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robot

January 3, 2023

Yo-Kai To Debut Desktop Ramen Robot For Space-Constrained Retail Formats at CES 2023

Yo-Kai Express, a startup that makes autonomous ramen robots, will debut its latest model at CES, a desktop ramen-making machine targeted at small-format retailers such as gas stations and co-working spaces.

The new machine, called the YKE Desktop, is a semi-automatic cooking machine that makes a bowl of ramen in 90 seconds. The machine is paired with an RFID-enabled freezer that holds up to 24 bowls of ramen.

“We are pleased to debut our new product : Yo-Kai Desktop, the new terminal with a smaller form factor, which can be installed anywhere – remote office, gas station, convenience stores, co-working space,” said Andy Lin, founder and CEO of Yo-Kai Express. “It’s a semi-automated machine that provides our customers more flexibility.”

In addition to showing off its newest model at CES, the company will demo a new app that enables customers to order ramen remotely. The app, which will be released to the public in the spring, allows customers to earn loyalty points, discounts, and rewards.

The news follows a busy fall for Yo-Kai, in which they expanded throughout Japan, raised additional funding, and partnered with the Japanese robotics giant Softbank to enable an integration with server robot Pepper.

For those interested in checking out the new Yo-Kai machine, they will be in the Food Tech Pavilion at CES at booth 53114.

November 16, 2022

Ottonomy Partners With Norwegian Post Office to Trial Sidewalk Robot Delivery

Ottonomy.IO, a maker of autonomous (and swervy!) sidewalk delivery robots, has partnered with Posten Norge to trial its robot in Oslo. The partnership, which also includes Nordic autonomous vehicle integrator Holo, will test how autonomous robots can improve Norway’s post office intra-logistics in city centers. Posten Norge also plans to trial Ottobots for first-mile pick-ups, receiving and delivering goods for the digital marketplace AMOI from the Aker Brygge area in Oslo.

Posten Norge looks to be all-in on this trial, going so far as creating a special page for its cute little Ottobot. The page, which features a video of Ottonomy’s robot (which you can see below), talks about the goals for the trial:

The purpose of this project is simply to learn as much as possible. We want to learn how people interact with Ottobot, the maturity of the technology, and we want to explore whether Ottobot can help solve challenges in connection with picking up and delivering goods in the city. 

Among other things, the project will give us insight into how the citizens of Oslo experience a robot in the urban environment, how do people feel about interacting with a robot, and whether it creates unforeseen challenges in our city. In addition, we need to understand which obstacles are difficult for the robot to maneuver, whether it can manage driving in Nordic weather conditions and how reliable Ottobot is in operation. 

While there’s no doubt that some of the sidewalk robot startups have struggled over the past year as a darkening economic outlook has led to cutbacks among logistics and delivery companies, Ottonomy looks like it’s faring pretty well. The company recently raised money and is showing up in airports in the US and Europe, and now, with its new partnership with one of the largest post offices, Ottonomy may have cracked open a potentially lucrative (and deep-pocketed) customer category.

November 1, 2022

Picnic Partners With Modular Kitchen Manufacturer To Deliver Pizza Kitchen in a Box

Picnic Works, a Seattle-based maker of food-making robots, today announced a new partnership with ContekPro, a manufacturer of modular kitchens. Under the newly announced partnership, the two companies will deliver custom-built, pre-fabricated kitchens to quick service operators, hotel chains, or anyone else who wants a pizza robot restaurant in a box.

For those unfamiliar with Picnic’s newest partner, ContekPro builds modular kitchens for food service companies, including quick-serve restaurants, ghost kitchens, and resorts. The Portland-based company was founded in 2017 as a modular construction company and pivoted in 2019 to focus exclusively on modular kitchens after it found over half of its orders were for modular kitchens.

The deal marks the second partnership for Picnic over the last few months with a fellow Northwest startup. In August, the company announced an agreement with Minnow to offer its Pizza Station with the fellow Northwest startup’s pickup pods. The company has also been announcing a string of new trials with operators big and small for its pizza robot this year.

The combined solution from Picnic and ContekPro offers something of an answer to one of Picnic’s competitors, Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based startup that builds shipping container food robots. Last year Hyper announced it had made a shipping container-based robot restaurant for Pizza Hut Israel (Hyper’s founder happens to be the master franchise owner for all of Pizza Hut Israel).

Whether it’s for a QSR building a small footprint drive-thru or a ghost kitchen operator expanding into new markets, modular kitchens make a lot of sense in many scenarios. For example, instead of finding land, breaking ground, and going through the often arduous process of zoning a new building, dropping a shipping container kitchen into a parking lot or some other easily accessible location can provide a much easier way to expand.

