Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

Robot Smoothie Company Blendid Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign

Blendid, a company that produces standalone robotic smoothie-making kiosks, is running an equity crowdfunding campaign through MicroVentures with the goal of raising up to $5 million.

Blendid sent word of its crowdfunding efforts via a marketing email today, though it appears that the campaign itself has been live for roughly a month already. As of this writing, Blendid has already raised more than $240,000 in its crowdfunding campaign.

Equity crowdfunding is becoming quite the popular way to raise money for food-related robot companies. In 2020 alone, Miso Robotics, Kiwibot, Piestro, Bobacino and Small Robot Company all launched or announced equity crowdfunding campaigns.

There are pluses and minuses to going the crowdfunding route. By eschewing traditional VC capital, startups lose out on some of the knowledge and connections that come with institutional investors. But at the same time, crowdfunding helps these companies sidestep some of the scaling pressures that comes with VC money.

Previously, Blendid (formerly 6D Bytes) raised $13.5 million from Benhamou Global Ventures, Plug & Play, Hone Capital and Partech Ventures. We sent a note to Blendid to find out more about its decision to go the crowdfunding route and will update when we hear back. UPDATE: Blendid Founder and CEO, Vipin Jain emailed us the following statement:

“Since Blendid has recently expanded into retail establishments with national partners – giving us a much broader audience – it made sense to do crowdfunding.  Crowdfunding not only allows you to raise money, but also drives consumer brand awareness and advocacy, by enabling fans of Blendid to individually invest as well as enjoy our delicious blends.”

As part of its pitch to potential investors of the crowdfunding campaign, Blendid shared some of its financials. Not surprisingly, 2020 was a rough year for the company. Blendid’s first two locations were at colleges, and given the pandemic and the shift to remote learning, those machines have been inactive for most of the year. According to Blendid, the company earned just $546 in Q3 of this year and $64,119 for its 2020 fiscal year.

Having said that, the fourth quarter has been pretty busy for Blendid. The company has opened two new robots at Walmart locations in California. One of those locations is actually a co-branded robot with Jamba as the company moves away from an owner-operated model to more licensed deals. This shift towards licensing should help with consumer adoption by leveraging the brand recognition that comes with a partnership like Jamba (and others).

One other interesting tid bit from Blendid’s disclosures is that the company is already looking beyond making just smoothies. From the “Product Roadmap” portion of the campaign page:

Q3 2021 – Food format #2 leveraging the existing kiosk, which has been designed as a platform that can be modified to support a large variety of food formats.

For those interested, the minimum investment for the crowdfunding campaign is $100. This post isn’t an endorsement of Blendid and any investment carries with it a certain amount of risk.

With Self-Driving Delivery Vehicles, KFC’s International Brands Keep Pushing Us Into the Future

As with many posts we write about on The Spoon, there is the news and then there is the story.

The news rumbling across Twitter and as reported by Cnet’s Roadshow is that KFC-branded self-driving vehicles were spotted on the road in China bringing fried chicken to people outside. Roadshow reports that this “restaurant on wheels” looks like it’s a partnership between Yum Brands (which owns KFC) and a Chinese company called Neolix (though neither company confirmed that news). From Roadshow’s story:

As for how the little food pods work, it looks like customers make a selection via screens and pay via a QR code and then a door opens to reveal their order. It’s not clear what stops someone from taking more than what they ordered, but surely there’s some sort of system for that. There isn’t anyone inside preparing food as it happens.

Keeping people from taking food that isn’t theirs probably isn’t too big of an issue. This could be addressed either through cameras and computer vision or shelf sensors or both. If a person took more than they had ordered, they would probably just get charged more.

So the news is that China has self-driving cars acting as mobile restaurants. That’s cool. But the bigger story here is what the heck is going on with the international KFC brands? This rolling chicken stand is just the latest example of the company bringing its food into a sci-fi-style future. Consider other moves that KFC has done abroad:

  • A KFC in Moscow is using a system of conveyor belts and an articulating arm to shuttle food from the kitchen into a locker from which customers pick up their order.
  • In July, KFC Russia announced that it was “launching the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to create chicken meat in cooperation with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory.”
  • Last month, KFC in Korea partnered with Hyundai to develop chicken frying robots.

