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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Softbank

Softbank Brings Yo-Kai, Servi & Pepper Together to Demo End-to-End Roboticized Food Service

Last week, the robotics division of Japanese tech and energy conglomerate Softbank showed off a future in which food service robots work hand in hand to deliver a meal to the customer.

The demo featured a Yo-Kai ramen vending machine, a Servi server robot from Bear Robotics, and Softbank’s own Pepper humanoid robot acting as a host and entertainer. The announcement and demo were part of a newly focused effort by Softbank Robotics to position itself as a robotics integrator.

The demo took place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, at Softbank’s robot restaurant proof of concept store, Pepper House. As seen in the video below, the process flow for a food order starts with the consumer ordering on an app. From there, Yo-Kai starts preparing the ramen, and a cartoon version of Pepper appears on the screen preparing the ramen. Once the ramen is ready, Pepper sends a notification to Servi to approach the Yo-Kai. From there, a human removes the ramen from the Yo-Kai and places it on Servi’s tray, and Servi brings the hot ramen to the customer’s table.

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According to the Japanese publication Robotstart, Softbank envisions the installation of a robot hand on the Servi in the future to eliminate the need for a human server.

The demo is an interesting illustration of a fully automated robotic future. Most implementations of food robotics today involve single robots that automate only a portion of the food service process, whether prep, cooking or serving food itself. We haven’t seen many examples of the interconnection between the various parts of the process, mainly because startups building these machines tend to focus on the part of the process. Softbank hopes to change that by providing integration services to combine all the pieces into one integrated service offering.

If other more mature industries are any indication, the arrival of integration services to the food robotics business is a relatively natural evolution of a currently nascent industry. Other tech sectors like enterprise IT, telecom, and retail tech all have evolved integration consulting industries, and it’s not hard to imagine some of the more prominent players in adjacent spaces moving to become food robotics integrators like Softbank. The ability to tie together disparate robotic systems from different companies will become relatively commonplace and a necessary step to push the food robotics space beyond the small niche it resides in today and will be instrumental in building the fully automated restaurant concepts of tomorrow.

Plenty Raises $140M to Expand Its Vertical Farming Operations

Vertical farming startup Plenty announced today it has raised a $140 million Series D round led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 1. The round also included participation from berry producer Driscoll’s, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. The investment brings Plenty’s total funding to date to $541 million.

The funding announcement comes mere days after Plenty announced a partnership with Driscoll’s to grow strawberries inside Plenty vertical farms. Part of this new investment will go towards that partnership, as well as Plenty’s collaboration with grocery retailer Albertsons and development on the company’s new farm in Compton, California.

Both the Driscoll’s and Albertsons partnerships mean Plenty’s produce will be available in more locations, especially California, where the company is headquartered. The Albertsons partnership, announced in August of this year, will put plenty greens in 431 of the retailer’s California stores. For the Driscoll’s partnership, Plenty will use its Laramie, Wyoming facility to grow the berry producer’s proprietary strawberry breed.

Plenty’s news follows other recent developments in the vertical/indoor farming sector that span commercial-scale farms, at-home gardens, and initiatives in the grocery store itself. Kalera, another massive vertical farming operation, announced Denver as the next city for its rapid expansion westward. Rise Gardens this week announced an investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund for its in-home hydroponic grow system, and last month, In-Farm raised $170 million to expand its network of vertical farming pods across more grocery stores. 

Less than one year ago, the vertical farming sector was expanding, but a lot of questions remained around the scalability of the concept and how appealing it could be to investors. The nearly constant stream of funding and product announcements in 2020 has sped up that expansion. Part of this is due to, yep, you guessed it, the pandemic. Disruptions in the food supply chain due to COVID-19 have consumers more interested than ever in where their food comes from, and having it grown closer to home is an increasingly attractive option. 

Bear Robotics and SoftBank Debut New Servi Restaurant Robot

Good-bye, Penny. Hello Servi.

Bear Robotics and SoftBank announced their new food service robot, dubbed Servi, at an event in Tokyo today. The new robot is actually a redesigned version of Bear’s Penny, an autonomous server robot that shuttles food and empty dishware between the front and back of house of a restaurant.

SoftBank is actually an investor in Bear Robotics, and led Bear’s $32 million Series A round that closed at the beginning of the year. The two companies have been working closely on Servi, and will focus initially on the Japanese market, where Bear has already lined up Denny’s as a customer.

