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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

Dexterity Robotics Has a Light Touch for Food Packing (and $56M in Funding)

Dexterity Robotics unveiled its new full-stack robotics solution for industrial applications like warehouses and supply chain management yesterday. In addition to taking the wraps off its product, Dexterity also revealed that it has raised $56.2 million, including venture investments and debt from Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Obvious Ventures, Pacific West Bank, B37 Ventures, Presidio (Sumitomo) Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Stanford StartX.

Part of Dexterity’s pitch is that its grippers have enough sensitivity to pick up and pack soft, delicate items like bread. Jonathan Vanian over at Fortune got an early look at the Dexterity robots in action and wrote:

The robotic arms can figure out how much pressure is needed to apply to a particular object, which is helpful so they don’t smash a spongy material like bread when they grip it. The software also helps the robot decide to gently lower the bread and other objects into a crate instead of dropping it carelessly into a container, which Menon described as a sort of Achilles heel for some pick-and-place machines.

Food is actually a good application to help advance the entire field of robotics. In addition to much of it being soft and malleable like bread, food is often irregularly shaped (produce) and delicate (eggs). That’s why Sony partnered with Carnegie-Mellon to develop food robots, and why researchers at MIT and Harvard developed an origami robot. Soft Robotics has also developed special octopus-like rubber grippers to handle food with odd shapes and textures.

The goal with all this is robo-development is to automate the repetitive tasks like packing boxes in large warehouses. Through computer vision and a soft touch, as it were, robots can accurately sort and pack items for shipment around the clock, ideally bringing more consistency and speed to the supply chain.

With a $56.2 million warchest, we’ll have to see now if Dexterity has the agility to make an impact on the supply chain.

Miso Robotics Expands Equity Crowdfunding Efforts to the UK

Miso Robotics, maker of Flippy the robot cook, announced yesterday that it has launched an equity crowdfunding campaign in the UK on the CrowdCube platform.

Equity crowdfunding is a way of raising money from everyday investors instead of institutional investment sources. CrowdCube funders can invest as little as £10 to own a piece of Miso.

This is the second equity crowdfunding campaign for Miso, which opened one on SeedInvest here in the U.S. back in April with the goal of raising $30 million. That $30 million seems to be a global fundraising goal (yesterday’s press release states Miso is looking to raise £24 million worldwide, which is roughly $30 million USD). We’ve reached out to Miso to clarify.

According to the CrowdCube campaign page, it looks like Miso has already surpassed its UK-specific goal of £1,201,904 and has raised £2,544,720 (~$ 3.2 million USD) from 292 investors with 20 days still left to go. Coincidentally, $3.2 million is what Miso has raised in the U.S. via SeedInvest so far.

Miso’s UK crowdfunding campaign comes just one day after the company announced that U.S. fast food chain, White Castle, was using Flippy to operate the fry station in a pilot program at one of its Chicago locations. This was the first non-investor customer for Flippy, which has also gone to work at CaliBurger as well as the Dodger and Diamondback baseball stadiums.

Miso has raised $13.1 million in traditional funding, with its last round being a Series B back in February of 2018. There are actually a number of startups that have turned to equity crowdfunding in recent years including Small Robot Company (also on CrowdCube), as well as Winc, Mellow and GoSun. Equity crowdfunding helps alleviate some of the scaling pressures that come with institutional money, but also removes some of the institutional knowledge and connections that come with VCs.

Miso appears to be catching on so far with UK investors, now we need to see how many paying customers Flippy can rack up across the pond as well.

Restaurant Robots Used to Be About Labor, Now They’re About Hygiene

This was one of the takeaways from our virtual fireside chat on The State of Restaurant Robotics yesterday. Linda Poulliot, CEO of Dischcraft Robotics, and Clatyon Wood, CEO of Picnic, were our guests, and they shared their insights about what their customers are looking for with automation right now.

At the moment, restaurants, cafeterias and other food service establishments are looking for safety and hygiene, something that robots can definitely help with in a few ways.

