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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Tally

Grocery Robot Specialist Simbe Robotics Patents System to Detect Produce Freshness

Whether it’s to carry groceries around the store or to deliver them to our front door, it won’t be too much longer before everyday shoppers see robots both in and around the grocery store.

But one potential interesting new use-case for in-store robotics we haven’t heard much about is for detection of produce freshness. That may change soon, as Simbe Robotics, the maker of the Tally 3.0 robot, has just been issued a patent for spectral imaging of produce and meats and detect how fresh they are.

The US patent, which is number 11,200,537 and titled “Method for tracking and characterizing perishable goods in a store,” uses computer vision to record images across a period of time and derive a set of characteristics specific to the type of food. For produce, it can assign a percentage of ripeness, determine whether it is under, over, or at peak ripeness, and determine if there is other biological matter such as a contaminant on the food. It can also determine whether a fruit or vegetable is rotten, damaged, or bruised.

Figure from Simbe Robot’s New Patent

From the patent:

The computer system can access and implement hyper-spectral template histograms or template spectral profiles for “underripe by three days,” “underripe by two days,” “underripe by one day,” “ripe,” “overripe by one day,” “overripe by two days,” “spoiled or rotten”, and “moldy” for specific varietals of fruits and vegetables or for fruits and/or vegetables generally. Similarly, the computer system can access and implement hyper-spectral template histograms or template spectral profiles for “fresh,” “rancid,” “low-fat,” “moderate-fat,” “high-fat,” “low-water content,” “moderate-water content,” and “high-water content” for specific varietals of meats or for meats generally.

For those unfamiliar with the Tally 3.0 robot, the company first unveiled its latest in-store mobile grocery robot in October of 2020. The robot, which wanders grocery store aisles to monitor product levels and detects misplaced items, utilizes computer vision and AI algorithms to capture and provide data to store managers more quickly without needing to send as much information to Simbe’s cloud platform.

This type of mobile inventory checking technology is valuable enough, so much so that grocers like Schnucks have already started deploying the robot across the entire chain of stores. Others, like Hy-vee, are in trials with the Tally 3.0 and likely will expand their fleets over time.

As Simbe’s robots add the capability to help grocers fight food waste – one of the most significant cost drivers for the notoriously thin profit margins in the grocery business – chances are we’ll see more grocers adopt in-store inventory robots en masse.

Simbe Robotics Announces New Tally 3.0 Shelf-Scanning Robot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grocer Giant Eagle to Spread Its Robotic Wings

There was a time when all you needed to make your grocery store stand out was a better selection of food. Those quaint days are gone as any food retailer worth its sel de mer now needs robots. Whether they are in the storeroom or out and about in the aisles, all the cool kids are getting robots: Albertsons, Kroger, Stop & Shop, and Walmart, to name a few.

Regional grocery chain Giant Eagle evidently got the robo-memo and will soon have its own automaton sailing up and down its rows of products. TribLive reports that Tally, a shelf-scanning robot, will be working at Giant Eagle checking inventory, identifying items put back in the wrong place and verifying price tags. Data collected by Tally can also provide insightful analytics about purchases, store presentation and inventory to store management. The robot, built by Simbe, has actually already been in use in pilot programs at a number of Giant Eagle locations in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron.

Same as just about every other grocery chain that adds robots to the roster, Giant Eagle insists that Tally won’t be taking any human jobs. Instead, the robot will assist humans by taking over tedious, time-consuming tasks (like going up and down the aisles, checking inventory).

Giant Eagle’s announcement comes just days after Walmart announced it was greatly expanding its robot program, adding shelf-scanning bots to 300 locations, as well as floor scrubbing robots to more than 1,000 stores. It also follows Ahold Delhaize’s news in January that it was deploying 500 “Marty” robots to scan for spills in its Giant Foods and Stop & Shop stores.

For those who keep track of this sort of thing, each of these robots is made by a different manufacturer. As noted earlier, Giant Eagles’ bot is made by Simbe, Walmart’s shelf-scanner is made by Bossa Nova and Ahold Delhaize ordered robots from Badger Technologies. In addition to keeping tabs on which grocers go robotic, we’ll also need to see which robots they are buying (and from whom) to see if there is a particular automated solution that is working better for retailers.

It should be noted, however, that the days of the shelf-scanning robot could be numbered. There are a number of companies building cashierless checkout systems that use hundreds of tiny cameras mounted to the ceiling which not only keep track of what people buy, but also give the store a continuous, real-time snapshot of shelf inventory. This sort of setup would be faster than waiting for a robot to make its rounds.

The fact that so many grocery stores are adding robots is just one of the reasons we created the ArticulATE food automation summit, happening next week in San Francisco. We’ll actually be talking food retail with Albertsons to see how robots play into its overall playbook. Tickets are just about gone, but you can still grab one today!