Servi is coming to market at a time of heightened interest in automation in the restaurant industry. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought increased scrutiny over the amount and types of human-to-human interactions that happen when dining out. Robots like Servi can also work long hours without a break, won’t call in sick and don’t have to worry about awkward exchanges with customers over wearing their masks (e.g., taking a mask off to eat, putting it back on when ordering).

But Bear is not alone in the robot server space. With players like PuduTech and Keenon Robotics, server robots could quickly become a commodity, with restaurants just opting for the lowest cost option.

John Ha, Founder and CEO of Bear Robotics, told me by phone last week that Bear’s robots are different from the competition because of their full autonomous driving (no need for special tags to be placed on ceilings) and easier set up.

Ha was in South Korea at the time because Bear has an office in Seoul and that is where the company will be manufacturing Servi. This scaled up production, Ha said, will be a way Bear can fend off newer startups looking to break into the robot space. “People without mass production won’t be close anytime soon, because mass production is not a joke,” Ha said.

South Korea will also be among the first markets for Bear, with Ha saying that they have received a lot of inbound interest from restaurants there. In South Korea, Bear will go up against Woowa Brothers, which teamed up with LG and the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) to develop robot waiters as well.

As noted, the pandemic is accelerating the interest and adoption of food robots. So expect to be saying hello to a lot more robots like Servi in your not-too-distant dining future.

UPDATED: Zume to Lay Off Staff

UPDATE: CNBC reports Zume is laying off 360 people and shutting down its pizza delivery service.

Zume, the startup famous for its pizza-making robots, is set to lay off 400 people, or 80 percent of its staff, according to a report from Business Insider (subscription required) yesterday. (See update above.)

According to Business Insider, the layoffs come as the company has faced challenges securing more funding from Softbank. Zume had raised $375 million from Softbank in November of 2018, and part of that deal was reportedly an additional $375 million investment from Softbank at a later date. Zume has raised $423 million in total to date.

Business Insider writes that the layoffs follow a number of executive departures from the company, including its CMO, general counsel, and vice president of talent, as well as the president of Zume’s original pizza business.

While Zume’s robotic pizza has typically grabbed all the headlines, the company was actually more of a data play. It claimed to be able to take tons of data like weather reports, purchasing history, and local sporting events to predict how many pizzas and what kind it needed to make in an evening. From there it would parbake and assemble the pizzas and cook them in a mobile oven on the way to being delivered.

The cook-on-the-go concept was later abandoned by the company in favor of parking mobile kitchens in designated neighborhoods in more of a hub-and-spoke model that only relied on drivers to deliver the pies over the last mile.

Zume had also placed big bets in 2019, launching a packaging business with the acquisition of compostable packaging company Pivot Packaging in June of last year, and launching a new program that was in essence a mobile ghost kitchen that restaurants could license. The first customer for that mobile ghost kitchen was &Pizza on the East Coast.

However, it looks like the money is drying up and Softbank, still dealing with WeWork’s implosion, is probably less inclined to throw more money into Zume if the returns aren’t there.

Right now, we don’t know where all the layoffs will hit and where Zume will focus its resources. Will it abandon pizza making to focus on selling packaging and licensing out its tech stack? We reached out to Zume to find out more information and will update this post as we learn more.

With Zume Deal, Softbank Has Pieces For Full-Stack Food Delivery

Softbank is investing $375 million into food delivery and logistics company, Zume, according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal. Softbank is also expected to invest another round of $375 million into Zume at a later date.

We had heard rumblings about this deal earlier this year, and The Journal got the news through an SEC filing. Zume provided the following statement to The Journal: “We’ve recently closed a round of funding to support our growth and hiring.”

Based in the Bay Area, Zume uses mountains of data to predict how many and what types of pizzas will sell in different neighborhoods. The startup also uses robots to help make the pizza, and a special van outfitted with ovens to finish cooking pizzas on their way to people’s houses. Earlier this year, the company announced that it would license its predictive technology out to help other types of restaurants to improve delivery of different types of cuisines.

As we’ve noted before, this investment makes a lot of sense for both companies. For Zume, it brings the necessary capital to expand both geographically outside of the Bay Area, and helps it broaden into other food categories.

For Softbank, putting money into Zume aligns nicely with some of its other investments. Softbank has invested in food delivery services DoorDash and Uber Eats. And last month, Softbank joined forces with Toyota to form a joint venture called MONET, which will use the car company’s e-Palette technology to create customizable self-driving vehicles that could be anything from a dentist office to a mobile pizza oven.

