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Posted on 02/10/2021 9:18:07 AM PST by mylife
DoorDash has acquired salad-making robot startup Chowbotics, the companies announced Monday. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the Chowbotics team have all become DoorDash employees, and the company will operate independently within DoorDash.
“We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access to fresh meals, with its groundbreaking robotics product and vision,” DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang said in statement emailed to The Verge. “With the Chowbotics team on board, we can explore new use cases and customers, providing another service to help our merchants grow.”
Chowbotics was founded in 2014, and its fresh food robot Sally — a rectangular machine that’s essentially a salad vending machine — can create customizable salads, grain and poke bowls, parfaits, cereals, and snacks all within a small space. The robot is used by companies like universities, hospitals, and grocery stores, according to a blog post from DoorDash general manager Penn Daniel.
DoorDash currently has the greatest share of the US food delivery market, around 48 percent, ahead of rivals like UberEats and Grubhub. Its revenue skyrocketed in 2020 as restaurants closed in-person dining due to the pandemic and customers relied on delivery services. But when DoorDash went public late last year, its IPO was criticized by some analysts as lacking in value; they questioned how DoorDash would be able to continue to grow if demand for food delivery subsides once the pandemic is over.
Analyst David Trainer of New Constructs said at the time, “We think this proposed public equity offering holds no value, $0, beyond bailing out private investors before unsuspecting public investors realize the business is not viable in its current form.”
But the Chowbotics acquisition raises interesting questions about DoorDash’s post-pandemic plans. Daniel wrote in the blog post that Chowbotics will allow DoorDash to help the restaurants that use its delivery platform expand their offerings. It seems likely that Chowbotics’ vending machines would fit into the ghost kitchen model, which are delivery-only restaurants that some in the industry regard warily. DoorDash has a ghost kitchen facility in California, and last year announced it was working with Chicago restaurant Krazy Hog — which closed in-person dining during the pandemic — as part of its Reopen for Delivery initiative.
If you’re ordering for delivery, chances are you’d never know whether your salad was made by a Chowbotics robot or a human unless the restaurant tells you. It’s not uncommon for restaurants to brand their delivery operations under a different name — like when some diners discovered the pizzas they ordered from “Pasqually’s” actually came from kids’ eatery Chuck E. Cheese.
It demands $15.00 an hour PLUS benefits.
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Most times, we just order directly from the restaurant if they still deliver. Just Lysol the outside packaging and good to go.
Salad from a machine not only sounds delicious, but I’m sure it’s very nutritious too. /s
If I’m going to a machine, or even door dash, I want some good old fashioned junk food. Not something that taste like crap and must have been frankensteined not to be perishable.
Why can’t she build a salad herself?
Even if you can’t boil water or use a microwave you can still toss a salad from raw ingredients.
I would think cleaning the machines and keeping bugs out would be the biggest problems.
How many times do you get a roach in your salad before you stop buying?
I understand your point, but automation is unstoppable to some degree. I’ve am not in the restaurant business but I’ve seen a lot of new services have been invented; from burger flipping machines, automatic dish washer that rinses, sanitizes, dries and stacks fresh plates, and now this salad machine. It slices, it dices, it’s indestructible! McDonalds paid nearly half a billion for software that can understand your order in a drive-through in almost any language or accent.
It’s not that it helps the bottom line as much as it makes operations run a lot more smoothly. Machines work 24 hours a day, they don’t call in sick, show up late, require benefits, talk back, gossip or cause workplace conflict. Now I am certain that Congress and the CBO did not factor this into their proposed $15/hour minimum wage hike. For a place that operates 24 hours a day, every $15/hour position costs $1800 a week plus payroll taxes and workers compensation insurance and maybe other benefits etc. The amortization costs on any of these devices will come in lower than that.
I’m sorry, I don’t need a robot to make my food or deliver it, and I am pretty housebound.
I don’t think they are “doing it” so much as operating a subsidiary that provides this service/device to restaurants. It doesn’t make logistical sense that GrubHub drivers have to go to pick up from 2 locations to deliver burgers and a salad. My guess is they want to upsell services to their restaurant clients who would then provide you a burger and a salad.
Why do they sell precut salad in bags at the grocer?
People are lazy retards.
Oh I’ll pay more cuz I am to dumb to slice up veg...
It’s not for you, or really any of we consumers. It is for the restaurants. Imagine a banquet hall and all the dishes that need to be washed. Do you have a dishwasher? Imagine the cost of washing dishes in a banquet hall. So now imagine a device that will scrape plates, rinse, soap and sanitize, dry and stack dishes as fast as you can load them - like a coin sorter. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with eliminating menial tasks. It’s practically already humans doing a robot’s work. Emotionless, rote tasks like dish washing, flipping burgers, cooking fries and chopping carrots can and already are to a degree automated. They sell pre-peeled carrots in the market (I don’t buy them, we peel our own too) but the process is automated - a scaled down version of a logging machine that strips the bark off trees.
Automation in the electronics industry cracks me up.
“I don’t want to pay ‘mylife’ to troubleshoot circuits, so I will buy a million dollar prober, send mylife to school to learn how to run it and program it and repair it”
LOL
As I understand it, the pre-cut bags of lettuce in the market started out as a way to profit from waste. They were using the left-over pieces from salad suppliers and distributors who were discarding the loose outside pieces so the heads of lettuce looked good stacked in the market. They took those excess pieces and chopped and bagged them. After it became acceptable to consumers and demand increased, they expanded to using whole heads of lettuce and even bags of cole slaw (without the sauce). I will admit to buying that. I like cole slaw, so I make my own. But more often I just sliver off cabbage and dress it with Italian. I like bigger pieces. More fun to chew and easier to stab with a fork :-)
The pre-sliced leafy greens come in pre-mixed packages. You can buy 1/4lb of this 1/4lb of that and 1/2 pound of something else. Probably not going to save much.
And I find if I slice up my celery the day I buy it and then put it in a ziplock bag, it lasts longer than if I leave the whole thing together and just cut off a few stalks each day. They start to wilt quickly.
I do slice up my own pineapples as well. They want far too much to do it for you.
Well I don’t know about electronics per se, but some or another form of automation is used just about everywhere. The machines don’t need 24 hour maintenance and programming. Just routine maintenance and the occasional repair. One full time technician can service 100’s or even 1000’s of restaurants.
I guess my point was more about the minimum wage hike, and unintended consequences of that. At some point the amortization costs (and hassle factor of scheduling and working with humans) will beat labor costs and we will witness the vanishing of those $15 hour jobs year after year the more they are adopted in the industries. $15 an hour, plus the employers share of tax, plus the insurance is more like $20/hour.
>>McDonalds paid nearly half a billion for software that can understand your order in a drive-through in almost any language or accent.
>>
>>It’s not that it helps the bottom line as much as it makes operations run a lot more smoothly. Machines work 24 hours a day, they don’t call in sick, show up late, require benefits, talk back, gossip or cause workplace conflict.
Just a few years ago the drive thrus in America were using telecenters in India to take drivers’ orders. The person taking your order was not onsite at the restaurant. Easy to put someone else in the rotation if some high schooler decided not to go to work that day.
But those lower end jobs were learning experiences for young adults. Learn to show up every day. Learn to put in your 8 hours. Learn how much the government takes out of your paycheck before you ever receive it.
I didn’t know they used telecenters, interesting. But this new software should be better, can order in scores of languages and accents according to what I read, the software auto-detects the language. Of course I agree about the entry level jobs but you can’t stop progress or technology. I’m stopping here before I go into a rant about education.
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