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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Starship Robots Now Autonomously Deliver Packages

Starship announced today that it’s four-wheeled robots now autonomously deliver packages to people at their home and work, in a move that pushes the company beyond food delivery and more into everyday use.

The new service makes Starship something of a middleman in the delivery process. Users download the Starship app and when ordering something like spatulas from Amazon, has the item shipped to a Starship fulfillment center instead of their house. When it arrives at Starship’s facility, the customer is notified and can then schedule the robot delivery to their doorstep or office.

Right now, Starship’s autonomous delivery is only available in a three-mile radius in the town of Milton Keynes in the U.K.. The company says it will be expanding to the Bay Area by the end of this year.

Starship is pitching the service as a way to thwart package theft off your porch or stoop. It certainly isn’t alone in this endeavor. Amazon offers in-trunk or even in-house delivery while you’re away. Walmart and Phrame also enable deliveries to your fridge or car trunk, respectively.

I spoke with Starship CEO, Lex Bayer, who said that his company has 100 robots that have traveled more than 200,000 km and made more than 20,000 autonomous deliveries to date. One stat he shared that surprised me was that in all their deliveries not one of their robots have been vandalized or stolen or had anything stolen from it. It probably helps that their robots are monitored in a central HQ and humans can take over their driving at any time.

Delivery robots are becoming an actual thing… slowly. While rival robot companies like Kiwi are expanding into LA, and Marble continues its march across Texas, true adoption of this technology will hinge on state and city laws. Starship operates in the Bay Area in places like Intuit’s corporate campus, but just to the north, San Francisco has clamped down on commercial robot use.

There is also the question of what will people and towns prefer when it comes to home delivery. Will they want lots of small robots running around on sidewalks, or bigger autonomous delivery vehicles driving down city streets or drones flying overhead?

While those questions seemed like science fiction a few years back, companies like Starship are making them more of a reality we have to deal with (and, to be fair, enjoy the benefits of) right now.

Kiwi Delivery Robots Expand into Los Angeles

If you live in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, you can see sunshine, the occasional movie star, and now delivery robots shuttling food to hungry local denizens.

According to the Daily Bruin, Kiwi Campus started rolling out its delivery robots at the beginning of this month. Westwood is home to UCLA, so this particular expansion makes sense given that Kiwi already operates at and around UC Berkeley.

A spokesperson for Kiwi told the Daily Bruin that the company picked UCLA because of the compact nature of the campus. It probably doesn’t hurt that LA typically has great weather throughout the year, thereby reducing at least one bit of complexity for the autonomous, cooler-sized robots to navigate around.

Kiwi is working with 15 Westwood businesses including Subway, Jamba Juice and Veggie Grill. For now, however, robot deliveries are only being made off campus as Kiwi doesn’t have the necessary permits for them to scurry around campus. Until those are sorted out Kiwi will offer a human delivery person for on-campus deliveries.

Campuses in general are becoming a popular option for robot delivery companies. Earlier this year Kiwi rival Starship announced that it would be deploying 1,000 delivery robots by the end of this year and that campuses (both academic and corporate) would be a major avenue of growth for them.

Starting with campuses is a smart idea for robot delivery. They are like starter cities. First, you have a sizeable audience of students and workers who spend most of their time there. Working on campuses (at least private ones) can also help sidestep some of the municipal legal issues that come with running robots on city streets. Campuses are also typically well maintained, so roads and walkways won’t have as many hazards to navigate.

You might think students would be excited to have futuristic, self-driving robots running around their campus. But the reactions reported by the Daily Bruin were much more negative. Rather than a marvel of technology, students quoted saw them as easy targets for theft, causes of increased congestion and basically just something that won’t catch on.

Of course, if I had movie stars in my backyard, I may feel the same way (but maybe with this expansion Uber will give Kiwi a closer look).

