Four Years After CES, Breadbot’s Bread Maker Takes Loaves Out of Grocery Stores
For robotics startups who want to make a splash at CES, there are several options: hold a big press conference, make it weird and shocking, or serve cocktails. However, one method stands out above all others for drawing crowds: raising the smell of freshly baked bread (also known as the ‘Subway method’).
That’s what the people behind Wilkinson Baking Company did back in 2019, and the result was their robot, Breadbot, which became a sensation that year at the world’s biggest tech event. The smell of fresh bread drawn by journalists, technologists, and passers-by like a tractor bell, associated with the type of press of big budget brands like Samsung.
The small company based in Eastern Washington, co-founded by brothers Randall and Ron Wilkinson, has been working hard to bring their product to market ever since. Their goal was to change from a functional model to a production-ready machine suitable for grocery stores.
As part of the transition, the company also looked to find a new CEO. The Wilkinson brothers, both over 60 years old, were looking for a CEO who could take an early-stage startup from a small LLC with a big idea to one big enough to raise funding and bring the first product to market. Paul Rhynard, a former McKinsey strategic consultant who also had fundraising experience as Chief Strategy Officer of Russell Investments, joined Randall in April of last year and helped raise a $3 million seed round last summer to fund the creation of a robotics startup.
According to Rhynard, the new robot was developed after testing the first prototype at a small grocery store in Eastern Washington.
“The machine that was at CES has been incredibly updated,” Rhynard told The Spoon. “One of the big differences is that we rebuilt the logic of it. We have fully custom chipboards and a custom technology stack that runs the machine. It was a big update from a control and software perspective to really run the machine.”
The company also made significant improvements to the equipment system, including adding four hoppers instead of one, allowing the Breadbot to make four types of bread throughout the day. The new Breadbot has significant updates to how it bakes and measures bread quality, according to Rhynard, allowing the machine to achieve consistent results.
“So now we have a machine that we can scale up and start putting it in grocery stores across the country,” said Rhynard.
And that’s what they’re starting to do. The company has built 20 robots and so far has placed seven of them in different stores including Super One Foods, which uses Breadbot in a store in Northern Idaho and two others in Montana, and last month the company installed Breadbot in Akins Fresh Market in eastern Washington. Three more Breadbots will be installed in the high-end store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this month.
Rhynard says the company’s business model is a rent-and-fee model, where store buyers pay a monthly fee and a small amount of bread baked. In return, Breadbot offers a turnkey solution, which includes providing bread mix, yeast, bread bags, and continuous storage.
In return, grocers get what is essentially a bakery in a box that sits in front of customers lining the store floor. This machine, capable of producing up to 200 loaves of bread per day, can produce bread throughout the day, each loaf taking about 96 minutes from start to finish to make the bread. In the stores it currently operates, Breadbot makes three types of bread: Nine grain, homestyle, and honey oat.
According to Rhynard, in the morning the shops aligned the baking of the bread with the time of the bakery workers, which means that the Breadbot was baking all the bread in the morning. Now, he says, some stores will start trying to bake bread during peak shopping hours, from four to seven at night, which will allow shoppers to buy hot, freshly made bread (and take in that freshly baked bread aroma).
Rhynard says that while grocery stores are their main customer, they are also in talks with other potential customers, including restaurants and the military. The company is also talking to potential buyers in places where fresh baked bread is hard to come by, including Hawaii, which imports most of its bread from the American west coast.
To support continued growth, Rhynard said the company is now starting to look at raising a Series A. He knows it will be a challenge given the current market situation, but he hopes the way the company operates will attract new fans.
However, for now, the company is busy finding new customers who want to attract consumers with the smell of freshly baked robot bread.