For example, Picnic’s pizza assembling robot can top 200 pizzas in an hour without human hands ever touching them. The stretched dough runs on a conveyor belt where robotic nodes dispense the proper amount of toppings consistently. Not only does this reduce the number of people touching food, it also helps in small kitchens where there isn’t enough room for workers to socially distance.

For its part, Dishcraft offers dishes as a service to cafeterias, restaurants and more. Dirty dishes are picked up from a restaurant and brought to a Discraft’s facility where the robot cleans and inspects them better and more environmentally friendly than a human can. The company recently branched out into offering reuseable containers so restaurants can cut down on all the packaging waste that comes with takeout and delivery.

These were just a couple of topics we touched on during our exclusive Spoon Plus event. Spoon Plus subscribers can check out the full video from the event below.

If you’d like to see the full event video, future events and premium reports, interviews and exclusive research, become a member today!

Glacierfire’s Ice+Fries Seems Like Everything You’d Want from an Icelandic Robot Bar

Iceland is having a bit of a moment right now, thanks to the success of Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, which stars Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams as Icelandic singers. Oh, and also because Glacierfire launched a robotic bar/restaurant called Ice+Fries there a couple months back.

Ice+Fries features two robotic arms, dubbed Tipsy Floki and Ragnar, that can mix up to 100 cocktails per hour and 1,500 cocktails a day without human intervention. It also sports a 3D printer that prints out fancy desserts and garnishes for drinks. There’s even a robotic Aibo dog that wanders the bar. But the automation is woven much more deeply into the very fabric of the restaurant.

I spoke with Glacierfire CEO Priyesh Patel by phone this week, who explained some of the smarts that goes into the restaurant. The robo-bartenders themselves are made by Makr Shakr, but Glacierfire has integrated its own software stack that keeps the bar running, including order management, timesheets, ingredient/temperature monitoring, etc. There is also a healthy amount of artificial intelligence (AI) implemented.

Patel explained how they use the AI with facial recognition for a number of different purposes. The facial recognition will guide people as to where they pick up their orders. It can also be used in determining if there are underaged people trying to order alcoholic drinks (the drinking age in Iceland is 20). The AI+facial recogntion combo is also used to gauge sentiment in the bar. (i.e., Are customers happy?) Your mileage may vary on whether or not you find that kind of monitoring useful or creepy.

Ice+Fries isn’t completely human-less. The food is still cooked by people, and there are technicians on hand to deal with the robots. But in building the automated experience Patel echoed the sentiment of many food robot companies: If you can use robots to lower labor costs, then you can pass that savings on to the consumer. Patel said that cocktails in Iceland are typically $15 per drink, but Ice+Fries can serve them at $10.

Ice+Fries has only been open since April in Iceland, so we have yet to prove that those economics bear out. Here in the U.S., Miso Robotics found that its first generation of Flippy robots were too expensive for many QSRs. Robot barista Cafe X had to shutter its downtown locations, and robot burger joint, Creator, recently closed its restaurant down as well.

To be fair, Creator’s shutdown was more attributable to the global pandemic that closed dine in operations at restaurants around the country. According to Patel, Iceland was able to avoid COVID-induced lockdowns. But as the virus continues to rage on here in the U.S., Ice & Fries might actually model what a restaurant will look like post-pandemic.

Setting aside the close quarters and inside nature of the restaurant for a moment, the Ice & Fries experience is contactless, a key feature in these coronavirus times. While orders can be done on a touchscreen, there is also a mobile app customers can use, and robot bartenders remove one more vector of human-to-human viral transmission.

The first Ice+Fries is located in Reykjavik, Iceland, but the company has plans for expansions into Lisbon, Portugal, and Paris, France. Patel said Galcierfire has a two-pronged go-to market strategy for this robot restaurant concept. The first is to build out and launch its own branded restaurants, and the second it to license the Ice+Fries technology out to third-party restaurant companies looking to create similar concepts.

Who knows? If this takes off, we could all be singing an Icelandic song of Ice+Fries.

