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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

A Look at the Vayu One Delivery Robot, Which Navigates Bike Lanes to Deliver Your Food

Ever since the founders of Skype launched Starship over eight years ago, we’ve seen an explosion of small-footprint delivery robots that navigate sidewalks to deliver their payloads to consumers.

While these small robots sidestep many of the challenges and regulatory oversight needed for on-road travel, they are, in general, pretty small and usually only travel short distances.

However, a new company called Vayu, founded by former Apple and Lyft execs, hopes to make the robot delivery market (and our groceries) arrive just a little faster by jumping off the curb and into the bike delivery lane with its new robot. The Vayu One, which was formerly introduced today, is a larger form-factor robot which can carry up to 100 pounds of payload and move at 20 miles per hour.

You can see the Vayu One in action in the video provided by the company below:

A Look at Vayu's Bike Lane Delivery Robot

According to the company, the robot uses a transformer-based model (likely a vision language model) combined with a “passive sensor” that enables the robot to navigate without lidar (the laser-light-based navigation technology used by many autonomous automobiles). The company says the robot can navigate roads, and in-store environments, and also drop off the payloads at its delivery destinations unassisted (you can see it do just that in the video).

The video shows a worker using voice commands to control the robot and load packages as it navigates around the store. Unlike the smaller sidewalk robots like those of Serve and Starship, the Vayu One is somewhat sizable, about the length of an e-bike and approximately three feet wide. This makes me wonder how it will navigate within the narrow corridors of some small-format stores.

Interestingly, the company says it has already obtained regulatory approval to operate on some public roads in certain cities. I’m interested to see which cities have greenlit the company, as my guess is that putting a robot onto a public street – even if it’s a bike lane – would require a significant amount of regulatory hoop-hopping compared to sidewalk delivery.

According to the company, they have a deal with a “large e-commerce player” to deploy 2,500 robots to enable ultra-fast delivery. If the deal holds up, Vayu would quickly eclipse the fleet numbers of Serve (which has about 100 robots in the field) and other players in the autonomous bot delivery space.

Vayu is backed by blue-chip VC Khosla Ventures, which recently led a $12.7 million funding round.

SKS 2024 Preview: Clayton Wood Talks The Current State of Food Robotics

We’re just one month away from the Smart Kitchen Summit, so we’re going to be checking and hearing from some of our speakers.

First up is Clayton Wood, a long-time entrepreneur who has been navigating the food robotics market for the last five years, first as the CEO of Picnic (which debuted its robot at SKS 2019), talking about the challenges and opportunities he sees in this market. You can watch the full interview by clicking play below or read some of the highlights in the transcript below.

The Spoon Talks to Food Robotics Entrepreneur Clayton Wood.

Michael Wolf: I imagine that a lot of startups in the food robotics space are probably wanting to get your advice because you ran one of the early pretty successful food robotics companies with Picnic. Talk about some of the conversations you’re having and maybe some of the, are there early stage entrepreneurs in the space that are coming to you say, hey, we have an idea.

Clayton Wood: Absolutely. I started getting inbound interest in being an advisor as soon as I left Picnic, a little over a year ago. I’ve talked to a large number of companies in the space. Many of them are at the same spot, which, given market conditions, isn’t too surprising, which is they’ve got an idea. They’ve probably got a product or a prototype, having trouble raising their first round, having trouble finding product market fit. And just trying to make that leap into kind of being a more mature company. It’s a tough spot under any circumstances, but in market conditions, the last few years have made it especially difficult.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about food robotics is it’s a long path to getting into market. It’s a lot of capital. And with the venture capital winter that is seemingly lasting forever, it seems like a tough time for food robotics companies.

Clayton Wood: It very much is. I know at Picnic, we started in what I finally refer to as the free money era, where you raised one round just to get to the next round, and raising money wasn’t really that much of a question. Now it’s a huge problem. The challenge that food robotics companies have specifically is that as the market tightened up, it became very conservative, and conservative investors don’t like hardware in general.

Food tech is seen as a challenging category of hardware. So if you’re looking at, you know, show me when you’re cashflow positive, show me when you’re profitable. It’s very, very difficult as a food hardware company to show that because it’s such a new field. Product market fit is elusive and being able to say when that those financial metrics will turn right side up is really challenging. It’s just a really tough time for all startups, but I think food robotics, food hardware is especially a challenging category, and has been for the last two or three years.

Michael Wolf: One of the things about Picnic was I felt like it was a next-generation pizza food robotics company and that it was purpose-built around building pizzas. It wasn’t one of these where someone got a general-purpose robotic arm and would just move things around within a confined space. And you’re still seeing those sometimes. What are some of the if you’re giving advice to a food robotics company in terms of building out a system and thinking it through what ultimately may succeed in the market, what would you tell them?

Clayton Wood: Yes.I think it’s one of those signs, you’re absolutely right about the arms and the big footprints. It’s one of those signs of a new, immature market. People haven’t seen food robotics, they don’t know what to think about it. We had people at trade shows looking at the Picnic robot and they’re in the pizza business, and they’re watching it make a pizza and they’re going, ‘does it make the pizza?’ It’s really hard to just wrap their head around it.

I think the challenge, it’s common to a lot of technology companies, but especially true in food robotics, you’ve got to start with the customer. What’s the customer’s pain point, and what can they actually use? And unfortunately, not uncommonly, people start with ‘what can my product do?’ and ‘how can I make it do it in a real fancy, impressive way and how fast can it do it or that sort of thing?’

