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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

Soft Robotics Gets a Firm Grip on $20 Million

Soft Robotics has raised $20 million to expand the use of its “air actuated soft elastomeric end effectors.” Put another way--the company just raised a bunch of money for its rubbery robot parts that can gently handle delicate items such as eggs and fruit without crushing them.

Robots, as we’ve written before, are great for manual, repetitive tasks, but traditional systems like suction cups or metal grippers have never been great at handling irregularly shaped or soft items. To accomplish that, Soft Robotics uses material science to mimic an octopus (see the TED video below for a full explainer), and the result is an attachment of rubbery-tipped appendages that can be added to existing industrial systems and used to pick, manipulate and sort all manner of items.

According to the company’s product page, Soft Robotics offers three different configurations of its attachment, each meant to handle different types of food ranging from apples to pastries to hamburger patties.

Using robots for picking, sorting and otherwise handling of food would mean faster, more consistent results that could happen twenty-four hours a day. Soft Robotics SuperPick bin-picking system, for example, can execute more than 600 picks in an hour.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Soft Robotics is going to use the new money to push further into the food and beverage sector. It’s not hard to instantly see where this technology could be beneficial throughout the food stack.

In agriculture, Soft Robotics’ grippers could be used for picking fruits without smushing them. In the produce supply chain, a soft touch would come in handy for gentle sorting and shipping. And restaurants like Zume and CaliBurger could most likely find use for a robot that could handle dough and tomatoes (and keep up with the other robots already in use there).

Soft Robotics has more than 100 customers and told the Journal that it had revenues of “less than $10 million” last year (though that was an 80 percent jump over the previous year). This is the second round of funding for the Cambridge, MA company, which had previously raised $5 million. This latest infusion was led by Hyperlane Venture Capital and includes Scale Venture Partners as well as the VC group at Honywell International.

With this new money, Soft Robotics will undoubtedly make their grippers even more robust, but it will be hard to top this video of them in use packing donuts.

Soft Robotics Automation: Dunkin Donuts Demonstration

DoorDash Hiring for new “Moonshot Initiatives” Like Drones and Robots

When DoorDash closed its $535 million Series D round in March, we wondered if that meant more robot delivery vehicles were on the way. Based on a job listing by the company, it looks like we will, and possibly some drones and self-driving cars too boot.

The job listing is for a Software Engineer, Special Projects. And according to the posting they are “forming a new team at DoorDash dedicated to tackling big bets and moonshot initiatives. Think self driving cars, robotics, drones, chatbots, etc.”

The company is “looking for entrepreneurs to join the founding team,” and the role reports directly to the Co-founder (doesn’t say which one). It goes on to say that the person hired will “Build the 10x ideas from the ground up e.g. robotics, drones, next-gen dispatch, ML-chatbots, strategic partnerships, etc.”

DoorDash has already used robots from Marble for delivery in certain San Francisco neighborhoods. Moving some of that R&D in-house could mean the company is looking to build its own, customized version of one.

The listing doesn’t have a posted date, so we don’t know exactly how long they’ve been searching for such a role. We reached out to DoorDash for a comment, but didn’t hear back in time for publication. We will update this post when we hear back from the company.

A little less than a month ago, DoorDash expanded beyond restaurant delivery and into groceries with a partnership with Walmart in Atlanta. DoorDash is basically powering the logistics and delivery as more of a while label for Walmart in that instance. With 10 percent of U.S. consumers now regularly buying groceries online, getting into that category is a big opportunity. But it also brings bigger competitors, namely Amazon, which is a master of logistics and delivery. DoorDash will need to be innovative as it looks to possibly take on Bezos and company.

DoorDash COO Christopher Payne will be speaking at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October. Hopefully he’ll bring robot or drone or a robot piloting a drone with him.

