Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics

Dawn of the Robocorn? Micro-Fulfillment Robot Specialist Fabric Raises $200M on $1 Billion Valuation

Fabric, a maker of robotic micro-fulfillment solutions for grocery and e-commerce retailers, announced today they have raised $200 million in a Series C funding round. The new funding puts the company’s valuation at $1 billion.

Formerly called Common Sense Robotics, Fabric works with large online grocers and retailers such as Walmart, Instacart, and FreshDirect to build automated micro-fulfillment centers via a mix of fulfillment-as-a-service and hybrid ownership models. The company’s solution involves an intricate blend of robotics, vertically stacked storage of products, and human operators and packers that help package up the final delivery and handoff to delivery drivers.

You can see what a Fabric micro-fulfillment center (MFC) in Tel Aviv looks like in action as it processes an order below:

The World's First 1-hour Delivery Fulfilled by Robots

The funding, which vaults the company into what it describes as a ‘robocorn’ status, is not a surprise given the fast growth of the company and the broader micro-fulfillment market. Interact Analysis forecasts MFC automation and robotics market to grow from $136 million in 2020 to $5.3 billion in 2025. Revenue growth will be fueled by a rapidly growing number of MFC installations in various formats throughout the forecast; Interact expects the the total number of MFCs installed annual to grow from 29 in 2020 to over 2100 new MFCs installed in 2025.

The company plans to use the funds to grow its fulfillment solution in the general merchandise market and build a network of micro-fulfillment centers in cities across the United States. The company’s model relies heavily on building warehouse fulfillment centers that allow grocery retailers to outsource micro-fulfillment to Fabric. Fabric also co-invests and builds distributed fulfillment centers in partnership with larger players such as Instacart and FreshDirect.

That strategy makes Fabric part of a new kind of third-party logistics (3PL) player built around robotics and automation as an enabling platform for their distributed fulfillment networks. While large 3PL companies like XPO Logistics and C.H. Robinson been adopting automation in their warehouses for some time, companies like Fabric, Exotec and Attabotics are building hybrid networks of dark and retail/integrated grocery MFCs architected from the get-go with robotics in mind (rather than a bolt-on or forced integration). As more retailers invest in distribution networks tailored towards a grocery industry with 50%+ e-commerce penetration, next-gen MFC platform companies like these are well-situated to benefit.

“While we use the term ‘robocorn’ a bit tongue in cheek, we see this milestone as a real turning point in the industry, from what was once trepid exploration of micro-fulfillment to total market validation and now rapid expansion,’ said Fabric CEO Elram Goren in the release sent to The Spoon. “We’re thankful to our partners for trusting us to serve them and to our incredible team who will continue moving mountains to make our vision a reality. This is still ‘day one’ for us, and we’re extremely excited about the road ahead as we expand our offering into new markets, drive more efficiencies across the supply chain, and focus on scaling.”

Video: A Look at The RoboEatz Robotic Kitchen

In the world of food robots, there’s a trend towards building what are, in essence, stand-alone restaurants in a box.

These independent robotic kiosks enable operators to offer food and generate revenue from pretty much anywhere: airports, universities, condos. For the consumer, they’re great because it allows you to buy a warm meal without having to sit down at a restaurant.

Many of these self-contained food-making robots specialize in a type of food or are limited in what exactly they can do. The RoboEatz Ark 03, however, stands out because it can do almost everything: food prep, make hot or cold meals, plating the meal, cook four meals simultaneously. It even cleans up when it’s done.

“It’s almost like a dark kitchen,” Alex Barseghian, CEO of RobEatz, tells the Spoon. “You can cook bowls, salads, pasta all in one shot.”

Recently, The Spoon’s Carlos Rodela caught up with Barseghian to check in on the company’s progress and see the Ark 03 in action. During the interview, Barseghian tells Carlos all the details about the robot kitcen, including how many meals it can make, how many ingredients it holds, and when it expects to deploy the Ark 03 to a second location.

You can hear all of that and more by watching the full interview below:

A Look at The RoboEatz Food Robot With The Spoon

PizzaHQ’s Founders Are Building a Robot-Powered Pizza Chain of the Future

Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija had a choice: Expand their successful New Jersey pizza restaurant brand called Pizza Love, or start a tech-powered pizza concept that could change the pizza industry.

They decided to start a revolution.

“We’ve put a lot of time into building a labor-reduced, tech-driven concept that we believe will revolutionize the pizza industry,” said Udrija, who cofounded PizzaHQ alongside partners Dueltgen and Matt Bassil.