Flippy’s Frying Pilot is a Hit at Dodger Stadium

Miso Robotics announced last week that in addition to cooking hamburgers, Flippy the robot is now a full-fledged frying machine after going through a pilot program at Dodger Stadium this summer.

According to the press announcement, Flippy has been working as a frying assistant since the end of July, and in that time has helped cook and serve more than ten thousand pounds of chicken tenders and tater tots, producing as much as 80 baskets per hour.

The Flippy platform started its culinary career at Caliburger, where it uses an array of computer vision, thermal sensors and AI to autonomously cook hamburgers. This summer, Miso began the pilot at Dodger Stadium to expand Flippy’s capabilities.

At the fryer, Flippy uses the Miso See, Miso Serve and Miso Move technologies to fry up the aforementioned tenders and tots. Miso See allows Flippy to identify food, cookware and utensils. Miso Serve helps the robot make real-time cooking decisions. Miso Move controls Flippy’s movements to make sure it is working safely and efficiently. All together, Flippy can put full baskets in the fry oil, monitor the cooking time (and gently shake the baskets while cooking), remove the baskets to drain the oil, and set the food at a designated location for serving.

With the pilot wrapping up successfully, it’s a safe bet that Flippy will be making its way to more stadiums over the next year. Levy, a Chicago hospitality firm that runs a number of sports and entertainment venues as well as convention centers, is an investor in Miso.

Flippy is among the first wave of robots that will be assisting/taking over food production in high-traffic areas. Robots like Flippy are perfect for sporting venues because they can work non-stop without needing a break, and can take on the more dangerous work such as frying food without getting hurt. Zume pizza is another company using robots for more dangerous work, employing automated assistants for pulling dough out of hot ovens.

Companies like Caliburger and Zume both say that robots help free up humans to do higher level tasks, which is true. But in settings like stadiums, the object is more about speed and volume, so it’s not hard to envision a future where ‘bots like Flippy take more jobs and reduce the number of people needed to run food establishments there.

It’s a sticky issue and one that we’ll be tackling at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle next month. I’ll be moderating a panel with people from Cafe X, Zimplistic and Chowbotics to discuss the evolution of robots, and we’re sure to touch on what that means for humans. Get your ticket to come and join the conversation!

Kroger and Nuro Launch First Pilot for Self-Driving Grocery Delivery Cars in Arizona

Starting today, if you shop at Fry’s Food Store onEast McDowell Road in Scottsdale, Arizona, you can get your groceries delivered via self-driving car.

This is the first such pilot to come from the previously announced partnership between Fry’s parent company, Kroger, and autonomous driving startup Nuro.

According to the press announcement, customers can shop via frysfood.com or the Fry’s Food Stores mobile app, and place their order based on available time slots. Grocery orders can be scheduled for same-day or next-day delivery by Nuro’s fleet of self-driving vehicles for a flat $5.95 fee with no minimum order.

The only bummer about this pilot is that for now, the two companies are using a self-driving Toyota Prius fleet — not the cute li’l R1 robot delivery pod/vehicles (seen in the picture above). The R1s will begin rolling out this fall. A Nuro spokesperson explained the Prius move, telling TechCrunch “The Priuses share many software and hardware systems with the R1 custom vehicle, so while we compete final certification and testing of the R1, the Prius will begin delivering groceries and help us improve the overall service and customer experience.”

What’s not spelled out in the press release is the role of humans in this pilot. As these are tests to learn about consumers’ acceptance of autonomous vehicles for delivery, I assume that there will be a human in the car for safety reasons. But is that a Kroger or a Nuro person? And will they bring the groceries in or just sit in the car while people come out to pick up their food? The R1s don’t have drivers, so those will presumably present an entirely different experience for the customer when those roll out.

Regardless, this self-driving delivery pilot is among the many tech moves Kroger is making in its ongoing grocery delivery battles with the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Albertsons. Earlier this year, Kroger increased its investment in U.K.-based Ocado, and will bring that company’s robotic, smart warehouses and last-mile logistics platform to the U.S. for faster, more efficient delivery.

