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robot

June 4, 2020

Creator Temporarily Closes its Robot Restaurant

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant built around a hamburger-cooking robot, announced last night on Instagram that it was temporarily closing its one physical location tomorrow.

The company wrote:

Our restaurant at 680 Folsom Street in SF is going on a temporary hiatus. The stay at home order, combined with extended work-from-home policies (which we support), have emptied out SoMa – as @Eater_SF captured so poignantly. We haven’t seen a coyote or tumbleweeds on Folsom Street yet but it’s getting there.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Creator 🍔 (@eatatcreator)

Creator launched in the summer of 2018 around the idea that robots could take over the repetitive restaurant task of grilling burgers, freeing up human workers for more creative tasks like customer service.

Up until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, 2020 had been a year of growth for Creator. In January the restaurant expanded to being open five days a week, and in March it added dinner service. Even when the pandemic forced its dining room to close, Creator put up a good fight and invented what was basically an air lock for hamburger pickup that aimed to keep workers, delivery drivers and food safe.

We don’t know what this means for Creator, which has raised $18 million in funding. Even though the one location is closed, they have a year and a half’s worth of data and experience that could be useful if they wanted to license out the robot technology to other foodservice operators. As the long-term effects of the pandemic remain unclear, restaurants may be more keen on reducing the number of humans involved in preparing and serving food. Having a robot cook could be one less vector of transmission for a restaurant.

We have reached out to Creator to find out more about any future plans.

On a more personal note, Creator was a highlight for me during my robot food tour of San Francisco last year , and whenever I was in town I made a point of going. Not because of the robot, but because the food was delicious and the experience was always great.

May 29, 2020

With Ella, Crown Coffee is Transparent About its Robot Barista Ambitions

I know I should probably be more focused on the robot part of Crown Coffee’s “Ella.” Ella is, after all, a robot barista. But watching a video of Ella in action that the company posted to Linkedin, I can’t stop staring at the machine’s screen. It’s transparent but still displays messages about orders. The words just float in front of the articulating arm that swirls around making coffee.

That transparent OLED screen is made by LG, but as Crown Digital IO Founder and CEO Keith Tan told me by phone this week “It was just a prototype. LG wasn’t even selling them.” Somehow, Tan convinced LG to give him a pre-production version of the display, to which Crown added touch capabilities.

Based in Singapore, Crown Coffee started off in 2016 as a regular chain of human-powered cafes before Tan got the idea to add robotics into the service mix last year. Ella comes in three different sizes and can serve a variety of coffee, tea and iced drinks. It also makes up to 200 coffees per hour. Drinks can be ordered and paid for via touchscreen on the machine or with a mobile app.

So far, Ella has just one installation in Singapore and has made a number of appearances serving coffee at large events.

Ella joins the ranks of other robot baristas around the world including Briggo, Cafe X, TrueBird, MontyCafe, Rozum Cafe and Fibbee. They all offer the same basic value proposition: good coffee served quickly in high-traffic areas. But in the age of COVID-19, Ella, and all of the robot baristas also offer something more appealing than a faster latte. They offer a contactless way to get your morning joe.

Robots, as I’ve been repeating for the past couple of months, don’t get sick. In an age of social distancing and facemasks, that lack of human touch could be appealing to a global population that has watched a viral outbreak sicken and take so many lives.

Crown Coffee is currently bootstrapped, and the company plans to both own and operate its machines as well as lease them out with a rev-share to outside locations. Like other robot barista companies, Crown Coffee is targeting high-volume areas like airports and train stations.

Unlike a lot of its competitors, Tan says that coffee is just the beginning. “All this groundwork will evolve Ella into other use cases like food,” Tan said. “The lowest hanging fruit is coffee, tea and soft serve.”

While there is a lot of competition in the robo-barista world, it’s still pretty spread out around the world. Given the small footprint of each of these machines, and how many people love their java, the automated coffee space doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching out for Ella, and then watching that screen.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post inaccurately stated that LG added the touch capabilities to the screen. This technology was added by Crown. We regret the error.

May 4, 2020

Chowbotics Deploying 50 New Salad Making Robots to Hospitals Across the Country

Chowbotics announced today that it is deploying 50 new salad making robots to hospitals across the country. The company said that by the end of June, it will have a total of 70 Sally robots in hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, up from 16 at the beginning of February.

The coronavirus pandemic has thrust Chowbotics into a unique position, especially when it comes to feeding healthcare workers. Doctors and nurses are working around the clock and need access to fresh food, and Sally, which can make yogurt, grain and salad bowls, can serve a variety of meals for every daypart , 24 hours a day.

