Breadbot: The automated bakery you can now lease

SXSW is an exciting event, and this year, the Wilkinson Baking Company has made it even more interesting with the showcase of its new BreadBot.

Ten years in the making, the automated baking-machine helps create a new ‘farm to table’ experience – a bread bot that creates fresh bread right in front of your eyes.

According to the company’s press release, the machine aims to help bring a local bakery feel to retailers everywhere, while reducing carbon footprint, eliminating preservatives and cutting down on wastes.

What’s even more interesting is that the smart bread robot uses multi-facial recognition to customize its bread offerings.

Dubbed “The Mini Bakery“, it is fully automated, produces 10 loaves an hour, and uses smart technology like AI, big data analytics, and provides real-time insights into customer purchasing behavior for retailers.

The value that the company aims to bring is simple: efficiency for everyone.

 

According to Wilkinson, the traditional method of bread-making mass produces bread in a large, centralized factory. It ships the bread to distribution centers, and then ships that bread to stores. This model requires tens of thousands of trucks on the road and fails to deliver fresh(est) of loaves.

The new model they envisage eliminates the need for a truck to deliver bread and allows the customer to take fresh bread minutes after it’s been baked.

“A better loaf and better for the Earth,” according to the company.

The recipes (and baking mixes) that the company currently offers include whole wheat, homestyle wheat, nine grain, organic whole wheat, and organic seeds and grains.

Since the company believes in transparency, it allows customers to know exactly where, when, and how, their bread was made.

The company also claims that the product is employee friendly and sends messages to call for help instead of requiring constant monitoring.

Examples of messages it sends include: “Please empty the cabinet of bread“, “I need more mix“, or “I’m finished baking today“. This allows the bakery staff to spend on average only 40 minutes a day pouring mix and slicing bread.

After baking for the day, the bakery will ask to be washed and to run an auto cleaning cycle to clean out the mixing pot. An employee is still needed to wipe down surfaces, but the auto cleaning cycle does most of the work, saving employees time and energy.

According to Ashley Carman of The Verge who trialed a slice of bread by the Breadbot and spoke to the company reported:

The idea is to lease these machines to big stores, and eventually let customers pre-order specific bread recipes, although that’ll be much later because the machine can only currently handle one recipe at a time. The company also wants to get all these machines online so they can talk to each other and learn from their recipe experiences. A machine in Colorado will let a machine in Miami know how it bakes bread in specific temperature and humidity situations and vice versa.

If you’re thinking of getting a bunch of these machines on lease for your office canteen or your grocery store, don’t think for too long.

The fragrance of freshly-baked organic bread and the magic performed by the AI-powered, IoT-driven Bakerbot can be quite a charm for your business. People already seem impressed.

#breadbot this is going to revolutionize the way we bake bread… just saying… #sxsw #blockhaus #atx #GameChanger pic.twitter.com/vYI6JPBSIn

— Marissa (@mrosas0789) March 10, 2018

 

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