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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics

Robots, Instagram, and Flan: Highlights from our Future of Restaurants Meetup

For our latest food tech meetup, we decided to do things a little bit differently. We were lucky enough to work with Chef Eric Rivera (formerly of Alinea in Chicago) and host the event at his new incubator space, addo.

We knew Chef and his team had high standards, but we were still blown away when we walked in the door. Addo is a creative culinary mind’s dream: the space is a coffeeshop during the day and plays host to pop-up dinners, cooking classes, and community get-togethers (Mario Kart tournaments, salsa classes, etc.) during the evening and weekends. “Basically, it allows me to do whatever I want,” he said.

That means that he lets chefs — usually ones who are up-and-coming or have been recently let go — to host pop-up dinners there, and fills the pastry case with locals who want somewhere to display their baking chops. The space opened its doors 2 months ago and already has a staff of 20.

Part of the reason that Rivera could even create a place like addo is because of new technology. When he returned to Seattle to cook after working in the legendary Alinea, where he was Director of Culinary, Rivera hit a lot of roadblocks. People told him he couldn’t start a restaurant without a certain amount of money, or investors. But Rivera decided to forge ahead and create a space inspired by his own struggles — powered, at least partially, by technology. Culinary booking services like Tock allowed him to do things like host 2-seat dinners out of his home kitchen before he got the addo space, and food delivery from his current operation pads his business.

Over a Puerto Rican meal of roast pork with chimichurri, fried plantains, and flan (Rivera’s mom’s recipe), the chef joined The Spoon’s Michael Wolf and Modernist Cuisine’s Scott Heimendinger in a conversation about how technology big and small is changing the restaurant — from robotics to sous vide to Instagram.

Instagram may seem relatively banal when it comes to restaurant tech — after all, most of us use it to post food pictures all the time — but for bootstrapped entrepreneurs like Rivera, it’s been game changing. “I don’t have the money to hire a marketing or PR firm,” said Rivera. Instead, he uses Instagram as a marketing platform, as well as a way to target certain demographics.

It’s also a tool for him to tap into another trend we cover a lot in the food tech space: personalization. When diners reserve a spot online, Rivera has them fill out a questionnaire to get their dining preferences, but he also does a little sleuthing on their social profiles to see what restaurants they like to eat in, food preferences, etc. It’s a little Minority Report-y maybe, but when you’re paying a hefty price, you want each dish on the menu to be something you really want to eat.

Chef Rivera in front of his beloved smart oven.

Of course, we also had to cover a contentious subject for the future of restaurants: robots. “Robots are better than people for almost everything,” said Heimendiner. Especially for when you need to do something that’s highly repeatable or requires lots of accuracy.

Which is obviously useful in places with high volume and basic tasks, like flipping burgers. In Rivera’s kitchen, at least, robots won’t be replacing people — they’ll just help them do their jobs better. That might be an exoskeleton to help workers unload heavy boxes of produce, or Roombas vacuuming up at the end of the day.

Possibly the best leftovers plate we’ve ever seen.

For restaurants, food delivery is a blessing — and a curse. It can increase overall sales, capturing people too lazy to get off the couch, but on the flip side it also reduces foot traffic. Heimendinger made an interesting comparison: “The trend in ordering delivery from restaurants follows a little bit the trend of going to the movies,” he said. People are streaming movies at home instead of going to theaters, and are ordering food delivery instead of dining out. “This will change some of the function of a restaurant’s physical form,” predicted Heimendinger. He thinks it won’t be just a space to eat food: it will also, more than already, be a place to relax, meet up, have a meeting, etc. Which changes the business model. “It turns it into a community space,” he explained, “Not just a dinner table.”

Addo is certainly more than just a dinner table. Based on the interest we saw last night in addo’s far-ranging dining experience and community vibe, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more incubators popping up in the future.

Want to hear more of Chef Rivera’s perspective on how technology can help lighten the load of restaurant workers and open up new revenue streams? He’ll be speaking at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle on October 8-9th — get your tickets now! 

We ended the night by making some crepes with the Hestan Cue!

Spyce Restaurant Review: Delicious Bowl Food Made Me (Almost) Forget The Robots

Last month, I visited Boston with my sixteen-year-old son.

After a few days of site seeing in a city rich with American history, I asked him what his favorite thing he’d seen so far.

“The robot restaurant,” he said without hesitation.

So much for the founding fathers. Instead of Faneuil Hall or the site of the Boston Massacre, my son thought the coolest thing in Beantown was a restaurant where bowl food is assembled by robots.

I can’t really blame him. Overall it was a fun experience, and the food was tasty. Here’s a quick review of my son’s first (and favorite) robot restaurant.

