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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Yo-Kai Express

I Tried Yo-Kai’s Ramen Meal Kit, and Now I Have to Move to California

“This is amazing!” That was my 9-year old son raving in between big juicy slurps of his Black Garlic Tonkatsu ramen that I had just whipped up for him.

This five star review was soon followed by my wife, who after trying the Spicey Kimchi ramen I also made this afternoon, said “That’s soul satisfying food.”

Am I a ramen prodigy? A culinary genius? Not quite (or at all). Both of those delicious ramen dishes were courtesy of Yo-Kai Express, the automated ramen vending machine company that launched a ramen meal kit service last week. Right now, Yo-Kai’s meal kits are only available in parts the Bay Area, but the company was kind enough to overnight me a couple samples to try.

I was eager to see how all this would work for a number of reasons. I’m not the world’s best cook, and have certainly never made real ramen (read: not the bricks of dried noodles+salt you buy at the grocery store). I don’t really like traditional meal kits because they are too much work. And honestly, the Yo-Kai ramen was one of the highlights of my robot food tour of San Francisco last year, and I didn’t want to be disappointed.

Thankfully, the Yo-Kai meal kit came through.

All the ingredients for the two different dishes arrived in a plain box. I was a little concerned because the food wasn’t packed in dry ice or anything, but it was evident that the meats and broths had been shipped frozen. Tucked inside an insulated sleeve, they were still cold to the touch.

The one complaint I had about the meal kit was that it didn’t come with the cooking directions. I had to go to Yo-Kai’s site for those. Whether this was an accident or by design to get me back to menu and order page, I’m not sure.

The ramen kits run between $11 and $12 each, and both dishes were super easy to make. Boil water, add the noodles for a quick heat before draining. Heat up the broth and add the meat, corn, green onions and other ingredients right as it’s coming to a boil. Put everything in a bowl and enjoy.

The two dishes Yo-Kai sent: Black Garlic and Spicy Kimchi were delightful in their own completely different ways. The black garlic had a robust umami flavor with a lot of depth. The Kimchi, for this middle-aged suburban dad, was just the right amount of spicy. Enough to give the dish a punch, but not enough to distract from the flavors of the meal.

Look, I’m not a food critic, nor a ramen expert. I’m writing about this because I think it’s a fascinating move by Yo-Kai. As noted, the company’s main business is automated ramen vending machines. But vending machines are typically located in high-traffic areas like airports and office buildings. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing shelter-in-place orders, most of those locations aren’t high-traffic anymore. So the company is adapting. If you can’t make it to one of their machines, they’ll deliver the ramen to you, where you can enjoy it at your own social distance.

Those of us living outside the Bay Area are too distant to even get Yo-Kai’s ramen kits for now. And while moving back to California would mean I could get these meal kits all the time, I’m guessing that if Yo-Kai’s meal kit line takes off, they’ll be available up here soon enough.

Get Ramen Delivered to Your Door, Courtesy of Yo-Kai Express’ New Meal Kits

Yo-Kai Express, makers of the automated ramen vending machines, launched a new ramen meal kit delivery service today.

Sadly, the new service is only available in San Francisco, Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. So if you don’t live in these parts of the Bay Area — no ramen soup for you!

Menu items include Japanese Black Garlic Tonkatsu Ramen, Japanese Asari Ramen, and Korean Spicy Seafood Jjamppong Ramen with most meals costing $10.99 and $11.99. Yo-Kai is also selling add-ons like tea and coffee drinks as well.

Yo-Kai’s menu was actually created by a Michelin-star chef (if you have the chance to try their vending machine, I highly recommend). With the mail order kit, Yo-Kai will send you the pre-portioned ingredients and provides you with the instructions for making the meal.

According to the Yo-Kai store’s website, there is free shipping on orders over $60 and meals ordered before 5 p.m. will deliver the next day between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Meals ordered after 5 p.m. will be delivered in two days.

This is an interesting move for Yo-Kai, given the current state of the world. The company had placed vending machines in high-traffic areas like the SFO airport, the Metreon in downtown San Francisco and other corporate campuses. But given California’s shelter in place order, those locations aren’t so high-traffic any more, and who knows when things will return to the normal level of activity.

Adding a mail order kit option gives Yo-Kai and entirely new line of business catering to people who have to stay at home. They are also carving out a nice lane for themselves by focusing on ramen. It’s like getting a restaurant meal delivered, without paying exorbitant delivery fees (though you do have to cook it).

A Yo-Kai is a Japanese spirit that can appear anywhere. With these new meal kits, Yo-Kais ramen can now magically appear at your doorstep.

Yo-Kai Express Opens up its Automated Hot Ramen Machine at SFO

Yo-Kai Express, which makes hot ramen vending machines, opened up its first airport location last week at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

The SFO Twitter account posted a picture of the machine yesterday, and Andy Lin, CEO of Yo-Kai, confirmed to us via Linkedin that the machine went live last week. It’s located in Terminal 3, near gate E4, and from the looks of the picture, it’s right next to the Cafe X robot-barista (more on that in a minute).

