Treat-vending robots are popping up in San Francisco parks

The company behind the enterprising robots is called Tortoise, a Mountain View-based robot delivery company that recently pivoted to “Mobile Smart Stores,” or “the world’s first robotic remote-controlled store-on-wheels,” as it claims.

“We had a remote control grocery delivery robot, and we were deploying that in a bunch of different markets,” said Tortoise co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko. “We saw the same thing happening again and again — whenever the robot would be parked, people would walk up to it and talk to the robot and interact with it.” 

He said that when the company asked people what they were expecting from the robot, people thought they could buy something from it. 

“As is often the case, your customers are a lot wiser than you are,” Shevelenko said. “We kind of took the insight to heart.”

It only took one modification to turn the grocery delivery robots into miniature mobile stores: installing a tap-to-pay card reader in the top of the container lid. People who want to buy something just tap their card, the lid unlocks and they grab their box of cookies from inside. All the while, the robot’s remote controller, who can be stationed halfway across the world, is watching the transaction and playing audio messages to guide the consumer.

For those wondering what’s stopping people from robbing the robots, the fact that it requires your credit card information before the container unlocks discourages most people from taking more than their fair share. Plus, it has a camera prominently displayed (a not-so-subtle reminder that we are literally always being surveilled).

“We’ve done hundreds of transactions, and there hasn’t been a single person who’s taken more than one box,” Shevelenko said.

While Tortoise is based in the Bay Area, its launch is worldwide: Robots will soon also be popping up in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Denver, Dallas, San Diego, Santa Cruz, South Carolina and Missouri, hawking everything from headphones to truffles.

Bake Sum, an Oakland bakery selling Asian American-inspired pastries, was one of Tortoise’s first customers. Owner Joyce Tang is a friend of Shevelenko’s — they used to work at Facebook together — so she was happy to give Tortoise a try for its fee of 10% of gross sales. 

“Pastries don’t require refrigeration or heating to transit, and that makes it a lot easier for the kind of logistics required in a mobile smart store,” Tang said. “So it was kind of an easy, natural fit.” 

Over the past few weeks, Bake Sum has sent its robot into San Francisco parks to sell cookies. Every time the bakery has used it, Tang said, it’s sold out. 

“It’s actually a great way for us to widen the market a little bit and get a little bit more exposure in areas that we don’t normally get to,” Tang explained. “So I think it’s fun, and it makes it a lot more convenient to get our pastries, given we’re only open so many hours a day and you have to come to Oakland most of the time.”

Tang has also tried stationing the robot in front of Bake Sum after its normal business hours to sell pastry boxes. Since the bakery has quite limited hours — it’s only open Friday to Monday until 1 p.m. — it allows them to drum up more business after hours in a time of labor crisis. 

“I think while the business environment is still kind of weird and evolving, Tortoise definitely gives us a lot more flexibility to be able to pull off another sales channel without a crazy amount of overhead,” Tang said. 

These are certainly not the first robots to pop up in Bay Area businesses — over the past few years, we’ve seen robots waiting tables, robots giving manicures and robots delivering food. As robots have begun to infiltrate more and more of our everyday life, particularly during the pandemic, fear that they are taking jobs from humans grows more palpable. 

Kiwibot, a robot food delivery startup based in Berkeley, responded to these fears in a 2020 SFGATE interview by arguing that it was actually creating jobs: Its bots, like Tortoise, are not autonomous, so an actual human must be employed to navigate them. But these companies tend to outsource that labor to countries with cheaper labor — Kiwibot employs remote workers in Colombia, and Tortoise’s are based in Mexico City.

San Francisco hasn’t exactly been hospitable to delivery robots. In 2017, the city strictly limited the number of delivery robots allowed in the city and banned them from most sidewalks. 

This is partially why Tortoise made the shift from delivery robots to “Mobile Smart Stores”: A business doesn’t need a permit to park a robot in front of its own private property. As for the park sales, that’s not strictly legal. But Shevelenko says that element is not their business model — the focus is more on stationing the robots in front of businesses — and putting the robots in parks was more just for testing purposes. 

“The thing that just obviously we want to be cognizant of is in some of those cases, you’d need a mobile vending permit. … We don’t want to run afoul of any of those,” Shevelenko said. “So I think it’s a question for merchants that are using us in the Bay Area. Wherever they’re getting permits, that’s where they’ll be deploying their robots.”

Tang says she’d love for her cookie-selling robot, which she’s named Leonardo, to make more appearances in San Francisco parks or elsewhere. She’s even considering making an Instagram account for Leonardo so people know where to find it. The use of robots in restaurants has always been of interest to her, she said. 

“That’s always been in the back of my mind, but with the way that small businesses work, I’ll never have enough time or resources or energy to dedicate to mechanize my workflow like this,” Tang said. “So it’s kind of the perfect partnership that Dmitry gets to focus on what he’s good at, and I get to focus on making the pastries themselves. And it enables us to reach more people together than we could have otherwise done alone.”