Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics

Bonsai’s Announcement Shows Momentum for ‘Physical AI’ in Food & Ag Continues Post-CES

While NVIDIA’s taken a beating the last couple of weeks with the industry-shaking release of DeepSeek, company CEO Jensen Huang’s talk at CES about how AI models are now extending to help us gain a better understanding of our physical world continues to be a tailwind behind those startups levering AI for robotics, computer vision systems and more in a variety of industries.

Including agriculture. Sure, Bonsai’s round was probably nailed down before CES but the announcement’s big emphasis on physical AI was undoubtedly influenced by the big buzz coming out of the big tech show. Bonsai, which makes AI-driven autonomous systems for harsh farming environments, announced last week they’ve secured $15 million in Series A funding to enhance its software, expand its platform, and accelerate commercialization.

The company’s flagship technology, Visionsteer, enables autonomous navigation and data analysis in orchards, even in challenging conditions such as dust, darkness, and uneven terrain. The company says it has over 40 deployed units and has collected data from more than 500,000 acres, which it says translates into lower costs, increased yields, and operational insights previously unavailable through traditional farming methods.

You can check out the company’s hero reel of their computer vision below.

Bonsai 2024 Introduction Video

How Working the Land (and with Steve Jobs and Michael Dell) Led Tim Bucher to Build a Farming Automation Company

While many tech entrepreneurs dream of retiring as a gentleman farmer, Tim Bucher’s journey took the opposite trajectory. It was only after he bought and started working on his own farm at age 16 that a young Bucher discovered his love for software programming in college. That realization embarked him on a career that would eventually see him working alongside Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, and other Silicon Valley legends.

Yet, despite all his success in tech, Bucher never left the farm behind. In fact, for most of his life, he has straddled the high-tech world of innovation in Silicon Valley and the vineyards of California’s wine country. Now, as the founder and CEO of Agtonomy, Bucher is merging his two lifelong passions—technology and agriculture—to address one of the farming industry’s biggest challenges: labor shortages and operational inefficiencies.

On a recent episode of The Spoon Podcast, Bucher reflected on his early efforts to use innovation to tackle real-world farming challenges. His farm, Trattori Farms, produces grapes and olives—high-value crops that require precise, labor-intensive care. Over the years, he automated irrigation and winemaking processes, but one critical challenge remained: mechanized labor in the fields.

“The gap between rising costs and revenue was closing,” Bucher explained. “I kept automating everything I could, but I couldn’t automate the skilled labor that was needed out in the vineyards and orchards.”

It wasn’t until Bucher watched a documentary about NASA’s Mars rover that he began thinking about how automation could be applied to farming in a way that made sense for both longtime farmers like himself and the manufacturers of the equipment they trust.

“If we can have self-driving vehicles on Mars, why can’t we have them in our orchards and vineyards?” Bucher said. “There’s no traffic on Mars—just like in agriculture.”

This realization led him to found Agtonomy, a company that transforms traditional tractors into autonomous farming machines. But rather than disrupt the farm equipment industry, Agtonomy’s approach is to partner with manufacturers—helping them integrate drive-by-wire and AI technology into their existing models.

“Farmers trust their brands,” Bucher said. “They need the dealer networks, the parts, the service. Buying farm equipment from a startup isn’t realistic. That’s why Agtonomy is helping manufacturers digitally transform, rather than disrupt.”

As AI continues to evolve, Bucher envisions a future where farmers manage their fields remotely—relying on AI agents to analyze data, recommend actions, and deploy autonomous tractors at optimal times.

“Imagine sitting in a command center where AI tells you, ‘Given the soil, weather, and crop conditions, you should send your autonomous tractors out at 9:12 AM on Wednesday,’” he said. “And you just hit ‘Go.’”

While Bucher sees the potential of automated farming, he doesn’t believe technology will replace human farmers—instead, he sees it as a tool to make them more efficient.

