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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robot restaurant

Tech-Powered MOTO Pizza Raises $1.85M as It Eyes Drone Delivery & Expansion to California

Before the pandemic, Lee Kindell ran a travel hostel in Seattle, where he was known for the tasty pizza he served his guests. A couple years and a pandemic later, he’s running Seattle’s hottest restaurant and has just closed his first round of funding.

In an interview with The Spoon, Kindell has revealed that MOTO Pizza has raised $1.85 million in funding from what he describes as strategic, private “non-venture capital” funding. He says the new funding will help the company execute on its plans for the next twelve months, plans which include the chain’s first move outside of Washington State.

According to Kindell, MOTO will open its first location in California in Indian Wells, a city in Coachella Valley nestled between Palm Desert and La Quinta. California’s first MOTO will reside within the Indian Wells Tennis Garden tennis facility, where it will serve up pizza at big events such as the Indian Wells Tennis Open in March 2024. The company also has plans to expand to new locations within Washington State, including up north to Bellingham and over on the east side in Bellevue.

Beyond store expansion, MOTO is expanding its technology portfolio, including trialing a salad-bowl robot from Vancouver’s Cibotica. For Cibotica, which publicly debuted its bowl food robot last week, MOTO is their first announced trial partner in the US.

Kindell told The Spoon that MOTO will also start delivery via drone in 2024, signing a deal with Zipline to deliver pizza by the end of next year. Last month, Zipline achieved a significant milestone when it launched its first “beyond visual line of sight” (BLVS) delivery. MOTO is the second pizza partner for Zipline in Washington state after the company announced it was working with Pagliacci in May.

Kindell said that while he’s heard from several VCs interested in investing in MOTO, a modest investment felt right for the coming year.

“We felt like it was too early for us to raise through VC,” said Kindell. “We wanted to take advantage of the demand and attention for MOTO and use it to grow, while implementing the new technology into our growth. I think we will have the model we’ve been working hard towards next year, and then we can put together a big raise. We’ve already captured some attention with some VC, and that’s pretty exciting.”

“My end game is a successful autonomous pizza operation, and I can’t wait for it!”

Remy Launches in U.S. With Robot-Powered Virtual Restaurant in NYC Called Better Days

This week, Remy Robotics opened in the U.S. with a robot-powered virtual restaurant brand in New York City called Better Days, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The launch comes after the Spain-based startup spent the last few years operating a hub-and-spoke model of robotic-enabled ghost kitchens in Spain and France, where the company says it has produced and delivered over 100,000 meals.

According to company CEO Yegor Traiman, he hopes to merge the convenience of fast food with the quality associated with fine dining, all powered by robots.

“Remy Robotics exists to do what was previously thought impossible – make high-quality, delicious food consistently, accessibly, and profitably at scale,” said CEO and Founder Yegór Traiman. “With the launch of Better Days in New York, we are taking major steps, we’re just starting to show what is possible. Our goal is to make good food at an affordable price available and accessible to everyone while creating better jobs and improving the work environment for chefs.”, said Traiman.

Readers of The Spoon may recall that Traiman and his engineers created an entire food production flow around robots instead of designing the robots to mimic human chefs. Remy has redesigned the cooking process to be more robot-compatible, focusing on the precision and consistency of machines. The result is a system where AI-powered robots prepare food based on algorithmic recipes that factor in delivery times and other logistical elements.

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman told The Spoon in an interview last year. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

According to the company, the new restaurant will utilize human chefs to prep the food in a central commissary before it is transported to what it calls “node kitchens” where robots do all of the cooking. The food is refrigerated before being transferred to an oven and cooked using what the company calls “algorithmic recipes” in robotic ovens. From there, Remy says AI algorithms work with sensors to control food’s quality by monitoring the food’s internal temperature and uses a scale that calculates moisture reduction. According to Remy, they can adjust cook times automatically for orders depending on whether they are placed for delivery, takeout, or dine-in.