I realize the grass is always greener on the other side, but it seems like the only thing KFC in the U.S. is working is… a better drive-thru (womp womp). I mean, that’s important, but come on! Where are our robots?

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop Adds Miso’s Flippy Robot to its Automat Concept

In addition to feeding you, the Brooklyn Dumpling Shop wants to create a “zero human interaction” experience. And as Restaurant Business reports today, the company is removing at least one human from its equation by bringing on Miso Robotics’ Flippy to work in its kitchen.

Brooklyn Dumpling Shop (BDS) co-founder Stratis Morfogen told Restaurant Business, “Miso is executing the full kitchen operation, which will be available in the third quarter 2021. Until then we will be using countertop portable versions in Q1 of 2021.”

What Morfogen seems to be referring to there is that eventually his company will install Flippy ROARs, which run on rails above the fry station. For now, his store will use the ground-based versions.

The Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, which is slated to open its first location in December (and, confusingly, in Manhattan), is bringing back the old Automat concept. Customers will order their meals via a kiosk or mobile app. Once ready, BDS stores each order in its own a temperature-controlled locker until the customer arrives to retrieve it.

The timing is certainly right when it come to having fewer humans involved in the preparation of your restaurant food. The COVID-19 pandemic is more widespread than ever and causing another round of restaurant dining room closures. Creating a restaurant where you don’t have to interact with another person helps reduce the vectors of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

Robots like Flippy are also finding accelerated interest from restaurants because they can work around the clock, don’t get sick and can create more social distance for employees inside a kitchen. White Castle recently announced it was adding ten more Flippys to its roster after an initial pilot earlier this year.

For BDS, the addition of Flippy plays into a bigger expansion plans for the company. As Restaurant Business wrote in today’s post, Brooklyn Dumpling Shop also signed a deal with Fransmart to franchise the brand with the possibility of adding 1,000 locations across North America.

Highpper Aims to Make Standalone Robot-Powered Restaurants-in-a-Box

When we write about food robots, typically those robots are like (very advanced) appliances that fit into an existing kitchen. Miso’s Flippy works the fryers, Picnic’s robot assembles pizza, and Spyce’s Infinite Kitchen sits at the center of that particular restaurant, making meals.

So one of the things that makes Tel Aviv, Israel-based Highpper interesting is that its robot is the restaurant. Everything from storage to production to packaging is 100 percent automated and done within a standalone 40-foot-long container that can be set up in parking lots or pretty much wherever you can get power and water. Highpper can run all day without needing human assistance.

That’s the plan, anyway. The company is still in the very early prototype phase, but there are reasons to believe it could come through on its ambitious plans. One such reason is that its founder and CEO, Udi Shamai, is also the president of Pizza Hut Israel, a master franchisee that oversees 90 Pizza Huts across his country. Shamai is also the non-executive chairman of Dragontail Systems, which uses computer vision and AI to automate food quality assessment for clients such as Domino’s Australia. (Dragontail was also named one of our Food Tech 25 in 2020)

Because of Shamai’s background, it’s no wonder that Highpper is starting with pizza. As we’ve said before, if you want to see the future of food tech, look to pizza, and Highpper is no exception. Though, when I spoke with Shamai by phone this week, he insisted that Highpper’s unique value proposition was less about futuristic technology and more about scale.

“I can ship 200 stores,” Shamai told me. “It’s scaled.”

Obviously, the proof will be the pudding to see if that’s the case, but Shamai said that Highpper will open its first third-party branded (Shamai declined to say which brand) standalone pizza operation in June of next year in Israel. Before that, the company will install components of its robots in an existing restaurant, to show off the machine’s capabilities.

One of the obvious uses for Highpper’s technology is automated ghost kitchens. If Highpper’s containers work (and that’s a big if right now), it’s not hard to imagine a parking lot filled with various robo-restaurants, churning out food for delivery, twenty-four hours a day. Speaking of ghost kitchen automation, there is actually another Tel Aviv-based company called Kitchen Robotics, which unveiled its Beastro robotic ghost kitchen earlier this year. Bistro, however, only does cooking and not everything Highpper says its machine does.