“People fear AI taking jobs, but in farming, we don’t have enough labor. This technology doesn’t replace people—it enables them to do more with less.”

For Bucher, Agtonomy was the logical next step, given his lifelong love for both technology and farming. But beyond personal passion, he believes automation is necessary for the survival of modern agriculture.

“Agriculture has to evolve,” he said. “If we don’t automate, we won’t survive.”

You can listen to the full podcast below, or find it on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Watch as This Robot Pizza Chain Operator Breaks Down the Cost Each Part of the Pizza-Making Process

For small operators (and big ones as well) in the pizza business, Andrew Simmons’s posts on Linkedin have become must-read material.

That’s because Simmons, who I wrote about last year as he experimented with utilizing pizza automation technology in his San Diego area restaurant, has open-sourced his learnings as he continues experimenting with various forms of technology. And boy, is he experimenting!

And it’s not just automation (though that’s a big part). He’s constantly tinkering with every part of his restaurant tech stack as he expands beyond his original restaurant and looks to create a nationwide chain of tech-powered pizza restaurants. Add in the fact that he’s utilizing a crowdfunding model in which he sells subscriptions and a share of future pizza profits, and Simmons has created a live in-process testing lab for how to build a next-gen pizza chain that everyone can learn from.

One example of his highly detailed learnings that I found fascinating is his post today detailing the cost-per-pizza after allocating the costs of the different pizza-making automation he’s deployed in one of his restaurants. The video, seen below, shows how much each part of the process — dough making, doughball prep, dough-pressing, toppings allocation — costs and how he arrives at a 2024 price-per-pie of $1.91.

Simmons details how he’s tinkered with different automation systems over the past year and how they’ve impacted the price. One change he’s tinkered with is switching out the Picnic pizza robot for a Middleby Pizza Bot, which is more expensive but handles more of the pizza-making process and requires less human intervention.

From Simmons’s post:

Last year, the financial model was built using the Picnic Pizza Station. It was more expensive last year than it is today. This year, I’ve incorporated The Middleby Corporation Automation tool into the equation, but either unit could work. Middleby is a little more costly, adding about 60¢ to the per pizza estimate, but it takes the pizza from dough blank to cooked, whereas the Picnic requires some intervention to cook it. Picnic runs about 38¢ per pizza this year.

Simmons points to recent changes in California’s employment laws as one motivator for his becoming an early adopter of these solutions, saying that the changes will lead to more restaurant chains experimenting with automation.

“Thank you to the pioneers in this space that have tried, adopted, succeeded or failed, equipment manufacturers and restaurateurs alike; and to Governor Newsom, for accelerating adoption of automation,” wrote Simmons.

You can (and I suggest you do) follow Simmons’s posts about his journey to build a robotic restaurant chain on Linkedin.

Bear Brings Its Robots To Hospitals Through Partnership With Sodexo

When John Ha started Bear Robotics, he was a computer scientist with a restaurant side hustle who thought he might make the lives of his servers easier through automation technology. Since then, his robots have shown up in restaurants across the globe to lift some of the burden of physically demanding restaurant service jobs.

As it turns out, there are many other physically demanding jobs, one of which is nursing, which is why this week’s announcement by Bear of their deal with Sodexo makes sense. According to the company, they’ve closed a deal with food service giant Sodexo, where Bear’s robots will support staff and patient care within healthcare facilities.

According to a report from McKinsey & Company, the potential for automation to take on mundane tasks could free up nursing activities by 15 percent, allowing healthcare workers to focus more on patient care. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the healthcare industry will grow 16 percent from 2020 to 2030, adding about 2.6 million new jobs.

“In partnership with Sodexo, we will be enhancing the future of work for healthcare professionals and maximizing the value of their time with patients through seamless integration of technology and efficiency,” said Juan Higueros, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bear Robotics.

According to Bear, the pilot programs are set to launch in the United States in 2024.

