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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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

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

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

Comment Pazzi réinvente la restauration ? [FORMAT 1MIN]

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

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

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

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

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

Starship More Than Doubled its Robot Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

High school graduation happened last night in my town, which means in a matter of months, most of those kids will be heading off to college. And maybe, if they are lucky, they’ll be heading off to a college that has delivery robots.

As we’ve covered throughout the year, companies like Starship and Kiwi are bringing their li’l rover robots to college campuses like George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, UC Berkeley, Purdue, Cornell, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard. These delivery robots scurry about to bring hungry students snacks and meals.

At George Mason in particular, Starship’s robots are proving quite popular. According to an article yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education, George Mason has more than doubled it robot delivery fleet since January, adding 23 robots to the initial order of 20. And GMU is not stopping there: the university plans to add another 15 to the fleet in the fall.

That’s a lot of robots roaming about the quad.

In addition to adding more ‘bots, the popularity of robots also has the school imposing some limits. Starship told me during an interview earlier this year that though the robots could make deliveries 24/7, George Mason limits delivery hours so as not to interfere with students’ sleeping habits.

I used Kiwi’s robot delivery service at Berkeley earlier this year, and while it had its hiccups, the overall experience felt like living in the future. The ability to order food from your phone and have it delivered wherever you have on campus brings news levels of convenience that busy/lazy college students will quickly get used to.

Ford Developing Bi-Pedal Robot to Carry Deliveries from Driverless Cars to Your Door

Plenty of companies are bringing robot-powered delivery of food and other household goods to the last mile, but most stop at the last few feet. Autonomous cars park at a curb and little rover bots typically can’t climb the front steps of a house.

Which is why Ford is working on a bi-pedal robot that literally walks deliveries from driverless cars right up to your front door(h/t to Bloomberg). Dr. Ken Washington, Vice President, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, and Chief Technology Officer published a post on Medium today outlining the program, writing:

Enter Digit, a two-legged robot designed and built by Agility Robotics to not only approximate the look of a human, but to walk like one, too. Built out of lightweight material and capable of lifting packages that weigh up to 40 pounds, Digit can go up and down stairs, walk naturally through uneven terrain, and even react to things like being bumped without losing its balance and falling over.

Like something straight out of an Asimov novel, Digit folds up and sits in the back of a driverless delivery van. When a package needs to be delivered, it emerges from the vehicle, stands up and carries the package to a person’s doorstop. Digit doesn’t have a ton of autonomy gear and processing power on it. Instead, the driverless car, which is packed with sensors and mapping equipment, sees the surrounding area and sends Digit the best path to the door. If Digit needs help, or encounters something unexpected, the problem can be sent up to the cloud where another system (perhaps even a human) can assist.

Though the Ford post didn’t mention groceries specifically, they are a good use case for this type of robot delivery. Groceries are heavy, and even if a driverless car brings them to a house, a person still needs to go out to the street to retrieve and lug them back inside. The weight of groceries is one of the reasons self-driving delivery company, AutoX moved more into (the much lighter) restaurant food. For most, this walking to the curb is a minor inconvenience, but for those who have trouble moving, a robot walking packages to the door would be a big help.

Ford isn’t alone in getting goods up directly to your front door. Earlier this year, FedEx unveiled a its own delivery robot that can climb stairs (though it uses wheels, not legs), and Amazon received a patent for an autonomous robot that would live in a home’s garage and would venture out to fetch packages from delivery trucks.

There’s no word on when or if this particular version of Ford’s delivery vision will be coming to a neighborhood near you, there are still a lot of regulatory hurdles for self-driving vehicles to get through. But with the pace of innovation, robots are bound to be bounding up your walkway to deliver a package someday soon.

AI-Powered Robots Taste Testing Chinese Food for Authenticity

If there was one job you’d think would be safe from automation, it would be taste-testing. And yet, a report out today from The Star online says that in China, a government program has been using AI-powered robots to look at, smell and taste food to ensure its quality and authenticity.

China’s National Light Industry Council has been running a test for the past three years with different food manufacturers to test products such as black rice vinegar, fine dried noodles and Chinese yellow wine. From The Star:

The machines, which can learn on the job, are planted at various points along production lines to monitor the state of the food from raw ingredients to end product. They are equipped with electrical and optical sensors to simulate human eyes, noses and tongues, with a “brain” running a neural network algorithm, which looks for patterns in data.

