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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

restaurant robots

Scoop: Travis Kalanick is Building Restaurant Robots With Help of Uber’s Former Head of Self-Driving Cars

For the past half-decade, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been endeavoring to reimagine how restaurants operate by building a nationwide network of ghost kitchens under a business called CloudKitchens. That business, which he and his team constructed stealthily under a holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS), was joined at the hip by another technology business called Otter, which sells restaurant order management software.

Now, the Spoon has learned that Kalanick’s CSS is building its own restaurant automation and robotics business under the name Lab37. According to company sources and a blog post quietly published by the company in September, Lab37 has built its first restaurant robot, a bowl-making robot called (what else?) Bowl Builder.

The Bowl Builder, which makes hundreds of hot or cold bowls per day, is fully NSF-certified and its dimensions are 20′ wide by 9′ deep. The system can handle the entire process of making bowl food, as bowls run on a conveyor belt under 18 different dispenser modules for ingredients and sauces before getting sealed, utensils added, and bagged up for pickup.

The Spoon has learned that Lab37 is headed up by Eric Meyhofer, an executive and automation innovator who formerly ran Uber’s self-driving car unit for years (and racked up quite a few patents during that time). Meyhofer, who is listed on LinkedIn as a co-founder of Carnegie Robotics – a robotics development lab that helped to give birth to Uber’s self-driving car unit – also served as a commercialization specialist at Carnegie Melon University, his alma mater and widely recognized as the world’s leading robotics research university. Meyhofer does not list Lab37 on his LinkedIn profile.

Lab37 is located in a warehouse on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The location includes a commercial research and development kitchen, fabrication shop, engineering office, electrical engineering lab, assembly lab, and testing lab.

Lab37 has been trialing the Bowl Builder out through its Hungry Group virtual restaurant division, which is described as a R&D kitchen company building “the future of dining, where diverse options, cutting-edge convenience, and technology unite.” According to the company, the Hungry Group’s R&D kitchen is in the same warehouse where the Bowl Builder food robot was designed, tested, and assembled.

The Spoon has learned that the early trials with the Bowl Builder have gone very well, and locations that have tried it out have seen substantial increases in revenue. According to a Lab37 spokesperson, the company plans to trial the Bowl Builder in additional locations in the coming months, including more CloudKitchen locations.

One potential customer of Lab37’s Bowl Builder is Salted, a fast-growing bowl-food startup that has leaned heavily into the ghost kitchen model in recent years. While Salted has several physical brick-and-mortar locations, its CEO, Jeff Applebaum, has indicated that much of the company’s future growth will come via ghost kitchens. The Spoon has learned that Salted is a customer at a number of CloudKitchen’s locations.

Interestingly, this news comes just a few weeks after Spain-based Remy Robotics announced they were also working with CloudKitchens for its US entry. The Remy robot, which uses a robotic arm and looks to have a smaller footprint than Lab37’s Bowl Builder, debuted in the US under Remy’s Better Days virtual restaurant brand in the New York City market.

Stepping back, this latest revelation about Kalanick’s push into food automation shows his current journey is not too dissimilar from the one he took with Uber. As with his former company, Kalanick is moving from a startup concept that rethinks the traditional usage model of a long-standing industry (it was taxis and travel with Uber, and now it’s restaurants with CSS) and is building enabling technology as the second (or third) act to help realize this vision. He’s using the well-worn tech industry playbook of building “picks and shovels” for an industry, but only after spending time showing the industry there’s a way of doing things that’s is much different than the long-standing model.

Creator Re-Opens With a New Burger Making-Robot Customers Can Control

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant made famous by its burger-making robot, was among the thousands of restaurants shut down by the pandemic (even though it engineered an awesome germ-free airlock delivery system). But the restaurnt announced today that it is back with a new location in Daly City, California, and that is has a brand new robot that customers can control.

Creator’s new robot is a little different from its first incarnation, offering a new array of functionality. The robot is faster, capable of cooking a burger in less than four minutes (when there are no other burgers in the order queue). It also holds 25 different seasonings and sauces that can be dispensed down to the milliliter. Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will no apply to the burger themselves.

But perhaps the biggest change for Creator’s robot is how customers can interact with it. “We’re going to allow anyone to take control of the robot,” Creator Founder Alex Vardakostas told me via video chat this week. Customers can download the Creator mobile app and tweak the seasonings and sauces to their liking. These settings can then be saved and shared, which allows for someone like a well-known chef to “brand” their own burger program that people can replicate.

