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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Robots + Connected Kitchen Appliances Can Help Diabetics Manage Diets

Anyone with kids knows that getting them to eat healthy can be a challenge. That challenge is compounded if your child has a disease like diabetes, where their diets must be strictly managed.

That’s where Belgium-based IDLab thinks robots can help, especially for older kids who are a little more independent. In the video below, IDLab demonstrates how a home robot working in conjunction with a connected cooking device like mealhero’s can help people with diabetes watch their carbohydrate intake and regulate their insulin accordingly.

The video shows more of a use case scenario, rather than a full-blown production level solution (it also over-simplifies the carbs in carrots). It’s also pretty complicated, requiring the robot, a mealhero meal plan and steamer, a connected food scale and a calculator to figure out the carb count of a meal to enter into an insulin pump.

But it’s easy to see from this proof-of-concept where the technology could eventually go. The robot provides a “friendly” interface to guide the child or whomever through a meal planning process. A product like mealhero works in this scenario because it has a standardized set of ingredients that are shipped individually and its connected cooking device automatically cooks the food. Similar companies like Tovala, Suvie or Brava could provide the same type of meal+connected appliance.

Given these basic building blocks, there’s no reason the process couldn’t work with any number of diseases that require adherence to a particular diet.

When we write about robots, there are often two big caveats: first is that there will be a human employment cost as automation continues; second, useful robotics applications in the home are still a ways off in the future. What IDLab is demonstrating here is that food-related robots can actually be helpful to people and while clunky, that robotic future is closer to today than some distant tomorrow.

Brookings: Food Service Jobs for Humans in Jeopardy as Automation Takes Hold

The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program released a new report yesterday on the future and impact of automation on the U.S. workforce. Predictably, food service jobs do not fare well.

Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places forecasts automation trends across industries through 2030. From that report:

Approximately 25 percent of U.S. employment (36 million jobs in 2016) will face high exposure to automation in the coming decades (with greater than 70 percent of current task content at risk of substitution).

Among the industries with the greatest share of tasks susceptible to automation, food service comes in second highest, behind production.

That food service is so greatly impacted by automation is not that surprising. The Brookings’ study follows a report last year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that predicted 14 percent of jobs worldwide were “highly automatable,” including food services.

But you also don’t need a fancy research paper to see the automation happening across the food service industry right before our eyes: Bear Robotics has Penny bussing tables, Flippy is grilling burgers, Cafe X is slinging lattes, Spyce is almost entirely robot run. And that’s just here in the U.S.

Definitely check out Brookings’ full report for more details on how automation will impact minorities in particular, as well as different states across the country.

Thankfully, the Brookings report doesn’t just dish out dire predictions, it also makes suggestions for how to deal with all of those soon-to-be displaced workers. Brookings suggests that governments should lean into this coming wave of automation, writing:

One response to the trends detailed here might seem to be to curb technology-driven change. Leaders should resist this impulse. Instead, while committing to a just and beneficial transition, they should embrace tech and indeed automation to generate the economic productivity needed to increase both living standards and the demand for labor in non-automated tasks. By embracing technology-based growth, the nation and its regions will have the best shot at ensuring that there are enough jobs

To be sure, automation is not uniformly bad. Robots can perform manual, repetitive tasks with greater speed and precision than a human. They are don’t get injured doing more dangerous work like operating a hot oven or deep fryer. Robots doing those tasks also free up humans for higher-skill and more customer-facing work.

Robots are coming, the process now will be managing the transition throughout the food service industry from our current, human-centric workforce to an automated one.

To help displaced workers and society at large with this impending transition, Brookings says we should adopt a “Universal Adjustment Benefit.” This benefit would include career counseling, retraining, and “robust income support.”

But I highly doubt our current political leaders are equipped and empathetic enough to take these suggestions seriously, or even recognize the issues related to automation and worker displacement already happening.

We at The Spoon, however, are encouraging this exact type of conversation and trying to help those up and down the food stack deal with automation. The ethics surrounding robots and automation in the food industry is one of the topics we’ll have experts chatting about at our Articulate conference in San Francisco on April 16th. You should join us there and share your thoughts, and more importantly, solutions.

