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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics

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!

Who Are The Leaders of the Food Tech Revolution?

We may be a little biased here at The Spoon, but we think food tech is the most exciting industry going.

Think about it: Food is what many of us – heck, most of us – spend a huge chunk of our day thinking about, craving, searching for, and consuming. Food is something everyone is passionate about.

It’s also an industry where some of the biggest advances in AI, biology, agriculture, design, chemistry, and many more fields are now manifesting themselves to create some of the most interesting and exciting changes we’ve ever seen in what, where, how, and why we feed ourselves.

And perhaps most importantly, food systems and their future will undeniably play an outsized role in determining what life on earth looks like here in 10, 20, or 100 years.

All of which is why we love covering this industry, and the biggest joy in all of it is talking to the people leading the food tech revolution. The innovation, the collective progress we make, the futuristic advances we see nearly every week, all of it is a direct result of the many inspiring voices pioneering in this space and trying to create a better world.

It’s an industry made up of thoughtful and brilliant people worthy of celebrating, which is why we’re launching the Food Tech Visionary Awards. To be presented at The Food Tech Leaders Forum in November, The Food Tech Visionary Awards will recognize those making the biggest impact and inspiring others to help lead the charge.

And because we know we’re not the only ones who are energized and inspired by the many leaders building the future of food, we want to ask our readers to tell us who they think deserves consideration. If you know someone who you think is creating something amazing and helping to catalyze the world of food tech, please let us know by filling out this nomination form.

The Food Tech Visionary awards will consider seven categories: Sustainability/Food Waste Reduction, Future Food, Future Kitchen, Restaurant Tech, Food Robotics & AI, Agriculture & Farm Tech, and Food Web3. You can find out more about what is considered under each category on the nomination page here.

We will be taking nominations until August 15th. Final selections will be chosen by the Spoon editorial team and an assembled panel of experts. Finalists will be notified and announced in the fall and the winners in each category will be named live at the Food Tech Leaders Forum on November 3rd (get tickets here).

Nominate someone who you think is a visionary helping to build the food tech revolution!

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.

Foodservice Distributor Gordon Trials Dexai’s Bowl-Food Making Robot

Gordon, one of the largest regional foodservice distributors in the US, is trialing a bowl-food robot from Dexai Robotics.

Dexai (a Smart Kitchen Summit finalist in 2018), makes an articulating-arm robot named Alfred. According to the post, the company installed an Alfred bowl-making salad station at Gordon’s test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

You can see the Alfred in action below:

“We help operators with efficiency,” said Dexai CEO Dave Johnson. “They can load up a table with ingredients and let the robot assemble 100 grab-and-go chicken Caesar salads. You no longer need to have a body to do that, the machine doesn’t take breaks or call in sick. … It really goes to labor savings.”

While the partnership involves a single test location today, it’s easy to see how it could blossom into a bigger collaboration for Dexai. Gordon could deploy the bowl-food robot in a managed cafeteria or in one of its nearly 200 stores it operates in the US and Canada.

For Dexai, the news comes on the heels of the Massachusetts-based startup’s deployment of Alfred to 10 military bases across the US. According to Johnson, the company plans to continue developing new robots to handle tasks such as plating food and serving drinks, which could expand the locations the robot finds itself in the future.

The Food Robot Roundup: Alfred Joins the Military, Wings Hits Milestone

While much has been made about White Castle rolling out the Flippy 2 fry station robot to 100 more of its 350 locations, we thought we’d take this chance to showcase some smaller news stories from the food robot universe in this week’s food robot roundup.

Robot Chefs Enlist in The Military

We’ve seen food robots in restaurants, hospitals, universities, and malls, but placing them on military bases is new. The U.S. Department of Defense is deploying Dexai Robotics’ automated sous chefs to ten military U.S. military bases. The robotic arms use AI and computer vision to interact with their surroundings and use standard kitchen utensils to prepare various meals. The ten robots will cost the department $1.6 million to reduce food waste, improve sanitation, and keep facilities adequately staffed. The first one was deployed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield California at the end of last year in a dining facility that serves around 950 people a day. 

For Dexai, the news is just another sign of the company’s momentum. The Boston-based startup also recently made news through a new trial of its robotic system with Gordon, one of the biggest foodservice companies in the country. The two companies are trialing Alfred, the salad-assembly robot at Gordon’s developmental test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Wing’s Flock Grows

Drone service Wing announced this week that it had completed 200,000 commercial deliveries, with a significant amount of them in its primary market of Australia. It makes more than 1,000 deliveries a day and has Australia’sring with Coles, one of Australia’s leading supermarket chains. 