Those numbers are nice and you get people excited, but it’s not really what the customer needs. And ultimately, the real challenge in food robotics is integration. How will your device get integrated into a commercial kitchen so that the kitchen can continue to operate, do what it needs to do, and do it without disrupting the process? And until there are new concepts that are really built around automation and those are starting to emerge. I used to say no one who has a kitchen has a pizza robot sized hole in their kitchen that they’re just waiting to plug it in.

Michael Wolf: You know, there are a couple of founders out there on the smaller side that I think are innovating. They’re not a big chain. So you see like Andrew Simmons, which I think you talk a lot with. You see Lee Kindell up here in Seattle with Moto. And I imagine there are others that are showing how you can be a smaller operator and almost build your new restaurant concept around utilizing kind of off-the-shelf robotics. It’s not like a Zume, where they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Softbank and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to build our own robot, do this custom thing.’ These smaller operators are taking a system like Picnic’s and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a new concept that is essentially centered around automation and kind of move forward.’ I feel like they’re pioneering in a sense. Do you think that’s going to be what we’re going to see in the future, more people pioneering concepts that are leveraging automation because they think that can help them scale better?

Clayton Wood: I love to see that. I think Andrew and Lee are brilliant, and I’d say, you know, they’re unfortunately they’re at the far end of the open-minded innovator scale. They’re both kind of willing to move things around and try things, and they’re not just open to innovation, but they embrace it and they seek it out. I don’t think that’s really the persona that I’d use to describe most people in the restaurant business.

If you have that kind of open -minded approach, there’s all kinds of things you could do and you can adapt. If you don’t want to adapt, you say, this is the way I do things. Can you help me? That’s where you run into an integration challenge. But I think what I love about what Lee is doing at Moto and what Andrew is doing with Mama Ramona’s Pizza Roboto is they’re showing how it can work. They’re sharing real world experiences.

Andrew is doing his whole build -in public diary on LinkedIn, which I think is brilliant and super useful because he’s sharing the wins and the losses. But it shows that it can work, you’ve just got to adapt. And I think that’s a lot of the product market fit in these early days is about adapting on both sides. The customer has to be willing to adapt a little bit and the product companies have to go in realizing that regardless of what they may think, they haven’t built a perfect machine and they need to be willing to tweak and change and reconfigure to make the best fit.

Michael Wolf: Okay, you’ve been in this business for half a decade now, you’re advising companies. What are you excited about in terms of food robotics? And are there spaces you think you’d like to see more entrepreneurs or inventors go in terms of building automation around food?

Clayton Wood: I’ve seen some in the home space as well as the restaurant space who are starting out with products that already solve some of the challenges that we’ve seen really block some of the earlier companies. Building devices that are drop-in replacements for a make line, for instance. Acknowledging the fact that if you have the way a restaurant operates, workers are seldom just dedicated to a station standing there all day. The automation needs to work even if the person is only giving intermittent attention. You need to see things like a holding station where if you’re making 10 salads a minute, well, if there’s nobody there to catch the 10 salads, they need to be suitably caught and retained and held there.

And it needs to work around the way the workflow goes in the kitchen, which is multitasking, short staff, and it needs to solve real problems. And the nice thing is you can solve different problems and make it work. I’ve heard people say that, well, the automation didn’t really save me any labor because I only had one person working there anyway. I still need one person working the automation, but the consistency means the cook goes well. The pizzas cook really well because they’re all consistent.

Food waste is another area where food waste is a huge problem, especially in the pizza category, but I think it’s also a problem in other categories as well. If you can eliminate food waste, just food waste alone can pay for the system. So I think if you’re an automation company or product developer, thinking about all the different ways you can add value, but it can only do that if it works with that particular operator.

So you’re going to find the customer who is doing something the way that your machine is designed to do it. If you can make 200 dishes an hour, that’s brilliant and that sounds really impressive, but how many restaurants are making 200 of the same thing every hour? Not that many. And so you may not really have a big market if that’s your claim to fame and that’s really the reason you want somebody to buy it and that’s how your economics work. If people are making 20 an hour, is it still economical? Does it still pay for itself?

Michael Wolf: You mentioned home and you’re seeing some things that are exciting you. And you don’t have to necessarily name names, but home has been really tough to crack for food robotics. And you’re seeing some interesting ones that broke over some of the barriers that were challenging in the past. What are you seeing there that’s exciting?

Clayton Wood: Home is tricky because it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be small. It’s gotta be versatile. Um, it can’t lock you into, you can only do, you can only use it if you buy our packet of pre -packaged food. Um, so I’ve seen one or two players in there who are, who are solving that, who are offering pre -packaged food or recipes, but you can also customize and add your own ingredients, but making a pretty versatile device. So I think that’s a category that has promise, but it’s especially tricky because even if you’ve got something that works brilliantly, you’ve got the whole, it’s a consumer market, and how do you break into consumer markets? You know, got to build a brand and get everybody’s attention. And that’s just, that’s a world that I’m less familiar with. And it’s a pretty daunting challenge to break into that consumer market.

Michael Wolf: All right, well, we’ll be talking about both the restaurant, robotic space, as well as the consumer space at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Lee Kindell will be there. Clayton, you’re going to be there as well, June 4th and 5th in Seattle. And I’m excited to see you there, man.

Clayton Wood: Looking forward to it.

You can hear Clayton at Smart Kitchen Summit on June 4-5th in Seattle. Get your ticket today!

Remy Launches in U.S. With Robot-Powered Virtual Restaurant in NYC Called Better Days

This week, Remy Robotics opened in the U.S. with a robot-powered virtual restaurant brand in New York City called Better Days, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The launch comes after the Spain-based startup spent the last few years operating a hub-and-spoke model of robotic-enabled ghost kitchens in Spain and France, where the company says it has produced and delivered over 100,000 meals.

