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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

robots

Just in Time for a Contactless World, Keenon Robotics has 6,000 Food Server Robots Already in Action

As restaurants across the country start to reopen, one question we’ve been asking is, assuming people will even want to go back into restaurants, how will they want to be served? Will customers want their server to wear a mask or not wear a mask? Which is less off-putting?

Another third option that may become increasingly common is having a robot server in your restaurant. Autonomous robots can shuttle food and empty dishes to and from the kitchen, they don’t get fevers and they’ll never cough anywhere near you or your food.

One company making such robots is China’s Keenon Robotics, which launched its first server robots back in 2016. Keenon’s robots use both 3D mapping and specially coded stickers mounted on ceilings to navigate. A camera pointing up on the robot sees the sticker and determines its route. The robots also feature obstacle detection and automated stopping so they don’t bump into people. Robots can be leased for $1,500 – $1,600 a month.

Other players in the space include Bear Robotics and PuduTech, but what sets Keenon apart is scale. Of the 9,000 robots Keenon has operational around the world, 6,000 are already in the hotel and restaurant industry. Simi Wang, the Director of Global Sales at Keenon Robotics, told me by phone this week that the company can produce 30,000 robots this year.

The question now is, will that be too many robots… or too little?

Keenon certainly seems to be filling its pipeline. The company has partnerships with Burger King in China, the Haidilao hot pot restaurant chain, and recently entered into an agreement with Chinese delivery service Meituan Dianping to create a new contactless restaurant.

Will there be that same demand for server robots here in the U.S.? When I spoke with Bear Robotics’ CEO last month, he said that there was definitely more inbound interest in his robots. He attributed this increased interest to customers wanting more transparency into who has touched their food. But again, we’re at the very beginning stages of restaurants coming back online, so we don’t know how much people will actually care.

Pre-COVID, the labor crunch was a big factor for restaurants considering a robotic workforce. Casual and quick service restaurants in particular had huge churn rates. With so many people out of work, and so many fewer restaurants still operational, the economics of human labor won’t be as much of an issue. The question now will just be how much people trust other people to handle their food.

Starship Angling to Make its Robot Food Deliveries in Frisco, TX. Notice the Pattern?

Starship’s small, autonomous food delivery robots could soon be rolling around Frisco, TX. The Community Impact Newspaper in Frisco reports that earlier this week Starship pitched its robotic plans to the town’s city council.

If adopted, Starship’s robots would be making deliveries from local restaurants and grocery stores in that area. More importantly during this COVID-19 pandemic, those deliveries would be done without human-to-human contact.

Community Impact writes that the city council is still working through details with Starship, but it looks like the program will proceed, with a launch announcement expected in the next few weeks.

The expansion into Frisco would follow Starship’s recent deployments to other cities such as Fairfax, VA and Tempe, AZ. One thing Frisco, Fairfax and Tempe all have in common is that they are (relatively) close to a college or university that Starship had previously been serving (University of Texas at Dallas, George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, respectively).

A Starship rep told Community Impact: “With the pandemic, a lot of campuses have emptied out of students. So we have accelerated our long-term plans, which is to offer neighborhood deliveries.”

It would make sense that Starship would take those college robots and let them loose in nearby neighborhoods to make deliveries to the general public. If that logic holds true, we can probably expect to see Starship robots making deliveries in towns near Houston, TX; Madison, WI, Pittsburgh, PA; and West Lafayette, IN.

Robots could have greater appeal as a delivery mechanism given heightened fears people now have of viral transmissions. Robots don’t get sick and can be easily sanitized. This, in combination with working with smaller towns, could make local governments more willing to put autonomous vehicles on their sidewalks.

Prior to the pandemic, cities and states were cautious about allowing robots to run about on public streets and sidewalks. But shelter in place orders across the country have spurred demand for home delivery of food and groceries. Robots, with their ability to run around the clock, can help meet that demand.

