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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Common Sense Robotics De-Emphasizes Robotics with “Fabric” Re-Branding

Common Sense Robotics announced today that it is changing its name to Fabric in a move that emphasizes the company’s focus on overall logistics and puts its robotic origins on the back burner.

Up until now, Fabric had been best known for building out automated robot fulfillment centers that could be built into dense urban areas to facilitate fast delivery of online grocery shopping orders. The hook for the company was its ability to build its robotics vertically to make more efficient use of the spaces it built into. In July, the company announced it was breaking ground on an 18,000 sq. ft. facility in an underground parking structure in Tel Aviv.

In today’s press announcement, Elram Goren, CEO and co-founder of Fabric, provided a statement about the rationale for the name change and the removal of robotics from its name, saying “For us, our robots and software are critical to what we do, but at the end of the day, they’re a means to an end. What we’re really here to do is to be the fabric that binds retailers and their customers together, enabling goods to be fulfilled and delivered faster and cheaper within cities.”

We reached out to Fabric to find out more about the impetus for the name change, and was told that all of the messaging could be found in the press release.

Fabric is part of a wave of companies looking to automate and subsequently speed up online grocery order fulfillment, which is a small-but-growing slice of overall grocery shopping. Takeoff Technologies, which builds similar fulfillment centers in-store, is working with Sedano’s, Ahold Delhaize and Albertsons, and recently announced a standalone fulfillment center in New Jersey for ShopRite. Kroger is building out robotic fulfillment centers using Ocado’s technology. And Walmart is using Alert Innovation for its own back-of-house automated fulfillment.

In addition to the re-brand, Fabric also announced today that it will move its corporate headquarters from Tel Aviv to New York City. So now we’ll have to see if a new name and a new town can help Fabric weave itself into the U.S. grocery business in a meaningful way.

Having Nearly 100% (or More!) Worker Turnover Per Year is Common for Panera and Other QSRs

A big reason we write about food robots so much (and built an entire conference around them), can be summed up in this stat: Panera loses nearly 100 percent of its workforce over the course of a year — and that number is actually considered pretty good for the QSR industry.

CNBC has a fascinating and in-depth look at how it’s not uncommon for fast food restaurants to lose more than 100 percent of its workers in a year. From that article:

The official Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover rate for the restaurant sector was 81.9% for the 2015–2017 period, but industry estimates are much higher, reaching 150%, and the problem has gotten worse in recent years.

How is it possible to lose 150 percent of a workforce? Because QSRs are losing not just one worker, but also the person that comes in to replace them.

CNBC outlines lots of reasons that turnover is so high: fast food jobs are so routinized as to make them disposable, low pay, no real career path, the societal reputation of having a “McJob,” and how gig economy jobs allow people to set their own schedules. You should definitely read the full article.

We wanted to highlight it here on The Spoon because in our previous coverage and fireside chats with restauranteurs and food robotics startups, we often hear these same sentiments about fast food labor — but they are delivered in pretty vague terms. Basically we are told that restaurants have a hard time hiring and keeping people, nobody wants to work at a restaurant, more people would rather drive for Uber. What CNBC’s piece does quite well is it provides some hard context around those issues with hard numbers.

Sloughing off more than 100 percent of your workforce each year is a crazy way to run a business. But this deep turnover is the reason we see so many robotics companies looking to fill that void. Brightloom (formerly Eatsa), Miso, Creator, Bear Robotics, Dishcraft, and Cafe X are just some of the companies looking to automate different parts of the restaurant workforce.

Creator is actually a good example of what could be possible for automating jobs in a QSR. It’s a restaurant built around a (delicious) cheeseburger making robot. As Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas told us, the idea is that if you take away the menial, repetitive work of flipping a burger, you can free up human workers to be more creative and ideally more fulfilled at their jobs.

Creator is just starting out and its thesis has yet to be proven at scale, but it could be a model for future QSRs. Vardakostas realizes that his employees won’t work at his restaurant forever, but he wants to make their time at Creator enriching and fulfilling. Creator employees even get “5 percent” time to learn a new skill.

