Food-Delivery Robots Are the Next Big Thing for Campus Dining. No, They Don’t Accept Tips.

David Rodriguez has a vision for the future of college dining: fleets of pixel-faced robots, each about the size of an Igloo cooler, piloted remotely by low-wage workers in Colombia, rolling around idyllic greens and quads to deliver nourishment to busy students.

It may sound like something out of a vaguely discomfiting science-fiction novel, but that vision is already a reality at several universities, where tech companies are taking advantage of closed, ADA-compliant campuses and a reliable base of time-strapped customers to test out this new frontier in food delivery.

Rodriguez, head of business development for the tech startup Kiwi Campus, just attended the National Campus Leadership Council’s annual Presidential Leadership Summit, held this week in Washington, D.C., where he pitched his product to student-body presidents from across the country.

“They were super excited,” he said. “I think it’s really going to catch on.”

Kiwi’s robots have been serving students at the University of California at Berkeley since 2017. In fact, they were born on the campus, at Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator, a launchpad program for university-affiliated startups. From there, they were given free rein to roam the campus, where, for a $3.80 charge, students and locals can use Kiwi’s app to summon one of their smiling mobile canteens.

Berkeley “has been our sandbox for the last two years,” Rodriguez said.

He said the bots have already delivered 35,000 meals and snacks at Berkeley, with their top 100 repeat customers placing an average of 10 deliveries per week. The company’s success has prompted plans for expansion. Rodriguez said that Kiwi is in talks with about a dozen universities, including Rutgers and Stanford Universities, and the University of California at Davis.

Lunch, Conveyed by Bot

Dustin Cutler, dining director for Cornell University — where a few Kiwi bots have been trundling up the Ithacan hills on trial runs recently — said that while university officials haven’t had any discussions with the company, interest in food-delivery robots has been building along with the national hype.

“Before long, there will surely be requests for autonomous deliveries on the Cornell campus, as there are already elsewhere,” he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “We’d love to have a cost-effective mechanism to deliver lunch or dinner to students, staff, and faculty on campus.”

Starship Technologies, one of Kiwi’s competitors, has delivered food and packages with delivery bots in four countries since 2014. This past January, the company sent its first bots to a campus: George Mason University.

There, Starship partnered with the food-services contractor Sodexo to incorporate the robots into student meal plans. For a $1.99 delivery fee, students can use an app to place an order with a handful of campus dining options like Dunkin’ Donuts and Blaze Pizza, and the bots will dutifully fetch it. Students who aren’t on the meal plan can pay by credit card.

Starship’s strategy, to work directly with university dining services, has enabled the company to expand more quickly than Kiwi. Just months after the program launched at GMU, Starship robots were introduced to student meal plans at Northern Arizona University, which also contracts with Sodexo.

Bigger companies are looking to get in on the game, as well. This year, PepsiCo partnered with the tech company Robby Technologies to bring food-delivery robots to the University of the Pacific, in Stockton, Calif. And there are rumors that even Amazon is looking to throw its hat in the ring, courtesy of its Prime delivery robot, Scout.

These companies want to make college campuses the test market for their robot-delivery business models. But apart from their ability to impress tour groups, what benefits do the robots bring to colleges? Sure, students are busy, but the bots are owned and operated by outside companies, are limited in their range of movement, and travel at a maximum speed of four miles per hour — not to mention they have exhibited the very real threat of spontaneous combustion. So what do colleges have to gain from introducing these computerized snack couriers to their campuses?

Low Labor Costs, Progressive Optics

Mark Kraner, George Mason’s executive director of campus retail operations, said the robots present a cost-effective way to serve student demand for food delivery, a demand that most campus dining services have yet to meet and thus, is usually left to off-campus vendors.

“The number of pizza deliveries, Chinese food deliveries, has been growing over the years,” he said. “We’ve got some great brands on campus. How can we tap into that market and retain those sales?”

Kraner tried other means of bringing delivery services to students, including a partnership with another campus-oriented tech company, Tapingo, which was acquired by Grubhub last year. But nothing seemed to fit smoothly, and inexpensively, into the student dining plan.

The bots are so popular, Kraner said, that George Mason has added 23 units to its original fleet of 20 since the program started in January, with plans to bring on at least 15 more in the fall.

So far, Kiwi has deployed its bots only at Berkeley. But the company’s plans for expansion are much different than Starship’s. Rodriguez said that while Kiwi is exploring partnerships with university dining services in some cases, the company’s main strategy is to give interested students some of their robots at no cost, allowing them to “own Kiwi at their universities.”

He compared the model to a franchise system, wherein Kiwi would pay student managers, would be entitled to a portion of the profits they generate, and wouldn’t be involved in the management of delivery programs on individual campuses. He said that under Kiwi’s model, students would have an educational opportunity to run their own business and cater it to local needs.

A Potentially Unsustainable Cost Model

But colleges may want to be careful: Third-party delivery services have caused major issues for food providers. Uber Eats, Grubhub, and similar services have elicited first frustration, then anger, and finally lawsuits from restaurants that were blindsided by unexpected fees and commissions.

When asked if Starship also charges fees, Ryan Tuohy, Starship’s senior vice president for business development, declined to comment on the details of its contract with Sodexo, but said that it’s “a business partnership which is valuable to both sides.”

But Kevin Rettle, Sodexo’s vice president for global offer development, said that Sodexo, while pleased with the popularity and efficiency of Starship’s robots, is working on making a new arrangement with the company to “ensure our final solution is affordable and sufficiently scalable.”

Kraner said that while he’s not familiar with the details of Sodexo’s partnership with Starship, he wouldn’t be surprised if the food-services provider encountered similar issues to those facing franchises that partnered with Grubhub and Uber Eats.

“Starship has to make money,” he observed. “How long can they sustain?”

Liam Knox is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @liamhknox, or email him at liam.knox@chronicle.com.

Correction (6/17/2019, 12:03 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the location of the Presidential Leadership Summit. It was held at a hotel in Washington, D.C., not at George Washington University. In addition, David Rodriquez pitched the Kiwi Campus food-delivery robots to student-body presidents, not college presidents. The article has been corrected.