Starship’s Robots are Headed for School and Corporate Campuses

Starship Technologies today announced a major commercial rollout (pardon the pun) of its small, autonomous robot delivery vehicles to academic and corporate campuses across the U.S. and Europe. In a press statement, the company said it will deploy more than 1,000 robots by the end of the year.

Starship’s robots have already been in use on Intuit’s 4.3 acre campus to deliver food and office supplies to workers. As shown in the video below, people can use the Starship app to order food and choose a pickup point (only outside deliveries for now, not inside their building or to their desk). The app will tell them when their package will arrive and once there, customers use their phone to unlock the robot and take their food.

Starship Campus Delivery Service with Robots

Focusing on corporate and academic campuses is a smart play by Starship. First and foremost, this move presumably sidesteps any legal and municipal issues associated with autonomous robot deliveries on public streets. While pilot programs for robot delivery are happening in various cities across the country, San Francisco--a hotbed for early adopter activity-- has put tight restrictions on them. By transitioning from public sidewalks to private campuses Starship’s robots can be more free-range, as it were.

In fact, today’s announcement comes 13 days after Starship was supposed to hold a press conference in which the mayor of San Jose was reportedly going to help “welcome Starship delivery robots to the city.” As far as I can tell, that press conference never happened. I reached out to Starship after the press conference evaporated to find out why, but never heard back.

It’s also a smart move to stick with campuses for the good of the robots. At least on corporate campuses, there will be less chance of vandalism, theft or accident befalling the cute li’l delivery vehicles. And even though campuses aren’t urban environments, there is enough infrastructure in place for the robot to learn how to better navigate people, roads, and traffic to get smarter.

Starship’s press release today said that it will continue to grow its residential neighborhood deliveries as well. In that arena, however, it will be competing with rival, Marble, which just last week closed its $10 million Series A. Starship, for its part, has raised $17.2 million from automotive company Daimler Benz.

If you’re at Intuit, or on a campus that gets one of these robots, be sure to take a pic and send it to us here at The Spoon.

A Peek Inside JUST’s Clean Meat Lab

Last June, JUST, the company formerly known as Hampton Creek, announced out of nowhere that they would bring lab-grown meat to market by 2018. If they succeed, they would be the first to do so; Finless Foods hopes their cultured fish will gain price parity with bluefin tuna by 2019, and Memphis Meats is aiming to premiere their cultured meat in 2021.

But it’ll be an uphill battle to get there. Soon after their announcement about lab-grown meat nearly all of JUST’s board resigned, leaving only Josh Tetrick, their very charismatic (and polarizing) CEO. Their former cellular agriculture director also left the company in early 2018 to start his own cultured animal product venture. (The new CTO who oversees the cellular agriculture team has been there since November.) At the same time, though, JUST has raised a total $310M in funding over the years, which is light years away from other clean meat startups (Memphis Meats has currently raised $20.1M). Can a company such high-profile turnover and drama, along with 125 employees and some pretty hefty capital, achieve its very ambitious vision of being the first to bring cultured meat to market?

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I was able to get a peek behind the heavily guarded doors of JUST (well, there was only one guard, but still) and take a tour of this buzzy startup — including their clean meat lab. I came in feeling skeptical and left much the same … but also oddly inspired.

A few of the plants in JUST’s library.

JUST is the prototypical millennial-heavy food tech startup, complete with geometric logos, repurposed factory workspaces, and lots of robots.  First I was led through the discovery platform, the part of JUST where scientists use custom-built robots to test plants from across the globe, determining their potential in vegan food products. Next, those plants go to the product development area; a fancified, high-tech kitchen staffed by chefs, many with Michelin stars.

During my tour I got to try a few flavors of JUST’s signature eggless mayo (really darn good) and their vegan cookies (tasted like normal cookies, though I suppose that was the point). But the coolest thing I sampled was their eggless scramble. Made of mung beans, the pale yellow liquid perfectly acted just like eggs, forming curds in the hot pan that were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The only giveaway was the beany flavor, though their VP of Product Development Ben Roche told me they’re working currently working on a new version that tastes more egg-like.

