Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution
In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.
Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.
Last week, Amazon announced they were acquiring iRobot. The acquisition of the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuums comes less than a year after Amazon unveiled its own home robot, Astro.
The news came the same week we got a sneak preview of Optimus, Tesla’s robotic humanoid. After the preview, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he thinks the impact of the Optimus could someday exceed that of the company’s hugely popular electric vehicles.
“I’m sort of surprised that you know people are like analysts out there are not really understanding the importance of the Optimus robot,” Musk said. “My guess is Optimus will be more valuable than the car long term.”
While Musk has suggested his company’s robot will someday provide a nearly inexhaustible amount of “labor” (of the mechanized, non-human variety), he also outlined how the robot will also help us at home with everyday tasks.
“It should be able to, you know, please go to the store and get me the following groceries, that kind of thing,” he said.
For Amazon, much of the early hot takes on the company’s purchase of iRobot frame it as part of a larger effort by the online giant to better understand its customers. And no doubt, adding the home mapping capability of the Roomba to the already rich data profiles Amazon has through our purchase history and Alexa voice interactions will give the company an even better contextual understanding with which to sell us even more stuff.
But I also think Amazon is serious about becoming a leading platform builder in home robotics. Robotics are just a natural evolution of the smart home – something us old-timers used to call ‘home automation’ – and I expect the roboticization of the home will ultimately lead to a multi-hundred billion dollar market. Today’s consumer robot market – mostly products like the Roomba – is forecasted to be a $9 billion market next year. One can only imagine how big it will be once multipurpose, life-assisting robots that can do more than just clean our floors are widely available.
Astro was Amazon’s first toe in the water, and with Roomba’s huge patent portfolio and in-house expertise, I expect we’ll start to see much more interesting new products roll out from the company in coming years. One obvious product idea would be something like Labrador Retriever by Alexa Fund-backed Labrador Systems, a robotic beast of burden for everyday tasks.
One advantage both companies have is they can develop and amortize their robotic investments across both their industrial and consumer-facing markets. Industry has and always will lead in terms of automation adoption, and that’s partly why both companies have invested so much over the past decade in building out their robotics platforms; it gives them a strategic advantage in manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and other parts of their core business.
Now, with all of the in-house IP and automation know-how, both are turning their eyes toward the consumer market. Amazon and Tesla – companies well known for having much longer-than-average time horizons when it comes to product road maps – have already gotten their first products ready for market. In Amazon’s case, they’ve just added North America’s biggest home robotics company to their portfolio and can now bulk up its home robotics lab launched a few years ago as part of Lab 126.
My biggest fear isn’t Amazon mapping my home, but instead that the home robotics market will be yet another duolopy dominated by a couple of technology giants. While others like Labrador and Hello Robot have exciting projects they are working on, do we really think Amazon or Tesla won’t be able to buy them or, in the case of Hello’s $20 thousand home assistant, beat them on price?
My guess is the two companies’ biggest competition will come from Asia, where Samsung, LG, Sony and a number of Chinese companies have been working hard on building robot platforms. Sony is particularly interesting to me given their interest in the intersection of cooking and robotics, which Samsung has also shown interest in.
Bottom line, with two of the world’s biggest technology companies – along with a lot of other big consumer product companies – finally getting serious about the home robotics market, we should all be prepared for the coming wave of home robot assistants – be their souped-up Roombas or robotic butlers – in the coming years.
When Elon Musk said he wanted a drive-in restaurant, apparently he meant a drive-in movie theater restaurant.
As detailed in the plans filed with the city of Los Angeles, the new Tesla drive-in restaurant will have not one but two movie screens that will show ~30-minute movies (about the time it takes to charge a Tesla). The screens will sit on the north and west property lines and be viewable from both the rooftop area and diners’ vehicles.