Typical ContekPro containers range anywhere from 320 square feet up to 960 square feet in size (according to ContekPro, the rendering in the announcement is 320 square feet). And while the announcement doesn’t describe the economics of a pizza-robot-in-a-box, ContekPro told The Spoon that operators can probably expect to pay from $240 thousand up to $400-$500 thousand or so for a restaurant container. As far as the cost of a Picnic, operators can expect to pay Picnic its typical robot-as-a-service monthly fees (which can range from $3,500 to $4,500 a month).

September 5, 2022

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.

June 1, 2022

Xook Raises $1.3 Million to Roll Out Robotic ‘Food Courts in a Box’ in The US

If you’ve ever visited a cafeteria at a tech giant like Google or Facebook, you probably found that the food is just as tasty (or tastier) and often better for you than what you might order at a corner restaurant or make in your own kitchen.

But according to Xook CEO Raja Natarajan, this kind of access to an abundance of tasty, healthy, and free food is more the exception than the rule for US office workers. This is very different from countries like India, said Natarajan, where most corporate employers provide access to cafeterias stocked with food options for employees. This is why, after trialing a prototype for what he and cofounder Ratul Roy describe as a “food court in a box” in Bangalore, they are eyeing the US for the rollout of their robotic kiosk.

“In countries with high labor costs and high food costs, it is very hard to offer this kind of experience unless it comes with automation,” Natarajan told The Spoon in a recent interview.

To fund the manufacturing and rollout of their kiosks, the company has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding from a group that includes deep tech fund SRI Capital, India-based micro-VC Pitchright Ventures, investor syndicates from Letsventure and WeFounderCircle, tech accelerator Techstars, and a handful of angel investors. 

According to the Xook, their first kiosk – the Xook Primus – will be able to make salads and meal bowls across a variety of cuisines. The unmanned kiosks have a 3’x3′ footprint and can make a meal in two minutes. Xook’s current pilot in Bangalore has made 60 different types of meals and is currently offering 25 of the most popular dishes.

Unlike other robotic kiosk startups, Xook plans to utilize a business model in which they provide the kiosk to a customer at no cost, and the company makes money through the sale of meals. The meals, which can be paid for by the employer or employee (or resident in a multifamily housing unit), will be replenished daily by a Xook employee located in each city.

Natarajan and Roy told me they believe this model will work, in part, because of the low cost of their machines, which will each cost about $15 thousand to manufacture. This, they say, compares to a cost of up to $70 thousand for other robotic kiosks. The founders told me they could achieve a lower cost per unit due to their custom-built robotics and easy access to the technical talent and manufacturing in India, where most of their employees are located.

Interestingly, while most of Xook’s employees are in India, the company is based in Singapore. According to the cofounders, the reason for that was they had initially planned on trialing their robots in the island country due to the business-friendly environment and the country’s embrace of high-tech options like robotic vending kiosks.

For now, though, the company is planning to launch its first pilot in the US by the end of this year and has lined up two food brands to help them enter the market. These partners, which include a salad brand and bowl meal brand, will “use Xook as a channel to market” for different locations like offices and apartment buildings.

When it launches in the US, Xook will be joining others like Doordash’s Chowbotics, SJW, Nommi, and RoboEatz, each fighting for market traction with their kiosks. Some, like Basil Street, have found the going pretty rough and have had to call it quits.

In addition to its lower cost and unique business model, Xook’s founders believe they can find a path into an increasingly crowded market for automated food kiosks by relying on food brand partners. In addition to its initial two partners, they think the Xook’s ability to handle a variety of foods will allow them to add additional partners as they grow.

“There could be multiple brands who could be serving food in the same vending machine at the same time,” said Roy. “The Xook is like a multi-brand food court in a box.”

May 25, 2022

Remy Robotics Unveils Robotic Ghost Kitchen Platform as It Opens Third Location in Barcelona

Remy Robotics, an automated ghost kitchen startup, came out of stealth this week as it opened its third autonomous robotic kitchen.

Remy, based in Barcelona, creates custom-built robotic kitchens tailored for the food delivery industry. For the past year, the company has been operating two dark kitchens, one in Barcelona and one in Paris, and is opening its third kitchen in Barcelona this week.

Until this point, the company has been delivering food under its own virtual kitchen brands – including a flexitarian food brand called OMG – and has cooked and sold 60 thousand meals. Now, with the launch of its third kitchen, Remy is opening up its kitchens to other restaurant brands. According to the company, its system has the flexibility to install a new robotic kitchen and have it operational in about 48 hours.

If a brand is thinking about launching a new delivery-centric virtual brand with Remy, they shouldn’t expect to use their chefs and employees to make the meals. Remy believes that automated kitchens work better when the food is optimized for robotics from the ground up.

“We maximize what robots can do,” Remy CEO Yegor Traiman told The Spoon in a Zoom interview. “The main mistake of most robotics companies is they’re trying to mimic the human and teach robots how to do the things a human would do.”