While the company is calling Better Days a “restaurant”, it is, for the time being at least, what looks to be only a virtual brand, serving up meals through delivery via the company’s own app and third-party delivery companies such as Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats. According to the announcement, Better Days will feature main courses built around meals with rice, veggies and proteins such as chicken and salmon. All the entrees are priced between $7 and $16.

If you live in the New York City market, you can check out and order a meal from Better Days via their website or their app.

French Robot Pizza Restaurant Startup Pazzi Shuts its Doors

Another robot pizza startup has shut down.

According to an email sent to The Spoon, the Paris-based startup had seen its assets liquidated by a French court. The company, which had attempted to find a buyer, closed the doors of its two restaurants last Monday and will lay off its remaining 35 employees in the coming days.

It’s a sad ending for one of the robotic restaurant industry’s earliest startups. The company, which started as EKIM and worked on its technology for the better part of a decade, opened the doors on its first restaurant a little over a year ago in Beaubourg in Paris, France after running a pilot in the Paris suburb of Marne-la-Vallée starting in 2019. The company would raise over €12M in funding.

In a post written on Linkedin, Pazzi CEO Philippe Goldman said he felt the company ultimately didn’t survive in large part due to a combination of an immature French hardware startup ecosystem and a mistrust of robotics by the general public.

…”the hardware eco-system in France is immature and insufficient both in terms of public and institutional funding, the valuation of industrial or robotic nuggets is low vs. a dominant software culture and there is a general mistrust of the population towards robotics, condemned to steal only jobs,” wrote Goldman.

The news is the latest in what’s been a string of bad news on the pizza robotics front. In May we got news of Basil Street taking final bids on their assets, and in July The Spoon broke the news that the OG pizza vending machine startup Pizzametry was looking for a buyer.

A Robot-Powered Pasta Restaurant in Tokyo is Just the Beginning for Startup TechMagic

Back in 2017, I was in Tokyo for the first SKS Japan and thought I’d look around to see if I could find any robot-powered restaurants. I didn’t have much luck. In fact, about the only one that showed up during my search was a tourist attraction in Shinjuku, which wasn’t so much a robot restaurant as it was a dinner theater show that could only be described as Care Bears meets Mad Max Fury Road

Five years later, things have sure changed. Not only have automated mini-restaurants like Yo-Kai popped up around town, but there’s also a robot pasta restaurant slinging plates of noodles right across from Tokyo Station. That new restaurant, called E Vino Spaghetti, pumps out plates of pasta at a rate of over one per minute with its 3-axis robot.

Called P-Robo, the robot was designed by a Tokyo-based startup called TechMagic. The company spent three and a half years developing the robot, says company CEO and founder Yuji Shiraki.

TechMagic CEO Yuji Shiraki

The restaurant is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Suntory. Pronto has over 300 restaurants around Japan, and TechMagic is working to deploy robots at 50 or so over the next three years. And that’s just one project; according to Shiraki, the company has deals to build robots for several large corporations, ranging from a large and well-known Korean company to Cup Noodle giant Nissin.

As for the P-Robo, I was impressed with how quickly it worked in a fairly small space. The robot preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is put on a plate, and a human worker does final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleans the prep bowls.

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The idea to build a food robot first came to Shiraki when he visited his grandmother. Over 90 years old, Shiraki saw she could not cook for herself and so started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. It wasn’t long before he quit his job as a management consultant and founded TechMagic.

That was five years ago. Since then, the company has raised $23 million in funding (including a $15 million Series B last September), received a patent for its pasta-making robot, and plans to create its own chain of robot-powered franchise restaurants.

At the rate Shiraki and his team are going, Tokyo might just be filled with restaurant robots when I come back for SKS Japan 2023. And who knows, someday soon, I may even see a TechMagic robot closer to home.

Mezli’s Containerized Robot Restaurant Opens to Public This Weekend

Mezli, a maker of containerized robotic restaurants, is having a grand opening of its first restaurant this Sunday, August 28th, in San Francisco. The restaurant will open at the Spark Social food truck park located in the city’s Mission Bay area and run every weekend from Friday through Sunday.