Right now, Highpper’s system only makes pizza, with burgers to follow and then the vaguely worded “Asian” food option. Highpper is in the business of selling its containers, not owning and operating its own machines or leasing the robots out as a service. An automated container will cost roughly $350,000 per unit (though Shamai indicated that price might vary a little bit).

Highpper is certainly entering the market at the right time. Euromonitor predicts that the ghost kitchen market will hit $1 trillion by 2030. More immediately, the global pandemic has accelerated interest in food robotics. Highpper’s ability to automate the entire workflow of creating fast food, could make potential restaurant customers pretty high on the company.

Video: Chowbotics’ Sally Makes Salads at Coborn’s Marketplace

As you are well aware, the way we get our food has undergone dramatic changes during this pandemic.

One of the more visible changes we’ve seen is the removal of buffet-style services like salad bars in grocery stores. The thought of trays of lettuce and mushrooms and bacon bits just sitting in the open for lots of people to pick through (and worse) is no longer appetizing, to say the least.

What is slowly starting to replace some of those grocery salad bars is robots. Specifically Chowbotics’ Sally robot. The company recently signed a licensing deal with Saladworks , which will put Sallys in grocery stores. And just last month Chowbotics introduced new features that enabled contactless ordering, as well as a video screen that displays dynamic video advertising, which will make its robot more attractive to potential retailers.

Thanks to a promotional video from Apex Commercial Kitchen posted to Linkedin (see below), we can now take a look at what Chowbotics robots look like in the grocery store. Yes, this video is a little commerical-y and doesn’t provide much detail, but it shows what Sallys look like in the real world, and oh yeah, also is a bit of an announcement that Sallys are being deployed to at least one Coborn’s market.

During different conversations with the company throughout the year, Chowbotics has told us that it has seen increased interest from grocery retailers looking to replace their salad bars. We’re starting to see that interest turn into actual installations. In addition to Sally at the supermarket, Blendid’s smoothie-making robot recently debuted at a Walmart in Fremont, CA.

As retailers (and shoppers) still deal with the ongoing ramifications of the pandemic, we can expect to see more robot deals like Chowbotics and Blendid in the coming months. For more on the automated vending space, check out The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report I did for Spoon Plus earlier this year.

Ocado Buys Kindred Systems and Haddington Dynamics for a Total of $287M

British grocer Ocado announced yesterday that it is bolstering its robotics capabilities with the acquisitions of North American companies Kindred Systems and Haddington Dynamics for a total of $287 million.

Kindred Systems is an AI company that develops piece-picking robots with computer vision and motion control. The technology uses deep reinforcement learning to help robots better handle the variety and types of items found in grocery. Haddington Dynamics builds “highly dextrous” robotic arms that can be 3D-printed and are subsequently low cost.

According to an Ocado presentation on the deal, the company spent $262 million in cash on Kindred and $25 million in cash and stock on Haddington. Both deals are expected to close in 2020.

Putting an obvious two and two together, with these purchases, Ocado is getting a smarter, more advanced system for picking groceries that the company can deploy at its automated smart warehouses.

In a broader sense, these deals come against the backdrop of the global pandemic, which pushed people to record amounts of online grocery shopping this year. While sales have come down from those record highs earlier this year, online grocery is still projected to make up 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025, hitting $250 billion.

All of those orders will need to be fulfilled, and the speed at which orders can be processed and delivered to/picked up by consumers could determine the retail winners and losers in the new grocery landscape.

In a more specific sense, Kroger, which is an investor in Ocado, is using Ocado’s technology to build out automated fulfillment warehouses across the U.S. The first of those warehouses is set to open early next year. The ability to set up smarter robotic systems more quickly could translate into opening up those warehouses sooner.

Ocado isn’t the only robotic grocery fulfillment solution coming online. Takeoff Technologies, which builds micro-fulfillment centers in the backs of existing stores is expanding its relationship with Albertsons. And FreshDirect is using Fabric’s automated fulfillment system in the D.C. area.

