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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics

AppHarvest Acquires Crop Harvesting Robot Startup Root AI for $60M

Controlled ag company AppHarvest announced today that it has acquired Root AI, a startup that makes AI-based robots for harvesting crops grown in indoor farms. According to the press announcement, AppHarvest is spending roughly $60 million to acquire Root AI, with $10 million in cash and the balance in AppHarvest common shares. Root AI had raised $9.5 million in funding.

Root AI makes Virgo, a universal harvester that can be configured to identify and harvest different crops such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and strawberries. Virgo’s cameras use computer vision along with an infrared laser to create a 3D color scan of an area to determine what work the robot needs to perform.

For a crop like tomatoes, the system figures out the orientation of the fruit and determines if they are ripe enough to pick. Once it “sees” which tomatoes need to be picked, Virgo selects the most efficient route to picking the fruit and then sends a robotic arm and gripper to pluck the fruit.

Root AI - Going Cross-Crop

The acquisition makes sense for AppHarvest, which runs a 2.76 million square foot indoor farm in Morehead, Kentucky that is expected to produce roughly 45 million pounds of tomatoes each year. That facility uses an array of sensors, LEDs and other automated systems to control the entire growing process. Adding robotics harvesters to its stack seems like a logical next step for AppHarvest — particularly as the company is in the process of building out its network of farms. AppHarvest has two more farms currently under construction in Kentucky.

The company is also flush with cash, having went public via SPAC in February, giving it $435 million in “unrestricted cash” to run and grow its operations.

After the acquisition, Root AI’s 19 employees are expected to join AppHarvest, with Co-Founder and CEO Josh Lessing taking on the role of AppHarvest CTO, and Co-Founder Ryan Knopf joining as VP of technology.

Sony Invests in Analytical Flavor Systems To Help Our Robot Chefs of the Future Better Predict What We Want to Eat

When Analytical Flavor Systems (AFS) CEO Jason Cohen talks about his company’s technology, it usually involves a story about helping a big food company. In particular, how AFS’s AI flavor platform, Gastrograph AI, can predict how a new product such as a bag of chips or energy drink might perform in a new country or with a new demographic group.

Ask him to tell you about his company’s flagship product in the future, though, and the conversation might well include discussing how it helped a robot chef decide what exactly to make us for dinner.

That’s because the New York-based startup has recently taken a corporate investment round from Sony, which late last year announced a dedicated project focused specifically on developing food focused AI and robotics technology.

According to Cohen, Sony’s investment team believes AFS’s technology could help them achieve their goal of creating robot chefs that know exactly what to cook.

“Once you get a food robot up and running, you don’t know what people are gonna want to eat, what they’re going to prefer, like and dislike,” said Cohen in a Zoom call.

But with a technology like Gastrograph, robots of the future might be able to more accurately predict flavor combinations consumers better than humans themselves.

“Consumers have no idea what they like and dislike,” said Cohen. “They’re actually really bad at determining whether, say, they want more vanilla in their vanilla cup. You ask them and they say ‘yes’, you put it down and they want less. Sony recognized that and that’s what part of this investment is for: future innovation and growth, to help them accomplish their goals of getting cooking robots into every home.”

In addition to Sony, AFS also took on corporate investment from BASF. According to Cohen, the German conglomerate’s plant breeding and genomics program is interested in using Gastrograph AI to help them in seed development so they can ultimately predict with a higher success rate with the crops they are breeding.

“It takes a really long time, anywhere from a year to a couple of years, even decades, on some crops, in order to breed in specific traits,” said Cohen. “And so they work with us to rapidly screen and profile the fruits that they are market leaders in, or the fruits that they want to become market leaders in, and to breed better seed stock that they can then sell to farmers in different countries around the world.”

While Cohen wouldn’t disclose the amount of investment from Sony and BASF, he did say that this was an in-between “corporate”round that they had been discussing with the two strategic investors before COVID hit, so when everything shut down in March of last year things were “already in place.” Next year, said Cohen, he expects the company will raise a Series A round of funding.

Speaking of COVID, I asked Cohen how his company did this past year, and he said their core business of working with CPG innovation teams actually benefitted because as companies wanted to keep the innovation pipelines moving during a time of severe travel restrictions and AFS’s technology allowed them to do that. Since the normal big food practice of testing products in-market with focus groups curtailed during lockdowns, some companies relied on Gastrograph AI’s technology to predict how a new product might do.

