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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

A Cookie Robot is Pumping Out That New Cookie Smell in Huntsville, Alabama

If there’s one of our five senses that’s continuously underutilized when getting people to open their wallets, it’s the sense of smell. Anyone who’s been lured into a Subway sandwich shop by that bread(ish) odor wafting in the air knows what I’m talking about.

So naturally, when the company behind a new Smart Cookie cookie-making robot reached out to tell me about their new machine and its deployment at Dipwich sandwich shop in Huntsville, Alabama, my first thought was how great it must smell.

The cookie scent wafting machine robot itself is pretty simple. First, a robotic arm puts a paper-plated par-baked cookie into an oven. Once the cookie is rethermalized to 350 degrees – which takes about two minutes – the robot puts toppings on top of the cookie and then places it in a small cubby for the customer to retrieve it. The robot has two ovens within the kiosk, and working at full-speed can pump out about 60 cookies per hour.

You can watch it in action via the company provided video below:

Watch The Cookie Robot by RoboChef

The customer orders their cookie through an app or an iPad touch screen as an order interface. They have a choice between drizzled chocolate or caramel, and on top of that, they can choose from six different dry toppings. The customer can also choose between three different types of cookies: chocolate royale, the sugar cookie and a lemon cooler. The total combinations of cookie, drizzle, and toppings are 160 variations.

Chicago-based RoboChef is led by Aravind Durai, a long-time robotics executive. Durai, who was founder of Home Delivery Service, a maker of robotic fulfillment solutions for food delivery, and also headed up the America’s group for Mitsubishi robotics, started RoboChef in early 2021.

The company also counts restaurant industry veteran Bill Post as one of its advisors. Post was the founder of Roti Mediterranean Grill and was the long-time COO of Levy Restaurants, a division of Compass. Through his current company, WJP Restaurant Group, Post owns the Dipwich Sandwiches location in Huntsville, where the Smart Cookie robot trial is taking place.

I sat down with Durai to ask a few questions about his company and its new food robot.

You got this robot out to market pretty quickly, which is pretty different from a lot of robot companies. Why and how’d you do it?

“There were two things we needed to be validated right away. One is whether a restaurant will be able to run a fully autonomous system with its own staff. Even if it’s like a small portion of what they are offering, it should not require highly trained roboticists and software engineers to run this machine. So that is fundamental to how to be able to democratize robotics and automation in the food-service arena.

The second thing is we wanted to get validation that consumers will be delighted by two things. One is the ability to personalize their food order. The second is whether the food can be autonomously made by a robot and served to customers in a completely contactless touchless manner. And we wanted to get validation of that right away. Is it possible for us to do that in a lab environment? So we said, ‘let’s just put it out there, make customers pay for it, and see what they say.’

So to answer your question as to the how, we have a team of highly motivated and seasoned engineers with deep expertise in robotics and software tech who can execute rapidly.”

Who manages the cookie robot once it’s in the store?

“We wanted to have an ambassador from the restaurant. But, unfortunately, it is very hard to find people in the foodservice industry and also the restaurant really could not spare anybody from their own staff. So we lowered the qualifications of somebody to be an ambassador. Pretty much the only qualification was that they should like cookies. And we found an amazing ambassador, and she pretty much got trained on it in a couple of hours.”

Do you monitor the robot remotely?

“We have continuous monitoring of every single thing that’s going on. It’s all recorded in our data center for us to be able to keep an eye on things. Our engineers basically can monitor and understand this is how many toppings and how many cookies are consumed at the end of the day. We know how long the customer was on the app. We believe that data itself is going to be so valuable not just to improve our machine, improve our robots, improve our process and whatnot, but also the operators. It is going to give them a deep insight into the behavior in a retail environment of their customers, but it’s also going to give them deep insights into their own operations as well.”

Tell me more about the company.

“We are fairly early stage. We have full-time engineers and technologists working on it, and a few people who are working with us part-time on developing the software and the app and things like that. But we early on recognized that we need to have a complementary skill set within our company with food service, restaurant, and retail industry expertise. So we brought on a few key people in the organization to help us out daily. One of them is a gentleman named Bill Post.”

