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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

vending machine

Farmer’s Fridge Adds Contactless Ordering and Payment

Farmer’s Fridge vending machines have always had a lot of things people were looking for: 24 hour access, a creative menu, and fresh salads served in cute jars. But the one thing Farmer’s Fridge didn’t offer was contactless ordering and payment, features made more important by the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers still needed to touch the machine to place there order and make a payment.

Until recently, that is. I spoke with Farmer’s Fridge CTO, Candice Savino, this week, who told me that the company rolled out contactless reserve and pay functionality to its machines at the end of August.

Like so many other players in the vending machine space, the addition of contactless ordering was on Farmer’s Fridge’s roadmap but was bumped to the head of the feature queue when the pandemic hit. Savino’s team worked quickly, creating an early prototype in May and rolling out the finished product in August to 160 of its 200 machines that are still active (prior to the pandemic, Farmer’s Fridge had 700 machines active in places like office buildings and convention centers).

Farmer’s Fridge contactless ordering works through the company’s mobile app. In the app, the user selects the machine it wants to order from, places the order and pays. That machine then holds the food until the person arrives and punches in a special code generated by the Farmer’s Fridge app.

Savino said the solution allows the company to actually have more accurate inventory management across its entire fleet of machines because it moves stocking data from the edge to a centralized location in the cloud. There are also safeguards in place to prevent remote dispensing, say if you accidentally went to one machine but had ordered from a different machine across town. (If that is the case, the user cancels and re-orders.)

Savino said that adoption of the new ordering system has been good, with 20 percent of Farmer’s Fridge orders going through the mobile app and growing week over week.

With the pandemic still raging, it’s a safe bet that all vending services will adopt contactless ordering and payment going forward. Chowbotics, which makes Sally the robot salad maker, added contactless ordering at the end of last month, and Blendid, which makes a robot smoothie kiosk, has always featured contactless ordering and payment.

Farmer’s Fridge is definitely in touch with the times, especially when it comes to removing touch from its retail experience.

Merlot-M-G! The WineCab Wine Wall is a Robot+AI Sommelier

What do you get for the person who has everything? How about an artificially intelligent robot sommelier that can securely store, manage and suggest wines from your collection?

The Winecab Wine Wall does all that (hat tip to Boss Hunting), acting kinda like a very expensive automated wine vending machine that you’d find in only the poshest 7-Eleven.

Wine Walls come in a variety of sizes, from the more modest Curio Classic model, which holds 130 bottles ($139,000) to the 15 ft. Wine Wall, which holds 600 bottles ($249,900). Each system features:

  • An articulating arm, calibrated with a gentle touch for handling delicate bottles of wine
  • A label scanner to automatically catalog bottles you add
  • An AI assistant to recommend wines and food pairings
  • Security features to gate access to certain bottles

OK. So the Wine Wall might be a bit of pricey overkill for your average oenophile. But, it’s possible to see the Wine Wall in a restaurant or hotel or even a grocery retailer that wants to add high-tech wine recommenation to their offerings without bringing on a full-time sommelier. (Though, admittedly, the interaction with a human sommelier is part of the fun of ordering fancy wine.) Winecab even has a smaller six-foot version of its wall “coming soon” that basically looks like a wine vending machine.

The idea of a vino vending machine isn’t that far fetched. Last year PanPacific unveiled a beer vending machine that could verify the buyer’s age before dispensing. Combine that type of technology with the higher end cuisine vending companies like Yo-Kai Express, Chowbotics and Piestro are trying to create and suddenly the idea of a robot wine sommelier doesn’t seem so silly.

Hmmmm… perhaps I’ll put one on my Christmas list for next year.

Should We Ditch the Term “Vending Machine?”

When I say the words “vending machine,” what comes to mind?

It’s probably a cold, metal box with bags of chips and candy bars lined up in coils behind glass. That metal box is probably tucked away in some poorly lit corner or alcove, and it keeps spitting your perfectly good dollar bill back out at you.

Basically, nothing about that conjured experience screams “fresh,” “high-end,” or even “appealing.”

These established negative connotations could be a problem for the rising wave of high-end automated vending services that are serving up fresh food, sometimes with menus created by Michelin-star chefs.

It’s a topic that we touched on during my Future Fresh: Rethinking the Vending Machine panel today at the Smart Kitchen Summit. Megan Mokri, Co-Founder and CEO of Byte Technologies, Chloe Vichot, Co-Founder and COO of Fresh Bowl, talked with me about a range of topics impacting the unattended food vending services, including COVID-19, machine vandalism, and whether “vending machine” is a good term.

