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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Cafe X Shuts Down its Three Downtown San Francisco Locations

Cafe X, the robot coffee chain, shuttered its three downtown San Francisco locations. The San Francisco Chronicle was first to report the news, and Cafe X Co-Founder and CEO Henry Hu confirmed the shutdowns yesterday on Twitter.

Cafe X builds standalone kiosks featuring a robotic arm that serves up hot and cold beverages. It had locations in San Francisco’s Metreon building, a dedicated store on Market St. and a pop-up-style location on Sansome and Bush St.

The downtown SF closures follow the recent launch of two new Cafe X locations at the San Jose Airport and San Francisco Airport. These new locations feature the latest version of the Cafe X robot, which includes an expanded menu and a customizable space for items like baked goods.

As part of that airport push, Cafe X had been working to get its NSF Certification so its robots can be designated as vending machines. In an interview with The Spoon in November, Hu said that this would allow Cafe X robots to operate longer hours and without a human on hand (Cafe X’s SF locations featured a person to help with drink selection and customer service).

In a tweet confirming the downtown closures, Hu wrote:

Our 3 downtown SF locations helped us develop the newest machine that we launched recently at SJC and SFO. Thanks to our amazing customers who supported us in SF over the last 3 years.

We received the following statement from Hu by email this morning:

We launched our prototype robotic coffee bars in San Francisco in 2017, in an effort to perfect our beverage offerings, software, and hardware solution.

We launched our newest V2.1 product at two airports, SFO and SJC, in Q4 of 2019, which now serve thousands of customers every week and is capable of preparing up to six drinks in a minute.

Having learned everything we could from our San Francisco locations, we decided to laser focus on growing Cafe X at airports through partnerships with leading coffee brands and retailers in addition to Cafe X operated units. 

Cafe X has raised $14.5 million in funding, with its last round being $12 million back in August of 2018. The sudden shutdown of its three SF locations and the departure of its COO last August could be seen as some sort of harbinger of more bad news to come.

Food robot startups have hit some tough times recently. Zume, which uses robots to help make pizzas, is reportedly laying off 80 percent of its staff. And according to Axios, Creator, the robot hamburger restaurant also in SF, hit a fundraising snag when Softbank supposedly backed out of an investment deal.

The case for Cafe X optimism would be the company’s recent airport launches. Airports are a potentially big market for automated food service that can serve passengers and employees at all hours of the day. Cafe X robot coffee rival Briggo recently launched at the San Francisco airport as well and has signed a deal with SSP America to open up 25 more airport locations.

We have reached out to Cafe X to learn more and will update this story accordingly.

Postmates’ Serve Robot Spotted (and Filmed) Making Deliveries in LA

From the looks of it, Postmates’ Serve robot is ready to roll into action, almost exactly a year after the delivery service unveiled it.

First, Serve made an appearance on The Ellen Show last week in a staged bit about delivering chips and guacamole. And almost immediately after that, Chris Reilly posted an Instagram video of Serve out in the wild making a delivery in “#Hollywood” by the “#CNNBuilding.”

It’s not exactly thrilling footage, but it does show that Serve is real and making rounds around La La Land.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5tJXUxlN6b

In addition to being cute and cool, Serve’s apparent public debut party, as it were, is a bright spot for what has otherwise been a bummer of back half of 2019 for Postmates. The company delayed its IPO following the WeWork debacle and a general souring on third-party delivery services that have yet to prove their profitability. Then last week, Postmates shut down its Mexico City office and laid off dozens of employees across multiple offices in the U.S.

But Postmates continues to ride the robot delivery wave. Serve is just one of the delivery rover robots that have rolled into the market this year. Starship is being used by a number of colleges now, Refraction AI is proving its hardiness by making deliveries in snow covered streets, and Kiwi just announced a reinvention of its own robot that will make the device more rugged and give it the ability to retrieve items from vending machines.