Have you raised funding yet?

“No, we have not raised institutional funding yet. We plan to do that early next year sometime. But we are in the process of getting some attention of potential customers who want to work with us on doing some pilots.”

What’s the plan for your rollout over the next few years?

“We are hoping to be able to have some pilots I’m talking about with well known national brands. We hope to have some pilots underway early next year. And once that happens, we believe next, whatever the rate within these individual businesses will allow, that’s what we’re doing. In theory, we could be around 100 units with multiple partners in another two to two and a half years.”

If you are near Huntsville, Alabama, you can head on down to Dipwich and both smell and taste the cookies from the Smart Cookie robot through early January. If you do, take pictures and send them our way.

Miso Introduces Second Generation Restaurant Kitchen Robot, the Flippy 2

Today Miso Robotics, a maker of restaurant robots, unveiled the second generation of its flagship robot Flippy, the Flippy 2. The new robot, which was developed in part with feedback from strategic innovation partner White Castle, represents a significant jump forward in capabilities, customizability, and design.

Some of the new capabilities and features of the Flippy 2 include:

  • Takes over more work: The original Flippy requires human help on both sides of the robot to complete a task. The Flippy 2 basically makes the fry station a closed loop system where items are loaded into the fryer, fried and then placed into a hot holding area, all without assistance from a human.
  • Hot Food Transfer: The Flippy 2 transfers hot food items to the holding area, which eliminates a potential danger-spot for human and prevents burns and oil spillage.
  • Customizable Basket System: The Flippy 2 has a new customizable basket management system. Called AutoBin, the new system can be tailored for the specific needs of a kitchen, allowing for specialty items like vegetables and fish to get their own dedicated basket to prevent cross-contamination.
  • Smaller Footprint: The Flippy 2 is smaller than the original, with 56% reduced aisle intrusion, a 13% reduction in height and less surfaces to clean.

Like the original, the Flippy 2 uses machine vision to aid in the task of operating a cooking station, but just oversees more of the overall process. According to the company, the Flippy2 has increased throughput of 30% compared to the original and can handle up to 60 baskets per hour.

The Flippy 2 makes its debut in the White Castle’s Chicago 42 location. From there, company CEO Mike Bell told The Spoon that they plan to deploy the new robot in as many as 10 White Castle locations in 2022. And while White Castle represents a significant portion of the trials, Bell says the company will also roll out pilots with other partners.

“Currently, we have plans to deploy about a dozen additional pilots in the next few months, and we’re also in talks with several top restaurants and QSRs who are interested in bringing Flippy to their kitchens, both in the U.S. and overseas,” said Bell. 

That Miso is already launching a second generation of its flagship robot is a testament to the company’s stature as a pioneer in what is a fairly new and nascent industry. Miso first debuted the original Flippy in 2017 at the Caliburger in Pasadena, and started working with White Castle last year. All of those trials allowed the company to get data and critical feedback about the robot in real-world, high-volume kitchens, the result of which are the improvements they are debuting today.

“The truth is that Flippy has been in development for more than five years,” said Bell. “We’re truly the only company learning at the level we are learning about real kitchen operations. And Flippy 2 is the result of many conversations and the feedback we’ve received from valuable industry partners, like White Castle, who deployed Flippy for the first time in September 2020.”

You can see the new Flippy working the fry station in the video below.

The Flippy 2 Restaurant Robot Cooks Food

Watch The Jamba Smoothie Robot In Action In The Middle of Stonewood Center Mall

Sometimes it’s hard to visualize something in action until, well, you see it in action.

That’s why I thought this fast-motion video clip from Blendid of their new Jamba branded smoothie robot is so interesting.

In the clip, you can see the robot sitting in the middle of the mall and shoppers convening around it as it makes smoothies. The placement of the robot in the middle of the mall walkway where you typically find iPhone case and t-shirt booths illustrates why Jamba is interested in trying this new format out. The ability to drop a smoothie bot into a mall without the traditional store opens up the option of a faster-deployed, lower cost, and less permanent build-out.