According to Udrija, PizzaHQ will utilize robotics and other technology to create a more affordable pizza (“almost a 50% lower price point”) while using the same recipe and high-quality ingredients of the pies made at their dine-in restaurant.

“Our POS will directly inject the customer order into the Picnic system,” said Udrija. “The Picnic conveyer feeds straight into our ovens and then gets cut and boxed before pick up for delivery.”

Once the pizza is boxed, it’s loaded into delivery vans and distributed to heated pickup lockers around Totowa, New Jersey, a borough about thirty minutes north of Newark. Customers will be able to track their delivery and will scan a QR code to pick up the pizza waiting for them in a locker. Third party delivery partners like UberEats will also be able to pick up orders from the pickup lockers and deliver to customers.

To reach a wider swath of customers over time, Udrija and his cofounders plan to use a hub and spoke model that creates enough production volume to blanket a metro area with coverage for their pizza. Udrija says the company plans to surround the central production facility, or hub, with five fulfillment centers over the next five years. The raw ingredients for the pizzas will be prepared at the hub each day and delivered to the fulfillment centers. The plans is for the hub to grow up to four Picnic pizza robots and 50 employees, while each distribution center will have two Picnic pizza bots and about ten employees each.

Udrija says once they work out the kinks in their northern New Jersey system, they plan to replicate the model in other cities across the country. To fund their growth, the company has raised $1.3 million through private investors and a bank loan, and plan on closing out the first round of funding at $1.7 million in the next few months.

If PizzaHQ takes off, it would be a big win for Picnic. PizzaHQ’s entire system is built around Picnic pizza robots, so each city the company builds out at a similar scale to its northern New Jersey market would translate to more than a dozen Picnic pizza machines.

PizzaHQ’s rethink of the pizza restaurant is part of a broader trend in the restaurant industry to adapt to the rapid rise in digital ordering. In markets like China, hub and spoke production models optimized for delivery have grown rapidly in recent years. In the US, digital ordering and delivery have given rise to new operating models, including online-only restaurant concepts powered by ghost kitchens. With PizzaHQ, the company is combining the hub and spoke with the dark kitchen model along with a few extra toppings of automation and other technology on top.

It may be too soon to tell if PizzaHQ will revolutionize the industry, but the company has a few things working in its favor. For one, the pizza industry is massive and is already largely built around delivery. The founders also have experience building a pizza restaurant business, which gives them both an existing customer base to market into as well as a sense of legitimacy in an industry that is bloating up quickly with digital-only concepts.

For those who live in or around Totowa, New Jersey and want to try PizzaHQ out, the company expects to start service in the first quarter of 2022.

Podcast: Building Food Robots with Now Cuisine’s Adam Lloyd Cohen

In the mid-eighties, Adam Lloyd Cohen was in Paris working on a documentary about ancient robots as a project during his senior year in college. After steeping himself in the history of automation during the day and dining on French cuisine at night, he began to think about how we might use robots to make food.

Nearly forty years later, Cohen is finally bringing his vision to life.

In 2018 he got to work on a beta prototype of a food-making robot that he and his new company Now Cuisine trialed in late 2020. That trial helped him secure a deal with a popular burrito chain in Texas called Freebirds World Burrito to run a three-month pilot with six new automated robotic kiosks called Takeout Stations. The robots will be deployed in different office buildings and multifamily housing units throughout Dallas.

Cohen sat down with me recently to discuss his decades-long journey on the Spoon Podcast. In this podcast we discuss:

  • How he came up with the idea for his food robot
  • Why he decided now was the time to bring his vision to life
  • The deal with Freebirds and how he sees his robots being deployed in the future
  • The business model for his unattended food making robots
  • Where he sees the food robotics industry going

You can listen to my conversation with Cohen below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Smoothie Robot Blendid Joins The Equity Crowdfunding Crowd With $2 Million Raise

Blendid, the maker of smoothie-making robots, announced today it had raised $2 million via crowdfunding platform StartEngine. According to the announcement sent to The Spoon, the raise brings the company’s total funding to $20 million raised through venture capital, strategic funding, and crowdfunding. The company raised funds over a four month period from over 1475 individual investors.

From the release:

Blendid is currently focused on growing its location footprint to increase its reach across the United States and perfect its food automation platform. Recently announcing its expansion plans to two new geographic areas, Blendid will use the additional funds to accelerate its expansion into the Southern California and Georgia markets with openings in a variety of venues such as malls, airports, hospitals, universities and retail stores.