Los Angeles is an interesting test case for Postmates’ delivery robots. It’s very spread out, which typically works against rover bots with their slow speed and smaller delivery range. However, Los Angeles has nice weather year round and is pretty flat (making it easier for the robot to get around), plus it has a ton of celebrities who order via Postmates.

Postmates seems to be focusing Serve’s, errr, service in California right now. The company announced it August that it was given a permit for sidewalk robotics operations from the City of San Francisco.

Kiwi Unveils New Name and a New Robot (That Can Get Food From Vending Machines!)

Words matter. That’s a lesson I hope robot delivery startup learned earlier this week when it sent out an email saying “We want to let you know that we will be ending the Kiwibot delivery service, effective December 15, 2019.“

We weren’t sure exactly what that meant, and after a full day of confusion and multiple explanatory emails from the company, it turns out it wasn’t the END end for Kiwi. It was just stopping service for the winter. (Sidenote: Don’t skimp on a copywriter.)

The company then said it would be announcing its reinvention yesterday, which it did towards the close of business with a corporate blog post. Kiwi had already shared some details from this “reinvention” earlier in the week: the company has changed its name to “Kiwibot,” there’s a new, more rugged robot on the way (see video below), and something called Kiwi Express promises to be the “First end to end robotic Food delivery service.”

Yesterday’s blog post added a few details:

In 2020, we will roll out Kiwibot Cloud Pro. A new generation is coming. Refined hardware design, new operations features, and superior human interactions will transform the logistics landscape and yield better service.

We combine sensors of a custom made stereo camera to get more information about the environment. Our Kiwibots will sense the world more accurately and move more precisely. Our Kiwibots are now resilient to dynamic light conditions on different sidewalks.

Kiwibot v3.2 | Nuestro robot más avanzado

In addition to the new technology, this new Kiwibot is also more rugged, which will make it less likely to get stuck (and need a human’s help).

On Kiwibot’s website, the company says that its robots can now interact with vending machines. At first blush, this might seem like overkill to have a robot pick you up a Snickers bar from the lobby vending machine because you are too lazy to walk down there. But vending machines are changing and turning into something more akin to small restaurants. Companies like Yo-Kai Express serve hot ramen from vending machines, and Cafe X is re-classifying its coffee robot as a vending machine. So being early to integrate its robot with those types of systems now makes a lot of sense for Kiwi.

It’s nice to know that Kiwi isn’t shutting down. While there are still a lot of issues to work out, I’m still a big believer in robot delivery. More players in the space means more competition and more innovation.

Now Kiwi just needs fewer wording mistakes.

Starship Robots Roll Out to University of Wisconsin-Madison, Can They Survive the Winter?

I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but people from there tell me that it gets cold about this time of year, I mean, it snowed there on Halloween last week, with more expected tomorrow and Wednesday. This type of inclement weather was actually the first thing I thought about when Starship sent me a press release today announcing that its robots are now rolling around the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), delivering food.

Starship makes six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that can carry 20 pounds worth of cargo. UW-M has 66,000 students, staff and faculty, and is getting 30 Starship robots those people can use by downloading the Starship app, ordering from three different markets at the school and dropping a pin on the campus map to set the delivery point. There is a $1.99 delivery fee and at first, the delivery area will be limited to a specific area before expanding across campus.

This is the latest school to adopt Starship’s delivery robots, following George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Purdue, University of Houston and the University Pittsburgh.

Pitt, however, recently suspended its robot delivery program after running into issues with the autonomous robots allegedly blocking sidewalk access to people in wheelchairs.

That type of real-world complication makes me wonder how the robots will do when truly nasty Wisconsin weather strikes. On the one hand, I’m sure that Starship and the UW-M have thought about this and come up with solutions. One advantage to delivering on campuses is that they are smaller geographic areas with lots of walkways and dedicated maintenance staffs to keep those walkways safe and clear.

But still, snow and ice could be big obstacles for a robot with little wheels. That’s one of the reasons Refraction.ai is using fat bike tires for its autonomous robots. Not to mention that the performance of lithium-ion batteries, like those in Starship robots, degrades in cold temperatures. We reached out to Starship to see how they will address the cold, and will update when we hear back.