The partnership will involve Wing making deliveries in Canberra, Australia’s capital, and sparks debate of the efficacy and viability of drone deliveries in rural vs. urban areas. In some cases, such as when Australian-based drone company Swoop Aero has delivered Pfizer vaccines to Malawi, drones have been used to deliver critical supplies (like medicine) to hard-to-reach areas. Vaccines require ultra-cold chain conditions, and the Swoop Aero drones can bypass global supply chain bottlenecks to distribute vaccines in remote communities. In the case of a city-based delivery like with Wing, drone delivery can reduce traffic congestion, accidents, and greenhouse gas emissions. 

In general, last-mile delivery has been rapidly growing and this week multicultural grocery delivery service Weee! announced $425 million in funding. We also covered Kiwibot’s $7.5M pre-series A funding a few weeks ago and the global last mile delivery market size is projected to be $128.54 billion USD this year. 

The Turnkey Robotic Restaurant

You’ve heard of software-as-a-service and even robots-as-a-service, but have you heard of restaurants-as-a-service? This week Nala Robotics debuted Nala Marketplace, a network of customizable robotic chefs that can prepare recipes from various cuisines and enable restaurateurs to launch a new digital restaurant in a day. The marketplace goes hand-in-hand with the robot kitchens Nala produces, which involve a system of multiple robots using articulating arms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to prepare, cook, and serve food. 

Restaurant chefs and owners will be able to upload recipes and menu items to the secure database and create a virtual storefront. From there, customers will be able to access these menu items and place orders sent directly to the chefs in the robot kitchen. It all sounds very futuristic, but the first Nala Marketplace location opened last month in Naperville, Illinois, where several other restaurants by Nala Robotics are operating. 

According to Ajay Sunkara, cofounder and CEO of Nala Robotics, Nala Marketplace reduces labor expenses by 60 percent, and restaurants can be set up in less than 24 hours. This has significant benefits for restaurant owners since upfront costs and labor costs can make it difficult to start a restaurant. Additionally, the flexibility of the robots to make food from many cuisines expands the options beyond the capabilities of human chefs and could also enable restaurateurs to start ghost kitchens.

Meet Dashbotics

After acquiring robotic bowl food vending machine startup Chowbotics last year, it seems that they’re expanding their food robot plans internally as well. Doordash filed trademark applications in December and early February for the names Dashbotics, Tex-Mess, and Queso Your Way. The first could indicate a plan to integrate Chowbotics into Doordash and position the platform as a white-label offering for other restaurants to launch their own consumer-facing kiosks, or it could be a sign of Doordash looking to leverage their own brand for the robotic kiosks.

Are We Ready for Humanoid Robots Like Ameca to Take Our Food Order?

If you watched the news coming out of CES, you probably saw a robot named Ameca talking to attendees on the trade show floor.

The robot, whose human(ish) eyes and facial expressions had Elon Musk freaked out when it showed up on Twitter last December, went viral during CES in January as press and attendees tweeted out videos of the humanoid interacting with attendees.

Ever since CES, I haven’t been able to shake the image of Ameca and wonder when we might see a robot like her at my corner restaurant. And, once humanoid robots start to show up in our restaurants, I can’t help but wonder how exactly consumers will feel about it? After all, it’s one thing to show off futuristic technology at a geek-filled conference like CES. It’s another to see it in your local restaurant.

Why wonder, you ask? After all, aren’t today’s front-of-house robots more R2D2 than C3PO, and didn’t a spokesperson for the company behind Ameca say it’s probably a decade before a robot like her is walking on the streets amongst us.

Because it’s only a matter of time. My guess is we’ll start to see humanoids like Ameca in customer service roles within five years, first in scenarios where interactions are limited to a focused topic (like ordering food) and the robot is either immobile (standing behind a register) or where mobility is limited to a small spacial terrain.

So if I am right and that’s the case, it’s worth asking: will consumers embrace or run away from humanoid robots working at their local restaurant?

Industry research would suggest it depends. In a research paper published in 2018 entitled “Human Or Robot? the Uncanny Valley in Consumer Robots”, researchers describe a test in which they showed participants images of three different customer service workers – a highly but imperfectly human-like robot, a human, and a human posing as a perfectly human-like robot – and told them a chain of stores is considering employing them.

