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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

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.

Schnuck Markets Expands Use of Tally, Simbe Robotics’ Shelf-Scanning Robot

Missouri-based regional grocer Schnuck Markets announced today that it is expanding its use of Simbe Robotics‘ shelf-scanning Tally robot. Tally will be rolled out to an additional 46 stores, bringing the total number of Schnuck locations using the robot to 62.

Tally is a tall, autonomous robot that roams store aisles and uses a combination of computer vision and RFID to analyze on-shelf inventory. Simbe says that Tally is 14x better at detecting out-of-stock items than manual auditing, which results in a 20 percent reduction in out-of-stock items.

Schnucks first started using Tally in the summer of 2017 and expanded that pilot in 2018. It takes Tally about three hours to scan the roughly 35,000 products per store, but it helps give store managers a closer-to-real time assessment of store inventory throughout the day.

In-store inventory accuracy is perhaps more important than ever. The early stages of the COVID pandemic and subsequent panic shopping meant staples were out of stock at stores across the country. Even though those dark times passed and stores are back to being fully stocked, grocers are girding for the holidays and potential a virus resurgence over the coming months by stocking up.

When I interviewed him in August, Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, said that Tally can not only help with shocks to the system like what happened with the pandemic, but can also help provide more accurate inventory data for the increase in online grocery shopping. As anyone who has shopped for groceries online can attest, a big gap in inventory data means what you order may not actually be in stock when you pick it up at the store or it arrives by delivery.

Schnucks isn’t the only market that’s investing automation. Walmart is adding 1,000 Bossa Nova shelf-scanning robots to its workforce, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies robots throughout the midwest.

In addition to Schnucks, Simbe is also working with Giant Eagle supermarkets here in the U.S. After an initial set up fee, Simbe makes its money by charging between $2,000 – $4,000 per month per store, depending on the size and number of stores.

Set It & Forget It: Creator of The Oliver Cooking Robot Hopes to Usher in the Era of Unattended Cooking

Forget Top Chef. The most interesting contest in the kitchen in recent years has been the battle to become the all-in-one cooking appliance.

Air fryers, smart pressure cookers, slice and dice multicookers and even stand mixers have been throwing elbows in the fight for countertop space and consumer dollars.

But what if an entirely different category of cooker won the hearts and minds of consumers as the indispensable kitchen helper? That’s the hope of Khalid Aboujassoum, founder of Else Labs, who makes a little device called the Oliver.

So what exactly is Oliver?

“It’s a smart cooking robot,” said Aboujassoum in an interview with The Spoon.

The kitchen robot is something we’ve been writing about here at the Spoon since early days and, while we all like to envision science fiction futures with a robotic chef cooking for us every night, the only kitchen robots that have found any success so far are uni-taskers like the Rotimatic.

But according to its inventor, Oliver can do much more than one thing really well.

“It’s a recipe library, meal planner, shopping assistant, and expert chef all in one,” said Aboujassoum,

While you wouldn’t exactly call the Thermomix or other digital powered kitchen multicookers “robots”, these appliances are popular with chefs and home cooks alike because they can do so much. And the thing is, they’re adding more functions all the time. The Thermomix recently added shopping capabilities that allows the user to essentially make meal kits and order them on the fly.

But according the Aboujassoum, the major difference between Oliver and the multicooker is how much they can do during the cooking process.

“They (multicookers) are guided cooking,” he said. “The Oliver can do unattended stovetop cooking.”

What he is talking here about just how much a device can do without the consumer being involved. According to Aboujassoum, Oliver can cook the entire meal while the user goes off to take a nap or watch some TV.

“The user basically browses the recipes, selecting a recipe, loads the ingredients and then walks away,” said Aboujassoum.

This is where it’s worth looking at how the Oliver works. The user preloads the prepped ingredients into dispensing chambers that sit on the lid. Once the user selects the recipe on a connected app and hits cook, the Oliver dispenses ingredients into the single pot cooking chamber where a stirring arm mixes the food.

Ultimately, a conversation about unattended vs guided cooking is one about where and when the consumer gets involved in the cooking process. Multicookers like the Thermomix guide a cook through a meal with step-by-step recipes, and can do pretty much everything including chopping and grinding ingredients.