You can see what the restaurant (and screens and decorative bamboo poles) might look like in the renderings below:
Below is the description of the drive-in theater portion of the new restaurant from the filing:
Finally, there will be two movie screens for viewing by people charging their cars and/or eating in the restaurant. The movies to be shown will be features lasting approximately the same amount of time as it takes to charge a vehicle (~30 minutes). The two screens will be on both North and West property lines of the site to allow people to view the screens from both their vehicles and from the roof top seating area. A decorative bamboo landscape screen will be planted on the property lines to frame both movie screens. The operational hours for the Drive-In movie theatre will be from 7 am-11 pm pursuant to the Commercial Corner standards
There are many more details, many of which were recently shared by Twitter user MarcoRP with some extra reporting by electric mobility blog Elektrek. Here are some of the particulars and questions we have about the project:
The restaurant will have lots of seating – The theater has lots of built-in seating both inside and outside. There will be two rows of theater seating on the top level, a standing bar area behind the theater seating, and multiple table rounds. On the bottom floor, there will be seating both inside and outside the rotunda-style building. There will also be charging stalls in the parking lot where Tesla owners (and I am assuming lots of non-Tesla owners) will be able to park, order food and watch video on the large screens.
You can see the parking lot schematic with the round restaurant and charging stations in the graphic below:
The restaurant will be on the site of an old Shakey’s – The future location of the Tesla restaurant is where an old (but still operational) Shakey’s restaurant stands today. The address is on Santa Monica Blvd in downtown Hollywood, not the original planned location in the city of Santa Monica near Route 66. The plot size is .565 acres with a large parking lot.
The new restaurant will run 24 hours a day – While the movie viewing hours will be restricted (7 am – 11 pm) to no doubt comply with local ordinances, Tesla wants the dining portion of its futuristic drive-in to rock around the clock.
Most parking spots will have superchargers. Who will be able to park there? – The parking lot will have 34 stalls, with 29 of the stalls having superchargers. It will be interesting to see whether Tesla imposes any restrictions on who can park in the restaurant stalls. Since the restaurant will no doubt draw in lots of tourists, parking stall demand will likely exceed availability. While many visitors will no doubt drive Teslas, chances are more likely will not. My guess is that Tesla will restrict most of the parking stalls for Tesla vehicles.
Still no hard date on opening – The filing doesn’t specify when the new restaurant would be built or open for business. While I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that this project has been gestating since 2018, it is at least encouraging that the company has drawn up plans and looks to have decided on the location.
The first of many? It’s worth wondering if this will be the first of what could be multiple restaurants for Tesla. My guess is that it all depends on how successful this location is. Sure, it’s a showcase location in the middle of Hollywood that will undoubtedly draw in lots of tourists, but I can see Tesla building more of these (or at least a modified version of the concept) as they build out their charging station network.
And Robots? The final question (naturally) is: Will there be robots?
If there’s one thing you could say about Elon Musk, it’s that he never stops surprising us, whether that means smoking weed on podcasts or saying crazy things on Twitter.
But where he is especially surprising – and honestly way more interesting – is with new product reveals.
And his most interesting reveal this year was the Tesla bipedal humanoid robot. The new robot, which Musk teased at Tesla’s AI day, was in retrospect something that we should have expected; after all, Musk is building space ships and human-to-computer brain interfaces for goodness sake. Still, most of us were a little surprised, at least mainly because you’d think a guy who is trying to go to space and build brain implants would be too busy to build a robot.
Another surprise this year was the Tesla restaurant. The restaurant concept, uncovered via a Trademark search, was something Musk mused about in 2018 when he talked about creating an old-fashioned carhop which would feature high-tech touches like pop-up menus and Tesla charging stations.
And maybe robots? Nowadays, restaurants deploy front-of-house restaurants bots like Servi to move trays of food around and bus tables. Using robots in a carhop restaurant, where navigating back and forth to cars on pavement, seems like a comparably easy task.
It’s something Musk and his team has no doubt discussed. What I’m less sure about is whether any robot servers at Tesla restaurants would be humanoid. The current generation of front-of-house bots roll around on wheels, a mode of mobility that is a much easier engineering task than building a humanoid walking around a busy fast-food foodservice environment.
But who knows? Musk almost always aims for the stars – literally and figuratively – with his ideas, so building a restaurant with C3POs walking around delivering burgers and fries seems on-brand for the world’s well-known – and most surprising – tech entrepreneur.
Tesla is working on a bipedal humanoid robot that will get your groceries and take over other “dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.” Company CEO Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s robotic ambitions yesterday during the company’s AI Day.