Another nice new feature is that when you place an order now, Creator’s system will let you know exactly long your wait time will be before your food is ready for pickup.

In addition to all these front-facing changes, Vardakostas said that there are also a number of back-end improvements to the robot that help with production and growth. “The new system is hyper scalable,” he said, “and way more reliable.” It’s these types of back-end changes that will allow Creator to manufacture robots en masse and expand in different ways. Vardakostas said that Creator’s growth will include a mix of owned and operated locations, licensing deals that still carry the Creator brand, and a white-label approach where the machine is modified for another restaurant’s use.

Despite all this technology, Creator remains a very human-focused eating experience. Vardakostas said his team looked at using ordering kiosks, but decided to stick with human order takers. “For a lot of us, we want to talk to a human,” he said.

Speaking of humans, unlike other restaurants, Vardakostas said that finding and hiring workers has not been a problem. “Labor has been a slam dunk. It’s been super easy,” he said. Part of that Vardakostas attributes to Creator being as much a tech company as it is a restaurant company. “Overall, a lot of people want to move into tech,” he said. But there certainly other factors at play, such as not having to work over a hot grill (since the robot does the cooking), Creator also helps with professional development by paying for things like Coursera classes (though a lot of QSRs offer something like that now). Creator does provide an upward path into the technology/robotics sector, however. Vardakostas said that Creator recently promoted two restaurant workers into its development lab.

Creator is part of a larger movement towards automation in the food industry, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. Robots can work all day without taking break, don’t get sick or injured, and can help free up space for social distancing in the kitchen. As a result, there are a number of restaurant robots either at market or on their way. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is working the deep fryers at White Castle. Hyphen just introduced its new Makeline robot assembly system for Sweetgreen-style restaurants. And Picnic just announced the commercial availability of its pizza assembling robot.

For those in the Bay Area who have not yet tried Creator’s robot-made burger (ed. note: They are delicious), you can visit the restaurant’s new location in the Westlake Shopping Center at 514 Westlake, Daly City.

New Croatian Restaurant Uses Five GammaChef Robots to Make Meals

Typically when we write about food making robots, they fall into either one of two categories: Smaller countertop devices meant for the home, or larger, more industrial robots meant for restaurant kitchens. But a restaurant called Bots&Pots in Zagreb, Croatia, is combining those two ideas and using a number of GammaChef cooking robots to make meals for its customers.

GammaChef, also based in Croatia (and also a former Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase finalist), makes the eponymous robot capable of creating one-pot dishes such as stews, risottos and pastas. The device stores ingredients, dispenses them into the pot, and stirs the food as it cooks. According to Total Croatia News, customers at Bots&Pots choose their meal via touchscreen at one of five GammaChefs inside the restaurant and they’ll be able to see their meal prepared. According to the story, with five robots running, the restaurant can make up to 60 meals per hour. Human chefs at Bots&Pots are also creating new recipes for the robot to “learn.”

We don’t have a ton of other details about Bots&Pots right now. Based on the restaurant’s Facebook page, it appears as though it is in more of a showroom mode, and not quite open to the public yet. A translation of a Bots&Pots Facebook post on August 14 reads “Soon….Zagreb, then the world 🤟😇.” The restaurant also mentions franchising in earlier Facebook posts, so it appears that Bots&Pots is looking to take the concept to more stores in more locations.

What’s intriguing about Bots&Pots is its robot deployment strategy. The restaurant is foregoing one big, self-contained autonomous kiosk (like the DaVinci Kitchen) in favor smaller consumer appliances. This approach could help save money up front, because there is no big installation or training that needs to happen around a large robot. Not needing to build around a big bulky robot also means that as Bots&Pots franchises out, the concept can adapt to just about any real estate because you just plunk the GammaChefs down on some countertops.

Will this be a strategy other restaurants adopt? Could we see other home cooking robots like the Oliver or Nymble’s Julia be used in bulk at eateries? We’ll have to see how the nuts and bolts of Bots&Pots works out.

South Korea: Shinhwa Food Group to Use Woowa Bros. Dilly Plate Server Robots

The Shinhwa Food Group will be rolling out server robots at its restaurants brands in South Korea thanks to a new deal with Woowa Brothers. Aju Business Daily reported yesterday that Shinhwa has agreed to gradually introduce roughly 100 “Dilly Plate” server robots at its restaurants by the end of this year.