Instead, Traiman says that they configured the entire process of food making to be done by robots, developing recipes and cooking techniques based on a variety of parameters, including the shape of Remy’s own packaging and how much moisture is lost during the cooking process. The company claims that their robotic systems decide autonomously how and for how long to cook a dish, based on where a customer lives and how long the delivery will take. They also utilize “computer vision and neural networks” alongside “smart ovens and sensors controlling temperature, moisture, weight and other key parameters.”

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman said. “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.”

A Remy robot-powered ghost kitchen can fit up to ten brands into the same space that one human-powered kitchen can operate, and, according to Traiman, it shouldn’t be a problem adding new partners.

“There is huge interest at the moment in Spain and in France,” Traiman said. “Almost every neighbor at these cloud kitchen facilities a knocking on the door asking ‘guys, can we do something together?'”

May 5, 2022

Basil Street Pizza Taking Final Bids For Assets to Pizza Robot Business

Back in mid-April, The Spoon first started getting tips that Basil Street Pizza was looking for a buyer.

When we emailed the maker of automated pizza-making kiosks, the auto-responder we got back was essentially a for-sale sign: “Thanks for your message. Basil Street Cafe is currently seeking qualified individuals or groups interested in acquiring company assets. If you are interested in purchasing assets of the company, please contact it’s Chief Restructuring Officer, Jeff Klemp”

The news of Basil Street’s liquidation comes just about six months after the company announced its deal with Prepango to put the APK in airports. The company had planned to expand to up to 200 airports in the coming year.

While Klemp had a “no comment” for us, The Spoon has since learned the company has about 30 or so automated pizza kitchens (not all are currently deployed) which it’s looking to sell alongside the rest of its assets, including patents, software source code and more.

All of this makes it worth asking: have we reached peak pizza robot? With Pizzametry, Basil Street, Picnic, API Tech, Pazzi , Hyper-Robotics or Piestro to name a few (not to mention any secret projects the big guys may or may not be working on), the market is certainly pretty crowded.

A counterpoint might be that pizza is one of the world’s most popular foods, and there will always be demand for pizza-making technology, especially with most of the big chains yet to roboticize their operations.

Either way, it looks like Basil Street won’t be one of the brands fighting it out for market share in the future. Anyone looking to join that fight, however, can accelerate their entry by scooping up Basil Street’s assets.

Better hurry though: tomorrow is the last day the company is taking bids.

April 8, 2022

Big in Japan: Yo-Kai Attracts Huge Press With Japanese Launch of Ramen Robot

In the middle of Japan’s busiest train station, Yo-Kai Express debuted its third ramen robot in Japan in three weeks. The new Tokyo Station robot joins other Yo-Kai Express machines installed at Haneda Airport and the Shibaura Parking Area.

If you think the unveiling of a new food robot might slip under the radar in this ramen-obsessed country, you’d be wrong. At a press conference held yesterday by Yo-Kai to unveil their latest robot and discuss their entry into Japan, over 70 members of the Japanese media showed up. The result was at least a dozen articles and news reports across broadcast and print.

The interest in Yo-Kai is understandable. After all, Japan is well-recognized as a mecca for vending machines, and here’s a new robot that makes the country’s favorite food in 90 seconds. In a few years, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Yo-Kai machines sprinkled around Tokyo and other Japanese cities to serve up hot bowls to those too busy to sit down in a local slurp shop.

While some ramen shop operators might be upset by the entry of a ramen-making robot, others see it as an exciting new opportunity, including the founder of the most popular ramen joint in Japan, Ippudo.

“A vending machine cooks hot ramen on the spot,” said Shigemi Kawahara, President, and Founder of Ippudo. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

Of course, Kawahara has reason to be excited. Ippudo’s Tonkotsu Ramen will soon be added to Yo-Kai’s menu.

Photo credit: Hitoshi Hokamura

March 31, 2022

Watch This Video of RoboBurger, a Robot Burger Vending Machine, Cooking Up Burgers

Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.

The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.

RoboBurger CEO Audrey Wilson

The machine makes burgers without any human ever touching the food. The frozen meat and buns are prepackaged. The only time a human gets involved with the RoboBurger’s operation is when they come out every couple of days to restock and empty the wastewater. The wastewater comes from the 30-second cleaning cycle the machine conducts between each burger served.

RoboBurger CEO and cofounder Audrey Wilson, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who spent much of his career heading up analytics and business intelligence groups at places like Vimeo and Arkadium, has been burning the midnight oil on the RoboBurger for much of the past two decades. Wilson started to make serious headway on his robot vending machine four years ago, left his full-time job in 2020, and cofounded RoboBurger with CTO Dan Braido and CMO Andy Siegel.