With the pandemic still going strong coupled with the colder winter months upon us here in the northern hemisphere, there’s a good chance the online grocery shopping sales will crop back up as people avoid going outside. After eight months of pandemic living, the question will be how much has grocery e-commerce become a new everyday habit. If so, the robots will be ready.

Walmart to Stop Using Bossa Nova’s Shelf-Scanning Robots

After touting their efficiency and effectiveness for years, Walmart has decided to stop using Bossa Nova’a autonomous shelf-scanning robots to monitor inventory, according to a scoop in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Almost exactly three years ago, Walmart announced it was deploying Bossa Nova’s ‘bots to 50 stores. At that time, the company hailed the robots’ efficiency, saying the machines were 50 percent more productive and three times faster than a human at the job of taking inventory. In April of 2019, Walmart announced it was broadening Bossa Nova’s use to 300 locations, and just in January of this year, Walmart bumped the deployment number up to 1,000 stores.

Of course, shortly after that January announcement, the pandemic hit, which precipitated a massive surge in online grocery shopping. And this seems to have had an unintended consequence when it comes to automation, writes the Journal:

Walmart ended the partnership because it found different, sometimes simpler solutions that proved just as useful, said people familiar with the situation. As more shoppers flock to online delivery and pickup because of Covid-19 concerns, Walmart has more workers walking the aisles frequently to collect online orders, gleaning new data on inventory problems, said some of these people. The retailer is pursuing ways to use those workers to monitor product amounts and locations, as well as other automation technology, according to the people familiar with the situation.

Additionally, the Journal reported, Walmart was concerned with how shoppers were reacting to seeing the six-foot tall robots roaming the aisles.

The pitch from Bossa Nova and other players like Simbe Robotics and Badger Technologies is that shelf-scanning robots can provide a more accurate and up-to-date accounting of inventory on store shelves. As the CEO of Simbe Robotics told me in August, better data about what’s in stock can alleviate product outages like those experienced during the panic buying early on in the pandemic.

At the same time Walmart is retreating on shelf-scanning robots, other retailers are increasing their use. Schnuck Markets is expanding the use of Simbe’s Tally robot to 62 locations across the Midwest. And Woodman’s Market in Wisconsin will add Badger Technologies’ shelf scanning robot to all of its 18 stores and Illinois and Wisconsin by the end of this year.

For all their advantages, robots were always kind of a stopgap technology for grocers. Robots still need time to go up and down store aisles, and as noted above, interact with human shoppers. Cameras, sensors and the burgeoning world of cashierless checkout technology can do much the same in real time (or near real time) without intruding on a shoppers’ space.

Walmart debuted its IRL store last year that uses cameras and computer vision to monitor inventory. Trax installs cameras on ceilings and store shelves to do much the same. And lineless checkout companies like Grabango monitor what people are taking from store shelves and charging them automatically as they leave the store.

The Journal reports that Bossa Nova, which has raised more than $100 million in funding, laid off 50 percent of its staff after the Walmart contract was terminated.

We have reached out to both Walmart and Bossa Nova and will update as we hear back.

UPDATE: A Walmart rep sent us the following statement via email:

We’ve worked with Bossa Nova for five years and together we learned a lot about how technology can assist associates, make jobs easier and provide a better customer experience. This was one idea we tried in roughly 500 stores just as we are trying other ideas in additional stores. We will continue testing new technologies and investing in our own processes and apps to best understand and track our inventory and help move products to our shelves as quickly as we can.

SECOND UPDATE: We received the following statement from Bossa Nova CEO Sarjoun Skaff via email:

“I cannot comment on Walmart, however the pandemic has forced us to streamline our operations and focus on our core technologies. We have made stunning advances in AI and robotics. Our retail AI is the industry’s best and works as well on robots as with fixed cameras, and our hardware, autonomy and operations excelled in more than 500 of the world’s most challenging stores. With the board’s full support, we continue deploying this technology with our partners in retail and in other fields.”

A Roundup of Pizza Robots

To borrow from The White Stripes, “I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating now.” If you want to know the future of food tech, look at what’s happening in pizza.