We’re already seeing more robots on public streets. In Ann Arbor, MI, Refraction’s REV-1 is making restaurant and grocery deliveries. And in California, Nuro has been given the go ahead to test its autonomous delivery vehicle on public roads.

One thing that could hold robot delivery back, however, is the commission fees it is charging. We learned recently that Starship can charge almost as much as a human-powered third-party delivery service. This seems to defeat the labor cost savings robots are supposed to bring, and not at all helpful to restaurants that are struggling to stay in business. But as Starship pointed out, they are working on an accelerated timeline, and hopefully the company will soon bring more equity to its delivery.

If you’re in one of these towns where robots can bring you food, drop us a line and let us know how it went, and if you’d use them again!

Wait, Robot Delivery Companies Charge the Same Commissions as Human Delivery?

One of the key selling points of our delivery robot future was that it would be less expensive than existing human efforts. Yes, automation would take some human jobs, but the savings would create cheaper food and faster service. But a story out in WIRED today shows that at least right now, robot delivery companies are charging the same commissions as their human counterparts.

The main thrust of the WIRED story is that robot deliveries should be having a big moment during this pandemic. Robots reduce human-to-human contact, can go into dangerous areas, and can operate around the clock. But they aren’t having that big moment, hampered by technical limitations, local regulations, and in some cases — cost.

WIRED highlights two delivery companies: Starship and Refraction. Starship makes cooler-sized robots that are best known in the U.S. for scurrying around a number of college campuses bringing meals and snacks to hungry students. Refraction makes the bigger REV-1, a robust three-wheeled robot that can tackle inclement weather and launched lunch delivery in Ann Arbor, MI at the end of last year.

In Fairfax, VA, where Starship recently started making restaurant deliveries, the owners of the Havabite restaurant told WIRED that Starship is charging them 20 percent commission fees (after a one-month free trial), which they said is more than the restaurant pays GrubHub for delivery.

Up in Michigan, Refraction is charging 15 percent commission on deliveries, which WIRED says is “a rate equal to or lower than that charged by human-powered delivery apps.”

We have reached out to both Starship and Refraction for confirmation clarification. A Refraction rep emailed us the following: “Average delivery fees for a restaurant are typically 30% (like through Doordash or Uber Eats) and [Refraction is] charging half of that. On the consumer side, there is a $3 fee which is about a quarter of the typical order cost. Refraction is also now testing a grocery delivery pilot with zero fees.”

Back in January of 2019, as it was rolling out to its first college campus, Starship told us that it “uses different revenue models depending on location,” and that it “sometimes charge[s] a margin on top of the delivery fee.” For its part, Refraction told us in July of 2019 that it was charging a delivery fee that was better than what Uber is charging.

I get that 2019 was a lifetime ago and a lot has happened since then. I also get that robots ain’t cheap, especially when they are just starting out and haven’t reached scale yet. But human third-party delivery services are being vilified for cutting into the already slim margins of restaurants during this pandemic crisis, so much so that local governments are enforcing caps on delivery commissions. You’d think robot companies, which still have technical and regulatory hurdles to overcome, would want to make them as attractive an alternative as possible.

But maybe that isn’t possible right now. This COVID-19 pandemic is impacting every corner of the economy, including the companies behind these burgeoning robot delivery services. It’s not exactly the easiest time to raise fresh capital to fuel growth. Starship reportedly went through a round of layoffs at the end of March.

Despite all this, the coronavirus has strengthened my belief that robots are the future of delivery, especially in a more socially distant post-pandemic world. Hopefully the economics will work out so robots can help us get through all this to find out.

Bear Robotics CEO on the Role of Restaurant Server Robots in a COVID (and Beyond) World

For the past couple of years, robots were the shiny new object for restaurants. They could automate cooking, serving and delivering food, and even wash the dishes when all was said and done. But last year’s robots were still first generation tech and more of a novelty as the restaurant industry figured out the cultural and economic costs and benefits of automation.

