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Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It does not need to sleep. It is precise in a way that humans will never be able to do. It does not require training. It cannot be exited. It remembers every customer's order. There has never been a perfect drink.

It does not require health insurance.

Don't think of it as the enemy of the barista, Kevin Nater, the CEO of the company that created this technological miracle, insists. Think of it as a tool that people can use to create the ideal coffee experience. Think of it as a cure for "people who go out for coffee"-Nater's phrase-tired of "inconsistent experiences."

Think of it as the future. Think of it as authorization. Your coffee, your way, is flawless, every time, without judgment. 16 ounces of four pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup. Half coffee bean latte? It is delivered to you when your smartphone app says it will arrive, it is hot, fresh and no different from the last one you ordered.

In a public area of ​​the University of Texas at Austin, the Briggo coffee kiosk is covered with fake wood panelling and touch screens. There are not many other things, and it takes up almost the same space as a pair of phone booths. Its appearance was designed by award-winning industrial designer Yves Behar to exude authenticity, and what Briggo said is that it is committed to making coffee equivalent to coffee from any high-end coffee shop.

The university’s kiosk is the second version, which will be launched in places that are still confidential across the country. It only requires 50 square feet (4.6 square meters) of floor space and can be placed anywhere-airports, hospitals, company parks, cafes with tables, chairs, and WiFi, just like Starbucks. It is manufactured in Austin.

Under the protection of a stainless steel wall and a series of patents, there is a secret proprietary internal organ, which is composed of pipes, storage containers, heating equipment, robotic arms and about 250 sensors. Together, they complete the human barista as long as there is something to do. Everything is like perfect self-knowledge. "How is the performance of my milk steamer? Is my brewing temperature half a degree lower? Is my water pressure the same? Is there any residue in my brewing room that may require me to switch to a backup system?"

The Briggo Coffee Kiosk knows how to make the perfect coffee because it is "trained" by the award-winning barista Patrick Pierce. He has since left the company, but no matter what: just like in the technological utopian singularity, its followers believe that one day we will upload our brains to the computer. Once Briggo captures the essence of the barista, he The human form is just a legacy system.

In addition, baristas, especially those at the most popular "high-end" coffee shops in the United States, usually don't hold on long enough to become as good as Pierce. Starbucks’ turnover is a typical feature of all demanding retail environments, and this leads to what Nater calls “changes” rather than the exciting kind—the kind that coffee connoisseurs don’t like, because it means coffee Not the best way to extract from coffee beans.

"What we created is essentially a small food factory that completely replicates what the champion barista does," Nater said. Briggo roasts his own coffee beans-purchased by a pair of coffee supply veterans who have worked at Starbucks for 40 years. "We have calibrated this machine to brew the espresso to the same specifications as Illy, Stumptown or Intelligentsia. We have just completed this work without human factors."

Once in line at Starbucks or other cafes, wondering why in 2013, you couldn’t send your order 10 minutes in advance through the app on your phone and then pick it up as soon as you enter the door? Briggo has one such application. It requires you to log in in order to remember your order and payment information, thereby enabling one-click coffee ordering. Or you can order a cup of coffee for your friends. And use the app to check the waiting time for a drink. fifteen minutes? Now just complete your order and when you walk across the campus-it will be ready when you arrive. Click another button to announce on Facebook that you will be at the Briggo kiosk before 9:30, hey, who wants to meet?

"What we found at [University of Texas] is that we have a younger generation of consumers who have no scruples about remote ordering and self-service," Nat said. "Coffee shops are a great point of social interaction, but so is social media."

Have a great experience at Briggo? Why not tweet? Invented a new combination of syrup, brewing temperature and other elements to produce the perfect drink? Twitter too. Briggo can make espresso, latte, or even iced coffee made by cold brewing for you, even many coffee shops will not provide it because it takes time to make. Don't like coffee? How about a cup of milk tea latte, a cup of ice milk latte, hot chocolate or milk steamer?

In 2012, British philosophy writer and coffee lover Julian Baggini wanted to know why dozens of European Michelin-star restaurants offered coffee made from vacuum-sealed plastic capsules made by Nespresso. So he conducted a taste test on a small group of experts. The barista who uses the best freshly roasted coffee beans confronts the Nespresso capsule coffee brewer. This is the story of John Henry again, but now it is a matter of skill and elegance rather than brute force.

As expected by countless restaurant chefs, Nespresso defeated the barista.