This recent investment follows a 2018 seed round investment of $4 million.

Albertsons Debuts Automated Pickup Kiosk

Grocery retailer Albertsons announced today that it is piloting a new automated kiosk for grocery pickup. The kiosk is located at one of the company’s Jewel-Osco stores in Chicago.

The new kiosk, built by Cleveron, has regular and deep-freeze temperature zones, and gives curbside pickup customers a new contactless option when getting their groceries.

Jewel-Osco customers in the service area interested in using the new kiosk select “Kiosk PickUp” when shopping online, and are then give two-hour time slots to pick up their groceries. When customers arrive, they scan a code on their phone at the kiosk and their order is robotically moved to the front of the unit for pickup.

Last year, Alberstons expanded the use of automated micro-fulfillment centers, which use robotics in the back of house to pick and pack e-commerce orders. With today’s news, Albertsons is extending its automation efforts from the store room to the curb.

Albertsons’ moves, however, are part of a larger wave of automation running through the grocery industry right now. Last year was a record year for online grocery shopping, thanks to the pandemic closing restaurants and keeping people at home. In response, grocery chains have been adding systems to make online grocery shopping and order fulfillment easier. Kroger will open its automated fulfillment centers this year, FreshDirect built out an automated fulfillment facility in D.C. using Fabric’s technology, while Walmart started testing grocery delivery via autonomous vehicles.

Albertsons first automated kiosk in Chicago is already fulfilling orders and the company says it plans to install a second unit at a San Francisco Bay Area Safeway soon.

Report: Prep, Cook, Automate – Where Tech Is Leading the Restaurant Back of House

Back-of-house processes in the restaurant tend to involve a lot more legacy hardware and closed-loop systems, which present significantly different challenges than those at the front of house. That in turn has created a slower innovation pipeline and less interest from investors. 

This report will examine current back of house processes and technologies as well as the drivers for innovation changing those things. 

 Back-of-house operations present a huge opportunity for tech companies and other startups willing to tackle the many problems that have yet to be solved in the space. Additionally, technological innovations in robotics, AI and machine learning will change the physical restaurant kitchen along with its labor needs and cooking and delivery systems.

This report is available to Spoon Plus members. To learn more about Spoon Plus, go here.

Iron Ox Raises $20M Series B for More Robotic Greenhouses

Ag tech company Iron Ox, best known for its greenhouses powered by robotics and AI, announced this week it has raised a $20 million Series B round. The round was led by Pathbreak Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, At One Ventures, Crosslink Capital, , ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, and Tuesday Ventures. Iron Ox’s total funding to-date including this round is $45 million.   

In addition to the funding news, Iron Ox also announced a new farming facility in California, this one in Gilroy. Like the company’s first greenhouse, which is located in San Carlos and opened in 2018, the Gilroy facility will use a hydroponic grow system manned not by humans but by a large mobile machine equipped with robotic grippers. The machine plants, harvests, and moves the heavy grow trays around as needed, while machine learning and computer vision systems monitor plant growth. Humans aren’t completely out of the equation, though: the system still needs them to prune and inspect plants. 

Unlike many other indoor farming operations, Iron Ox does not use LED lights, but instead relies on good ol’ fashioned sunlight for plant growth. For now, the farms grow the standard mixture of leafy greens and herbs. The new Gilroy farm will sell these greens to Whole Foods and Bianchinis markets in California. 

Some of the benefits high-tech greenhouses like those of Iron Ox bring include more efficient use of space and the ability to serve customers (the ones that can afford Whole Foods, at least) locally. Iron Ox also says it uses less water than traditional farming as well as less energy. 

The company joins AppHarvest, Lufa Farms, and Gotham Greens in making recent headlines around new developments and investments in large-scale, high-tech greenhouse farming.

The EPIC-KITCHENS Project is Building a Foundation For Artificial Intelligence in the Kitchen

From the post in 2018:

The ultimate goal behind EPIC-KITCHENS is to create an open dataset about kitchen-centric objects, behavior, and interactions upon which researchers across the world can then focus their deep-learning algorithms on in the hope of advancing artificial intelligence in the kitchen.