With the Oliver, the unattended part is true but, because it doesn’t have a built-in blade, the user may need to do a little more up front work to prep ingredients in advance and put into the ingredient chambers.

I do think the concept of a home cooking robot is promising. I’m sure there are many busy folks who would be happy to let a robot do the heavy lifting while they go do chores or relax.

Consumers who want to get their own cooking robot will soon be able to back Oliver via crowdfunding. The device will launch on Indiegogo on September 29th and early backers can get in on the appliance for $530.

For those of you who are wary of backing hardware on crowdfunding sites, you might be assured that folks behind Oliver have been working on the product for a good part of a decade (an early generation prototype of the Oliver was on display at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016) and, according to Aboujassoum, the product is ready to go.

“We could have launched two years ago or three years ago,” said Aboujassoum. “We refuse to sell unfinished product. That’s kind of our story, our strategic execution philosophy. And today we are done with the product.”

Aboujassoum said backers of Oliver should expect to get their cooking robot in June of 2021.

With the Oliver hitting the market and the Nymble on its way as well, 2021 could prove an interesting year for cooking robots. Others, like the Gamma Chef, are still in development and could make an appearance.

So hopefully we’ll know soon if the era of unattended cooking is upon us.

Tortoise Unveils its Not-Autonomous Grocery Delivery Robot

Up to now, San Francisco-based Tortoise has mostly been known for its technology that helps manage micro-mobility fleets like electric scooters and bikes. But earlier this week the company took to Twitter to unveil its new line of business: delivery robots.

But Tortoise is setting itself apart from other players like Starship and Kiwi that are already in the robot delivery space. First off, the slow-moving Tortoise, roughly the size of an electric wheelchair, is bigger than a rover bot and can carry 100-plus pounds. It’s not meant for on-demand delivery of burritos or lattes, but rather for making scheduled deliveries of groceries, parcels and other goods within a three mile radius of a store or hub.

Second, and perhaps more intriguing, is the fact that Tortoise robots are not autonomous. There are teleoperators who drive each Tortoise remotely. This manual control, according to the Tortoise rep I spoke with by phone this week, will allow the company to get to market and scale faster that other delivery robots.

It’s not hard to see why. While the idea of a fleet of self-driving robots is very cool, it can also come with some very real-world problems. Last fall, Starship’s robots had to pause deliveries in Pittsburgh after complaints of the robot blocking the sidewalk entrance of a person in a wheelchair. And based on this guest post in TechCrunch last month, robots have still not fully adapted to be disability friendly.

With a human at the Tortoise wheel, so to speak, the robots can stop, reverse and in general avoid incidents that could impact pedestrian and property safety. So having teleoperators could make city and local governments more amenable to Tortoise bots scurrying around on public sidewalks.

Needing one human to operate one Tortoise at at a time seems like it could be a barrier to scaling. However, the Tortoise rep told me that eventually, driving robots could operate like a call center, with drivers around the world, or Tortoise could become a gig-economy platform where people stay at home and play what is essentially a real-world videogame, driving the robots around. Though I can’t imagine it would pay all that well.

Tortoise’s business model is to flat-out lease robots to customers who would be responsible for storing and charging the robots. Tortoise would do maintenance as needed and control the driving platform to get deliveries to their destination. The company already has one bulk food delivery company as a customer with more retail partner announcements to come.

Tortoise is launching at a time when interest in delivery robots is accelerating. The pandemic has restaurants and retailers looking for ways to reduce human-to-human transmission. In addition to providing contactless delivery, Tortoise robots won’t get sick.

But Tortoise is also an example of how thinly sliced the delivery robot market is getting. You have the small rover bots of Starship and Kiwi, the larger bike lane-driving robots of Refraction, and the even larger pod-like vehicles of Nuro. By eschewing restaurant delivery and focusing on bigger grocery deliveries, Tortoise is carving out its own, more narrow niche.

Tortoise may not have been first in the delivery robot race, but it’s focus could speed it to front-runner status soon enough.

Simbe Robotics CEO: Robots Help Prevent Empty Grocery Store Shelves

Can robots help prevent the empty grocery store shelves that we saw during the initial panic buying stage of this pandemic? Brad Bogolea, Co-Founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics, thinks so.

