Imagine it’s pizza-and-wine night (is that a thing? It should be). Flashback to what the journey might look like. From production to preparation, the middle part of the journey of goods is not always top-of-mind. It’s less glamorous. But an efficient supply chain is crucial to cost-saving, safety, optimizing materials, and time; overall, ensuring smoother transactions. Let's take a look at the behind-the-scenes work that the supply chain involves and how it’s adapting to robotic technology to automate processes. Robotic technology is being used in many fields, as we know, but today, we narrow it to the food supply chain to understand the ecosystem of production processes and where robot technology fits in.

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What do we mean when we refer to robotics?

Extending the traditional meaning of robots, we adapt builtin’s definition to mean machines that can be programmed, are able to mimic human actions, as well as having varying levels of autonomous control, ranging from human-controlled bots to fully-autonomous bots, which includes robotic technology used in droids and drones.

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What does the food supply chain include?

Harvard’s definition of the food supply chain from farm to the table includes processes such as production, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal. While humans are needed at every stage of this value chain, we find robotic technology’s assistance growing in these processes. Today’s focus will touch on a few of these stages, namely harvesting, preparing, and delivering. 

We won’t touch on distribution and disposal here but see our truck tech industry and waste recovery and management industry hub to learn more about food waste.

The following “food story” is a collection of elements from our varying industry hubs and does not reflect a real-life example, but shows robotic involvement, at varying stages.

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First, grow and gather food

Where you have labor-intensive tasks like seeding, crop-picking, and collecting, you might see more robotic technology automating precision agriculture with smart farming, addressing a labor shortage issue. 

For indoor solutions, players like AppHarvest, which acquired Root Ai and its Robot Virgo for USD 60 million for artificial intelligence to help indoor farmers with precision and smart farm decision-making, will use Root Ai to further strengthen its robotic services. The amount of data collected from Virgo to analyze crop health, optimize agricultural operations, and predict yield is especially valuable.

Also, players like, Soft Robotics, a provider of robotics gripping systems launched its new mGripAI technology, mGripAI, targeting the food industrySoft Robotics, to automate complex food processing tasks previously done manually.

Perhaps in the future, a vineyard could use Kubota, a Japanese listed agricultural machinery manufacturer. Kubota announced that it is developing a new AI-based autonomous vineyard robot that can monitor grape's growth! The robots use AI and cameras to autonomously navigate the vineyards and provide insights into the growth of the grapes. Furthermore, Kubota plans to develop the robot’s capabilities to harvest wine grapes on its own in the future. 

There’s more to explore in smart farming that we haven’t covered here like food processing and packing, which can be found in our industry hub.

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Next, prepare the food 

Kitchen jobs aren’t always easy and working to meet hungry-customer demands can take a toll on the labor force. Seeing this gap and the need for automation, robotics technology is being applied in cooking spaces.

For instance, Picnic debuted its first automated pizza assembly system in October 2019. This conveyor belt and canister-based system allow high-volume pizza production (300 12" pizzas per hour or 180 18" pizzas per hour) with customizable toppings. Later in October 2020, Picnic unveiled its second-generation pizza-making robot, with product improvements including clear canisters that allow kitchen operators to monitor ingredient levels; changes to components allowing easier cleaning and maintenance; and multiple emergency stop buttons across different parts of the kitchen robot. Its system can also be used to assemble other food items such as sandwiches, salad bowls, tacos, and burritos!

Featured in the EDGE100 report was Miso Robotics, which offers a range of kitchen automation solutions and a software platform that powers its robots (the latter as a standalone service). The company’s latest product line includes second-generation burger-flipping robot “Flippy 2,” high-volume chicken-wing-frying robot “Flippy Wings,” frying and seasoning robot “Flippy Lite,” and beverage-dispensing robot “Sippy,” and its cooking platform “CookRight.”

Source: select section of the SPEEDA Edge market map.

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Lastly, deliver to doorstep

Once the food’s prepped and popped out of the oven, there’s a final step before you can dig in—delivery. Robotic tech has begun assisting this crucial step as well.

Last-mile delivery automation (LMD) covers the process of transporting products from a distribution center—usually a retail store or warehouse—to the end consumer. However, we are seeing delivery drones and droids being deployed in campus settings and even in cases like when SkyDrop, the drone-based delivery provider. SkyDrop (formerly known as Flirtey) partnered with Domino’s in January this year to start commercial drone-based delivery trials in New Zealand.

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Conclusion

Robots involve complex technology—no doubt. But if you look at most use cases, they are solving both simple and sophisticated problems in our everyday lives. Many players are starting to offer Robots-as-a-Service and designing them to coexist with humans. The food supply chain is just one example of how robotic technology is applied, though it relies on and interacts with technologies like AI, 5G and Edge computing to optimize functions. A pizza-wine night’s back story might involve more robotic tech punctuating each process in time to come!