When all these programs run for real, you’ll have robots packing your groceries, which will be loaded into autonomous vehicles that will deliver them to your door any time of day or night. If you’re in Scottsdale and shop at Fry’s, let us know if you use the new autonomous driving delivery and how well it goes.

Video: A Trip to Caliburger to See Flippy the Robot and Pay with my Face

If you read our newsletter (and you should!), you know that I’m in Los Angeles this week. One of the reasons I was so excited to come down here was to finally meet Flippy, the burger flipping robot.

Flippy is currently online at Caliburger in Pasadena, where it cooks up anywhere between 500 and 1,000 burgers a day, according to a Cali Group representative. Behind a glass wall, the robotic arms swings and swivels to turn meat over, change spatulas for raw and cooked meat, and remove burgers from the heat to set them aside for dressing.

Its movements are faster than I expected, especially when dropping off finished burgers. It’s a quick, precise motion, but almost jerky in its precision.

What was especially interesting was watching it interact with the human co-workers, who placed raw patties to the grill, added cheese and dressed each burger. Humans also do a temperature check on each of Flippy’s cooked burgers to ensure food safety. People seem to have figured out the dance they need to do with Flippy and have a rhythm. Flippy even fails sometimes, pushing a burger instead of flipping it, but its human coworkers quickly correct any problems.

For the humans’ safety, there is a taped off area around Flippy. If a someone enters that space, Flippy immediately shuts down until the person walk back outside its designated area.

On a screen above the work area, visitors can see what Flippy “sees” on the grill. It’s a not-quite-Terminator-like view of various burgers, each with a countdown as they near readiness.

Since I was there, I decided to order up some lunch and try out Caliburger’s automated kiosk, which lets you pay with your face. The kiosk and payment system is actually part of PopIQ, which is also owned by Cali Group. PopIQ is aiming to become a universal loyalty program used by different restaurants or gyms or any place else with frequent repeat customers. The idea is that your face becomes your payment system and loyalty card when you shop at participating locations.

The Caliburger rep told me that about 65 percent of Caliburger customers use the automated kiosk to order pay, but most are still wary of storing their face data and credit card information with the company. I too, was a little wary, as Caliburger has locations around the world and I wasn’t given a sufficient explanation as to where my data is stored and what governments of different countries can access. Given recent news about data breaches, this is definitely an issue the company should explicitly address.

Having said that, I was here for a story, so I went through the sign up process and scanned my face into the Caliburger system. The kiosk was straightforward with a clean UI and I found it easy to use. In less than a minute I was up and running. Once in the system I went through the touchscreen menu to order my burger and customize it. When it came time to pay it let me know it was scanning my face and that was it, my order went off to Flippy for preparation.

The payment process, while fast and convenient, could use a little more guidance. Once you pay, there is no clear direction on where to go or what to do next. The order just goes into the ether and you aren’t sure where your food will arrive or where to get your drink. You can sense why some people prefer to stick with people when paying.

Foodservice robots like Flippy are quickly moving from novelty to mainstream. Flippy is expanding its skillset and becoming a fry cook, Penny shuttles food and empty dishes around a restaurant, Ekim’s PAZZI will make you a pizza, and Cafe X’s robot will wave to you after it makes your latté.

And lucky for me, pretty soon I won’t have to travel for my next Flippy-made burger. Caliburger is adding Flippy to its new Seattle (where I’m based) location later this year. Until Flippy comes to your town, you can enjoy these videos of it in action.

Cafe X Raising $12 Million “Seed-1” Round

Cafe X, the startup that builds robot baristas, is in the process of raising a $12 million “Seed-1” round. Crunchbase News broke the story after coming across regulatory filings which showed that Cafe X has already raised $9.42 million of the new round. Cafe X Founder and CEO Henry Hu later confirmed the news with Crunchbase.