The capsule coffee system only requires two steps in the coffee making process, but they are the most important steps: roasting and brewing. The beans roasted in the factory will not change from the moment they are vacuum sealed into the capsule, because oxygen is the factor that causes the food to deteriorate. (In contrast, "fresh" roasted coffee beans will continue to oxidize until they are brewed.) And the coffee brewing process is very complicated. To achieve its perfect expression, a machine that is free from human interference is required.

"With pre-dose capsules, it is always the right way to grind," said Mark Romano, senior director of Illy Coffee, which manufactures its own line of capsule coffee systems. "Using a separate extraction room, you can consistently reach 80-90 [quality level 100]."

Romano said that the capsule brewing system can now control more variables in the brewing process—the relevant variables are temperature, pressure, and the way the water reaches the ground beans—even more than the best regular Starbucks machine.

"In any system you use, the biggest risk to quality is the remaining coffee oil, which will be oxidized, spoiled and spoiled. They are passing the flavor to the next cup," Romano said. It is difficult to clean these machines properly, and it may just be the problem of residual cleaning products instead of the problem of residual coffee oil. The disposable capsule system is not affected by these problems. Illy claims in its promotional materials that it also "ensures that all particles in the capsule are fully saturated", which is difficult to achieve with traditional brewing systems.

I asked Romano whether it would be better for Starbucks to provide customers with capsule coffee. "I think in many cases they will. Maybe they should use capsules in most of their locations." Romano also pointed out that although Illy still employs "baristi" in many of its 240 cafes in Europe, only in North America The 8 Illy cafes are mainly because it is impossible to find baristas trained by the company's strict standards.

I also asked if Starbucks would increase the degree of automation it already uses in its stores. The company’s spokesperson, Linda Mills, would only say that it will not move in this direction because automated baristas will “reduce the products we offer every day.”

Presumably, she meant the experience of being served by humans. But is this enough?

The leaders of Briggo claim that they are "fanatic" about coffee, and automation is mainly a driving factor, as Nater said, it will "let us grow rapidly." They say the Starbucks veterans they recently hired have a background in sourcing, blending and inventing new and seasonal beverages, which they say is to make something comparable to any other "third wave" coffee shop like Starbucks or Stumptown. .

Generally speaking, automation in food service means first standardizing the food to be prepared, which means depriving them of their individuality. Currently, Briggo only sells single blended beans from three countries. But nothing prevents the kiosk from distributing coffee from a single source and adjusting each of its parameters to accommodate the new coffee beans, Nater said.

The Briggo coffee robot "can measure humidity and impact time, and can automatically adjust the grinding degree of coffee beans to compensate," he said. "We can see that bean. We track every espresso. We know if it is within our quality specifications, and we have complete control of the entire supply chain. We can go far beyond the ability of high turnover part-time employees."

Briggo doesn't have to be better than the best barista in the world. It just needs to be better than the nearest coffee shop. Don't think of this as an epic chess showdown between Garry Kasparov and the IBM computer Deep Blue; instead, think of Briggo as Starbucks Blockbuster's Redbox video kiosk.

Nevertheless, the Redbox/Blockbuster analogy still has limitations. Blockbuster's decline is because it can't provide anything that video kiosks can't provide, and more importantly, it can't provide online streaming services like Netflix. But as Romano of Illy pointed out, coffee vending machines cannot reproduce the experience of a coffee shop. "Coffee is a kind of social-do you really want to replace the social value of [your barista]?" he asked. In fact, Nater told Melanie Kaplan of Smartplanet, “We don’t want people to stop going to coffee shops.”

But Brigo hopes to replace Starbucks at least to a certain extent. Tim Kern, a 22-year veteran of Starbucks who joined Briggo in July, observed that some places where the company is looking for locations, such as the public areas of corporate campuses, people may be resolved in terms of social interaction and caffeine. Instead of trekking to a nearby coffee shop. This is no different from the disruption of the PC industry by tablets and smartphones: these mobile devices have not replaced PCs, but they do reduce the number of times you need one.

Kern said that for now, directly replacing Starbucks — imagine a cafe with an owner but no barista — is not in Briggo's business plan, even though the company's leaders have discussed this issue in the past. (Romano is skeptical of the idea: "We can go back to the 50s, where you can enter Automat, where you can have the machines you can get whatever you want, but the real value of this experience is What?" He asked.) The near-term plan is to move to places where coffee is not good—such as universities, hospitals, airports, and company cafeterias—and improve products. “With only 50 square feet, we can create a barista-quality experience in places where coffee shops cannot operate,” Nater said.