Walk In and Order

We visited on a Sunday afternoon. Walking in, the first thing I noticed was not only were there a row of robots, but a couple of humans are running around helping out behind the counter.

Spyce’s human and robot workers

The place was crowded. People were ordering food at the kiosks, and most tables had people scooping food out of bowls.

There were a row of kiosks that are immediately visible when you walk in. A manager type was hanging out near the front wearing a suit, ready to help if we had any questions. We decided to try it by ourselves.

Ordering a meal at the Spyce robot restaurant in Boston.

The kiosk ordering experience was easy. It reminded me of ordering a meal at Eatsa, in part because I was ordering bowl food, but also because it was an intuitive ordering experience that moved very quickly.

There were a number of basic bowls to choose from. Each bowl cost the same: $7.50. I picked a Thai bowl and my son an Indian bowl. Once your  bowl is picked, you can choose from a number of add-ins and sides such as soft boiled eggs, cabbage slaw, and pumpkin seeds.  After sides,  you choose from one of three drinks: iced tea, hibiscus ginger and tart kiwi limeade.

Meal Preparation

Once a meal is ordered, the information is sent to the robots.

Meal Preparation At Spyce Restaurant

After portions of veggies, rice and protein are scooped into one of seven woks, a dispenser scoots around and squirts sauce into the meals.  From there, the woks start spinning and cooking. Above the woks, signs tell you what’s cooking. A sign above one wok read “Now Cooking Thai Bowl for Mike Wolf”.

The food is cooked quickly (the restaurant touts each meal takes about three minutes). I chatted briefly with the manager, who told me during the busy lunch hours the robots can prepare around 150 or so meals per hour.  He said that while lunch is their busiest meal, they serve around 40 or so meals per hour during dinner.

Final Prep and Serve

After a couple of minutes, the wok tips over and drops the steaming hot food into a bowl.

Adding Garnishes At Spyce Restaurant

From there, bowls are picked up by a human who adds garnishes and the sides. The experience wasn’t all that different from watching over a a Subway sandwich being made (minus the processed ham and turkey).  I chatted with the prep server, who politely answered all my questions.

The Meal

The meal is served in a paper bowl with a lid on it. On to is the customer’s name and bowl type printed on the lid paper. My bowl read “Mike Wolf” and it had the world “Thai” in small print.

The food was excellent. My meal, the Thai bowl, was yummy, but my son out-ordered me with the Indian bowl. Perfectly seasoned chicken, peas lathered in tikka masala sauce, potatoes and brown rice. Delicious.

The drinks weren’t as good as the food. Since the customer dispensed them at a drink station, I tried them all. I liked the limeade the best, but overall none were outstanding.

But this was ok because the food was tasty and cheap, and the order and preparation experience was quick and fun.

“I’d eat there every day,” my son told me as we left.

Paul Revere never stood a chance.

How An Obscure Academic Project May Have Just Started A Kitchen Robot Revolution

Imagine it’s 2031 and you’ve sat down for dinner with your family.

It’s middle of the week so tonight’s meal is nothing too ambitious, mac and cheese or fajitas. As is the usual routine, you catch up with the family and share a few laughs until the meal is finally served, at which point everyone loads their plates and starts chowing down on what turns out to be a tasty dinner (the third one this week!).  Soon your youngest – the finicky one – asks for seconds.

Congrats parent, another successful meal, but don’t spend too much time patting yourself on the back because here’s the thing: Neither you nor your significant other spent any time preparing tonight’s dinner.  Instead, tonight’s dinner – and every dinner this week – was prepared in its entirety by a robot, the very same robot who is now in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner and preparing dessert.

Futuristic? Yes. A science fiction movie cliche? Definitely. But the above scenario may also be a very realistic possibility in large part due to an obscure research project involving 32 GoPro adorned home cooks making dinner.

Creating A Technology Big Bang

With any technology that changes the world, there’s almost always a research breakthrough or two that helps unleash innovation. In today’s world of AI and robotics, most experts would agree that one of these technological “big bangs” was a 2012 ImageNet Challenge research team led by the University of Toronto’s Geoff Hinton.

ImageNet is a crowdsourced database of millions of annotated images. The accompanying ImageNet Challenge is an annual contest where teams of researchers in the area of machine vision come together to pit their machine vision algorithms on the ImageNet dataset and against one another to try and achieve the highest degree of accuracy.

Hinton’s 2012 team had what is widely believed to be a breakthrough in AI research by utilizing deep learning techniques to achieve much greater accuracy than before (85%).  Since this breakthrough effort six years ago, there’s been leaps forward each year – today’s ImageNet Challenge teams routinely achieve 95% accuracy, better than most humans –   helping to drive significant progress in all corners of the AI world from autonomous driving to augmented reality to industrial and consumer robotics.