All the usual players, but vegan.

The fact that it cooks so much like regular scrambled eggs would make it an easy swap for foodservice — even easier than the real thing, since they don’t have to blend up the eggs first. Roche told me that they’re also working on pre-cooked eggless patties. I could see them putting those on the breakfast menu of a fast-food chain, following in the footsteps of partnerships like Impossible Foods and White Castle. For now, though, Just Scramble is only available in only a few restaurants in San Francisco and Hong Kong, though they’re hoping to expand it soon. 

No eggs, just mung beans!

The area of JUST I had the highest expectations for was their clean meat lab. It’s also the area where I learned the least — though I suppose I wasn’t really expecting JUST to give away all their secrets so easily. (Sorry, no photos allowed in here.)

For a company that claims they’ll produce enough cultured meat to bring to market by the end of this year, the lab was surprisingly small. The room was filled with incubators growing cells cultures, bioreactors, and a small area behind a plastic curtain where a scientist was pipetting something into wells. (I was not allowed behind the curtain.)

In the corner of the room was a machine filled with shaking bottles. Vitor Espirito Santo, the Senior Scientist of Cellular Agriculture at JUST, explained to me that the bottles contained proliferating muscle cells; in order to scale up their meat production to a marketable scale, they have to grow them in suspension. Espirito Santo told me that the plan was to transfer the cells into larger and larger bioreactors (the vessels where cultured meat is grown) as their technology improved. The largest one they had in the lab was 2 liters — which is pretty small, though JUST says they want to scale up to pilot plant facilities in the near future.

What JUST’s lab-grown burger will look like.

Despite my skepticism, Espirito Santo was adamant that JUST’s lab-grown meat would be available by the end of 2018 as promised. When I pressed him for details but all I got was “It will be something avian.” The technology required to grow meat with the texture of a chicken breast isn’t evolved enough for mass production, so I’m predicting that their first product will be some sort of ground turkey or chicken. JUST’s press office also clarified with me that they were aiming to make the first commercial sale of clean meat by the end of 2018, subject to regulatory considerations — which, as we’ve written about before, could slow things down considerably. 

Though they’re planning to be the first to bring clean meat to market, JUST’s chief focus seemed to be developing plant-based media. If they’re successful it would be a huge boon for the cultured meat industry. Many clean meat labs use fetal bovine serum (FBS) as the media in which to grow their muscle cells. FBS, however, is very expensive and also (duh) not vegan. If JUST can succeed in developing a plant-based media as effective and versatile as FBS, they have a real shot at making clean meat affordable, scalable, and 100% animal-free.

They’re not the first company to work on developing an alternative to animal-based media. In fact, Shojinmeat, a resource for people growing cultured meat at home, has found a way to do away with FBS altogether, using yeast extract as their media. Yeast extract isn’t a perfect solution — it only works with certain types of cells and doesn’t catalyze as much growth as FBS — but it is an exciting step towards inexpensive, plant-based media.

To me, the most provocative part of the clean meat lab wasn’t what Espirito Santo and his team were doing (or not doing), but what they hoped to do someday. Two drawings on the wall of the clean meat lab laid out their vision for the future of meat: a utopian architectural plan of a vertically integrated cultured meat production facility.

On one end of the property is a farm where they grow the plants for their cell media. On the other are the giant vats where the meat is grown, which lead to a factory where the meat is “assembled” on conveyor belts with 3D printing technology. The only humans involved in the process were walking between the belts doing quality control. The factory has glass walls, so the whole affair is transparent – literally and metaphorically. Consumers could come to the facility, watch their meat being printed out, and select cuts for their dinner. Sort of like a visit to one of those places you can watch cheese being made before buying a wheel, but with cultured meat. 

Espirito Santo said they want that setup to be the same size as the largest slaughterhouse in the U.S. If he and his team can make plant-based media, and if 3D printing technology improves to allow for those production speeds, their goal could actually be attainable. 

