Robots Are Coming For Your Coffee
Do robot baristas dream of electric beans?
Specialty coffee’s premier feminist sage, Trish Rothgeb, is bullish on artificial intelligence.
She founded Wrecking Ball Coffee. She’s also the woman who wrote down, while learning to roast in sacred Northern European cafes, how the waves of feminism mapped onto coffee, coining the term “third-wave coffee” in 2002. Now she’s finishing up a two-month-long course, Artificial Intelligence: Business Strategies and Applications, at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School. Rothgeb says it’ll solve coffee’s most confounding problems.
“I think there’s so much exciting innovation happening, built on what happened decades ago,” Rothgeb says, “and it’s accelerating quickly.”
These technologies are not just on the horizon. They’re already changing coffee from the inside out. Coffee writer Fionn Pooler rounded up a heap of examples of machine learning in coffee, pointing out the difference between data-analyzing “traditional” AI versus the boom of proactive generative AI models, including Nestlé’s use of AI in its R&D processes. Big tech is getting its hands in the service end of coffee, installing “smart” robot arms in mom-and-pop shops and factories alike. That’s not to mention machine learning’s impact on roasting: There are audio bots that listen for first crack on roasting equipment.
This is no random phenomenon in the industry, no genie opened from a bottle. It’s a multi-pronged campaign to reduce market variance and circumvent pesky baristas and producers along the way.
