Portable Food Evolves to Portable Retail

Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® asks does your retail foodservice footprint look more like yesterday than today’s interactive participatory successful footprints?  If so you have a long way to go to catch up to tomorrow’s footprint if it is anything like the “Little Yellow Horse”.

Ok, just Imagine a c-store that comes to you. If you cannot you are not on the same page as Liu Zhiyong, founder and CEO of Zhen Robotics, which manufactures a snack-delivering robot, sees a bright future for his “Little Yellow Horse." 

About the size of a small washing machine, this autonomous robot delivers drinks, fruit and snacks from a local store to the residents of the Kafka compound in the Chinese capital of Beijing.

The “Little Yellow Horse” is equipped with a GPS system, cameras and radar, and the CEO of Zhen predicts that 1 billion packages will eventually be delivered every day because of technologies like his. He goes on to say that "there will not be enough humans to make the deliveries. We need more and more robots to fill this gap in manpower and to reduce costs."

China is the world's biggest online shopping market with more than half of its population making at least one smartphone purchase per month, according to professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. This compares to 14% in the rest of the world.

To get a delivery via the "Little Yellow Horse," according to a report in Japan Today, the customer selects the desired products, taps in the address and pays right on their phone. The supermarket staff place the items in the robot, and the robot takes off.  So, we ask are you looking far enough into the future or are you looking backwards for your next steps?

Deliveries in China are increasingly being made by autonomous means and several firms have received the okay to operate drones, either to deliver directly to the customer or to ferry goods between hubs.  Are you ready for some fresh ideations?

Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced food marketing and business development ideations. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a new menu product segment and brand and menu integration strategy.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant/ or twitter.com/grocerant