According to company CEO Yegor Traiman, he hopes to merge the convenience of fast food with the quality associated with fine dining, all powered by robots.

“Remy Robotics exists to do what was previously thought impossible – make high-quality, delicious food consistently, accessibly, and profitably at scale,” said CEO and Founder Yegór Traiman. “With the launch of Better Days in New York, we are taking major steps, we’re just starting to show what is possible. Our goal is to make good food at an affordable price available and accessible to everyone while creating better jobs and improving the work environment for chefs.”, said Traiman.

Readers of The Spoon may recall that Traiman and his engineers created an entire food production flow around robots instead of designing the robots to mimic human chefs. Remy has redesigned the cooking process to be more robot-compatible, focusing on the precision and consistency of machines. The result is a system where AI-powered robots prepare food based on algorithmic recipes that factor in delivery times and other logistical elements.

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman told The Spoon in an interview last year. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

According to the company, the new restaurant will utilize human chefs to prep the food in a central commissary before it is transported to what it calls “node kitchens” where robots do all of the cooking. The food is refrigerated before being transferred to an oven and cooked using what the company calls “algorithmic recipes” in robotic ovens. From there, Remy says AI algorithms work with sensors to control food’s quality by monitoring the food’s internal temperature and uses a scale that calculates moisture reduction. According to Remy, they can adjust cook times automatically for orders depending on whether they are placed for delivery, takeout, or dine-in.

While the company is calling Better Days a “restaurant”, it is, for the time being at least, what looks to be only a virtual brand, serving up meals through delivery via the company’s own app and third-party delivery companies such as Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats. According to the announcement, Better Days will feature main courses built around meals with rice, veggies and proteins such as chicken and salmon. All the entrees are priced between $7 and $16.

If you live in the New York City market, you can check out and order a meal from Better Days via their website or their app.

I Attended a Workshop on the Impact of AI on The Food World. Here’s What We Discussed

Last month, I headed down to San Luis Obispo to participate in a National Science Foundation-funded project analyzing the impact of automation and AI on the food system. I’d been invited to participate in a workshop headed up by Patrick Lin and Ryan Jenkins, professors at Cal Poly and the project leads.

The workshop was the first for the four-year project exploring the social and ethical impacts of automation and artificial intelligence in kitchens. The project endeavors to draw out the wide-ranging implications of this technology, exploring both the impact on commercial environments like restaurants and how automation could impact the longstanding tradition of home cooking and family meals.

“This project will help to draw out the hidden and very broad impacts of technology,” said Lin at the time of the project’s announcement. “By focusing on the trend of robot kitchens that’s just emerging from under the radar, there is still time for technical and policy interventions in order to maximize benefits and minimize harms and disruptions.” 

The two-day workshop included a cross-section of academic types, chefs and food service professionals, journalists, and technology experts. It was the first of three workshops across continents to gather insights and work towards producing a report and academic curriculum centered around the intersection of food and automation and AI.

The workshop, structured as a giant whiteboard session, included expert presentations and facilitated conversations. During and after each presentation, the participants shared their thoughts on potential impacts – both direct and cascading effects – that could result from the introduction of AI in its various forms over time. While much of the conversation focused more heavily on AI in the form of automation – i.e., cooking robots – AI in other forms, such as generative AI, was also discussed.

Below are some of the key themes discussed during the two days, as well as a few of my thoughts now that I’ve had time to think through the issues since the workshop.

I’d also love to hear your thoughts on this critical topic, so please send them along!

Finally, we’ll be discussing many of these same issues at the Food AI Summit on October 25th. If this is an issue critical to you and your company, make sure to join us!

Atrophying Cooking Skills

One of the concerns raised during the workshop was the potential loss of cooking skills and culinary knowledge as we rely increasingly on automation and AI to make our meals. While it was generally recognized that robotics could take over repetitive and tedious cooking tasks, some wondered if handing over the cooking process to machines could lead to a general loss of competency in culinary arts and a homogenization of meals produced by highly automated cooking.

It’s easy to see how highly automated food prep would be extremely popular; some would hand the entire process over to the machine. However, there’s a good chance that handing off the mundane parts of cooking would give home cooks, chefs, or food workers more time to focus on creating the special touches that often make a meal great. As we have seen with the advent of digital design and art tools, there’s a possibility that those who love making food could use technology to take their work to the next level.

The Loss of Together Time

Another concern raised across the two days was the impact on shared family time by handing over meal prep and cooking to robots. Parents and other caregivers often use time in the kitchen to share lessons to help children develop motor skills, understand their heritage and develop self-confidence. Over-automation of cooking could disrupt this transfer of knowledge. Cooking has also shown many positive mental health benefits for those involved.

I think these are valid concerns, as there is a real risk of losing some of the benefits of the shared cooking process due to automation. After all, there’s no replacement for a grandchild spending time with their grandma learning how to make her special cookies and the sharing of family history that comes along with such an activity.

However, a few counterpoints. First, no one says the act of hand-making that special recipe has to be a victim of technology, and, in some ways, I think the kitchen will prove to be one of the areas where some families will insist on preserving the art and act of doing the actual cooking themselves.

And as the world becomes more digital and automated, kitchens may be a refuge for many who find the hands-on nature of making food therapeutic and fulfilling. In other words, the kitchen may be the last true ‘maker space’ left in our homes, and many will look to protect and preserve that.