Starship Launches Robot Food Delivery Fleet at George Mason University

Starship Technologies announced that starting today lazy tech-savvy students at George Mason University can get food and drinks delivered via robot anywhere on campus.

A fleet of more than 25 robots will be deployed at launch at the Fairfax, VA school, which, the company says, is “the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services on a university campus.” The program was created in partnership with food facilities management company, Sodexo North America, and allows students and faculty to use the “Starship Deliveries” mobile app to order food and beverages from Blake Pizza, Starbucks and Dunkin’, with more campus eateries to be announced “in the coming weeks.” The new service works with the George Mason’s student meal plans, and charges $1.99 delivery fee to anywhere on campus between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m..

Campuses have been on Starship’s radar screen for a while now. In April of last year the company said that it would be deploying 1,000 robots to corporate and academic campuses by the end of 2018 (Starship has since backed off that number and in an emailed statement said instead they’d been focusing on “new offerings to cater to the needs of our customers and partners including our new package delivery service, and spending more time working with local charities and organizations to ensure every member of the community is confident and comfortable using our technology.”). The company has raised $42.2 million in venture funding and counts Daimler Benz as an investor. Its robots have already been hard at work making deliveries on Intuit’s corporate campus, and roaming the town of Milton Keys, Britain, delivering packages and groceries.

When asked how Starship was making money through this George Mason deal– Was it just through the delivery fee? Was it through leasing the robots or a revenue split?– the company simply replied that it “uses different revenue models depending on location,” and that it “sometimes charge[s] a margin on top of the delivery fee.”

Colleges are becoming a hotbed of robot activity. Kiwi has been making robot deliveries to the University of California Berkeley, and expanded to Los Angeles with an eye towards delivering to UCLA. And more recently, Pepsi enlisted Robby robots for mobile snack commerce at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA.

George Mason and the University of the Pacific programs are a little different however. Starship robots will be making straight point-to-point deliveries of ordered meals and drinks from eateries to anywhere on the GM campus. For its robot run, Pepsi is basically using an autonomous roving mini-mart filled with snacks and drinks that you can pre-order and/or buy on the spot, and will only show up to designated areas on campus.

College and corporate campuses are actually a great place to run autonomous robot delivery pilots. You have a lot of people confined to one general location for an entire day (and they all need to eat). If it’s a private campus, robot companies can sidestep city regulations required to operate on public streets (since, you know, a robot might catch fire). Additionally, for something like a college campus, you can train an entire generation of consumers to use on-demand robot delivery, which they will then presumably still want as they head off into the real world.

We predicted that robots were going to be a big thing this year, and Starship is certainly kicking things off with a robotic bang. If you want to know more about where autonomous delivery is headed, join us at Articulate, our one-day food robot and automation conference on April 16 in San Francisco!

Video: We Check Out Creator, the Burger-Making Robot

When I was in San Francisco last week I had the good fortune to visit Creator, the restaurant that cooks their burgers via robot.

Creator‘s 14-foot robot creates custom burgers from scratch. It splits and toasts the bun, adds condiments and toppings (like ketchup, lettuce, and pickles), drops and melts freshly-shredded cheese, and grinds and cooks beef patties — all to order. The process takes roughly 5 minutes and can make approximately 120 patties per hour.

Unfortunately, Creator doesn’t have a vegetarian option (yet), so I didn’t get to taste anything made by the burger-bot. But I did get to see it in action! Check out the sped up video below to see the whole process from start to finish.

A Visit to Creator Burger in San Francisco

Are you a huge food robot nerd? (Same!) Join us on April 16th in San Francisco for Articulate, the food robotics and automation summit! Tickets are available here, but they’ll go fast — snag yours now.

The Bartesian Home Cocktail Robot Will Ship in March

Sometimes a good cocktail takes a while to make.

And a good home cocktail robot? That can take almost half a decade to get things just right, at least if you’re Bartesian.

Of course, taking a long and circuitous route to market wasn’t originally part of the business plan for this Canadian startup. Like many companies who have initial Kickstarter success, Bartesian came out of the gate strong with plans to ship their hardware and capsule-based cocktail machine in a year. But, as is the case with so many Kickstarter hardware campaigners before and after, the original ship dates came and went as the company was hit with the hard reality of getting the product into production.

