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The next
frontier in automated food could be coming to an office
kitchen near you, complete with big, salad-making
robots.
Relying
on AI to make on-demand lunches at work could provide
employees with more healthy options while cutting down
on the time they spend away from their desks searching
for food, say two companies at the forefront of the work
lunch frontier.
Byte
Foods provides an automated, refrigerator-like store
where employees can buy prepared meals from third party
restaurants and food vendors. Chowbotics offers a
robotic chef-in-a-box that prepares salads on demand.
Along with firms working on self-driving cars that can
carry dozens of grocery bags to knee-high food bots that
navigate sidewalks to deliver meals, the two Bay Area
companies were on hand at ArticulAte, a food robotics
summit in San Francisco hosted by Smart Kitchen Summit
and The Spoon.
“It’s
like a mini-Whole Foods for your office,” Lee Mokri,
founder and VP of sales for Byte, said in an interview.
“You’ll see Blue Bottle iced coffee in there,
you’ll see Urban Remedy salads and wraps and Kombucha
and parfaits.”
For those
food companies, offices are a huge untapped market,
Mokri said.
“You’ve
got this captive group of customers. You know they’re
going to be there every day. You know what they want to
eat. You can market to them directly,” he said. “You
are inserting your brand into their lives rather than
asking them to take time out of their day to go to your
store.”
Unlike a
traditional vending machine where the vendor pays the
office to set up their machine, companies ranging from
Apple, Google and Amazon to smaller nonprofits and law
firms pay Byte to install its fridges in their offices,
Mokri said. Employees can then just swipe their credit
cards and open the fridge door.
“You
treat it like a normal retail experience where you can
pick things up, you can put them back, take multiple
things at the same time,” he said. When you close the
door, the device figures out what you took and charges
you for it.
If Byte
is bringing a grocery store to the office kitchen,
Chowbotics wants to bring a salad bar with a chef.
Through Sally, their robotic chef-in-a-box, customers
can order custom salads, prepared in the moment. Deepak
Sekar, founder and CEO of the Redwood City-based
Chowbotics, said salads are a healthy option for
employees that also cut down on the time workers might
spend going out.
Chowbotics
doesn’t directly operate the roughly 50 machines it
has in about 30 locations in the US and Europe. Instead,
Chowbotics sells the machine, which costs about $30,000,
and the new owner maintains it and makes sure it’s
stocked with ingredients, Sekar said.
“We
want to create an Apple experience,” he said, where
clients can take their Sally out of the box, plug it in
and start selling salads without any training or help
from Chowbotics. Speaking after his presentation, Sekar
said the cost savings from automation allows Sally’s
operators to sell salads for as little as $4 and still
make a profit.
Byte
doesn’t prepare any of the food it sells, but Mokri
said they can use customer data to see what kinds of
products make the most sense in each location. For
example, he said, Tesla has Byte machines in its factory
for manufacturing employees.
“They’re
looking for high protein, affordable sandwiches and
denser entrees,” Mokri said. “Whereas a small law
firm or ad agency may be looking for salads and green
drinks and that type of thing.”
The
company can even see which products are about to expire
and send targeted ads to customers it knows like those
sandwiches or drinks. Mokri said San Rafael-based Byte
now has more than 500 fridges in the Bay Area and though
they get a fee from those locations, the primary revenue
source is the products sold in the fridges.
Both Byte
and Chowbotics also have devices outside of offices, in
airports, hospitals and college campuses — places with
captive audiences. Although those locations tend to be
secure, Sekar said there are challenges. In France, he
said, students hacked one of the salad machines and used
it to display adult images. At another company office,
Chowbotics noticed the machine kept shutting off during
the day.
“The
employees had a habit of unplugging the machine from the
socket,” he said. They were using the socket to plug
in their laptops.
Sally was
updated, he said, to make the robot harder to unplug.
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