Finally, average meal times shrank 5% between 2006 and 2014, a much smaller decline than we’ve seen in meal prep times as the advent of ready-to-eat meals has become more popular over the past few decades. While automation may result in faster meals, people could spend nearly as much time – or maybe more – sitting around the dinner table.

A Loss of Authenticity, Creativity, and Happy Accidents

With AI, there’s a chance recipe creation algorithms may rely too heavily on existing data patterns and therefore lack originality. There was also the concern that AI systems may limit opportunities for spontaneous creativity and the type of “happy accidents” that often lead to new recipes. One workshop participant gave an example of mistakes leading to important new dishes, like the croissant.

There was also concern that using AI to generate meal plans or recipes could result in over-standardization and homogenization, particularly if the AI systems rely too narrowly on popular recipes, which could also reduce culinary diversity.

It’s a valid concern that AI systems will generalize based on limited data sets, often creating recipes or meal plans based on popular or trending food concepts. Anyone who listens to algorithm-generated playlists by Spotify or Pandora can attest to some off-note song recommendations, and I can see how that could easily be the case with food and recipe generation. However, good technology products allow humans to reject recommendations and fine-tune algorithms, which may allow for more personalized recommendations based on a particular user’s preferences.

There’s also a real possibility that AI could lead to new and intriguing food combinations. Chef Watson and other AIs have been able to create unexpected but interesting recipes based on intelligence built into the algorithms around flavor compounds. If a restaurant or home chef can leverage heretofore inaccessible deep insights based on science and flavor research built into AI systems to create their next masterpiece, the results could be exciting.

As for the impact on cultural diversity, I think it’s important to recognize that AI systems are known to have bias problems, often hewing more closely to the worldviews of their creators and their preferred datasets. Because the world of food is one of the most important pathways for under-represented voices to connect with broader audiences, it will be critical for us to guard against the loss of accessibility and equality in the culinary world as AI and automation tools become more commonplace.

However, food AIs could be built to emphasize unique and emerging food cultures, which could be a savvy move since millennials and younger generations celebrate new food discoveries, often from cultures outside their home markets. Also, many of the creators of new food automation technology are often from markets outside our own, emphasizing food types different from our traditional fare.

This is just a few of the themes discussed during the workshop. Other themes, such as job loss and the economic impacts of automation, were also explored in detail, and I’ll have more thoughts on that later this week.

Sweetgreen: We’re Going Full Robot

Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman told investors this week at William Blair’s Growth Stock conference that the company plans to have its Infinite Kitchen robotic makeline installed at all new locations within a five-year timeframe. The proclamation marks the first time the fast-casual salad chain has indicated they plan to deploy automation across all of its new locations.

According to the analyst’s note about Neman’s disclosures at the conference, the early results from the Infinite Kitchen have been extremely positive:

Sweetgreen’s first Infinite Kitchen (robotic assembly makeline) has proven that the technology works, with zero downtime so far and significant benefits related to faster throughput and improved portioning and order accuracy (order portioning and accuracy have historically been the company’s weakest links in NPS). With less labor intensity and greater job satisfaction so far, we believe the Infinite Kitchen has the potential to structurally change sweetgreen’s labor model, as roughly half of variable labor stems from assembly.

Another interesting disclosure from the conference was the success of the company’s membership program. According to William Blair, Sweetgreen’s sweetpass and sweetpass+ “are yielding incremental guest frequency, with gamified and personalized challenges yielding a 15% frequency lift while sweetpass+ ($10 monthly membership offering a $3 daily discount) is exceeding expectations with a significant lift in frequency (management indicated it would be happy with an incremental two visits per member per month) and low churn.”

These results show the company has improved food production, customer experience, and loyalty by deploying new technology. The result is a stronger bottom line, as Blair predicts the company will continue its fairly impressive 20%+ EBITDA margins in established locations and new build locations in the coming years. For a company that has long stated it’s as much a technology company as a restaurant company, it looks like its approach has continued to yield dividends and keep Sweetgreen one of the most interesting chains in the restaurant business.

A Food Tech Case Study: Four Lessons From the Demise of Zume

Late last week, news broke that Zume, the company famous mostly for raising a whole bunch of money for its pizza robot & cook-on-the-road food trucks concept, had shut down. The company’s demise, first reported by The Information, comes after burning through $450 million and a well-documented pivot away from its pizza robot and delivery technology products to sustainable packaging in 2020.

Here at The Spoon, we’ve followed Zume since its inception and even had its CTO speak at our event just months before the company laid off 500 employees and dropped its automation business.

When Zume inevitably shows up in business school case studies in years to come, here are a few lessons we can extract from the company’s journey:

Startups Should Pick One Thing To Be Good At

You always hear startup founders talk about how important it is to focus, partly because their first product needs to be really good, but also because distractions can keep a team from executing the way they need to execute. Zume was trying to reinvent both food making and food delivery, which meant they were basically running two highly capital-intensive startups in one. They were early enough at pizza automation to have a shot at success, but then they made their job infinitely more complicated by also trying to create an entirely new kind of delivery truck complete with built-in ovens. That’s a lot of time and capital to achieve marginally fresher pizza.

Creating Custom-Designed Delivery Fleets (with Built-in Cooking!) is an Expensive Fool’s Errand

We don’t just have Zume to prove this, but also Wonder, a company that decided they would differentiate by creating an entirely custom-built delivery fleet in which the food was cooked after it left the kitchen. Both of these companies burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and, in the end, realized that they probably should not have invested all that investor capital in something other companies are pretty good at (delivery) just to make sure the food was maybe a little fresher by the time it got to the customer’s door.