The opening of Mezli comes after about two years of development after being conceived of by three Stanford graduate students. The three co-founders – Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele, and Maxwell Perham – set up shop at KitchenTown, a food innovation hub and development space based in San Mateo, where they worked on their containerized robot in a large small warehouse area and developed the food across the street in KitchenTown’s commissary kitchen.

Now the company is ready to start taking orders. The way it works is the Mezli refrigerated container houses prepped and pre-cooked food made by humans in a centralized kitchen. Once customers order via a touch screen kiosk on the side of the container or on a mobile app, food is heated and plated, garnishes are added, and plated food is placed into smart lockers on one end of the Mezli container for customer pickup. According to Kolchinski, the Mezli system is able to pump out up to 75 meals per hour.

The Mezli team claims their restaurant is the world’s first fully self-contained robotic restaurant that serves a fresh and customized menu. While we don’t necessarily agree that Mezli is actually the first – after all, we’ve seen startups like Bolk are already serving up simpler bowl food offerings via their robotic kiosks around Paris, and Hyper Robotics has its fully automated robotic pizza restaurants-in-a-box serving up pies for Pizza Hut Israel – we can say that the Mezli is the first self-contained automatic system we’ve seen dishing up these kinds of complex multi-item plates of Mediterranean food.

And for the record, the food is pretty good. When I visited the Mezli team last December and had a falafel platter, I found the portion sizes generous as my meal was larger than what I got at Eatsa or through a Chowbotics-style kiosk, and included a tasty mix of proteins, rice, vegetables, and sauces.

Mezli’s meals start at $7 per meal. If any of our readers in the Bay Area stop by, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

You can watch our conversation with Mezli CEO Alex Kolchinski before last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit below (Mezli was the winner of the SKS 2021 Startup Showcase).

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Mezli, a Maker of Robot Restaurants, Wins the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase

Mezli, a maker of robotized container restaurants, has won the 2021 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase.

The company, which currently operates a prototype restaurant in San Mateo’s KitchenTown, was started after two of the company’s cofounders, Alex Kolchinski and Alex Gruebele, met while studying at Stanford. Like most college students, the two were always on the hunt for food to fuel their studies but usually found the options lacking.

“Both of us had this problem that we’re trying to solve that it was really expensive to eat good food out,” said Kolchinski from the Smart Kitchen Summit virtual mainstage. “We were pretty busy as Ph.D. students, we can cook all the time. But if we wanted to eat out, it was kind of a choice between going to McDonald’s, which didn’t make us feel great if we ate it every day, or going places like the Stanford dining halls.”

So alongside a third cofounder, Max Perham, they got to work on building a robot restaurant. Unlike many robotic restaurants or kiosk concepts, the trio decided to create a completely customized robot purpose-fit for the job.

“We’ve got kind of a lot of opinions on how to do things in a way that makes the most sense for the problem we’re solving, which is making good with meals on-site that tastes great that are good for you and we do it efficiently,” said Kolchinski. “We’re not using any robotic arms. We’re using custom hardware, some of which we’ve designed in-house and filed some patents on. And some of which we’re adopting from off-the-shelf things. We’ve done some pretty hacky things in here. And I think we’re going to continue to take this kind of hybrid approach in the future too.”

And what does that future entail?

“We’re building up to where we have a whole fleet of these across the country, even across the world, where these are all over the place because they’re cheaper and smaller than restaurants, you can put them in more places.”

According to Kolchinski, Mezli plans on building thousands of containerized restaurants, starting with their current Mediterranean bowl concept and experimenting with other ideas along the way.

“We are building the robotics in a way that can do a lot of different stuff. Basically, anything that goes in a bowl of soup, salads, you name it, curry bowls.”

Mezli joins a series of other innovators participating in the industry’s longest-running food tech startup showcase. In its seventh year, the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase has been a launching pad for a variety of food tech startups such as Tovala, SAVRPak, Bostrista, Cultured Decadance, Millo and Freshstix.