Since those early days, the project has continued to progress, recently releasing a newly expanded dataset and publishing the results from the second annual challenge. The first research challenge, completed in 2019, was focused researchers building models that can recognize actions in the kitchen. The recently completed challenge focused on action anticipation, where they asked researchers to predict what action would take place after one second of video.

Researchers who competed in the most research challenge include teams from a variety of universities spanning the globe from Cambridge to Georgia to Singapore as well as some corporate research labs such as the AI team from Facebook.

I recently caught up with the resesarch lead for EPIC-KITCHENS, Dr. Dima Damen from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who told me that the various research teams competing used a variety of approaches to help make their systems better at recognizing and predicting actions based on the information from the video.

“There are some people who’ve used audio,” said Damen. “So they’ve used the audio from the video to identify something like opening the tap versus closing the tap. Traditionally, computer vision has relied on just images without like videos without sound.”

“There are some people who looked on a very big set of things, at what happened the past minute, because that’s helping them. And there are people who said, ‘no, I’ll focus on the objects, like where the hand is, where the object is, that’s a better approach.'”

For the next set of challenges, the group is providing a newly expanded set of data and asking them to focus on things such as “test of time”, where they ask if models trained two years ago still perform well and “scalabilty,” where they will have researchers look at whether more data is better.

Part of the expanded data will be a newly broadened dataset called EPIC-KITCHEN-100, where new footage brings the total number of hours of video captured to 100. According to Damen, the new video is from a cohort that included participants from both the previous study (half of the original 32 participants agreed to participate again) and 8 new participants.

According to Damen, by bringing back past participants, it will allow the computer models to better understand kitchen behavior by factoring in what happens with the passage of time, like in real life, but also better understanding how small changes can impact the results.

“It’s the natural progression, like how life will be,” said Damen. “The question is what happens to computer vision in the meanwhile? So it’s tiny tiny changes, right? It’s a slightly new camera, people might have moved home, and then we’re asking more questions that we believe would be interest to the community.”

Damen said she hopes that her technology can help build better technology and systems that could be of help to humans who need assistance.

“So there are new questions that are being asked which, interestingly, even the assistive technology community is not talking about. As in, if you want to help someone, sometimes you can guess what they’re doing, but many times you can’t.”

Spoon Plus Subscribers can read the full transcript of our conversation and watch my video interview with Daman below.

The Food Tech Show: Are We Ready to Eat Bugs?

The Spoon team got together talk about the most interesting food and kitchen tech stories of the week, including:

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, download direct to your device or just click play below.

Drive-Thrus Are Getting Slower. Can Tech Change That?

Wait times in the drive-thru lines are getting slower, according to QSR’s annual Drive-Thru Study, which launched this week and says drive-thru speed of service in 2019 was 20 seconds longer than in 2018.

The study actually covers a number of different areas of drive-thru performance, from customer service to order accuracy to which chains are installing digital menu boards. But the continued lag in speed of service stuck out this year.

In 2019, the average time a customer spent in the drive-thru — from speaker to order window — was 255 seconds. To put that number in context, the average time from speaker to order window in 1999 was roughly 181 seconds, according to data from previous QSR Drive-Thru studies. That number dipped up and down over the next decade before climbing to 226.30 seconds in 2016. It’s gone steadily upward ever since.

What’s with the wait?

One reason is menus. The QSR 2019 study notes that “more complex menus” contributed to slowdown in order accuracy, which fell just over 5 percentage points compared to 2018. As the study says, “more intricate menus touted by brands like Taco Bell and Arby’s proved to be a stiffer challenge for employees working to deliver complicated orders at top drive-thru speed.”

Along with those larger menus come more complicated food items, like Taco Bell’s now-retired XXL Grilled Stuft Burrito, the making of which adds more time to the drive-thru process. Even a latte, which isn’t an inherently complicated drink, takes more seconds to make than pouring a regular cup of coffee. Some chains brands have gotten hip to this problem and trimmed down their bloated menus. Even so, it ain’t 1985, when you could count McDonald’s burger offerings on one hand, and we’re not likely to return to that level of simplicity.

Mobile orders also contributed to the slowdown in drive-thru times, and with “lanes possibly getting more crowded with not only drive-thru customers but also those picking up mobile orders, it’s going to be difficult for brands to shave off seconds moving forward.”