All of which brings us back to the kitchen.

And Now Into the Kitchen (The Epic Kitchen)

Now, a group of research academics is trying to create what is the equivalent of an ImageNet for the kitchen. Called EPIC-KITCHENS, the project is an ambitious effort to capture people performing natural tasks in their home kitchens like cooking, cleaning and doing laundry and then release the resulting millions of annotated images into the wild. 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.

Why the kitchen? According to the study’s lead, Dr. Dima Damen, the kitchen is one of the most complex environments in everyday life for artificial intelligence to master because it involves so many tasks and actions.

EPIC-KITCHENS 2018 TRAILER

“The most challenging type of object interactions tend to be in our kitchen,” said Damen in a phone interview I conducted last month. “We’re doing lots of tasks, on short notice, we’re multitasking. We might be adding something to our meal and moving something around. That makes the kitchen environment the most challenging environment for our types of perception.”

Damen, who is with the University of Bristol in the UK, partnered with researchers at the University of Toronto and Italy’s University of Catania to bring the project to life. The project took about a year to complete and involved a panel of 32 home cooks across ten nationalities in four cities in Europe (United Kingdom) and North America (Canada and US). To capture their activity, each participant mounted a GoPro on their head and went through 1-5 hours of preparing meals, cleaning and whatever else came naturally.

“We gave them a camera, sent them home, and said just record whatever you are doing in your kitchen for 3-5 days,” said Damen.

From there, the participants watched the video and narrated their videos so researchers had an audio track from which to manually annotate the atomized images – 11.5 million in all- captured in the 55 hours of video.

The result is a massive database its creators hope will help researchers in training their AI systems to better understand the kitchen. Like ImageNet, the creators also hope to foster competition with challenges and will track the progress with online leaderboards.

The data itself is something many will find somewhat mundane:

Distribution of actions in kitchen. Source: Epic Kitchens

The above distribution of annotated actions and objects are what you would probably expect: a really long list of things – like vegetables, kitchenware, spices – found in the kitchen. Same for actions. The above distribution breaks down pretty much all the verbs we perform in the kitchen such as put, take, twist and so on.

And that’s the point, at least if you’re a researcher hoping to train an artificial intelligence system. Just as this type of granular data helped ImageNet Challenge teams achieve a 95% accuracy rate with their software, the EPIC KITCHENS team hopes to reach a similar level of accuracy. By helping these systems understand what everyday objects are and how people manipulate them in a series of actions every day to do the basic functions of like in our kitchen like cooking and cleaning, the EPIC-KITCHENS data and what evolves out of it can provide a foundation upon which technologists can eventually create robots that act like humans and perform human-like functions in the kitchen.

The result could be an explosion in innovation in spaces like augmented reality, personalized food identification apps and, yes, cooking robotics. And while a fully-functional Rosie the home cooking robot could be the ultimate end-result of this research a decade from now, chances are we’ll see much more evolutionary improvements between now and then in the form of smarter appliances, more capable virtual assistants and more immersive guided cooking experiences.

And oh yeah: if you’re the type who wants to keep the robots out of the kitchen altogether, don’t worry. One of the biggest challenges with machine understanding of food is that the three-dimensional human comprehension of taste, smell and texture is extremely hard to replicate with machines. Add in the difficulty of AI to understand context and it makes me think that while we may eventually get to cooking robots, they may only be average cooks at best.

The real artists, the chefs – whether home based are on TV – are probably safe from the robot invasion.

Probably.

The Harvesting-Robot Early Adopter Market Is Now Worth $5.5 Billion

Of all the uses for robots, harvesting plants seems like one of the most practical and therefore promising ways to put these machines to work.

I’m not alone in thinking this. Based on findings from 1,300 farmers recently surveyed by market research firm Alpha Brown, the robot-harvesting market is now worth $5.5 billion. And that’s just the early adopter segment. Because the robotics-for-harvesting segment is so new, and because most of the machines aren’t yet available for commercial use, Alpha Brown confined its findings to this segment.

But there’s much to discuss within that early adopter market. And while harvesting bots aren’t the only ones rolling around the farm these days, they serve an especially sensitive area of the agricultural supply chain.

Harvesting things like fruits and vegetables requires labor, and labor on farms is in short supply these days. In Santa Barbara County alone last year, $13 million of strawberries, broccoli, and produce was left to rot in the field because there weren’t enough workers harvest the crops. Another estimate states that 20 percent of produce grown in the U.S. never leaves the farm because of either labor shortage or cost of labor.