Then COVID-19 came along and the world turned upside down. Restaurants that haven’t shut down permanently are looking to see what socially distant changes will be mandated in order for them to reopen. With their inability to get sick, robots could move from a novelty in restaurants to a necessity.

To see if there’s been a increase in robot interest from the restaurant industry, I checked in with John Ha, Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics. Bear is the company behind Penny, the autonomous front of house robot that can bring food to tables and carry empty plates back to be cleaned.

“Interest is going up a lot,” Ha said about incoming inquiries of his robot. “Before COVID, [restaurant] operators loved our robots, but employees were fifty-fifty, and customers didn’t really care. Now the changes that I see are on the customer side.”

The changes he’s talking about are what concerns customers now have. Before they didn’t care about the robot because they were most interested in the food. But in a pandemic world, customers now want to know who has touched their food and the cleanliness of those hands.

“People come back for the food before, now people are going to pick the restaurant they can trust,” Ha said. “People want less contact in the restaurant.”

Robots are a way of providing one less point of human contact. Kitchen staff can load up the robot tray and the robot then drives itself to its table destination to bring people their order. But then it actually gets a little complicated. When it comes to moving the food off the robot and onto the table, as Ha explained. “Should we allow customers to pick up the food? There’s danger involved with that as well.” It’s not hard to imagine, for example, a customer dropping a bowl of scalding soup as they lifted it off the robot.

“But would you want the servers to touch the food?” Ha continued. “They can’t wash their hands every minute, and even if they could, how do you know?”

One thing Ha does know is that the next version of Penny will be easier to clean. “The next version much easier to clean and food contact safe,” said Ha, “From the materials to design.”

Sterilization is going to play an increasingly important role in food robotics, and could become one of its biggest selling points. It’s much easier to wipe down a robot than it is to constantly monitor all your employees for any sign of illness.

Then there is the question of what do restaurant customers want to interact with? Restaurants in California will reportedly need to have servers wear gloves and masks. Which is less threatening to a customer, a masked human or a robot?

I don’t know. We’re all figuring this out in real time, and robots may not be the answer for every restaurant. “Adopting a robot is an intrusive change for the restaurant,” Ha said. “They have to redefine the workflow for expediters, servers, bussers.”

Despite all that, in a world wary of human contact, robotics could solve at least part of the meal journey puzzle. As Ha noted “Now it’s something everyone will consider.”

Starship Robots Making Food Deliveries in Tempe, AZ

If a person dropping food off on your doorstep is still one human too many in these COVID-19 times, then maybe you should try moving to Tempe, AZ where Starship’s autonomous robots have started making restaurant deliveries.

Starship’s li’l rovers are squat, six-wheeled, cooler-sized robots that can scurry around town making deliveries. In a time when people are being asked to shelter in place, autonomous robots can help reduce human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus by, well, not being human.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Starship now has more than 30 autonomous, on-demand robots delivering daily between 10:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. Meals are available from three different Tempe restaurants: Fate Brewing Company, Tempe City Tacos and Venezia’s Pizza. For those in Tempe, the delivery area is bordered by S. Mill Ave. to the east, S. Rural Road to the west, Route 60 to the south and Southern Ave. to the north.

Starship had been focusing its go-to market in the US on colleges, where it has been steadily rolling out on different campuses over the past year. But with the global pandemic forcing schools to send students home and the rising need for contactless delivery, Starship’s shift towards deliveries for the general public makes sense.

Tempe is the third location in the US where Starship has been making non-college deliveries. The company has already begun delivering different restaurants in Washington DC and Irvine, CA. According to a Starship spokesperson, future delivery cities include the City of Fairfax in DC and Moutain View, CA (which will also be testing Nuro’s driverless delivery pods!).

In addition to requiring one less human putting themselves at risk to bring you a burrito, autonomous robots can also run continuously without needing a break, and can be easily cleaned in between trips.