Jamba and Blendid have hinted additional locations are to come. I expect if this location goes well, we’ll see more malls added to the rollout plans for the Jambabot.

You can see how the robot makes a smoothie in the video below.

Jamba by Blendid - Stonewood Center in Downey, CA

DaVinci Kitchen Equity Crowdfunds €500,000 for Robotic Pasta Kiosk

DaVinci Kitchen, a German startup making an autonomous robotic pasta kiosk, has raised more than €500,000 (~$591,000 USD) through equity crowdfunding. The company’s campaign ran from March to the end of June this year on Seedmatch, with 488 investors participating. Combined with a previous Seed round, DaVinci has raised now raised €1.35M (~$1.6M USD).

DaVinci’s pasta station is a self-contained pasta-making kiosk that’s 2.1m wide by 2.5m high and 2.4m long. Customers use an app to place orders and customize their meals, and an articulating arm swings about preparing and plating the dish. The DaVinci can make 40 meals per hour. As company Founder Vick Jorge Manuel explained to me last year, pasta is actually just the beginning for the kiosk, as different components (like a deep fryer) can be swapped into make all manner of cuisines and dishes.

DaVinci is just the latest robot startup to use equity crowdfunding to raise money. Blendid, Kiwibot, and a bunch of companies in Wavemaker Labs’ portfolio (Piestro, Bobacino, Miso Robotics) have all turned to the crowd to raise capital. Part of the allure of equity crowdfunding is that it allows a company to raise money without the pressure to scale that can come with institutional VC funding. Additionally, equity crowdfunding can act as a marketing vehicle and helps build a community around a product. For more, check out this panel from our recent ArticulATE conference all about the ins and outs of equity crowdfunding. (Spoon Plus membership required.)

Through an exchange on Linkedin over this past weekend, DaVinci told me that the company will use the new money to finish its pre-production version kiosk, with the goal of opening up its own test restaurant in Leipzig. DaVinci will also start to raise a traditional round of funding for its Series A starting in September.

Miso and Lancer Worldwide Aim to Automate Beverage Dispensing for QSRs

Miso Robotics is making moves to expand its restaurant automation beyond fryers and grills into QSR beverage stations. Last week Miso announced a partnership with Lancer Worldwide, a global manufacturer of beverage dispensers, to develop an automated, intelligent system designed to speed up and organize drink orders.

The forthcoming beverage dispenser will integrate with a QSR’s POS system, so when a drink order comes in the machine will grab the right size cup, fill it with ice, pour the ordered drink and seal it. Additionally, the system will intelligently group drink orders together under color-coded LED lighting, so its easier for an cashier to place them with the correct order.

The machine is still in the prototyping stage, so the exact size and form factor are still yet to be worked out. It will, however, hold 24 flavors of carbonated and non-carbonated drinks. Details around pricing and business model (lease versus direct sale) have yet to be worked out as well.

Miso Robotics and Lancer Worldwide automated beverage dispenser demo

Up to now, Miso has been best known for Flippy, the robot that grills burgers and works the deep fryer at restaurants. The company also recently released a camera+software product called CookRight that allows smaller restaurants to get the same precise automated cooking of Flippy without the need for a robot installation. But honestly? While the details still need to worked out, this beverage robot could be a much bigger business for Miso than Flippy.

Not every QSR or restaurant serves burgers or deep fried foods — but they all offer drinks. Flippy requires installation in kitchens (that are big enough to begin with) that can limit exactly where human workers can stand and walk to avoid the robot as it moves about. The Miso/Lancer beverage dispenser will fit on a countertop and, based on how its described, easily slide into a QSR employee’s existing workflow.