That shortage is, of course, wrapped up in a web of economics and politics I’ll leave you to read up on yourselves. The bottom line is that labor is an issue when it comes to harvesting produce, and robots are seen as one promising solution to the problem. 

The Alpha Brown report based the $5.5 billion market value on robots’ abilities to offset existing labor costs. Labor will, according to the report, “determine the level of implementation of this technology in the market.”

And while only about 3 percent of growers currently use robots for harvesting, there are plenty of choices out there for those considering. The following are just a few companies making promising moves in this space as they bring their bots to market.

Harvest Automation

Harvest Automation has been around since 2008, originally operating under the mission of using robotics to solve problems across various industries. The nursery and greenhouse market is one such area that needs the help, as the struggle to find enough labor is especially pervasive here.

Enter the HV-100, the company’s flagship product. Aside from looking a little like Wall-E, the robot automates the task of spacing of containerized plants commonly found in nursery operations. As plants grow, their containers need to be spaced increasingly farther apart to ensure a uniform canopy overhead. The HV-100, which is built to handle most container sizes, makes this manually-intensive task faster and more efficient, and the spacing more accurate.

The HV-100 is also designed to work alongside human laborers, rather than replace them, and can be used both outdoors and in.

Harvest Automation About Us

Agrobot

Fruit is far and above the most delicate type of produce out there, which makes the idea of using harvester robots especially practical. Spain-based company Agrobot has narrowed this idea down to one of the most sensitive fruits out there, the strawberry. The company’s SW6010 uses morphological and color analysis to determine, in real time, how ripe a fruit is, its size, and other factors that will determine whether it gets collected. The robot does this one strawberry at a time, which sounds like it would take forever but happens in seconds, according to Agrobot’s site.

Abundant Robotics

Hayward, Calif.-based startup Abundant Robotics spun out of SRI International and is currently testing a prototype that automates apple picking. Using computer vision algorithms, the robot locates the apples and picks them using a vacuum-like mechanism. To robot is designed to pick one fruit per second from the tree. At the same time, Abundant says the machine is gentle enough not to damage the fruit during the harvesting process.

The company is reportedly planning to go from prototype to mass production in 2018.

FRRobotics

FRRobotics takes the concept of harvesting delicate produce one step further with its machine, a grasping hand that can be adjusted based on the fruit it’s picking. Strawberries, for example, would need a much more delicate touch than apples. With FFRobotics’ yet-unnamed machine, a simple modification could accommodate those different needs. This also allows farm to use harvesters over multiple seasons.

The robot emulates the way an actual hand picks fruit and can pick, according to the company, “10 times more usable fruit than the average worker.” Like Abundant, FRRobotics’ machine uses advanced image processing to locate and harvest the fruit.

FFRobotics - The Future of Fresh Fruit Harvest

Energid

Energid makes a few different kinds of robots, among them a citrus harvesting system. The prototype system was tested in a Florida orange grove by mounting it to a four-axis hydraulic arm, which in turn was mounted to a truck. The result? The machine can pick an orange every two to three seconds, with 80 percent picking accuracy.

You can check out the machine shown in slow-motion below, to get an idea of just how many oranges two to three seconds yields.

Robotic Citrus Harvesting

Right now the biggest question mark seems to be cost. Farmers surveyed for the Alpha Brown who hadn’t yet integrated robotics into harvesting said the technology was either too costly or their farms weren’t big enough to justify the purchase. It’s a little early to tell if this will change as more robots become commercially available. But given the millions of dollars in un-harvested produce we’re losing, let’s hope these companies find a way to get more machines onto more farms, sooner rather than later.

‘Humanless Retail’ On Display at CES, But Will Humans Buy It?

One trend on display at this year’s CES is what I would describe ‘humanless retail’, where technology is used to sell physical goods to consumers without the help of humans.

Of course, this trend isn’t new. 2017 brought us a bunch of new ideas for taking the human out of the retail transaction by using machine vision/AI, IoT and more. What I saw on the show floor in Vegas is just a continuation of these concepts.

For example, last year we hear a lot about Amazon Go, a store concept where customers walk in and out without ever talking to a cashier. And this week, we saw the startup version of this in AIPoly, a company which offers a machine vision and sensor platform to create what the company calls “autonomous markets”.

Just as with Amazon Go, AIPoly customers register with the “store” and are identified as they walk in (or up to in the case of a kiosk) through facial recognition. The store then registers a purchase as the machine vision recognizes the products they pick off the shelves.

Below is a pic of the demo the company was showing off at CES.