There are almost no barista robots, and the space has become more and more crowded. One company targeting the low-end market is Marley Coffee, which has developed “an Android-based coffee kiosk with a full touch screen automatic checkout system in collaboration with vending machine manufacturer AVT,” said Joe Menichiello, vice president of sales and AVT marketing.

One model is equipped with a huge 48-inch (122 cm) touch screen. "You press the type of coffee you want, specify how much sugar you want, then swipe the card, and when it grinds and brews for you, it's playing Bob Marley's music," Menichiello said. Yes, Marley coffee is named after that Marley. "Bob Marley is one of the 10 most famous names in the world," Menichiello said. "From a brand point of view, this is a breeze for us."

AVT's system is not as complicated as Briggo's system-for example, there is no professionally frothed market fresh milk, only powdered ones-but, Menichiello said, "We still grind coffee beans individually for each customer. Customers. There will be coffee grounds on our coffee beans (the oil of the coffee beans). Unless the coffee is just ground, there will be no coffee." He said, this is "almost better than any physical coffee shop."

The parts entering the Marley Coffee kiosk are standard enough at this point, and AVT expects a lot of competition. "Coffee is coffee, and many companies use the same model as us," Menichiello said. "When we were at NAMA-a large vending conference in Las Vegas-I looked around and there were a lot of machines, you can press a button, and they would do the bean-to-cup thing and provide each customer with Something freshly ground."

In fact, one of AVT's competitors is Starbucks itself. It has reached an agreement with Redbox to place coffee kiosks wherever there are currently Redbox DVD rental kiosks, under the name of the best Seattle brand owned by Starbucks. These systems are actually built by Coinstar, which owns Redbox, and the trade name of these machines is Rubi.

However, there are still different niches in the market. Starbucks kiosks are often aimed at convenience stores and supermarkets. Briggo is looking for more high-end customers. Marley Coffee is in the middle position and is applying its system to airports (Briggo also has ambitions) and university bookstores.

Upstarts have two ways to disrupt established companies like Starbucks: one is to provide a better experience. The leaders of Briggo believe that they can achieve this by combining convenience and the climax of technology, and the other is in price To compete on. A cup of organic coffee from the Briggo kiosk is $1.40, and in many places in Starbucks, a cup of drip (non-organic) coffee is $1.85. The price difference partly reflects the difference in the cost structure of the two methods: Briggo does not have to deal with all the manpower expenses, and currently it does not have to consider the cost of renting all retail space.

Nater said that Briggo has raised "more than $11 million in funding." Although it has only "approximately 20 employees," it has managed to align its executive team with personnel with extensive experience in building and operating large-scale technology companies. combine it all toghther. Briggo founder Charles Studor (Charles Studor) was the head of Motorola/Freescale's multi-billion dollar integrated circuit division. Chief Information Officer John Craparo served as Chief Information Officer for GE Capital and Dell Financial Services. Briggo's vice president of engineering led manufacturing projects at Johnson & Johnson for 25 years. Briggo kiosk was designed in collaboration with Deaton Engineering, which has created everything from field-tested PCs used by the Air Force to industrial waste recycling systems.

"Our desire is to build a global business," Nater said. "The Middle East, North America, and Asia are all interested in us. We think this model is very effective in Asia because of the massive adoption of mobile platforms and automated experiences in Asia."

Two huge unknowns hung over Briggo and anyone else trying to follow his lead. The first is whether people will, at least at some point, accept coffee kiosks as an alternative to coffee shops, even if the products are the same or better. The second is whether Briggo's high-end machines can provide better coffee, so that cheaper competitors like Marley and Seattle's Best cannot squeeze them out.

But it is still too early. Kern said that Starbucks itself is an example of how an evolving company can find the perfect market fit through a tortuous road. When Kern started working at Starbucks, the company was still trying to become a "retail experience" aimed at selling coffee machines and coffee beans. But customers kept coming in for a cup of coffee, so in the end it decided to change direction. "Starbucks has become such a thing, when it only has six stores, I can't imagine," Kern said.

It is also worth noting that, in a crucial sense, Briggo is not a coffee company. It is difficult to beat all others in the quality of beans. On the contrary, it is an automation company whose expertise is to create computerized robotic systems that can be perfected and perfected endlessly. This means that if another company is trying to acquire Briggo, rather than a larger coffee conglomerate or a food retailer, why not just focus on the perfection of automated processes like Amazon?

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