I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be more productive, from a price and efficiency point of view, for JUST to simply put their resources into developing plant-based meats that taste the same as the “real” thing. For example, Seattle Food Tech is developing vegan chicken nuggets — and manufacturing technology to make them scalable — which seems like a much more feasible way to take a bite out of the meat industry. Omnipork and Beyond Meat are developing plant-based pork and beef burgers, respectively. Which begs the question: If people can’t taste the difference, will they really care if their pork chop is made of muscle cells grown in a bioreactor, or plants made to have the same taste and texture as meat? This question seems especially relevant since, outside of the clean meat lab, all of JUST’s resources are focused on making plant-based versions of animal products, such as their eggless scramble.

While I think that JUST’s claim that they’ll bring lab-grown meat to market by 2018 is definitely a stretch, you have to respect their self-assuredness. The word “disrupt” gets thrown around a lot in the field of food innovation, but JUST really is trying to radically shake up the way we eat. They want to replace some of our most beloved foods — scrambled eggs, mayonnaise, and hamburgers — with vegan taste-alikes, and so far they’ve been pretty successful. We’ll have to see if their vision for cultured meat comes to pass, or if it’s just a drawing on the wall. 

——

This article has been updated to reflect that JUST plans to be the first to make a commercial sale of cultured meat, not bring it to mass market, barring regulatory considerations. We also clarified that the CTO overseeing the cellular agriculture program has been at JUST since November. 

Bear Robotics Receives $2M Investment from Woowa Brothers

Bear Robotics, which makes the restaurant robot, “Penny,” announced today that it has received a $2 million investment from South Korean food tech company, Woowa Brothers. ZDNet reports that the money is part of Bear’s seed round and comes in the form of convertible bonds. Bear Robotics had previously raised $3.8 million.

Bear created Penny, the bowling pin-shaped restaurant robot runner, which can autonomously shuttle food from the kitchen out to tables and bring dirty dishes back for cleaning.

Woowa runs Baedal Minjok, South Korea’s largest food delivery app. The company has developed its own delivery robot and is reportedly looking to expand its AI and robotics efforts.

Bear Robotics PennyBot demo

Bear Robotics is co-founded and run by ex-Googler John Ha, who used Penny at his restaurant, Kang Nam Tofu House, in Milpitas, CA. Ha told us previously that Penny was borne out of seeing inefficiencies and difficulties that come along with human restaurant workers.

Penny was built for front of house operations (so no burger flipping) and its functionality is currentlypretty limited. While it can navigate between people and tables, it still requires humans to load its table-top surface, transfer the food onto the tables, and place dirty dishes on back onto it. Penny, however, doesn’t tire out, take breaks or call in sick.

Bear plans on renting out Penny’s to restaurants in a labor-as-a-service business model, and had signed up the Bay Area-based Amici’s Pizza chain as a customer.

Robots and food are a hot topic right now. In addition to Flippy, the burger cooking robot, Little Caesars’ has patented its own pizza making robot, Sony and Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up for food + robot-related research, and who knows — maybe even Amazon’s reported robot will have some culinary skill.

Sony and Carnegie Mellon Team Up to Work on Food Robots

Sony Corporation announced yesterday that it has hooked up with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to collaborate on artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics research that will initially focus on “optimizing food preparation, cooking and delivery.”

In a press release, Sony said they were starting off with food-related robots because the complexities involved with food could later be applied to a wider range of industries. Specifically, it cited the ability to work with fragile and odd-shaped materials, as well as the ability to operate a robot in small spaces.

The research will happen mostly at CMU’s School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh. Partnering with a big tech company isn’t new for CMU; the school has previously worked with Uber on self-driving car technology.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the complexities involved with its preparation, food robotics is a hot area right now. Miso Robotics has Flippy, a robot which uses a series of cameras, thermal imaging and AI to properly cook a hamburger. Cafe X launched its second generation robot barista-in-a-box. Meanwhile, 6d bytes and Alberts have both launched smoothie-making robots.