Meet The Dutch Robotic Kitchen That Makes Five Thousand Meals Per Day

Last month, a Dutch startup named Eatch announced they had built a fully automated robotic kitchen that makes up to five thousand meals per day. The company’s new robot, designed to work in a high-production centralized kitchen, has been making meals in the Amsterdam market for food service and catering giant ISS for the past four months.

The Eatch robotic kitchen platform handles the entire meal production flow. It oils the cooking pans, dispenses refrigerated ingredients, adds spices, plates the food, and cleans the cooking pans when everything is done.

You can watch it in action in the video below:

Eatch - World's First Robotic Kitchen for Large-scale Cooking - Up to 5.000 meals per day

Eatch’s robotic kitchen uses a pot system similar to those we’ve seen in the Spyce kitchen, Kitchen Robotics’ Beastro, and TechMagic’s pasta robot in Tokyo. The Eatch’s tilted pans rotate and toss the food inside, using an internal peg to push the food into a rotation and then drop from the top, creating a toss fry cooking motion common in stir fry kitchens.

What’s most impressive about the Eatch is the throughput, creating five thousand daily meals (and the company says it has the potential to produce up to 15 thousand per day), handling the entire production flow. Most robotic kitchens we’ve seen have production volumes much lower than this and often don’t incorporate plating and pot cleaning in the automation flow.

Company CEO Jelle Sijm told The Spoon that the company has approximately 10 employees and has raised €4.5 million. The company expansion plan includes working with partners who can handle the daily operations, and Eatch will provide the automation technology, software, and recipes. Sijm sees Eatch working with partners to produce food in centralized kitchens for contact caterers. Sijm says they are eyeing an American market entry and says the company is currently in talks with some grocery chains and contract caterers in the US.

As Jobs Disappear, Could Restaurants Become a Battleground For Pushback Against AI & Automation?

Last month, after 29 months straight of job gains, the number of total available restaurant jobs dropped. It wasn’t a huge dip – 800 jobs – but compared to the previous month’s gain of 24 thousand and monthly gains as high as 81 thousand at the beginning of the year, the dip was somewhat surprising, especially as restaurant sales have slowly but surely inched upwards throughout the year.

Could this be a temporary setback? Perhaps, but there’s also a possibility that it’s an early indicator of a long-term, potentially irreversible decline in the restaurant industry’s job market as emerging technologies come into play.

And by new technologies, I primarily mean automation and artificial intelligence. All one has to do is scan the headlines for the past 12 months to find that the restaurant industry has caught automation fever. Big chains ranging from Chipotle to Sweetgreen to McDonald’s are experimenting with ways to automate their restaurants.

And then there’s AI. Last month Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Google in which they are piloting a new generative AI solution called Wendy’s Fresh AI in a drive-thru in Columbus, Ohio. The company said this is the first of what could potentially be many locations that use the technology. Mcdonald’s has also been trialing AI technology, which its execs believe, in some ways, is better at handling customer interactions than humans.

“Humans sometimes forget to greet people, they forget, they make mistakes, they don’t hear as well,” Lucy Brady, McDonald’s chief digital customer engagement officer, told CNN. “A machine can actually have a consistent greeting and remain calm under pressure.”

This wave of new tech goes beyond robotic arms and simulated voices taking orders at the drive-thru. There’s been a recent surge – accelerated during the pandemic – in digital kiosks, mobile ordering apps, and QR code ordering at tables. These have resulted in an increased number of digital touchpoints designed to speed up the process and, to some extent, reduce reliance on human intervention.

It’s hard to fault the operators. A significant number of restaurant employees permanently exited the industry during the pandemic, and since then, operators have struggled to fill vacant positions. Despite offering higher wages and improved benefits, many open positions remain unfilled due to a lack of interest. If employees are hard to find, why not let technology take over?

Which brings us back to how we humans will be impacted by all this new technology. Workers are increasingly tasked with working alongside all this new tech, transforming job descriptions into something that can sound like working an IT help desk. Others find that technology is increasingly eating away at opportunities at the human connection aspect of the job they enjoy.