The company counts Walmart and Jamba as its customers and, according to company sources, has served over 50 thousand customer orders.

Blendid isn’t the only robotics company to use crowdfunding in recent years. In fact, it seems like food robotics equity crowdfunding space has become downright crowded .

So why the interest in equity crowdfunding? There are a few reasons:

The first reason is the shine of traditional rewards-based crowdfunding has dimmed in recent years after several high-profile failures like the Coolest Cooler. By offering equity in the company, smaller investors feel they have a stake in the company and may be more forgiving than those who came to see rewards-based crowdfunding platforms as merchandise marketplaces.

Second, equity crowdfunding also gives small companies a way to sidestep traditional venture and strategic investors who a) might have higher oversight requirements or b) ask for too much of a stake than a founder(s) is willing to give up. It also opens up an entirely new pool of funding from small investors who have been shut out of the more traditional venture funding ecosystem.

Finally, robotics is a category that resonates with smaller investors. It’s an easy-to-understand space, and the investment thesis undergirding many of the proposals is largely correct: the food space is ripe for more automation and robotics, so why shouldn’t I put some skin in the game.

Long term, I expect the food robotics equity crowdfunding momentum to continue as smaller investors look for places to put their money outside of traditional investment vehicles. How these investments pay off for these investors is another story worth watching.

Will Zero-Emission Zones Drive Robotic Delivery Adoption? Looks Like It.

Last February, Santa Monica passed a rule that said all deliveries within it need to have zero emissions. Basically, this means that food needs to be delivered by someone on a bike, in an electric vehicle or…a robot.

It looks like the robots may be winning.

According to this dot.LA piece, delivery bots from a few different companies are now buzzing around the sidewalks, one of them being the Santa Monica-based Coco.

Launched in 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has expanded operations from one Santa Monica neighborhood to six other neighborhoods in little over a year. In February, the company rolled out their robots in San Pedro, working with Councilman and mayoral hopeful Joe Busciano and the Chamber of Commerce. Several local restaurants including San Pedro Brewing Co. and Whale & Ale signed on.

California often leads when it comes to regulations, and Santa Monica’s new zero-emission zone is the country’s first. I suspect that we’ll probably see other California cities follow suit and, if they do, I expect we’ll see more sidewalk robots shuttling meals to customers soon after.

Could other cities outside of California follow suit? I think they will, especially as cities become increasingly crowded with traffic from customers ordering food.

For now, though, we’ll keep an eye on how many more robots pop on the sunny sidewalks of Santa Monica.

Food Tech Show Live: AB InBev Enters Alt-Protein Game

The usual Spoon gang got together this week to talk food tech with special guest Riana Lynn, longtime food tech entrepreneur and CEO of Journey Foods.

This stories we discuss on this week’s show include:

You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also just click play below:

Iron Ox Breaks Ground on a New Robotic Farm in Texas

Iron Ox, a company best known for its robotic greenhouses, announced this week it had broken ground on a new facility, a 535,000 square-foot indoor farm in Lockhart, Texas. This is the third farm from Iron Ox, which is based in California and operates two other farms in that state. 

All Iron Ox farms are equipped with hydroponic grow systems as well as robotics, the latter being a mobile transport system that can move trays of produce as well as tend and harvest plants via a robotic grasper. Farms are semi-autonomous, with humans still needed to inspect plants and prune them.

The company says the forthcoming Lockhart farm will grow leafy greens, herbs, berries, and vine crops, and anticipates delivering its first harvest by the close of 2021. Select chefs and food retailers in Texas will be the first recipients of that harvest. The company says the new farm will serve several cities in the state thanks to its proximity to Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. The new farm will also create roughly 100 new jobs in the region. 

Constructions of high-tech greenhouses are happening all over the country right now, with Element Farms, AppHarvest, Little Leaf Farms, and others building or planning to build new facilities. Unlike vertical farms, these greenhouses still rely on sunlight (usually supplemented by some LEDs) as their primary source of lighting. And there’s plenty of sunlight to be had in Texas.

Technology like data-collecting sensors as well as AI systems are increasingly a part of these greenhouse operations, though robotic arms for harvesting crops are a little less common right now. However, AppHarvest recently acquired Root, which makes a crop-harvesting robot, suggesting a future for greenhouses that includes much more in the way of robotics. For its part, Iron Ox has said before that it would like its farms to one day be fully autonomous.

As with other high-tech greenhouse setups, automation in the Iron Ox farms helps to ensure consistency in the crops, better quality plants, and ultimately tasty veggies for consumers. 

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.