More difficult than actually building useful robots may be tackling the issues surrounding human/robot interaction. Flippy was “retired” after just one day because human workers just couldn’t keep up with the fast robot. Cafe X and 6d bytes’ bots are self-contained units that have pretty much taken humans out of the equation altogether.

The delivery aspect of this partnership is also intriguing. Companies like Marble and Starship have started rolling out pilot projects for robot food delivery in cities across the country. Leveraging CMU’s experience with autonomous driving could rapidly advance the viability of small, grocery-carrying robots scurrying around city sidewalks.

We’ll keep tabs on this project to see what comes of it. Who knows, maybe Sony can develop a delivery robot that’s as cute as its Aibo robot dog.

Zimplistic Raises $30M for Robot Roti Maker

Zimplistic, the company behind the Rotimatic, has raised a $30 million Series C round, according to the Economic Times. The round was led by Credence Partners and EDBI, which is part of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and brings Zimplistic’s total funding to $48.5 million.

The Rotimatic is, as the name implies, an automated roti maker. Roti is a flatbread that is a staple food for roughly 1 billion people around the world, according to Zimplistic. The connected countertop device automatically mixes, kneads, flattens, cooks and puffs each roti, and is able to make one per minute.

Rotimatic - One Touch for Fresh Rotis and Wraps (Price USD$999)

According to Rishin Israni, CEO and Co-Founder of Zimplistic, the company has 30,000 customers and generated $20 million in revenue last year. The Rotimaker is available in seven markets including the U.S., Singapore, the Middle East and Canada.

Costing $999, the Rotimatic isn’t cheap. But its smart updates will help justify that high price tag by adding the ability to make puris, masala rotis, pizza and tortillas.

The Rotimatic is one of a raft of robot devices coming for kitchen countertops. All of them aim to make your cooking life simpler: Gammachef makes pasta and stews, Yomee lets you make and chill your own yogurt, Bartesian mixes cocktails, and Breville’s Oracle crafts your morning cup of coffee. Your connected kitchen is going to need more cupboards.

Not all of these will succeed, but Zimplistic seems to be taking the right approach. It has a big addressable market, and focuses one thing — flatbread, which the Rotimatic can make faster and more consistently than a person. The ability to make pizza dough and tortillas will expand the Rotimatic market greatly while sticking with the core value of the product.

Spyce Kitchen Robot Restaurant Opening This Spring

Spyce, the meal making robot from minds of MIT alums, will open its first restaurant location this Spring in Boston, and is holding a press event on May 1 to explain its automated, futuristic, vision of fast food.

The Spyce Kitchen is a fully contained, self-cleaning robot kiosk that refrigerates, mixes, cooks and serves up a selection of “bowl” meals. You can see an earlier version of Spyce in action at the MIT dining hall in this video Futurism posted two years ago.

An Autonomous Kitchen That Will Cook, Serve, And Clean For You

The team from Spyce has partnered with Chef Daniel Boulud to come up with recipes fit for a space age restaurant robot. According to The New Yorker, the latest incarnation of the Spyce Kitchen has been approved by the National Sanitation Foundation for commercial use, and later this month, a Spyce restaurant location will open to customers and create seven different types of bowls at $7.50 a piece.

Spyce is part of a new cohort of self-contained food robot kiosks popping up all around us. In addition to Spyce, there is the Cafe X robot coffee shop, Chowbotics’s salad making robot, Sally, and 6d bytes’ new Blendid smoothie maker bot.

We love food robots here at The Spoon and can’t wait to check out the Spyce in action.

6d Bytes Debuts New Smoothie Making Robot

Stealthy startup 6d bytes came out of hiding yesterday to debut Blendid, a fully autonomous, smoothie-making robot station. Using a combination of machine learning, machine vision and robotics, Blendid promises to deliver customizable and consistently tasting smoothies to consumers whenever they want.