You can watch Alex Kolchinski’s full interview below.

Mezli Wins 2021 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase

SKS 2021: Meet Mezli, Maker of Robotic Containerized Restaurants

Over the next couple of weeks, The Spoon is featuring interviews with leaders from the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase, and this time up we have Alex Kolchinski, the CEO of Mezli.

Mezli builds containerized robot restaurants they call auto-kitchens. The company’s fully autonomous restaurants-in-a-box offer a menu of Mediterranean grain bowls, sides, and drinks. Mezli’s version 2 auto-kitchen is complete and the company is getting ready to launch v3 publicly next year.

If you’d like to connect with Alex at the Smart Kitchen Summit, hop on over to Hopin where we are hosting our virtual event and pick up your ticket today!

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Aitme is Building a Robot Restaurant Kiosk in Berlin

As vaccinations roll out around the world, one area to watch is office buildings and corporate campuses. Specifically, what physical workplaces will look like.

For instance, will big corporate campuses have cafeterias? Pre-pandemic, those made sense (for big companies), but do they now? Will there be enough workers to justify the high cost of running a cafeteria, and will workplace kitchens need to be re-designed with more contactless interactions in mind?

It’s against this backdrop of unknowns that we’re seeing companies like Aitme appear. Based in Berlin, Aitme (eye-t-me) is building a fully autonomous restaurant kiosk. The current version of the kiosk is 8 sq. meters (86 sq. ft.), but the next iteration has already shrunk that size down to 4 sq. meters (43 sq. ft.).

Inside, the Aitme holds 40 hot and cold ingredients and has a menu of 10 different meals, including pasta bolognese, tahini protein bowl and curries. There are articulating arms to grab ingredients and rotating induction bowls to heat and mix meals. Customers order via attached tablet, and Aitme can make 120 meals in an hour. The machine is self-cleaning and only needs to be re-stocked once a day.

Unlike Mezli, which is building out its own robo-restaurant brand, Aitme is strictly a B2B play, aiming to be the new automated cooks for office cafeterias. If one were to be installed in, for example, Google, the menu could be customized and branding on the kiosk would be Google’s with a small “powered by Aitme” visible somewhere.

Aitme shares some robo-qualities with other players in the standalone automated cooking space. Both RoboEatz and Karakuri have fully robotic restaurant kiosks, but both are looking to license their technology out to third-party restaurants.

Aitme may be more appealing to businesses than office food delivery services because Aitme can run around the clock. With delivery, workers are locked into eating a particular time. Aitme can cook up a hot meal anytime of day or night.

Additionally, Aitme is also contactless, so offices would have fewer human-to-human vectors of transmission as they figure out appropriate worker schedules and social distancing.

Aitme has raised €3 million (~$3.5M USD) and has one contract to install one of their kiosks at an undisclosed customer. The company aims to have five more units sold and produced this year.

Want to know more about the future of food robotics? Join us at ArticulATE, our virtual food automation summit, happening on May 18.

Mezli Building a New Robo-Restaurant in a Shipping Container

Shipping containers area already being used to make hip residential homes, and in the not too distant future, you’ll see them pop up as fully automated robo-restaurants, too.

Mezli is the latest startup working on such a robot-restaurant-in-a-box concept. The San Francisco Bay Area startup has already launched the restaurant part of the equation, operating a human-powered Mezli that makes Mediterranean-style bowl meals out of a ghost kitchen in San Mateo, California.

But at the same time, Mezli is also busy building its robotic restaurant. When completed, the container restaurant will be fully autonomous, cooking, plating and packaging the food. The first version of the robotic Mezli will hold 15 ingredients and will be able to place items inside a container rather than just mixing them altogether or layering them on top of one another.