UPDATE: Starship sent us the following statement: “The robots are designed to work in a variety of conditions including snow and rain. There is negligible battery degradation in the extreme cold.”

In the meantime, there are now 66,000 people at UW-M who are more likely to avoid the bitter cold and can stay in and order food thanks to Starship’s robots.

You Know You Want to Read a Story About a Cocktail Robot Called SirMixABot

It’s hard coming up with a name for a product. It has to be catchy, memorable, and ideally give you some kind of inkling as to what the product does. With that in mind, I’m going to go ahead and declare SirMixABot to be a Hall of Fame product name.

Aside from scratching any 90’s nostalgia itch, SirMixABot is a pretty fantastic name for a cocktail making robot. Load up to six bottles on the top and then use the built-in touchscreen (or accompanying app) to see all the drinks you can make. Set your glass in the machine and SirMixABot does the rest.

Sadly, you can’t get a SirMixABot at this time. The company had been selling DIY kits where you assemble the robot at home but the stopped making and shipping that version. As Brendan Stiffle, Co-Founder and CEO of SirMixABot told me by phone this week: “Selling DIY was great because it let us bootstrap [our] first iteration.” However, he went on to add that “the market is much larger when you have a plug-and-play unit.”

Plug-and-play is just a fancy way of saying Stiffle and Co. want to sell a straight up countertop device, no assembly required. To help with that endeavor, Stiffle, who is currently a student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, got SirMixABot into the MIT Delta V accelerator, which provided some funding as well as access to engineering resources at the school.

Stiffle’s plan is to roll out SirMixABots around Boston to discover and work through any issue before taking it out more broadly in 2020. The company is actually going after multiple target markets: home use, offices, and even event services. As such Stiffle wouldn’t provide any pricing information as it will change depending on whether someone is leasing it or buying the machine outright. FWIW, the DIY version of the six-bottle SirMixABot cost $499 plus shipping.

SirMixABot is stepping into a market that is already pretty crowded with established cocktail bots. Bartesian (made by Hamilton Beach) sells for $350, though that uses flavor pods to make drinks. The Barsys uses a similar bottle system as SirMixABot, but costs close to $1,000. DrinkWorks (a joint venture of Keurig Dr. Pepper and Anheuser-Busch) is slowly rolling out its countertop drink maker, which also makes beer and cider, and costs $299. And of course, let we forget the MyBar, which you can buy assembled for $399 or as a DIY kit for $299.

Then there is also the issue of scaling production. Right now, SirMixABot is bootstrapped with six students and other part-timers working on the project. As we’ve seen from crowdfunded hardware projects that have gone bust, moving from a prototype to a full-on mass produced appliance is not easy. But Stiffle doesn’t seem daunted by the task. “Hardware is hard,” he said, but “it doesn’t scare us.” Students on the team will be graduating with in a year and after MIT the company will shift into fundraising mode.

We’ll have to check in on SirMixABot next year to see if Stiffle’s baby got greenbacks. (ed. note; SORRY!).

From Power to Perception, What Challenges Do Drone and Robot Delivery Need to Tackle?

The devil is in the details, as they say, and this became more apparent then ever after I moderated a panel on robot and drone delivery at GreenBiz’s Verge 19 conference in Oakland, CA this week. These devilish details, however, are important for everyone involved in the food space: retailers, delivery services, governments and even consumers to consider as autonomous robotic delivery moves from sci-fi to sidewalk.

On the panel were Jill North, Innovation and New Technology Program Manager for the City of San Jose; Natasha Blum Founder & Principal Director, Research & Strategy at Blumline; Matthew Lipka, Federal Public Policy Lead for Nuro; and Connor French, General Counsel at Zipline International.