Simbe makes Tally, an autonomous shelf-scanning robot that roams grocery store aisles and uses computer vision and RFID to keep tabs on inventory. Simbe says Tally can spot inventory anomalies and provide analytics about purchasing and re-stocking insights.

Because Tally is a robot, it can spend its day going up and down aisles, giving store managers ongoing updates about product inventory. It is this near-real time snapshot of a store that Bogolea says can help retailers thwart outages during panic-buying sprees like the one we saw earlier in 2020, and also provide a better e-commerce buying experience for consumers.

Tally is currently being used in trials by grocers like Schnuck’s and Giant Eagle, as well as other partners across six countries. “We’ve had insights related to consumption patterns on shelves,” Bogolea told me by phone this week, “Especially in peak panic buying.”

Bogolea said the problem stores experienced during this panic buying was bad supply chain data. “Many of these stores operate on a replenishment system,” said Bogolea. He explained that “if there’s heavy distortion, retailers may assume a positive balance on-hand,” even though the products actually aren’t there.

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.

But robots aren’t just helpful dealing with sudden pandemic buying. As the pandemic pushes people into record amounts of grocery e-commerce, there is a greater need for what the consumer sees online to match the availability in store. Anyone who’s ordered groceries online is familiar with ordering a basket of groceries only to get notifications prior to pickup or delivery that, whoops, that item was actually out of stock.

Bogolea said an additional benefit of using shelf-scanning robots is that they can free up human workers to do other tasks such as picking items for online orders and sanitizing the store and carts.

Simbe is not the only company making shelf-scanning robots. Walmart is expanding the use of Bossa Nova’s robots to 1,000 stores, and Woodman’s Markets is using Badger Technologies’ robots at its locations throughout the midwest.

Bogolea said that since the pandemic Simbe has seen an uptick in the amount of inbound interest in Tally. But despite all the promises of his company’s technology, Bogolea is the first to admit that adopting it is not like flipping a switch.

“Though there is stronger interest,” Bogolea said, “There’s a lot of work to deploy this type of technology.” As we learned from Albertsons at our Articulate food robotics summit last year, grocery stores, especially big chains, only adopt solutions that are already at scale.

Simbe has its own plans to scale up and build 1,000 robots over the coming year. Between it and all the other robotic players in the space, there’s a good chance you’ll be passing one in the grocery aisle in the not too distant future.

Pudu Robotics Raises $15M in Series B+ Round

Chinese delivery robot company Pudu Robotics (aka Pudu Tech) announced this week that it has completed a Series B+ round of nearly $15 million in funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital China with participation from existing investors Meituan, Everwin Investment, QC Capital, and Chengbohan Fund.

Pudu makes self-driving restaurant server robots equipped with racks of trays that can shuttle plates of food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen.

This B+ funding comes on the heels of Pudu Robotics’ Series B fundraise of $15 million, which the company announced on July 1 of this year. The B+ round brings the total amount of announced funding raised by Pudu to roughly $30 million. (Crunchbase lists prior Series A, Seed and Angel rounds of undisclosed amounts.)

According to today’s press announcement, Pudu’s robots have been sold to more than 20 countries and regions around the world. Earlier this month, Pudu announced that the Muhguri restaurant is Sokcho, South Korea now had 11 Pudu robots serving food to customers.

Pudu is certainly not alone in creating a new robotic labor force for restaurants. Other players in the space include fellow Chinese company Keenon Robotics, California-based Bear Robotics, and South Korea’s Woowa Bros., which has partnered with LG for server bots.

Pudu said this latest funding would be used to expand its market. The money is coming just as the global pandemic has restaurants reassessing their dine-in businesses. Server robots like Pudu’s remove one possible vector of human-to-human viral transmission, and come with the added benefit of not getting sick themselves.

While that may be good news in terms of not spreading the coronavirus, the increased use of robots means fewer jobs for humans. A recent survey from Aaron Allen & Associates found that more than 80 percent of restaurant jobs could be automated, with the majority of them being server positions.

That stat, of course, brings up a host of other societal issues, but right now, most people are pre-occupied with the more immediate pandemic-related problems.