Blendid is an all-in-one robotic installation that can be set up on-site in food service operations. Inside the kiosk, the robot system blends, pours and serves up smoothies. No humans are needed, except for the site operator to manage inventory and address any issues that my arise.

Customers can use a mobile app or Blendid tablets to order from a menu of drinks including Blueberry Cacao, Mango Mint and Green Warrior, with smoothies costing between $4 and $5 for a 12-ounce drink. The robot whips it together and slides it over in under two minutes.

While the wow factor for patrons might be watching the robot arm swing back and forth with precision (see video below), there is actually a lot of impressive artificial intelligence going on in the background to orchestrate the whole operation.

Blendid Station Working

Through extensive use of machine learning, Blendid tracks the amount of each ingredient in each drink. So, for example, one drink might include only 40 grams of bananas instead of 45. The user can provide feedback on their purchase, and if they happen to like the one with slightly less banana, Blendid will remember this and adjust the drink accordingly next time.

Blendid also aggregates all the data from all of its users to help make recommendations. When someone goes to order a drink the system will say “Welcome back, Would you like the usual? Or, given your taste, you might like this other drink.”

There is also a lot of machine vision going on. Every item is coded, but should someone accidentally put spinach in the blueberry bin, Blendid will “see” the difference, know that blueberries are not spinach, and adjust accordingly, understanding the new location of the spinach.

Blendid also has the capacity to self configure and self-calibrate. Basically, every component that goes into Blendid is a standalone smart IoT (internet of things) device. If an ingredient runs out, it will take that item off the menu; if a part fails, Blendid identifies what went wrong and alerts the operator. Operators can also get a live, steady stream of analytics from the machine, detailing what ingredients are being used, if any ingredients are low, how many drinks is it serving, etc.

Sadly, for smoothie connoisseurs such as myself, Blendid won’t be serving me up strawberry banana protein blasts from the comfort of my home. Each machine costs around $70,000 and is meant for large food service operations like school and corporate cafeterias, supermarkets and stadiums. Once set up, Blendid can work all day without breaks, and 6d bytes co-founder and CEO, Vipin Jain, says operators can earn their money back after just nine months.

6d bytes has been developing Blendid discreetly for the past three years. The company is based in Sunnyvale, CA, has 15 employees, and Jain says it has raised “a little less than” $4 million in venture funding. The first Blendid is now operational at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale California. (if you’re down there, do a taste test and let us know about it!)

Smoothies are just the start for 6d bytes. According Jain, the company’s robotic platform can be adapted to serve up hot and cold solid food. Jain is a big believer that food service and fast casual need to change and has big plans for his company

“The whole on-the-go food space has to go through a transition for better consumer experience and operator economics,” said Jain. “There are 80,000 food service locations where Blendid can go. It’s a big addressable market. Our intent is to go after these locations.”

Perhaps as it goes after them, Blendid can hook up with Cafe X and Flippy to deliver a full-on robot army to get customers through breakfast, mid-morning coffee and lunch.

Restaurant Robots Starting to Fill in for Fatigued Staff

Often, when we talk about robots in the food industry, there is a measure of doom and gloom associated with it. I’m guilty of this as well, trying to balance excitement around innovation with the gravitas of millions of human jobs being wiped out.

But it’s also important to remember that robots are really frickin’ cool, and as a CNBC story points out, robots are needed in a country like Japan, which is facing a labor shortages due to a shrinking population.

Tetsuya Sawanobobori started up a restaurant upon completion of grad school. Long story short: long hours made it exhausting and he quit after a year. For sure, owning a restaurant is challenging, but Sawanobori talked to CNBC about the food service industry in Japan more generally, saying “Right now, especially in the food service industry, they have a serious lack of labor because people tend to avoid these kinds of jobs, doing daily, repetitive tasks.”