The biggest takeaway from our lively discussion was just how complicated it is to deploy robots and drones, and how we are learning about these complications in real time. This was perfectly illustrated with news this week that the University of Pittsburgh is pausing its robot delivery with Starship because the robots may have been blocking people from wheelchairs from accessing the sidewalk. The real world has a way of bringing up complexities that may not have been foreseen while testing or were perhaps just ignored.

As a government employee, the real world is very much where North works. As an employee of the city of San Jose, she has to find a balance between pushing innovation ahead and not leaving people behind. Robots can’t be implemented just because they are cool, or because they get tech bros their burritos faster. She needs to answer questions like who has access to these new services? How will they interact with emergency services? How will they get electrical power? And because all this is so new, there aren’t a lot of answers right now.

Blum, however, is in the business of finding answers. Her Blumline research and design firm helped work on Postmates’ Serve robot by taking an ethnographic approach. Her team went into specific communities to learn what would be considered friendly or off-putting in a robot design. For example: should a robot sit higher and be more visible and sacrifice maneuverability or the other way around? One interesting outcome of Blum’s work could be that robots are customized for each community, featuring different colors or designs that make people more comfortable with the emerging automation in our lives.

Another technology that faces an uphill battle when it comes to getting people on board is drones. As French explained, drones are either associated with battlefield killing machines, tools of a surveillance state, or just the loud, buzzy nuisance that someone flies at the park. This puts the drone industry in a bit of a conundrum. It needs to expand into more benevolent purposes (e.g. medicine and food delivery to remote or hard to reach areas), but it can’t do so until more people are more comfortable with the idea of drones flying over their neighborhoods.

One company already in neighborhoods is Nuro, which has been using its pod-like, low-speed vehicles for grocery delivery in cities like Scottsdale, AZ, and Houston, TX. Lipka pointed out was that even if you work and engage with cities, communities and consumers, Mother Nature can still come along and throw you a curveball. A curveball like haboobs, which are intense dust storms that spring up in places like Arizona. These storms can do all kinds of damage to the sensors and cameras on a Nuro. Learning to interact with the idiosyncrasies associated with different environments is something robot and drone designers must pay attention to as well.

Finally, the big, yet-to-be-answered question from all of this innovation in the drone and robot delivery space is: Who pays for what? As North pointed out, more autonomous robot delivery means fewer people paying for parking, a major source of municipal income. Who pays for the upkeep of roads or new infrastructure like expanded sidewalks or special lanes on roads? The taxpayer? The private company?

This is all new territory, and again, it’s evolving in real-time right in front of us. But discussions like the one from this panel will help more people think about and develop strategies around solving the issues before they happen, rather than trying to fix them after the fact.

Chowbotics Gets a New CEO as Founder Moves to President Role

Chowbotics, maker of Sally the salad making robot, announced yesterday that Rick Wilmer will be the company’s new CEO (hat tip to FE&S magazine). Founder and former CEO Deepak Sekar will assume the role of president and be responsible for technology, products and strategic partnerships.

Wilmer’s 30 plus year professional background is not in food, but rather in more hardcore technology. Previously he was CEO of Mojo Networks, which he led to an acquisition by Arista Networks, and prior to that he was CEO of Pliant, which he led to an acquisition by SanDisk for $327 million.

This is the second bit of CEO shuffling we’ve reported on this week here at The Spoon. On Tuesday, we revealed and Dave Zito was no longer CEO or with Miso Robotics, the startup behind Flippy, the burger making robot. Though we still don’t know the reasons behind Zito’s departure.

A former boss of mine was fond of saying that there are two types of CEOs: builders and scalers. Builders know how to get the product and company off the ground, and scalers know how to guide the company through its next levels of enterprise level growth.

With this chestnut in mind, Chowbotics’ CEO replacement is probably not the last bit of executive shuffling we’ll see in the near term at a food robotics company, and that’s a good thing. It shows that the industry is maturing beyond the building-a-startup stage and into the scaling-a-business stage.

