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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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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.

Creator Re-Opens With a New Burger Making-Robot Customers Can Control

Creator, the San Francisco restaurant made famous by its burger-making robot, was among the thousands of restaurants shut down by the pandemic (even though it engineered an awesome germ-free airlock delivery system). But the restaurnt announced today that it is back with a new location in Daly City, California, and that is has a brand new robot that customers can control.

Creator’s new robot is a little different from its first incarnation, offering a new array of functionality. The robot is faster, capable of cooking a burger in less than four minutes (when there are no other burgers in the order queue). It also holds 25 different seasonings and sauces that can be dispensed down to the milliliter. Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will no apply to the burger themselves.

But perhaps the biggest change for Creator’s robot is how customers can interact with it. “We’re going to allow anyone to take control of the robot,” Creator Founder Alex Vardakostas told me via video chat this week. Customers can download the Creator mobile app and tweak the seasonings and sauces to their liking. These settings can then be saved and shared, which allows for someone like a well-known chef to “brand” their own burger program that people can replicate.

Another nice new feature is that when you place an order now, Creator’s system will let you know exactly long your wait time will be before your food is ready for pickup.

In addition to all these front-facing changes, Vardakostas said that there are also a number of back-end improvements to the robot that help with production and growth. “The new system is hyper scalable,” he said, “and way more reliable.” It’s these types of back-end changes that will allow Creator to manufacture robots en masse and expand in different ways. Vardakostas said that Creator’s growth will include a mix of owned and operated locations, licensing deals that still carry the Creator brand, and a white-label approach where the machine is modified for another restaurant’s use.

Despite all this technology, Creator remains a very human-focused eating experience. Vardakostas said his team looked at using ordering kiosks, but decided to stick with human order takers. “For a lot of us, we want to talk to a human,” he said.

Speaking of humans, unlike other restaurants, Vardakostas said that finding and hiring workers has not been a problem. “Labor has been a slam dunk. It’s been super easy,” he said. Part of that Vardakostas attributes to Creator being as much a tech company as it is a restaurant company. “Overall, a lot of people want to move into tech,” he said. But there certainly other factors at play, such as not having to work over a hot grill (since the robot does the cooking), Creator also helps with professional development by paying for things like Coursera classes (though a lot of QSRs offer something like that now). Creator does provide an upward path into the technology/robotics sector, however. Vardakostas said that Creator recently promoted two restaurant workers into its development lab.

Creator is part of a larger movement towards automation in the food industry, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. Robots can work all day without taking break, don’t get sick or injured, and can help free up space for social distancing in the kitchen. As a result, there are a number of restaurant robots either at market or on their way. Miso Robotics’ Flippy is working the deep fryers at White Castle. Hyphen just introduced its new Makeline robot assembly system for Sweetgreen-style restaurants. And Picnic just announced the commercial availability of its pizza assembling robot.

For those in the Bay Area who have not yet tried Creator’s robot-made burger (ed. note: They are delicious), you can visit the restaurant’s new location in the Westlake Shopping Center at 514 Westlake, Daly City.

New Croatian Restaurant Uses Five GammaChef Robots to Make Meals

Typically when we write about food making robots, they fall into either one of two categories: Smaller countertop devices meant for the home, or larger, more industrial robots meant for restaurant kitchens. But a restaurant called Bots&Pots in Zagreb, Croatia, is combining those two ideas and using a number of GammaChef cooking robots to make meals for its customers.

GammaChef, also based in Croatia (and also a former Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase finalist), makes the eponymous robot capable of creating one-pot dishes such as stews, risottos and pastas. The device stores ingredients, dispenses them into the pot, and stirs the food as it cooks. According to Total Croatia News, customers at Bots&Pots choose their meal via touchscreen at one of five GammaChefs inside the restaurant and they’ll be able to see their meal prepared. According to the story, with five robots running, the restaurant can make up to 60 meals per hour. Human chefs at Bots&Pots are also creating new recipes for the robot to “learn.”