Additionally, open salad bars are being removed from cafeterias, restaurants and grocery stores out of concern that they can spread the coronavirus. So finding and selling a salad will get more complicated. Sally’s 22 ingredients are stored in airtight containers that are held within the robot, providing an added layer of protection from outside contamination.

It’s not a good thing that hospitals represent such a big opportunity for Chowbotics and other robotic vending services right now. The fact that hospitals are busy illustrate a sad and deadly fact about the COVID-19. From a strictly cold, business standpoint, Chowbotics’ ability to sell into the healthcare market right now comes at the same time when colleges, the company’s other big customer segment, have shut down, eliminating those lines of business.

With their ability to reduce human-to-human contact, and inability to actually get sick during this pandemic, robots are starting to play a larger role in our meal journey. Robots like Sally are making meals, while delivery robots like those from Starship and Refraction are bringing meals to our doorsteps. As the effect coronavirus has on social distancing continues to ripple long after the virus has receded, we will be interacting with more robots in our day-to-day lives.

April 15, 2020

From Michigan to Korea, Robots Keep Food Rolling When People Can’t

Prior to this pandemic, the big ethical questions surrounding food robotics and automation was their impact on loss of human jobs. But as COVID-19 has forced us to social distance and rethink our regular activities, replacing humans with robots for food delivery seems like a more ethical choice. Robots, after all, don’t need face masks, can be placed in frontline situations and won’t accidentally cough on your groceries.

As it’s done with many other aspects of the meal journey, the coronavirus is accelerating the adoption of certain types of food tech — like robots — that otherwise would have come to market on a much longer timeline.

The Detroit News posted a story yesterday about the increased demand for Refraction’s delivery robots in Michigan. Refraction makes the rugged, three-wheeled, self-driving REV-1 delivery bot. It’s bigger than Starship’s cooler-sized robots, yet not as big as Nuro’s self-driving pod vehicles.

At the end of last year, Refraction kicked off a beta program to deliver takeout meals from four different Ann Arbor restaurants. The Detroit News reports that Refraction now has more than 400 restaurant partners and the company’s fleet of five robots is running at capacity. Refraction is also working to get into grocery delivery.

The robots are cleaned between deliveries, and Refraction has added UV lights to the interior of the robot to further sanitize the cargo compartment. The robot is also contactless as consumers use their phone to unlock and open the robot to retrieve their food.

Refraction’s robots also, obviously, reduce human-to-human contact for people receiving food while sheltering in place. Our country may regain a certain amount of freedom to move in the coming months, but we’ve had a pretty healthy fear of other people pumped into us for the past couple of months. Robots may be more welcome once we’re past this.

These robotic advantages could also be applied beyond restaurant delivery and into restaurants themselves. The Korea Times reports that this week Woowa Bros. announced it would offer free rentals of its “Dilly” server robot to 50 restaurants in Korea for two months starting in mid-April.

The Dilly is an autonomous robot with a series of racks meant to work the front of house, delivering food from the kitchen to tables and bringing empty plates back.

Woowa Bros. launched the Dilly server program back in November and charged roughly $773 a month (with a two-year contract) for the robot. The Korea Times writes that 164 restaurants applied for the program, and currently Woowa has 23 robots operating in 16 restaurants across Korea.

It’s entirely likely that we’ll see more server robots in restaurants here in the U.S. as well. Though coronavirus has permanently shuttered at least 3 percent of restaurants across the nation, there’s already talk of what restaurants will look like when dine-in rooms re-open. Expect fewer people, disposable menus, and possibly servers wearing masks.

One has to wonder what people will prefer interacting with: a server wearing a mask or a robot? To be fair, a lot more of us will probably be wearing masks in public in the near future, but the cold, sterility of a robot may be more appealing to nervous people just starting to come out from sheltering in place.

Refraction and Woowa aren’t the only examples of robots gaining more popularity. Starship recently expanded the use of its food delivery robots beyond college campuses and onto city streets in Arizona and around Washington DC. And Nuro just got the greenlight to test its autonomous delivery vehicles on public streets in California.

But it’s not just the consumer end of the robotic equation that we should be thinking about. While robots may help reduce human-to-human contact when accepting your food, they also relieve some of the new dangers of being a delivery person. Let’s face it, delivery people have worked hard during this outbreak and have often gotten the short end of the gig economy stick. Ideally the food industry can use any savings from automation to help fund new job opportunities for humans.

The ethical questions surrounding the availability of human jobs in an increasingly automated world will remain and need to be addressed in a thoughtful manner after this virus recedes. But in the shorter term, robots may help reduce transmission of a deadly virus and perhaps ease a little bit of anxiety around getting our food delivered.