Country Garden Opened a Massive Robot Restaurant Complex in China This Week

You may be debating whether or not you’re ready to go back into a restaurant. But what if that restaurant was operated entirely by robots? Would that make you more inclined to eat out?

Earlier this week, the Qianxi Robot Catering Group, a subsidiary of Country Garden, opened up a robot-powered restaurant complex in the city of Shunde in China’s Guangdong province.

The complex is 2,000 sq. meters (more than 21,000 sq. ft.) and serves Chinese, hot pot and fast food. The restaurant can serve 600 diners at once, offering 200 menu items that can be served up in as little as 20 seconds, according to the press announcement.

The complex has more than 20 robots developed in-house by Qianxi that cook up a variety of different styles including Chinese cuisine, clay pot rice and noodles. Though the press release doesn’t mention them specifically, from the accompanying photos, there is also a small army of pink server robots to bring dishes out to tables. No word on whether these were developed in-house as well, but they don’t look like the server robots make by PuduTech, Keenon or Bear Robotics.

Country Garden’s restaurant certainly isn’t the first to use robots. Spyce Kitchen in Boston uses robots to cook. Caliburger has Flippy grilling burgers. And Bear Robotics’ Penny server bot has been put to work shuttling food in restarants. But Country Garden seems to be among the first putting all of the front and back-of-house pieces together, and doing so at scale.

In addition to a having a bunch of robots, the Country Garden restaurant is also contactless, a factor increasingly important on our pandemic planet. As restaurants re-open here in the U.S., businesses and eater alike are grappling with restrictions like facemasks and socially distant tables. Having a full-on robot restaurant isn’t a guarantee to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but it does remove some human vectors from the equation.

It’s a question I’ve asked before, but what will make people more comfortable inside restaurants: the human touch while wearing a facemask and gloves, or the cold sterility of a robot?

Does this Robot-Powered KFC Point to the Future of Fast Food?

Earlier this year, KFC pulled its “finger lickin good” ad campaign because during a global coronavirus pandemic, touching your face, let alone putting your fingers in your mouth, is not such a great idea.

Now it looks like a KFC in Moscow is going one step further and reducing the number of fingers ever touching your food. Bloomberg uploaded a video this week of the inner workings of said KFC, which uses conveyor belts, an articulating arm and cubbies to move food from the kitchen to consumer.

KFC Tests Fast Food of the Future in Moscow

This KFC actually shows off a number of technologies restaurants are implementing as they move towards a more contactless experience. Customers order via self-serve kiosk. Conveyor belts and the robotic arm then move the tray of food out of the kitchen, and an enclosed cubby holds the order and unlocks when the customer enters a code on the touchscreen.

The KFC is not entirely humanless, however. It looks as though there are still people (with masks and gloves) in the back of house preparing and assembling the order. And the process is far from contactless as customers still need to enter their orders and pickup codes on touchscreens with their fingers.

But this peek inside KFC does point to a direction that we could see more QSRs headed. Fears over the coronavirus are pushing restaurants to create fewer points of human contact inside their stores.

In addition to the steps taken at KFC, a QSR could add Flippy the robot to grill burgers and fry food, and add a PopID kiosk that lets you pay with your face (or bulk up digital ordering options).

This type of automation isn’t cheap, however. Cost was one of the reasons Flippy’s first iteration didn’t make a lot of headway with restaurants. But at least in the U.S., where the pandemic doesn’t show signs of abating, operators may decide that the cost to implement more tech is worth it to keep the business going.

The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report

Thanks to advances in hardware, the internet of things, and food preparation, vending machines today are basically restaurants in a box. They offer high-end cuisine in minutes, require minimal setup time, and have the on-board computing smarts to manage inventory and communicate any issues that arise.

With these capabilities, it’s no wonder the vending machine category was valued at more than $30 billion in 2018, according to Grandview Research, and was anticipated to have a CAGR of 9.4 percent from 2019 through 2025.

