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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

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 fully in his right to thinks 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.

The Food Robot Roundup: Zomato Invests in Mukunda, Ramen on Wheels

The last few weeks have been pretty eventful in the food robotics space. Here’s our latest food robot roundup to catch you up on some of the most interesting stories.

 Strio.AI Says Goodbye to Agtech With Zoox Acquihire

Strio.AI, a Boston-based robotics company founded by MIT alumnus in 2020, was acquired by Zoox, the robotaxi firm owned by Amazon. Strio.AI automates the picking and pruning strawberry crops and has been tested on farms in California and Florida.  

Automating fruit picking is challenging, which is why Strio.AI’s fast pace of testing is impressive. However, Zoox is looking to utilize Strio.AI’s expertise to bulk up its computer vision team, which means the Strio.AI team will be winding down its agtech business. The Strio team will lead Zoox’s Perception product, the computer vision software that drives Zoox’s automation. 

The Strio.AI deal is just the latest in a string of agtech automation acquisitions. Last month, strawberry-picking robot Traptic was acquired by Bowery, a New York based vertical farm, and pivoted from outdoor to indoor farming. Traptic was founded in 2016 and claims to pick 100,000 strawberries a day, preserving the fruit by pulling by the stem and not touching the strawberry directly. The technology will be adapted and integrated into Bowery’s existing hardware and software since the original tractor-like system isn’t conducive in a vertical farming environment. In April 2021, Root.ai, a company with a machine that picks grape tomatoes with a three-pronged robotic gripper, was acquired by AppHarvest, the operator of the largest greenhouse in the U.S. and now uses four- and eight-fingered grippers to pick strawberries and cucumbers. Since acquisition, picking rates have doubled and the next step is to reduce the costs of the robot.

NVIDIA Invests in Serve Robotics

NVIDIA is investing $10 million in Serve Robotics to expand its sidewalk robot delivery service outside of Los Angeles and San Francisco. While NVIDIA is a new investor in the robotic delivery space, the two companies are familiar with one another as Serve utilizes NVIDIA’s synthetic data generation tools for training and testing Serve’s models in simulations as well as robotic fleet management. 

Serve is a fully automated and fully self-driving last-mile delivery service and the startup raised $13 million in an expanded seed round in December. Last-mile delivery services, both on the ground and in the sky have seen significant growth in recent years as the pandemic increased delivery orders. As the sidewalks and streets get more crowded, here’s a table to help you understand the little robots you might be sharing the roads within the near future. 

Zomato Invests in Mukunda

Indian multinational food delivery company Zomato has acquired a 16.66% stake in Mukunda Foods, a food robotics company that designs and manufactures smart robotic equipment for restaurant automation. The stake comes with a price tag of $5 million. The deal puts Mukunda at $30 million valuation.

Mukunda Foods offers end-to-end kitchen automation solutions for QSR and Cloud brands and their six products have been installed in over 2000 locations. Their unique proposition is Nucleus, kitchen automation as a service (KAAS), which enables brands to expand cloud kitchens to new locations with a fully operational kitchen equipped with automated equipment, no rentals on property, no operational concerns, high consistency of products, and highly scalable profits. They’ve already partnered with several brands in Bangalore and plan to expand to other cities in India. 

There are a lot of opportunities for synergy since Mukunda Foods serves ghost kitchens and the ghost kitchens on Zomato have carved niches with loyal customer bases. There’s also a significant market opportunity since the Indian cloud kitchen market is projected to be between $2 and $2.8 billion USD by 2025. 

Ramen on wheels

In a commercial that debuted this month, Nissan showcased the e-4ORCE technology on its new Ariya by putting it on a self-driving car that delivers hot bowls of ramen to customers. The technology is designed to reduce abruptness and swaying for passenger comfort which is great for making sure that ramen soup doesn’t spill. On the Ramen Counter, the soup bowl sits on a flat tray and twin electric motors independently control the front and rear wheels. 