These robots gather all the sensory information about the food, inspecting it for accuracy and consistency. According to the story, programmers and food experts have gotten the AI to take in all the multisensory data to make assessments that are roughly 90 percent as good as a human.

Though the AI can achieve results that are more consistent than a bank of human testers, The Star writes that the program is not without controversy. The China Cuisine Association objects to the robots, noting that the sophistication of Chinese food requires more nuance and understanding than the AI is capable of, especially when it comes to labeling something as “authentic.”

This isn’t the only instance of the Chinese government using AI to standardize practices in the food world. In January of this year, the Shaoxing Province of China started using cameras and AI in restaurants to automatically (and continuously) monitor sanitary conditions.

LG to Develop Food Robots with CJ Foodville

Looks like LG is getting into the dedicated food robot space with the announcement today that it has formed a partnership with Korean restaurant chain, CJ Foodville. According to the AJU Business Daily, LG will build a Flippy-like robot that will begin testing this year.

LG’s move into more dedicated food robotics isn’t that surprising as the company already has its line of CLOi robots to help out the hospitality industry. Plus, all of its main rivals have their own food robot initiatives as well. Samsung has its robotic arm kitchen helper, Sony partnered with Carnegie-Mellon to develop food-related robots, and Panasonic is helping roboticize the Haidilao restaurant chain in China.

LG and CJ Foodville didn’t provide details about the program, a senior official at LG was quoted by the Korean Herald as saying “Robots will help with repetitive chores on behalf of human employees while the employees can provide better service and value for customers.”

This is a common refrain and one we hear whenever robots are introduced into the workforce whether it be behind the grill or roaming the grocery aisle. We talked a lot about the issues of robots and human labor at our recent ArticulATE automation summit this week. One of the issues panelists brought up is that quick service restaurants are facing a labor crunch, with one of the reasons being that a lot of people would prefer the flexibility of driving for Uber rather than working in a kitchen.

Automation in the food business is inevitable, so expect even more robot announcements from LG and other consumer electronics giants throughout this year.

Grocer Giant Eagle to Spread Its Robotic Wings

There was a time when all you needed to make your grocery store stand out was a better selection of food. Those quaint days are gone as any food retailer worth its sel de mer now needs robots. Whether they are in the storeroom or out and about in the aisles, all the cool kids are getting robots: Albertsons, Kroger, Stop & Shop, and Walmart, to name a few.

Regional grocery chain Giant Eagle evidently got the robo-memo and will soon have its own automaton sailing up and down its rows of products. TribLive reports that Tally, a shelf-scanning robot, will be working at Giant Eagle checking inventory, identifying items put back in the wrong place and verifying price tags. Data collected by Tally can also provide insightful analytics about purchases, store presentation and inventory to store management. The robot, built by Simbe, has actually already been in use in pilot programs at a number of Giant Eagle locations in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron.

Same as just about every other grocery chain that adds robots to the roster, Giant Eagle insists that Tally won’t be taking any human jobs. Instead, the robot will assist humans by taking over tedious, time-consuming tasks (like going up and down the aisles, checking inventory).

Giant Eagle’s announcement comes just days after Walmart announced it was greatly expanding its robot program, adding shelf-scanning bots to 300 locations, as well as floor scrubbing robots to more than 1,000 stores. It also follows Ahold Delhaize’s news in January that it was deploying 500 “Marty” robots to scan for spills in its Giant Foods and Stop & Shop stores.

For those who keep track of this sort of thing, each of these robots is made by a different manufacturer. As noted earlier, Giant Eagles’ bot is made by Simbe, Walmart’s shelf-scanner is made by Bossa Nova and Ahold Delhaize ordered robots from Badger Technologies. In addition to keeping tabs on which grocers go robotic, we’ll also need to see which robots they are buying (and from whom) to see if there is a particular automated solution that is working better for retailers.

It should be noted, however, that the days of the shelf-scanning robot could be numbered. There are a number of companies building cashierless checkout systems that use hundreds of tiny cameras mounted to the ceiling which not only keep track of what people buy, but also give the store a continuous, real-time snapshot of shelf inventory. This sort of setup would be faster than waiting for a robot to make its rounds.