The human-shaped robot will be 5 feet 8 inches tall, weigh 125 pounds and capable of deadlifting 150 pounds. Musk also reassured the crowd that “you can run away from it” and “most likely overpower it,” which are a couple of descriptors that are meant to be comforting but are actually just somewhat unsettling.
Tesla’s decision to go with a human-shaped robot bring up a question I asked last year — “Should food robots be humanoid?” If we are looking towards automation to make our lives easier and create more convenience, wouldn’t more distributed, industrial type machines be better? For example, is it faster to have an android wash dishes individually by robotic hand, or to have a dishwasher appliance clean them all at once? (Obviously the best solution is to have the robot load the dishwasher, but you get my point.)
Think about the grocery example Musk specifically called during his presentation. Fetching your groceries quite honestly seems like it would take longer for a bipedal robot that only moves at 5 miles per hour. Why not just autopilot a Tesla car to the grocery store to curbside pickup the food you ordered online. Sure, Tesla Bots could be useful in loading your trunk, but the car would drive itself back home. To be fair, Musk is a smart guy, so perhaps he meant the humanoid would act more like a house servant and bring your groceries from the car into your house.
But creating a humanoid robotic labor force is certainly more on-brand for the sci-fi inspired Tesla, which is also developing the Cybertruck, which looks like it was pulled from the movie MegaForce. There is theatricality to a humanoid robot, which is the reason some robot startups choose to go with the slower articulating arms. The robotic arms are part of the attraction. Watching an autonomous arm swivel about to make us drinks and meals scratches some basic itch we have to live in the future.
As part of his robot presentation, Musk envisioned a world where robots take over most of the everyday manual jobs that humans currently do. He also said that in doing so, we basically build an infinite labor force. He quickly added that if such a vision were to come to pass, there would need to be a universal basic income for displaced workers. The societal implications of an increasingly automated workforce are complex and need to be addressed sooner than later, but at least Musk is thinking of them now.
Of course, the bigger issue right now is if and when Tesla bots will actually make it to market. Sure, robots can do parkour now, but developing a smart useful robot assistant will take massive amounts of work. But, if anyone can will such vision into existence, it’s probably Musk.
Tesla has filed a trademark under restaurant services, which suggests the automaker may be finally working to realize its dream of combining its charging stations with an old-school drive-in restaurant concept. The application is currently waiting to be reviewed.
This isn’t a new idea. As far back as 2018, CEO Elon Musk has said he wants a “retro carhop” where a menu would automatically pop up on a driver’s dash when they parked their car at the restaurant. Roller skates and rock ‘n’ roll would also be included in the package. And these restaurants would, of course, include Tesla charging stations. The company even applied for permits to build this “Supercharger station” in Santa Monica, California.
For the last few years, no work on the project has been done until building applications for said Supercharger station were submitted this year, and the trademark application filed last week. Under the latter, Tesla’s “T” logo would be trademarked for use by “restaurant services, pop-up restaurant services, self-service restaurant services, take-out restaurant services,” according to the application.
While the name “Tesla” may not automatically conjure images of restaurants, the idea of combining a quick-service eating establishment with a charging station makes perfect sense. Consumers need something to do if they are away from home while having to charge their car. Eating a meal is an obvious activity, and many restaurant chains are already partnering with companies to host charging stations in parking lots.
Whether Tesla concocts its own restaurant concept from the ground up or partners with another brand remains to be seen.
This week’s Food Tech News round-up is a great distraction from constantly refreshing election updates and bashing how slow Nevada is when it comes to counting votes. A few stories stood out to us this week, including Tesla’s Tequila, vegan fridges in bodegas, Beyond Meat pizzas at Pizza Hut, and an indoor farm company funding round.
Tesla Tequila sells out in hours
A few years ago on April Fool’s day, Elon Musk made a joke about the idea of Tesla Tequila. Fast-forward to 2020, and Tesla Tequila has come to life. The tequila is aged for 15 months in a French oak barrel and comes in a hand-blown glass lightning bolt bottle. The liquid itself has “a dry fruit and light vanilla nose with a balanced cinnamon pepper finish.” Even with a hefty price tag of $250 per bottle, it sold out in a few hours, and it is unclear if it will be restocked.
