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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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API Tech Bringing Smart Pizza Vending Machines From Europe to the U.S.

We were watching the vending machine space closely before the pandemic, because of their increasing ability to create high-quality food in very small footprints. But ever since COVID-19 crashed all over the world, we are paying even closer attention to vending machines because they eliminate person-to-person contact when buying a meal.

There are a number of cool vending machines out there making great food: Yo-Kai Express serves up hot bowls of ramen, Chowbotics makes salads and grain bowls, Bake Xpress pushes out warm pastries. Now you can add to that list API Tech’s Smart Pizza machines, which, as you can probably guess, deliver hot pizza into your paws in under three minutes.

Smart Pizza makes standalone vending machine that can hold up 96 par-baked pizzas. Once a pizza is ordered either through a built-in touchscreen or on a mobile app, the pizza gets a final cook using a proprietary oven before being boxed up and dispensed.

Spoon readers might recall another pizza vending machine coming to market made by Basil Street. But unlike Basil Street, which makes the Automated Pizza Kitchen (APK), API Tech is an industrial automation company and does not make any of its own pizzas. The machine is sold to food companies, which can then stock it with whatever types of pizza they choose. The system menu can handle up to 200 different pizza recipes, with the operator determining the prices for each flavor.

Detlev Goedbloed, Business Development Manager USA at API Tech told me by phone this week that another differentiator for the Smart Pizza machine is the way it cooks. The companies proprietary heating system can change up the cook program based on the pizza. So if you have a pizza with fresh food on top (like pineapple) the oven will heat just the bottom; but for something like a plain cheese pizza, it can heat the top as well. Goedbloed also said the Smart Pizza’s oven allows the final product to have a crisp, pizzeria-like crust.

Because the Smart Pizza machine stores pizza that is not frozen, pies can only last for a couple of days in the machine before they need to be removed. Basil Street’s APKs store frozen pizzas, so they can last for a month inside the machine.

API Tech is headquartered in Nancy, France and right now has 223 Smart Pizza vending machines across Europe and the UK. Last year the company placed its first two machines in the U.S., one in California and one in Florida. API Tech sells the machines outright at a cost of $68,000 and is currently working on expanding its presence in America.

Perhaps most important right now, given the state of the world, is the fact that these machines can operate without a human (except for the restocking bit). Customers don’t even need to touch the machine to order or pay as that can be done through an accompanying app. These will be valuable attributes in a post-pandemic world, and definitely something we’ll be watching closely over the coming year.

The Food Tech Show: How Coronavirus is Accelerating Certain Food Tech Sectors

It’s a scary and confusing time, so I hope getting together with some familiar food tech friends will give you a 30 or so minute respite from the madness.

One warning in advance though: we do talk a little coronavirus, but we do look at the possible bright side for some of those sectors in the food tech space where the outbreak could accelerate adoption.

Other stories we discuss in today’s pod include:

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below.

Korea’s Meatbox 365 is an Automated Meat Vending Machine

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, we are watching in real time as our food systems adapt. Everyone, after all, still has to eat amidst the outbreak, but enjoying a meal or shopping for groceries around hundreds of strangers in a crowded restaurant or supermarket carries more risk than it did just a few months ago.

We’ve seen robots delivering food to quarantined patients, a driverless vehicle company offering up its technology to assist with food delivery, and over the weekend, a reader sent us the following tip:

In Korea, non-commercial, unmanned fresh food stores are popular because of the coronavirus.

Along with that brief note came a link to a Korean blog post about the Meatbox 365, an automated meat vending machine service. It’s a small, real world location that houses three different vending machines. We couldn’t get a ton of details because we read a Google translation of the webpage, but it appears that two vending machines are serving a range of meats like beef, lamb, and pork in a variety of cuts. The third machine serves salads and sides. There also appears to be a bank of cold storage lockers where you can presumably safely store your purchases for pickup later.

