The Rise (and Fall?) of Food Robotics
The Rise (and Fall?) of Food Robotics
Darian Ahler shares insights from 20 years in the foodtech industry
Having spent my whole career operating at the intersection of food and technology, I’ve been lucky enough to see first-hand the rise of automation and how it has (or hasn’t) been received in the food industry over the past two decades. During that time I have worked in meat processing, indoor farming, next-generation vending and back-of-house automation. I have literally seen the sausage get made (and designed the machines that made it). This experience has driven and informed my core thesis: robots are going to take over the food and beverage industry.
I mean, they have to, right? So many other industries have followed that trend, so why not F&B? While industry employment is stabilizing, labor shortages are still a huge challenge for many establishments. Minimum wage increases have come to 25 states this year (finally) and customers are revolting on the ever-increasing price of fast food. Coupling those challenges with the increased accessibility, quality and cost-reduction of automation, this feels like a no-brainer.
So why haven’t they taken over yet? Over the course of the next few weeks I will walk through the history of modern food robotics, the challenges that they (and the restaurant industry) are facing and how we might solve this problem. Let’s start with a quick history lesson.
A Brief History of Restaurant Innovation
I’m not going to go deep on the full history, but suffice to say “fast food” or “street food” has been in existence since the Roman Empire. The first restaurants showed up in Kaifeng and Hangzhou around 1100 AD and the table d’hôte (noon time communal meal) in France came along in the 16th century. While the history of restaurants is fascinating, let’s focus on the last 130 years in the United States.
Starting in 1896, German-born Max Sielaff invented “automats”, vending machine restaurants, and brought the technology to the U.S. at the turn of the century. In 1902, Joseph Horn and James Hardart opened an automat in New York City, marking the beginning of “fast food” in the United States. These expanded across the eastern seaboard as a way for working professionals, blue and white collar alike, to get a quick, affordable meal on their lunch break.
A few decades later, three innovations occurred almost simultaneously: burger joints, franchising and drive-thrus. White Castle, by many accounts the original fast-food burger joint, opened its first restaurant in 1921 to raving success. And while franchising existed in various versions since the early 18th century (starting with Benjamin Franklin, strangely enough), its modern version appeared in restaurants in 1924 with Roy Allen franchising A&W locations. This model helped companies expand quickly with little capital. And coinciding with the increase of car ownership and the development of the interstate system, the late 1940’s saw an explosion of drive-ins, hops and drive-thrus with West Coast-born chains like In-n-Out, Jack-in-the-Box and McDonald’s.
Now Americans could drive across the United States and get a delicious meal of a burger, fries and a drink delivered straight to their car. This combination created the golden era in the 1950’s and 60’s. Fast food, now an integral part of American culture, continued adding what are now household names: Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC to name a few. This trend continues into the modern day, thanks to relatively recent chains like Starbucks and Jimmy John’s. Nowadays, the top ten fast food companies have over 90,000 locations in the United States alone.
The Robot Revolution
Fast food, fast casual and QSRs now dominate the urban and suburban landscape with no signs of slowing. The Last 20 years have seen another wave of innovation in restaurants, this one focused more around how to serve more food faster with less people. The self-ordering kiosk is probably the most prominent innovation. While it has been around in restaurants for a while, the pandemic dramatically increased adoption. Kiosks or app-based ordering is now ubiquitous for most quick serve establishments, not to mention a good number of sit-down restaurants as well. I would argue this is low-hanging fruit, however, and not really pushing the needle on restaurant innovation and automation. The robot revolution really began in 2015.
This revolution, like much of contemporary tech, started in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. Zume Pizza, a robotic pizza company, started in 2015 and quickly became a unicorn, raising almost half a billion dollars in three years for its vision to revolutionize pizza, delivery, packaging… and everything in food. That same year Cafe X, a robotic coffee kiosk, launched in the Metreon, a mall in Downtown S.F. Eatsa opened a tech-forward reimagining of the Automat that was popular a century prior. Elsewhere, LA-based Miso Robotics launched a burger-flipping robot in 2016. A couple years later Spyce, a fully autonomous restaurant serving healthy grain-based bowls, set up shop in Boston. The robots were coming fast and the tech world couldn’t get enough of them. This was a sea change and VCs were taking notice. It seemed everywhere you looked, some other startup was trying to revolutionize some component of food or dining.