April 9, 2020

Just in Time for Social Distancing, Rozum Cafe Launches its Robot Barista

There are two opposing forces during our sheltering in place and social distancing. We are actively avoiding other people, especially those we don’t know, and also actively working to maintain small comforts where they can be found — like in your morning cup of coffee.

While at-home packaged coffee sales have surged during our isolation, sales at Starbucks have dropped precipitously. A massive part of this drop, obviously is that Starbucks had to shut down its walk-in options last month. But once we emerge from quarantine, will those in need of a latté still stand in crowded stores with other people and trust the human hands crafting their drinks?

Perhaps the coronavirus could spur greater interest in robot-powered coffee kiosks. With their lack of humans, consistent product and ability to work around the clock, robo-ristas could become the next hot thing in coffee. Which means that the Rozum Cafe appears to have launched at the right time.

Developed by Belarus-based Rozum Robotics and announced this past weekend, the Rozum Cafe is an enclosed kiosk with an articulating arm that serves up a variety of coffee drinks. According to its FAQ, the Rozum Cafe can serve 300 drinks “per shift,” though they don’t say specifically how long a shift is. It can also be customized to expand drink menus and even serve up pastries.

There’s no official pricing for the Rozum Cafe, with the web site only saying that anyone buying one should actually get three of them for “optimal results” with the ROI. New owners will also have to pay for shipping, installing and setup of the machines.

The Rozum Cafe is certainly not alone in the robot coffee space. Cafe X, Briggo and MontyCafe have all already been on the market for more than a year.

However, the world has changed drastically in just the past few months and the opportunity for automated coffee could wind up being bigger than ever. In a post-pandemic world where we may no longer shake hands, grabbing a cup of coffee is something we’ll still want to do, just perhaps in a more humanless way.

March 24, 2020

Starship Robots Deliver Food Over Social Distances at Bowling Green

There is probably some grim metaphor in the fact that while people across the US shelter in place to avoid human contact, robots continue to roll out, making deliveries, unaware of the pandemic that surrounds them.

Ever since this outbreak started, we at The Spoon have wondered why autonomous delivery robots aren’t being used more often, especially in cities. As grocery and restaurant deliveries surge, robots could remove at least one human from the delivery equation (and they are a lot easier to scrub down after each use).

Turns out that Bowling Green State University is still using Starship robots for food delivery on campus, according to the Sentinel-Tribune. At least Jon Zachrich, Bowling Green State University Dining Director of Marketing and Communications, thinks that’s a good thing in these end times.

“I personally think it’s a good opportunity for social distancing, just because your only interaction is going to be with the actual robot, once it comes from our facility,” Zachrich told the Sentinel-Tribune.

He also spilled some factoids that I, as someone who follows the robot space, found interesting. The surface of the robot is non-porous, so it’s easy to clean. Zachrich also outlined some of the sanitizing protocols for the robot, saying that each robot is wiped down with disinfectant and anti-bacterial cleaners after each use.

On a more general interest note, Zachrich also gave us a glimpse as to how many orders the robots were running at Bowling Green before the pandemic. The robots debuted on campus on Feb. 20 and “Orders were quickly maxed out at over 750 per day,” the Sentinel-Tribune writes. Each of those came with $1.99 Starship delivery fee if you want to do the math on revenue generation.

That number has obviously dropped off as Bowling Green, like so many other colleges, has shifted to distance learning. Most restaurants on campus have closed, but the restaurants are still delivering to essential staff on campus and students who remained because they don’t have any other place to go.

This outbreak doesn’t seem to be subsiding anytime soon, especially in this country. With social distancing becoming the new norm, at least for the foreseeable future, perhaps more places will be like Bowling Green and get their own robots rolling across the social distance gap.

February 15, 2020

Food Tech News: A Trash Robot Sorts Recycling, plus Space Mac & Cheese

You made it to the weekend! Hopefully you don’t have too much of a candy hangover from Valentine’s Day festivities. Over here at The Spoon, we’re laser focused on Customize, our food personalization summit coming up in a little less than two weeks (!) in NYC. (Wanna come? Use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off tickets.)

But conference or no conference, cool food tech news keeps on happening. This week we’ve rounded up stories about recyclable-sorting trash bins, space mac & cheese, and a plant-based burger taste test featuring Bill Gates. Enjoy!

TrashBot automates recycling and waste sorting

It’s something most of us do every day — try to figure out whether our cup/bowl/utensil belongs should be thrown into the trash, recycling, or compost. Startup CleanRobotics is trying to automate that choice for us with its TrashBot, a metal bin that will automatically sort your garbage for you. FastCompany wrote about the company this week, which is trying to streamline the waste management process and also gather data on what we’re throwing away. To use the device, just toss in your item and the robot uses a combination of camera and sensors to determine in which internal bin — recycling, landfill, etc. — it should go.