Because of its ubiquity, relative ease to make, and transportability (i.e. great for delivery!), pizza is a perfect food when it comes to testing out new technologies across the meal journey.

One technology in particular being applied to pizza making is robotics. Automated pizza making appears to be all the rage nowadays with a number of players heating up the space. Here’s a quick rundown of the key companies bringing robotics to the world of pizza:

PICNIC
Funding: $20.7 million
Solution: Picnic makes a modular system of robots that precisely apply toppings like cheese, pepperoni and more to pre-formed dough. Picnic’s robot can assemble 300 pies in an hour that are cooked separately, and just last week the company debuted its second-gen robot, which provides greater visibility into the machine. Picnic’s solution isn’t just for pizza, however, it can also be used to assemble foods like burritos and Subway-style sandwiches.

MIDDLEBY/Lab 2 Fab
Funding: Publicly traded
Solution: Middleby’s Lab 2 Fab publicly debuted its new PizzaBot 5000 at our Smart Kitchen Summit last month. The enclosed cabinet robot applies three base ingredients (e.g. sauce, cheese, pepperoni), and can assemble a pizza in under a minute, where it can be moved by a human or a robot into an oven. The PizzaBot 5000 will go into beta in early 2021.

PIESTRO
Funding: completed $1 million in equity crowdfunding, seeking another $5 million
Solution: Piestro is a new startup looking to build a robotic pizza vending machine. The planned machine can accept orders through a mobile app and deliver a hot pizza in under three minutes. The company also recently announced a partnership with Kiwibot that allows that company’s eponymous delivery robot to retrieve pizzas from Piestro and deliver them to customers.

PAZZI
Funding: €12.2 million (~$14.9M USD)
Solution: Of all the companies listed here, PAZZI’s (formerly EKIM) pizza maker is the more “robotic,” with multiple articulating arms that top the pizza, put it in the oven, remove a slice it. PAZZIs are roughly 45 sq. meters and meant to be automated standalone kiosks. The first PAZZI went live in France last year.

This list doesn’t even include the pizza vending machines that are popping up from API Tech, Basil St. and Bake Xpress. We didn’t formally include those in this roundup because they are just re-heating frozen pizzas, not performing a series of different tasks to create a pizza on the spot.

With its universal appeal (who doesn’t like pizza?), pizza will remain a medium that pushes food technology forward that other types of cuisine will benefit from.

Simbe Robotics Announces New Tally 3.0 Shelf-Scanning Robot

Simbe Robotics today announced the Tally 3.0, the company’s latest generation of inventory management robot that now features better optical capabilities and more computing power on the edge.

Simbe’s Tally is an autonomous robot that wanders grocery store aisles to monitor product levels and detect misplaced items. By automating this task with robots, Simbe says stores get a more accurate, closer-to-real time snapshot of on-shelf inventory to make more informed stocking decisions.

Improvements to the Tally include added Intel RealSense depth and RGB cameras to help the robot “see” more products on shelves and stacked in coolers. The new camera system can read data from up to 30 inches away, which, according to the press announcement, brings the robot’s recognition accuracy to almost 99 percent without needing to slow down.

The Tally 3.0 has also pushed its computer vision and AI algorithms to the device itself. By running this additional processing on the edge, the new Tally can capture and provide data to store managers more quickly without needing to send as much information to Simbe’s cloud platform. This can be especially helpful for stores that may not have a lot of internet bandwidth at their location.

Simbe claims that its Tally detects up to 10x more out-of-stock items than manual audits, and averages a 20 percent reduction in out-of-stock items at the store level.

Brad Bogolea, Simbe Robotics Co-Founder and CEO,told me by phone earlier this month that his company saw a massive uptick in interest around August and September, spurred in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent panic buying outages. As Bogolea explained to me during an interview in August, stores experienced those outages because of bad supply chain data. As we wrote then:

The bad supply chain data, according to Bogolea, is a result of the manual inventory checks that stores currently carry out. If robots are used, shelf inventory count is more accurate and up to the minute (basically) because the robots can run multiple shelf audits throughout the day. More accurate data means that stores can respond faster when there is a sudden run on particular products to speed up replenishment.