The results showed people felt most comfortable with humans and least comfortable with almost-human robots. Interestingly, while respondents weren’t as comfortable with the perfectly human-like robot as they were humans, they did feel slightly more comfortable with perfectly human-like robots than ones that were slightly off. This suggested to the researchers that once consumers can no longer discern small differences that make a humanoid seem slightly uncanny, they become more comfortable.

The receptivity of humanoids might also depend on where people live. The same researchers conducted a test in the US and Japan where they showed survey respondents pictures of robots with moderate or high human likeness and also photos of humans. Japanese respondents tended to see the robots as significantly less uncanny than Americans and were more likely to see the robots as having more “human nature.”

Researchers theorized these differences in reactions between Japanese and US respondents might be cultural. They suggest that in countries like Japan where religions like Confucianism and Shinto teach that spirits live in both animate and inanimate objects, consumers may be more likely to grant human nature onto robots. They contrast this with the US, where Christianity, a religion that believes only humans have souls, is dominant.

While consumer perceptions tied to religious or local value systems are important, it’s also worth recognizing that collective perceptions in society do change over time. As robotics become more commonplace, everyday consumers may just become less freaked out about them. Today’s novelty could become tomorrow’s everyday reality, if you will.

And while only time will tell, my guess is operators might opt to be more conservative, at least in the near term, when deploying humanoid robots. After all, if almost-human robots freak out consumers, restaurant owners might be safer installing something closer to Chuck E. Cheese than some real-world version of the kid from Polar Express.

Where to See Food Tech on the Show Floor @ CES 2022: Day 1

While CES 2022 will be smaller this year as the show returns to in-person after hosting an all-virtual show in 2021, we’re excited to see food tech as an official category on the show floor. The Spoon team will be in the Sands Expo in Booth 53752 talking to leaders from startups to funders and execs across agtech, robotics, future food and kitchen tech.

We’ll have videos and reports as the show goes on. To start, here’s a quick list of booths where you’ll see food tech and smart kitchen innovations and the companies behind them:

  • Bear Robotics — Booth #53755 — Bear Robotics is utilizing AI and autonomous robot technology, deploying bots to take care of everything from drink and food serving to bussing. Bear Robotics works with top chefs and restaurants, providing front of house labor support.
  • MycoTechnology — Booth #53753 — MycoTechnology harnesses the metabolic engine of mushrooms, known as mycelium, using natural fermentation to create novel ingredients that solve the food industry’s biggest challenges. (Stay tuned for a story on their consumer facing brand launching at CES.)
  • Yo-Kai Express — Booth #53758 — Yo-Kai debuted as a robotic ramen vending machine and announced a 2021 expansion into other autonomous food and cooking devices at the Smart Kitchen Summit Japan.
  • Edamam — Booth #53860 — Edamam structures and organizes food and nutrition data and sells it as a subscription to businesses in the food, health, and wellness sectors. They have worked with food and retail giants include Nestle, Amazon, and The Food Network and according to the company have close to 100,000 developers using Edamam’s APIs.
  • Northfork — Booth #53959 — Northfork is a Swedish-based startup that enables shoppable recipes online, bridging the world of digital recipes and food retail.
  • Apex / “OrderHQ” Smart Food Locker — Booth #53958 — Apex Order Pickup Solutions is the creator of the OrderHQ smart food locker, a secure, contactless solution for food pickup and delivery services. The lockers combine front and back of house technology, including hot and cold storage as well as integration with fully automated order fulfilment.
  • Uvera — Booth #54058 — Uvera is a Saudi cleantech startup that wants to reduce food waste with a device that claims to increase the shelf-life of fresh food up to “97% on average within only 30 seconds of using the device, without any chemicals.”
  • Yangyoo / Armored Fresh — Booth #53761 — Yangyoo is a Korea-based food tech company launching Korea’s first vegan cheese alternative first developed by its US subsidiary, Armored Fresh. The future food brand uses a similar fermenting process that produces natural cheese on plant-based protein milk.
  • Endless West — Booth #54061 — Endless West is a beverage technology startup founded by biotechnologists using science to create a blend of wines and spirits; its first product – Glyph – is the first molecular-made whiskey, created without aging or barreling.