New York City bodegas get vegan fridges
Three bodegas in New York City will host Plantega, a collective that sources vegan products for in-store displays, and its vegan fridges for a 12-week trial run. The fridges will contain vegan products from brands like Just Egg, Miyoko’s Creamery, Beyond Meat, Good Catch, and No Evil Foods. Vegan products like these are normally found in health food stores, specialty stores, and Whole Foods. Plantega’s goal is to make vegan products more accessible to underserved communities that normally don’t see these products in their local stores. The three Plantega fridges will be located in bodegas in Bushwick, Cypress Hills, and The Bronx, and more locations may be added if the trial goes well.
UK Pizza Huts to add Beyond Meat pizzas
Pizza Huts located in the UK will add plant-based Beyond Meat sausage, beef, and pork on top of its pizzas. The new pizza flavors include 3 Meat Supreme, Italian Style Sausage, Beyond Beef Sizzle, and Beyond Pork & Sweet Chilli. The chain has been using Violife cheese to top pizzas in the UK, and will likely continue to use this cheese for its newest vegan pizzas.
80 Acres raises undisclosed funding round
80 Acres operates eight indoor farms throughout the U.S., and the company’s most recent funding round of an undisclosed amount was led by Barclays with participation by Virgo Investments, Orange Wings Capital, QuietStar Capital. 80 Acres produces salad greens, microgreens, herbs, and tomatoes, which can be found at Whole Foods, Kroger, The Fresh Market, and through distributors like Sysco and US Foods. The company’s total funding amount to date is $40M.
Happy long weekend, to those of you lucky enough to have one! This is a cause for celebration — and for food tech news. This week was heavy on grocery, from Tesla shipping trucks to international in-store vertical farms. Enjoy!
Kroger expands Ship, enables voice ordering for grocery pickup
It was quite a week for grocery giant Kroger! First, the company expanded Ship, its home delivery service, to the Mid-Atlantic region, covering Virginia, West Virginia, and the Raleigh-Durham area (h/t BizJournal). With this latest expansion, Ship is now offered in each Kroger store division. According to BizJournal, the company will next roll it out to their other divisions, like Harris Teeter and Ralphs.
A few days later, the grocery chain let drop on their Linkedin page that they would be launching voice-enabled ordering through an action on the Google Assistant voice app (h/t FoodDive). Customers can access the app through iOS, Android, or Google Assistant, and use it to view their Kroger Grocery Pickup. So far, the service is available in six banner stores including QFC and Fred Meyer.
Amazon unveils new food-related variable type for Alexa
Speaking of voice assistants, this week Amazon added four new variable types to Alexa’s skillset, including AMAZON.Food. According to VentureBeat, AMAZON.Food “captures food items, such as ‘bacon,’ ‘scrambled egg,’ and ‘lemon juice,'” so that it can help users save time and have better voice experiences. All the recently-announced skills are in public beta and can be used in skills published to the Alexa Skills Store.
Albertsons adds 10 Tesla semi trucks to its delivery crew
On Tuesday grocery chain Albertsons announced that it is purchasing 10 all-electric Tesla tractors for its Southern California fleet. The trucks will be able to travel between 300 and 500 miles on a single charge, even when pulling a fully stocked trailer. This move is part of the company’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions, as part of their overarching sustainability agenda.
Ember launches copper mug for the holidays
Looking for a gift for the coffee/tea/hot chocolate lover in your life? Ember, the company that makes connected mugs/thermoses that allows users to precisely control the temperature of their drinks, launched a copper mug today. The metallic mug costs $129.99 and joins Embers’ travel and ceramic mug.
Vertical farming company Infarm crosses country lines into Paris
Berlin-based startup Infarm, which installs small vertical farms inside grocery stores and restaurants, is expanding out of Germany for the first time — and into Paris (h/t Techcrunch). The French launch of Infarm’s in-store farm unit will be at the Metro flagship store later this month. This expansion comes after the company raised a $25 million Series A in February of this year.
Google’s new algorithm can help you avoid food poisoning
Google has teamed up with Harvard to develop an algorithm which alerts you to restaurants that carry a higher risk of food poisoning. As Harvard reports, the algorithm uses machine learning to flags search terms associated with food poisoning (like “vomiting”) and check them against the location history of the affected user. Using this information, it can determine likely restaurant food safety issues, after which it can alert local health inspectors to investigate.
Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech with a tip!