Pivots Should be Somewhat Adjacent to Core IP

After spending years and hundreds of millions of dollars to build a food automation and delivery tech business, the company pivoted to a completely different business in sustainable packaging. The company, which had developed a fairly interesting realtime delivery intelligence platform in addition to a food automation platform, likely could have pivoted to a less-capital intensive business in either of these areas and continued to maintain momentum. Instead, they started over in a fairly crowded vertical and never got enough traction to make a go of it.

Tech Companies Rarely Succeed in Creating Customer-Facing Restaurant Businesses

Time and time again, we’ve watched as startups try to build the “restaurant of the future” and fail because building a consumer brand requires focus and capital, capital they don’t have because they’ve spent it all developing technology. Zume, Eatsa, Wonder, and others have shown it’s probably best to choose between being a technology company or a restaurant business, but probably not both. Some may point to Sweetgreen as something of an exception, but even they had to acquire a company in Spyce which had tried and failed to build a consumer-facing brand for their own restaurant robot technology.

Is Jeff Bezos Eyeing The Buildout of an Underground Delivery Network?

Today, Wendy’s announced they will trial an underground delivery system later this year in partnership with Pipedream Labs. According to the announcement, the system will deliver orders to customers via a carside pick-up portal using “autonomous robots” that traverse an underground pipe system.

Spoon readers might remember Pipedream Labs as the company with big plans to build an underground delivery network of pipes around cities to shuttle food or other items all the way to the home. The company is working with Wendy’s and other restaurants in the near term – you gotta pay the bills after all – but still has hopes to build the bigger vision of a citywide underground delivery network.

In fact, in a recent Twitter thread, Pipedream CTO Canon Reeves said the company is now courting master-planned community builders with a system that would deliver into the home.

According to Reeves, the Home Portal system would look something like this:

Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Photo: Canon Reeves

And the delivery robots look like this:

Pipedream Delivery Robot. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

Building these systems into new master-planned communities makes lots of sense for a couple of reasons, the first of which is retrofitting existing homes for underground to in-home delivery would be extremely hard and very expensive. Master-planned communities present greenfield build opportunities for concepts like this, where customers can be presented with the option as a feature in a new home, and the cost of the home system can be rolled into a mortgage. Home builders can also build out the delivery infrastructure as they lay down other infrastructure, either going underground or along the community right-of-way areas (as they did in Atlanta in a public right-of-way).

But even if the company just focuses on new build opportunities, the idea is still a little far-fetched, the kind of far-fetched where you almost need a utopia-curious billionaire who invests in crazy ideas to get behind something like this.

Someone like, I don’t know, Jeff Bezos:

Jeff Bezos watching a demo of Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

According to Reeves, Bezos stopped by last month to check out the home delivery prototype. And while Reeves didn’t say anything beyond that – like Bezos is interested in investing in the system – one could speculate that the guy who founded the biggest online ordering marketplace in the US might just be curious about what a future with an underground delivery network might look like.

Could he be there on behalf of Amazon? Maybe. It’s not like Amazon doesn’t invest in delivery infrastructure, and, in fact, the company invested around $40 billion from 2014-2020 and continues to do so. And, let’s not forget, Amazon itself has explored the idea of underground delivery before and was granted a patent for the idea in 2017.

And even if this isn’t an Amazon thing, but a billionaire-investor-Jeff-Bezos-thing, Bezos has shown a penchant for investing in big ideas like space flight, and if Elon can build underground tunnels for shuttling people around in Teslas, Bezos would be entirely in his right to think sending items around underground in pipes might have a future.

French Robot Pizza Restaurant Startup Pazzi Shuts its Doors

Another robot pizza startup has shut down.

According to an email sent to The Spoon, the Paris-based startup had seen its assets liquidated by a French court. The company, which had attempted to find a buyer, closed the doors of its two restaurants last Monday and will lay off its remaining 35 employees in the coming days.

It’s a sad ending for one of the robotic restaurant industry’s earliest startups. The company, which started as EKIM and worked on its technology for the better part of a decade, opened the doors on its first restaurant a little over a year ago in Beaubourg in Paris, France after running a pilot in the Paris suburb of Marne-la-Vallée starting in 2019. The company would raise over €12M in funding.

In a post written on Linkedin, Pazzi CEO Philippe Goldman said he felt the company ultimately didn’t survive in large part due to a combination of an immature French hardware startup ecosystem and a mistrust of robotics by the general public.

…”the hardware eco-system in France is immature and insufficient both in terms of public and institutional funding, the valuation of industrial or robotic nuggets is low vs. a dominant software culture and there is a general mistrust of the population towards robotics, condemned to steal only jobs,” wrote Goldman.

The news is the latest in what’s been a string of bad news on the pizza robotics front. In May we got news of Basil Street taking final bids on their assets, and in July The Spoon broke the news that the OG pizza vending machine startup Pizzametry was looking for a buyer.

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

At this point, insect Larvae are fed on recycled organic food waste in a climate-controlled environment. The insects are then ready to be harvested within seven days only. The final step is processing the insect larvae into protein powder and oils. The end product is three animal feed types high in protein, antibacterial, and antiviral properties.

LIVIN Farms LIVIN farms recently opened a fully up-and-running 1,400 square meter pilot site in Vienna where the HIVE PRO is demonstrated to interested customers.

Unger began her journey to building LIVIN Farms in 2013, she said. “The idea for Livin farms started when I developed the first device to grow the entire lifecycle of the black soldier fly larvae in a kitchen device to turn kitchen scraps into proteins ready to harvest. This prototype was patented and then turned into a tabletop farm for mealworms (The Hive) later on that was sold in the hundreds to more than 45 countries worldwide. Since 2019, Livin Farms has used our years of R&D to focus on industrial insect farming technologies.”

