This Robot Barista Makes a Good Latee
A ’concierge’ oversees the operation of the automated Cafe X barista robot.
Sometimes a coffee means something: it’s an opportunity to catch up with friends, sit quietly among strangers, or unofficially pay a morning’s rent on your Starbucks office. That’s when you want a big, spacious cafe rich with the sound of typing and dense with the smell of roasted beans and five-minute pour-overs the price of a steak. Other times, though, a coffee is pure fuel: a jolt of caffeine to kick you up and out of your sleepy doldrums. Cafe X is for those times.
When you go to Cafe X, there are no hipster bartenders, and no judgy glances when you ask for a bit of half-and-half. There’s not even a cafe. It’s just a small, rounded kiosk, white on the bottom, with a large glass panel that lets you watch while an industrial robot pumps caramel into your latte. You order at an iPad-powered kiosk, or using Cafe X’s app. Pick your espresso drink, choose from three kinds of beans, and decide whether you want a little syrup, a lot of super, or Insane Syrup. Then pay, and press order. The robot barista then spins around, grabs a cup from the dispenser, and sticks it under the industrial-grade WMF espresso machine. One robot can make several drinks at once, and each takes about 20 seconds. Once your drink is ready, you type in a four-digit pin code, reach into the hatch, and grab your white cup printed with Cafe X’s logo.
One Cafe X robot has been serving coffee at the Hong Kong Science Park for a while now, but the first American kiosk opens today at the Metreon shopping center in San Francisco, after months of preparation. Mostly paperwork, actually: the health department couldn’t figure out what to make of Cafe X, eventually deciding to classify it like a food truck. “We even offered to put wheels on it!” says Stephen Klein, Cafe X’s general manager, but their only eventual requirement was to add a sink, which sits in some closed-off room down the hall. Now that the government understands Cafe X, CEO Henry Hu says they can set up another robot in half an hour.
The Cafe X robot barista.Cafe X
Which they intend to do as quickly as possible, Klein says, assuming they can navigate around what he describes as “the coffee mafia” in San Francisco. Peet’s owns the rights to serve coffee in many of the city’s transit centers, for instance. But anywhere there are a lot of people, moving quickly, Cafe X wants to be there. Rather than waiting in line at Starbucks every morning, they want to offer their morning fix without any of the hassle (or human interaction). But they’re still hoping the robot experience is fun enough that you’ll want to go back every day—that’s why Cafe X isn’t just a vending machine, and why you can watch the robot work as it makes your joe. It’s a tricky balance: Hu even thought about adding more personality to the robot, teaching it to dance or flourish the way a cruise ship taught its robot bartenders, but decided against it. “You don’t want to see it dancing, when you’re like, ‘just make my coffee.'”
A ’concierge’ oversees the operation of the automated Cafe X barista robot.
How Do You Take It?
Hu started working on Cafe X in 2014, and has raised $5 million in venture-capital funding. He also received a Thiel Fellowship in 2016, which gave him $100,000 to drop out of school and work on Cafe X fill-time. He knew a bit about car-building factory robots, which are incredibly precise and programmable, and thought he could use the same arms for other uses. “Some people ask if it’s overkill,” he says, to take a robot that can build a Prius and employ it making lattes. “Maybe it is a little.” Ultimately, he thinks this tech could be applied throughout the food service industry, to other kinds of beverages and beyond. “Cafes are not just coffee,” he says with a smile.
Hu’s robot-server idea is coming into view at the right time, as political and technological debate rages over automation and the future of work. “The jobs that are going away are primarily going away because of automation,” Barack Obama said recently. “And that’s going to accelerate.” Hu mostly wants to talk about coffee, but is clearly interested in where else his robots could work.
For now, though, it’s just coffee. Surprisingly delicious coffee, starting at $2.25—cheaper than you’d find at Sightglass or even Starbucks. Cafe X’s location in the corner of the Metreon may not entice you out of your daily routine. But maybe someday, when you can order coffee at the bottom of the subway station escalator and pick it up at the top, with a tip of your cap to your robot barista, you’ll appreciate that first cup even more.
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Meet The “Bionic Barrista” Whose Mission Is To Terminate Millions Of Minimum Wage Jobs
Tired of your barista giving you attitude, spitting in your coffee if you only mention Trump, or misspelling your name on your morning cup of joe? Surely a robot could do better. Well, we are about to find out, because on Monday, Cafe X opened its very first robotic cafe in San Francisco’s Metreon shopping center Digital Trends reports. Promising “precision crafted specialty coffee in seconds, the way the roaster intended,” Cafe X thinks that anything a human can do, its machines can do better. Or rather just one machine.
Nicknamed Gordon, after a Cafe X employee, this robot mans, or robots, two standard professional coffee machines in order to serve up espressos and lattes. In the San Francisco location, customers can grab a cup of coffee with beans from AKA Coffee, Verve Coffee Roasters, or Peet’s. While the coffee itself may not make Cafe X stand out from the competition, the startup hopes that the robot’s efficiency and utility will.
And it surely will, because while its name may be Gordon, its title is the “bionic barrista” and its primary mission is to terminate millions of minimum wage jobs around the globe, boosting the bottom line for major coffee chains everywhere, whose growth has plateaued and who are desperate to cut on overhead costs. Already the average Cafe X coffee costs more than 10%, or 40 cents less than a similar drink at Starbucks. With greater scale the price will only drop.
While offering clear savings for the business, there will be some tradeoffs – introducing automation and robotics into food service will reduce costs and increase efficiency at the expense of customization and a “human touch.” Some companies – and clients – may prefer a personal experience to an efficient one, or a customized product. The company behind Gordon, however, disagrees: “There’s a lot of work that goes into great coffee. The Cafe X system is designed for humans and robots to collaborate,” Cafe X explains on its websites. “Smart robotics and machine learning working autonomously allows our operations team to focus on sourcing and using fresh ingredients, maintaining extremely high hygiene standards, and ensuring a great customer experience with every single interaction.” According to Cafe X, a great customer experience involves efficiency and replicability. “By being automated, we guarantee every cup of coffee you are served from a Cafe X machine is how the roaster intended you to enjoy their coffee,” Cafe X CEO Henry Hu told CNET.
For clients, the efficiency improvements and passed-through cost savings will likely more than offset any loss of a “human touch” – you can order your cup of coffee ahead of time with the Cafe X mobile app and even schedule a pickup time, if you want. Thanks to the robot’s artificial intelligence software, your pre-orders are taken into consideration alongside walk-in orders to ensure that no one is waiting for too long. And with a single robot capable of making 100 to 120 cups of coffee in an hour, you likely won’t be waiting long at all.
And since bionic barristas not only do not expect a weekly paycheck, but need no healthcare of benefits, the choice for Howard Schultz’ replacement is clear. Oh, and to those 10,000 refugees who had hoped to get a job at Starbucks, our condolences.
Watch ROBOT in action here @
https://youtu.be/UYcTG7YLTQw
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https://youtu.be/jr9cXDNg0uc
and @
https://youtu.be/t42XCAChUN8
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