Mezli Co-Founder and CEO Alex Kolchinski told me by video chat last week that a robo-Mezli can go 48 hours or make 300 meals (whichever comes first) before needing to be serviced by a human. Kolchinski wouldn’t disclose what types of heating/cooking methods it was using, but did say that the robot allows users to write their name (or whatever) in sauce on their food. Once cooked and packaged up, food will be deposited in a cubby that a user will unlock with their phone. By using robotics, Kolchinksi plans to keep costs down and be able to serve meals for as little as $4.99.

When asked whether Mezli was a technology company or a restaurant company, Kolchinski was quick to say they were definitely a food company. Mezli has developed its own menu and plans to focus on launching its own line of Mezli robo-restaurants.

This owner/operator approach is a little different from Highpper, an Israeli company that is also building a fully autonomous restaurant in a shipping container. Instead of creating its own chain of restaurants however, Highpper is licensing its technology out to other restaurant brands (first up will be a pizza restaurant launching in June).

Mezli is still very early on in it’s ambitions, Kolchinski couldn’t even say how many meals its robot will be able to make in an hour. But the company has secured a pre-seed round of funding and plans to bring its first robot-powered Mezli online in just over a month.

If Mezli’s first autonomous spot is a hit, there’s a good chance a shipping container restaurant will be popping up in your neck of the woods someday soon.

RoboEatz Shows Off Ark 03 Autonomous Robotic Meal Making Kiosk

It’s pretty remarkable to think of how much food robots have evolved over the three years I’ve been covering them. At the start of that time period, we had Flippy the robotic arm that could grill up burgers, and even that required human help. Fast forward to 2021, and RoboEatz is showing off its fully autonomous robotic meal-preparation system that can put together 1,000 meals on its own before a human is needed to refill its ingredients.

RoboEatz Ark 03 is a 200 sq. ft. standalone kiosk featuring an articulating arm, 110 fresh ingredients (30 of which are liquids like soups and salad dressings), an induction cooker and a number of cubbies that hold orders for pickup. After an order is placed (via mobile app or tablet), the robot arm grabs ingredients, places them in the rotating induction cooker, and puts the finished meal container in a cubby. You can see it in action in this video:

RoboEatz creates both cold and hot food, can produce a meal every 30 seconds, cleans and sanitizes itself, and only needs a human for refilling any ingredients that run out. Food can also be customized to meet certain taste and dietary preferences.

You won’t be seeing RoboEatz-branded robo restaurants, as the company plans to license out its technology to third-party restaurants. As I’ve said before, this type of co-branding makes a lot of sense for food robot companies. Hungry consumers won’t know what a “RoboEatz” restaurant would serve, but they would know what to expect from a robot kiosk with “Olive Garden” branding (or whatever, I’m just naming a random.

There is more interest in food robots now, thanks to the global pandemic. A fully robotic kitchen/restaurant means a truly contactless meal creation and pickup experience.

But food robots have the potential to help with the operational costs of running a foodservice operation. There’s the aforementioned savings from not employing a human (a bigger, ethical and societal issues to be sure), but robots can also dispense ingredients with precision and consistency, reducing ingredient waste. Robots can also keep ingredients out of the open keeping them away from outside germs and preventing cross-contamination. Plus, they can run 24 hours a day without a break, eliminating any downtime.

All of the above is why we’re seeing so many fully autonomous robot restaurants coming to market right now. Karakuri, YPC and Highpper all have various versions of fully autonomous robot restaurant kiosks in the works.

All of those companies are also eyeing the same high-traffic locales when placing their robo-restaurants: hospitals, transportation hubs, schools, etc. RoboEatz says it will be opening its first location “soon” in Latvia (where the company is headquartered), with another location at an undisclosed airport opening as well as a prototype store in the U.S. later this year.

Spyce Kitchen Relaunches with All New Robot Kitchen, Dynamic Menu and Delivery

Spyce, the Boston-based robot-centric restaurant, officially announced its revamped concept today. The new Spyce features an all new automated cooking system, a dynamic, customizable menu, and in-house delivery.