Over time, however, the company realized that their secret sauce – or rather, liqueurs, bitters and juices – was their capsule delivery system and not the robot itself. So last year,  the company decided to hand over manufacturing to an established housewares brand in Hamilton Beach as part of a three year manufacturing agreement.

“It was soul searching time” said Bartesian CEO Ryan Close last year when asked about the deal. According to Close, the company had to ask themselves, “Do we want to be an appliance company or a CPG company?” Eventually they decided to focus on the capsules after realizing doing both a replenishable and hardware would too difficult.

However, the decision to sign a manufacturing partner came only after the company had spent nearly three years working on getting a product ready to ship to Kickstarter backers. Because of this, the company made the interesting decision to hand assemble over 300 units and send them to their backers and – once manufacturing started – send the same backers an additional Bartesian when final production units were available.

“Our Kickstarter backers have been incredibly patient and supportive while we battled through the R&D and production of launching both innovative hardware and customized CPG’s,” said Close in a June 2018 interview with The Spoon. “They will each keep the KS unit, the retail version is an extra and all about gratitude for being with us from the start – extreme patience – and cheering us on from the sidelines.”

And so now in early 2019, the company is finally ready to ship production units to backers and into retail this March. According to Close, the retail price will be $299 and capsules, which are purchasable through the website, will go for $14 per six pack.

You can see the Spoon’s interview with Ryan Close at last week’s FoodTech Live @ CES below.

The Spoon Talks with Ryan Close of Bartesian (a home cocktail robot)

Meet Fromaggio, a Countertop Cheese-Making Robot

For most of us, making cheese at home seems almost laughably unattainable, something for the Martha Stewart’s of the world, not the average (or even above average) home cook. A simple ricotta, maybe, but a blue cheese or a cheddar? No way.

A new device claims it can make even the most hapless cook into a cheesemaker. Fromaggio, which debuted at CES 2019, is a smart countertop appliance that takes the guesswork out of making any kind of cheese. Just add the right type of milk (sheep, cow, or goat), pop in a pod of cultures, and press a button. In 48 hours or less you’ll have a round of cheese. (Admittedly, for hard cheeses like cheddar you still have to age it.)

We caught up with Fromaggio founder Dr. Glen Feder on the floor of our Food Tech Live event to get a hands-on look at the machine that will make everyone (yes, even you) a cheesemaker. And to eat our weight in cheese samples, of course.

The Spoon looks at Fromaggio, a smart home cheese maker

CES 2019 Video: The Fresh Geoffrey is a Robot Party Butler

Do I really need to say more than “Robot Party Butler” to pique your interest? Because if I do, thankfully I have a video from CES showing Fresh Geoffrey in action.

Fresh Geoffrey is an autonomous robot that can roam around your house serving you and your guests cold beer on tap, snacks, and, because the machine is French — wine. It even has a glass washer so you don’t mix backwash with that fresh pint. Geoffrey responds to your voice command so you can just call out to bring you a beer and voila!

Sadly, Fresh Geoffrey won’t be able to beer you up this Super Bowl, but the company says it should be shipping in time for the next one! You can see Geoffrey scooting around the CES show space here:

The Fresh Geoffrey is a Robot Party Butler

News Roundup: Sleep-Friendly Ice Cream, Beer Bot and Calorie Counting AI

We’re knee-deep in pre-CES news right now, and gearing up for the big show next week. But even in the midst of the news rush about robots and gadgets we’ll meet in Las Vegas, a few non-CES items caught our eye this week. We’ve shared a few of our favorites here.