This new round is being led by famed angel investor Jason Calacanis and Craft Ventures. The $9.4 million raised so far brings the total amount raised by Cafe X to $14.5 million. We reached out to the company for any further comment as well as information about what the new funds will be used for, and will update this post when we hear back.

While Cafe X has two dedicated indoor locations in downtown San Francisco, the company recently deployed its second generation barista-bot-in-a-box on a street corner, also in downtown SF. These automated kiosks are meant to serve high-traffic areas where people can grab a (quality) cup of coffee quickly.

Cafe X isn’t alone in the robot coffee space. Austin-based Briggo, which makes the Coffe Haus, just installed its automated coffee kiosk at its latest location, in the Austin Airport. And later this summer, the robotic MontyCafe will be up and running in Russia.

Presumably, Cafe X’s new money will be used to hire out engineering and software teams and help fuel expansion, as this type of money often does. When I talked with Hu earlier this year, he said that while Cafe X has received inbound interest from all over the world for their robot barista, geographic expansion would focus first on the Bay Area.

There might be a different type of expansion possible, however. Craft Ventures also led the Series A investment round in electric scooter sharing startup Bird. Perhaps after riding one to get your afternoon latté from a Cafe X kiosk, you’ll be able to recharge it there (and maybe even earn a Cafe X discount). Or perhaps that’s just a bit of overly corporate synergistic caffeinated strategy that this new funding has me thinking.

Robot Fulfillment for Curbside Grocery Pickup is Becoming a Thing

Two-hour delivery may grab the lion’s share of headlines in the grocery news world, but store curbside pickup could wind up being a sleeping giant.

Case in point: Walmart announced last Friday that it is partnering with Alert Innovation to build out a robotic fulfillment center in its Salem, New Hampshire store. As Supermarket News reports:

“Walmart is adding a 20,000-square-foot extension to the Salem store to house the Alphabot system, warehouse online grocery orders and serve as a pickup point, with drive-through lanes for customers. When the project is finished, automated mobile carts will retrieve ordered items and ferry them to personal shoppers at one of four pick stations. The associates then will pick, assemble and deliver the orders to customers.”

You can get a glimpse of the system in action in this video:

Associates, Alphabot Team Up to Make Grocery Pickup Even Better

As you can see in the video, small, wheeled robots (Alphabots) scurry around on tracks to bring items to a human, who then puts them in the bag corresponding with the correct online order. Then, expanded, dedicated drive-through lanes provide a fast way for shoppers to pick up groceries (still loaded into trunks by humans… for now) without getting out of their car. The new system is scheduled to be up and running at the Salem Supercenter by the end of the year.

This might sound familiar to readers of The Spoon, as it’s pretty much what the startup Takeoff is doing: creating robot-powered micro-fulfillment centers within existing grocery stores paired with dedicated pickup areas. Takeoff says it only needs 6,000 – 10,000 square feet inside a store to build out its robot fulfillment system.

There’s a lot to unpack with these automated grocery centers. However, there are four major convergent factors that I think could drive their rapid adoption:

First is optimization. Walmart is big on robots, especially for tasks it says are manual and repetitive (oh hi, shelf scanning robot!). It makes more sense for robots to grab items from a backroom than a human to run around with a shopping cart. The Alphabot system, Walmart says, will allow its employees to focus on customer service and selling things. This is something we hear a lot — robots let humans prioritize the more human tasks (like picking produce).

Then there’s speed. A robotic system can fulfill orders faster than a human. While Takeoff currently has a two-hour pickup window for pre-ordered groceries, the company says the system actually completes an order in only two minutes and can ratchet the pickup window down to a half hour, if need be.

In terms of convenience, getting your groceries in half an hour makes curbside pickup competitive with a two-hour home delivery. There’s no need to wait at home (or let a stranger in) when you can pick up orders quickly from your trusted local store on your way home from work, or make them a part of your existing errand routine. Not to mention that curbside pickup from Walmart, at least, is free.