“Those points of connection get lost in mobile ordering,” said one former Starbucks barista. “So, it’s just like, ‘Here’s your order, bye.”

Then there’s the threat of job extinction as automation and AI take hold. While no big chains have deployed robotics or AI so widely that they’ve eliminated key positions in the front or back of house, it’s only a matter of time before early pilots become the primary engine of production. Sweetgreen has essentially proclaimed its new bowl-making robot is the future, and both Wendy’s and McDonald’s have hinted at broader applications of automation and AI.

As we teeter on the precipice of an automated and AI-powered restaurant industry, are we beginning to see signals of pushback stemming from job loss fears? There are subtle signs. When Chili’s showed off their trial of the Bear Robotics server in a video on Facebook last year, some commentators pushed back. “Quit trying to erase people!” wrote one. Another commented, “Another reason why I will never set foot inside of a Chili’s. You cannot replace a human in the hospitality industry.” Others are penning editorials saying that while operators may benefit from automation, workers and customers lose.

In certain instances, workers displaced by new technology have begun to retaliate. As detailed in our interview with restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, he struggled when a former employee who resisted the deployment of automation at his San Diego area pizza restaurant started making negative comments on social media and called in complaints to the local health department.

Are these initial pushbacks a sign of a larger anti-technology movement? That remains to be seen, but ignoring these early indications of a neo-luddite movement would be ill-advised, according to one professor.

“The various signals currently circulating in public discourse are not immediately obvious, nor are they specifically anti-technology or anti-progress,” wrote Sunil Manghani, a Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique at the University of Southampton and Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for AI. “Yet, arguably, the signals are of a nascent sense of ‘protest’. Just as Hobsbawm reminds us, the Luddites were not opposed to machines in principle, but rather to those machines that were threatening their livelihoods and communities, we will likely start to see opposition not to software in principle, but various instances of software; opposition, then, to how and who deploy new technologies in the particular.”

Today resistance may manifest in an employee fighting back here or there or the occasional social media pushback against new automation. However, these intermittent signals could become the norm, especially if job numbers continue to decrease while more restaurants deploy robots and AI. Some studies say that over 80% of restaurant jobs could be handled by robotics, and some experts see millions of jobs being replaced through AI or automation within a decade.

And, of course, it’s not just restaurant jobs. Other lines of work, from creative to industrial, are threatened by new technology. And as more and more workers see unionization as the front line to a fight for more equitable pay, it’s also apparent – as evidenced by the Writers and Actors guild strike – the biggest fear about making a living in the future is whether or not employees will be replaced by technology.

Still, the restaurant industry, perhaps more than any other, is ripe for an automation and AI takeover, which is why I think that it could become the central battleground for the pushback in the form of an automation neo-luddite movement. Restaurant chains are the second biggest employer in the US, and two – Mcdonald’s and Yum Brands – are two of the top three employers in the country. Although Andrew Yang’s campaign warning of societal destabilization due to robotics and AI didn’t gain much traction in 2020, there’s a good chance he was ahead of his time, and we may see future politicians campaigning on an anti-automation platform with restaurants as one of the primary areas of focus.

Readers of The Spoon know we’re not anti-technology around here. In fact, we’ve covered just about every food robot out there and will continue to do so. But as we see more signals about potential pushback against the rise of automation and AI, I think it would be wise for the restaurant industry to begin to get ahead of this growing issue and think about how to balance new (and often necessary) technology with taking care of their employees.

Otherwise, they risk losing control of the narrative as more people organize to resist the impending AI and robot invasion.

Come hear experts talk about the impact of automation and AI on food jobs at The Food AI Summit on October 25th.

MIT & NVIDIA Researchers Are Building Tech That Could Enable Better Kitchen-Robot Precision

This week, a group of researchers from MIT and NVIDIA are showing off a system that one day may be pivotal in helping our robot chef make dinner without making a mistake.