While food robots and automation are going to take a certain number of human jobs in the fast food industry. Hopefully it can work to make those remaining jobs more attractive so people will stay in them longer.

Advanced Farm Technologies Raises $7.5M Series A for its Strawberry Picking Robot

Advanced Farm Technologies (AFT), an agtech robotics startup, has raised a $7.5 million Series A round of funding led by Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley (“YMVSV”), the strategic business development and investment arm of Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd., with participation from Kubota Corporation, Catapult Ventures, and Impact Venture Capital. This brings the total amount raised by AFT to $9.2 million.

Based in Davis, CA, AFT creates robots as a service for farmers. It has developed the T-6 robotic strawberry harvester which operates on farms in the Oxnard, Santa Maria, and Salinas-Watsonville areas of California.

Agriculture is a hot area for robotics companies and automation. In addition to the fact that farms are facing a human labor shortage, farm work is hard work. It entains repetitive, manual labor often in hot conditions. Automating some of those tasks would help save people from getting heat stroke or dehydration after being out in the fields all day. Robots can also pave the way towards more efficient farming with precision application of water and pesticides.

Despite their potential benefits, robots haven’t had the best track record when it comes to picking strawberries. Even with the aid of computer vision, ripe berries can be hard to spot. They’re also fragile, so plucking them has to be done with the right amount of robotic care.

Perhaps this is why so many companies are tackling the problem. In addition to AFT, CROO Robotics, Traptic, and Agrobot are all working on robotic strawberry harvesters.

For its part, AFT says it will use the new funds to further expand its robotic strawberry harvesting program and “innovate in other areas.” If the company can nail robotic strawberry picking, that will indeed be pretty sweet.

Will Botrista’s Free Drinkbot Model Accelerate Restaurant Robot Adoption?

Back in December, my big prediction was that 2019 would be a breakout year for food robots. While neither Rosey nor Robbie are common sites at your local restaurant, we aren’t that far off from that prediction coming true, and a startup called Botrista is looking to accelerate the automated food trend.

Robots like Flippy and Cafe X already cook burgers and sling cappuccinos, but Sean Hsu, Co-Founder and CEO of Botrista, thinks those robots are too expensive for most restaurants. “Our belief is if we can find a robot that is $3,000 – $15,000 dollars,” Hsu told me by phone, “that will be a massive opportunity for restaurant owners.”

To that end, Botrista has created a robotic drink dispenser named, appropriately enough, Drinkbot. Drinkbot is a hardware/software solution for restaurants looking to expand their drink options. The dispensing hardware connects to a library of hundreds of drink recipes (mocktails, juices, fusion teas, etc) in Botrista’s cloud, and restaurants can choose anywhere from 6 – 20 drinks they want to serve at a given time.

The hook with Botrista is that the hardware is free. Restaurants pay per drink and for the ingredients, which are ordered through Botrista. It costs restaurants anywhere from $1.40 – $1.90 per drink, depending on what the restaurant chooses. Hsu then recommends that restaurants sell those drinks for anywhere from $4 to $8.

At first, Botrista toyed with the idea of building a real-world shop around Drinkbot, a la Creator. “But then there’s too much overhead,” Hsu said.

Instead, Hsu and Co. realized that every restaurant sells drinks, and this would be a way for them to offer something other than the sugar-filled sodas people are steadily shunning. “Every restaurant needs a drink solution,” said Hsu.

But the drinks are just a foot in the door for Botrista. The company’s ultimate goal is to improve the overall experience of eating out. Hsu reasons that if they improve food production while reducing that cost, restaurants can then take the money that would normally go towards labor and put it towards better ingredients or better customer service.

It’s an argument you hear from almost all the food robot companies. Robots can take over repetitive, mundane or dangerous jobs (without taking breaks) and free up humans to do higher-skill tasks. That may be true, and it also has bigger societal repercussions like human unemployment, which is a heavy and heady topic requiring its own post.

While Hsu wouldn’t get into specifics on the type of food-related robots he is working on, he certainly has the chops to work with robots at scale. Hsu was a engineer for Tesla, working on the assembly robots that built the Model S, X and 3.