Sekar stepping down comes following a year where Chowbotics’ Sally has been expanding into Europe, finding success in hospitals, and even going off to multiple colleges. But its early mover advantage in the standalone food robot space is quickly evaporating as a new wave of automated food kiosks come to market. Farmer’s Fridge and Fresh Bowl are fresh salad machines coming to market, while high-end vending machines like like Yo-Kai Express and Basil Street Express offer fully cooked meals like ramen and pizza. All of these player will be fighting for prime square footage to feed hungry students, airline passengers and office workers.

Chowbotics will need to scale in order to tip the scales in its favor.

Cala Raises €1M for its Vegetarian Pasta Making Robot

In addition to the coffee, smoothies, cheeseburgers, chicken tenders and pizza robots are making, you can now add pasta dishes to that list. Paris-based Cala has developed a pasta cooking robot, and recently raised €1 million (~$1.1M USD) in angel funding to help bring it to market early next year.

Cala’s pastabot will be the center of a self-contained mini-restaurant that measures 5 square meters (~53 square feet) and can make up to 800 dishes an hour. As you can see from the video below, the Cala bot uses Cartesian approach, rather than an articulating arm. The restaurant will be fully autonomous. Users order via mobile app, meals cost €6 with a drink (~$6.6 USD), and the robot prepares and plates all of the food as well as doing the cleaning.

“We want everything to be sustainable,” Cala CEO Ylan Richard told me in a phone interview this week. And that sustainability runs throughout the company and its robot. First, Richard believes that the only way to sustain a business of bringing healthy food to people quickly while making enough margin is through robotics.

Second, right now Cala bot only serves vegetarian dishes. In addition to being better for the planet, avoiding meat also cuts down on costs and complications associated with storing and cooking all the ingredients inside the machine. Richard says they use “a lot of organic things,” but says his bigger priority is to locally source all of their ingredients.

Cala ran a live test restaurant in Paris for four months and Richard said that from the test the company learned that it’s important for the robot to fade into the background once the meal is served. “If you don’t come just for the meal that means there is something wrong with the way we do things,” Richard said. This mission for the robot to merely be the means and not the star of a restaurant is pretty much the exact same thing that Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas told us at our Articulate Food Robot conference earlier this year.

What’s kind of funny is that France, famous for its hallowed culinary tradition, is now home to not one, but two different robot restaurant companies. Earlier this year PAZZI (formerly EKIM) raised €10 million for its autonomous robot pizza restaurants.

I asked Richard about any dichotomies around French companies building what is quite literally lifeless food preparation. He told me that sure, France is famous for its high-end cooking, but the French are also some of McDonald’s biggest customers. “Sometimes we just want to eat something quickly,” he said.

Cala will use its recent funding to bring its robo-restaurant back to the public at the beginning of next year. The company plans to own and operate its next location, which will be outside a university in Paris. Richard said that as the company grows, it will look at franchising, rather than licensing the technology out to a larger brand, and that eventually Cala will make more types of food beyond just vegetarian dishes and pasta.

Henn Na Cafe is Tokyo’s Robot Barista. Here’s What It Looks Like

Growing up, UHF TV stations would run Japanese anime cartoons that featured giant robots. Fast forward a few decades to when I finally got the chance to visit Tokyo, and I thought the city would be lousy with robots. But sadly, that turned out not to be the case. In fact, I could only find one coffee robot in Tokyo — which is a bit surprising, given that San Francisco has three, plus another one at its airport.

Nestled in the heart of the H.I.S. travel agency in the Shibuya part of Tokyo sits the Henn Na Cafe (fun fact, Henn Na means weird in Japanese). “Tom,” the autonomous articulating arm that serves up hot and iced coffee, matcha tea and other assorted drinks and snacks. Tom is akin to Cafe X, but doesn’t offer the same variety, and, at least from my viewing, sadly doesn’t perform any theatrics for customers. Tom does, however, sport a pair of bright eyes and a dapper chapeau for a more personal touch.

Tom and the Henn Na Cafe were installed in H.I.S. in February of last year because the travel agency thought that as people plan their vacations, they would like to discuss them in a cafe-like setting. But it wasn’t feasible for the company to dedicate staff to making lattes, so it brought Tom online.