Starship’s robots aren’t the only ones pitching in during these dire times. The Postmates Serve robot has been making deliveries in Los Angeles. On a much larger scale, the CEO of driverless van startup, Udelv, has publicly offered his company’s autonomous delivery services to help make deliveries in quarantined areas.

If you’re in the designated area in Tempe and use Starship’s robot delivery, take a picture and let us know how it went!

LG and Woowa Bros. to Develop Food Delivery and Serving Robots

South Korean companies LG and Woowa Brothers announced today that they will work together on developing robots that deliver food to tables at restaurants as well as to your front door (hat tip to The Investor).

The companies didn’t provide many specifics, just saying that there were synergies between the two and they looked forward to making a better world where robots and humans coexist.

The move isn’t surprising given that both companies have made numerous robotic moves in parallel up to this point. Just earlier this month South Korean restaurant chain CJ Foodville started deploying LG’s CLoi ServeBots at its locations to serve food and shuttle empty dishes.

For its part Woowa Brothers, which operates Baedal Minjok, South Korea’s largest food delivery operation, launched a robot rental program for restaurants in November of last year. And last summer, Woowa partnered with UCLA to develop cooking robots. Woowa was acquired by Delivery Hero for $4 billion last December, but prior to that, Woowa’s CEO had talked openly about how delivery robots should be multi-taskers and do things like take away trash and recycling.

The announcement comes amid the backdrop of the deadly coronavirus. Cases in South Korea have spiked, and as the disease becomes a global pandemic, robots are one measure being taken to reduce human-to-human contact. As we saw early in the virus’ spread, a quarantined hotel in China used robots to serve food to stranded travelers. In fact, robots could wind up being instrumental in the contactless method of food delivery, if proper sterilization procedures can be put into place.

LG certainly isn’t alone in its food robot endeavors. Sony has a big vision for cooking robots and partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to research them. Sony also recently launched a dedicated artificial intelligence unit that would work on “gastronomy.”

All of this is to say that with the intense focus from companies like LG, Woowa, Sony and more, the world of food delivery and restaurant robots is being primed to undergo massive advancements in the coming years.

Dishcraft Publicly Rolls Out Dishes as a Service to the Bay Area

Since Dishcraft Robotics, the robot dishwashing startup, came out of stealth last year, we’ve known that its business model would be dishes as a service. In a Linkedin post yesterday, Dishcraft Founder and CEO, Linda Pouliot talked publicly for the first time about the roll of that service, dubbed Dishcraft Daily.

Dishcraft Daily quietly launched in September of last year and is currently being used by a number of unnamed corporate campuses, cafeterias and other high-volume eating venues. 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.

As we wrote last year at the time of the company’s launch:

[Dishcraft’s robot] grabs each dish individually and inserts it into a rotating wheel. The wheel spins the dirty plate face down and into position where it’s sprayed with water and scrubbed clean in seconds. The scrubbed plate is then rotated again where cameras and computer vision software inspect it for any debris left on the plate before exiting the machine into a dishrack or going back in for another scrub.

Once outside the robot, dishes are sent to be sanitized and stacked to be shipped back out the next day.

I spoke with Pouliot by phone this week and she said since the company’s launch last year, its robot is now faster and has improved the AI function that detects dirt and other matter that might linger on the dishes. The company is opening up a new facility next month that will be able to handle dishes from up to 50,000 diners a day.

When writing about robots and automation, there is always the question of the human cost. Dishcraft’s robot is automating a job that is not only done by a person but also serves as a good entry-level job that doesn’t require a high degree of specialization.

However, restaurants are currently facing a labor shortage, with turnover as high as 150 percent. Restaurants are also grappling with increased pressure from the current administration that is cracking down on undocumented workers, a labor pool restaurants rely on.

While Pouliot wouldn’t provide specific pricing, she said that Dishcraft Daily is comparable to existing dishwashing solutions currently available to dining operators. Additionally, Pouliot claims that the Dishcraft robot’s computer vision and AI are more accurate and impartial (i.e., what constitutes “clean”) than a human to create consistently cleaner dishes.

