Meet Japan's High-Tech Food Robots

Hi everyone, today we have come to Caferes in Yokohama, which is one of the largest trade shows for cutting edge technology in the food industry. So this exhibition is full of Japanese companies from all over the country, food and technology based showing off some of the highest quality boutique food goods, and also there's some kind of crazy entertaining robots that might be serving you food sometime in the near future. And the best part is that we get to try a bunch of food samples. Yeah, luckily I didn't eat breakfast this morning. While trade shows are often a little underwhelming, what makes Caferes interesting is that it's the gathering place for some of the main innovators in the Japanese food industry in terms of production and supply. This less glitzy side is often overshadowed by the end product of Japan's many famous dishes, but that doesn't make it any less important. One of the first companies to catch our attention was Green Meats, who are attempting to pioneer a future wave of veganism in Japan. It's pretty nice. It tastes like, I don't think I've ever tried a Polish sausage before, but coming from a Polish family, I got exposed to a lot of this, but it's got that kind of taste to it, the spices or whatever. But the texture's like a bit more chewy maybe than like a hot dog. It's nice. Give it my ranking. Cutting meat production is one of the most important steps we can currently take to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, so it was great to get some insight into the work that Green Meats is doing. Perhaps even more important though is finding new and imaginative ways to serve up ice cream. Okay, so I'm now with Sato-san from Connected Robotics. I see. Okay, so yeah, I'm going to make my own cone now. Just pop this in here. That's it, away it goes. Automatic. Check this out. Soft cream. And he pulls it down. Look at that. Perfectly served. In like 30 seconds. Good job. I'm pretty excited. First ever robot served ice cream I've ever tried in my life. It's good, yeah. It's just regular soft serve. But the delivery was far more entertaining than what I'm used to. Pretty big as well. It didn't cost a thing. Soft serve dinosaurs weren't the only automated helpers on hand. Over in a makeshift cafe was Peanut, a robot that is mainly designed with restaurants in mind. Essentially a set of shelves on wheels, it utilises an array of sensors to deliver drinks and meals from the bar or kitchen directly to the customer's tables. Once you've received your order, just wave your hand over the motion sensor on its head and it will automatically turn back to its designated base point. Innovations in technology don't always need to be robotic though. This is perfectly demonstrated by the company Kajuta that has designed a new type of fruit juice machine that operates using an ingeniously simple mechanism whilst yielding highly effective results. So this machine works out of two parts, this scissor part and the main part, body part. And you're just going to combine together and you are ready to use this. Okay so you're going to first take out of the core part of the oranges, grapefruits and lemons and you're going to squeeze out of the core and it looks just like this. So you're going to put this scissor part into this core and when you put the this wheels down it works like this so the scissors getting wider and wider down there so it seems like cutting down the all the first part and making it into juice. And it takes only like three or 30 seconds and this is very fresh because we take out of the core just before we serve. It's very fresh and also it doesn't oxidize over time so it's really good. And now we are ready to serve. So this is uh yeah my first try of the freshest orange ever. Oh my god that's so good. That's so good. It just tastes like I've just taken a bite out of an orange. But like way less messy you know because I can just I can drink this and then just throw the shell away I don't have to peel. Yeah so to me it looks super eco-friendly because you're not using any plastic cups right? Yes we don't use any plastics. First of all the cups we usually use cups for drinks but we don't because the shell of the fruits itself becomes the cups and we serve using that shell so no plastic involved in that. And the straw itself looking like this is a biodegradable straw that goes back into nature so we don't need to use plastic for the straws and that's what we stand for as an organic company. And that was Cafe Rest 2020. There was certainly a lot on show and I'm left wondering how long it will be before robot waiters and vegan meat become commonplace in restaurants all throughout Japan. If you enjoyed this video then please be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to Rew Tokyo for new videos every single week. Thanks for watching and we'll see you again in the next video.