Scientists develop mac & cheese for space travel

It looks like astronauts’ menu might now include mac & cheese. Scientists at Washington State University (WSU) announced that they have developed a way to make macaroni and cheese shelf stable for up to three years (h/t IFT). And not the boxed stuff either — this is the ready-to-eat version. The new offering, which uses thermal sterilization and a special protective film, has triple the lifespan of your typical ready-to-eat mac and cheese. WSU is currently testing the product with the Army.

Photo: Mark Rober

Bill Gates taste tests plant-based and beef burgers

This week Bill Gates appeared in a video by YouTube star Mark Rober (h/t GeekWire). In it he talked about meat alternatives and, most importantly, did a mini taste test between two offerings: one plant-based Impossible burger, and one burger from Seattle classic Dick’s burgers. Gates, who has invested in both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, said that the plant-based burger was “quite good” and “light years away from what they used to like.”

February 7, 2020

Robot Bartender Now Serving Drinks in Tokyo Train Station

Just when you thought Tokyo couldn’t get any more futuristic, the city’s subway system has a new robot bartender serving up drinks to commuters.

The Daily Mail reported this week that the Yoronotaki company has launched the Zeroken Robo Tavern in the Ikebukuro train station. The small pop-up opened on Jan. 23 and will run as a pilot to gauge customer reaction to the concept until March 19th.

The robot itself is just an articulating arm with an LED face. Customers enter their order via separate kiosk and then the robot whirrs into action, pouring out a beer in 40 seconds, or mixing up a cocktail for something a little stronger.

The robot is made by QBIT Robotics, which also built the Henn Na robot barista, also in Tokyo. The robot costs $82,000, which is evidently three years’ salary for an average bartender in Japan. Yoronotaki told the Daily Mail that labor shortages in Japan are part of the reason it is trying the robot out.

Japan has a greying population with more than one-third of its people over the age of 65. Many companies are working on robotic solutions to help stave off any potential labor crisis. Sony has teamed up with Carnegie-Mellon University to create food robots and has big ambitions for a robotic home cooking assistant. Connected Robots, which makes the takoyaki-cooking Octochef robot, raised raised a ¥850M ($7.8 million USD) last year to expand its food robot lineup. And in 2018, the Dawn Avatar cafe used robot servers that were operated remotely by people with disabilities.

Given how small the retail spaces in Japan can be, and the volume of people that travel Tokyo’s subway system, there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more robot bartenders pop up across Japan.

February 4, 2020

Madison, WI Regulators Aim to Limit Robot Food Delivery

Looks like Starship’s delivery robots may be blocked from roaming the city streets of Madison, WI. The Wisconsin State Journal reports that the local Transportation Policy and Planning Board there unanimously recommended a measure yesterday that would prohibit the delivery robots everywhere in the city except for the University of Wisconsin.

Starship robots have been running around the UW campus making food and drink deliveries since November of last year. Madison’s Assistant City Attorney told The State Journal that the purpose of the proposed rule is to prevent other companies from coming in and jamming up the city’s sidewalks with robots.

The new rule wouldn’t impact the robots that are currently making deliveries to students, faculty and staff at UW. It would just bar them from expanding outside of campus. The new rule would not prevent other robot delivery companies from also operating on the UW campus.

One of the most intriguing aspects of robot delivery is watching how cities around the country have to grapple with the issue in real time. How do you balance the convenience robot delivery with equity and accessibility issues, potential losses in city revenues and liability issues? This is all new territory and cities have to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation.

In 2017, San Francisco enacted tight restrictions around robot delivery, but recently relented a bit and gave Postmates a permit to test its Serve robot in the city. Cities like Scottsdale, AZ and Houston have been popular testing grounds for autonomous vehicles. In 2018, Dallas, TX allowed robot delivery on select sidewalks. Kiwi’s robots were allowed to roam the sidewalks of Berkeley, CA. And last year Washington state passed a law allowing robot deliveries (under certain conditions) statewide.

From a business perspective, Madison’s move probably won’t have too much of an impact on Starship. The company is focusing on college and corporate campuses, and has a growing number of delivery programs running on colleges around the country.

From a city perspective, I can’t really fault Madison for this move. I think delivery robots like Starship’s are inevitable as they can run all day and night and potentially make food delivery cheaper and more accessible to everyone. But there are real issues surrounding their deployment on public streets. It’s fine to put a pause on robots to figure things out, it just shouldn’t be a full stop on the issue.