The new dispenser is also arriving at the right time. Big QSR brands like Burger King, Chipotle, Shake Shack, KFC and more are pivoting to more drive-thru centric model and long wait times to pick up orders are a “dealbreaker” for customers. Adding automation to the beverage portion of an order could speed up expediting times, and if tied into AI-based ordering systems, human workers could spend less time placing cups under spigots and more time on customer service and other more complicated tasks.

Hop Robotics’ Beer Robot is Ready for Events This Summer

The U.S., it seems, has lagged behind Europe when it comes to automated beer pouring action. There’s EBar in the UK, Revolmatic out of Poland, and Macco Robotics in Spain. But fear not, proud Americans! There’s a homebrewed, as it were, beer robot coming to market courtesy of Hop Robotics in South Carolina.

Dubbed Walter, Hop’s beer robot uses an articulating arm and bottom pouring cups to automate beer dispensing. The robotic arm is built on a kegerator with four dispensers. Walter can take an order, dispense and serve a drink in roughly 25 seconds, and do roughly 140 cups of beer an hour.

Pint 2 Pint Time Trial-Hop Robotics

As Grayson Dawson, Founder of Hop Robotics, explained to me by phone this week, his company is still pretty early on and is in the pre-revenue, commercial prototype phase. Hop Robotics has one robot available that Dawson shuttles to events at cities around the Carolinas and Georgia. Right now, Walter isn’t tied into a payment system, so Dawson manually takes cash or drink tickets and enters the order into the machine himself. Additionally, while Dawson has some age verification capabilities, he is instead relying on venues to do age and overconsumption checks.

With more people than ever vaccinated in the U.S., activities like sporting events, fairs and concerts are opening back up. Crushes of people with pent up demand for mass entertainment will probably want a frosty beverage during the summer heat, and having an automated system to churn out beer after beer could come in handy. The question is how Hop Robotics could handle any potential surge in demand.

The company has proven out the basics of its technology, but Dawson is currently seeking funding or strategic partnerships to scale the business up beyond just one machine and the one person operating it.

Switzerland: Smyze’s Robot Barista Makes Coffee and Mocktail Drinks

Switzerland-based robots startup Smyze is a lot like other robot baristas already out on the market. It’s eponymous robot is a self-contained kiosk installed in high-traffic areas, users order drinks from an on-board touchscreen or via a web app to order and an articulating arms swing and swivels around to make those drinks.

So far, this sounds a lot like other robo-ristas on the market from the likes of Cafe X, Crown Digital and Blue Hill coffee. What makes Smyze a little different is that it also offers a variety of mocktail-type drinks, making it more of a full beverage station rather than just a high-tech, sci-fi latte machine. Measuring 2 meters by 2 meters, the Smyze station has a menu of 60 drinks, split 50/50 between coffee drinks and mocktails, and can churn out 120 drinks per hour.

“We didn’t want to just be a robot barista,” Daniel Adamec, Co-Founder of Smyze told me by video chat this week. “We have a broad range of drink possibilities, you don’t want to restrict yourself to just coffee.”

Smyze Robotic Bar: Serves freshly ground and brewed barista quality coffee

I asked Adamec why his company went with an articulating arm for its design, as it might not be as fast as more of an industrial machine type of approach. “We want the robot experience,” he said, highlighting the arm’s theatricality. “We don’t want to have a vending machine. It doesn’t add a huge cost, and it’s just an experience. People love it.”

There are currently three Smyze robots up and running in Switzerland with two more set to go online in that country in the next couple of months. The robots are owned and operated by Smyze, so it is responsible for stocking, cleaning and maintenance (which Adamec said happens once a day). When they install in a new location, Smyze negotiates a revenue sharing deal with that location rather than renting space or leasing the machine outright. Adamec said that Smyze will continue that owner/operator model as the company grows across Europe, but will also use more of a franchise model for its forthcoming customers in the middle east and Asia, where Smyze is not physically located.

As noted, there are currently plenty of robot baristas coming to market in different places around the world. But Smyze is part of a larger movement of startups looking to automated all kinds of commercial beverage experiences. Blendid and Alberts make smoothies. Rotender and Celia make actual cocktails. And Drinkbot makes a variety of juice-based mocktailers. Right now, Smyze sits somewhere in the middle of all these, offering a broad array of drinks, which just might help its robot stand out in an increasingly crowded field.