In her post, Pouliot also said that Dishcraft can help companies with zero-waste initiatives. A corporate office feeding employees probably doesn’t have dishwashing facilities or a place to store hundreds of plates on-site. Rather than setting out single-use plates (even compostable ones may have forever chemicals in them), companies can offer reusable, clean plates.

Right now, Dishcraft is only servicing customers between San Francisco and San Jose. We’ll have to see if the land that brought us software as a service will embrace dishes as a service.

Robots Deliver Food to People Quarantined in China Hotel

One of the most useful things about robots, we are told by the companies developing them, is that they can do the work that is too manual, repetitive and dangerous for humans. That last part is being put to the test in China, where robots have been spotted delivering food to quarantined people amid that country’s rapidly escalating Coronavirus outbreak.

The UK’s Daily Star reports that a hotel in Hangzhou, China, more than 200 tourists were being isolated after a flight arrived carrying some passengers from Wuhan, the epicenter of the viral outbreak.

Staff at the quarantined hotel dispatched 16 robots, one for each floor of the building, to deliver food to people in an effort to limit cross contamination. A video posted to the China Trends YouTube channel two days ago shows the robot, calling itself “peanut,” rolling down the hotel hallway, announcing its presence as people pop out from their rooms to grab food.

#Coronavirus: Robots Deployed to Deliver Meals to Travelers in Isolation #Wuhan

One assumes/hopes that each robot is also getting a good scrubdown after each trip.

There are nearly 6,000 confirmed cases of the Coronavirus in mainland China, and 132 people have died. Roughly 60 million people are on lockdown in China.

The fact that robots are being put to use in this way would be pretty cool if it wasn’t so deadly serious. But it does highlight how robots can be used in situations that are hazardous to humans and help save lives (everyone needs to eat). Hopefully, more robots will be employed to limit human exposure to the virus, and we’ll be able to apply lessons learned here to help curb this and future outbreaks.

Macco Robotics Beer-Pouring Kime-bot has Big Kitchen Plans

Macco Robotics’ Kime robot bartender probably won’t be able to dispense homespun, sage advice like a human, but it can definitely pour you a beer.

Made by Seville, Spain-based Macco Robotics, Kime is a humanoid food and beverage serving robot. Measuring about 2 square meters, the Kime features a robotic head and torso and has two articulating arms that can be used to grab and dispense beverages.

If you’ve ever worked in a bar, you know you can’t just shoot a beer straight into a glass; there is some subtlety to it. The Kime’s hands pull the tap appropriately and angles the glass properly for a correct pour. Macco Robotics CTO, Kish Renganathan, told me by phone this week that the Kime can pour one beer in 23 seconds.

Portugal gas company, Prio, trialed the Kime at one of its gas stations last year. Why you would want to serve up cups of beer to people getting gas and out for a drive is a little beyond me, but hey, Europeans do things a little differently. Renganathan said that for its next phase of testing, Prio is looking to shuttle the one kiosk between different gas stations and have it serve up other beverages like fountain drinks, milkshakes and even grab fresh made food items.

The Kime is also being used by a Spanish beer brand, though Macco actually switched things up a bit for that trial. Instead of being a stationary kiosk, Kime was attached to a cart and used as a rolling robot beer machine for events like festivals.

What’s interesting about the Kime is that the company is sticking with the humanoid form. When it comes to automation, you typically have something like the Cafe X, which also uses articulating arms to add some theatricality as it pours and serves drinks, or you have something that’s more embedded automation like the Briggo, which uses rails and dispensers hidden inside the machine.

Given that the Kime is being used for events and fast service locations like convenience stores, I would assume that embedded automation would deliver the speed and volume necessary to keep up with orders. But Renganathan laid out a bigger vision for me.