We don’t have a ton of other details about Bots&Pots right now. Based on the restaurant’s Facebook page, it appears as though it is in more of a showroom mode, and not quite open to the public yet. A translation of a Bots&Pots Facebook post on August 14 reads “Soon….Zagreb, then the world 🤟😇.” The restaurant also mentions franchising in earlier Facebook posts, so it appears that Bots&Pots is looking to take the concept to more stores in more locations.

What’s intriguing about Bots&Pots is its robot deployment strategy. The restaurant is foregoing one big, self-contained autonomous kiosk (like the DaVinci Kitchen) in favor smaller consumer appliances. This approach could help save money up front, because there is no big installation or training that needs to happen around a large robot. Not needing to build around a big bulky robot also means that as Bots&Pots franchises out, the concept can adapt to just about any real estate because you just plunk the GammaChefs down on some countertops.

Will this be a strategy other restaurants adopt? Could we see other home cooking robots like the Oliver or Nymble’s Julia be used in bulk at eateries? We’ll have to see how the nuts and bolts of Bots&Pots works out.

Q&A: RoboEatz on the Importance of Robotics in Restaurants of the Future

Thanks in part to the pandemic and the changing restaurant experience, there is more interest in food robots these days. While we’re not yet at the point where counters, kitchens, and drive-thrus are fully manned by these bots, there is a steadily growing number of choices when it comes to machines that can speed up and/or smooth out operations, save on costs, and provide a truly contactless meal creation and pickup experience.

One such offering is the RoboEatz Ark 03. it is a standalone kiosk that contains an articulating arm, fresh ingredients (including soups and salad dressings), an induction cooker and cubbies to hold pickup orders. When a customer places an order (via phone or tablet), the robot arm grabs ingredients, places them in the rotating induction cooker, and puts the finished meal container in a cubby.

RoboEatz’ CEO Alex Barseghian will share more on this exciting new world of restaurant tech at The Spoon’s upcoming Restaurant Tech Summit on August 17. As a teaser, we recently got some thoughts from him about restaurant robotics, which you can read below. And if you haven’t already, grab a ticket to the virtual show here.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

1. What problem does Roboeatz solve for restaurants/the restaurant industry?

The robot solves multiple things in one system. The ARK 03 can hold 80 ingredients allowing for 1,000 menu items to be made. Anyone from a salad concept to a pasta bar QSR or an Asian restaurant chain can leverage it. It self cleans the entire system and utensils, can dish out meals every 20 seconds and can serve 1,000 meals before it needs replenishment. It reduces waste, makes more consistent and great tasting food and labour shortages are resolved.

2. What is the biggest change in terms of the restaurant industry’s approach towards technology as a result of the pandemic?

There are a number. Touchless interaction is becoming more vital. Everything from digital menu boards, touchless payments and curbside pick have increased in demand during the pandemic. Chains are going to look to automate key areas of the kitchen or replace the whole kitchen to reduce mundane tasks. There is global labour shortage for the restaurant industry and technology is going to be a vital way to solve for that problem. 

3. Where do robotics and automation make the most sense in the restaurant industry (e.g., back of house, standalone machines, etc.)?

They can be either back of house or full standalone systems. The application will depend on the environment. For example, business canteens, student campuses, mining camps, airports and transit hubs can drop in a standalone machine like the ARK03. But if you have a casual fine dining chain with a massive infrastructure, you will take much more of an iterative approach to technology. Test and learn which pain points need to be fixed and automated. Only after can you scale — which takes time and extensive resources.

4. What is the biggest challenge for restaurants right now when it comes to digitization? 

The whole continuum of the journey is a challenge because there are so many aspects to digitization. From the ease of consumer ordering and personalization on the mobile phone to the end point of picking something in store, systems interacting with each other is a very large pain point.  

5. What are you most excited about when it comes to the impact of restaurant technology?

That we, as a society, can rely on is great quality food that is produced safely and without much food waste. We have a profitable model that is scalable for multiple restaurant verticals, from QSRs to managed food service companies with the aforementioned goal in mind.

6. What do you think the restaurant industry will look like in five years?

The fine dining restaurants will deploy automation that is not visible to customers.  Managed food service companies will deploy full systems in multiple verticals they service, especially where grab and go or 24/7 food is needed. QSR chains will have either a full system or have hybrid back of house functions. It is a very exciting time.  