(Shared) Booth #51830

  • Picnic — Robotic pizza machine designed for back of house operations in restaurants; they first launched onto the scene at CES 2020 and started filling orders in the middle of 2021.
  • iUNU — iUNU (you knew) is a Seattle agtech firm creating an AI-based platform for greenhouses and vertical farms that assists indoor growers with yields, farming waste and overall operations.
  • Minnow was the winner of the 2020 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase for their contactless food delivery solution called the Minnow Pickup Pod. An IoT-enabled locker for businesses and multifamily properties, Minnow streamlines food delivery on site.

We’ll add more companies to the list as we cover news and discover additional companies! Follow us at @TheSpoonTech on Twitter and LinkedIn as well as hashtags #CES2022 and #CESFoodTech for social updates.

The Walkaround Guide of Food Robot Companies Exhibiting at CES 2022

At CES 2022 this week, there will be a bunch of automated food-making machines on display. So with the big tech show starting in just two days, I thought I’d make a quick walk-around guide for those looking to do the food robots tour at CES 2022.

Beyond Honeycomb

While we don’t know a lot about this Korean-based company and their restaurant robot, we are intrigued by the company’s description: AI-driven kitchen robot that learns to reproduce world-class chef dishes. With its food sensors, the robot digitizes the texture and taste of the original dish and replicates at the molecular level. The company aims to innovate commercial kitchens to create a digital platform.

Beyond Honeycomb will be exhibiting at booth CP-29 at CES 2022, and it’s one we have on our list to check out while in Vegas.

Cecilia

Suppose you can imagine Siri fused with a weird Polar Express-like animated character. Then imagine this character served you drinks. In that case, you might have some idea of what the Celicia.ai bartender experience is like. If you want to check out this voice-assistant powered animated robot bartender for yourself, you can do so at booth 61708.

Yo-Kai

Readers of The Spoon may remember that Yo-Kai gave a sneak peak at the Takumi home ramen machine at last year’s Food Tech Live. At this year’s CES, the company will be primarily focusing on its fast-growing autonomous ramen robot for public and retail spaces, the Octo-chef. You can visit Yo-Kai in the food tech exhibition space at booth 53578.

Carbon Origins

As I wrote late last week, not only is Carbon Origins building a refrigerated sidewalk delivery robot by the name of Skippy, the company is also assembling a roster of remote robot pilots who will utilize virtual reality technology to pilot Skippy around to businesses and consumer homes. If you’re at CES, you can visit Carbon Origins and even possibly get adorned in VR gear and drive a Skippy at booth 15883.

Picnic

Picnic made its CES debut in 2020 when it teamed up with convention center catering company Centerplate and made thousands of pizzas to feed hungry trade show attendees. The Seattle-based pizza robot startup returns this year and will be making pies once again at LVCC West Hall #5043. If you want to hear what Picnic CEO Clayton Wood has to say about their robot and the food robotics landscape, you can see him speak at the Food Tech Conference at CES on a panel entitled Welcome to our Food Robotics Future led by yours truly on Thursday, January 6th.

Bear Robotics

After a big 2021 which saw the maker of front-of-house food robots showing up at Chili’s, Denny’s and lots of other places, Bear Robotics is kicking off 2022 by showcasing its Servi robot at CES. You can find Bear at booth 53755 and also hear the company COO, Juan Higueros, on the panel Welcome to Our Food Robot Future on Thursday.

Yummy Future

Yummy Future, which was co-founded by a group of students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, makes a robotic coffee kiosk that serves up both hot and cold coffee beverages and can make a cup of joe in about 30 seconds. If you want to check out Yummy Future, they will be at booth 63149 in Eureka Park in the Venetian Expo Center.

Ottonomy

Readers of The Spoon are familiar with Ottonomy, maker of autonomous delivery robots that can navigate through both outdoors and indoor environments. You can check out Ottonomy’s robot at booth 9648.

If we’ve missed any food robots, drop us a line and we’ll put them on the list.

Sidewalk Robot Specialist Serve Raises $13 Million From Uber, 7-Eleven & Wavemaker Labs

Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery robot spinout of Postmates (which itself was acquired by Uber), has announced a $13 million expanded seed round of funding. The new funding round includes several strategic investors, including former parent Uber Technologies, Delivery Hero backed DX Ventures,7-Eleven Inc.’s corporate venture arm, 7-Ventures, and Wavemaker Labs.

According to the release, Serve plans to use the new funding to accelerate its technology development and expand into new markets. The company, which has been trialing its delivery bot in the West Hollywood neighborhood, recently started to expand its executive ranks as it prepares to scale.