24시간 운영하는 고기 자판기…무인 정육점 미트박스365를 사용해보니[현장포커스]

Meatbox 365 falls neatly into the Venn diagram of topics we’re following closely here at The Spoon. First, it’s another example of the golden age of vending machines, which we are starting to enter now. The Meatbox 365 is basically a 24-hour butcher shrunk down into a very small physical footprint. Not everyone needs a pork chop at 2 a.m., but it can provide a fresh meat alternative for busy people unable to make it to an actual grocery store.

Second, as noted earlier, we are watching to see how the coronavirus pandemic alters the meal journey. An automated butcher means less human-to-human contact as people shop for meat, and people can venture out of their homes in off-hours to buy protein to avoid crowds.

Of course, the touchscreens and dispensing cavities of the Meatbox 365 machines need to be scrubbed down and/or people need to wash their hands after using the machine to minimize the risk of spreading the virus.

Based on a video posted by TechCafe, Meatbox 365 has been in operation since at least October of last year. I’d love to see any stats around Meatbox 365 sales since then, just to get a sense of how people in Korea adopt buying meat from a machine. But it would also be interesting to see stats over the past few weeks as coronavirus cases have spiked in Korea, and whether the automated nature of the machines has spurred sales.

We actually have meat vending machines here in the U.S. as well. The Applestone Meat company has two meat vending machines that operate 24/7 in New York. Though those machines aren’t as high-tech, and lack the touchscreens of Meatbox.

If you’re in Korea and have bought meat from a Meatbox, drop us a line and let us know why you did so and how the experience was!

NÜTY Rolls Out Smart Chillers That Let Customers Buy Food With WhatsApp and WeChat

Ray Nathan had a problem.

The longtime technology entrepreneur and investor had spent years and a significant amount of his own capital to create a line of fresh, direct-to-consumer Indian food under the brand NÜTY, only to find traditional Indian retailers were not well equipped for the type of cold-chain continuity required for such a premium product.

One solution would be to use a fresh-food vending machine like Farmer’s Fridge or Bite Kiosk but, as it turns out, these automated cashierless food retail machines had yet to make their way to India. So Nathan did what any self-respecting food company founder who had also built his own tech company in a previous life would do: He built his own solution.

Conceived as a sister company to NÜTY Foods, Nathan decided to start NÜTY Technology to make IoT powered smart chillers which would keep his food at the right temperature until purchased by the consumer.

The chillers, which Nathan and his company had on display this month at the IoT Fair in India, give customers the ability to buy in person using NFC or through social apps. In India, that means Whatsapp, which allow consumers to buy food through the chat function.

To buy food from a NÜTY chiller with WhatsApp, the user simply opens the app and starts a conversation with NÜTY, finds a chiller near them and orders by texting the word pay. From there the chatbot sends a pay link. Once they pay, the consumer is free to pick up their food at the designated chiller.

The company is also testing their food chillers in China with WeChat as the conversational commerce platform. WeChat has become an entire commerce ecosystem in and of itself over the past few years with its mini-program platform, which NÜTY’s ordering and payment app is built upon.

The food inventory is tracked using RFID. Each chiller is outfitted with an “RFID set top” and has internal RFID sensors can track up to 30 or 40 products at a time.

Today Nathan’s chillers are in 80 locations, including across office parks, coworking spaces, cafeterias and shared living spaces, and he has plans to roll them out across India and in certain cities in China and, eventually, into the US market.

While mobile payments are taking off in every region, countries that embraced superapps like WeChat and WhatsApp for payment have moved faster than other regions. China in particular has pulled ahead of pretty much everyone else, where some estimates have mobile payments adoption above 80% of transactions.

As we’ve written here for some time on The Spoon, interest in next-generation vending machines and kiosks has been growing in recent years, with self-service fresh food kiosks being as one of the more interesting categories. In the US, players like Byte and Farmer’s Fridge have emerged as an alternative to cafeterias, local deli or the fresh food aisle at your grocery store, but in markets like India options like the NÜTY chiller could help to actually serve as a critical platform to enable the availability of high quality packaged fresh food.

Hey Robot Vending Companies, Y’all Should Team Up!