The fact that so many grocery stores are adding robots is just one of the reasons we created the ArticulATE food automation summit, happening next week in San Francisco. We’ll actually be talking food retail with Albertsons to see how robots play into its overall playbook. Tickets are just about gone, but you can still grab one today!

Truebird to Launch Five Robot Micro-Cafes in NYC This Year

When we first wrote about Truebird, the quiet NYC startup building automated micro-cafes, we didn’t have many details about the company or its go-to market strategy. But I had the chance to chat with Truebird Co-Cofounder and CEO Josh Feuerstein this week, who shared with me some more information about Truebird and how his barista ‘bot fit into the competitive robo-coffee landscape.

THE ROBOT
The first thing I asked him about was about the robotic design Truebird chose. Instead of an articulating arm or a series of rails and grippers, Truebird uses magnetic “pucks” that cradle coffee cups to slide them around a glass surface. While soothing to watch, it didn’t seem to be a particularly fast method for a machine meant to sling morning cups of joe to busy people in high-traffic areas.

“We chose them for a variety of reasons,” said Feuerstein, “Chief among them, we think it is a surprisingly warm and approachable and almost magical experience. For us the experience is really important.” He went on to say that while they are designing for an elegant experience the company is “very happy” with the throughput of the machine.

The machines themselves are smaller than competitors like Briggo and Cafe X. They fit through a standard door and don’t require any plumbing, so Truebirds can be installed easily and in a wide variety of locations.

Truebird Micro-cafe

GO-TO MARKET
Truebird is focusing on New York initially, and will deploy five of its micro-cafes throughout the city by the end of this year. While the company is still determining its pricing and business model, it is a B2B play and will partner with high-volume locations like hotels, hospitals, office buildings, etc. The machines will be owned and operated by Truebird, so the company will be responsible for stocking, maintenance and service.

Feuerstein said that at some point, Truebird will probably open a location that is its own dedicated space with “four walls.”

THE COFFEE
Unlike Briggo, Truebird isn’t going so far as to select and roast its own beans (though Feuerstein didn’t rule out that possibility). Instead, the company is working with roasters in the New York area. Truebird doesn’t offer the same variety of drinks as Briggo or Cafe X as it only carries traditional dairy milk and oat milk.

THE COMPANY
Truebird is 100 percent backed by Alleycorp and has 15 employees.

Geographically speaking, there are now three high-profile coffee robot companies across the U.S. Truebird in NYC, Briggo in Austin, TX, and Cafe X in San Francisco. This doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game as there are plenty of locations around the country that could use a coffee robot to caffeinate consumers. Heck, the San Francisco Airport alone is getting two coffee robots this year. The only question remaining is which robot serves up the tastiest lattes.

If you’re interested in the future of coffee and food robots, you should definitely come to our ArticulATE Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday. C-level speakers from both Briggo and Cafe X will be there. But we literally only have a handful of tickets left, so get yours today!

Video: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Visits Singapore to Talk AI With Inventors of the Rotimatic

Back when I worked at Gigaom, every year we’d invite Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on stage at our big cloud computing conference and interview him about the future of the Internet and distributed computing.

Nowadays Vogels is conducting his own interviews, heading out to far-flung locales to talk to innovators about how they are using cloud computing and AI to build products and change the world in ways both big and small.

It’s all for his new Amazon web show titled Now Go Build with Werner Vogels, and for his most recent interview, the cloud computing pioneer went to Singapore to talk to the inventors of the Rotimatic about why they built machine learning into a home food robot.

The video is a fun watch as Vogels visits with the wife and husband team of Pranoti Nagarkar and Rishi Israni in the middle of a bustling Singapore restaurant and later heads into the kitchen to try his hand at making his own rotis.

The conversation high point for me was hearing Nagarkar and Israni talk about why they decided to power what was, at first, a fairly simple automated roti maker with machine learning.

“I remember there is one particular phase where we tried to make it an embedded system where you have a fixed program that could run it and it could find out the right proportion of flour and water,” said Nagarkar, who came up for the idea of the Rotimatic after getting tired of making roti every day by hand.

“That wasn’t enough,” she said. ” You had to build machine learning in because every time you make a dough ball you learn something more about it and you use it for the next dough ball. It just kept making the machine better and better.”

Israni agreed and said they also realized machine learning would be necessary to ensure high performance of the robot over its lifetime.

“We see machine learning mostly in computer systems where things aren’t moving much” said Israni.  “Here with life, there is degradation in all the tolerances and all the parts, so the performance of parts keep shifting over time.