While Bogolea obviously has a horse in this particular race, we’ve definitely seen broader adoption of robots to help maintain retail inventories. Bossa Nova’s shelf-scanning robot is being deployed to 1,000 Walmart locations, and Badger Technologies’ robot is being used at Woodman’s Markets across the Midwest.

Schnucks Markets recently announced that it expanding the use of Simbe’s Tally to 62 of its locations, and Giant Eagle is trialing Tally as well. Simbe offers the Tally for a monthly subscription costing between $2,000 and $4,000 a month per store, depending on the number of stores. Though when I spoke to Bogolea this month, he said that through better sensor technology and improved manufacturing, the company is continuing to bring that cost down.

Picnic Raises $3M for its Robot-Powered Pizza Assembly

Picnic, which makes a robotic system for assembling foods like pizza, has raised $3 million in funding. Geekwire was first to report the news, writing that “Vulcan Capital, Flying Fish Partners, Creative Ventures, Arnold Venture Group, and others put more money behind Picnic.” This brings the total amount raised by Picnic to $20.7 million.

Picnic’s robot, which was a hit when it debuted at our Smart Kitchen Summit last year, is a modular system that uses computer vision and conveyors to properly dispense ingredients (like pizza toppings). Though it is best known for its ability to assemble pizzas (it can put together 300 in an hour), it has broader applications and could be used to make burritos, subway-style sandwiches and more.

The global pandemic has put a spotlight on food robotics companies like Picnic because they reduce the amount of human-to-human contact when making food, and they also help create more social distance in the kitchen. It also doesn’t hurt that robots don’t get or call-in sick, and they can work around the clock without needing a break. Robots can also work at high volumes. One of Picnic’s first customers was Centerplate Pizza at T-Mobile park in Seattle, though stadiums are pretty much shut down right now.

There are actually a number of companies in the food robot space, angling to bring their automation to restaurant kitchens. Both PAZZI and Piestro are pizza robots. Miso Robotics, just announced the commercial availability of its Flippy ROAR robot. And Blendid’s robot kiosks whip up smoothies.

If you are interested in learning more about Picnic and the future of robots in restaurants, I’ll be hosting a panel with Picnic CEO, Clayton Wood, Dischcraft Robotics CEO, Linda Poulliot, and John Ha, Bear Robotics, next week at our virtual Smart Kitchen Summit. Get your ticket today!

Tennant Debuts New, Smaller Brain OS-based Floor-Scrubbing Bot

Tennant, a company that designs and manufacturers cleaning systems, announced today the debut of its new T380AMR Robotic Floor Scrubber, which is powered by Brain Corp.’s Brain OS. The new robot is smaller than other versions of Tennant’s floor scrubbers, allowing the robot to navigate smaller spaces.

The Brain OS is used by a number of different robot manufacturers for a variety purposes including scrubbing and vacuuming floors. Brain-powered robots can autonomously traverse store aisles cleaning, all while avoiding people and other obstacles.

The COVID crisis is placing a spotlight on store sanitation. According to Brain Robots can provide a more thorough cleaning that is also verfiable (you can check the software to see where the robot has been). Additionally, shifting the dull, repetitive work of floor scrubbing over to a robot frees up humans to do other higher-skilled tasks like customer service.

Floor-scrubbing robots are part of a larger move grocery retail is making towards automation. In addition to floor scrubbers, we’re also seeing robots from Bossa Nova and Simbe Robotics autonomously scan shelves to check inventory, and companies like Takeoff and Fabric build out robot-powered automated fulfillment.

T380AMR Ride-On Robotic Scrubber | Product Overview | Tennant Company

Brain-powered floor scrubbing robots are already being used by Walmart, as well as other retailers like Schnuck Markets, Kroger and Giant Eagle.

The news from Tennant today is interesting because a more diminutive robot is built to work in smaller stores with tighter spaces. While no pricing information was made available, presumably this smaller version — meant for smaller stores — would be more affordable and open up autonomy to more stores.

In other words, be ready to see more robots when you go grocery shopping.