There are a lot of smart people currently working for robot vending machine companies. Building mechanisms that autonomously make lattes, mix salads and serve hot pizza isn’t easy. But after writing about startups like Briggo, Chowbotics and Bake Xpress, I really hope their marketing departments are smart enough to talk to each other because there is a big opportunity to bundle some robot food services.

For instance, it would be cool to have a Briggo Coffee Haus right next to a Bake Xpress in an airport. That way, when you order a robo-coffee, you could also grab a robo-choco-croissant. Or there should be a Yo-Kai Express next to a Chowbotics’s Sally so you could have soup and salad.

The nice thing about vending machines is that they don’t take up very much space and can carve out their own culinary niche without competing with one another. So as more vending machines come online, it could be entirely possible to have a whole automated food court offering all different kinds of cuisines tucked away in the corner of an airport terminal or the lobby of a hospital.

This means that there are plenty of opportunities for vending machine companies to mix and match promotional and marketing opportunities. Buy an Alberts smoothie, get ten percent off your Fresh Bowl salad. Order a Basil Street Pizza, and get a dollar off your Cafe X iced tea.

Obviously, there aren’t a lot of these high-end vending machines out in the world right now. Yo-Kai Express lists just 10 locations, half of which are at private corporate campuses. Cafe X has just two locations now. Alberts is only in Europe and Basil St. hasn’t even launched yet.

But that newness may actually work in these companies’ favor. Perhaps they can coordinate as they determine new installation locales. They are all going after the same types of locations anyway — airports, hospitals, corporate and college campuses. Why not team up and give those locations more robot bang for the buck?

Fresh Bowl Raises $2.1M, Plans for 50 Vending Machines Open This Year

Salad and snack vending machine company Fresh Bowl has raised a $2.1 million seed round, reports Restaurant Hospitality. The round was led by Betaworks and Ground Ventures, with Tuesday and Mana Capital also participating.

In addition to being a healthy food vending machine, Fresh Bowl’s hook is that it serves its meals in recyclable glass jars. When the company launched, it charged a $2 deposit for the jar, which could be rolled over into the next purchase upon its return.

But it looks like Fresh Bowl has changed up its model. Fast Company today wrote that instead of tacking on a deposit on top of the price of a meal, Fresh Bowl now offers a discount on the next bowl if you return the jar. With this new approach, Fresh Bowl says its seen an 85 percent return rate.

Armed with more cash, Fresh Bowl is also looking to expand to more places. The company lists six locations on its website right now, and Fresh Bowl co-founder, Zach Lawless, told Fast Company that they are looking to have a total of 50 machines in operation by the end of this year.

To quote Jack White, “I’ve said it once before but it bears repeating now.” We are entering a golden age of food vending machines. Companies like Fresh Bowl, Briggo, Chowbotics, Farmer’s Fridge, and Yo-Kai Express are all working to deliver restaurant quality meals from a teeny-tiny automated footprint. These vending machines can be squirreled away in office buildings, dormitories, factories and airports, operating twenty-four hours a day, serving up delicious meals in minutes for busy people on the go.

Hopefully more of this cohort will be able to take a page from Fresh Bowl’s fresh approach and incorporate recyclable containers into their service.

Oh My Green Acquires Byte Foods Business from Byte Technology

Oh My Green announced today that it has acquired Byte Foods, the food distribution and logistics service of Byte Technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Before we get too far, it’s important to make the distinction between Byte Foods and Byte Technology. In 2015 Byte launched its own line of smart fridges for offices that wanted to provide healthy eating options for employees but weren’t able to afford a full catering solution. As we wrote back in 2018:

To use the fridges, employees simply swipe a credit card and pick what they want. A receipt for each purchase is sent to their email address. Each food item has a disposable RFID tag on the bottom, which Byte supplies to their producers. Before and after the fridge door opens, Byte scans the tag to determine what the employee took, then charges them accordingly. Each fridge also features a screen with nutrition and dietary information as well as prices.