Tom is actually two robots: the articulating arm, which shuttles cups and coffee grounds around, and the PourSteady, an automated pour-over coffee machine. Place an order for hot or iced coffee at the nearby kiosk and Tom whirrs into action. Three to four minutes later, Tom pulls your finished coffee and sets it in a small case for people to pick up. Though unlike other coffee robots, this is just a plain case with no screen or anything to indicate whose drink is up. But that probably isn’t as necessary, given H.I.S. is a travel agency first, and the cafe is more of a, pardon the pun, perk.

Since I was in town, and Grendeizer wasn’t flying overhead, I popped to make a quick video for you to see Henn Na Cafe’s Tom for yourself.

Tokyo's Henn Na Cafe Robot Cafe in Action

City By the Bot: Postmates Gets Permit to Test its “Serve” Delivery Robot in San Francisco

San Francisco has given Postmates the city’s “first-ever permit for sidewalk robotics operations,” according to a story in TechCrunch. The move marks a turn in the city’s official attitude towards delivery robots on its city sidewalks.

Postmates unveiled its rover robot, dubbed Serve, in December of last year, but has been relatively quiet about the program since then. Serve is a cooler sized robot on wheels that can carry 50 pounds, go 25 miles on a charge and uses a combination of cameras, lidar and human assistance when needed to navigate.

But perhaps more intriguing than the robot itself is the city it will, errr, Serve. In December of 2017, the city of San Francisco enacted tight restrictions on the use of commercial sidewalk robots. At the time, San Francisco’s robot ban was seen as part of its attempt by the city to get ahead of a technology issue and avoid the civic complications things like ridesharing and corporate commuter busses created.

But while San Francisco clamped down, nearby cities like Berkeley and Sacramento and other towns across the country like Phoenix and Houston rolled out the welcome mat for delivery robots… at least for testing. Perhaps San Francisco felt that getting ahead of any robotic problems could wind up leaving it behind.

Postmates told TechCrunch that it has “…been eager to work directly with cities to seek a collaborative and inclusive approach to robotic deployment that respects our public rights of way, includes community input, and allows cities to develop thoughtful regulatory regimes,”

The robot delivery sector is certainly heating up this year. In addition to Postmates, rivals Kiwi and Starship have been heading to college campuses, Amazon is testing out its Scout robot in Irivine, CA, and Refraction AI just recently launched its three-wheeled autonomous delivery vehicle.

Postmates raised $100 million at the beginning of this year and is expected to go public later this year. If they follow through, perhaps a robot could ring the opening bell.

Report: Amazon Still Working on a Robot for Inside the Home

Amazon is still hard at work building an actual Rosie the Robot-type robot for your home, according to a report today in Bloomberg.

We first heard about this robot a little more than a year ago, but this latest report indicates Amazon has not given up on the project and has actually increased work on it — though details remain scant. We know it’s called “Vesta” internally at Amazon, and Bloomberg’s sources say prototypes have wheels and “are about waist-high and navigate with the help of an array of computer-vision cameras.” It also can be summoned with voice commands a la Echo and Alexa.

Evidently, Amazon had wanted to debut the robot this year according to Bloomberg, but it’s not ready for scaled up production. The robot could also never see the light of day, projects get killed all the time at large companies, but Bloomberg writes that Amazon has added engineers to the project, which could mean it plans to sell Vesta at some point.

Beyond all this, we still don’t know what this robot is for. It could be some type of mobile Alexa that follows you around, and, for our purposes here at The Spoon, potentially help you by controlling various connected kitchen gadgets or ordering groceries, but without more information, we’re just guessing.

When we first wrote about Vesta, I was skeptical that it would be just a mobile virtual assistant. First, we don’t know if the robot can do things like climb stairs, which is kind of important in a lot of houses. Second, Echos are so cheap, if you need a ubiquitous Star Trek-like computer assistant, you could just get a bunch of Dots and place them all throughout the house.