Some are trying to knock out those extra seconds, most notably Dunkin’, which started building stores with dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile-order customers in 2018. Fellow donut-peddler Krispy Kreme is doing the same as it revamps its locations for the digital age. In Australia, KFC is piloting a drive-thru-only store heavily focused on digital transactions and testing out new concepts to speed up wait times.

But mobile orders aren’t going away, and, as I mentioned earlier, menus aren’t about to get smaller, so what’s a restaurant chain to do?

Implement AI.

McDonald’s made that much clear when it acquired Dynamic Yield in March and subsequently rolled out the latter’s AI tech to hundreds of locations. Right now, that particular implementation of the tech is aimed at things like order accuracy and quickly upselling items to customers. Where it could make a massive impact, though, is in making restaurants more predictive.

Dynamic Yield-enabled menu displays at McDonald’s drive-thrus can show customers food based on data like the time of day, the weather, and trending menu items. Narrowing down someone’s food selection based on those factors could help the average customer parse through a massive menu and get through the selection process faster, shaving seconds off the time between ordering and collecting the meal. As McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook noted on an earnings call in April, “. . . using the data collected based on current restaurant traffic at the drive-thru, the technology will begin to suggest items that can make peak times easier on our restaurant operations and crew.”

It could also help predict future demand. If the system can tell by data that it’s 80 degrees outside, sunny, and a football game is about to let out nearby, the restaurant can prepare itself with extra staffing ahead of time to move a potentially bigger rush through the line faster.

Meanwhile, companies like 5Thru and Valyant AI are implementing things like license plate recognition and conversational AI to speed up the order and pay process in the drive thru. 5Thru, in particular, is also working with car manufacturers to add voice-order capability in the vehicle, sort of like Domino’s is doing with Chevrolet and other car companies.

All of these efforts are aimed at automating parts, or eventually all, of the drive-thru process to keep chains competitive in what’s become a very oversaturated fast food market. This time next year, we’ll have a better idea of how far towards that goal Dynamic Yield can get McDonald’s, and AI in general can get the industry. If the seconds spend in line start to drop, we could one day offer a 2020-sized menu much faster, so restaurant operators can party like it’s 1999.

Tally ho! Simbe Robotics Raises $26M for its Inventory-bot

Simbe Robotics, which makes the autonomous Tally inventory robot for retailers, announced today that it has raised a $26 million Series A round of funding led by Venrock with participation from Future Shape, Valo Ventures, and Activant Capital. Additionally, Simbe also announced today that it is expanding its existing partnership with SoftBank Robotics America to include inventory financing to scale the manufacturing of an additional 1,000 Tally robots over the next two years.

Tally is an autonomous robot that roams store aisles using computer vision and RFID to scan shelves to check on inventory. It’s part of a suite of services from Simbe that provides analytics about purchases and insights about re-stocking management. Simbe provides the hardware for free and charges a monthly subscription for the software and analytics. So far, Tally has been put to work in trials at Giant Eagle and Schnuck’s grocery store chains.

Tally is just one of the robots coming to a grocer near you. Earlier this year, Walmart announced it would expand Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robots to 300 locations, and Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 “Marty” floor roaming robots from Badger Technologies.

While retailers may like the fact that robots are faster and more precise than humans (and the fact that they don’t take breaks or call in sick), there are still a lot of kinks that need to be worked out with robots. As we’ve written before, robots can make their human co-workers enjoy their jobs less, and shoppers don’t know how to interact with a cold, silent, sentinel (even if they have googley eyes).

Additionally, how long will robots be necessary for things like inventory management? Walmart debuted its IRL store earlier this summer which features banks of cameras installed and computer vision to keep a real-time eye on what’s in stock.

However, retrofitting a store with the cameras, software and sensors needed to keep track of inventory in that way is expensive and will take a long time. So until then, robots like Tally will probably find a place among the produce at plenty of retailers.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: We Have Opinions on Tiny Dishwashers & Beyond Burgers

In case you didn’t already know, The Spoon team has lots of opinions. As you might guess, those opinions are especially pronounced when it comes to food and kitchen gadgets.

And so we decided to get together and get some things off our chest on this Editor Roundtable edition of the Food Tech Show.

Here’s what we talked about:

In addition to lots of opinions, we also share sound effects (or at least I do).