Since its launch, Byte Foods had grown to 500 smart fridges installed around the Bay Area. But those locations all had to be managed and stocked by Byte, and owning and operating your own mini-stores is not a super scalable business for a startup. So in 2019, Byte bifurcated into Byte Foods, which managed its own fridges, and Byte Technology, which is responsible for the underlying technology and software management platform that powers Byte’s fridges.

Instead of deploying its own fridges, Byte Technology sells the hardware and licenses out its platform to food providers like grocery stores and restaurants. These food providers can then wrap these smart fridges in their own branding to extend their sales channels to where people are — namely at work — without the cost of building an entirely new permanent physical store. Through Byte Technology’s platform, these grocery and restaurant licensees get access to all the data from their customers, as well as inventory management tools and analytics.

By selling its Foods business, Byte Technology will be able to focus its energies on the much more scalable software side of the business. Byte Technology currently operates 1,000 smart fridge stores across the U.S., and with this acquisition, OMG will become a customer of Byte Technology.

Like Byte, Oh My Green is an office catering startup based in the Bay Area. OMG offers a full suite of food related services for corporations from chef-made catering to stocking the office room with snacks. OMG has raised $20 million in seed funding and with the acquisition of Byte Foods’, OMG will be able to offer an additional, Goldilocks-like sales option for companies that want to provide more than snacks but less than full catering.

In the press announcement, OMG says that in addition to offices, the company plans to provided smart fridge storefronts to hospitals, government facilities and universities.

OMG’s acquisition is another step into the forthcoming golden age of vending machines that we are entering into. Smart fridges like Byte’s, and robots like Chowbotics’ Sally are providing new levels of fresh food to high-traffic areas 24/7.

Fresco Fridge Brings its Smart Fridges to Offices in the U.S.

The most facile way to describe Fresco Fridge is to say that they are like the Italian version of Byte Technology. That’s not entirely fair to Fresco Fridge, which has built up its own business halfway round the world and this month entered the U.S. with a new Manhattan location, but the comparison is kinda the quickest and easiest way to set the stage.

Fresco Fridge makes a smart refrigerator platform for offices and other high-traffic buildings. It’s a vending machine that uses RFID tags on the items inside so someone can open the fridge with their smartphone, grab what they want, then get automatically charged for it.

See? It sounds a lot like what Byte has been doing in the Bay Area.

Unlike Byte, which started out in the food biz but has since moved on to become more of an open platform, Fresco has never stocked the fridges with its own food. Instead, Fresco has since day one been a vehicle for selling some other vendor’s food.

One of the alluring aspects of a smart fridge like Fresco’s is that it allows offices to provide fresh food for its employees without having to take on the expense of catering meals. Companies can subsidize food in the fridge as little or as much as they want to give their workers more eating options on premises.

Fresco provides its fridges for free to a location and makes its money by charging a monthly fee and collecting a rev share with the food vendor. So if Sandwich Shop X stocks the fridge with food, Sandwich Shop X pays the fee and splits the sales. Vendors also get access to inventory management software, marketing opportunities (special offer notifications) and sales data and analytics as part of the package.

Fresco Fridge launched in September of 2018 and has raised €2 million in funding from a mix of European angel and venture investors. So far the company has 100 fridges in the field in Europe and a new one just recently installed in Manhattan. Fresco has also announced a partnership Proper Foods to sell that company’s assortment of healthy snacks and dishes. The company also has a partnership with an undisclosed commercial real estate company that has buildings across the U.S. and Europe.

Despite any similarities to its competitors, the potential market for Fresco and other smart vending services is pretty massive when you consider all of the office buildings, residential buildings, hospitals, etc. that could offer more food options on-site. As Fresco continues to expand throughout the U.S. next year, a lot more people could be saying “Ciao!” to the smart fridge.

I’ll Bet You’re Thinking of How this Beer Vending Machine Can Be Tricked While You Read This

In a world where there are vending machines that dispense pizza and hot ramen, it only makes sense that eventually we’d have one that serves up ice cold beer and other adult beverages. Last week, PanPacific unveiled the SmartPan Pro, an age-verifying, beer dispensing vending machine.