The company is working on projects throughout Europe, Unger said. LIVIN Farms hopes to have several installations over the next several years.

LIVIN Farms has previously secured a Seed investment round, grants, and subsidies from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Austrian Promotional Bank (AWS), and the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the European “Green Deal,” totaling more than $4 million €. The company believes its latest investment will lead to the “further growth of the company and will be used for expanding the LIVIN farms team, standardization of the technical solutions, and driving the initial scale-up phase.”

The Weekly Spoon: A Farmers Markets in the Metaverse & The Coming Home Robot Invasion

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Come With Me as I Walk Around a CPG Farmers Market in the Metaverse

Last night I walked around a farmers market. I spent about an hour walking from stand to stand, having conversations, and learning about new CPG products. Someone even offered me free candy. It was a blast!

And all of it happened in the metaverse. I attended a virtual pop-up farmers market put on by an organization called The Metamarket. The event featured over a dozen different CPG brands, each of which had a virtual exhibit stand in a virtual 2D Sims-like world that allowed me to interact with both the products and the people.

The platform The Metamarket used for the event is Gather, a virtual world/metaverse startup that started during the pandemic and has since raised $76 million in funding. Gather has some interesting features, including one called ‘proximity chatting’ in which a video pop window emerges for chats with people in the space (see below), making it a nice mashup of video game meets professional networking tool.

Come to SKS Invent on October 12th to Explore The Future of Food & Cooking. Use discount code NEWSLETTER to get 20% off tickets!

Robot Butlers & Roombas: Elon and Amazon Are Getting Serious About Building Home Robots

Last week, Amazon announced they were acquiring iRobot. The acquisition of the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums comes less than a year after Amazon unveiled its own home robot, Astro.

The news came the same week we got a sneak preview of Optimus, Tesla’s robotic humanoid. After the preview, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he thinks the impact of the Optimus could someday exceed that of the company’s hugely popular electric vehicles.

“I’m sort of surprised that you know people are like analysts out there are not really understanding the importance of the Optimus robot,” Musk said. “My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term.”

While Musk has suggested his company’s robot will someday provide a nearly inexhaustible amount of “labor” (of the mechanized, non-human variety), he also outlined how the robot will also help us at home with everyday tasks.

“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” he said.

For Amazon, much of the early hot takes on the company’s purchase of iRobot frame it as part of a larger effort by the online giant to better understand its customers. And no doubt, adding the home mapping capability of the Roomba to the already rich data profiles Amazon has through our purchase history and Alexa voice interactions will give the company an even better contextual understanding with which to sell us even more stuff.

But I also think Amazon is serious about becoming a leading platform builder in home robotics. Robotics are just a natural evolution of the smart home – something us old-timers used to call ‘home automation’ – and I expect the roboticization of the home will ultimately lead to a multi-hundred billion dollar market. Today’s consumer robot market – mostly products like the Roomba – is forecasted to be a $9 billion market next year. One can only imagine how big it will be once multipurpose, life-assisting robots that can do more than just clean our floors are widely available.

Read the full story at The Spoon.

Food Waste 

From Grad School Project to $115 Million Series B: Afresh’s Matt Schwartz on Building an Operating System for Fresh Food

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany.

At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future.

“That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of eating, to be able to nourish the world sustainably. And those two things converged into saying, I want to accelerate this fresh technology thing.”

The focus on fresh food soon led Schwartz and his eventual cofounder of Afresh, Nathan Fenner, to do a graduate study in which they talked to close to one hundred people involved in the food supply chain. It wasn’t long before they realized that, despite the increasing importance of fresh food for food retailers, there wasn’t any technology optimized for managing it.

You can read the full story at The Spoon. 

Q&A: Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe Talks About Her Plan To Build a $100 Million Company Addressing Food Waste & Food Insecurity

Last month, food waste reduction and food insecurity startup Goodr raised an $8 million Series A funding round.

When Jasmine Crowe founded the company, the Atlanta-based startup used technology to help large food service providers reduce food waste. Over the past two years, Goodr has expanded its business to provide expertise to companies looking to provide food to those in food insecure situations.

I wanted to catch up with Crowe to ask her about how the business has evolved, the challenges of raising venture funding as a Black founder, and where she sees the company going in the future.

You can read the full interview transcript below.

Before this most recent round, you’d managed to operate without a lot of outside funding.

We really just bootstrapped. To date have done more revenue than we’ve done in funding, which is something I’m personally proud of.

What was some of the thinking behind deciding to go after new funding?

It was really about scaling up to meet our demand. We had so many big deals that we were bringing in, so many new customers that we were onboarding. Because we have always been really lean and capital efficient, we’ve also had a very small team. So it really got down to ‘hey, we need to, we got to get more people in the door.’ And so that’s kind of really what happened. I was like, ‘I’ve got to raise money because I’ve got to hire more people.’

This round comes at a time where we are seeing a pullback in venture funding. You were right in the midst of that pullback.

We definitely were 100% all involved with that market change and it was scary. It was really scary because we just didn’t know. When I started raising funds in the market in late September, October of last year, and I remember one of my investors was like, ‘oh, Jasmine, your numbers are so great, look what you’ve done.’ At the time, I had only raised like $1.4 million or whatever prior to so we were like ‘you’re going to be able to raise this money so easily, like this is going to be the fastest money you’ve ever raised’. And it definitely wasn’t that. I think we had some struggles with it.

