While much has been made about White Castle rolling out the Flippy 2 fry station robot to 100 more of its 350 locations, we thought we’d take this chance to showcase some smaller news stories from the food robot universe in this week’s food robot roundup.
Robot Chefs Enlist in The Military
We’ve seen food robots in restaurants, hospitals, universities, and malls, but placing them on military bases is new. The U.S. Department of Defense is deploying Dexai Robotics’ automated sous chefs to ten military U.S. military bases. The robotic arms use AI and computer vision to interact with their surroundings and use standard kitchen utensils to prepare various meals. The ten robots will cost the department $1.6 million to reduce food waste, improve sanitation, and keep facilities adequately staffed. The first one was deployed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield California at the end of last year in a dining facility that serves around 950 people a day.
For Dexai, the news is just another sign of the company’s momentum. The Boston-based startup also recently made news through a new trial of its robotic system with Gordon, one of the biggest foodservice companies in the country. The two companies are trialing Alfred, the salad-assembly robot at Gordon’s developmental test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Wing’s Flock Grows
Drone service Wing announced this week that it had completed 200,000 commercial deliveries, with a significant amount of them in its primary market of Australia. It makes more than 1,000 deliveries a day and has Australia’sring with Coles, one of Australia’s leading supermarket chains.
The partnership will involve Wing making deliveries in Canberra, Australia’s capital, and sparks debate of the efficacy and viability of drone deliveries in rural vs. urban areas. In some cases, such as when Australian-based drone company Swoop Aero has delivered Pfizer vaccines to Malawi, drones have been used to deliver critical supplies (like medicine) to hard-to-reach areas. Vaccines require ultra-cold chain conditions, and the Swoop Aero drones can bypass global supply chain bottlenecks to distribute vaccines in remote communities. In the case of a city-based delivery like with Wing, drone delivery can reduce traffic congestion, accidents, and greenhouse gas emissions.
In general, last-mile delivery has been rapidly growing and this week multicultural grocery delivery service Weee! announced $425 million in funding. We also covered Kiwibot’s $7.5M pre-series A funding a few weeks ago and the global last mile delivery market size is projected to be $128.54 billion USD this year.
The Turnkey Robotic Restaurant
You’ve heard of software-as-a-service and even robots-as-a-service, but have you heard of restaurants-as-a-service? This week Nala Robotics debuted Nala Marketplace, a network of customizable robotic chefs that can prepare recipes from various cuisines and enable restaurateurs to launch a new digital restaurant in a day. The marketplace goes hand-in-hand with the robot kitchens Nala produces, which involve a system of multiple robots using articulating arms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to prepare, cook, and serve food.
Restaurant chefs and owners will be able to upload recipes and menu items to the secure database and create a virtual storefront. From there, customers will be able to access these menu items and place orders sent directly to the chefs in the robot kitchen. It all sounds very futuristic, but the first Nala Marketplace location opened last month in Naperville, Illinois, where several other restaurants by Nala Robotics are operating.
According to Ajay Sunkara, cofounder and CEO of Nala Robotics, Nala Marketplace reduces labor expenses by 60 percent, and restaurants can be set up in less than 24 hours. This has significant benefits for restaurant owners since upfront costs and labor costs can make it difficult to start a restaurant. Additionally, the flexibility of the robots to make food from many cuisines expands the options beyond the capabilities of human chefs and could also enable restaurateurs to start ghost kitchens.
Meet Dashbotics
After acquiring robotic bowl food vending machine startup Chowbotics last year, it seems that they’re expanding their food robot plans internally as well. Doordash filed trademark applications in December and early February for the names Dashbotics, Tex-Mess, and Queso Your Way. The first could indicate a plan to integrate Chowbotics into Doordash and position the platform as a white-label offering for other restaurants to launch their own consumer-facing kiosks, or it could be a sign of Doordash looking to leverage their own brand for the robotic kiosks.
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