Finally, and this is probably not as huge of a deal as the other factors listed, studies show that a big reason people don’t buy groceries online is that they want to touch and feel a product before purchasing it. Having curbside pickup theoretically allows shoppers to get out of their car (gasp!) and inspect delicate items such as fruits and vegetables, then return them if the selection isn’t to their liking.

Seeing as how none of these robotic fulfillment centers in grocery stores have gone online yet, we don’t know how people will interact with them. But the idea isn’t something retail outlets should sleep on.

Flippy Fires up a new Job at Dodger Stadium, Will it be a Home Run?

Flippy, Miso Robotics‘ fast food robot assistant, has a new job and some new skills: frying up tater tots and chicken tenders at LA’s Dodger Stadium.

The pilot is a collaboration between Miso, data analytics company E15 Group, and hospitality company Levy, who participated in Miso’s Series B funding round earlier this year. Miso and Levy had announced a plan to put Flippy in sports venues back in March.

The first Flippy works at the Pasadena Caliburger location, flipping burgers. When the ‘bot first came online in March, it ran into a few technical snafus as well as some issues with human counterparts keeping up. After a brief hiatus, Flippy returned to CaliBurger in May; it now cooks up thousands of burgers a day.

This stadium gig will be an intriguing test for Flippy. First, Miso is adding a new skill to the robot, moving it from the grill to the fryer, pushing Flippy’s artificial intelligence, HD cameras, thermal sensors and grippers all into a new food type and cooking technique. Second, it’s working at Dodger Stadium, which seats 56,000 people, so there will be high volume of work over a shorter period of time.

Having said that, baseball seems like the perfect sport for Flippy to start with. The slow and leisurely place means customers coming throughout the game, rather than high bursts of activity between quarters or halves.

As Mike Wolf pointed out earlier this week, robot restaurants are all the rage, and Flippy’s move to the majors is a perfect example of why. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive work more precisely, and leave us humans to do higher level work. By one 2017 estimate, foodservice accounted for 12,000 burns to employees per year. If Flippy can run the fryer properly, fewer employees could get hurt (saving people from pain and restaurants money).

If you’re in the LA area, take yourself out to the ball game, buy yourself some peanuts and robot-cooked chicken tenders and tell us how they are.

Will You Try Pizzametry’s Pizza Vending Machine?

Let’s start with the obvious question you probably have after reading this story’s headline. Is it pronounced:

Peet-ZAH-metry, like Geometry?

or

PEETZA-me-try, like Cookie Monster would say it if he switched his favorite food?

The answer, according to Jim Benjamin, President of APM Partners, the company that makes Pizzametry is… both. It doesn’t matter how you slice the name; the Pizzametry is a vending machine will bake up a hot, fresh personal pizza any time of day or night.

“It’s for the consumer that’s looking for a meal replacement,” Benjamin told me by phone, “And needs more than just a bag of potato chips or a muffin.”

The Pizzametry is the size of a beefy vending machine. For around $5 – $6 (prices will vary depending on location), you can order either an eight-inch cheese (no sauce), or cheese (with sauce) or pepperoni pizza. The machine is pre-loaded with canisters of frozen dough which are then thawed, cut, pressed, topped and cooked at 700 degrees to make a pizza in three and a half minutes (that time actually goes down to 90 seconds on subsequent pizzas if you order more than one).

The Pizzametry, like so many automated food vendors, is meant for high-traffic areas like airports (which are starting to fill up with robots) or dorms or anywhere people want to grab a very quick bite to eat. Each machine can make 150 pizzas and accepts credit cards, bills and online payment services like PayPal and Apple Pay. The Pizzametry is also internet connected for self-diagnosis and can alert the homebase should any maintenance be needed.

Based in Rochester, NY, APM Partners is bootstrapped and has three employees. The Pizzametry has gone through field tests at the University of Rochester and the company is now taking orders and looking to deploy on a wider scale over the next six months. APM plans to own and operate the Pizzametries at first, handling all the stocking and cleaning of each machine.