“Our vision is to make a humanoid for cooking,” Renganathan said, admitting that swiveling arms might be less efficient. The kiosk, in this case, is a contained environment in which the robot can learn to manipulate different food and drink. “Our goal is to take the robot outside and leave it in the kitchen to assist the chef.”

That’s a pretty big goal. Huge companies like Samsung and Sony don’t even seem to be thinking that big. While their visions of kitchen assistants do feature robotic arms, they are attached to a cabinet, and not to a free-roaming autonomous humanoid.

Right now, Macco is self-funded, and it’ll have to raise a sizeable chunk o’ change to make that vision a reality. Now we’ll have to wait to see if Macco will be raising a glass in celebration of its success, or pouring one out for another food robot demise.

Soft Robotics Raises $23M Series B for its Gripping Tech

Soft Robotics, which makes grippers for robots so they can handle odd-shaped and delicate items like food, announced today that it has raised a $23 million Series B round of funding. The round was co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact and includes existing investors Honeywell, Hyperplane, Scale, Tekfen Ventures, and Yamaha.

Also participating in the round was industrial automation solutions provider, FANUC, which had previously formed a strategic partnership with Soft Robotics to integrate the startup’s mGrip gripper system with any FANUC robot through the release of a new controller.

This brings the total amount of funding raised by Soft Robotics to $48 million.

As we wrote in 2018, Soft Robotics’ gripping solution for picking up objects mimics an octopus, using rubbery-tipped appendages. In the company’s demo video below, you can see the one gripper picking up all different kinds of items with odd shapes and textures like a loaf of bread, individual cookies, an onion and a package of chicken.

There are two reasons to pay attention to this technology. First, grocery stores like Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons are all starting to implement more robotic fulfillment centers. The ability to pick up fresh and delicate items will expand a retailer’s ability to automate fulfillment of online grocery orders. In addition to the CPGs, robots could be used to pack more fresh items like donuts, baguettes or store made bags of soup.

Second, as we’ve seen from Sony and Nvidia, the ability for a robot to safely manipulate fragile and odd-shaped objects like eggs and bananas can translate into other sectors of automation like medicine that require a gentle touch.

In today’s press announcement, Soft Robotics said it will use the new funding for its next stage of growth.

The UK’s Small Robot Company Equity Crowdfunds its Precision Ag Robots

Based in the UK, the Small Robot Company is actually making its second trip to the crowd for money, and launched its second such campaign earlier this week on CrowdCube.

Equity crowdfunding is a trend we’re watching closely this year. That’s where instead of traditional venture capital, startups let everyday people (with certain restrictions) invest in and receive an actual piece of the company.

Small Robot makes precision agriculture robots that the company hopes will eventually move farmers away from broad chemical spraying of crops and monoculture of plant species in fields. Small Robot has a multi-part, autonomous robot solution it’s building that includes:

  • Tom uses cameras and computer vision to precisely map a field of its plants and weeds
  • Wilma is the AI that analyzes those images to gather per-plant intelligence and weed identification
  • Dick is an autonomous weed zapper that is armed with an electric wand and information from Wilma to precisely electrocute individual weed without the need for chemicals
  • The company will eventually add a third robot, Harry, to its lineup that will do no-till drilling.

Small Robot’s “Tom” robots are currently in the working prototype phase, and in use on 20 farms in the UK. The company aims to ramp up production and manufacturing this year and go live on more farms by the end of 2020.

I spoke with Sam Watson Jones, Co-founder, Small Robot Company by phone this week, and he said his ultimate goal is to empower farms with precision agriculture to such a degree that it’s done on a plant-by-plant level. Farmers will know where each individual seed is planted and automate custom care for each plant as it grows. This means reducing fertilizer use, and planting a variety of crops next to each other to limit the spread of crop disease, maintain nitrogen levels and pollinate more efficiently.

To help it get there, Small Robot is turning to the crowd, again. Previously the company received £1.4 million in non-equity funding from a UK government innovation fund, and in 2018 raised £1.2 million in equity crowdfunding through the CrowdCube platform.