Unfortunately, it looks like this is more of a concept for advertising the Nissan Ariya and Nissan probably won’t make this available commercially but it’s cool to imagine a fresh bowl of ramen zooming down the counter to you. You can watch the video below.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon You Will Be Able to Buy Bubble Tea From a Robot and Pay With Your Face

If having a boba drink made by a robot wasn’t futuristic enough for you, soon you will be able to pay for that bubble tea with your face.

That’s because Bobacino, the maker of eponymous boba-making robots, announced today it has partnered up with PopID to let boba lovers pay for their drinks using facial recognition technology.

The way it works is customers can choose to opt-in and register using the PopID app. The app will scan the user’s face during registration, and from there, they can preorder and pay for the boba tea on the app. The customer can also choose to verify their ID once at the Bobacino kiosk to retrieve the drink. Once scanned, the drink is dispensed.

The PopID app integrated with Bobacino

If this all sounds like technology piled on technology, it is. That said, there’s no doubt biometrics as a form of payment has its advantages. Face-pay and other biometrics do add additional security beyond that of the traditional debit card PIN or even NFC-powered mobile payment, since, after all, it’s tough to fake someone’s face (or retina).

The big challenge for face-pay systems will be convincing some customers to use them. The rollout of face-pay in China raised privacy concerns and left some customers confused by the onboarding process. Because PopID’s system is opt-in, it may sidestep privacy concerns, but the two companies will still have work to do educating customers on the benefits of face-pay.

PopID’s move into automated beverage kiosks is a logical evolution given the company’s early traction integrating with payment kiosks as restaurants looked for ways to mitigate consumer fear about COVID. Last year, the company established its pay-by-face network in Southern California and had since taken it nationwide, riding the wave of interest over in contactless payment.

For Bobacino, partnering with PopID adds one more interesting tool in the toolbox for its operator partners when the company rolls out the machines. Last year, the company said it planned to roll out its machines in the second half of 2021, and they are currently raising funds on StartEngine to help fund the rollout. Bobacino is backed by Wavemaker Ventures, the same fund backing Miso, Piestro (who also partnered with PopID), and other food robotics startups.

You can see what the Bobacino looks like in action (face-pay not included) on the video below:

Bobacino Brand FINAL3

Schnuck Markets to Deploy Simbe Shelf Scanning Robot to All of its Locations

Schnuck Markets announced today that it will be deploying Simbe Robotics‘ Tally shelf-scanning robot to all of its 111 locations across the U.S. This builds on the existing agreement between the two companies, which currently has Tally bots in 70 percent of Schnucks stores.

Simbe’s Tally robot is an autonomous shelf-scanning robot used to monitor a stores inventory. The robot traverses up and down aisles, using computer vision and AI to scan shelves and detect when a product is running low or has been misplaced. Tally can also monitor other issues such as pricing to ensure that sales and promotions are being executed properly.

Validating in-store inventory is more important than ever as people continue to shop for groceries online. Stores need to be more aware of what is in stock to accommodate both in-store shoppers, and customers selecting items online (where they can’t physically see store shelves or ask staff if there is more in the backroom). By automating inventory checks, Simbe says that retailers can get more accurate data and act faster to prevent out-of-stocks. In the press announcement today, Simbe said that Tally enables a 20 – 30 percent reduction in out-of-stock items.

Worth noting is that Schnuck Markets is expanding its use of shelf-scanning robots almost a year after Walmart gave up on them. Last November Walmart made headlines when it announced it was no longer using Bossa Nova’s robots to manage inventory. It was reported at the time that Walmart had found what it considered easier ways of managing inventory than using the robots.

Other retailers, however have put in-store robots to use. Giant Eagle was trialing Simbe’s Tally as well, and Woodman’s Markets was testing Badger Technologies’ robot at its stores across the Midwest.

Coco Raises $36M Series A for Teleoperated Robot Delivery

Coco, a teleoperated robot delivery service, announced today that it has raised a Series A round of funding led by Sam Altman, Silicon Valley Bank and Founder’s Fund.