After exiting the restaurant business, Sawanobori got into robotics and is now the president of Connected Robotics. The company will start selling a robot this summer that can prepare Takoyaki, a Japanese street food consisting of batter balls and minced octopus. Sawanobori said that his robot will take the pressure off of cooking staff who won’t have to stand in front of a hot grill all day.

Takoyaki Robot Demo @Maker Faire Tokyo 2017

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story coming out of Japan. At our own Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year, Hirofumi Mori told our audience that his time performing repetitive, manual tasks at a crêpe shop inspired him to invent his own crêpe making robot.

Here in the U.S., the long hours of restaurant work are spurring our own robot adoption. Bear Robotics created “Penny,” a robot that looks like a bowling pin and shuttles food and dirty dishes around the restaurant. Bear CEO John Ha told us that he built Penny because “[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard.”

Sometimes, however, it seems like our new restaurant robots are working too hard. The most famous example of this is Miso Robotics’ Flippy, the burger flipping robot. Flippy was temporarily “retired” after its first official day on the job, but evidently that’s because it was too fast and the human co-workers couldn’t keep up.

Perhaps the possible Little Caeser’s pizza making robot will fare better.

With the restaurant robot genie out of the bottle, now it’s incumbent upon us a society to keep up, and avoid the doom and gloom.

Study: Food Workers Do Not Fare Well in Our Robot Future

We’ve known for a while that the robots are coming for our jobs. Now a recent study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) sheds some light on how many human jobs run the risk of getting replaced by robots and other automation around the world, and in what industries (hat tip: MIT Technology Review). Spoiler: based on these numbers, the food industry should get set for some major changes.

Overall, the OECD research found that 14 percent of jobs are “highly automatable,” which means that the probability that they will become automatized is more than 70 percent. This translates into more than 66 million workers across the 32 countries covered in the study.

Not every job sector will be impacted the same, and jobs requiring low to basic education will take the brunt of the impact. From the study:

“Automation is found to mainly affect jobs in the manufacturing industry and agriculture, although a number of service sectors, such as postal and courier services, land transport and food services are also found to be highly automatable.”

The study also found that “the risk of automation is the highest among teenage jobs.” Which, if you think back to your teenage years, most likely included a few stints either at a fast food or casual dining restaurant.

The OECD paper adds to the growing debate over exactly how much automation will replace human workers. If there’s good news in this research, it’s that 14 percent automation is far less than the 47 percent predicted by researchers back in 2013. And the OECD paper even couches its own numbers, saying they could change depending on government regulations and the social reaction to automation. It also touches on the fact that automation could create jobs for humans, as well as replace them.

That’s why I’m hesitant to call this OECD study “bad” news. Automation is just… inevitable. As we’ve seen from the likes of Walmart’s shelf-scanning robots, or the cashier-less Amazon Go store, there are some repetitive tasks that machines and computers can do better and more consistently than humans.

The OECD study is, however, another reminder that we need to start thinking of how we will re-shape our workforce — not just fearing how robots will replace it. Until then, perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that Flippy, the burger flipping robot was “retired” (temporarily) after just one day on its job.

Food Tech News Roundup: DIY Food Printers, Salad Analytics, Ramen Robots

It’s time for your weekly dose of food tech news! This is when we take a look at some of the stories from the week which intrigued us and put them all in one convenient place.

This week we’ve got stories about lab-grown meat, DIY 3D bioprinter building, and sushi-serving robots. Get yourself a big mug of coffee and settle in for a read.

Lab-grown meat company Wild Type gets a funding boost

Cultured meat company Wild Type raised $3.5 million this week in a seed round led by firm Spark Capital with participation by Root Ventures, Mission Bay Capital, and other investors.

Wild Type is yet another player in the growing field of clean meat, along with startups like Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats, and Supermeat. Startup Finless Foods is also using cellular agriculture to culture fish in a lab, though they’re focused on bluefin tuna while Wild Type is working on salmon.