The first Spyce Kitchen restaurant burst on to the scene back in the Spring of 2018. The robot used in that incarnation featured a row of bowls that spun to mix and heat ingredients that were dropped into them. This new version, dubbed the “Infinite Kitchen” aesthetically seems more akin to Creator’s burger creating robot.

Spyce’s new food robot makes both salads and warm bowl food, and holds 49 separate recipes. Serving dishes are placed on a conveyor belt that runs underneath the dispensers, which automatically portion out the proper ingredients for each dish. There is also a plancha searing station to cook and dispense proteins and vegetables as well as a superheated steamer to cook pastas. The Infinite Kitchen can make up to 350 bowls in an hour, with the average bowl costing $11.

Food is ordered either through the Spyce mobile app or via in-store kiosk. The new menus feature real-time customization to meet dietary preferences such as keto or vegan, as well as eight different allergen requirements like gluten-free. The menu also lets you adjust to taste preferences like levels of sauce and spiciness. The new Spyce menu does not, however, offer red meat, which has been left off for environmental impact purposes.

Like just about every other restaurant looking to survive this pandemic, Spyce is also placing an emphasis on delivery. There is no dining room to eat in, though people can walk in to order and take out food. The robot and new ordering system work in conjunction with each other to ensure that food is prepared and ready just in time for delivery.

Spyce is extending its precise operational control to delivery as well. The company is using its own in-house delivery fleet, which will help Spyce retain more of the customer experience (and data) and help ensure a good delivery experience. Drivers are W2 employees and will use electric scooters outfitted with special hot side/cold side insulated containers to carry the food.

The new Spyce is located at 241 Washington St. and is open for lunch and dinner every day between 11 a.m. and 9 p.m.. Delivery is currently to the Back Bay, Battery Wharf, Financial District, North End and West End neighborhoods, with the delivery radius increasing to more neighborhoods in the coming weeks. Spyce also plans to open up a second location in Cambridge’s Harvard Square neighborhood later this fall.

EKIM Raises €10M for Autonomous Robot Pizza Restaurant, Rebrands as PAZZI

Given its rich culinary history, France might not be the first place to come to mind when thinking about autonomous restaurant chains, but French robot-pizza restaurant PAZZI (formerly known as EKIM) may change all that. Today PAZZI announced it has raised a €10 million (~$11.2M USD) Series A round of funding led Singaporean investment fund Qualgro. This brings the total amount raised by PAZZI €12.2M Euros (~$13.68M USD).

PAZZI creates small autonomous, robot-powered pizza restaurants. At roughly 45 square meters, the PAZZI concept is something between a large automated kiosk (like the Blendid robot) and full-on regular-sized restaurant. Shoppers order and customize their pizzas via touchscreen, which a three-armed robot makes, slides in and out of an oven, and slices — all without humans. According to this promotional video, PAZZI can make a pizza every 30 seconds.

Comment Pazzi réinvente la restauration ? [FORMAT 1MIN]

PAZZI is opening up its first location to the public in Montevrain, France on June 24, and the company told us in an email that the new money will “accelerate the development of its technology.”

We aren’t aware of too many other robot restaurants in France, but PAZZI is certainly not alone in launching an autonomous restaurant experiences. As we learned at our Articulate conference earlier this year, robots are good for repetitive (applying sauce and cheese to dough) and dangerous (working a hot oven) restaurant tasks.

Here in the U.S., robo-restaurants are starting to sprout up. Boston-based Spyce raised $21 million to expand its presence, Caliburger and Creator both have robots making burgers, and Cafe X and Briggo are broadening their robo-barista footprint. Over in China, Alibaba has Robot.he and the Haidilao hotpot chain wants to launch thousands of robot restaurants. (For more, check out our food robot market map!)

PAZZI seems to have equally large ambitions, and with its small footprint, and 24 hour capabilities, its robot seems perfect for malls, offices, airports and other high-traffic areas where speed is as important as taste.

With its new funding, we’ll see if PAZZI can scale its operations, without sacrificing any flavor.