Dilly Plates are basically self-driving racks of trays that shuttle plates of food and empty dishes back and forth from a restaurant’s kitchen to its tables. The robots are equipped with sensors and smarts to do things like avoid obstacles and other people. Woowa debuted its first Dilly Plate (made by Bear Robotics, shown in the picture above) at a Seoul Pizza Hut back in 2018. According to the Aju Business Daily, Woowa now has five different Dilly Plate models that are deployed across 305 restaurants in South Korea. Woowa’s deal with Shinhwa is the biggest deployment agreement so far.

Interest in food robotics has accelerated since the pandemic last year. The use of a robot such as the Dilly Plate can reduce the amount of human-to-human contact in a restaurant by removing a human from the equation. Robots can also alleviate some of the hard work associated with being server by carrying heavy loads back and forth continuously without needing a break.

Woowa Brothers has been working on a number of different food robot-related initiatives. The company launched its food delivery robot program last year, and is even working with companies like Hyundai that allow those delivery robots to do things like autonomously access buildings and ride elevators. Additionally, Woowa worked with South Korean electronics giant LG and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement to develop its server bots.

A Woowa Brothers rep told Aju Business Daily that server robots are just the beginning of the company’s automation ambitions. Other plans include developing cooking robots and packaging robots that use artificial intelligence.

Pizza Robot Company Picnic Raises $16.3M Series A, Adds Strategic Partners

Picnic, which makes pizza assembly robots, announced today that is has raised a $16.3 million Series A round of funding. The new round was led by Thursday Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creative Ventures, Flying Fish Partners and Vulcan Capital (and includes the $3M bridge funding from October of last year). This brings the total amount of funding raised by Picnic to $34.2 million. At the same time, Picnic also announced new strategic partnerships with with food service industry company Orion Land Mark, Ethan Stowell Restaurants, National Service Cooperative and Baseline Hardware Financing.

Seattle, Washington-based Picnic makes modular pizza assembly robots capable of topping hundreds of pizzas an hour. These automated machines can be placed in a row, with each one dispensing their own ingredients. Pizza crusts are place on a conveyor belt, which runs under the dispensers which dish out the proper amounts of sauce, cheese and other toppings. Picnic announced its second generation robot in October of last year, which featured a switch to transparent walls and containers so operators could see in real time when toppings need to be refilled.

Interest in food robots and automation has accelerated thanks largely to the pandemic. Not only can robots work 24 hours a day and not call in sick, they also reduce human contact with food and create more social distancing in kitchens. But Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic, told me by phone last week that the pandemic has ushered in entirely new thinking about foodservice. “What we really see as we come out of the pandemic is the foodserice industry has been reimagined,” Wood said. “It’s divorced the idea that the kitchen has to be attached to a dining room.”

As such, there are new opportunities for Picnic and other food automation companies where there are high volumes of takeout and delivery. Wood cited ghost kitchens and even grocers as two examples.

In addition to adapting to new post-COVID workplace realities, Wood is quick to point out that Picnic also helps food operators with ingredient cost. “There’s a lot of denial about food waste, even though the industry average is 10 percent,” Wood said. Robotic systems like Picnic’s can help lower waste and cost because they dispense the exact same amount of toppings every time without any overages.

Pizza is becoming a popular food for robotics. In addition to Picnic, xRobotics has its own take on automated pizza assembly, and Middleby launched its PizzaBot 5000 last year. In addition to pizza making robots, we’re also seeing a number of pizza vending machines come to market like Piestro, API Tech and Basil Street.

“It’s a sign of the industry maturing,” Wood said of all his competition. For its part, Picnic will use its new funding and partnerships to separate itself from the pizza pack. The company says it will use its new money to hire out its team and expand commercial operations, which will most likely be made easier by the company’s new strategic investors. Orion Land Mark is one of the biggest suppliers of pizza and pizza supplies to convenience stores around the world and Ethan Stowell Restaurants operates a number of eateries in the Seattle area.

Video: Connected Robotics’ Restaurant Bots Prep, Cook and Clean

The last time we checked in with Japanese company Connected Robotics, it was primarily known for its OctoChef Tokoyaki robot, which creates fried octopus balls. Connected Robotics had also raised roughly $7.8 million to expand its robo-lineup, which it showed off at the Hotel Restaurant Show at the end of March.