Right now, Botrista has only raised an angel round of funding, and is running a few pilots in the Bay Area. But the company is one we’ll definitely keep our eye on as its hardware + software + ingredients model is carving out a new space somewhere in the cracks between Flippy, Cafe X and Creator. Will free hardware and pay-per-use be the model that kickstarts more robots in restaurants? It’s too soon to make that prediction.

The Food Tech Show: Delivery Bots Head to College

This week the Spoon gang got together to talk about some of the most interesting food tech stories of the week.

On this week’s Food Tech Show we talk about:

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

Audio Player

Enjoy the podcast!

Cafe X COO, Cynthia Yeung, Departs From the Robot Coffee Company

Cynthia Yeung, now the former COO Cafe X, posted on Linkedin yesterday that as of last Friday she was no longer with the coffee robotics startup after having worked there for a year and a half. Normally we don’t write about executive shuffles, but Yeung was high up at the company, and her departure comes at a time when rival robo-coffee company, Briggo, is scaling up.

Yeung posted the following to Linkedin yesterday:

Friday was my last day as COO of Cafe X Technologies. I learned a lot from growing the company (now 35+ people) through our Series A and am grateful to Henry Hu, Jason Calacanis, and David O. Sacks for giving me the opportunity to be in “the room where it happens”. I’m proud of the upcoming SFO launch of our new machine (in addition to a few other locations), bringing on more experienced engineering talent, and having built some corporate infrastructure to help the team scale. I’m looking forward to seeing where the company goes next.

One thing that caught our eye is that Yeung said “through our Series A,” but so far, the $14.5 million Cafe X has raised has been publicly referred to as seed and “Seed-1” money, not Series A. We reached out to both Yeung and Cafe X CEO, Henry Hu to see if the company has raised a new round or if there is some other explanation. Yeung directed all questions to Hu.

UPDATE: Hu told us via tweet that they renamed the Seed-1 as a Series A.

Regardless, as Yeung also indicates, her departure comes as Cafe X is set to launch its first robot barista at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), the company’s first location outside of the city of San Francisco.

But Cafe X’s robot will actually be the second automated cafe at SFO. Earlier this summer, Austin-based Briggo opened its robot Coffee Haus at that airport. In fact, Briggo was initially awarded the SFO contract, but Yeung was instrumental in the inclusion of Cafe X. As the San Francisco Business Times reported last November:

“We are striving to be a very, very responsible employer in San Francisco bringing trade jobs back to the city,” Cynthia Yeung, COO of Cafe X, told the SFO commissioners at the Nov. 6 [SFO Airport Commission] meeting. “And I want to understand why, with so little transparency, this trial program was awarded to a Texas based company?”

High-traffic locations like airports are perfect for robotic baristas because robots are fast, accurate and can operate around the clock. While there are plenty of airports around the world, they will be a battleground for automated food services like vending machines and robot coffee makers. Yeung left just days after Briggo announced it had entered into an exclusive agreement with SSP America to put Coffee Hauses in an additional 25 airports around the U.S. and Canada over the next two years.

While this was probably more of a coincidence, as Yeung indicated on Linkedin, Cafe X is entering the scaling phase of its startup lifecycle — a time when having steady leadership at the top is especially important.

Here at The Spoon, we kinda hope Yeung stays in food robotics because she’s a great guest to have on stage at our Smart Kitchen Summit and Articulate conferences.

This article originally stated Yeung worked at Cafe X for a year, it was actually a year and a half and this post has been updated to reflect that.

Starship Raises $40M Series A, Rolls Out its Delivery Robots to U. of Pittsburgh and Purdue Campuses

Autonomus robot delivery startup Starship announced today that it has raised a $40 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from prior investors including Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, MetaPlanet Holdings, as well as new investors including TDK Ventures, Qu Ventures and others. This brings the total amount raised by Starship to $85 million.