One problem is that managers of potential machine locations — think office parks or higher-end residential buildings — carry with them pre-conceived notions of what vending machines are (see above). Mokri said that there were some locations that wouldn’t even talk with Byte because of the baggage of the phrase”vending machine.” Vichot said that Fresh Bowl doesn’t use “vending machine” in the titles of sales emails or presentations because of how potential customers can react.

As we’ve covered extensively, vending machines today are basically small, automated restaurants that serve up everything from custom salads to spicey bowls of ramen to piping hot pizza. They are not just coils of empty-calorie snacks.

So should we ditch the term “vending machine?” It’s almost the inverse of the question I asked earlier this year about whether we should use the word “robot.” In that instance, I wondered if the term “robot” was setting expectations too high (people were expecting Rosie the robot) and perhaps we should use the term “machine” instead.

Vichot said that while she wasn’t opposed to the term vending machine, Fresh Bowl uses the term “kiosk.” But even that doesn’t seem to capture what today’s vending machines are capable of.

I don’t have the answers, but I think it’s an important question to tackle now. Automated vending services are going to become a more popular vehicle for meal preparation because of their small footprint, lower cost (than a full buildout), contactless nature, and the ability to craft fresh food.

The technology is here, we just need a better name for it to help pave the way for its bright future.

Krispy Kreme Has a Donut Dispensing Vending Machine

In this time of bitter partisan divide, I believe the one thing that can bring us together is donuts. Specifically, access to donuts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So I am patriotically pleased as punch to inform you that Krispy Kreme now has a vending machine that will serve you donuts anytime you like. That is, as long as you’re near the company headquarters shop in Charlotte, NC.

It looks like the vending machine actually debuted at the end of August, but we caught word of it through a Vending Times article posted today. The machine features a giant screen to display inventory and even run video, temperature control, and credit card and mobile payment options. It also features a “no-drop” dispenser so that precious cargo — the donut — doesn’t get crushed.

From that Vending Times story:

The machine vends three different standard variety packs: “The Fan Favorites” — one Original Glazed, one raspberry-filled, and one chocolate sprinkled for $4.99; “The Classics” — one Original Glazed, one chocolate iced cream filled and one strawberry sprinkle for $4.99; and “The Original Glazed Lovers” pack — three Original Glazed for $3.99.

While it’s always fun to write about donuts because, well, donuts, the news is noteworthy because it’s another example of how vending machines are proving useful and important to restaurant brands.

By setting up more vending machines, Krispy Kreme can extend its brand into new locations in a low-cost way without requiring any major build outs. Think: inside grocery stores, at airports, on college campuses. It also achieves this expanded reach in a contactless way, something made more important by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vending machines are unattended, so there is no human to interact with, and with mobile payments, actual touching of the machine can be minimized.

We’ve seen this kind of automated brand extension with Saladworks creating branded versions of Chowbotics’ Sally robot. And Byte Technologies is built around making smart vending refrigerators for other market and restaurant brands. I go into this and more reasons why smart vending machines are a smart play in my The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report over on our Spoon+ premium section.

Long story short: If the Charlotte pilot proves successful, you could soon see Krispy Kreme donuts popping up all over. You’ll never be that far from a donut — and that’s something I think we can all get behind.

Blendid’s New Feature Has the Robot Hold Your Smoothie Until You’re Ready

In addition to making your smoothie, Blendid’s robot will now hold it for you until you are ready to pick it up.

The company posted a video to Linkedin yesterday showing a variety of drinks on its counter. Amidst the colorful assortment of drinks are two small, relatively flat U-shaped brackets. In the video (below) you can see the brackets slide around the surface, pushing drinks into the pickup area.

We’re already seeing an acceleration of interest in food robotics like Blendid’s because of their capabilities and contactless nature. Blendid’s robot can make nine drinks simultaneously, up to 45 drinks per hour and work around the clock. All the ingredients are kept behind glass and sealed away from people, and having a robot slinging drinks means that there is one less human to be a vector for viral transmission.

Blendid is a little ahead of its automated vending bretheren when it comes to contactless retail. In addition to the robot preparing the drinks, ordering is done by mobile phone. Other robot vending services like Chowbotics still rely on touchscreens on the machine itself, which is obviously problematic during a pandemic as dozens of people use the machine in a day.

The addition of Blendid’s hold feature adds another nice bit of social distancing to the company’s offering. Being able to order ahead and have the drink held means customers all don’t need to stand around the machine to order and then wait for their drinks at the same time.