And then there’s the Qvie, a single-product micro-vending machine that is essentially a connected lockbox version of the booze fridge in the Hilton. Qvie is targeted at the Airbnb host as a way to enable additional revenue through in-room sales, a trend that seems almost inevitable as Airbnb becomes a more and more viable alternative to hotel stays.

Finally, there’s Robomart, which can best be described as the love child of the controversial Bodega and an autonomous automobile.  The vision behind Robomart is a retailer such as 7-11 or Target would lease a fleet of Robomarts, stock them, and then bring the store to the consumer’s home. While it’s not exactly the same as Zume Pizza delivery trucks, it does something similar in making the retail location less relevant by bringing the point of presence closer to the consumer.

Robomart CEO Ali Ahmed told me he expects the first Robomarts to be available this year, which strikes me as extremely ambitious since the company is still raising funding to build out its vision. A mobile autonomous car-store combo doesn’t strike me as something you can do cheaply.

These are just three ideas I ran across in a couple hours on the floor at CES, enough to make clear that humanless retail is going to be much in 2018. The question for me is, will humans buy the idea of humanless retail, or is this just another case of Silicon Valley getting ahead of itself as it looks for addressable markets to apply new tech like AI, robotics and IoT?

The answer is yes, humanless retail is going to big. Sure, there will be lots of companies floating in the humanless retail startup deadpool before it’s all said and done (this is the case with pretty much every startup market in case you haven’t noticed), but the reason I think many of these early ideas will become much bigger and common is they’re simply evolutionary steps of what we’ve been seeing for decades and with much more rudimentary technology.

The self-service checkout at the grocery store, vending machines in your office, and the booze fridge in your hotel room are all innovations aimed at selling things to people without the need for another person to take money and put something in a bag. The only difference with these new ideas is the latest technologies to make humanless retail more convenient than ever before.

Oliver Aims To Take One Pot Cooking To The Next Level

The holy grail of convenience cooking has always been the one pot solution. Since the early 1970s, the CrockPot and other less famous brands of slow cooking machines dominated the kitchen as the solution for “set it and forget it” meals. Whether it was pork roasts, applesauce, stews or chili, the Crock Pot lets users combine (mostly) raw ingredients, turn the device on and come back later in the day to a fully cooked meal. In 2009, with the rise of the electric pressure cooker, the Instant Pot debuted and the debate began as to which technology was actually more useful.

The Instant Pot has a slow cooker feature, but the love of the device comes from its ability to produce cooked food in a much shorter amount of time through pressure cooking.

But whether you’re team Crock Pot or team Instant Pot, one thing remains true: one pot cooking tech hasn’t changed much in the last 40+ years. They still require users to dump a slew of ingredients all at once into a large bowl (or manually add different ingredients at different times) and hope it all cooks perfectly. But not every food item requires the same amount of time – or the same levels of heat – to cook.

This was the challenge Else Labs was trying to tackle with new one pot automated cooking machine Oliver. The technology and device design allows ingredients to be divided into dispensing canisters and then placed into the pot for cooking when the recipe-driven app tells it to.

Else Labs Founder & CEO Khalid Aboujassoum sat down with The Spoon’s Allen Weiner at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit.

“This technology takes slow cooking to a new level. You can taste every ingredient – they all have the right texture and right flavor because they were cooked correctly,” said Aboujassoum.

Oliver isn’t exactly a slow cooker; it mimics the way you’d cook on a stove top (saute onions first, add vegetables, cook meat around it, make the broth separate, etc) – but it enables automation and connectivity to take over and relieve the cook from standing over the stove for the entire process.

Oliver does what Crock Pot and Instant Pot can’t – understand the sequence and temperature of how each ingredient should be cooked and mimic those actions the way a human cook would. Oliver dispenses at the right time and heats to the right temperature with a robotic stirring arm built in to stir as needed.

“Tell Oliver ‘I need food by six’ and the machine will do the math for you in terms of when to start, stir, dispense and stop,” said Aboujassoum.

Another differentiator? Oliver records the work of pros so busy home cooks can replicate their work. According to Aboujassoum, the recipes generated from the Oliver app are all created with professional chefs. As the chefs make their recipes with Oliver, Oliver and the app capture all the actions, recording the sequence so it can be automated and replicated for Oliver users. Eventually, the plan is to let the Oliver user community contribute and add recipes using this same method to capture a more diverse range of content.

It took almost 40 years for the Crock Pot to have a serious competitor but it seems the Instant Pot may not enjoy the same length of time as a crowd favorite. Oliver is poised to launch in 2018.

 

SKS 2016 Flashback: The Cooking Automation Continuum

With Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 just days away, here at the Spoon, we thought we’d revisit some of our favorite session from last year.