We weren’t able to be at that convention, but came across video of Connected Robotics restaraunt bot lineup in action via a post on Linkedin over the weekend.

【Exhibition】国際ホテル・レストラン・ショー2021_202102

In the video you can see a variety of Connected Robotics’ robots performing different kitchen-related tasks: cooking noodles, grabbing food and placing it in a fryer, sliding cooked food into a display, washing dirty dishes and stacking them once they are cleaned. There’s even computer vision for what looks like inventory management and automated checkout.

Each system makes heavy use of articulating arms, and there appears to be the need for at least one set of human hands in the noodle-plating process. But overall, the robots whirr and swivel and do almost everything on their own.

Japan in particular is a burgeoning center for food-related robotics as the company has a greying population and is looking to automate parts of its labor force. Consumer electronics giant Sony is working on robot chefs and recently invested in Analytical Flavor Systems to help those robots combine flavors when cooking. Panasonic has also developed cooking robots in partnership with the Haidilao hotpot restaurant chain.

If you are interested in learning about — and seeing! — more food robots in action, be sure to attend our ArticulATE food robotics and automation virtual summit on May 18. We’ll have speakers from Karakuri, Mukunda Foods, Yo-Kai Express, Mezli and more! Get your ticket today!

Smile Robotics Makes an Autonomous Table Bussing Robot

Last year was a big one for restaurant server robots, those self-driving trays on wheels that shuttle food from the kitchen to your table and take your empty dishes back. Yes, the pandemic closed many restaurants in the U.S., but companies like Bear Robotics, Pudu Robotics, and Keenon Robotics all made news with their particular autonomous service bots.

All of those autonomous robots, however still require a human to manually transfer food to the table or pick up the dirty dishes and place them back on the robot. And as we live in a COVID world that values fewer human-to-human interactions, this is where Smile Robotics‘ robot could come in handy. The Japanese company has developed the ACUR-C, which can autonomously serve food and drinks or collect trays of dirty or empty dishes and carry them off.

You can check it out for yourself in this video Smile Robotics posted last year:

Autonomous Clear Up Robot (ACUR-C) [Smile Robotics]

That video only shows off the bussing aspect of the robot, and even that capability won’t set any speed records. A human would be able to clear those tables in a fraction of the time it takes the robot. But it’s a start, and as with all things robot, the technology is only going to improve.

The ACUR-C is fully self-driving robot. In other words, it doesn’t need ceiling or floor markers to “see” and navigate around a restaurant. It can carry multiple trays, and the “hands” of the robotic arm can be swapped out to either collect or serve items. We reached out to Smile Robotics to find out more and will update this post when we hear back.

It’s super easy to see the ACUR-C fitting into a restaurant like the Country Garden robot restaurant complex in Guangdong, China. That restaurant has robot servers and food descending from ceilings, but nothing (as far as we know) that will automatically bus the tables.

Smile Robotics, however, could be thinking a little closer to home. Japan has an aging population and is facing a resulting labor shortage. A robot table server + busser combo will undoubtedly find a lot of use there.

Video: Food Descends from the Ceiling in This Chinese Robot Restaurant

In June of this year, we wrote about a robot-run restaurant opening up in the Guangdong province of China. The Qianxi Robot Catering Group, a subsidiary of Country Garden, opened a restaurant complex featuring different robots that cooked and carried food.

One thing we didn’t know at the time was that meals would be dropped from the ceiling. At least, that appears to be what happens inside the restaurant based on a video we came across.

I should insert a few caveats here about this story. There is still a lot we don’t know yet about the video below, but it looks legit and is pretty remarkable, so we wanted to share it.

Yesterday Anthony James, CEO of Innovation and Growth at Trinity Consulting, posted a video on Linkedin showing how food travels around the inside of a robot restaurant in Guangdong, China. We don’t know who shot the video, and the restaurant in the video goes unnamed, but from the bright pink decor and pink robots, it appears to be the same restaurant we wrote about back in June.

The main reason we wanted to post this is because of the rail system that delivers orders. According to a follow up comment from James, guests place an order with one of the bright pink server robots that wheel about on the floor. The cooking robot prepares the meal, which then gets plated and sent out on a modified tray via an overhead rail system. When the meal reaches the ordering table, a tethered tray drops from the ceiling to just above the table where the customer takes the plate of food off the tray. The tray and tether then retract back up to the ceiling to go make another delivery.