To read the full interview, click here. 

Food Delivery

‘Late Empire Sort of Stuff’: Wonder Faces Backlash Over Environmental Impact of Vans

By and large, the residents of the northern New Jersey suburbs where Wonder delivers agree that the well-funded startup’s food tastes great.

What they can’t agree on is whether having hundreds of Mercedes diesel vans idling curbside each night while Wonder employees prep meals is a good idea at a time when most experts agree climate change is fast becoming an existential crisis.

A story published in the Wall Street Journal details the bickering that has broken out amongst residents of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, about the omnipresent vans zig-zagging through their towns each night.

On the one hand, some feel the Wonder trucks are an unnecessary and carbon-emitting extravagance.

“There’s a stigma of calling the Wonder truck and having them idle outside your house for the decadent purpose of making you dinner in a truck,” resident Will Meyer told the Journal. “It feels like this is late empire sort of stuff.”

And then there are those who don’t see a problem with the trucks.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Lisa Bressler, who didn’t see the trucks being much different from Amazon and UPS trucks driving around town. “I guess I like unnecessary luxuries.”

To read the full story, head over to The Spoon.

Future Food

Here’s Our Q&A With Ranjani Varadan, Who Just Became Shiru’s New CSO After a Decade With Impossible Foods

When she became the first scientist ever hired by Pat Brown at Impossible Foods in 2011, Ranjani Varadan became a pivotal part of the R&D team for one of the earliest entrants in the modern plant-based meat industry. Over the next decade, she would play a part in helping guide Impossible through many technical milestones, from the very early days in its stealth lab all the way to commercial scaleup.

And now, Varadan hopes to witness many more seminal moments in the alternative protein space as part of her new role as the Chief Science Officer for Shiru, a company that makes ingredients for CPG companies building plant-based meats and other alternative proteins. Varadan will oversee all aspects of R&D, from discovery and screening to ingredient pre-production.

I sat down with Varadan to talk to ask her about her time at Impossible, the decision to come to Shiru, how she believes her new company differentiates itself in a fast-growing alt protein market, and what she sees going forward for the plant-based foods and alternative protein industry. Answers have been edited slightly for readability.

You can read the full interview with Ranjani at The Spoon.

Podcast: Building a Next-Generation Ingredient Company with Shiru’s Jasmin Hume

As the former head of food chemistry for Eat Just, Dr. Jasmin Hume thought there was a lot of white space for innovation when it came to food ingredients.

She knew food companies would increasingly need new and novel ingredients they could build plant-based food products around, but felt there wasn’t enough research being done to discover these critical building blocks.

So she decided to start a company to do just that. So far, the company has raised over $20 million and recently hired Impossible Foods’ former VP of R&D and strategic ingredients.

On the podcast, Jasmin and I discuss a variety of topics, including:

  • How the alternative protein market is evolving from early fully vertically integrated brands to companies like Shiru that build ingredients and solutions for a variety of companies
  • The new cohort of food companies utilizing AI and ML to build the next generation of food
  • How what Shiru is doing with precision fermentation is different from that of Perfect Day and others trying to create animal-identical proteins
  • Where Jasmin sees the ingredient industry going in the future
  • Plus lots more!

You can listen to the full episode at The Spoon or, as always, find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Food Robots

Ottonomy Debuts a Swervy, Customizable Delivery Robot in Ottobot 2.0 as it Closes $3.3M Seed Round

Earlier this month, Ottonomy, a maker of autonomous delivery robots, unveiled its second generation robot, the Ottobot 2.0, alongside its announcement of its $3.3 million seed funding round according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The new funding, which is led by pi ventures, also has Connetic Ventures, Branded Hospitality Ventures, and Sangeet Kumar (Founder & CEO of Addverb Technologies) joining the round.

As you can see in the video below, the second-gen Ottobot introduces several features, including a new swerve-drive capability (which Ottonomy calls “crab mode”) in which the Ottobot’s drive train can turn each wheel independently. This allows the Ottobot 2 to spin in place (aka ‘zero-radius turning’) and swerve as it navigates (vs. the more tank-style mobility of robots without a swerve drive) towards it destination. This type of advanced maneuverability allows robots to weave through tight spaces, something that the Ottobot will need with its emphasis on both indoor and outdoor delivery.

To read the full story, click here!

Robot Butlers & Roombas: Elon and Amazon Are Getting Serious About Building Home Robots

Last week, Amazon announced they were acquiring iRobot. The acquisition of the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums comes less than a year after Amazon unveiled its own home robot, Astro.

The news came the same week we got a sneak preview of Optimus, Tesla’s robotic humanoid. After the preview, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he thinks the impact of the Optimus could someday exceed that of the company’s hugely popular electric vehicles.

“I’m sort of surprised that you know people are like analysts out there are not really understanding the importance of the Optimus robot,” Musk said. “My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term.”

While Musk has suggested his company’s robot will someday provide a nearly inexhaustible amount of “labor” (of the mechanized, non-human variety), he also outlined how the robot will also help us at home with everyday tasks.

“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” he said.

For Amazon, much of the early hot takes on the company’s purchase of iRobot frame it as part of a larger effort by the online giant to better understand its customers. And no doubt, adding the home mapping capability of the Roomba to the already rich data profiles Amazon has through our purchase history and Alexa voice interactions will give the company an even better contextual understanding with which to sell us even more stuff.