Another interesting bit about Blendid’s new hold feature is how it’s similar to the pucks used by Truebird’s robot coffee barista. Rather than having a robot arms pick up and move drinks around, Blendid’s brackets glide across the counter, sliding drinks into place.

Given that the pandemic is still going strong throughout much of the country, I expect we will continue to see small iterations like Blendid’s across the automated vending space to create even more contactless experiences.

For more on the automated vending machine market, check out my recent report on The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report (Spoon Plus Membership required).

Daily Harvest Serves Up Free Ice Cream Through Traveling Vending Machine

During 2020, we have had our fair share of stressful and saddening news. A vending machine that dispenses free vegan ice cream while playing 90’s music is exactly the kind of thing we need to read about right now. 

Daily Harvest is a plant-based meal delivery service that offers pre-made meals such as smoothies, flatbreads, and bowls. Their most recent release, Scoops, is a vegan ice cream made from plant-based ingredients like coconut cream, fruit, black sesame, cacao, and mint, which is now available for purchase in their subscription boxes. To promote the release of Scoops, Daily Harvest recently set up their first outdoor vending machine in Newport, Rhode Island.

The vending machine is regularly sanitized and requires wearing a mask and practicing social distancing while selecting your free ice cream. “Scoops”, an original song written specifically for Daily Harvest by Boyz ll Men, plays as you choose between two flavors: Chocolate + Ooey, Gooey Midnight Fudge, and Mint + Dark, Melty Cacao Chips. The machine has a small sign that reads, “This is not a mirage” because let’s be honest, free ice cream seems too good to be true right now. 

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers want to minimize human contact and interaction when purchasing food. Less hands on your food, the better. We have seen a rise in food delivery pods, robot cooks,  unmanned convenience stores, and smart vending machines. Our food systems have to adapt in the face of a pandemic, and vending machines like Daily Harvest’s could be part of this new normal we find ourselves in. 

The vending machine popped up in Newport, RI last week for two days, and is now on the move. The Daily Harvest vending machine will pop up in Domino Park in Brooklyn, NY August 21-23rd. According to the website, they will continue to add additional locations, are running an Instagram poll to determine the next site of its vending machine. 

Byte Adds Dynamic Pricing to Its Smart Vending Fridges

Byte Technology added dynamic pricing to its smart fridges this week, giving its clients the ability change prices of stocked items on the fly.

Through a combination of RFID and IoT, Byte makes smart vending refrigerators that allow shoppers to swipe their credit card, take what they want from that fridge and get charged automatically. The company licenses its technology platform to retail operations like supermarkets or restaurants, which brand the fridge to sell their packaged food (or anything really).

Because of the RFID tags and connectivity, a Byte fridge knows exactly what’s in its inventory as well as what items sold, when and to whom. With the addition of dynamic pricing, Byte fridge operators can now automatically discount items for just about any reason.

For example, if a fridge is stocked with fresh sandwiches, the operator can create a 25 percent discount on any of them set to expire. Because the fridge already knows everything about its inventory, it automatically knows which sandwiches this discount would apply to, so the operator doesn’t have to set a specific date or create a new rule each time. It could also run promotions on particular drinks, such as half-off carrot juice after 5p.m. on weekdays, or broader discounts like discounts on cobb salads every Monday.

By giving operators the ability to offer dynamic pricing, Byte hopes to reduce the amount of spoilage and food waste created through its platform. This type of dynamic pricing already exists in grocery stores through solutions like Wasteless, which algorithmically discounts food price based on factors like expiration date. And the Karma app teamed up with Electrolux to create special fridges in grocery stores that sell almost expired food for at least half off.

As I wrote about in my recent The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report, the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing retailers to examine new, contactless ways of selling. Vending services like Byte’s offer the ability to sell products without human-to-human interaction. And though the pandemic has shut down offices, which were a main line of business for Byte’s machines, Byte Founde, Lee Mokri told me by phone this week that it is seeing increased interest from places like residential buildings.

Come to think of it though, having a smart vending machine in the lobby of an apartment building that can automatically discount a pint of ice after midnight might not be the greatest thing in the world.

The Great Vending Reinvention: The Spoon’s Smart Vending Machine Market Report

Thanks to advances in hardware, the internet of things, and food preparation, vending machines today are basically restaurants in a box. They offer high-end cuisine in minutes, require minimal setup time, and have the on-board computing smarts to manage inventory and communicate any issues that arise.