South Korea: Lounge Lab Opens Brown Bana Robot Ice Cream Shop

South Korean robotics company Lounge Lab announced today that it has opened Brown Bana, a robot-powered ice cream store in Seoul.

Technically, Brown Bana is more of a co-botic setup, as the articulating robot arms just move cups and capsule-based ice cream around while a human adds the toppings (see the video below) and serves the finished product. But based on the information Lounge Labs sent to The Spoon, the robots are equal parts labor and entertainment.

From Lounge Labs’ press announcement:

Brown Bana’s ice cream robot Aris provides an interactive experience in which customers and robots communicate through emotional motion functions and animated characters that express various emotions with faces. A total of seven motion contents, including ‘greeting,’ ‘calling,’ ‘rest,’ ‘drowsy,’ and various dance movements, are applied, as well as facial expressions suitable for each motion through a mounted display with character animation.

로봇이 아이스크림을?! 한국 최초의 로봇 아이스크림 스토어 '브라운바나' 오픈!

Theatricality is certainly part of a food robot’s appeal, especially since the technology is still novel for most audiences. Watching a robot make you food is still enticing enough to make passers-by stop and watch. Cafe X added waving and other gestures to its articulating robotic barista arms, and even set up its see-through kiosk on a busy downtown San Francisco street corner (though, those locations later shut down).

Lounge Labs believes Brown Bana’s robot hook will be appealing to both millennials and gen z customers, and is targeting cafes, amusement parks and pop-up spaces as target installation locations.

Brown Bana is just one of the automated experiences that Lounge Labs has developed. The company also makes the LOUNGE’X robot barista that makes pourover coffee, as well as the MooinSangHoei AI-powered vending machine.

Bancroft Automated Restaurant Services Plots Pizza Robot for Parking Lots

Parking lots are typically associated with, well parking your car, or maybe doing donuts if you’re feeling rebellious. But parking lots may soon be home to an entirely new phenomenon — pizza robots — if Bancroft Automated Restaurant Services (BARS) has its way.

BARS has developed an all-in-one pizza robot that is larger than a vending machine or kiosk, and meant to be installed in big open areas like parks, sporting events or big parking lots.

The BARS Automated Pizza Kitchen stores 96 pre-topped, par-baked pizzas, each held in a takeout tray in a humidity controlled fridge. When an order is placed either by phone or via on-board touchscreen, the automated system plucks the pizza out of the fridge, runs it under a heater to finish cooking the pizza, and secures a takeout lid on top. From there it is stored in a heated cabinet. When the user enters their pickup code, the machine grabs their pizza from the heater and dispenses it to the user. The whole process takes under three minutes. You can see a video of it in action here.

Speed Bancroft, Founder and CEO of BARS, told me via video chat last week that his pizza kitchen can be integrated with third-party delivery services (so drivers can pick up orders), and can be configured either for walk-up or drive-through customers.

The robot makes 35 twelve-inch pizzas in an hour and requires a human to re-stock and clean the machine once a day. BARS is selling its Automated Pizza Kitchen for $80,000 with a $1,000/month subscription to run it. Though the BARS pizza system is meant to be licensed out to other restaurants, the first implementations will be through BARS’ own Speedy Fresh Pizza brand, with the first installation going in in the Tigerland area of Baton Rouge, Lousiana in about six months.

Pizza is a popular option for automation companies, as a number of players are coming to market in a variety of form factors. There are vending machines like Basil Street (which makes an “Automated Pizza Kitchen” of their own) and Piestro. There are standalone kiosks like PAZZI‘s. And on the larger end is Hyper, which is making fully automated pizza restaurants in a shipping container.

The good news for all these companies is that pizza doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Pizza is a popular food and there are plenty of places big and small to build these micro-pizzerias. And if you’re going to pick up one from a BARS robot, at least you know there will be plenty of parking.