February 3, 2020

LG’s CLoi ServeBot Picks Up Shifts at CJ Foodville in Seoul, South Korea

The restaurant CJ Foodville has a new server clocking in at its Cheiljemyunso location in Seoul, South Korea — though this one probably won’t accept tips. ZDNet writes that LG’s CLoi ServeBot is now autonomously shuttling food to tables and taking away empty dishes.

The CLoi ServeBot is self-driving robot with four vertically stacked trays that can navigate around tables and people (even playing music to give bystanders a heads up that its approaching). The ServeBot also features an LED screen that shows facial expressions.

It’s not a surprise that these ServeBots are working at CJ Foodville. The restaurant chain formed a partnership with LG last year to develop a number of different food robots. This past November, CJ Foodville installed an LG ChefBot at its Veeps buffet restaurant to cook up noodles.

The CLoi ServeBot is among a wave of server robots hitting restaurants in Asia and beyond. Bear Robotics just raised $32 million to scale up its Penny server robot. And PuduTech’s BellaBot, which sports LED feline features instead of human ones, showed off its server robot at CES this year.

All of them, however, do basically the same thing — cart plates around. That’s not to denigrate the engineering feat that a self-driving, dish-carrying robot is. It’s more that these robots are on a path from being a novelty to becoming a commodity. What features can a company add that will really set their robots apart from the competition?

Thankfully for those in the server robot space, there are plenty of restaurants in the world, so there’s plenty of potential robot business to go around.

January 23, 2020

Kroger Building Next Ocado Automated Fulfillment Center in Frederick, MD

Looks like grocery shoppers on the west coast hoping for an automated warehouse to fulfill their grocery orders will have to wait a little bit longer. Kroger announced today that its next Ocadao-style robot-powered fulfillment center will be in Frederick, MD.

Kroger is building 20 of these smart warehouses, but none so far have made it out west. Other cities getting automated fulfillment centers include Monroe, OH, Groveland, FL, Forest Park, GA, Dallas, TX, and Pleasant Prairie, WI. Frederick appears to be the vague “mid-Atlantic” location the company had previously announced.

These automated fulfillment centers use robotic totes on rails to assemble online grocery orders. Kroger, which is an investor in Ocado, is taking more of a standalone approach to automated grocery fulfillment, building out entirely new, separate facilities. Other retailers such as Albertsons are building out automated micro-fulfillment centers in the back of existing retail locations.

Online grocery shopping is still a small percentage of overall grocery shopping, but its growing. Automated fulfillment centers like the ones Kroger is building have the potential to boost online grocery’s slice of the pie by offering faster turnaround of online orders (and thus, create more orders).

All these systems are just coming online over the coming months, so it remains to be seen how people will engage with them. Additionally, we’ll have to see if there is a difference in convenience and shopper adoption between standalone facilities and in-store ones (or some combination of both).

Kroger shoppers living in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia being served by the new Frederick facility won’t actually be that far ahead of the west coast. The new warehouse won’t open until 24 months after groundbreaking.

January 23, 2020

As Starship Delivery Robots Hit Ole Miss, Where’s Kiwi?

Starship’s autonomous food delivery robots started rolling out across the University of Missisppi (Ole Miss) yesterday, reports the school’s newspaper. This, evidently, makes Ole Miss the first college in the Southeastern Conference to get autonomous robot delivery, which isn’t a huge deal to us, but is probably a jab at rival University of Alabama somehow.

Starship’s robots are cooler-sized, six-wheeled self-driving vehicles that automatically navigate around people and obstacles. Students and staff wanting food download the Starship app and place an order from participating eateries at that college. They then pay a $1.99 fee to have it delivered to wherever they are on campus.

Starship shows that it is not slowing down the rollout of its robotic services in the new year. The list of colleges using Starship’s robots is getting too long to mention each time we write about them. But in the past few months alone Starship’s bots have begun service at the University of Houston, the University of Wisconsin, and the company re-started service at the University of Pittsburgh.

As the litany of colleges using Starship continues to grow, one has to wonder what’s up with Kiwi, another startup that makes squat food delivery robots for college campuses. The company announced an updated version of its robot with new capabilities back in December, but hasn’t made much noise since then.

There are a lot of colleges out there, so there is still plenty of opportunity for Kiwi. But at the rate Starship is going, its solution looks like it’s becoming turnkey. The more miles and deliveries Starship runs, the more data it collects and the better its service will become, which will beget even more adoption by more schools.

If Kiwi doesn’t start ramping up, it’s going to miss out on more than just Ole Miss.

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