That news alone would be worthy of a story, but Starship upped the ante by also announcing that its rover bots arrived today at the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Indiana’s Purdue University in order to prepare to make food deliveries on both campuses in September. These new schools join George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, which launched their own robot delivery programs with Starship earlier this year, and are a step in Starship’s plan (also announced today) to be on 100 college campuses over the next two years.

Students, faculty, staff and whomever else on these school campuses are able to get robot delivery by downloading the Starship mobile app. Users choose from the restaurant and food options, order and pay (there’s a $1.99 delivery fee) to have their snacks, meals or groceries dropped off at any location on campus.

Starship’s robots have proven to be such big ‘bots on campus that the company said in today’s press release emailed to The Spoon that both George Mason and Northern Arizona have increased the number of delivery robots (George Mason actually doubled its fleet), as well as their hours of operation.

Serving colleges is a popular go-to market strategy for delivery robot startups. Earlier this summer, Kiwi announced it was expanding its robot delivery to fifteen colleges including Harvard, Stanford and… Purdue.

Obviously that last one is of interest, given Starship’s announcement today. When asked about Kiwi’s potential presence at Purdue, Starship provided us with the following statement: “Starship is looking forward to launching on Purdue University on September 9. The delivery robots are currently mapping the area and can’t wait to start serving students and staff in September. We look forward to sharing more details shortly.”

We’ve reached out to Kiwi to see if Purdue is still indeed on their rollout roadmap, but regardless of whether Purdue doubles up on robots or has quietly dropped Kiwi, the situation highlights how colleges will be a battleground for delivery robot services. Starship’s fresh $40 million certainly gives it a bigger warchest to woo universities than Kiwi, which has only raised $2 million to date.

Starship says it will use the new funding to “rapidly expand its services to more university campuses,” so a delivery battle is definitely brewing. The company already has a good track record: Starship says its robots have traveled more than 350,000 miles, crossed 4M streets, and have completed more than 100,000 autonomous deliveries.

Briggo Partners with SSP America to Open Up 25 Robot Coffee Hauses in Airports

Robot barista company Briggo announced today it has entered into an exclusive agreement with SSP America to open automated Coffee Hauses at an additional 25 airport locations over the next two years in the U.S. and Canada.

SSP America is a division of SSP Group, which operates roughly 2,600 restaurants, bars, cafés and marches in across 500 locations representing more than 500 of its own and licensed brands. The SSP America website says the company is “passionate about bringing cool, authentic restaurants to airports that reflect a taste of place.”

Briggo’s robotic Coffee Haus is definitely cool. It’s a self-contained automated coffee shop in a box that offers a variety of hot and iced coffee and teas that can be ordered via the Briggo app or through a tablet built into the machine. Meant for high-traffic areas (like airports!), Briggo says its Coffee Haus can make 100 cups off coffee an hour.

Details were pretty light in the press release emailed to us announcing the deal with SSP America, but the partnership should result in robot coffee experiences similar to the three Coffee Hauses Briggo has opened in the Austin and San Francisco International airports. As with its SFO location, Briggo said that in addition to its own coffee roast, it will “also work with airport teams to select local brands to showcase in their Coffee Hauses.”

When we first covered Briggo last year, the company was building up to be a full-stack coffee company. It selects and roasts its own beans, and would own and operate its machines. Briggo declined to answer questions about the business arrangement between it and SSP, so we don’t know what the financial or operational terms of this deal were.

Having said that, if Briggo is looking to scale quickly, partnering up with companies like SSP might be the most expeditious way. It can leverage their existing operational chains and relationships to more easily break into new markets.

The robo-barista game is not zero sum one. There are plenty of high-traffic locations for all the coffee robots. Having said that, our eyes now turn to the other barista-in-a-box, Cafe X, to see when it will start announcing more of its expansion plans.

Woowa Brothers Partners with UCLA to Develop Cooking Robots

Woowa Brothers Corp., the company behind South Korea’s popular food delivery app Baedal Minjok, is partnering with UCLA to research and develop cooking robots, according to a story today in The Korea Times.