Mars Wrigley Launches Mobile Robotic Kiosk at ShopRite

The impulse aisle in the checkout line has long been the bane of many parents’ grocery shopping trips. While cashiers scan items and parents wait to pay, racks of candy and treats are within arm’s reach of bored kids sitting in carts.

But if you thought tempting kids with treats out checkout was rough, wait until there’s a shiny new robot wandering the grocery aisles, offering up candy.

Mars Wrigley and Wakefern Food Corp. announced last week that they are working with robot company Savioke to deploy a mobile robotic vending kiosk at ShopRite store in Monroe, NY.

According to Kiosk Marketplace, the robot, dubbed “Smiley,” plays music and dances (doing the robot, we assume) (sorry!), while offering up treats and such for sale.

There aren’t a ton of details, such as how many treats Smiley can hold, or the mechanics of how the treats are dispensed and paid for. (We reached out to Mars Wrigley for more information.)

We’ve seen these types of robots before. Self-driving robots can wheel around inside existing retail spaces to act as promotional, err, vehicles, or direct avenues. In China, FANBOT is already scurrying around cinemas, malls and hotels, selling drinks, snacks and more. And Pudutech’s robot, which is basically a series of shelves on wheels, cruise around grocery stores in Japan and the Netherlands, showcasing items that are on sale.

At the risk of tooting my own horn too loudly, automated mobile kiosks was a trend I said to look out for in 2021. So I think we’re going to see a lot more robots roaming store aisles trying to sell us stuff. Maybe their LED faces will need to show a scowl though, to keep the kids away.

Rotender is a Drink Making Robot Built for High-Volume Bars

I worked at a nightclub in college and one thing I remember from that experience was the sheer volume of drinks bartenders poured each night. Our job wasn’t about fancy bottle flipping a la Cocktail, just getting drinks to the consumers and their money in the till.

This high-volume approach is what’s driving the team at Rotender, which has built a robotic vending machine that serves drinks. Each Rotender holds 16 one-liter bottles and five different types of syrups (e.g., cranberry or orange juice), has an automated soda gun and makes it own ice. Once up and running, the Rotender can serve a drink in 15 seconds and make more than 350 drinks before needing to be refilled.

Rather than sitting behind the bar like SomaBar, the Rotender is actually meant to be installed where consumers can use it. A customer uses their mobile phone to scan a QR code on the Rotender, which brings up the drink menu in the Rotender app. Users select their drink, pay for it, place their glass in the machine and then scan a QR code again to ensure that they are by the machine to pick up their drink. Once that’s done, the Rotender mixes the drink and serves it.

Right now, Rotender relies on the venue to handle age verification, though the company is exploring existing software solutions to handle that. The machine also keeps track of how many drinks it serves each customer. Should a consumer order too many drinks in a single hour, Rotender can pause service to that individual so as not to over-serve them.

When we talk about robotics, there is typically a discussion around how robot-like any machine should look. Other robo-bartenders on the market serving drinks at Glacierfire in Iceland or The Tipsy Robot bar in Las Vegas use articulating arms to make the drinks. Rotender has instead forsaken this “robot” approach in favor of creating more of a straight up drink-making machine. As Rotender Co-Founder and CEO, Ben Winston explained to me by phone this week, the reason is speed.

Rotender is built to churn out drinks for high-volume locations. As such, the machine focuses on meat and potato drinks — rum and coke, gin and tonic, etc. More complicated drinks are left to the human staff at the bar.

By foresaking expensive articulating robotic arms, Winston also said that Rotender is a more economical option for bars. It costs $999 a month to lease a Rotender (a robotic arm on its own can cost tens of thousands of dollars). In addition to that lease, Rotender also adds a per drink charge that it determines with the venue.

Rotender is about to do a pilot with a bar in Los Angeles, and Winston said they can currently serve clients in California and Nevada. Sadly, though, the Rotender won’t be doing any Cocktail-style bottle flips.