Eventually, the conversation turned towards the challenges of today’s food system.

“I’ve realized a few big problems with our world,” said Israni. “Seventy percent of illnesses are lifestyle disease-related, and they are primarily related to the type of food you consume.”

The other big problem is food waste. “One-third of world’s food is wasted,” said Israni.

Israni sees these two challenges are intertwined. “On one hand, you have people who are unhealthy who are maybe eating a little more than they need and the other you have people who are dying because of lack of food. We find that these two problems are prime problems to be solved by the kitchen of the future.”

How does a more technology forward kitchen helping solve these challenges? According to Israni, through shared data and more connected appliances.

“This is an information data problem,” he said. “We already know how to fix the knowledge gaps, but we can also execution gaps by building machines that are fully connected and exchange information with one another to delivery a cooking experience.”

Vogels agreed.

We also need “to see all of these devices as a platform and not only as a single function device,” said Vogels. “Software eats the world.”

“But you can’t eat software,” replied Israni with a smile.

You can watch the full video below:

Now Go Build with Werner Vogels – S1E2 Singapore | Amazon Web Services

Truebird Bringing its Robot-Barista Coffee to NYC

It’s the stones. They move like magic in Truebird‘s robot barista demo video, gliding across a glass surface to cradle and transport cups of coffee and lattes to waiting customers (go ahead and watch it down below, it’s mesmerizing). We’ve seen our fair share of coffee robots here at The Spoon, and at first glance, Truebird’s appears to be the least robotic.

We can’t tell you much about Truebird because not much has been written and they aren’t giving much information away. But they are a food (well, coffee) robot company, and food robots and automation are poised to drastically change how we buy our daily meals and beverages. So Truebird is a company we’ll keep an eye on, but for now, here’s what we do know:

Truebird creates automated micro-cafes, similar to Briggo and Cafe X. From the company’s Linkedin page:

We are for the busy people who love and appreciate high quality coffee, and are increasingly curious about where it comes from, and the caring hands that touched it. Through our micro-cafes, Truebird is a serene destination that provides a treat in the form of delicious coffee and a more elevated experience – but delivered efficiently, conveniently, and at a fair price for the busy individual on the move.

Truebird piloted its prototype for three months at New Lab in Brooklyn, and the company’s site says “The next Truebird evolution is coming to select NYC locations later this year.”

Truebird is backed by AlleyCorp, a New York based incubator that also backed MongoDB, DoubleClick and Business Insider.

Truebird Micro-cafe

Like Cafe X and Briggo, Truebird isn’t just about the robotics. It’s also focused on quality coffee. The company lists its own coffee program manager as an employee, but how involved in the coffee part of the equation is it? Is it like Briggo, which roasts its own beans, or more like Cafe X which highly curates the coffee it offers?

We reached out to Truebird to find out more, and will update when we hear back.

What is apparent is that each of these robot coffee companies is creating its own form factor and presenting its version of automation to customers in different ways. Cafe X has its articulating arm front and center and theatricality is part of its design. Briggo’s Coffee Haus, on the other hand hides all the complex machinery. If Truebird’s prototype is any indication, its robotics are more subtle (and with the stones perhaps even more artful), but are also meant to be watched in action.

The question is how fast those stones will be able to move. The whole point of a robot-barista is to sling drinks of consistent quality in high-traffic areas, like airports. While the stones are hypnotic, they won’t calm an impatient commuter waiting on their caffeine. Truebird, however, seems to recognize this, as its own copy reads that it’s for the “busy individual on the move.”

Busy individuals who are curious about the future of robot-made coffee should come to our ArticulATE food robot summit happening on April 16 in San Francisco. We’ll have the Founder and CTO of Briggo as well as the COO of Cafe X speaking, so it’s sure to be something you won’t want to miss!

Starship Delivery Robots to Roam Around Northern Arizona University

Starship announced today that it is heading off to (another) college.

Starting today, Starship will deploy 30 little delivery robots to Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, AZ. The school’s 25,000 students and faculty can use the Starship app to order meals from campus eateries and set a location for the robot to deliver the food. There’s a $1.99 delivery fee and orders will arrive in a “matter of minutes” according the press release, depending on the food ordered and the drop-off point. Students can pay for their food with their existing campus meal plan.