Fro-doze, “Sleep-Friendly” ice cream on its way
A bowl of creamy, delicious ice cream and a good night’s sleep are like the peanut butter and chocolate of evening activities (they go great together). Now a company called Nightfood is looking to take that pairing a step further with a new line of what it’s calling “sleep-friendly” ice cream. No, there won’t be any Nyquil mixed in with its frozen delights. Rather, all the ingredients have been curated so as not to interfere with sleep--so less sugar and sodium, etc. The ice cream comes out in February and I for one, can’t wait to eat many pints in the service of sleep science. (The Daily Meal)

BuWizz Beer bot - the man's best friend

Lego robot brings you a beer
Perhaps you’ll be spending your weekend settling in front of the TV to watch some football (go, Seahawks!). The only thing that would probably make that experience even better is having a robot to run back and forth to the kitchen to fetch you a beer or other beverage. The folks at BuWizz, which makes motors for Lego contraptions, did just that. Built from Legos, the BuWizz beer bot is remote controlled with your phone and can open a fridge door (with a little help), then open and pour your beer. It’s crude, not entirely accurate with the pouring, and from the video looks to take longer than just grabbing the beer yourself, but it’s better than anything I ever built with Legos. (The Sociable)

China's calorie-counting checkout system

Checkout camera counts cost and calories
Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University has developed an AI-powered camera that can be mounted at self-checkout lines in cafeterias that can tally up the cost--and calories--of food being purchased. The Aeye-go uses computer vision to recognize colors and patterns in food to charge the right amount of money and inform students of their impending caloric intake. The system is currently in use in several universities in Shanghai. (South China Morning Post)

The Denver Broncos Get a Beer Pouring Robot at Mile High Stadium

While the Denver Broncos may be in the midst of a losing season, they could win over fans this weekend when a new robot starts dispensing Bud Light at Mile High Stadium (h/t The Washington Post).

You’d think that such a mechanical miracle would have a fancy name like the “Robo-Bronco” or the “Elway 3000,” but no, it’s just called UR5e. Created by Universal Robots and MSI Tec, UR5e is a robotic arm that can pick up an empty cup fill it with beer and set it down to serve a customer. You can see it action in this video.

Universal Robots UR5e Pours Bud Light

What’s more impressive to me in that video is not so much the robot — between Cafe X, Flippy, MontyCafe and Ekim, there are plenty of autonomous articulating arms out there — but that the beer is dispensed from the bottom of the cup. What sort of wizardry is this? Evidently the flow is controlled by a magnet, which is a cool, but seems to an an extra layer of waste to an already wasteful single use cup.

Stadiums like Mile High are where we will most likely see even more robots coming online to serve us in 2019. Flippy spent the past summer making chicken tenders at Dodger Stadium. Miso Robotics (which makes Flippy) counts hospitality company Levy as an investor, and Levy runs a number of sport and entertainment venues.

As we’ve said before, stadiums are a good use case for robots as they are high-traffic, high-volume settings. Robots can sit and repeat the same task over and over, churning out food or beverages non-stop throughout a game.

Plus, getting robots in concession stands gets us one closer to robots on the field, playing the rock ’em, sock ’em, football.

Raise a Glass for the New Robot Bartender in Prague

The sitcom, Cheers, probably would have been a lot less funny if the role of Sam the bartender had been played by an robotic, drink-pouring arm. I mean, sure, it can serve up glasses of chablis, but it probably can’t yell out “NORM!”

Reuters reports there’s a new robotic cocktail slinger in town, and it probably doesn’t know your name. At the Cyberdog cafe, which just opened in Prague this week, you aren’t clamoring among throngs of people, trying to get the attention of a disinterested bartender to order your drink. Instead, you place your order via a mobile phone app, and BUDY, an orange, articulating robot arm whirrs to life grabbing and opening bottles of wine, pouring them out and then loading the completed order on to a service tray, which travels overhead on rails before descending so you can pick up your drinks.


(h/t to The Washington Post for the tweet)

Robotic bartenders aren’t new. The Tipsy Robot bar in Las Vegas (of course) has been making robo-cocktails since July 2017, and at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe, FoodPairing’s robo-bartendar whipped up personalized boozy concoctions. Not to mention the home robo-bartending appliances hitting the market like Somabar and Bartesian.

Foodpairing powers this robot bartender from The Spoon on Vimeo.

Having worked at a bar, I can see why robots would be a bar owner’s best friend. They pour out precise amounts of liquor (no over-pouring), don’t call in sick and don’t steal from the till. Having patronized many a bar though, it seems like there is something lacking when a bar lacks humans. Bartenders are often funny, great conversationalists, and authentic sources of local information when traveling.