With the rapid rise of robotic food companies a discussion arose that was a mix of “we’re living in the future!” and “the robots are taking our jobs!” This combination of excitement and fear is common with changes like these, but more so it was a big indicator that food robotics were now part of the public forum. The pace didn’t stop, however. Entrepreneurs saw the check sizes some of these companies were getting, and the market got HOT with startups trying to cash in on the hype. Other coffee kiosks like Briggo, BBox, Artly and my own company Truebird expanded or entered the market. Ono Foods and Blendid were slinging smoothies. Creator was grilling burgers. Yo-Kai Express started delivering ramen. Karakuri, Nala and Lab2Fab began making meals. Dishcraft wanted to clean everyone’s dishes. And then Covid hit.
The Pandemic: A Shot in the Arm for Food Tech
It is impossible to discuss the food and beverage industry (or much of anything, really) without acknowledging the pandemic’s impact and lasting effects. Overnight, restaurant business worldwide was decimated and operators were desperately looking for ways to stay alive. The food tech world, in its infancy (albeit being a HUGE toddler) did its best to answer the call. Mobile ordering and 3PD went from novelty to fixture. QR codes got a revival and ghost kitchens took over commissaries and shuttered restaurants everywhere. For those restaurants that found a way to survive during the worst of the pandemic, they were now facing staffing challenges due to illness, regulation and other risks associated with Covid. And now everyone wanted their meals to be “contactless”. Robotic companies like Wonder, Hyphen (formerly Ono) and my previous employer, Vebu (formerly Wavemaker Labs) seized the opportunity to show how automation could solve all the restaurants’ problems with complex, contactless solutions that would make and serve meals from scratch without human intervention. On the other end, Flytrex, Nuro and Coco helped with robotic last mile delivery. For every step of the food making process, there were a dozen companies ready to help with robotic solutions.
The Robots Are…Here?
So four years later, and where are we? Logically, ten years after “the revolution” began and a pandemic which pushed these solutions to the fore, we should be reaching “peak automation” now, right? Every fast-food chain is run by robots and its remaining employees have joined the borg, of course? Not exactly.
The pandemic also killed a ton of restaurants and tech companies alike. Briggo sold to Coke in 2020 for “undisclosed terms”. Truebird went dark and Bbox closed. Dishcraft washed out. Creator flamed. Zume “pivoted” to packaging in 2020 before finally folding in 2023. Karakuri, a challenger in the frying robot space, went under.
There have been some successes as well. Ono pivoted to become Hyphen and created the Makeline. They have received an investment from Chipotle’s fund Cultivate Next. Similarly, Vebu has garnered investment from Cultivate Next with their Autocado as they focused more on back of house automation than the next-gen vending machines like Piestro and Nommi from years previous.
Wonder pivoted from mobile kitchens that cook en route to multi-concept restaurants with hyper-local delivery. They recently just got a fresh $700 million investment (with just 11 locations, mind you). Another big player in the food equipment space, Middleby, acquired Lab2Fab to put some chips on the robotic kitchen of the future. Yo-Kai Express has aggressively expanded to at least 50 locations (unofficial reports put that number way higher).
Even with the “winners”, we have yet to see any robotic solutions reach notable scale. There are a good number of interesting data points that show possible scale in the coming years, but with how long some of these companies have been around and how “bad” the labor challenges are, there seems to be a mismatch of the supposed supply and demand of these solutions. So what’s really going on here? If robots were supposed to take over, why haven’t they? Is everyone waiting for AI to reach full sentience before implementing their physical counterparts? Follow along for Part II in this series, where we look at the core challenges facing the restaurant and robotics industries and how some of the key players are dealing with them.
Contributed by Darian Ahler.
Darian Ahler has spent two decades in the food automation and restaurant robotics industry. He most recently served as Head of Product Strategy at Vebu (formerly Wavemaker Labs) and CEO of Bobacino. Prior experience includes co-founding Truebird and work at AeroFarms.