Yo-Kai Express is a self-contained machine that serves up bowls of hot ramen noodles in about 45 seconds. The recipes for the ramen were developed by a Michelin-star chef (they are delicious), and they are stored frozen inside the machine. When you order on the touchscreen, a proprietary process re-heats the ramen and serves it up, complete with utensils.

From the SFO picture, this seems to be the latest version of the Yo-Kai machine, which features dual dispensers. Yo-Kai added this second delivery slot to reduce wait times for customers.

Yo-Kai is part of the emerging cohort of high-end vending machines, which also includes Chowbotics, Bake Xpress, Briggo and Cafe X. These companies are re-imagining what a vending machine can be, serving up fresh food at all hours of the day.

As mentioned earlier, it looks as though this new Yo-Kai is parked right next to the Cafe X at SFO. The two were actually neighbors in downtown San Francisco at the Metreon, before Cafe X shuttered its in-city locations.

But this type of food+drink placement is exactly what I wrote about a couple of weeks back. Because automated vending machines and kiosks have a smaller physical footprint, you can create a 24-hour, mini-food court in smaller corners an airport or hospital or any high-traffic location. Yo-Kai and Cafe X should be talking with one another to do cross-promotions (buy a bowl of ramen, get a coupon for an ice tea!).

These high-end vending machines will probably have a slight adoption curve at first as people get used to the idea of fresh food coming from an automated machine. People are more used to getting a Twix bar from a vending machine than a craft latte or Black Garlic Oil Tonkotsu Ramen. But that will change and soon there will be all types of cuisine waiting for us as we wait for our planes.

Will New Regulations Rain on the Rise of Vending Machines?

From the hot ramen dispensing Yo-Kai Express to fresh salads whipped up by Chowbotics’ Sally, we are entering a golden age of vending machines. Tucked into just about any corner of a busy building and operating autonomously 24 hours a day, vending machines are poised to disrupt what and how we eat. That is, unless regulators disrupt the rise of vending machines first.

The New York Times posted a story yesterday about how Farmers Fridge, which dispenses fresh salads in jars, sparked a change in the way New York City will regulate newer, high-tech vending machines.

The crux of the problem is that like so many things, municipal regulations lag behind technological innovations. Laws on the books around vending machines were made back when vending machines were just pre-packaged snacks and sodas. But vending machines nowadays dispense all manner of fresh food like salads and açai bowls, which are more susceptible to foodborne illnesses.

Given this new vector for potential food poisoning, New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene stepped in and actually forced all Farmers Fridges in NYC to temporarily shut down while the city figured it out, which the two parties eventually did. From the NYT article:

In negotiations over the last month, the department and the company have agreed that each Farmer’s Fridge machine will be treated, for the most part, as a restaurant — or “food service establishment,” per the health code. Every machine will require a permit, inspections and the same kind of letter grade posted everywhere from McDonald’s to Le Bernardin.

Food vending machines already jump through a lot of regulatory hoops just to be able to serve food in the first place. There are plenty of rules about the construction of these machines that include using food safe materials and not having angled corners (so bacteria doesn’t build up). And as Yo-Kai and Briggo have learned, there is also another layer of compliance for things like access for the visually impaired that must be met when installing machines at airports.

But NYC taking note of these newfangled vending machines could spark a new wave of rules across different cities that startups must comply with. City governments, always on the lookout for new revenue, probably won’t pass up the chance to impose new fines on high-tech vending machines. Companies like Chowbotics and Fresh Bowl in particular, both of which dispense fresh salads, will probably face greater scrutiny, but new administrative procedures are likely to impact companies like Yo-Kai and Basil Street as well.

As long as the regulations don’t become too onerous, this new scrutiny is probably a good thing. Even Farmers Fridge expressed empathy for NYC regulators in the Times piece, saying “New York regulators genuinely seem to be acting out the desire to keep people safe and understand a new business model. You always have to manage the chaos when you’re doing something new and different.”

Move fast and break things may work for software startups, but when it comes to the food we eat, slowing down and making sure it’s safe is probably a good thing.

Take an Instagram Food Robot Tour of San Francisco! Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express, Creator, Blendid and Le Bread Xpress

One of the reasons we hosted our ArticulATE food robot conference in San Francisco this week is because, well, it’s where most food robots are. So it only made sense while I was in town to go on a Food Network-esque trip around town, enjoying all the robot repasts I could.

My tour did not disappoint. I spent the day walking (and Ubering) around SF visiting Cafe X, Yo-Kai Express, Creator, Blendid and Le Bread Xpress. Because it’s better to show than to tell, we created a Spoon Instagram (follow us!) to give you a glimpse at all the cool food robotics happening right now.

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.