But I also think Amazon is serious about becoming a leading platform builder in home robotics. Robotics are just a natural evolution of the smart home – something us old-timers used to call ‘home automation’ – and I expect the roboticization of the home will ultimately lead to a multi-hundred billion dollar market. Today’s consumer robot market – mostly products like the Roomba – is forecasted to be a $9 billion market next year. One can only imagine how big it will be once multipurpose, life-assisting robots that can do more than just clean our floors are widely available.

Astro was Amazon’s first toe in the water, and with Roomba’s huge patent portfolio and in-house expertise, I expect we’ll start to see much more interesting new products roll out from the company in coming years. One obvious product idea would be something like Labrador Retriever by Alexa Fund-backed Labrador Systems, a robotic beast of burden for everyday tasks.

One advantage both companies have is they can develop and amortize their robotic investments across both their industrial and consumer-facing markets. Industry has and always will lead in terms of automation adoption, and that’s partly why both companies have invested so much over the past decade in building out their robotics platforms; it gives them a strategic advantage in manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and other parts of their core business.

Now, with all of the in-house IP and automation know-how, both are turning their eyes toward the consumer market. Amazon and Tesla – companies well known for having much longer-than-average time horizons when it comes to product road maps – have already gotten their first products ready for market. In Amazon’s case, they’ve just added North America’s biggest home robotics company to their portfolio and can now bulk up its home robotics lab launched a few years ago as part of Lab 126.

My biggest fear isn’t Amazon mapping my home, but instead that the home robotics market will be yet another duolopy dominated by a couple of technology giants. While others like Labrador and Hello Robot have exciting projects they are working on, do we really think Amazon or Tesla won’t be able to buy them or, in the case of Hello’s $20 thousand home assistant, beat them on price?

My guess is the two companies’ biggest competition will come from Asia, where Samsung, LG, Sony and a number of Chinese companies have been working hard on building robot platforms. Sony is particularly interesting to me given their interest in the intersection of cooking and robotics, which Samsung has also shown interest in.

Bottom line, with two of the world’s biggest technology companies – along with a lot of other big consumer product companies – finally getting serious about the home robotics market, we should all be prepared for the coming wave of home robot assistants – be their souped-up Roombas or robotic butlers – in the coming years.

From SpaceX to Pizza Robots on Wheels: The Story of Stellar Pizza

In 2019, Benson Tsai left his job building rockets for SpaceX to start a company building a different type of technology-powered vehicle: a truck with a pizza robot inside that cooks and delivers finished pies to customers.

“My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, and they opened a restaurant when they first moved to the U.S., selling fish and chips of all things,” Tsai told The Spoon in a recent interview. “But food has always been central to my life, and it’s been my one real passion.”

While he was at SpaceX, Tsai would go off campus during lunch with his coworkers to explore neighborhood restaurants. Before that, he started his own electric truck company, his first venture-backed startup. With his latest startup, Stellar Pizza, he can finally combine his love for food and expertise in engineering.

According to Tsai, the main problem that Stellar Pizza solves is the rising food costs in the United States. The USDA found that the restaurant purchases consumer price index, a measure of inflation, rose 0.7 percent in January 2022 and was 6.4 percent higher than in January 2021. There was more inflation for grocery and supermarket store purchases with the consumer price index for those purchases increasing 1.2% in January 2022 and being 7.4% higher in January 2021. 

Stellar Pizza hopes to address this problem directly by selling to its target customer: people who want food quickly and conveniently. With this comes the challenges of refining the recipe to something that customers will love, particularly working with the dough, and developing systems that can accommodate all the different pizza inputs. The culinary challenges are accompanied by the challenges of the approach they are taking by operating as a company that is building new technology and a restaurant brand simultaneously. 

“The development of food robotics as compared to developing space technology is a whole different ball game, it’s lower stakes,” Tsai said.  

Stellar Pizza’s solution is to build serially by first developing the technology and then the restaurant brand. The reason why Stellar Pizza chose to operate its own restaurant brand is to stay vertically integrated and customize the technology to fit its needs. 

“If you look at SpaceX, raw metals show up at the door of the factory, and they sell rides to space, not rockets or any of the technology.” 

Another aspect of operating a restaurant brand is consumer perception. Consumer response to automation in the restaurant industry has, in general, been mixed, with some praising it for making food cheaper and more available while others worried that it will take away jobs. 

“All of the fast food in the world is already made by robots,” Tsai said. “Like the sausage patty you get in your burger is made by a factory somewhere so automation in food has already been a part of our lives for decades. We’re just moving the robotics a little closer to the customer.”

The long-term vision for Stellar Pizza is to move the pizza production closer to the customer by having just one person, a driver, who hands off the pizza to the customer or another delivery driver. This application is a hub and spoke model with the main truck and a fleet of delivery drivers making deliveries. Last-mile delivery has been a huge area of innovation since the start of the pandemic, especially automated delivery. McKinsey found that of the $11.1 billion raised by last-mile delivery startups, $9.9 billion went to startups with unconventional technology such as drones and autonomous vehicles. 

Stellar Pizza isn’t the first company to combine robotics and truck delivery in one startup. Zume Pizza developed a cobot method where a robotic assembly line spread dough balls and sauce before human employees added toppings. Another robot transferred the pizza into a double-decker oven where it was par-baked and then transferred onto a rack. From there, humans loaded the pizzas onto the delivery trucks, where the pies were baked while in transit to the customer. 

Zume raised $375 million in funding from SoftBank in late 2018 before it had to fold its pizza delivery operation. Stellar Pizza is different in that the robots are directly on the delivery truck. Stellar Pizza has already raised $9 million from three firms: Root Ventures, Collaborative Fund, and Crosslink Capital. It plans to launch this summer in Los Angeles, California.