You can watch the whole process here:

Interest around food robots and automation has accelerated this past year, thanks to the pandemic. Robots don’t get sick, and they also reduce the amount of human-to-human interaction involved in getting a meal from the kitchen to the customer. But robots are also fast workhorses that can operate around the clock. Country Garden’s robot restaurant in Guangdong can serve up a meal in as little as 20 seconds.

The bigger question for establishments such as this, however, is how much of an investment to make in dining room technologies. Here in the U.S., foot traffic into major QSR dining rooms is half of what it was at the beginning of the year. Would that investment be better spent automating drive-thrus and other forms of food to go? Perhaps the Chinese market will rebound differently.

If you’re a Spoon reader in Guangdong, China, do us a solid and visit the restaurant. Then leave us a comment and tell us what it’s like.

Bear Robotics and SoftBank Debut New Servi Restaurant Robot

Good-bye, Penny. Hello Servi.

Bear Robotics and SoftBank announced their new food service robot, dubbed Servi, at an event in Tokyo today. The new robot is actually a redesigned version of Bear’s Penny, an autonomous server robot that shuttles food and empty dishware between the front and back of house of a restaurant.

SoftBank is actually an investor in Bear Robotics, and led Bear’s $32 million Series A round that closed at the beginning of the year. The two companies have been working closely on Servi, and will focus initially on the Japanese market, where Bear has already lined up Denny’s as a customer.

Servi is coming to market at a time of heightened interest in automation in the restaurant industry. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased scrutiny over the amount and types of human-to-human interactions that happen when dining out. Robots like Servi can also work long hours without a break, won’t call in sick and don’t have to worry about awkward exchanges with customers over wearing their masks (e.g., taking a mask off to eat, putting it back on when ordering).

But Bear is not alone in the robot server space. With players like PuduTech and Keenon Robotics, server robots could quickly become a commodity, with restaurants just opting for the lowest cost option.

John Ha, Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, told me by phone last week that Bear’s robots are different from the competition because of their full autonomous driving (no need for special tags to be placed on ceilings) and easier set up.

Ha was in South Korea at the time because Bear has an office in Seoul and that is where the company will be manufacturing Servi. This scaled up production, Ha said, will be a way Bear can fend off newer startups looking to break into the robot space. “People without mass production won’t be close anytime soon, because mass production is not a joke,” Ha said.

South Korea will also be among the first markets for Bear, with Ha saying that they have received a lot of inbound interest from restaurants there. In South Korea, Bear will go up against Woowa Brothers, which teamed up with LG and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) to develop robot waiters as well.

As noted, the pandemic is accelerating the interest and adoption of food robots. So expect to be saying hello to a lot more robots like Servi in your not-too-distant dining future.

Pudu Tech Raised More than $15M as the Server Robot Space Heats Up

Pudu Technology, which makes autonomous server robots used in hospitality settings, announced yesterday a funding round of more than $15 million, according to VentureBeat.

The Shenzen, China-based Pudu makes a number of self-driving robots equipped with a rack of trays to shuttle food and drinks to and from customers inside a restaurant. Pudu introduced the BellaBot, which sports cat-like features and even makes a cute LED-face when you pet it, at this year’s CES.

Pudu’s funding comes at the right time, as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced restaurants and bars to reduce the amount of human contact during table service. Server robots like Pudu’s provide a way to reduce at least one point of human-to-human interaction while dining out.

But Pudu will also need the funding because the robot server space is getting increasingly crowded. In the VentureBeat story, Pudu claims has 2,000 customers including Sheraton and JD.com, across 20 countries. Rival Keenon Robotics, server bot company based in China, says that it has 6,000 robots in action and that it can produce 30,000 robots a year.

Over in Korea, Woowa Bros. partnered with consumer electronics giant LG to develop and expand its robot waiter program. In Spain, Macco Robotics launched its Dbot modular server robot. And here in the U.S., Bear Robotics, raised $32 million earlier this year for its Penny robot server.

All of this is to say that there are a lot of companies looking to bring robot servers to your restaurant. So much so, that as I wrote back in February, they could become a commodity:

It feels like restaurant server robots are on their way to becoming less of a novelty and will soon be a commodity. They all do the same thing — carry food. They are meant to do the grunt work so humans don’t have to. So the feature set will be the same: Take food to table > carry food without spilling > avoid humans and other obstacles along the way.

Sure, there are enhancements that can be made, or perhaps there’s a unique way to move food from the robot to the table. But there really isn’t much else for the robot to do. Server robots will become a commodity, and whichever company creates the cheapest robot that does a decent job will win.