You can watch the RoboBurger make a burger (actually a few burgers) for CNET’s Bridget Carey, who visited with the RoboBurger team at the Newport Centre mall to learn how the machine works, in the video below.

A Robot Made Me a Messy Burger and I’d Do It Again (RoboBurger First Look)

March 23, 2022

Growmark, One of North America’s Largest Ag Coops, Tests a Farming Robot from Solinftec

Growmark, one of North America’s largest agriculture supply cooperatives, has partnered with agtech solution provider Solinftec to trial a new scanning and field monitoring robot.

According to the announcement sent to The Spoon, the new robot is powered by a neuro-network that features a detection algorithm to scan for crop health and nutrition, insects, and weeds, as well as monitor the entire field and provide real-time insights back to the farmer.

New Agtech Robot from Solinftec and Growmark

Growmark will trial the new robot for the bulk of the 2022 farming season and work with Solinftec to optimize the technology for planting to harvesting. This trial is the first evaluation of a farming robot under Growmark’s AgValidity­ testing program, the coop’s program to evaluate new ag technology products.

Growmark’s partnership with Solinftec is a sign of growing interest in automation on the farm. Coops serve as an important channel for new technologies to make their way into everyday use on the farm. With a network of regional FS coops that spans 40 states and into Canada, Growmark holds significant sway in technology used by farmers.

“We are looking at the future of farming,” said Lance Ruppert, Growmark’s director of agronomy marketing technology. “We have been working with and utilizing Solinftec’s leading agricultural technologies for over three years and are excited to partner on a project with the potential to change farm practices for the better of the industry and environment.”

One interesting aspect of the trial is Solinftech is pairing its robot with its ALICE AI platform, which essentially acts as a farm operating system. The robot will coordinate with the ALICE platform to orchestrate the machine’s operations. In the future, I expect we’ll see some farms deploying farm OSs that help farmers to plan and control operations of their farm, down to the robots roaming the field. By working closely with coop networks like Growmark’s, this future may arrive sooner rather than later.

February 2, 2022

Yo-Kai’s Self-Driving Ramen Vending Robot is Heading to the Super Bowl

Yo-Kai Express, a maker of robotic vending machines, debuted its autonomous mobile ramen vending robot this week. Named the Yatai, the robot made its appearance at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington as part of an innovation event put on by the software giant.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Yo-Kai Express Inc. (@yokaiexpress)

When the company first announced the mobile ramen-bot at The Smart Kitchen Summit Japan in December 2020, founder Andy Lin said the machine would be able to navigate specific routes and stop when hailed by a mobile phone. The company also said they were already beginning to work with a manufacturer and had started discussions with the Universities of California at Berkeley and Irvine about having the mobile ramen machine traverse their campuses.

While the final destinations for the first few Yatais have yet to be disclosed, the company knows where its next stop is for its autonomous ramen robot: The Super Bowl. According to Lin, The Yatai will make its general public debut in LA next week at the Super Bowl pre-party.

And what about the Takumi, the home ramen machine the company teased in 2020? Based on our conversations with Yo-Kai, because the company’s primary focus has been the rollout of the Yatai, they hit pause on the rollout of the Takumi. Hopefully, with the Yatai finally making it to market, we’ll see the Takumi making an appearance soon.

January 25, 2022

Pizza Hut Launches a Fully Robotic Restaurant-in-a-Box (Video)

This month, Pizza Hut debuted a fully automated robot-powered restaurant.

The ‘restaurant-in-a-box’ is based on technology from Hyper-Robotics, an Israel-based food robotics startup that makes containerized restaurants.

The restaurant is operating out of the parking lot of Drorim Mall, a shopping mall located in the central Israel city of Bnei Dror. The restaurant is fully self-contained, doing everything from dropping toppings to baking and boxing. About the only thing it doesn’t do is make the dough, but according to Hyper its pizza restaurant can hold up to 240 types of dough in different sizes.

You can see the robot in action here:

When Hyper launched its robot pizza restaurant in November, it had a capacity of 50 pies per hour. It also had 30 warming cabinets, two robotic dispensing arms and dispensers for up to 12 toppings.

The customer initiates an order for a pizza directly from a touchscreen kiosk on the restaurant exterior or through the Pizza Hut app. After the pizza is made and boxed, a Pizza Hut employee takes the pizza from a dispensing tray and hands it to the customer. In future versions, the restaurant will be able to dispense the pizza directly to the customer.

That Hyper’s biggest named customer is also the biggest name is pizza shouldn’t be a surprise, in part because its founder, Udi Shamai, is also the president of Pizza Hut Israel. Shamai is a master franchisee that oversees 90 Pizza Huts across the country.

When I wrote our food robotics predictions last week, one of the trends I predicted for food robotics was the rise of the robot restaurants-in-a-box. It looks like Hyper and Pizza Hut didn’t waste any time getting the ball rolling on this trend.

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