Wild Type hopes to use its new capital to speed up the development of its cultured salmon, increasing manufacturing capabilities while lowering costs. Their first product will be minced salmon meat intended for use in sushi, but they hope to eventually develop an animal-free lox and salmon filets.

 

 

Image: Adam Feinberg, HardwareX

Carnegie Mellon bioprinter could democratize 3D printing

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) recently developed a low-cost 3D bioprinter and are publishing the designs as open source so that anyone can build their own.

The researchers were able to cut costs by applying a syringe-based large volume extruder onto a standard desktop 3D printer (you have one at home, right?), essentially DIY-ing a 3D bioprinter. Bioprinters typically start at $10K to $20K and can cost up to $200K, but this MacGuyvered one can be built for under $500. It’s also easier to modify than a traditional 3D bioprinter.

Though the CMU team’s original research centers around organ tissue printing for transplants, their instructional abstract notes that these homemade bioprinters can perform “a wide range of 3D printing applications, including bioprinting, embedded printing, and food printing.” As we’ve covered on The Spoon before, 3D food printing is a massively underexplored area of food tech. Maybe these (relatively) affordable bioprinters will change that and make 3D food printing more accessible.

 

Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno, AFP via Mashable

Ramen-serving robots invade Seattle

Plenty USA will launch the new version of their AI-powered, Japan-made robot, dubbed ‘SOTA,’ in Seattle next month. The robot will premiere at JUNKICHI, a robota izakaya restaurant scheduled to open on April 15th in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

SOTA sits atop restaurant tables and uses AI to recognize diners’ faces. It is meant to facilitate communication between customers and servers, though it seems like having a table-bound robot as the middleman would make communication more confusing, if anything. Users can also use the SOTA app to make the robot speak, having guided conversations while they snack on hot pots and grilled meats.

This will be the North American launch for SOTA, but the robot is already a regular fixture at an izakaya restaurant in Japan. (They’e begun their integration into restaurants in America, as well.) According to Market Insider, the restaurant reported a 10% jump in sales since it started using SOTA, and the robot is a popular attraction for dinners. We’ll have to wait and see if it has the same success in an American market.

P.S. Keep an eye out for The Spoon team to make a field trip and interact with these robots ourselves! And eat some sushi, of course.

 

Beer gets high

For those who hate to choose between their vices, there’s a new product for you. Keith Villa, the inventor of Blue Moon beer has partnered with Ebbu, a company that works with marijuana compounds, to launch a THC-infused, non-alcoholic beer in Colorado this fall. The brew is designed to have the marijuana hit the drinker at the same rate as if they were consuming a beer.

The team plans to develop a wheat beer, a light beer, and a stout. The product will launch in Colorado, but producers want to eventually sell it in all states where marijuana is legal.

Other brewers, such as Lagunitas, have infused beer with CBD, a cannabanoid which does not produce any hallucinatory effects. However, this Colorado-based brew will be the first to incorporate THC, which is what gives marijuana users the trademark “high.” Its success (or lack thereof) will speak to how flexible Americans are willing to get with their cannabis consumption.

 

SweetGreen harnesses analytics to inform its new menu

Earlier this week, fast-casual salad chain SweetGreen made a major menu chance. At first glance, it seemed that all they had done was tweak their offerings — but it’s the why, not the what, that’s so interesting.

SweetGreen’s menu changes were apparently a direct result of tech-driven insights. The company recently told Bloomberg that they now use blockchain to track their produce, and also to inform their app (which they launched in 2013). Through the app they collect customer analytics to determine which salads to keep, which to introduce, and which to take off their menu, all of which led to their new menu — the first major menu change in 10 years.

This change is an indicator of how fast casual joints, like Eatsa, are integrating tech into their service models to distinguish themselves from the competition. They’re also harnessing platforms like Toast and Ingest.ai to help run restaurant operations for efficiently and increase revenue. Which all goes to say that this restaurant market is one that will likely see a lot of growth and change — in salad toppings and beyond.