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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Zimplistic

Video: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels Visits Singapore to Talk AI With Inventors of the Rotimatic

Back when I worked at Gigaom, every year we’d invite Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on stage at our big cloud computing conference and interview him about the future of the Internet and distributed computing.

Nowadays Vogels is conducting his own interviews, heading out to far-flung locales to talk to innovators about how they are using cloud computing and AI to build products and change the world in ways both big and small.

It’s all for his new Amazon web show titled Now Go Build with Werner Vogels, and for his most recent interview, the cloud computing pioneer went to Singapore to talk to the inventors of the Rotimatic about why they built machine learning into a home food robot.

The video is a fun watch as Vogels visits with the wife and husband team of Pranoti Nagarkar and Rishi Israni in the middle of a bustling Singapore restaurant and later heads into the kitchen to try his hand at making his own rotis.

The conversation high point for me was hearing Nagarkar and Israni talk about why they decided to power what was, at first, a fairly simple automated roti maker with machine learning.

“I remember there is one particular phase where we tried to make it an embedded system where you have a fixed program that could run it and it could find out the right proportion of flour and water,” said Nagarkar, who came up for the idea of the Rotimatic after getting tired of making roti every day by hand.

“That wasn’t enough,” she said. ” You had to build machine learning in because every time you make a dough ball you learn something more about it and you use it for the next dough ball. It just kept making the machine better and better.”

Israni agreed and said they also realized machine learning would be necessary to ensure high performance of the robot over its lifetime.

“We see machine learning mostly in computer systems where things aren’t moving much” said Israni.  “Here with life, there is degradation in all the tolerances and all the parts, so the performance of parts keep shifting over time.

Eventually, the conversation turned towards the challenges of today’s food system.

“I’ve realized a few big problems with our world,” said Israni. “Seventy percent of illnesses are lifestyle disease-related, and they are primarily related to the type of food you consume.”

The other big problem is food waste. “One-third of world’s food is wasted,” said Israni.

Israni sees these two challenges are intertwined. “On one hand, you have people who are unhealthy who are maybe eating a little more than they need and the other you have people who are dying because of lack of food. We find that these two problems are prime problems to be solved by the kitchen of the future.”

How does a more technology forward kitchen helping solve these challenges? According to Israni, through shared data and more connected appliances.

“This is an information data problem,” he said. “We already know how to fix the knowledge gaps, but we can also execution gaps by building machines that are fully connected and exchange information with one another to delivery a cooking experience.”

Vogels agreed.

We also need “to see all of these devices as a platform and not only as a single function device,” said Vogels. “Software eats the world.”

“But you can’t eat software,” replied Israni with a smile.

You can watch the full video below:

Now Go Build with Werner Vogels – S1E2 Singapore | Amazon Web Services

CES 2019 Video: Watch the Rotimatic Make Tortillas

We were excited earlier this week when Zimplistic announced that its Rotimatic flatbread maker would be adding flour tortilla recipes to its repertoire. We were even more excited when the company brought the Rotimatic to our Food Tech Live event so we could try them firsthand.

They did not disappoint. Using just flour, oil and water, the Rotimatic can mix, knead and bake fresh tortillas in just 90 seconds. The result is a warm, fresh-tasting tortilla. They come out a wee bit crispy, so they aren’t like the kind you get at a taqueria, but they would be a nice option for your next taco Tuesday (or any occasion, really).

The flour tortilla recipe hasn’t been released yet into the wild, so existing Rotimatic users can’t make them today, but the update should be arriving soon. Now the question is whether the addition of flour tortillas will entice new buyers to pony up a thousand bucks for the device.

Watch the Rotimatic Make Flour Tortillas

Zimplistic’s Rotimatic Can Now Make Flour Tortillas

Zimplistic announced today that it has added tortilla making and gluten-free functionality to its already immensely popular Rotimatic.

The Rotimatic is a connected countertop device that measures, dispenses, kneads and bakes dough to create ready-to-eat flatbreads in 90 seconds. According to the Zimplistic press announcement, its Rotimatic is “enjoyed by more than 50,000 families across 20 countries.” If we assume that 50,000 families equals 50,000 units sold, that’s an increase of 10,000 units since we last checked in with the company back in October, when it had sold 40,000 units.

The Rotimatic can already make a host of different flatbreads, including pizza dough, puris and pearl millet flour flatbread. In a statement, Zimplistic said that it’s been getting a lot of requests for tortilla capabilities, especially in the U.S. Adding tortillas to its roster, along with a gluten-free recipe could help ease the sting of the device’s high price tag of $1,000 and get more people to purchase the device.

Zimplistic will be at our Food Tech Live event this evening. We’ll be sure to sample the goods and report back on how they taste. Additionally, you can check out this podcast Mike Wolf did with Zimplistic Co-Founder, Rishi Israni.