This session, “The Cooking Automation Continuum: From Guided Cooking to The Cooking Robot,” was a fun panel moderated by your’s truly that explored the various ways innovators are looking to apply automation and robotics to food and cooking.

There’s no doubt that cooking automation is a continuum. We see basic automation in hugely popular cooking devices today such as the Instant Pot and Thermomix, while there are those exploring the outer boundaries of how to apply automation and robotics to create fully cooked meals.

We talk about all of this in this session.

The panelists for this session are Darren Vengroff, the (then) Chief Scientist of Hestan Smart Cooking, Timothy Chen, CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, and Ehsan Alipour, the CEO of Oliso.

We will be exploring cooking automation and robotics at this year’s Summit. If you’d like to see these sessions, talk to the innovators and become smarter about the future of cooking, you can still get tickets at the Smart Kitchen Summit website. Use the discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

Bubble Lab Wants Robots To Brew, Pour & Serve You Coffee

The Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase provides a platform for exciting startups, inventors, culinary makers and cutting-edge product companies to showcase what they are working on and let others experience it firsthand. Now in its third year, the Startup Showcase + PitchFest take place during SKS on October 10-11, 2017 in Seattle and is sponsored by the leading maker of soups and simple meals, beverages, snacks and packaged fresh foods, Campbell Soup Company. Campbell’s will provide a $10,000 cash prize to the winner, announced at live at SKS.

Imagine your Starbucks coffee one day being served to you by a robot – that’s the vision that Beijing based Bubble Labs had when they created the Drip barista robot. Drip is a precision engineered fully self-functioning mechanical arm that can brew, pour and serve coffee all while maintaining product consistency. It mimics the movement of a human performing every piece of the coffee brewing process.  Drip first wets the filter and warms the server. Then, it distributes the coffee cups, pours the coffee and cleans up the space, while wiping down the counter, and even discarding the filter offering a complete coffee creation experience. Every detail is considered – down to the ability to create recipes and customize parameters that Drip then utilizes to create product that is consistent.

Robotic barista making hand drip coffee by Bubble Lab

Busy café owners often run into the issue of creating consistent, quality-made product for mass quantities of coffee, while also maintaining a level of cleanliness in their establishment. Drip aims to enhance the experience of café-goers while also streamlining and simplifying operations for managers. Drip also gives baristas back their time, freeing them up to create different kinds of coffee drinks rather than wasting time on the same product. For example, Drip could be calibrated to only create black coffee so baristas in a shop are able to create lattes adorned with eye-catching designs that may be more time consuming.

Although the Drip arm is set to work for coffee making now, Bubble Labs have shared that additional robots for varying scenarios are also in the product pipeline. Robot taco makers, anyone?

Learn more about Bubble Lab at http://www.bubblelab.com/

Use this link to get 25% off to the Smart Kitchen Summit & see the startups in action!

Tim Enwall Thinks A Robot Should Be Our Friend, Not A “Mechanized Piece of Metal”

If you have a robot in your home today, chances are it vacuums your floor or mows your lawn.  And while you may be thankful for the back pain the little guy spares you, I’m willing to bet you don’t consider this industrious single-tasker your friend.

Tim Enwall, the CEO of Misty Robotics, thinks that needs to change.

A robot “can’t be this mechanized piece of metal that runs around the house or office,” said Enwall. “It has to be able to develop a relationship with us.”

I recently had a conversation with Enwall about the future of personal robotics for the Smart Home Show. How we relate to robots is something Enwall thinks a lot about since his company has made it their mission to be the first to create a real world version of Rosie, the famed cartoon robot from the Jetsons.

Enwall outlined four features that Misty CTO and founder Ian Bernstein sees as crucial for a personal robot:

It’s got to be familiar. “It can’t be freaky, it can’t put us off,” said Enwall. He admitted that many of today’s robots have too much uncanny vally-esque creepiness.  “We will get there, but today they’re too off putting.”

It has to develop a relationship with us. This is where Enwall points out robots can’t just be metal cans running around our homes. “That’s not going to be valuable or interesting to us,” said Enwall.

It’s got to be multifunction.  “We can’t go buy 20 single purpose robots for our house or office,” said Enwall. Here Enwall essentially points out today’s world of primarily single purpose robots is not sustainable. In other words, unless we want to add a room to our home for a robot garage, we’re going to need robots that can perform multiple tasks.

It has to be useful. While this one seems related to the last one, it makes sense to break it out.  A multifunction robots that can do many chores is something I would put hard-earned money down for.

Lastly, Enwall added a fifth characteristic he believes important for personal robots, one which essentially makes them human-like:

It has to be able to manipulate things. Here Enwall is basically points out what makes man different from other animals, and that robots need to do the same. I’m assuming Misty’s robots will, at some point, have something resembling opposable thumbs.