If you’re like me, your first thought was well how quickly will a high schooler be able to trick that machine. But according to the press release, the machines use “ultra-accurate finger-vein biometrics as the consumers’ identifier” which also prevents ID sharing. Once the user completes an account creation process, they can use their finger on any SmartPan Pro machine.

The SmartPan Pro is meant for venues like sports arenas and other, similar, high-traffic venues. Operators can add restrictions to the machine to create purchase or timeframe limits.

At first glance, it seems like this type of unattended sales mechanism would be ripe for abuse. Finding ways around booze restrictions is a time-honored tradition, after all. But borrowing someone’s finger to buy a beer is a lot harder than borrowing their ID. Sure, someone could buy a beer and then give it to an underaged friend somewhere else, but that always has and always will happen — with or without vending machines.

But if set up properly, a self-service beer vending machine makes sense. Place one or two in a designated beer garden (to check IDs before getting in), and you can free up human staff to serve higher ticket food items that require more human-level skill. (Well, until robots do those jobs too.)

This isn’t actually the first time you’ll be able to use your finger to pay for beer at a ball game. Last year, CLEAR (of airport fame), debuted a system at CenturyLink Field in Seattle allowing people to pay for concessions including booze.

A combination of tech like age verification, robotics and internet connectivity is transforming the capabilities of vending machines, opening up whole new options for eating around the clock in busy places like airports and hospitals. Though, the ER seems like a bad place for a beer vending machine.

Yo-Kai Express Dishes Out Delicious Ramen Bowls (and Accepts Airline Vouchers)

In the not-too-far-off future, if you’re stuck at the airport at an ungodly hour, at least you’ll have good food to eat, thanks to a wave of high-tech vending machines like the Yo-Kai Express.

Yo-Kai Express is built for high-traffic areas (like airports) and can dispense piping hot bowls of ramen 24 hours a day. Today I got a chance to watch a Yo-Kai in action, taste its wares (it was delicious!) and see how it stacks up among the cohort of new high-tech vending machines coming up.

“Yo-Kai is a Japanese ghost that can appear anywhere at any time,” Yo-Kai Founder and CEO Andy Lin told me in front of his machine at the Metreon in San Francisco. This is pretty much how Lin envisions his machine: popping up anywhere so people can eat at any time. Office buildings, airports, malls, any place where there are a lot of people who might be looking for a quick meal.

There are four menu choices, costing between $11 and $12. Each machine holds 40 frozen bowls of ingredients such as meat, vegetables and noodles. When someone orders their food, there is some secret, proprietary stuff that happens behind the scenes to hydrate and heat the contents, and less than a minute later, out comes a sealed bowl of literally piping hot soup (there’s actually a caution sign warning customers how hot the food is). The machine also gives you a little packet of utensils that includes a spoon, fork, napkin and chopsticks.

Lin says the key to its preparation is that the company has developed a flash freezing process that minimizes the size of the ice crystals that can form and damage the food. Because the food is stored frozen in the machine, Yo-Kai can prepare and freeze everything in a central kitchen. When the machine runs low, it alerts corporate HQ, which can then bring replacements (kept frozen the entire time).

The Yo-Kai made its debut at the Metreon in Feb. 2018, and is now in 14 additional locations including Tesla, Netflix, and Capital One offices in the Bay Area. The machines are free for the company to install, with Yo-Kai collecting all the revenue. This provides offices with a way of providing hot food for office workers, without incurring huge costs.

Lin didn’t want to provide sales numbers, but said that if a machine sells 40 bowls a day, it will recoup its cost in four months.

One of the more interesting aspects of Yo-Kai Express is that in addition to credit card, mobile payments and even cryptocurrencies, the machine will also accept airline vouchers to buy your food. Though there aren’t any Yo-Kais set up in airports yet (the first one goes into SFO in June), Lin said the company is working with United Airlines. By accepting the voucher, if your flight is delayed or you get bumped or whatever and the airline gives you a food voucher, you can use it at Yo-Kai after hours when other airport restaurants are closed, which is very smart.