On Monday of this week, Small Robot kicked off its second CrowdCube campaign and has already met its goal of raising £700,000. I asked Watson why his company didn’t go with the traditional VC route this time.

“VCs are a bit different in the UK,” he said, “There are very few early stage VCs to fund stuff that requires more development. We knew we had a load of farmers who were excited about what we could develop. ” Crowdfunding, Watson said “allowed us to get angels and people who would put ten quid in. It’s been a good forum for us to capitalize on the branding and PR.”

As with any investment, there are risks involved, and given that this crowdfunding is happening in the UK, there are restrictions around where people can invest from and how much. Check the campaign’s details for more information.

Small Robot Company is actually the second robotics company we’ve covered that has gone the equity crowdfunding app. On the other end of the meal journey is Miso Robotics, the maker of Flippy, which is using SeedInvest to try and raise a $30 million Series C round.

Small Robot will definitely need to beef up its warchest as it looks to expand outside the UK. Other players in the autonomous precision ag and weed-killing robot space include Australia’s Agerris, which raised $6.5 million (AUSD) last year, and U.S.-based Farmwise, which raised $14.5 million in 2019 as well.

For now though, Small Robot Company’s pitch to big crowds for tiny agriculture seems to be attracting big dollars.

Robot Baristas Aren’t Dead Yet. Briggo to Open 5 New Locations This Quarter

Normally we wouldn’t cover a gonna story. Like when a company says they are gonna do something. The Spoon likes to see actual results, not speculation, thank you very much.

But when robot barista company Briggo reached out to share some of their expansion plans for the coming year, I was intrigued. Whether by luck or rapidly assembled intention, Briggos’ announcement today comes on the heels of rival robo-coffee shop Cafe X shuttering three of its five locations.

There has also been a general sense of doom and gloom cast over the food robot industry in general as Zume shut down its pizza delivery business, and Creator was left stranded and unfunded by Softbank.

But you’d be hard pressed to think anything was wrong with the robot food business in talking with Kevin Nater, the Co-Founder and CEO of Briggo. I spoke with him by phone this week and Nater said five new automated Coffee Haus locations will go live in Q1 of this year, which is as many as the company launched in all of last year. Through its partnership with SSP America, Briggo plans to be in a dozen locations by the end of 2020.

One of the reasons Briggo can accelerate its install base is because it has moved its manufacturing to Foxconn. Previously Briggo was building every Coffee Haus by hand, but now Nater says “The Wisconsin facility can knock them out as fast as we can order them.” Depending on the location and permitting, Nater says they can get a Briggo machine up and running in a matter of weeks.

With SSP America doing business development for Briggo, Nater said that airports will continue to be a “huge focus” for the company. There are currently two Coffee Hauses in the Austin-Bergstrom Airport and one at San Francisco Airport (SFO).

As Briggo focuses on airports, and building out more locations, I asked Nater if that means the company will be pulling back on its own coffee creation ambitions. One part of Briggo’s business has been that it is also a coffee company that roasts its own beans. As it has expanded into new locations, it has also started offering coffees from roasters local to those areas (Sightglass in SFO, for instance). Nater said “Nope,” and that in addition to hosting other brands, Briggo will continue to sell its own coffee.

In addition to airports, Briggo opened up its first location inside a Whole Foods in Houston last fall. That Whole Foods happens to have 260 condos above it, and Nater said that condo owners are treating the Briggo almost like a personal coffee machine, ordering drinks with their phone in their condo and then coming downstairs to pick it up.

Given the recent setbacks for food robot-based startups, I asked Nater how he refers to their Coffee Hauses. Are they called “robots” or “machines” or something else, entirely? “We use the term robotic barista,” he said “to convey barista level quality.”

So Briggo is still in the robot business. It may strive to serve quality coffee, but we’re gonna have to watch to see if its automated approach translates into a scalable quantity.