Woowa Bros. Launches Robot Food Delivery in Korea

Woowa Brothers, which owns the popular Baedal Minjok food delivery service in Korea, announced yesterday that it started using robots for delivery on public streets just outside of Seoul.

Woowa’s “Dilly Drive” robots will have a very limited run at first, only making deliveries to Gwanggyo Alley Way, a multipurpose housing complex in Gwanggyo, Suwon city.

The Dilly service can be used by any of the 1,100 residents of the housing complex, or the public at large. To place an order, customers use the Baemin mobile app and the robot will either arrive at the first floor of the Gwanggyo Alley Way, or to tables outfitted with special QR codes in the complex’s plaza.

The Dilly Drive robots sport six wheels, move at a speed between 4 – 5 kilometers per hour (roughly the speed of a person walking) and can carry roughly 6 lunch boxes. The self-driving Dilly Drives can detect and avoid objects, people, and pets, and the robots now come equipped with remote control, presumably so a human can take over should one get stuck or incapacitated.

According to the press release, this is the first public use of food delivery robots in Korea. Woowa had previously tested the Dilly robots at Konkuk University in a pilot program back in November 2019.

While this may be the first public use of delivery robots in Korea, chances are good that it won’t be the last. The global COVID-19 pandemic has sparked the acceleration of contactless methods of delivery. Robots like the Dilly Drive, as well as those from Starship and Kiwibot, remove at least one human from the delivery equation. Robots also bring the added benefits of being able to work long hours without a break and never getting sick.

With the launch of the Dilly Drive, I’m curious to see if Woowa Founder and CEO Kim Bong-Jin will follow up on an idea he had a couple years back. During a press interview back in July 2018, Bong-Jin expressed an interest in having robots not only deliver food but also take away recycling. As more people have ordered delivery during this pandemic quarantine, single-use plastics have become a bigger problem. If a delivery robot could drop off food in a recyclable/re-usable container and then pick it up on its next trip, that could really help put a dent in the waste created by restaurant delivery.

Root AI Raises $7.2M for Its Harvest Robots and AI

Root AI, which makes an automated solution for harvesting crops grown on indoor farms, announced today that it has raised $7.2 million in seed funding. PJC, First Round Capital, Outsiders Fund, Accomplice and AgFunder all participated in the round, as well as Jason Calacanis. This brings the total amount raised by Root AI to $9.5 million.

Root AI’s robots use a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence to identify when a crop like tomatoes or stawberries need to be picked. Part of the Root AI pitch is that it’s a “cross crop” harvester, so it can use different grippers to pick different shaped fruit. The robot’s AI helps the grippers pick crops with just the right amount of pressure to remove the food, without damaging it.

Root AI - Going Cross-Crop

Root AI sits in the nexus of a number of different societal and market changes. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, robots were being eyed as a way to keep farms working even through dangerous heat and other conditions. With the pandemic still raging across the country, farms have reported outbreaks among its workers while the federal government has provided no rules to protect them. On a broader level, the pandemic has accelerated the potential for robot adoption because robots do not get sick and reduce the amount of human-to-human contact during the meal journey.

Root AI is also coming during a growth period for indoor farming. AppHarvest is building a massive indoor farm in Kentucky. Wilder Fields is converting an old Target in Chicago into and indoor farm. Even UK grocer, Ocado, has gotten into the indoor farming game with its Infinite Acres venture.

One key to making those indoor farms successful will be the economics of indoor farming. Will they be able to produce as much food as those high-tech systems cost? Robotics like those from Root AI, which will offer its robots as a service could help. In addition to not getting sick (or spreading sickness), robots like Root AI can run 24 hours a day.

Root AI is not the only harvesting ‘bot in town. Other players in the indoor farming robot space include MetoMotion, and outside on the farm, Traptic and Advanced Farm Technologies each have harvesting robots.

Kiwibot Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign for its Deliver Robot Service

Kiwibot, which makes rover delivery robots, officially announced its equity crowdfunding campaign today, with the goal of raising a little more than $1 million via Wefunder.

As of this writing, the company had raised more than $150,000 of that goal (the company raised $148,000 before officially launching). Those interested, can invest a minimum of $100 in the company. (I’m not a financial advisor, all investments have associated risks, caveat emptor, and all that.)

