Karakuri's robotic chef
Credit: Karakuri
And what could be more futuristic than installing a robot chef in your supermarket? Barney Wragg, the chief executive of robotic chef start-up Karakuri, has spent lockdown fielding a wave of interest from supermarkets and food retailers keen to buy automatic food production machines.
But coronavirus restrictions mean that Wragg, a former music industry executive who previously ran Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment business, has spent hours showing his robot off on video calls rather than offering in-person robotically-prepared meals.
“As people get really into using faster and faster e-commerce delivery services, I think the idea of walking into a supermarket becomes less and less attractive,” he says. “I genuinely think the whole concept of a supermarket is really in flux and we don’t know how much that flux is going to be yet.”
Karakuri has raised £13.5m in funding from backers including Ocado and early Deliveroo investor Hoxton Ventures for its robot, which rotates to grab ingredients and mix them together. The first installation of the artificial chef is expected to take place in Ocado’s staff canteen, but Wragg also sees it replacing salad bars in supermarkets.
Landing a supermarket contract can transform the fortunes of a start-up and set it on the path to becoming a global business. But supermarkets can sour on plugging in new technology.
In 2017, Walmart began using robots developed by American start-up Bossa Nova Robotics in its stores to carry out stock checks. The robots silently moved through the store, scanning shelves to count inventory.
But as the pandemic continued and in-person shopping gave way to employees picking items off shelves for e-commerce sales, Walmart said it found that humans were better than robots at counting stock. The robots were ditched and the start-up laid off 50pc of its employees.
One of the shelf-scanning robots which Walmart scrapped earlier this year
Credit: Bossa Nova Robotics
If supermarkets are apprehensive about buying robots for their stores, then the future may instead involve sticking miniature sensors to hardware in the store to collect masses of data on temperature, spillages and the number of people in the supermarket.
“It’s astounding how little data some [supermarkets] have,” says William Cowell de Gruchy, the chief executive of British start-up Infogrid which is in talks with supermarkets to help them gain an understanding of everything that goes on inside stores using its stick-on sensors.
“Some things they’re very sophisticated about such as the layout of aisles … they put a lot of time into that,” he adds, “I’d say they’re very behind the curve on the use of data.”
In the future, supermarkets are likely to use miniscule sensors to track things like potential spillages which are a surprisingly significant problem for the industry.
“One of the biggest costs for supermarkets in the UK is getting sued by people on slips and trips,” Cowell de Gruchy, a former British Army officer, says. “Catching those leaks early and stopping them is a massive deal.”
Supermarkets hoovering up increasing amounts of data gives rise to a pressing issue: Where should all that data go?
Most experts advise using cloud computing, but supermarkets are often reluctant to hand over their data to Amazon.
Ben-Porat says many supermarkets tell him they don’t want seemingly innocent data stored on Amazon’s servers in case the business uses that information to gain a competitive advantage. “Even though it’s just photos of bananas, they don’t want Amazon to know how many bananas are purchased at the till,” he says.
Edgify’s technology attaches webcams to self checkouts which can gradually teach themselves to recognise produce and even to check people’s ages, eliminating the need to send images back to a central server.
Google Amazon Cloud chart
Keeping all of the information in the supermarket prevents potential privacy issues, Ben-Porat says. The French government shut down a trial that involved transmitting self-checkout images over the internet after the supermarket chain found that many of the images featured children or people’s credit cards as they paid for their groceries.
Supermarkets clearly face a number of stumbling blocks over the introduction of new technology such as privacy concerns and persistent cost worries, but this new wave of start-up entrepreneurs is convinced that there are billion dollar opportunities to be found in upgrading stores.
In the future, expect to be shopping alongside robots while your local supermarket monitors what you’re picking up, the air quality and the number of people inside the store.
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