When This Food Robot Inventor Faced Gender Bias, She Hopped On A Motorbike

On its own, Rotimatic’s success is a great story: Tens of thousands of products sold.  $40 million in revenue. A new round of funding for the company aimed at helping to bring the flat-bread robot to new markets.

But one of the things that makes the Rotimatic story so cool is it was invented by a woman by the name of Pranoti Nagarkar. .

Of course, I don’t need to tell you the world of tech is a tough place for women. Gender bias has become so institutionalized at this point that even our AI has it when it comes to hiring women. So when a story like the Rotimatic’s inventor comes along, not only should we celebrate it, but we should look to founders like Nagarkar for lessons that could benefit others.

So this week when I saw Nagarkar had shared an anecdote on Linkedin about the challenge of being a female in tech, I thought it was worth re-sharing. In the post, Nagarkar recalled an answer she had given at a conference when asked how she had dealt with bias.

From her update:

During the early days, the suppliers I wanted to partner with thought I was the salesperson for the company, not the heavy lifter behind the product. Or perhaps, I made good rotis by hand so I was included in the team for that. They didn’t take me seriously. To fight the stereotype, one of the small things I did was to start riding a large cruiser motorbike when I went to meet them. This had them see me in a different light and made for a huge perception change.

Like other guys, I don’t face these same challenges, so I don’t have to worry about implicit bias when going to a meeting. For Nagarkar and other women, it’s just different.

I am sure there were many more challenges like this for Nagarkar along the way, which is part of what makes her story so inspiring. For me, I often think of these issues as a dad. My daughter, who just entered high school, has considered joining her high school robotics team which, despite a strong recruiting effort, is still predominantly male. With more stories like that of Nagarkar’s, I hope she and more of her classmates will be inspired to see robotics as a path to explore.

Zimplistic has Sold Roughly 40,000 Rotimatics

It looks like Zimplistic can lay claim to having the most popular food robot in the world. In a recent interview with The Spoon’s Mike Wolf, Zimplistic CEO, Rishi Israni said that his company has sold approximately 40,000 Rotimatics, and while we haven’t conducted a massive global audit, we can’t think of another food robot that even comes close.

Of course, it kind of depends on what you define as a “robot” and what you think of as an appliance. The Rotimatic is a countertop device that does one thing: makes rotis and other flatbread. And while the Rotimatic doesn’t have articulating arms and gripping hands, Israni and his wife, Pranoti Nagarkar Israni, the mechanical engineer who invented the Rotimatic, definitely consider it a robot.

The rotimatic takes raw ingredients: oil, flour and water, and turns them into rotis. A lot of rotis, actually. Israni said that so far that people have made more than 25 million rotis with the device, and that many people who purchase the Rotimatic make rotis every day. But it’s how the Rotimatic handles those basic inputs: water, flour and oil, that makes it a robot, according to Israni.

Part of the appeal of the Rotimatic is that people add their own inputs. This makes the rotis fresher, and negates the need for preservatives or other alterations (like sugar), which would make the rotis less healthy. Whereas something like a dishwasher will follow a straight path to getting your dishes clean, the Rotimatic pays attention to what’s happening inside the machine and adjusts accordingly. It is this ability to adjust to variable inputs that makes the Rotimatic a robot, said Israni.

Big, commercial robots like Flippy may grab headlines, but Rotimatic is quickly grabbing marketshare. At $1,000 a pop, Rotimatics are not cheap, but the company has tapped into a basic building block to cuisines around the world. Almost every culture has their own version of flatbread: rotis, tortillas, pitas, etc. Therefore, the market for Rotimatic is truly global.

Others see the value of Zimplistic’s vision as well. The company raised $30 million earlier this year, bringing its total funding to $48.5 million. With nearly 40,000 Rotimatics sold, the company has already generated revenues of roughly $40 million in sales.

I’ll actually be chatting on-stage with Israni next week at our Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle. He’s part of an amazing panel we’ve put together on The Food Robot Evolution. There’s still time to buy your ticket, but we’ll also be recapping our conversation here on The Spoon, so stay tuned.

Here’s the full interview between Mike and Rishi:

Podcast: Building Food Robots With Zimplistic’s Rishi Israni

While most of us only started to think about food robots in the last couple of years, Rishi Israni and his cofounder (and wife) Pranoti Nagarkar Israni have been thinking about them every day for a decade. That’s because ten years ago Pranoti decided to build a robot to create the Indian flat bread called roti so she wouldn’t have to make it every day by hand. Fast forward to 2018 and the Rotimatic flatbread robot is arguably the most successful home kitchen robot in the embryonic food robot market.

In this podcast I talk to Rishi about the journey behind the Rotimatic, what the difference is between and appliance and a robot and where exactly these things called food robots are going in the future.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking play below, download it directly or subscribe in Apple podcasts.

If you’d like to see the Rotimatic and meet Rishi and Pranoti in person, they’ll be at the Smart Kitchen Summit in four weeks. You can use the discount code PODCAST for 25% off tickets. Just use this link with the discount applied and we hope to see you there!