Flippy to its cooking team. Walmart likes to use robots for manual, repetitive tasks and already has them scanning store shelves, cleaning floors and potentially even driving shopping carts.

But that’s three jobs at Walmart that will potentially be performed by robots and not humans. Miso Robotics CEO, David Zito told Yahoo Finance, “Our whole thing is not about job replacement, right….What we want to do is assist the hardworking linemen cooks and chefs in America with tools to give them the ability to faithfully reproduce while taking the burden off some of these more repetitive and mundane tasks.” For its part, Walmart says having robots handle these repetitive tasks frees up humans to prep other food and do more customer service.

While there are mountains of ethical issues coming down the pike as robots take more of our jobs, the fry cook is one where it might actually make sense. In addition to being manual and repetitive, there’s also a certain level of danger associated with standing over a vat of hot oil. Robots,however, don’t get burned, and because they use software to precisely repeat its tasks all day, they won’t burn your tenders.

Flippy’s Frying Pilot is a Hit at Dodger Stadium

Miso Robotics announced last week that in addition to cooking hamburgers, Flippy the robot is now a full-fledged frying machine after going through a pilot program at Dodger Stadium this summer.

According to the press announcement, Flippy has been working as a frying assistant since the end of July, and in that time has helped cook and serve more than ten thousand pounds of chicken tenders and tater tots, producing as much as 80 baskets per hour.

The Flippy platform started its culinary career at Caliburger, where it uses an array of computer vision, thermal sensors and AI to autonomously cook hamburgers. This summer, Miso began the pilot at Dodger Stadium to expand Flippy’s capabilities.

At the fryer, Flippy uses the Miso See, Miso Serve and Miso Move technologies to fry up the aforementioned tenders and tots. Miso See allows Flippy to identify food, cookware and utensils. Miso Serve helps the robot make real-time cooking decisions. Miso Move controls Flippy’s movements to make sure it is working safely and efficiently. All together, Flippy can put full baskets in the fry oil, monitor the cooking time (and gently shake the baskets while cooking), remove the baskets to drain the oil, and set the food at a designated location for serving.

With the pilot wrapping up successfully, it’s a safe bet that Flippy will be making its way to more stadiums over the next year. Levy, a Chicago hospitality firm that runs a number of sports and entertainment venues as well as convention centers, is an investor in Miso.

Flippy is among the first wave of robots that will be assisting/taking over food production in high-traffic areas. Robots like Flippy are perfect for sporting venues because they can work non-stop without needing a break, and can take on the more dangerous work such as frying food without getting hurt. Zume pizza is another company using robots for more dangerous work, employing automated assistants for pulling dough out of hot ovens.

Companies like Caliburger and Zume both say that robots help free up humans to do higher level tasks, which is true. But in settings like stadiums, the object is more about speed and volume, so it’s not hard to envision a future where ‘bots like Flippy take more jobs and reduce the number of people needed to run food establishments there.

It’s a sticky issue and one that we’ll be tackling at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle next month. I’ll be moderating a panel with people from Cafe X, Zimplistic and Chowbotics to discuss the evolution of robots, and we’re sure to touch on what that means for humans. Get your ticket to come and join the conversation!

Flippy Fires up a new Job at Dodger Stadium, Will it be a Home Run?

Flippy, Miso Robotics‘ fast food robot assistant, has a new job and some new skills: frying up tater tots and chicken tenders at LA’s Dodger Stadium.

The pilot is a collaboration between Miso, data analytics company E15 Group, and hospitality company Levy, who participated in Miso’s Series B funding round earlier this year. Miso and Levy had announced a plan to put Flippy in sports venues back in March.

The first Flippy works at the Pasadena Caliburger location, flipping burgers. When the ‘bot first came online in March, it ran into a few technical snafus as well as some issues with human counterparts keeping up. After a brief hiatus, Flippy returned to CaliBurger in May; it now cooks up thousands of burgers a day.