Others disagreed, however. Last year friend of The Spoon, Kevin Tofel, wrote:

So maybe Vesta is more of a roving Echo than a robot that can fold laundry or make your coffee.

I’m OK with that and here’s why. I’d rather have one smart speaker that also has a camera than speakers and cameras — think Echo Show and Echo Spot — in every room of the house. If that one device can either follow me around the house or be within earshot, I don’t need multiple devices that basically do the same thing. And I can send a camera-enabled device away if that device is a robot.

But again, without more information, it’s hard to say how useful this robot may or may not be.

What we do know, however, is that we have reported on three different versions of home-related Amazon robots over the past year. In January, Amazon launched Scout, a squat cooler-looking rover bot that deliver packages. And in February, The Spoon uncovered a patent for an Amazon autonomous ground vehicle that would live in a persons garage and go out to fetch packages.

In addition to the robot news, the Bloomberg story also reported that Amazon is also prepping a new version of its Echo with improved sound.

FIBBEE is a Moscow-Based Robot Barista

If I told you that Russian ‘bots were getting more sophisticated and spreading, your first reaction might be one of concern. But what if I told you that those Russian ‘bots served coffee? Well, then you might welcome them with open arms.

Moscow-based Foodtronics has created FIBBEE, a robot barista that serves up all manner of lattes and other coffee drinks. Like Briggo and Cafe X here in the U.S., FIBBEE is an automated kiosk that can be set up in high-traffic areas, and like those American counterparts, the number of FIBBEE locations is expanding.

Moscow is downright hot for robo-baristas right now, as FIBBEE joins another automated coffee service, MontyCafe.

In our quest to chronicle the rise of food robots all over the world, following is an email interview with Foodtronics’ CEO Alexandr Khvastunov about FIBBEE. NOTE: Answers in this post were slightly revised after publication as Foodtronics felt the translations weren’t entirely accurate.

SPOON: What is Fibbee?
Aleksandr Khvastunov: FIBBEE is a robot-barista. We believe that it has a female entity so FIBBEE is her given name. Her personality is bright, easy-going and positive.

Besides the fact that she’s an ideal barista who never fails, FIBBEE may give you emotional recharge. She serves coffee to customer in one of the five colorful cups which are supposed to provoke different moods: boost, energy, balance, insight and fun.

How is Fibbee different from Cafe X, Briggo or even MontyCafe?
We’ve been professionally engaged in coffee for the past 8 years. We’ve opened traditional coffee houses (so-called third wave coffee houses), were engaged in the coffee wholesale and other projects.

At some point we understood that robotic retail may give us an opportunity to grow and scale well our love of coffee as of the lack of human factor – FIBBEE is fast, she’s always in a good mood and ready to meet your needs.

We have developed almost all technical components for FIBBEE, from chips and control systems to our own manipulators (specific system of moving objects).

We also have two coffee machine modules and we can brew two drinks at the same time. One manipulator inserts glasses into the coffee machine and when the drink is ready rearranges it into the waiting buffer. Another manipulator swaps coffee from the buffer to one of the 3 areas of issue.

How many different types of drinks can Fibbee make? Can it do hot and cold drinks?
Current menu includes espresso, americano, lungo, cortado, latte, cappuccino, cappuccino light, and coffee with syrups.

Still our customers can customize any drink. For example, they can add milk to black coffee in the required quantity, adjust the amount of foam and milk in cappuccino and latte, or select milk temperature (cold or hot).

In the nearest future we plan to introduce additional types of milk (soybean, oatmeal), various types of coffee beans and drinks with ice and nitro coffee which are being tested right now.

How many Fibbee’s are there and where are they located? How many more do you plan to roll out?
We have 2 robotic coffee bars now, and in July we’re opening the third. By the end of 2019, we plan to open more than 12 in Moscow. We’re creating our own chain and currently do not sell franchises.

Our ambition is to become the largest robotic chain of coffee houses in Russia and Europe. Because we love coffee and know how to make it delicious.