I had gotten to know Enwall from his days running smart home startup Revolv before their acquisition by Google, and earlier this year he went over to run Sphero’s new personal robot spinout. He’d gotten to know the founders of Sphero through being a part of the Boulder startup scene, which Enwall has been active part of since his days as CEO of pioneering home energy management startup Tendril.

Overall it was a fun and interesting conversation. Take a listen below, download here, or head over to Apple podcasts and subscribe.

Smart Kitchen Startup Else Labs Raises $1.8 Million

While no one has quite figured out what the robot cook of the future looks like, it’s not for lack of trying.

While some labor to create a fully functional transformer-meets-home-chef like Moley, others see a path filled with single-function robots spitting out tortillas and mixing drinks.

And then there’s Else Labs, which sees a future for cooking automation that fuses timeworn cooking concepts like a slow cooker with modern advances such as a smart dispenser system and app control.

Else founder Khalid Aboujassoum first presented the concept for his automated cooker on Stars of Science, a Qatar TV show similar to Shark Tank. At the time, he only had a rough working prototype of the product that would eventually come to be known as Oliver, but he received enough encouragement to start working with a San Francisco design firm and keep on developing the product.

Illustration of a user preparing food for the Oliver cooking chambers. Source: Else Labs

After participating in last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase, the team continued to work on Oliver’s development. They created another early prototype and started doing one-on-one cooking sessions with consumers in their homes to refine the experience. And now, with the company’s goal of bringing the product to market in spring of 2018, they have raised a seed round of $1.8 million.

I emailed Aboujassoum to ask him a few questions about the funding and the company’s product:

Wolf: Who were your investors?

Aboujassoum: Yellow Services, a wholly owned subsidiary by Qatar Development Bank, is the institutional investor. YS manages a $100M fund dedicated to innovation startups and SMEs that can contribute in diversifying Qatar’s economy.

Wolf: How much total has Else Labs raised?

Aboujassoum: $1.95 million. (ed note: The company raised an angel round of approximately $150 thousand)

Wolf: Where is Oliver in terms of development and expected ship date? 

Aboujassoum: We have an advanced working prototype that we are using to conduct 1-to-1 sessions with early adopters in their homes. Those sessions are helping us in refining the user experience and prepare for the pilot program that we are working on launching soon.

The pilot will inform our crowd-funding and overall launch strategy. Our target launch date is Q2 2018.

Wolf: Who are the key members of your team?

Aboujassoum: myself (ed note:Aboujassoum is founder & CEO), Tariq Maksoud (cofounder & lead mechanical engineer, and Abdulrahman Saleh Khamis (cofounder & lead electrical engineer).

Wolf: There hasn’t been a successful product in the robotic/automated cooking category yet. Why will Oliver be different?

Aboujassoum: We believe that the main reason it’s been difficult to crack the market is because the cost has been too high or the product has been simply too intimidating or different from what a user is accustomed to in a kitchen appliance.

We were determined to keep lasersharp focus on engineering Oliver to be cost effective and enhancing what is already familiar to the user in what to expect from a kitchen appliance. With Oliver, we were able to build the necessary functions of automated dispensing, mixing, and heating that meets its futuristic robotic function, but yet familiar in its form to the user.

Finding the balance between performance, form, and cost was a challenge that we were able to overcome with the technology we have developed. Overcoming this challenge was the key to opening the door to designing a user centred product in this space. This is what makes Oliver different.

We know that we still have a long way ahead of us, but we believe Oliver is the perfect balance that will be inviting to users in and will bridge that gap between traditional kitchen appliances and the future of cooking.

Else Labs was one of 15 startups selected for the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. To find the next big thing in cooking, you won’t want to miss the Startup Showcase at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of any ticket.

Delivery Platform DoorDash Hires Marble’s Robot Drivers For Food Delivery

If you live in San Francisco and order from DoorDash, you might find a friendly Marble robot on your front door step the next time you get takeout. Today DoorDash announced it would be using autonomous ground-delivery robots made by Marble, a robotics startup, for a food delivery pilot program in select San Francisco neighborhoods.

Marble was founded in 2015 by robotics enthusiasts Matt Delaney, Jason Calaiaro, Kevin Peterson while they attended Carnegie Mellon and describes themselves as a “scrappy robotics startup” working to build autonomous urban delivery robots. Scrappy as they might be, DoorDash is the second delivery pilot they’ve announced this year, partnering in April with Yelp’s Eat24.