Kiwibot’s financing move comes just weeks after the company rolled out its delivery robots on the streets of San Jose, CA. The company partnered with the City of San Jose, integrating with its municipal software systems to help better manage the fleet of robots and alleviate any hiccups that might occur (like a bot getting stuck on a street corner or something).

Indeed, Kiwibot lists regulatory hurdles as a risk for potential investors, saying:

Due to the actions of some of our competitors, delivery bots have proved controversial in some regulatory environments with some cities, like San Francisco, putting out laws that make it difficult for us to deploy. If this became widespread we would have trouble going to market.

As part of its filings on the WeFunder site, Kiwibot also published its finanials. The company says it generated more than $279,302 in 2019, with losses of -$2,621,693 during that year. Kiwibot says it has $232,562 in cash. According to Crunchbase, Kiwibot has previously raised $3.5 million in funding.

Equity crowdfunding has become a popular option for robotics companies. Miso Robotics, Small Robot and Piestro are all robotics companies that have run equity crowdfunding campaigns this year (both Small Robot and Piestro have met their goals).

Kiwibot’s timing with equity crowdfunding could be fortuitous. Delivery robots like Kiwi’s could be playing more of starring role in how people get their meals as restaurants and consumers look to reduce human-to-human contact. Robots don’t get sick and don’t cough all over your food.

The question now is whether Kiwi’s funding case is compelling enough for the crowd to deliver.

Greenfield Robotics Uses Robots to Tackle Weeds

Greenfield Robotics is on a mission to help farmers grow food with fewer chemicals. Rather than using the traditional method of applying herbicides and tilling the ground to control weeds, Greenfield uses a fleet of lightweight robots to take on the task. 

I spoke with Clint Brauer, the CEO of Greenfield Robotics, by phone this week, and he said that the main purpose of Greenfield’s robots is to mow down aggressive broadleaf weeds, specifically the fast-growing pigweed. Greenfield’s robots currently operate in soybean fields, and the next crop will be milo (grain sorghum). 

The robots from Greenfield Robotics weigh only 140lbs, and look like thin, upright vacuums. The perk of creating a small robot is that it is able to go out even in muddy conditions to mow weeds. Brauer said that even after fields received 3 inches of rain, Greenfield’s robots are able to go out and do their job, while a spray rig would easily get stuck in the mud. 

These petite robots are also intelligent, and have the ability to sense depth and crop rows. They essentially function as miniature lawn mowers, eliminating weeds as they travel up and down crop rows. As Greenfield Robotics continues to grow, their goal is to use a fleet of 10 robots to knock out 100 acres in one day. 

Greenfield Robotics is not the only company embracing robots as a solution to using fewer chemicals in agriculture. Farmwise builds self-driving robots equipped with computer vision and AI to identify and eliminate weeds. In the UK, the Small Robot Company uses a multi robot approach to map, identify and use electricity to zap weeds.

Greenfield Robotics has raised $885,000 in capital so far, and is currently raising an angel round. The company has signed up 10 farms in the U.S. to use its robots during the 2020 growing season. 

Report: 80 Percent of Restaurant Jobs Could be Taken Over by Robots

More than 80 percent of restaurant jobs, including cooking, serving and prepping, could be potentially be taken over by automation, according to restaurant consulting firm Aaron Allen & Associates.

Pizza Magazine was first to report on this, writing:

Aaron Allen & Associates shared a graphic proposing that 82 percent of restaurant positions could be automated. The majority of them, or 51 percent, would be server positions. Fifty-seven percent of fast-food and counter workers (or 3.2 million) could be replaced, and the same goes for 38 percent of waiters and waitresses. Twenty-one percent of cooking and food prep positions also could be automated, the company asserts.

Factors that could drive this widespread adoption of automation include continued labor shortage issues for restaurants and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We write about food robots a lot here at The Spoon, and while that 82 percent number is certainly daunting, it’s not completely surprising. Prior to the pandemic, sufficient staffing was an issue for restaurants as many potential workers preferred driving for Uber or doing some other form of gig work that allowed them to set up their own hours.