Had this report been written even just a few months ago, the main takeaway would have been that vending machines are perfect for high-traffic areas that operate around the clock: airports, corporate offices, college dorms, and hospitals.

But we’re living in a world continuously being shaped and reshaped by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Right now, some form of shelter-in-place orders blanket most of the U.S. Global air travel volume has plummeted, so airports are not busy. Non-essential businesses are closed and people are working from home, not office buildings. And colleges may not hold in-person classes until 2021.

While on the surface, those factors suggest vending machine companies will be yet-another sector wiped out by coronavirus, there has actually never been a better time for the automated vending machine industry. The small footprint and high-end food these devices offer are perhaps more important than ever at a time when minimizing human-to-human contact in foodservice is paramount to doing business. That makes the vending machine market uniquely positioned to capitalize on a post-pandemic world.

This report will define what the automated vending machine space is, list the major players, and present the challenges and opportunities for the market going forward.

Companies profiled in this report include Alberts, API Tech/Smart Pizza, Basil Street, Blendid, Briggo, Byte Technology, Cafe X, Chowbotics, Crown Coffee, Farmer’s Fridge, Fresh Bowl, Le Bread Xpress, Macco Robotics, TrueBird, and Yo-Kai Express.

This research report is exclusive for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

LG, Woowa Bros. and KIRIA to Develop Robot Waiters

Consumer electronics giant LG is teaming up with Woowa Bros and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) to develop robot waiters for restaurants, The Korea Times reported over the weekend.

This deal expands a partnership formed between LG and Woowa earlier this year. According to the Times, the two companies have “joined a project chaired by KIRIA, a Daegu-based state-run agency that supervises Korea’s robot industry.”

LG is developing robots and artificial intelligence that can be used across Woowa Brothers’ food delivery and robot rental businesses. Last November, Woowa launched a program that rents out server robots to restaurants. The Times reports that Woowa currently has 85 robots operating in 68 restaurants across Korea.

The LG robots developed through this program will not carry the LG CLOi branding. In February of this year LG announced its CLOi server robot would be used by Korea restaurant chain CJ Foodville.

Robot servers are gaining new attention during this pandemic because they reduce human-to-human interaction. There are plenty of companies betting on a bright future for server robots. Bear Robotics, Keenon Robotics and PuduTech are all creating similar, autonomous plate carrying robots.

Restaurants are re-opening, but following strict guidelines while doing so, including reduced occupancy, socially distant table setups, temperature checks and masks worn by staff.

Whether or not restaurants can survive under these limitations or whether people will want to dine in at restaurants again in the near future remain to be seen. But a robot server could be a more appealing, contactless alternative for restaurants looking to keep whatever customers they have at ease.

Robot Learns to Cook Omelets to Your Liking

Whether it’s burgers, tater tots or fried octopus balls, there are plenty of things robots can cook, and plenty of robots out there trying. But those robots are pretty rigid, following a specific set of criteria. The whole point is that they take over the repetitive task of cooking the same thing over and over and prepare it consistently.

But researchers at the University of Cambridge released a paper this week showing how they are teaching a robot to not just make an egg omelet for you, but also learn from how you like your eggs and adjust the cooking accordingly.

Improving robotic cooking using Batch Bayesian Optimization

IEE Spectrum has the full story (and an interview with the paper’s authors), and explains how the robot is able to do this customized cooking:

The researchers employed a solution to this problem called batch Bayesian optimization. The more traditional sequential Bayesian optimization would take a human’s score of each omelet and use it to modify the cooking process for the next omelet, but this approach doesn’t work well because the human feedback is, as the researchers tell us, “often ambiguous and relative.” By running the optimization process only after all scores have been collected, the robot is able to explore many more combinations of variables, yielding a substantially better end result. Instead of the omelets gradually getting better as you go, you’ll instead be tasting them randomly, but you’ll end up with a much tastier omelet.

In this case, the robot is able to adjust a number of different variables such as the amount of salt/pepper, whisking time and cook time.