In addition to straight sales, APM also has the ability to license out what is effectively ad space on the front of each Pizzametry. In Rochester, for instance, the company partnered with local pizzeria Salvatore’s, using their sauce on the pies. The effect, Benjamin said, is giving Pizzametry a recognizable neighborhood brand in each location.

Pizzametry is actually coming along at a good time to ride a wave of automation that’s sweeping the food industry. From fully autonomous restaurants like Spyce, to co-botics fast food from Flippy at Caliburger, to the smoothie making Blendid, to the salad dispensing Sally — food robots are becoming de rigueur.

I can’t speak to the quality of Pizzametry’s pizza, but if you think about hungry college students staying up late to study or a harried family needing just a quick bite before embarking on a plane, Pizzametry makes sense.

Now people just need to make sense of its name.

Meet MontyCafe, Russia’s Robot Barista

The robot revolution is heading to Russia, courtesy of MontyCafe, a self-contained, robotic barista is opening in Moscow this summer.

MontyCafe is a lot like the Cafe X coffee robot, which recently debuted on the streets of San Francisco. It’s an enclosed kiosk roughly five feet in diameter with two articulating arms that swing about to automatically serve up cups of coffee or other beverages.

You can see MontyCafe in action in this video:

MontyCafe: first robotic cafe franchise

The MontyCafe was spun out of industrial robot company GBL Robotics. I spoke with Pavel Zhdanov, who heads up Business Development for GBL, and the way he described MontyCafe, it seemed like it was more about the robot than the coffee.

In fact, you could better describe MontyCafe as more of an open robotic platform. Zhdanov outlined MontyCafe scenarios that included food like muffins and hot dogs, and the company is even exploring the robot dispensing soft serve ice cream. This is the advantage of using robotic arms. Unlike a Briggo, which is more of a self-contained, high-end vending machine, parts on MontyCafe’s robotic arms can be swapped out to lift, hold and serve just about anything you program them to.

Zhdanov said that a MontyCafe costs $20,000 and that the company is still working on an exact business model, though he mentioned franchises and revenue share as likely possibilities. The first one will go live in Moscow’s Aviapark mall this summer. Zhdanov said the company is already fielding incoming interest from potential customers in Kuwait and Australia.

MontyCafe’s technology may not be groundbreaking, and it could even be considered lagging (it’s not plumbed directly into water lines and humans still need to clean it every night). But it does highlight how robots are poised to radically change the way we buy coffee and other consumables around the world. As mentioned earlier, Cafe X is already in two locations in San Francisco, and Briggo will launch in the Austin, TX airport next week.

The plan for all these companies is the same: use robots to make coffee in high-traffic areas. They are meant for volume production, when people want to grab a cup of coffee on the go quickly. The one disadvantage I see for MontyCafe is that the quality of the coffee being dispensed could vary from location to location. Both Briggo and Cafe X have good coffee as part of their core mission. I didn’t get that sense from Zhdanov, and if customers get weak or otherwise bad coffee from MontyCafe, they probably won’t try it again because unlike having different baristas, there is only one robot making things the exact same way every time. Though the MontyCafe’s versatility to dispense anything could help the overall business make up for any specific coffee deficiencies.

All of this coffee robot news had The Spoon founder, Mike Wolf, pondering if and when Starbucks will get into the robot barista business. Robots seem like the perfect way for Starbucks to deliver a consistent, quality, coffee experience at scale, and they are already in so many high-traffic areas, it makes sense for at least some of their locations.

Starbucks is undoubtedly exploring the idea and watching to see how people react to Cafe X and Briggo and now probably MontyCafe. If Starbucks buys into robot baristas, the robot coffee revolution won’t just be in America and Russia, it will be everywhere.