Thanks to the pandemic, the U.S. is dealing with massive amounts of unemployment, so finding people to work may not be as big an issue in the short term (though there is a debate about workers making more money via the stimulus than at their job). But the bigger problem now is the number of restaurants closing down dine in operations or shuttering altogether, reducing the number of jobs in the industry overall.

COVID accelerated the push towards off-premises dining, which requires a different kind of staffing set up. You don’t need servers if there are no customers sitting at tables to serve. And if a dining room is open, there will be fewer people eating in it to accommodate social distancing.

But even then, COVID has us re-thinking the amount of human-to-human contact as we get our food. We won’t know what the lasting impact of the pandemic on our psyche will be, but there is a good chance we will be more wary of strangers and more cognizant of the number of people who touch our food.

This is another reason why we could see more robots in restaurants. Already, a number of companies like Bear Robotics, Keenon Robotics, and Pudu Technology make server robots that can autonomously shuttle food and empty dishes back and forth from the kitchen. Then there is Flippy from Miso Robotics, which can grill burgers and work the deep fryer. White Castle recently announced that it was piloting Flippy at one of its Chicago locations. There’s also Picnic robots, which can assemble 200 pizzas in an hour.

There have always been deep societal concerns around automation, especially within the restaurant industry, which in addition to be a career many people are passionate about, also serves as an accessible first job for lots of different people. Robots taking more than 80 percent of those jobs will have massive ramifications for the country, the labor force and our collective future.

Now the coronavirus is upending those conversations. There are still issues around equity and the ability for people to find work and training if a robot takes their job, but there is the added wrinkle of what is economical for restaurants to stay in business and what people are comfortable with in their dining experiences.

FreshDirect to Use Fabric’s Robots for Grocery Fulfillment in D.C. Area

Online grocer FreshDirect announced today that it has partnered with Fabric to build out an automated, robotic grocery e-commerce facility in the D.C. Metro Area. This is the first public U.S. partnership announcement for Fabric.

Using a system of totes and racks, Fabric creates automated systems for shuttling grocery items around a warehouse to fulfill e-commerce orders. Fabric will be building out an existing 10,000 sq. ft. When it opens later this year, the new FreshDirect facility in which it will be able to process 500 – 1,000 orders per day. Each order will take just minutes to fulfill, enabling FreshDirect to have a two-hour delivery window for customers in the D.C. area.

While this is the first U.S. facility for Fabric (née Common Sense Robotics), the company has two operational fulfillment centers running in Israel. Steve Hornyak, Chief Commercial Officer at Fabric, told me during a phone interview this week that his company has many more partnerships that will be announced soon, and that Fabric has seen a surge in demand.

“We got thrust five years into the future,” said Hornyak, adding that customers that had planned on implementing automation for e-commerce fulfillment in 2021 or 2022 are accelerating those timelines and starting the projects now.

There are 7.2 billion reasons grocery retailers are rushing into automation right now. The pandemic and subsequent stay-at-home orders pushed grocery e-commerce into multiple record-setting months in a row, hitting $7.2 billion in June. FreshDirect itself was hit hard in NYC during the height of the pandemic, at the beginning of the e-commerce surge, with delivery windows near impossible to get for most people. The inability to accept as many orders presumably translated into lost business for FreshDirect.

Hornyak said that the biggest issue for retailers Fabric is talking with is capacity. How do they increase the number of e-commerce orders they can fulfill? “Doing it manual sort-and-pick is arguably unprofitable,” said Hornyak. And while Fabric definitely has an incentive to bemoan the cost and speed at which humans move when picking items for an online grocery order, he has a point. Robots can just fulfill orders faster and for longer.

That’s why there are so many retailers investing in automated fulfillment. ShopRite and Albertsons both have programs with Takeoff Technologies, which builds micro-fulfillment centers in the backs of existing grocery stores. Walmart has a trial going with Alert Innovation. And Kroger is building out standalone automated warehouses powered by Ocado’s automation technology.

While we don’t know what permanent impacts the pandemic will have on buying behavior, large swaths of consumers have now had five months of new habituation, including buying their groceries online. As more automation gets built out, theoretically, delivery and curbside pickup options will get faster, which will attract more consumers, and an automated virtuous cycle will be born.