Today’s announcement follows a similar program Starship launched in January on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. Both programs are done in conjunction with food service management company, Sodexo.

Starship’s Senior VP, Business Development, Ryan Tuohy is speaking at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics conference next month. In a recent Q&A, we asked Tuohy how students were interacting with the robots. He responded:

The vast majority of people notice the robot on the sidewalk and simply pass by it. Initially, some people take a selfie or a photo of the robot. This effect diminishes over time as people in the particular location become familiar with seeing the robot in the area.

College and corporate campuses are a key go-to market strategy for Starship and other rover bot companies such as Kiwi (UC Berkeley) and Robby (University of the Pacific). Campuses are attractive for robot delivery and mobile commerce because they hold sizeable populations that either live or spend most of their time in one distinct — usually easily walkable (read: robot rollable) geographic locations — and have their own restaurants on-site.

FWIW, Arizona, like Florida, is turning into a hotbed of food robots. Over in Scottsdale, AZ, Kroger has been piloting grocer delivery via self-driving vehicles. If you want to know where the future of robots lies, then you should definitely come to our ArticulATE summit on April 16th in San Francisco to see Tuohy speak and interact robots like Kiwi and Penny up close.

This Origami Robot was Built to Bag Groceries

Groceries are a bit of an odd duck when it comes to automation. It’s a bunch of irregular shapes with different weights and oftentimes they are very delicate, so you can’t have just any robot hand trying to pick up and move them around. A grocery packing robot needs a certain… touch.

This was the inspiration for researchers at MIT and Harvard, who have developed an oragami-inspired Magic Ball robot gripper that can gently pick up irregularly shaped objects and place them where they need to go. From the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab blog post:

To give these soft robots a bit of a hand, researchers from MIT and Harvard have developed a new gripper that’s both soft and strong: a cone-shaped origami structure that collapses in on objects, much like a Venus flytrap, to pick up items that are as much as 100 times its weight. This motion lets the gripper grasp a much wider range of objects – such as soup cans, hammers, wine glasses, drones, and even a single broccoli floret.

You can check the origami bot in action here:

Origami Robot Gripper

Funny enough, this breakthrough robot was built to bag groceries. From that same blog post:

“One of my moonshots is to create a robot that can automatically pack groceries for you,” says MIT professor Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and one of the senior authors of a new paper about the project.

There are actually a number of companies working on making robotic manipulation of groceries better. Soft Robotics has its “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors” for delicate handling, and OpenAI has developed a robotic hand that can learn to do more human-like actions (like nestling groceries in a bag).

Rus’ breakthrough is coming at the right time. Robot-powered fulfillment centers are being built by a number of grocery outlets including Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize. Right now, these robot systems are more like crates that shuttle food items around and deposit them with a human who takes the assembled food and places it into the appropriate order.

If this origami robot works as described, humans could be removed from the fulfillment equation altogether. This brings up a whole hornet’s nest of societal issues that we talk about often here, and is part of a much-needed larger discussion about the role of robots in human society. But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just focus on the technology.

Using an origami picker in conjunction with an automated fulfillment center means your grocer can bag your order faster. Add in a self-driving delivery vehicle and you have an automated workflow that can run all day and night.

I’m sure this new Origami gripper will come up during our chat with Albertsons on-stage at our upcoming ArticulATE food robotics summit in San Francisco on April 16th. Get a grip on your ticket today!

ArticulATE Q&A: BreadBot’s Human Boss on What Consumers Crave and Stores Want

Surprisingly, two of the biggest stories out of this years’ Consumer Electronics Show (CES) weren’t about TVs or drones, they were about… food.

On the one hand, you had Impossible impressing with its new meatless burger. And tucked away in the South Hall of the convention center, a bread-making robot was busy baking loaves and grabbing headlines.

BreadBot is basically a mini-bakery that can autonomously make just about any type of dough-based bread (white, wheat, sourdough, etc.). BreadBot makes 10 loaves of fresh bread an hour that consumers take home basically straight out of the oven.

After seeing the BreadBot in action, we knew we wanted them to participate at Articulate, our upcoming food robotics and automation conference in San Francisco. Randall Wilkinson, CEO of Wilkinson Baking Company, the company behind the BreadBot, will in fact be speaking at Articulate. Before he takes the stage, though here’s a recent Q&A The Spoon did with him that will give you a sneak peek at (some of) what he’ll be talking about at the show. (The Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.)