The result of all those pieces is a full stack solution for restaurant delivery, with Zume’s analytics predicting demand, Uber Eats or DoorDash providing delivery, and MONET vehicles providing the transportation. That type of vision is a ways off, but you can smell the piping hot corporate synergies.

The first $375M investment from Softbank brings the total amount raised by Zume to $423 million. TechCrunch reports that this will give Zume a pre-money valuation of $1.5 billion.

SoftBank and Toyota Team up for Autonomous Meal Delivery Vehicles

SoftBank and Toyota today announced that they will be forming a joint venture to create autonomous vehicles that can provide a variety of smart mobility services, including self-driving vehicles which deliver robot-made meals.

The new venture will be called MONET (a portmanteau of the words “mobility network”) and will combine Toyota’s infrastructure for connected vehicles with data collected from SoftBank’s Internet of Things platform.

The result, according to the press release, will be:

“By the second half of the 2020s, MONET plans to roll out Autono-MaaS (autonomous mobility as a service) businesses using e-Palette, Toyota’s dedicated battery electric vehicle for mobility services that can be used for various purposes, including mobility, logistics, and sales. Possibilities include demand-focused just-in-time mobility services, such as meal deliveries vehicle where food is prepared while on the move, hospital shuttles where onboard medical examinations can be performed, mobile offices, and many more. MONET also intends to roll out these businesses in Japan with an eye to future expansion on the global market.”

Toyota announced its e-Palette autonomous vehicle platform at CES earlier this year. The idea behind e-Palette is to create a customizeable, self-driving vehicle that can be anything from a mobile pizza oven to shoe store on-the-go.

As The Wall Street Journal writes, MONET could provide mobile meals and medical services to Japan’s aging population, though it would by no means be limited to strictly that. In fact, SoftBank may already have the building blocks in place for much of what MONET wants to do.

This past summer, SoftBank was rumored to be investing $750 million in Zume, the Bay Area company that uses massive amounts of data to accurately predict pizza deliveries. Zume also happens to have a fleet of oven-equipped vans which ensure piping hot pizza on delivery. (Something that could come in handy for e-Palettes as well.)

SoftBank also led the $535 million Series D funding round in DoorDash, which uses a combination of humans and robots for food delivery (and has plans for last mile delivery of, well, anything).

Report: SoftBank Cooking Up Potential $750M Investment in Zume

Bloomberg reported yesterday that Softbank Group is in discussions to invest from $500 million to $750 million into Zume, the Bay Area company that uses a combination of data, robots and specially outfitted vans to deliver hot pizza.

When news outlets write about Zume, they often focus on the robots that help make the pizza. While those are cool, the company is really about data and last-mile logistics. As we’ve written before:

Zume takes into consideration hundreds of data points, such as day of the week, weather, school calendars and more to develop predictions around how much pizza and what types of pizza will be ordered in a given location. From there a food delivery vehicle cooks up the pizza on the move and delivers it with precise timing.

This could benefit Softbank for a couple of reasons. First, Zume recently announced that it was expanding beyond pizza and bringing its delivery expertise to other types of cuisine. Basically, it is setting up a consultancy to provide Zume’s data prowess to help any restaurant figure out how to deliver their food more efficiently.

As Alex Garden, Co-Founder and CEO of Zume told us at the time of that announcement, “The truth is that we’ve developed a tech stack that will allow any restaurant to power the next generation of their business.”

As restaurant delivery grows, a platform like Zume’s could theoretically ensure that food ordered from any type of restaurant would arrive piping hot and fresh. (No one wants soggy, tepid fries.) Not for nothing, it’s also a way for Zume to scale nationally without a capital heavy investment.

Softbank’s move also plays nice with its other investments. Just yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Softbank was in talks to invest in Alibaba’s Ele.me food delivery service in China. In March of this year, Softbank led DoorDash’s $535 million Series D round, and the company also owns a 15 percent stake in Uber, whose Uber Eats food delivery is growing like crazy.

From Zume’s perspective, the Softbank investment would obviously strap a booster rocket on its growth. Zume has been very methodical in its growth so far, expanding its pizza delivery only in the Bay Area. That type of cash would fund geographic expansion as well as give it the runway to broaden into new cuisines.

We’ve reached out to Zume for confirmation and will update this post when we hear back. UPDATE: Zume replied to us with a “no comment at this time.”