This stadium gig will be an intriguing test for Flippy. First, Miso is adding a new skill to the robot, moving it from the grill to the fryer, pushing Flippy’s artificial intelligence, HD cameras, thermal sensors and grippers all into a new food type and cooking technique. Second, it’s working at Dodger Stadium, which seats 56,000 people, so there will be high volume of work over a shorter period of time.

Having said that, baseball seems like the perfect sport for Flippy to start with. The slow and leisurely place means customers coming throughout the game, rather than high bursts of activity between quarters or halves.

As Mike Wolf pointed out earlier this week, robot restaurants are all the rage, and Flippy’s move to the majors is a perfect example of why. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive work more precisely, and leave us humans to do higher level work. By one 2017 estimate, foodservice accounted for 12,000 burns to employees per year. If Flippy can run the fryer properly, fewer employees could get hurt (saving people from pain and restaurants money).

If you’re in the LA area, take yourself out to the ball game, buy yourself some peanuts and robot-cooked chicken tenders and tell us how they are.

Flippy Gets Back to Work at Caliburger

After a brief hiatus, Flippy, Miso Robotics’ burger-grilling robot is back online and back at work at the Pasadena Caliburger location.

Flippy famously debuted at Caliburger back in March — only to be “fired” after just one day. Earlier reporting suggested that the problem was the human staffers who couldn’t keep up with the high-tech cook. While human interaction was an issue, a story in USA Today states that there were technical problems as well, with Flippy having trouble keeping up with demand and not putting burgers in the proper trays for co-workers.

Evidently, those glitches have been addressed and Flippy has been quietly back in action since the start of this month, doing a one-hour lunch shift every day, flipping roughly 300 burgers.

Flippy is a tip of the spear of sorts, leading the way for the restaurant robot revolution. In addition to Flippy, Zume has a pizza-making robot, Cafe X has a robot barista, and Bear Robotics has Penny to shuttle food and dirty dishes back and forth. Looking ahead, Sony recently teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to work on food robots for the future as well.

Despite its rocky start, Miso Robotics said that fifty more Flippys will be launched by 2019. Additionally, earlier this year Miso Robotics raised a $10 million Series B round, which included participation from hospitality company Levy. The two companies are working on using Flippy in commercial kitchens at large venues such as sports arenas.

If you love robots, be sure to subscribe to our podcast Automat on The Spoon Feed, which features discussions with those people building our food robot future, today.

Restaurant Robots Starting to Fill in for Fatigued Staff

Often, when we talk about robots in the food industry, there is a measure of doom and gloom associated with it. I’m guilty of this as well, trying to balance excitement around innovation with the gravitas of millions of human jobs being wiped out.

But it’s also important to remember that robots are really frickin’ cool, and as a CNBC story points out, robots are needed in a country like Japan, which is facing a labor shortages due to a shrinking population.

Tetsuya Sawanobobori started up a restaurant upon completion of grad school. Long story short: long hours made it exhausting and he quit after a year. For sure, owning a restaurant is challenging, but Sawanobori talked to CNBC about the food service industry in Japan more generally, saying “Right now, especially in the food service industry, they have a serious lack of labor because people tend to avoid these kinds of jobs, doing daily, repetitive tasks.”

After exiting the restaurant business, Sawanobori got into robotics and is now the president of Connected Robotics. The company will start selling a robot this summer that can prepare Takoyaki, a Japanese street food consisting of batter balls and minced octopus. Sawanobori said that his robot will take the pressure off of cooking staff who won’t have to stand in front of a hot grill all day.

Takoyaki Robot Demo @Maker Faire Tokyo 2017

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story coming out of Japan. At our own Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year, Hirofumi Mori told our audience that his time performing repetitive, manual tasks at a crêpe shop inspired him to invent his own crêpe making robot.