THE SPOON: What is the BreadBot go-to market strategy? How do you see it being deployed?
RANDALL WILKINSON: We see a number of different areas that the BreadBot would fit into. Clearly the greatest volume of bread in the country and worldwide is sold in grocery and retail, and that is our strategy. We have three of the top five grocers in the U.S. that will be starting pilot test projects in the second quarter of 2019. In those stores BreadBot will typically be an installation in the perimeter of the store to engage the customer to give them the fresh bread they are looking for. But foodservice delivers a lot of bread in all sorts of institutions (airlines, etc.), also the military. The U.S. Navy was one of our first customers, using it for service the sailors and soldiers.

What are the advantages of using Breadbot? What is your pitch?
The most important thing for a retailer is that they provide what the customer wants. And forever what the customer has wanted fresh bread at a reasonable cost. More recently, the awareness of the use of preservatives, artificial ingredients, etc., have been a concern and so the healthiness of bread has been important. That includes the concern over the sugar that is added to bread unnecessarily to compensate for the lack of freshness. And there are also concerns that the consumer has about supporting local production, and not congesting the highways with trucking things in and the environmental impact that those things have. So all of those are concerns that consumers have.

But at its core, [consumers] want a lot of taste for value. And so BreadBot first of all delivers on the consumer’s desire for fresh bread, and the engagement of being able to transparently see their bread being made, to take home the loaf of bread they saw come right out of the oven, to engage in the store with the aroma and the tactile senses of taking your own warm loaf home. The halo of that sort of thing extends to the whole store and so stores are very much interested in that.

All of those are good reasons for a store [get a BreadBot], but what makes BreadBot even more compelling for a retailer is that the production in the store eliminates the distribution costs of the light fluffy loaves from central factories to the thousands of store shelves, which turns out to be a very expensive thing to do for merchant bakers. And if you do that production at the store, you save a lot on the production and distribution of that bread and that either becomes dramatically higher profits for the store or a more competitive position for the store being able to sell a premium loaf of ultimately fresh bread at a lower cost than the competition.

The BreadBot was a hit at CES. It seems like, pardon the pun, theatricality is baked into the BreadBot, so you want this to be front of the house for people to see?
Yes, absolutely. All of the grocers we’re talking with are facing the challenge of engaging their shoppers. What reason is there to come to the store when they can order online? So the stores are very much interested in what they can do to delight and engage their shoppers.

You know, bread has been dying or stagnant category for retail for decades. And the casual observer would think that for us coming to CES with an announcement about bread would be just about as ho-hum and unremarkable and announcement as one can imagine. Instead, what we had was an announcement that went viral. We think that the reason is not that people have given up on bread, but what they had given up on was that center-aisle bread that had been baked how many days ago and has no real punch or life or pizzazz to it. Knowing that they now have the opportunity to go into their grocer and pick a loaf of bread literally out of the oven apparently was really exciting to millions of people.

When building the BreadBot, how do you combine the art and science of bread making, when designing a robot like this?
The reason that this has never been done before — and we have the patents and intellectual property surrounding it — is that it’s hard. Anybody who’s tried to make bread knows what that means, because you take someone and you give them a recipe and you take three cups of this two teaspoons of that, you mix it up put it in the pan and you take it out of the oven and whoa, this didn’t come out the way grandma made it. So it’s a nuanced production that depends on the age of yeast, conditions yeast was stored under, the ambient temperature, ambient humidity, all of these different things and more. It is typically not something that a machine has the sophistication to do. In fact, we had to mothball the project for years because the sensors, and the kinds of things we needed weren’t available yet, and it’s only recently that they’ve become available.

What we’re now able to do is to monitor on an ongoing basis all of these different parameters and then on the fly continually adjust to changing conditions and whatever is needed to bring about that optimal loaf of bread. It’s a self-adjusting intelligent production system.

What is your favorite fictional robot?
I’ll have to go with Wall-E. He was trying to save people from themselves. In our own way, we think bread ought to be healthier than what it is. We ought to be improving the quality of bread that people get, and helping people end up on the right side of healthy food.

Robots and automation are coming to the food industry, and Articulate is an entire day devoted to the technological and societal implications of these impending changes. Check out our stellar lineup of speakers, get your ticket, and join the conversation at Articualte, April 16 in San Francisco.