With these capabilities, it’s no wonder the vending machine category was valued at more than $30 billion in 2018, according to Grandview Research, and was anticipated to have a CAGR of 9.4 percent from 2019 through 2025.

Had this report been written even just a few months ago, the main takeaway would have been that vending machines are perfect for high-traffic areas that operate around the clock: airports, corporate offices, college dorms, and hospitals.

But we’re living in a world continuously being shaped and reshaped by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Right now, some form of shelter-in-place orders blanket most of the U.S. Global air travel volume has plummeted, so airports are not busy. Non-essential businesses are closed and people are working from home, not office buildings. And colleges may not hold in-person classes until 2021.

While on the surface, those factors suggest vending machine companies will be yet-another sector wiped out by coronavirus, there has actually never been a better time for the automated vending machine industry. The small footprint and high-end food these devices offer are perhaps more important than ever at a time when minimizing human-to-human contact in foodservice is paramount to doing business. That makes the vending machine market uniquely positioned to capitalize on a post-pandemic world.

This report will define what the automated vending machine space is, list the major players, and present the challenges and opportunities for the market going forward.

Companies profiled in this report include Alberts, API Tech/Smart Pizza, Basil Street, Blendid, Briggo, Byte Technology, Cafe X, Chowbotics, Crown Coffee, Farmer’s Fridge, Fresh Bowl, Le Bread Xpress, Macco Robotics, TrueBird, and Yo-Kai Express.

This research report is exclusive for Spoon Plus members. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.

Piestro’s Playful Pizza Robot Gives Equity Crowdfunding a Spin

Automated vending machines were already hot coming into 2020. Companies like Briggo, Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express and Chowbotics were ushering in a new golden age of vending machines. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing us to look at ways of reducing human-to-human contact when serving food, it looks like this golden age of automated vending is just getting started.

Throwing its hat into the ring is Piestro, a new robotic pizza making vending machine that just launched an equity crowdfunding campaign to get off the ground.

A portmanteau of pizza + maestro, Piestro is a colorful standalone automated kiosk. Inside, a robotic arm spins the dough under dispensers that pour sauce and apply cheese and other toppings. Then the pizza is run through a heater before being boxed up and popped out in 3 minutes. No word on the variety of pizzas (the video below shows pepperoni, peppers and mushrooms), but pizzas can be ordered via touchscreen on the machine or mobile app.

Piestro is actually entering a market that is already pretty competitive. Basil Street recently raised $10 million for its pizza vending machine, API Tech has more than 200 pizza machines in operation in Europe, and earlier this year Le Bread Xpress launched the Bake Xpress, which makes pizzas. Additionally, there’s Picnic, though its robots only do pizza assembly (not cooking), and PAZZI’s robot pizza maker is more of a micro restaurant than a vending machine.

Of these, Piestro seems to be most like the API Tech in that it’s not re-heating frozen pizzas, but the machine has the assembly elements of Picnic and the theatrical flair of Cafe X.

Piestro is just in a prototype phase right now, so it’s not currently available on the market. It looks like Piestro launched its equity crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine over the weekend and has gone on to raise more than $82,000 dollars. And if we are reading the terms outlined on the campaign page correctly, Piestro is aiming to raise close to $1.07 million. We’ve reached out to Piestro to find out more details.

Another thing of note about Piestro is the team behind it. Piestro CEO Massimo De Marco was a co-founder of ghost kitchen company, Kitchen United. Piestro’s COO is Kevin Morris, who is also the CFO of Miso Robotics. Buck Jordan, CEO of Miso Robotics and partner at Wavemaker Labs, which made a lead investment in Piestro, is on the Board. FWIW, Miso is also running an equity crowdfunding campaign of its own.

I’m a big believer in the vending machine space, and I do think that the global pandemic will accelerate the trend. First and foremost, the food that vending machines create is higher quality than ever, and the cuisines served will continue to diversify. Second, the small physical footprint of vending machines means that they can be placed just about anywhere for convenient food on the go. And finally the humanless aspect could carry more importance as people are more concerned about who is touching their food.

From the campaign, Piestro has a dual go-to market approach. In Phase 1 it will be making its own pizzas and selling directly to consumers. In Phase 2 it will license out the technology to existing pizza companies. Though it doesn’t provide a ton of details, Piestro says that its machines can be up and running in two weeks for a cost of $50,000.

If Piestro’s crowdfunding campaign is successful, pizza and vending machines could be a hot combination to watch out for.

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!