Meet San Francisco’s new, giant, smoothie-making robot

Chef B works around the clock, remembers everyone’s smoothie preferences and needs only about two minutes to blend a 12-ounce order of mango, kefir, agave and coconut water.

Chef B doesn’t take lunch breaks. Or talk. For Chef B, as you may have guessed, is a robot.

The automation revolution is well under way in the food world, constantly pivoting around new ways to serve consumers without human interference. The Bay Area is a pioneer in this pursuit, its dining world shaped by robots that can now serve coffee, chop salads and make pizzas at pie shops.

Now comes Chef B, an automated kiosk capable of making more than three dozen 12-ounce smoothies in an hour. Fully autonomous, the kiosk has refrigeration systems, blenders, robotic arms and 20 temperature-controlled dispensers for its fresh produce and liquids.

Orders are placed via the Blendid app or on the on-site tablet. The first kiosk in the city officially opened Monday at Market Cafe on the campus of the University of San Francisco, meaning local college kids are the first people in the city to pay for a robot to do the laborious smoothie-making work of opening a refrigerator and turning on a blender.

The Sunnyvale-based Blendid was founded in 2015. CEO Vipin Jain describes the origin of Chef B as a humble one: he and his team simply wanted to create a way for people to get healthy, customizable smoothies quickly. And bringing it to San Francisco just made sense.

“San Francisco is a food and innovation hub,” he said. “It’s a progressive city that adapts to positive change.”

True enough. One of the city’s more noteworthy coffee outfits is Cafe X, an automated business that features a robot barista. Chowbotics has a salad-making robot named Sally that, as recently as 2018, was securing investment from venture capitalists. The same can be said for Zume Pizza with its pie-making robots. The company Creator in San Francisco considers its burger-making Rube Goldberg machine a robot as well. Its debut was one of the most high-profile restaurant openings in San Francisco last year.

So, how does Blendid stand apart from the crowd? Affordability is one way. All of the 12-ounce blends cost $6. And though the machine costs around $70,000 to build, Blendid has a franchise business model, meaning it works with large operators like Bon Appetit Management Company, the same folks who run the USF dining establishments. As such, investment is low for franchisees and partners, meaning the prices remain low for consumers, according to Jain.

The recipes —which include options like Blueberry Cacao made with blueberries, bananas, apple juice, cacao and chia, as well as a Kale and Berry blend made with kale, raspberries, blueberries and coconut water — are created through joint collaborations between chefs and nutritionists. Still, there’s space for customization in the orders. Less agave and more chia seeds? All it takes is a few swipes on the app and the blend is adjusted.

The ultimate goal, Jain said, is to apply technology to other types of cuisines. The thinking isn’t unusual in the world of food and tech. Chowbotics has had similar plans since introducing Sally the robot to the world. The universal application of dining is based around the potential for replication.

“In San Francisco, our goal is to bring more concepts to the market. I imagine a few years from now you walk into an airport or a company cafeteria and you should have four or five concepts that are side-by-side,” Jain said. “One is making you making you blends, another is making you some other form of cuisine. That’s what we would want.”