CES 2019: The BreadBot May Make a Loaf Mobile Payments Easy
I was just starting to despair that there weren’t many mobile payments related items out of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year, and for a while, I had good reason to do so. There just didn’t seem to be much hitting the press circles about it. At least, that was the case until I finally spotted word about the BreadBot, a device that’s doing for fresh bread what similar devices were already doing for pizza: opening up the great possibility to make the staff of life mobile payments accessible.
The BreadBot is pretty much what it sounds like: it’s a fully-automated mechanism that can make fresh bread on demand using stored ingredients. With the BreadBot in place, grocery stores will be able to effectively make fresh bread on demand, as opposed to the current way of baking once for distribution later.
Meanwhile, the BreadBot—a product of the Wilkinson Baking Company—can produce it immediately from scratch, which could ultimately pave the way toward a vending machine that serves fresh, potentially even hot, bread on demand. It’s actually potentially possible to watch the device make your bread on demand, though customers also have the option to select an already-baked loaf that’s in the machine.
Though the company isn’t looking to make a bread-based vending machine, sadly, there is a lot of potential for this device to show up in unexpected places. Convenience stores, for example, are a potential beneficiary here, as well as coffee shops. But in the end, as noted by CEO Randall Wilkinson, customers buy bread at grocery stores, so grocery stores will be the focus. A few exceptions may come into play later as noted previously.
While it might have been a nice change of pace to be able to get hot, fresh bread on demand almost anywhere—especially if the option for jam is available—it’s not hard to understand that this won’t be showing up in airports or at bowling alleys any time soon. It may be the start of a whole new development in vending: fresh hot bread-based sandwiches.
You never know when something will come along that changes the way you look at the world, including making bread in a way that combines the accessibility of the vending machine with the quality of fresh-baked.