The Times writes, “Under the project name ‘Yori,’ Woowa Brothers will develop cooking robots that can perform various tasks, from placing orders and preparing meals, to bring an innovation to the dining culture.” As the article points out, the move with UCLA helps expand Woowa Brothers beyond food delivery.

But robots have been on the brain for Woowa Brothers for a while. In April of 2018, the company invested $2 million in Bear Robotics, which makes “Penny,” the robot that shuttles food and empty plates about on restaurant floors. And in December of last year, Woowa received $320 million in funding, some of which was going towards developing its autonomous delivery robot program.

Adding cooking robots to its arsenal would give Woowa Brothers a more full-stack solution and is in line with the broader, 360 degree view the company has about robots. In an interview last July, Kim Bong-jin, CEO and Founder of Woowa Brothers, talked about how food delivery robots could be more useful with less idle time. One idea Bong-jin floated was in addition to dropping off food, having a delivery robot take away a customer’s recycling.

Woowa Brothers is just the latest company to partner with a university for robotics research. Last year, Sony teamed up with Carnegie Mellon to develop food robots, and Nividia has a robotic kitchen lab set up with researchers from the University of Washington.

Food is a great application for robotics for a number of reasons. First, everyone eats, so there will always be a market for developing systems that help prepare, cook or deliver food faster. Second, food is oddly shaped, with varying sizes and degrees of fragility, making it difficult to work with. Overcoming the idiosyncrasies of food can make working with more uniform materials easier.

There Should be an Open Brand Image Database to Train Robots and Cashierless Checkout Systems

It was a box of Cheez-Its that made me think of the idea.

We were recently at Nvidia’s Robotics Seattle Robotics Lab, watching a presentation on how the company uses computer vision and synthetic data to train robots in the kitchen. In order for a robot to grab a box of Cheez-Its, that robot needs to know what a Cheez-Its box looks like. In order to teach the robot what a Cheez-Its box looks like, Nvidia needs give the robot detailed information about that box including size, shape, and artwork on the front.

This isn’t that hard if your kitchen, like the one at Nvidia, is stocked with only one box of Cheez-Its. You scan that box, input the dimensions and imagery so the robot can match what you’ve scanned to the real thing. But what happens when when you want the robot to find a box of something other than Cheez-Its? Or if the pantry has many different types of Cheez-Its, that kinda look similar but have different flavors? Or if it’s the holidays and the box has been altered from that first model so it now has a snowman on it?

Being able to identify particular products via computer vision isn’t just an issue for robotic hands. Startups like Grabango and Trigo Vision are retro-fitting grocery stores with lots of tiny cameras that use computer vision for cashierless checkout. These cameras need to precisely recognize the items that shoppers pick up and so that the consumer can be accurately charged. That means the AI powering the system needs to know the differences between a bottle of Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero, and be able to understand any changes to branding, like a new logo or seasonal updates.

Rather than having each robotics company and every cashierless checkout company separately create their own database of product images, it seems like having some sort of central repository of brand images would be useful. Think of it as a giant library of constantly updating brand images for all the products in a grocery store. CPG companies would upload 3D models of the latest versions of their products to this database, giving computer vision companies access the most up-to-date imagery for training their respective applications.

This is definitely not the most pressing issue facing CPG companies or retailers; cashierless checkout and product picking robots are still very much in the early stages. But they are coming — and preparing for their arrival now would make the evolution of computer vision and robotics that much faster. After all, training those systems is much easier when you can just download an image rather than creating it yourself.

During our visit I asked Dieter Fox, Senior Director of Robotics Research at NVIDIA, if there was such a system. He said there was for common objects, but not brand specific. ShapeNet has a 3D database of 50,000 common objects, and its subset, PartNet recently launched with a database of more than 26,000 objects broken down into their various parts.

There are competitive issues that might have CPG brands balking at the idea. Coke may not want people knowing about a particular branding change or partnership in advance. But the overall concept could be a tide that lifts all boats. It gives computer vision-related companies the most accurate 3D models of products for training purposes. The faster computer vision systems can be trained, the faster they can work in the real world without any hiccups, which would ideally allow brands to sell more products. It would also make it easier for kitchen robots, when they eventually arrive, to autonomously grab ingredients needed while cooking (“Robot, grab the turmeric.”).