While robotic planning systems are good at developing high-level plans, they often fail when confronted with highly-complex environments. Because of this, the group wanted to create a task-planning system that performed well in complicated scenarios with many obstacles.

The project focused on developing a task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithm to help robotic systems solve mobile manipulation problems in difficult environments. The core of the algorithm is PIGINet, which the group describes as a transformer-based learning system that, for each proposed task plan, helps the system more quickly understand the success probability of a given motion trajectory.

Today’s robotic system task planners often fail when faced with the reality of highly complex and infinitely variable real-world scenarios, getting bogged down in processing how to navigate through the unique physical geometries of their environments. The seemingly infinite variety of small things in a kitchen – random items on a counter, the different locations of a pot on a cooktop, open doors and drawers – may be easy for a human to handle but can give a robot fits. With the PIGINet transformer, the system will be able to more quickly process through and understand the success probabilities of each course of action due to the specific start state and the given obstacles within.

According to the group, the PIGINet transformer-enabled task planner gives the robot a better chance of success by better understanding the various scenarios and each’s feasibility before they are executed. Their initial experiments showed that using PIGINet substantially improves planning efficiency, cutting down runtime by 80% on problems in relatively simple scenarios and up to 50% in more complex ones.

While the group’s initial effort focused on kitchen and food-planning tasks, it believes its system can be applied to other tasks within and outside the home.

While there have been a lot of venture capital dollars and product development hours spent on developing kitchen robotics, you can see by this project and those similar to it just how early we are in developing truly advanced kitchen automation. The kitchen is one of the most complex and variable work environments, and creating a robot that doesn’t simply automate a single repeatable process is extremely difficult. With projects like this one and EPIC Kitchens, we are laying the foundation for our robot chef future.

You can watch a video on their project and how it works below:

PIGINet: Sequence-Based Plan Feasibility Prediction for Efficient Task and Motion Planning

Do You Have Thoughts on the Impact of Robotics & AI on The Food Biz? Fill Out Our Survey!

Last week, The Spoon hosted an insight-filled day talking with founders and operators about how new technology like generative AI will change the food business.

And next week, we’ll bring together investors, restaurant operators, and technology builders to get a pulse on the state of the food robotics market.

One thing we know from running these events is our community is one of the sharpest around when it comes to predicting how these technologies will impact the food business, so we figured why not ask them their thoughts in a Food Robotics and AI industry survey?

If you run a food company or provide technology that uses robotics or AI, or just have a good perspective on where you think these technologies are going, we want to hear from you! If you take a few minutes to fill out our survey and we’ll send you a summary of the results and enter you in a giveaway for a $100 Amazon gift card!

And oh yeah – make sure to sign up for next week’s event to get an early glimpse at the results and hear from some food robotic builders and investors.

Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurants in Japan Will Soon Use a Fry-Cooking Robot

TechMagic, a Tokyo-based restaurant robotics startup, has signed a development deal with Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan to build a robot to automate the entire process of cooking french fries.

According to company CEO Yuji Shiraki, preliminary testing of the TechMagic fry robots is complete and is the company is moving into the development phase, where they will focus on productization and in-store installation. The fry-bot will manage fry-feeding, frying, bagging, storing, and arranging the french fries. The company is also working to reduce the size of the frybot so as to enable deployment into space-contrained spaces of existing Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

Shiraki says they are aiming to introduce the robot in some Japanese locations by this fall.

Spoon readers may recall that TechMagic has already been working with restaurant operators to deploy its back-of-house food robots in restaurants in Japan. I had a chance to visit one, the P-Robo, last September when I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. The robot is a multi-function robot that automates nearly the entire process of creating pasta. It preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner, and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is plated and a human does the final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleansthe prep bowls. The entire process takes less than two minutes.