Cyberdog’s robot bartender may be a novelty now, but like its drink pouring robo-cousins Briggo and Cafe X (which just added iced drinks to its menu this week), the tireless, automated robotic precision will become common in high-traffic areas like airports, stadiums and anywhere else people want to grab a drink quickly, and faster service is something a lot of people would “cheers” for.

Cafe in Japan Uses Robots to Create Jobs for People with Disabilities

When we talk about robots in restaurants, we often talk about the human jobs that will be lost to this impending automation. But a cafe that opened in Tokyo this week is actually using robots to create jobs for people with physical disabilities.

The Japan Times reports that the Dawn Avatar cafe in Minato Ward, Tokyo will feature five robots that are roughly 3.9 feet tall that will take orders and serve food. The robots transmit audio and video over the internet so they can be controlled by people with conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) remotely from their homes. Ten remote workers with ALS will get ¥1,000 (~$8.79) an hour in wages for controlling the robots.

The cafe was formed as a joint project between Ory Lab, which develops the robots, Nippon Foundation and ANA Holdings. This iteration of the cafe is just a trial run and will only be open until Dec. 7. The three companies hope to launch a permanent version of the cafe in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

A shrinking population in japan is creating a labor shortage and robots are being built to do manual, repetitive work like making Takoyaki, a street food made from batter balls and minced octopus, and crêpes (even tri-colored ones!).

As Mike Wolf reported from our last Smart Kitchen Summit: Japan, a lot of innovation in that country comes from R&D departments in larger, established companies. For instance, Sony recently showed off its vision of the home robot chef and has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to develop food robots. And Softbank recently hooked up with Toyota to form MONET, a venture that will build autonomous vehicles to do things like deliver robot-made meals.

What I appreciate about Japan’s robot ambitions is how they are tying these programs into real world needs: aging at home, added mobility and in the case of this new cafe, providing new job opportunities for people who need them.

With Ahold Delhaize, In-Store Robot Fulfillment Centers Now a Trend

If it’s true that it takes three occurrences of something to make it a trend, then in-store robot fulfillment centers are now officially a trend in the U.S. Reuters reports Ahold Delhaize, the Netherlands-based grocery company, has partnered with Takeoff to roll out automated mini-warehouses at some of its retail locations, which include Food Lion, Stop & Shop and Giant Food.

The move makes Ahold Delhaize the third grocery giant to experiment with in-store robot fulfillment in recent months. In August, Walmart announced it would partner with Alert Innovation to build out an automated fulfillment center in its Salem, New Hampshire store. And just last week, Albertsons announced it was piloting its own robot fulfillment in partnership with Takeoff as well.

In-store robot fulfillment has the promise of speeding up delivery or pickup of groceries. Takeoff’s system usually takes up about an eighth of a store’s square footage. When an online grocery order comes into the store, a series of crates on racks and conveyor belts automatically shuttle food items to a human who assembles and bags them. The automated system could have a grocery order ready in as little as a half hour.

The fact that the fulfillment centers are built inside existing stores means that grocers don’t have to set up a separate distribution center with its own inventory (and accompanying systems). Since people typically shop from a grocer that is already in their neighborhood, delivery or curbside pick up of orders are that much closer–and thereby faster to reach their destination.

Online grocery shopping is set to hit $100 billion by 2022, and a recent study from the Retail Feedback Group showed that there is growing acceptance of purchasing fresh items such as produce and meats online, site unseen. This willingness to purchase even more food online from a generation of shoppers used to getting things on demand will make convenience and speed table stakes for anyone in the grocery game.

It should also be noted that the Ahold Delhaize deal marks the third publicly announced partnership for Takeoff. In addition to the aforementioned Albertsons, the startup is also working with Miami-area grocery chain Sedano’s. The company says it has agreements with five retailers and will have five of its fulfillment sites open in Q1 of 2019.

Not every grocer is jumping on the in-store bandwagon, however. Kroger upped its investment in U.K.-based Ocado earlier this year and has plans to build out twenty dedicated robot-driven grocery fulfillment centers over the coming years. The locations of the first three are set to be announced in the coming weeks.

None of these in-store automated systems are online yet, so it remains to be seen how they will be used and how much efficiency they will truly bring. But if they work as promised, today’s robot trend will be tomorrow’s new normal.