“This is a space that has kind of reached readiness for scale,” Serve CEO Ali Kashani told The Spoon in November. “So we are at a very pivotal point where we are no longer trying to develop something. We have developed something, and now we are putting it to use.”

For each of Serve’s new strategic investors, an alliance with the sidewalk robot company potentially adds another arrow to their automation quiver. For its part, 7-Eleven has been trialing autonomous automobile delivery with its partner Nuro in the California market, but has yet to partner up with a sidewalk robot partner. It will be interesting to watch if the company begins to trial with Serve in the California market in the coming months as it expands its efforts in autonomous delivery.

European delivery giant Delivery Hero had some early trials with sidewalk delivery startup Starship, but has since been relatively quiet on the sidewalk delivery front. However, the company’s head of special projects for its middle eastern delivery group, talabat, recently hinted that delivery robots and drones could become commonplace in the near future.

“I do see delivery robots being implemented quite soon, in specific scenarios,” said Maria Estevan, Head Of Special Projects at talabat, in a recent article on Delivery Hero’s website. “We can already see it at foodora, it’s already there. We just need to make it bigger, scalable, and adapted to the conditions of each country, its requirements, regulations, and culture. But to me, they are actually already here.”

For Wavemaker Labs, the company has largely been investing and incubating a lineup of different food robots ranging from its back-of-house frybot in Flippy from Miso, an autonomous pizza-making machine in Piestro, and its robotic kitchen robot in Nommi. With Serve, the food robotics-focused venture studio adds a food delivery robot to its portfolio of investments for the first time.

Our Ghost Kitchen Future Will Be Automated

Back at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, Adam Brotman, the CEO of restaurant tech startup Brightloom, suggested if he was a young entrepreneur and wanted to start a restaurant business, he’d create a ghost kitchen powered by a food making robot.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment ever since.

The combination of food produced via robots with a ghost kitchen model makes so much sense, in part because both are new approaches that help reduce two of the most significant cost drivers of the legacy restaurant business: real estate and labor.

Consider the real estate costs of starting a new sit-down restaurant. Some estimates put the typical down payment required for the commercial space somewhere between $150 to $350 thousand dollars in a market like LA. And that’s before you even get to the cost of renovation and installing a new kitchen, which can cost up to a quarter of a million bucks.

And then there’s labor. A typical fast-food restaurant has to factor in about 25% of sales will go to labor. A fine dining restaurant will pay even more, often up to 40%. For a spot that generates a million dollars a year in top-line revenue, this translates to $400 thousand annually in labor expenses.

That’s a lot of money, and no doubt a big part of the reason about one-third of restaurants don’t make it in normal times, let alone in an era ravaged by a pandemic.

And so, in 2021, it’s not that surprising to see several groups experimenting with ways to combine the idea of new dark kitchen models with automation. Here are just a few:

Pizza HQ: The founders of Pizza HQ are experienced sit-down pizza restaurant operators, but they are betting the future on a robot-powered dark kitchen model. The company is creating a centralized pizza production facility in New Jersey that will utilize up to four Picnic pizza robots and also develop a network of smaller fulfillment centers around the greater northern New Jersey area.

800 Degrees: Another pizza chain, 800 Degrees, is betting its future on a combination of ghost kitchens and automated pizza production. The company is working with ghost kitchen operator Reef to expand to up to 500 ghost kitchens over the next few years, many of which will include Piestro’s robotic pizza kiosks.

Cala: This French company has created a unique pasta-making robot that enables both customer pick up and third-party delivery of its dishes. This model of automated production via kiosk as well as delivery will be a popular hybrid model that enables operators to tap into multiple customer dining revenue streams.

Hyper-robotics: Hyper has created a containerized robotic pizza kitchen that can plug into a dark kitchen model or be used in a hybrid ghost and delivery/consumer pick-up restaurant.

Kitchen United/Kiwibot: While Kitchen United hasn’t announced any deals automating their food production via robotics, the ghost kitchen pioneer has started experimenting with the use of delivery robots to ship food produced in their kitchens to customers.

Nommi: Nommi is a new joint venture creating a bowl-food robot that can be utilized in a variety of ghost kitchen formats. According to company president Buck Jordan, the company also plans to work on technology that could eventually hand robot-produced food to a delivery robot to create an “end-to-end” food robot model from production to the customer doorstep.

