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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

pasta

Cala Raises €5.5M Seed Round To Fund Autonomous Pasta-Robot Restaurant

Cala, a maker of autonomous pasta-robot restaurants, announced it has raised a €5.5M Seed funding round led by BACKED VC, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The new funding follows a €1M angel round raised in 2019 by the Paris-based startup.

Cala’s robot is essentially a fully operational restaurant in a box. It preps and cooks pasta, plates it, and cleans up afterward using a cartesian coordinate system robot. While the company is on its gen-2 robot, you can get an idea of how the Cala bot works by watching the video of the gen one below. The current generation machine can prepare up to 400 pasta dishes in one hour.

cala - the future of restaurants

The company opened its first robot restaurant in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district in 2020 and, according to Cala, they’ve dished up 25 thousand servings of pasta so far. Customers can order their pasta at the kiosk using the touchscreen or through meal delivery apps like UberEats or Deliveroo. Interestingly, the company says about 95 percent of the meals made so far have gone to customers who ordered through delivery.

Cofounder and CEO Ylan Richard, who dropped out of college in 2017 at age nineteen to start the company with cofounders Julien Drago and Nicolas Barboni, said he was motivated to build his pasta robot restaurant because he was frustrated by the lack of affordable and healthy meals available to him as a student.

“Through our research, and driven by our own stomachs, we could see that the foodservice industry is broken,” said Richard in the announcement. “In fast food, the low-profit margin means that it’s impossible to use higher quality ingredients. We realized that if you could automate the meal preparation, you could rapidly increase the number of meals being produced and improve the economics.”

In some ways, Richard’s motivation echoes that of Now Cuisine’s Adam Lloyd Cohen, who started thinking about using automation as a way to democratize good food while also studying in Paris (what’s with France and food robots?).

The company plans to use the new funding to expand to new locations in France and around Europe. The company is also looking to add more employees across its engineering, product and operations teams.

Barilla Launches Blu1877, A Food Focused Venture Fund & Innovation Hub

With forty percent market share in the Italian pasta market, you’d almost forgive Barilla if they became complacent about the future.

But the 140-year-old, family held business is doing nothing of the sort. Instead, the company is embracing that future through a new venture fund and innovation hub called Blu1877, a name which references the company’s trademark blue pasta box and the year the Parma, Italy based company got its start as a small bakery.

Like its name, Blu1877 is an interesting hybrid. The new initiative combines an investment fund with an innovation hub that gives innovators access to the company’s pilot plant where they can take new food concepts and experiment with small batch production runs, as well as to a virtual expertise network of trusted advisors and other food and technology accelerators.

The first focus of the new VC/innovation hub is to make seed investments in food entrepreneurs creating new products related to Barilla’s core business and adjacent markets in pasta and meal solutions.

One interesting related development: With the launch of Blu1877, the company has transitioned the 3D pasta printer that we’ve been tracking from Barilla proper into Blu1877 under the name BluRhapsody. According to Blu1877 CEO & President Victoria Spadaro Grant (Spadaro Grant is also CTO of Barilla), they plan to develop BluRhapsody as “a portfolio of products aimed at high-end gastronomy applications and luxury catering only.” Spadaro Grant said the first line of products would focus, naturally, on pasta.

I interviewed Spadaro Grant about the launch of Blu1877 via email, which I have included below:

What are the investment themes/companies you are focused on?

Spadaro Grant: Blu1877 does have a total undisclosed amount that we are investing in selected areas related to Barilla’s core business and its adjacencies in the bakery and meal solutions like pasta, sauces, Italian style condiments, i.e. all types of pesti.

What is the stage of companies you are looking for?

Spadaro Grant: In this first phase, we are focused on seed-level investments.

Tell us about your Pilot Plant.

Spadaro Grant: With regards to piloting, prototyping and producing, Blu1877 does invite selected startups and accelerators to come to Italy to take advantage of our +100,000 square foot state-of-the-art pilot plant facility. We also collaborate with the US and European food accelerators and incubators.

What is the Open Innovation Hub?

Spadaro Grant: The Open Innovation Hub is a virtual center that we are nurturing along with other food accelerators and incubators in the food ecosystem. We are seeking to support and propel forward the creative thinkers of tomorrow’s food ecosystems.

Technology Innovation Adds New Dimension To Pasta Making

Alas, finally technology for those who like to play with their food.

Give its universal popularity, pasta is a natural prime target for entrepreneurs wanting to leave an imprint on the future of food. Living at the intersection of smart food techniques and future consumer trends are methods to shapeshift ordinary macaroni noodles into 3D wonders that delight the eye and tickle the palate.

Similar to those animal-shaped sponges that mysteriously grow when submerged, researchers at MIT have developed gelatin-based discs that separate and form origami-like three-dimensional shapes when dunked in hot water or broth. Not only are these creations fun to eat, their practical purpose is saving space during transport to retailers and consumers.

“We did some simple calculations, such as for macaroni pasta, and even if you pack it perfectly, you still will end up with 67 percent of the volume as air,” Wen Wang, a research scientist at MIT told the Tribune of India.

“We thought maybe in the future our shape-changing food could be packed flat and save space,” said Wang.

Shapeshifting pasta

According to MIT, researchers took their discovery to a chef at a leading Boston restaurant. The collaboration led to discs of gelatin flavored with plankton and squid ink, that quickly wrap around small beads of caviar. They also created long fettuccini-like strips, made from two gelatins that melt at different temperatures, causing the noodles to spontaneously divide when hot broth melts away certain sections.

The next step would be to see if the process will work with more traditional pasta ingredients such as eggs, flour and water.

Not to be left behind the innovation curve for indigenous food, Parma, Italy-based Barilla Group, has come up with a 3D pasta printer. In the works for more than three years, Barilla teased the market in 2014 by holding a 3D pasta printing competition. Winners made pasta in the shape of roses, Christmas trees and full moons, resulting in forms able to hold more sauce as well as dazzle the eye.

BARILLA - 3d pasta presented at Expo 2015

In 2016 at the CIBUS International Food Exhibition, Barilla showcased a working prototype of a pasta printer that is able to make four different shapes, each in under two minutes. The device, built in conjunction with Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) uses pre-made pasta cartridges loaded with Durum Wheat Semolina and water. Custom-made extruders deliver the final product.

At the 2016 event, Fabrizio Cassotta, Barilla’s Innovation Pasta, Ready Meals and Smart Food Manager, explained to 3ders.org, “All you need to do is load the dough cartridges in the machine and that’s it. It takes only a few minutes: you choose the pasta shape you want and the data is sent to the printer that materializes ready-to-cook pasta, shaped as cubes, moons, roses or many other shapes. Never seen before pasta shapes made with our favorite ingredients,” he says. Premade shapes can be selected using a tablet or smartphone.

Barilla will initially target restaurants and shops that sell fresh pasta before taking aim at the consumer market.

A second 3D pasta printing contest, sponsored by Barilla and administered by Desall.com, ended in early May with more than 1,100 entries with new designs. No winners have been announced.