Launched a year ago, Coco makes a four-wheeled, cooler-sized robot that delivers food and beverages. Coco prepositions its robot at merchant locations in dense city environments, and advertises that it completes deliveries in 30 minutes or less.

Unlike other delivery robots like those from Starship and Yandex, Coco’s robots are not self-driving and are instead piloted remotely. As with Tortoise, another teleoperated delivery robot, by foregoing autonomy, Coco can get to market faster because it doesn’t have to deal with the same state and city regulations around self-driving vehicles.

According to the company’s Careers page, those driving the robots are called “Coconauts,” and Coco is currently hiring remote drivers for Hawaii, Nevada, and Texas. Responsibilities include “Remotely drive a robot: carefully and responsibly” and “Follow a map to and from your destinations.” Under Qualifications, Coco asks that you have a “Reliable, high-speed internet connection,” and “Experience playing racing video games” (hopefully not just Mario Kart).

Coco is raising money at the right time as the food and restaurant world is accelerating its interest in robots and automation. Sweetgreen just acquired the robot restaurant Spyce, and 800 Degrees Pizza will launch 3,600 Piestro-powered robot pizza making vending machines over the next five years.

Robot delivery itself is poised to take off. As Ali Kashani, Co-Founder and CEO of robot delivery company Serve likes to say — you don’t need a two-ton car on the road to deliver a taco. With their smaller footprint, delivery robots can help ease congestion on the road by removing unnecessary full-sized delivery cars. With its new funding, Coco will be able to get its robots on the sidewalks (and provide humans with “driving” gigs), and scale up to more cities sooner than some of its competition.

Forthcoming Tesla Humanoid Robot Will Get Your Groceries, But Should it?

Tesla is working on a bipedal humanoid robot that will get your groceries and take over other “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.” Company CEO Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s robotic ambitions yesterday during the company’s AI Day.

The human-shaped robot will be 5 feet 8 inches tall, weigh 125 pounds and capable of deadlifting 150 pounds. Musk also reassured the crowd that “you can run away from it” and “most likely overpower it,” which are a couple of descriptors that are meant to be comforting but are actually just somewhat unsettling.

Tesla’s decision to go with a human-shaped robot bring up a question I asked last year — “Should food robots be humanoid?” If we are looking towards automation to make our lives easier and create more convenience, wouldn’t more distributed, industrial type machines be better? For example, is it faster to have an android wash dishes individually by robotic hand, or to have a dishwasher appliance clean them all at once? (Obviously the best solution is to have the robot load the dishwasher, but you get my point.)

Think about the grocery example Musk specifically called during his presentation. Fetching your groceries quite honestly seems like it would take longer for a bipedal robot that only moves at 5 miles per hour. Why not just autopilot a Tesla car to the grocery store to curbside pickup the food you ordered online. Sure, Tesla Bots could be useful in loading your trunk, but the car would drive itself back home. To be fair, Musk is a smart guy, so perhaps he meant the humanoid would act more like a house servant and bring your groceries from the car into your house.

But creating a humanoid robotic labor force is certainly more on-brand for the sci-fi inspired Tesla, which is also developing the Cybertruck, which looks like it was pulled from the movie MegaForce. There is theatricality to a humanoid robot, which is the reason some robot startups choose to go with the slower articulating arms. The robotic arms are part of the attraction. Watching an autonomous arm swivel about to make us drinks and meals scratches some basic itch we have to live in the future.

As part of his robot presentation, Musk envisioned a world where robots take over most of the everyday manual jobs that humans currently do. He also said that in doing so, we basically build an infinite labor force. He quickly added that if such a vision were to come to pass, there would need to be a universal basic income for displaced workers. The societal implications of an increasingly automated workforce are complex and need to be addressed sooner than later, but at least Musk is thinking of them now.

Of course, the bigger issue right now is if and when Tesla bots will actually make it to market. Sure, robots can do parkour now, but developing a smart useful robot assistant will take massive amounts of work. But, if anyone can will such vision into existence, it’s probably Musk.