Adding this type of customization to a robot’s repertoire and being able to apply it to more kinds of food could help automated cooking move from the more mass, industrial-sized food prep of fast food and more into personal cooking. Having your own robo-chef that can cook eggs just as you like them while you get ready in the morning (or have dinner waiting for you when you get home), is an idea that would be welcome in a lot of homes.

Dishcraft Raises $20M, Adds Reuseable Takeout Container Cleaning as a Service

Dishcraft Robotics, which uses robots and AI to automate dish cleaning for high-volume eating establishments, announced today that it has raised a $20 million “Series A1” round of funding. The round was led by new investor Grit Ventures with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Fuel Capital, and Lemnos. Dishcraft has raised $46 million in total funding to date.

When we last checked in with Dishcraft in January of this year, the company had just publicly come out with Dishcraft Daily, which is basically dishes as a service for foodservice locations like cafeterias. As we wrote back in January:

Each day, Dishcraft arrives at the end of lunch service, picks up all the dirty dishes that have been stacked into special carts, and drops off clean ones. Dirty dishes are taken back to the Dishcraft facility and loaded into the cleaning robot.

The Dishcraft robot uses computer vision, sensors, UV light and AI to detect the cleanliness of each dish as it goes through the machine. This technology, Dishcraft says, makes for cleaner plates because the machine can detect (and clean) any particles remaining that the human eye can’t.

However, the global pandemic hit shortly after the launch of Dishcraft Daily, forcing foodservice operations like corporate and college cafeterias to shut down. But rather than twiddle its thumbs to wait this whole thing out, Dischcraft adapted.

As part of today’s announcement, Dishcraft said it will use the new money to expand its daily dish delivery to now include reusable to-go containers and utensils. The reusable container program had been on the company’s roadmap, but was accelerated because takeout became the main, if only way, for foodservice companies to get meals out. But as anyone who’s ordered meal delivery during this global lockdown knows, restaurant food is packed in single-use plastic containers. That might help people eat right now, but those containers are definitely bad for the environment in the long term.

According to the press release, the reusable containers will allow cafeterias, caterers and restaurants “to offer diners individually portioned takeaway meals in reusable containers that meet health guidelines for sanitization and hygiene.” The program will start with corporate cafeterias and cafes, with to-go container return bins set up around the office. Those full bins will then be collected by Dishcraft to be sanitized every day. It’s easy to see how this could expand to colleges with bins placed around campus.

Dishcraft hasn’t fully worked out how it would integrate its to-go container program into restaurant operations, but Linda Pouliot, Founder and CEO of Dishcraft told me by phone this week that some options could be working with cities to set up designated collection areas, or even possibly Dishcraft creating its own curbside pickup service.

Restaurants and other foodservice companies are only just now coming out of quarantine and only in certain parts of the country. There are still lots of questions about exactly how they will re-open and what that will look like. One thing we do know from a recent Washington State University study is that consumers are nervous about going right back into restaurants and as my colleague Jenn Marston wrote:

Consumers surveyed for the report said that sanitation efforts like masks for servers, hand sanitizer stations, and other visible efforts, like seeing staff clean tables and chairs, will be the most important safety precautions.

Dishcraft’s sanitization service could then be attractive to restaurants looking to entice people back into their businesses. “We have such a closed system,” Pouliot said, “Our goal is that no human hand touches the dishes before it gets to the diner or plated.”

Dishcraft is available in the Bay Area, and currently counts Affirm and foodservice company Guckenheimer among its customers. Dishcraft said that it will expand the size of its dishwashing hub in San Carlos, CA.

Ahold Delhaize Launches Cleaning Bot Challenge to Find a Robot Floor Scrubber

Ahold Delhaize is on the lookout for a floor scrubbing robot, and it wants your help. Well, it wants your help if you’re a small startup that already has an existing prototype or MVP of a floor cleaning robot.