Yo-Kai certainly isn’t the only company that sees high-end vending machines as the next wave of high-volume food service. Chowbotics’ Sally robot is busy making fresh salads in offices and hospitals, and while it hasn’t come to market yet, Basil Street is developing a pizza machine that heats up frozen pizzas.

Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Yo-Kai has raised $1 million in seed funding, and has a mix of 13 execs, contractors and other employees working for the company. Lin said the company is busy prepping the next generation of its Express box, which will feature two dispensers so people don’t have to wait in line for a long time.

Yo-Kai won’t be able to make your long flight delays go away, but at least that time lost will become more tasty.

Fresh Bowl’s Vending Machine Dishes Up Healthy Food and Uses No Plastic Containers

Research shows that eating at work isn’t very healthy. Whether it’s grabbing a burger and fries or a salad drenched in too much dressing, eating while working doesn’t always work in your best interest.

Fresh Bowl is among a raft of startups looking to change how we eat at the office by providing a “Farm-to-Desk” vending machine experience that serves up healthier food options like lentil salads and açai bowls. The company even wants to improve how we consume our food by dispensing it in reusable glass containers.

The startup launched its first Fresh Bowl vending machine at the WeWork West in Soho New York City last November. The machine features food made from scratch that is delivered every morning. Prices are just under $10 for salads and just under $5 for a snack.

However, since food is served in reusable glass jars, there is an additional $2 jar deposit on top of that price. But what’s pretty cool is that you can return the glass jar to the vending machine and roll a $2 credit towards your next purchase (which covers the cost of your next jar deposit).

Fresh Bowl is similar to other players out there with the same mission of making office meals more healthy. Farmer’s Fridge raised $30 million last year to expand its salad-dispensing vending machines. Chowbotics raised $11 million last year to expand its menu robot-made salads to robot-made food bowls. And Byte provides offices with smart vending machines that are loaded with healthy food.

While there is plenty of competition on the healthy eating front, the reusable glass container is a nice differentiating hook for Fresh Bowl. The eco-friendly packaging comes at a time when the stigma around single-use plastic is increasing, and even big CPG brands are getting into the reusable packaging game. In a recent social media post, Fresh Bowl says that 90 percent of the jars were returned.

FreshBowl raised an undisclosed sum of money in December last year from a Bay Area investor and a few NYC-based angels. The company has three employees and is looking to roll out more vending machines by the end of March.

Chowbotics to Bring its Salad Making Robot to Europe

Chowbotics will be bringing a version of its salad making robot to Europe, courtesy of a new partnership with French vegetable company Bonduelle.

While here in the U.S. Chowbotics‘ ‘bot is named “Sally,” the forthcoming French version will go by “Cabaletta.” From the press release:

Like Sally the Robot, Cabaletta can operate 24/7 and will offer custom salads from any combination of 20 ingredients selected by Bonduelle, in addition to chef-crafted, pre-programmed recipes. Users can also fine-tune the calorie total by adding or subtracting ingredients, as well as view full nutritional details for each recipe. The robot’s proprietary technology reduces the risk of foodborne illness, as ingredients are kept sanitary and separate.

The agreement calls for Cabalettas to be deployed across mainland Europe, but the first robots will be installed in several offices and businesses around Lille, France. Though the partnership will kick off with salad robots, Chowbotics raised $11 million last year to fuel expansion into robot-made food bowls with ingredients like grains, yogurt and even poke, so perhaps we’ll see some of those put into circulation as well.

Robots are beginning to take hold around Europe. Based out of Belgium, Alberts is rolling out its Albert smoothie-making robot. Elsewhere in France, Ekim is building its tiny pizza-making robot restaurants. And over in Moscow, MontyCafe‘s robot arm is serving up coffee.

We’ll be sure to ask Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar about his company’s European strategy at our upcoming Articulate conference on April 16th in San Francisco. He’s among the many luminary speakers we’ll be chatting with about all things food robot and automation. You can be a part of the conversation too, get your ticket today!