This isn’t just for food, obviously. This type of repository could work for any brand across any sector that will involve computer vision. Perhaps it’s something Dieter Fox can talk about when he speaks at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in October. Get your ticket now and maybe you can talk with him about it over a box of Cheez-Its.

Kroger and Common Sense Robotics Each Announce New Grocery Robotic Fulfillment Centers

I get that it’s supposed to be three of something to make a trend, but the fact that two different companies a world apart made robot-fulfillment center opening announcements on the same day is totally indicative of a broader move towards grocery automation.

Here in the U.S., Kroger announced that Forest Park, GA, just outside of Atlanta, will be the next home of its Ocado-powered customer fulfillment center. Kroger will spend $55 million on this “shed,” as Kroger calls the centers, which will feature automated, robot-driven fulfillment of grocery orders. This is the third such shed of a planned 20 that the company plans to build. Other announced sheds are in Monroe, OH and Groveland, FL, with another one coming to the Mid-Atlantic region.

Over in Tel Aviv, Venture Beat reports that Common Sense Robotics has broken ground on a completely underground automated fulfillment center for an unnamed grocer. The new facility will be in a parking structure under the Shalom Meir Tower and will be 18,000 sq. feet. One of Common Sense’s selling points is that its vertically-oriented systems can better maximize available space and thus deliver full grocery store levels of product fulfillment in a fraction of the space.

That both of these stories happened on the same day is a coincidence, but it also highlights the moves grocery stores are making towards automation. Robotic fulfillment centers like these use totes on rails to quickly assemble items from online orders and hand them off to a human who puts them into bags for pickup or delivery. Robots can move faster than humans, they don’t get tired or need breaks, all of which can reduce the order fulfillment time down from hours to as little as a half hour for some systems.

This faster fulfillment is why so many grocery retailers are trying out robots. Takeoff Technologies has partnered with Ahold Delhaize and Albertsons, and Walmart is testing out automatic fulfillment through Alert Innovation. In each of those cases, robot-powered fulfillment centers are being built into the back of existing stores rather than off-site locations like Kroger and Common Sense’s.

These robotic fulfillment centers are very much in the early stages, but you can expect to see more of them over the next year as more grocers test and implement automation to get you your groceries faster.

Vegebot Can Identify and Harvest Lettuce (and More, at Some Point)

Homer Simpson once sang “You don’t win friends with salad,” but he might change his tune if he knew those greens were harvested by a robot.

Well, probably not. But we at The Spoon definitely think its cool that researchers at the University of Cambridge in England have developed a robot that can automatically identify and harvest heads of iceberg lettuce. Dubbed “Vegebot,” the research team announced over the weekend that its robot had successfully completed tests in a variety of field conditions on an actual farm.

Because it grows flat to the ground and is easily damaged, iceberg lettuce can be a challenging crop to harvest. The Vegebot uses an on-board camera and computer vision to identify the lettuce, whether it is mature enough to be harvested, and if it is healthy (diseased lettuce could spread to other lettuce in the harvest). Once identified, a second camera near the cutting blade makes sure the cut is smooth before a robot gripper picks it up.

This high-tech harvesting is cool, but as of now, it is also very slow. You can see just how slow in this video:

Robot uses machine learning to harvest lettuce

However, like with most things robotic, the speed will come. Right now, the robot has proven that its computer vision, cutting and gripping technology can work outside of the lab and under a variety of conditions. Additionally, the robot’s name is “Vegebot” not “Lettucebot” (there already was one of those), and Cambridge researchers say that the underlying technology could be used for a variety of crops.

Automation and robots are on the verge of becoming more mainstream in agriculture as technology like Vegebot’s, Augean Robotics and Agerris improve, and human labor shortages become more of an issue. Working on a farm requires intense physical labor, often in 100-plus degree weather. Having robots on hand can mean continued production without risking human life and health.

Even Homer Simpson can see that’s a winning idea.