The Dutch grocery giant’s AI for Retail (AIRLab) unit kicked off the Cleaning Bot Challenge today in an effort to automate the process of cleaning store floors. Ahold Delhaize described the problem in a post kicking off the challenge:

In supermarkets, floors are cleaned once a day before each store opens. It takes cleaning personnel an average of two hours every morning to sweep the floors for dirt, mop the hard-to-reach corners, and then go through the store with a ride-on floor scrubber. It is certainly both a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity. 

Ahold Delhaize’s AI for Retail (AIR) Lab is, thus, looking for a partner that can automate this process by creating an autonomous cleaning robot.

To be considered for the Cleaning Bot Challenge, participants must have a team of at least two co-founders and have an existing prototype of the robot. That robotic solution must be able to scale and the founders must be able to pitch their product in Dutch or English.

It’s not surprising that Ahold Delhaize is looking to automate cleaning its floors. Repetitive, manual tasks like floor scrubbing are perfect for robots. And in the age of COVID-19, cleaning is more important than ever, so you want to ensure the process is consistent and repeatable (two more robot attributes).

It’s also not surprising because Ahold Delhaize has basically gone all-in on robots. Last year the company’s GIANT/MARTIN’s and Stop & Shop stores ordered 500 aisle roaming robots to scan for messes on the floor. Ahold Delhaize has also partnered with Takeoff to build robotic micro-fulfillment centers at some of its retail locations. And Stop & Shop even installed a Breadbot at one of its locations.

What is a little surprising, is that given all of these robo-connections and experience, the company is holding a public contest to find a floor cleaning robot, especially since there are already floor scrubbing robots on the market. A year ago, Walmart announced it was deploying Brain Corp.’s autonomous floor scrubbing robots to 1,500 of its locations.

Were none of these solutions sufficient? What was lacking from existing robot partners that spurred a global hunt for something better? We reached out to Ahold Delhaize to find out more.

In the meantime, if you have a cleaning bot up your sleeve, you have until July 7 to complete your application.

Delivery ‘Bots from Starship and Postmates Spotted in the Wild on Both Coasts

We’ve been covering the acceleration of robots being rolled out for contactless food deliveries in different cities across the country. As these li’l rover ‘bots become more public, the public is catching their first glimpse of, and shooting video of, our food delivery future.

Starship recently started making restaurant and grocery deliveries in Chevy Chase, VA. That’s where Jake Tapper, host of CNN’s State of the Union caught not one but two Starship robots scurrying about in the rain and posted a video of them to Twitter.

Tapper wrote “I assume for food delivery? Still a bit @blackmirror,” which struck us as a bit odd. Black Mirror is the sci-fi anthology TV series that shows the dark side of our reliance/addiction to technology. But Tapper seems to be ignoring the fact that we are already living in the darkest timeline where human-to-human contact is fraught with anxiety and potentially danger, and technology like autonomous robots can actually be useful and could save lives.

As a reminder for Mr. Tapper, robots don’t get sick, won’t inadvertently cough on your broccoli and can help get food to people who may not be able to otherwise leave home. Not everything about robots is perfect, obviously. Robot companies like Starship are charging restaurants big commissions that might be unsustainable, and there are always are big, societal questions about automation and the cost of human jobs. But right now, we should absolutely be experimenting with more self-driving deliveries.

Over the West Coast, friend of The Spoon, Mike R., saw the Postmates Serve robot cruising down a Los Angeles city street. With its lit up eyes and bright color, the cheery robot certainly seemed to fit in with sunny California vibe. An “On Delivery” message displayed on its screen to let passers by know it was on a job as it quietly rolled on its own down the sidewalk (followed, appropriately enough, by someone on a scooter wearing a facemask).

Postmates Serve Robot Out on Delivery

For those living in the middle of the country, fret not. Self-driving delivery robots won’t be relegated to the coasts. Up in Ann Arbor, MI, Refraction’s REV-1 is making lunch and grocery deliveries. And Starship is eyeing Frisco, TX among the next cities to get its robot delivery service.

If you see robots running around your town, please shoot a picture or a video and share it with us!