You can see the P-Robo in action below:

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The Tokyo restaurant where P-Robo slings pasta is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan food and beverage conglomerate Suntory. When I interviewed Shiraki last summer, he indicated that they were also working with a large well-known Japanese food brand (presumably KFC Japan) and noodle giant Nissin.

For those wondering if this move means we’ll see KFC deploy robots stateside, I wouldn’t hold your breath, mainly because KFC Japan is operated by Mitsubishi, whereas the U.S. fried chicken chain is operated by the holding company Yum Brands.

Food Tech Weekend Podcast: Talking Food Robots With Clayton Wood

Our guest this week on our weekly food tech news wrapup is Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot startup Picnic. We talk about the latest food tech news and hear Clayton’s view on where things are going in the world of food robots.

Here are the stories we discuss on this week’s show:

We also put Clayton on the food robot hot seat, asking him:

  • How would you assess the food robot marketplace in 2022?
  • Will we see some consolidation in certain areas of food robotics in 2023?
  • Predictions for the 2023 food robot market.

You can listen to this week’s pod by clicking the player below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy!

Sweetgreen’s New Takeout-Only Location Is a Logical Landing Spot For Spyce’s Kitchen Robots

This morning, Sweetgreen announced they are opening their first pickup-only location in Washington DC’s Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood. Opening on August 1st, the new location will not have any dine-in seating, will feature shelves for pickup and delivery, and all food production will be hidden from sight behind the shelving system.

My first thought upon seeing the digital renderings of the new restaurant was it reminded a lot me of Eatsa’s spare tech-forward front-of-house. My second thought was maybe Sweetgreen has robot aspirations for the back of house like Eatsa once did.

A quick refresher to understand my line of thinking. Spoon readers may remember that Eatsa’s original vision included not only an automat-like front of house with rows of cubbies and ordering kiosks, but also included a long-term plan to roboticize the back of house. They even received a patent for a fully-automated food assembly system last year.

And then last year, Sweetgreen made a fairly surprising acquisition when they scooped up robotic restaurant startup Spyce. Surprising because just the year before, the company layed off its technology team, including the company’s head of automation.

Since that acquisition, Sweetgreen has closed the remaining Spyce branded restaurants and redeployed the Spyce team to work on solutions for Sweetgreen’s own restaurants. At the time of the deal, Sweetgreen said Spyce’s automation technology will allow its workers to focus more on customer service, expand its menu into warm foods, and make meal preparation more consistent.

With all that in mind, it makes one wonder if the new restaurant format is a logical landing place for Spyce’s automation technology. With a completely digital order flow, small kitchen footprint, and the design flexibility a completely new store format gives them, it makes sense that Sweetgreen might see its new pickup-only location as the perfect place to deploy Spyce’s kitchen robot technology.

Of course, this is all pure speculation, and there’s a good chance Sweetgreen might just stick with their traditional kitchens with humans doing the bulk of the cooking. But with the company’s founders’ original vision of creating a tech company that serves food, this new restaurant format might provide them just the opportunity they are looking for to put the robot business they acquired last year to good use.

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

Chili’s Serve pilot is just the latest move into robotics by the casual dining chain. Last October, robot servers named Rita from Bear Robotics started showing up across the country. And as mentioned previously, the company started testing out a Flytrex drone in North Texas.

As more restaurant revenue share comes via off-premise delivery, chains like Chili’s are exploring drone and sidewalk delivery to counter the high cost of traditional delivery from the likes of Uber and DoorDash. Wade Allen, Brinker’s SVP of innovation, told Dallas Innovates that drone delivery is “a lot cheaper” than solutions that involve a human and a car. Likewise, the cost economics of sidewalk delivery robots are also likely to be much lower than that of traditional delivery.

For Serve, which began life as a division of Postmates and spun out of Uber last year, Brinker represents a massive opportunity with over 1,600 Chili’s locations worldwide. The trial comes on the heels of last year’s seed round with strategic investors Uber, 7-Eleven, and Delivery Hero, all of which represent potentially interesting opportunities for the company.