As always, please subscribe, play (and rate!) the podcast in Apple podcasts (or your favorite pod player), download direct or just click play below.

Video: Do Food Robot Startup Founders Need Restaurant Experience to Be Successful?

Say you’re a VC looking to invest in a company that makes strawberry-picking robots. There are three or four companies in the space, all vying for your capital to get off the ground.

How do you choose where to put your dollars?

That’s one of the questions that we tackled last week at ArticulATE, our inaugural food and automation summit. We closed out the day with a lively panel on the opportunities — and challenges — in the food robotics investment landscape. Our speakers were VCs from the foodtech, hard tech and IoT spaces: Brian Frank of FTW Ventures, Brita Rosenheim of Better Food Ventures, Rajat Bhageria of Prototype Capital, and Avian Ross of Root VC.

The Spoon’s Michael Wolf moderated the conversation on what these investors are looking for in a food automation startup pitch specifically — and where they see significant opportunities in the fast-growing market. (Yes, both Frank and Ross have invested in strawberry-picking robots — and Ross claims he made the right choice.)

It’s certainly an exciting time in the food robotics space: there are tons of entrepreneurs out there with lofty plans to build the next robotic sushi restaurant, the next automated food delivery bot, or the next burrito-rolling robot arm (which, apparently, really hard to do).

However, the panelists seemed to agree that food robotics is a trickier investment space than a lot of other tech areas. Sure, the basic building blocks of food robotics — AI, articulating arms, etc. — are pretty democratized. But Ross (who — fun fact — spent a former life building robots for the Food Network) said that “robotics feels special and different.” He pointed out that the food system is incredibly complex and that a whole host of players have to be involved to deliver even the most basic meal to the consumer. And that’s just logistics: getting a robotic system to reach parity with a basic human fast food experience in terms of taste or customer experience is really tricky.

Because there are so many complexities at play it can require more capital than some other tech investments. It can also take longer to bring food automation technology to market. Which isn’t a problem — unless, as Rosenheim pointed out, you’re working with investors who are looking for “the next shiny thing” and aren’t patient enough to be in it for the long haul.

Investors in food robotics have to be especially willing to take risks and play the long game. However, not all the VCs saw eye-to-eye on what it takes for a food automation startup to be successful. The panelists disagreed on whether or not startups need deep restaurant market knowledge to be successful, how high the capital investment has to be in food automation, and what sets one seemingly identical food robotics startup apart from another.

Check out the video below to see the whole conversation — it was a really fun one.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics

Look out for more ArticulATE 2019 videos rolling out on our YouTube channel over the next week! 

Kroger and Ocado Begin to Roll Out Automated Fulfillment Centers

If you’re as fascinated as we are with the idea of robots scurrying around and doing your weekly grocery shop, Kroger and Ocado have some good news for you.

Today the grocery giant announced it would roll out two new Ocado-powered customer fulfillment centers (CFCs) — also called “sheds” — in the Central Florida and Mid-Atlantic regions. This news comes just a few months after Kroger named Monroe, OH (outside of Cincinnati) the location for its first automated robot warehouse.

In May of 2018 Kroger entered into an exclusive partnership with U.K.-based online grocer Ocado, nabbing a 6 percent stake in the company and promising to build twenty automated warehouse facilities across the U.S. over the following three years. We’re seeing that promise come to life.

As resident robo-expert Chris Albrecht pointed out, grocery logistics is hot hot hot right now and big players like Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Kroger are all racing to deliver your groceries as fast as possible.

To beat out its competitors, Kroger has invested not just in robotic fulfillment centers but also in self-driving cars, a direct-to-consumer e-commerce platform, and an expanded deal with Instacart.

And that’s just for grocery delivery and curbside pickup. In-store, Kroger also has a number of developments in the works. In this month alone, they partnered with Microsoft to launch two tech-enabled grocery stores (their answer to Amazon Go), and also unveiled new Customize It personalized meal kits. With the company’s brand new innovation lab, which it launched in August in tandem with the University of Cincinnati, Kroger doesn’t seem like it will stop reinventing the grocery space anytime soon.

Curious about how robotics and automation will reshape the grocery business? Join the conversation at ArticulATE, our food robotics summit in San Francisco on April 16th! Early Bird tickets are available now.