Here in the U.S., the long hours of restaurant work are spurring our own robot adoption. Bear Robotics created “Penny,” a robot that looks like a bowling pin and shuttles food and dirty dishes around the restaurant. Bear CEO John Ha told us that he built Penny because “[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard.”

Sometimes, however, it seems like our new restaurant robots are working too hard. The most famous example of this is Miso Robotics’ Flippy, the burger flipping robot. Flippy was temporarily “retired” after its first official day on the job, but evidently that’s because it was too fast and the human co-workers couldn’t keep up.

Perhaps the possible Little Caeser’s pizza making robot will fare better.

With the restaurant robot genie out of the bottle, now it’s incumbent upon us a society to keep up, and avoid the doom and gloom.

Flippy Clocks in at CaliBurger, Miso Robotics Makes Expansion Moves

Miso Robotics announced yesterday that Flippy, the burger cooking robot, is officially going to work at CaliBurger’s Pasadena location. Additionally, Miso announced that its robot kitchen assistants will soon be coming to sports and entertainment venues, thanks to the company’s partnership with sports and entertainment hospitality company Levy.

According to the press announcement, Flippy will start out working the lunch shift at CaliBurger. Using a combination of thermal imaging, visual recognition and artificial intelligence, Flippy can tell when a raw burger is ready to be flipped, when it’s cooked to the proper temperature, and when to take it off the grill.

Flippy uses two different spatulas — one for raw and one for cooked meat — and can also scrape the grill. Humans aren’t completely cut out of the cooking process (for now), as they are still needed to apply cheese and other toppings. Though, as Flippy gets smarter, its capabilities will expand.

According to TechCrunch, a Flippy robot will set a restaurant back $60,000 plus an annual 20 percent recurring fee for learning and maintenance. That’s pretty pricey for an employee that only works the lunch shift, but Miso says companies can earn that back through decreased wait times and less food waste. Plus, robots can create a more consistent product, won’t call in sick, need a break, or walk off mid-shift in a huff.

Flippy and its robotic brethren will also be expanding beyond CaliBurger. Through its partnership with Levy, Miso’s robotic kitchen assistants will be headed to convention centers and sporting events, with the first appearance coming later this year to an unnamed Levy venue. This expansion follows Levy’s participation in Miso’s $10 million fundraise last month.

Flippy officially going to work means we’re one step beyond “the robots are coming” and more towards “the robots are here!” In fact, the restaurant industry believes robots will become mainstream by 2025.

It addition to Flippy, CaliBurger has also rolled out self-ordering kiosks that let you pay with your face, reducing the need for staff in the front of the house. Elsewhere, companies like Eatsa and Chowbotics are helping automate even more dining experiences.

Flippy Gets More Funding, Miso Robotics Raises $10M

Miso Robotics, the company behind Flippy, the hamburger flipping robot, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series B round, led by Acacia Research. In a press release, Miso said it will use the new funding to expand its suite of kitchen robots and broaden the applications for its Miso AI machine learning platform.

Flippy is a big robotic arm that uses a combination of artificial intelligence, cameras, thermal scanners and lasers to cook hamburgers. Flippy will debut at the Pasadena location of CaliBurger this year, and will roll out to more than 50 CaliBurger locations worldwide by the end of 2019.

Participating in this funding round was Levy, a Chicago hospitality company that includes restaurants as well as sports and entertainment venues and convention centers. Given the high volume of food served at these types of locations, implementing robots makes a lot of sense.

Businesses such as CaliBurger like using robots for manual, repetitive tasks since they can work all day without breaks, and be more consistent with their work than a human. In the front of the store, CaliBurger has also started using automated self-ordering kiosks equipped with computer vision to let customers pay with their face.

Robots are popping up in other settings where convenience is king and robots can automate repetitive tasks. Cafe-X in San Francisco features a robot barista that brews up coffee for customers.

Today’s announcement brings the total amount of funding raised by Miso to $13.1 million.

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