The companies report that the pilot will allow them to “explore how to best optimize last-mile deliveries” and the first restaurant to take part in the robot delivery program fast food chain Jack in the Box. They made a quick video to show off Marble robots toting its first DoorDash deliveries in the North Beach neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Jack in the Box | Robot Delivery

The revenue model for robotics companies to partner with retail or food delivery services hasn’t been fully divulged; a spokesperson did say that Marble is being compensated for the work done in the pilot but declined to elaborate. However, delivery fees for a robot driver versus a human are the same for DoorDash customers. Marble said it didn’t have any hard data about how robot drivers create cost savings for delivery companies but that it hoped to share that information down the road.

Food delivery is an increasingly crowded space; aside from traditional restaurant delivery, “new delivery models” – companies like DoorDash, GrubHub and Eat24 – is expected to be a $20 billion market by 2025 according to a McKinsey report. In order to create efficiencies and differentiate, companies are looking to innovations like robot delivery drivers to stay ahead. And Marble isn’t the only game in sidewalk robotic delivery – former founders of Skype launched autonomous robotics startup Starship and received a $17 milllion investment earlier this year from carmarker Daimler Benz.

Starship had also announced a pilot in Redwood City, CA with DoorDash earlier this year. When asked if this program was designed to replace the competitive pilot, DoorDash responded that it was “…continuing the existing pilot with Starship in Redwood City, Washington DC, San Carlos and Sunnyvale. The Marble partnership adds to that relationship, allowing DoorDash to bring robot deliveries to San Francisco while also testing a new type of form factor and technology.”

Meanwhile, if you happen to see a Marble delivery robot on the sidewalk, you’ll probably see a human chaperone with it to answer questions and assist with interactions. At times when there isn’t a person nearby, Marble says they have remote operators ready to assist with issues and so far, they haven’t encountered any problems in the neighborhoods they’re serving.

Neato Robotics Machines Are Coming To Clean Up After Dinner

Giacomo Marini isn’t afraid of the robot future – in fact, the company he leads is betting on it. Neato Robotics was founded by Standford alums Joe Augenbraun, Linda Pouliot and JB Gomez through the Stanford Entrepreneur Challenge and officially launched in 2010. The idea behind the company – that robots are just as capable of performing chores as humans – Neato has been working to develop advanced robotic technology for for vaccums in order to alleviate the stress and drain of modern life.

Neato has enjoyed success as a startup against rivals like Roomba and they have a heavy focus on intelligence and proprietary technology to create a self-cleaning vacuum with the smarts of a self-driving car. In fact, the company is the first and only group making robot vacuums with laser SLAM technology, best known for its use in the Google self-driving car, to map and navigate. Marini claims this technology is uniquely suited for indoor navigation and allows the robots to operate with precision in the dark.

Robotics and machine learning are two hot areas in Silicon Valley at the moment – and Marini is no stranger to success in the tech mecca. A co-founder of Logitech, Marini was part of the team that moved the Swiss-based company to Palo Alto in the early 1980s and credits much of the computer accessory company’s growth to that move. Marini went on to stay in Silicon Valley and run a venture capital firm and eventually join Neato as CEO in 2013.

Neato sees their vacuums playing an important role in making the clean up after meal prep and dinner much simpler. “Gone are the days when spilling flower on the floor while you cook would mean hauling out the heavy upright vacuum,” adds Marini. “Now you can simply use your voice to tell your Google Home or Amazon Alexa to start your Neato for you.” Neato recently added chatbot functionality for Facebook, jumping on another trend of using chatbots to control our homes – meaning you could shoot your vacuum a note to clean up the kitchen after dinner’s over from the backyard. 

Marini believes that the continued focus on user experience has been an essential component in the increase in connected device adoption. And – he points out – as the complexity of what our devices can do increases – that experience must remain the same. “As the capabilities of this technology become more complex, it’s imperative that the devices remain simple to interact with, so that our relationship with them feels natural and compelling.”

Ultimately, Neato Robotics wants to make products to give people more time. If we have tech to help us shop more efficiently and cook good food at home more simply, we should also be able to use tech to clean up, right? Marini agrees, saying “We’re at a pivotal point when the speed of emerging technologies make the human potential seem limitless. Our mission is to allow people to spend more their spare time on things that really matter – their passions, work, loved ones – and not on housework.”

Don’t miss Giacomo Marini, CEO of Neato Robotics at the 2017 Smart Kitchen Summit. Check out the full list of speakers and to register for the Summit, use code NEATO to get 25% off ticket prices.

The Smart Kitchen Summit is the first event to tackle the future of food, cooking and the kitchen with leaders across food, tech, commerce, design, delivery and appliances. This series will highlight panelists and partners for the 2017 event, being held on October 10-11 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle.