Following the release of DigitalFoodLab’s FoodTech Trends 2026 report, we continue our deep dives into megatrends shaping the future of food. After alternative proteins, resilient farming, and healthy ageing, we turn to the automation of the food system.
What’s behind automation?
When we talk about automation, it’s not only to mention robots, or at least not for the sake of robots. It’s rather to solve some of the most pressing issues facing the food industry:
- A greater need to substitute workers: historically, the food industry is probably the least automated industry. This is visible from farm to fork, from the reliance on immigrant labourers in the fields to low-paid foodservice workers. As the population ages and shrinks globally, automation is increasingly making sense.
- Consumers’ desire for instant access to groceries and cooked meals, combined with a very low willingness to pay for the extra convenience.
- The need to reduce waste alongside the value chain, notably downstream and midstream, with better tools to predict what will be sold and hence what should be ordered.
Three innovation ecosystems
As shown in DigitalFoodLab’s trends curve, 8 trends make up the food automation megatrend. These can be split into three groups:
1 – Delivery trends which are doing well: from restaurant delivery to new retailers and cloud kitchens, these trends are already mature or on the verge of being so.
- Innovation is getting scarcer in this category, with regional leaders now quite established.
- As a testimonial to the relevance of FoodTech, even if these companies are often not perceived as disruptive, they are the first to go “all the way” from inception to disruption. Many of the delivery startups are now publicly traded and profitable companies. This journey took the better part of a decade and shows that changing things is possible in food, but that it also requires time and huge continuous investments.
- Source of the largest deals, with, for example, Picnic, €500M recent funding.
- Big regional differences: while quick-commerce is not a topic anymore in most developed countries, it is still very active in South America or Asia (notably India).
2 – Digitisation efforts enabling automation for the foodservice industry are still moving forward, but slowly:
- Digital restaurant startups are still popping up everywhere, even if nowadays the focus is increasingly on using artificial intelligence (AI) to create centralised “restaurant operating systems”.
- B2B marketplaces are not doing well at all: startups have failed to replace leading incumbents (which are doing better and are more consolidated than ever).
3 – Cooking robots, delivery robots, and smart stores are still emerging technologies not ready for disruption:
- Most cooking robots have gone bankrupt as they have failed to attract enough capital to keep experimenting. However, with the progress in physical AI, a renewal could happen, but probably not until a couple of years.
- Delivery robot players have gotten a bit of attention recently, but mass deployment still seems quite far away.
- Smart stores are almost forgotten for now: as for delivery robots, the problem is less with the technology than with behavioural issues.
How to manage these topics within an innovation strategy?
For now, food automation relies even more on cheap labour for cooking meals and delivering them alongside groceries. What should have been a transitory model has now become dominant, as progress in robotics has been much slower than anticipated ten years ago.
It is then important to shift expectations and be realistic about timelines. Even with advances in physical AI and recent progress in humanoid robots, it will take at least 5 to 10 years to glimpse the food automation initially imagined (with cooking and delivery robots).
So, what does that mean for an innovation strategy? First, that’s not such a long timeline, and planning ahead for this new robotic paradigm should start now. Indeed, it opens many new opportunities for companies, notably to directly transform ingredients and food products into cooked meals that are readily available to consumers. Secondly, in the short term, many areas are open to experimentation, starting with increasingly efficient and smart vending machines. These are not “ideal” robots, but they can do the job of creating new and interesting consumer experiences.
In a word, while food automation is often overlooked and considered only relevant to grocers and foodservice players, it is a space all players should consider, notably brands and ingredient companies.