Given the debate and debacle around re-opening restaurants here in the U.S., and restaurant workers test positive for COVID, we could see a rise in demand for restaurant robots. And it looks like there are plenty of companies ready if that demand comes.

Country Garden Opened a Massive Robot Restaurant Complex in China This Week

You may be debating whether or not you’re ready to go back into a restaurant. But what if that restaurant was operated entirely by robots? Would that make you more inclined to eat out?

Earlier this week, the Qianxi Robot Catering Group, a subsidiary of Country Garden, opened up a robot-powered restaurant complex in the city of Shunde in China’s Guangdong province.

The complex is 2,000 sq. meters (more than 21,000 sq. ft.) and serves Chinese, hot pot and fast food. The restaurant can serve 600 diners at once, offering 200 menu items that can be served up in as little as 20 seconds, according to the press announcement.

The complex has more than 20 robots developed in-house by Qianxi that cook up a variety of different styles including Chinese cuisine, clay pot rice and noodles. Though the press release doesn’t mention them specifically, from the accompanying photos, there is also a small army of pink server robots to bring dishes out to tables. No word on whether these were developed in-house as well, but they don’t look like the server robots make by PuduTech, Keenon or Bear Robotics.

Country Garden’s restaurant certainly isn’t the first to use robots. Spyce Kitchen in Boston uses robots to cook. Caliburger has Flippy grilling burgers. And Bear Robotics’ Penny server bot has been put to work shuttling food in restarants. But Country Garden seems to be among the first putting all of the front and back-of-house pieces together, and doing so at scale.

In addition to a having a bunch of robots, the Country Garden restaurant is also contactless, a factor increasingly important on our pandemic planet. As restaurants re-open here in the U.S., businesses and eater alike are grappling with restrictions like facemasks and socially distant tables. Having a full-on robot restaurant isn’t a guarantee to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but it does remove some human vectors from the equation.

It’s a question I’ve asked before, but what will make people more comfortable inside restaurants: the human touch while wearing a facemask and gloves, or the cold sterility of a robot?

Macco Robotics’ New “DBot” Modular Restaurant Robot Delivers Food and Disinfects

As restaurants around the world begin the process of re-opening, some of the (many) issues they will have to grapple with is keeping their establishments clean and reducing human-to-human contact. Macco Robotics wants to do both with its forthcoming Dbot.

The “D” in Dbot actually does double duty in this case, as it stands for “disinfect” and “delivery” (duh). The main part of the Dbot is a mobile base on wheels that uses lidar and computer vision to autonomously map out and navigate around the inside of a restaurant. Different modules can be attached to the top of the base, such as a sprayer, which mists out disinfectant, and a tray module for carrying food and drinks to tables.

This means a restaurant could spend its open hours shuttling food to customers without human servers (reducing a vector of transmission), and then turn into a sprayer at the end of the day. (Macco said that the robot can also be controlled manually, should a location require disinfecting in hard-to-reach places.)

It is this modularity, according to Macco Robotics’ CTO Kishhanth Renganathan, that will make Dbot stand out in what is becoming the quickly commoditized space of restaurant server robots. “It’s not just a delivery bot,” Renganathan said to me over the phone this week, “You are just buying one robot for two different applications.”

But will this flexibility be enough to entice cash-strapped restaurants devastated by the global pandemic and ensuing lockdowns? Bear Robotics’ Penny offers a swappable tray system, but there’s no reason it couldn’t offer some kind of sterilizer add-on. And if restaurants want a robot with a proven track record, they may look more towards Kennon Robotics in China, which has 6,000 robots already in use in restaurants and other hospitality venues.

If a restaurant wants to go with robots, what it chooses may just come down to price. Keenon’s robot can be leased for roughly $1,500 – $1,600 a month. Renganathan said that Macco will offer a lease as well, though pricing was not set yet.

In addition to swappable functions, another thing that sets the Dbot apart is how it fits in with Macco’s long-term vision. The company’s ultimate goal is to make a full-on, autonomous robotic restaurant experience. The Kime will one day leave its stationary kiosk to become a free-wheeling chef, and will hand off food to the Dbot, which will take it out to the tables. No human contact at all.

That vision is still off in the distance, though, and we need to get through this pandemic first. For restaurants planning on re-opening this summer, the Dbot will be available starting in July/August of this year.