Meet Ella, Singapore’s first fully autonomous robot barista.
You’re on your way to work, and you want a coffee. Get onto our app,
order, customize, pay, and Ella will produce. All right, let’s take a look.
Ella can whip up a fresh cup of Joe at four times the rate of her human counterparts
and will soon be available to subway passengers across the city-state.
You can then program this to replicate what we do in the coffee shop.
And her creator, well,
he spent years in the finance industry before deciding to take a coffee break.
I was 35 years old, in finance, and I thought it’s my chance,
I've got to do something, build something for myself.
Ella is the multimillion-dollar brainchild of 41-year-old Keith Tan,
a former wealth manager who gave up the daily grind in 2015 to launch his own coffee shop.
But it wasn’t long after he got the joint off the ground that
he began to discover the challenges of the food and beverage industry.
It’s really hard to hire and retain staff for the F&B industry, especially in Singapore. And
that limited our scalability. We had four shops that were facing labor crunch, and I thought,
‘I’ve just invested in this company, it’s going to grow, it’s going to grow more than that!’ So,
then I decided it was time to really look into technology.
With that, the idea for what is today Crown Digital was born:
an internet of things start-up aiming to address the difficulties within food and beverage.
Ella is the company’s debut product. It came to life in 2018, after years of experimentation.
Here's how it works.
With the mobile app, you can choose your drinks — that’s where you can customize if you want
to add flavors, buy now, checkout. This order then processes in our backend, goes to the cloud, and
comes back down here. Over here, you can see my two orders – Keith – and Ella springs into action.
Encased in a transparent kiosk measuring five square meters,
Ella’s autonomous arm, which is produced by robotics company Techman Robot,
operates around the clock and can serve up to 200 cups of coffee per hour.
The ingredients — fresh milk and beans — only need to be topped up every 360 servings.
This is monitored through an app, which alerts delivery drivers.
Our delivery drivers are following the apps. The job scope will be sent
to them through the mobile app. They know exactly when to top up,
and when they do, our command center will be updated as well.
The command center can also detect and resolve spillages or machine
faults remotely through inbuilt systems.
We are running multiple AI workloads, that are monitoring different aspects of the production.
Ella is designed for high-density, grab-and-go environments like airports,
transport hubs and offices, where speed is paramount.
There’s opportunities where you just want speed,
consistency and ease of ordering, and that’s where robotics can really come in.
Being efficient means that cost savings are passed on to consumers too. For comparison,
this latte by Ella costs S$4, while a typical barista coffee in Singapore costs $6.
But Ella isn’t the only robot barista around.
In 2015, Swiss engineering firm ABB unveiled YuMi, a versatile robot capable of executing
various tasks, including signing its name, solving a Rubik’s Cube
and even accompanying Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli to conduct an orchestra.
More robot cafes have sprung up in recent times,
such as Cafe X in San Francisco and B;eat at South Korea’s Incheon Airport.
According to Chris Holmes, managing director at IDC Insights Asia Pacific,
the robotics market is growing fast.
Automation, robotics, we’ve seen tremendous growth over the last few years. If we were to look at the
retail sector and particularly food and beverage, we expect one out of two food and beverage
outlets, one out of two retailers to have some form of robot in place over the next two years.
We’ll certainly see some sort of front of house, but we’ll also see a lot of robots actually in
the warehousing, in the transportation, the distribution. So actually, behind the scenes.
Covid has only boosted that demand. As more people became conscious of hygiene during the pandemic,
Keith secured Ella’s first permanent retail operation
in this central Singapore shopping mall in 2020.
Crown Digital has since signed deals to roll out its robot baristas at selected
stops on the East Japan Railway Company’s network of 1,657 stations,
and at 30 train stations in Singapore operated by SMRT. This will make Ella’s
grab-and-go coffee available to a combined 18 million daily commuters.
The two transport operators have also invested in Crown Digital,
bringing its total funding to over $3 million and valuing it at over $35 million.
We envision Ella’s going to be everywhere – in public spaces, train stations, offices.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the rise of the robots, however.
There’s a lot of concerns out there in terms of robots taking people’s jobs, and we can see
it both from the physical robots but we’ve also not touched on the software robots. But again,
going forward, we really see there’s this collaboration between the human and the robot.
The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, automation will displace some 85 million jobs.
However, it adds that the robot revolution will
create a further 97 million jobs over the same period.
Keith argues that robots like Ella are simply making way for more skilled human jobs.
We are not replacing that human experience in a café. Eventually, automation will come in
for the bread and butter and then you have the human experience where you can pay them better,
retain them, and build that human experience.
For Keith, his robot barista is barely scratching the surface,
and he has plans for how more robots can help with our everyday lives.
We’re starting off with coffee, but we’re not ending with that. Ella’s going to go on to do
food, for example, deliveries. The use cases are coming in
from around the world. There are going to be many different verticals where Ella could be deployed.