These are just a few examples, and we haven’t even gotten to the dozens of food robot startups building systems that could power food production in a ghost kitchen space. Companies like Beastro, Mezli, Middleby and others are working on self-contained food-making robots that could serve as enabling platforms for an entire new industry built around centralized automated food production made exclusively for digital orders.

One could argue the first company to try a robot-powered ghost kitchen model was Zume. The once high-flying startup raised hundreds of millions to create a roboticized dark pizza kitchen model to deliver pizza around the bay area using its high-tech oven equipped trucks. The company eventually shut down its robot pizza business, in part because like many pioneering startups, Zume never figured out an operating model that works (in retrospect, developing custom-built delivery trucks was probably an unnecessary use of venture funding).

But now, many of the companies following in Zume’s wake are building interesting and what looks like more sustainable businesses, in large part because they are working in partnership with restaurant operators who know the business and are savvy in building virtual restaurant businesses optimized to use third party delivery. While some of these models may eventually fail, it’s pretty clear that robotics and ghost kitchens are a combination that will play a big role in the restaurant industry’s future.

Meet Nommi, a Robotic Bowl Food Kiosk Designed by Wavemaker, C3, and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Today Wavemaker Labs announced the launch of a new startup and bowl-making robotic kiosk concept called Nommi. Nommi will be “a standalone robotic kitchen that is able to produce and dispense any grain-, noodle- or lettuce-based dish through a fully integrated cooking system.”

Nommi is the latest robot startup concept to emerge from Wavemaker Labs, the food automation incubation studio behind Miso Robotics (Flippy, a back-of-house fry and grillbot), Bobacino (boba drinkbot), Future Acres (farm assistant) and Piestro (pizza kiosk). What’s unique about Nommi is the company is a product of a partnership between Wavemaker, C3 and chef Masaharu Morimoto, each of whom hold equity in the new company.

“As we started developing it, we really wanted to get partners to allow this to scale quickly, and really kind of stack the deck before we start playing,” said Buck Jordan, President and Co-Founder of Nommi and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, in a recent zoom interview with The Spoon.

C3, which has made a name for itself over the past couple of years for its aggressive expansion into virtual food haul concepts, has plans to order up to one thousand Nommi units over the next few years. While Jordan and C3 envision the Nommi augmenting some physical restaurant locations, the primary focus for the bowl food robot will be food delivery.

“We’re building this to be really delivery accessible,” said Jordan. “Delivery is going to double over the next five years, and so we want to be part of that.”

According to Jordan, while the initial machine will be designed to assemble food bowls that can be handed off to humans for delivery, Nommi envisions a future that will be roboticized from end to end.

The system is “designed and go through our system to be picked up by the regular delivery apps by human,” said Jordan. “But in the long term, we are trying to figure out a way to have a robotic transfer system to some of these robotic delivery machines out there to make a full end to end.”

Chef Morimoto will run the first Nommi, featuring menu items from his Sa’Moto restaurant brand. According to Jordan, Morimoto’s input had a significant impact on the robot design.

“Chef Morimoto wants really high-quality food,” said Jordan. “There’s no compromising when it when he puts his name on it.”

Because Morimoto wanted to delicately place ingredients in each food bowl, Nommi’s design team endeavored to build a robot capable of such high-fidelity food-making. This resulted in a wheeled cart system that moves around under food dispensing stations and rotates up to 360 degrees for precision ingredient placement. You can watch the Nommi assembling bowls via its wheeled cart system in the video below.

The Nommi Bowl Making Kiosk

Nommi fills a hole in Wavemaker’s portfolio for a fully automated bowl kitchen kiosk. Wavemaker’s most well-known food robot startup, Miso, makes back-of-house robots for fry and grill work. Piestro makes consumer-facing pizza robot kiosks. With Nommi, the company has designed a flexible bowl-food robot that, according to Jordan, is flexible enough to replicate a variety of menus from high-end chefs.

“There will be brands built from the ground up to be automated,” said Jordan. “And so we want to take the best in class food from Michelin star chefs and bring fine dining to the masses. We want to do in a fully automated way and be able to have a grain bowl made by Morimoto cost the same as a Big Mac.”

Each Nommi machine has a capacity for up to 330 bowls and lids. Each kiosk will come with up to 21 food lockers that hold finished bowls. Customers or food delivery workers can pick up the food at the kiosk using a QR code.

According to Jordan, the company hopes to start shipping its production unit in 2023.

A Conversation With Buck Jordan of Nommi