Our Robot Coffee Future is Nigh: Briggo Barista Taking Off at Austin Airport

Austin, TX will get a little more hip (as if that were possible) next week as Briggo’s robotic Coffee Haus will land at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport on July 17th. Briggo says it will be the first robot coffee maker in a U.S. airport, but more importantly it’s another sign that robot baristas are on their way into the mainstream.

We profiled Briggo earlier this year and chatted with them for our Automat podcast. The Austin-based company not only builds 40 square foot craft coffee dispensing kiosks, it also selects and roasts its own specialty coffee specifically for its machines.

Briggo’s plans for the Austin airport have been public for a while, but the imminent launch of the barista bot is most interesting because it comes on the heels of Cafe X’s recent deployment of its own robot barista-in-a-box on the streets of San Francisco. Both companies are looking to create turnkey craft coffee solutions for high-traffic areas such as office buildings, campuses and airports.

Both Briggo and Cafe X will own and operate their machines. In the case of Cafe X, they still want to have a human on site with each robot to help guide people and curate their coffee experience. Briggo’s approach is more hands off, using humans only for re-stocking and required maintenance.

Though Briggo and Cafe X currently only have plans to grow in their specific areas — Texas and the Bay Area, respectively — each company says they have been fielding interest from around the world. And it’s not hard to see why. Coffee baristas like these are not your grandfather’s watered-down coffee vending machine. They both craft high-end coffee drinks, do so without taking a break or calling in sick, and are built to handle high volumes of people.

When I spoke with Briggo Co-Founder and CTO, Chas Studor this year, he was insistent that Briggo is not out to kill the café or replace every barista. He believes that for times when you just want to grab a cup of coffee quickly (like at the airport), robots are better suited for the task — and if you can build a robot that creates a good latté (or cappuccino or mocha…), people will raise their coffee expectations and visit people-powered high-end coffee shops more.

We’ll have to wait and see if that logic takes off, but starting next week, any hipsters traveling between Austin and San Francisco should sample both robot-made drinks and tell us what they think!

Alibaba Opens Robot Restaurant as Automation Expands Around the Globe

Alibaba has opened up a highly automated restaurant in Shanghai, as robots continue to enter eateries around the globe.

The Robot.he restaurant in the Hema supermarket uses a series of apps, QR codes, and robots to provide a futuristic dining experience (hat tip to Axios). The Hema app tells customers where to sit in the restaurant and is used to pay for meals as well as to order more food once seated. Once the food is ready, small pod-like robots scurry out on shiny tracks to deliver it straight to the table.

While there is a ton of technology at play here, Hema still relies on humans for much of the work. From the video (see below), staff on-hand helps with the selection of seafood, and there are human cooks making the meals.

Alibaba’s news site, Alizila, didn’t say exactly when the restaurant opened, or provide much information regarding future plans for Hema, but Alibaba is getting more into robots in other parts of the company, rolling out its autonomous delivery vehicles.

China will certainly be a hotbed for robot restaurant activity. Last month, Alibaba rival JD.com announced it would open up 1,000 completely robot-run restaurants by 2020. And for what it’s worth, Google recently invested $500 million in JD.com, so who knows how Alphabet’s AI endeavors might tie in with JD’s robo-ambitions.

But the Hema opening also shows how robot restaurants are opening around the globe. While they are a novelty right now, they will quickly become the norm. Here in the U.S., Spyce Kitchen’s robot restaurant whips up bowls of food, Creator makes a $6 hamburger and Cafe X just opened up its first sidewalk robot barista-in-a-box. Over in France, EKIM is busy building out its robot pizzaiolo, and in Japan, robots are making street food.

There are a few factors contributing to this rise of the restaurant robot. First, robots can run all day without a break, and in places where labor is tight, robots could be increasingly necessary. Second, robotics and AI are getting more evolved and developing technologies to better handle the different shapes and textures of food. And while this automation will impact the number of jobs available to millions of people, robots can also take over the menial, sometimes dangerous and repetitive jobs, freeing people up for higher-skilled labor.

And hopefully freeing people up to eat at more robot restaurants.