John Deere Acquires Bear Flag Robotics for $250M

John Deere announced today that it is acquiring autonomous tractor driving technology startup Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million. According to the press announcement, “The deal accelerates the development and delivery of automation and autonomy on the farm and supports John Deere’s long-term strategy to create smarter machines with advanced technology to support individual customer needs.”

Bear Flag’s technology turns tractors into self-driving vehicles, allowing them to autonomously complete tasks such as spraying, mowing, discing and rippling. The fact that Bear Flag sold for that much is pretty impressive, considering the company had only raised a total $12.5 million.

But the big price tag is a reflection of the growing importance of automation in agriculture, which is in the midst of severe labor shortages that are getting worse. In addition to being short staffed, farm work is hard work that can involve heavy lifting in extreme heat for long hours, or managing fields in inclement weather. Automation like that from Bear Flag Robotics can run in adverse conditions without needing to take a break or run the risk of getting injured. Additionally, automation and robots can bring about more data and precision to agricultural processes, reducing the amount of herbicides and pesticides used, as well as optimizing fertilizer and water usage.

As is always the case in a market sector when a big acquisition happens, industry watchers will start to guess who the next acquisition target will be. There are actually a number of ag tech robotics startups that could be, well, ripe for picking. Augean Robotics and Future Acres both make autonomous vehicle platforms for farms that are meant to haul crops and gear around. Farmwise makes an autonomous weeding robot. And Small Robot Company makes a trio of autonomous robots to map and zap weeds.

It’s also worth noting that this is not John Deere’s first trip to the farm robot rodeo. In 2017 the company bought Blue River Technology, which made the LettuceBot robot for $305 million.

If you want to learn more about agricultural automation, check out the video from the “Crops and Robots: How Automation is Changing Agriculture” panel we held at our ArticulATE food robotics conference in May that featured Aubrey Donnellan, Founder and COO of Bear Flag Robotics (Spoon Plus subscription required).

Will LG Make a Meal Out of its new Outdoor/Indoor Delivery Robot?

Consumer electronics giant LG unveiled a new indoor/outdoor rover robot at the Ubiquitous Robot 2021 conference yesterday in South Korea. The company aims to test the new robotic platform at the end of this year.

Though a number of Korean news outlets reported the story, there weren’t a ton of details available about the new robot. We know it was developed in conjunction with MIT Associate Professor Sangbae Kim at LG Boston Robotics Lab, and that the four-wheeled robot can adjust the gap between its wheels to adapt quickly to uneven terrain for a smoother ride.

But there are still plenty of questions unanswered questions. We don’t know what level of autonomy the robot has. For example, is it completely self-driving or is it teleguided? Will it be available outside of Korea, and if so, when? What industries is LG looking to sell this robot to? Given the robot’s ability to minimize jostling as it travels, food and meal delivery seems like a no-brainer. Additionally, the Aju Business Daily reported that LG released the following statement along with its new robot: “The integrated next-generation delivery robot is the result of our preemptive response to customers’ increased demands for non-face-to-face services.” Meal delivery was among the first services to go contactless during the pandemic last year, so it makes sense that such delivery would be on LG’s roadmap.

This isn’t LG’s first foray into robotics. In January of this year the company debuted its BaristaBot to serve coffee to workers at LG’s headquarters in Seoul. Last December, the company began using its CLOi robots to make deliveries from convenience stores to people inside its LG Science Park in Seoul. And in July of 2020, LG partnered with Woowa Brothers and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement to develop robot waiters.

What makes this latest robot more interesting than its previous robo-plays, however, is how it could alter the existing robot delivery market. Startups such as Starship, Serve and Kiwibot have been making robo-deliveries for years at this point, but what neither of those companies have is scale. LG is a giant electronics company that is better equipped to mass produce these rovers and bring their costs down. With its global reach, LG could then sell or lease robots more cheaply than existing robot companies to third-party delivery services (Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc.). You can kind of see a blueprint for such a deal in the recent Grubhub/Yandex partnership. Additionally, a company with the brand recognition and reputation of LG could also help spur adoption from reluctant potential partners and get more robots making deliveries.

NOTE: The LG image featured in this post is via The Korea Bizwire.