Tortoise has teamed up with hospitality giant Sodexo to bring a mobile smart store — which is basically a luxury vending machine with wheels — to Comic Con this year.
One of Tortoise’s robots, loaded with Sodexo’s carne asada burritos and 20-ounce bottles of Gatorade, will roam the main pavilion of the San Diego Convention Center to service Comic Con’s estimated crowd of 135,000 attendees.
Tortoise will only have one mobile smart store during the event from July 21 to 24, but this partnership with Sodexo may offer future scaling opportunities. Sodexo, for example, has a footprint on many college campuses in the US, and through partnerships with the robotic sidewalk delivery company, Kiwibot has shown its commitment to trying out new technology.
Comic Con guests can approach the robot, which will move “at turtle speed,” according to Tortoise co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko. An operator will recognize a potentially enthusiastic customer and stop the robot, allowing the customer to tap to pay with a credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. This opens the cart, revealing the treats inside. Customers are trusted to take the exact number of burritos or Gatorades they ordered and happily move on. Transactions take less than 15 seconds to complete, Tortoise says.
Tortoise began using its remote positioning technology to rebalance shared electric scooters. Last year Tortoise turned to robotic sidewalk delivery for supermarkets and convenience store chains, and this year it turned again to go exclusively for mobile smart stores.
The business model differs from a hardware-as-a-service model. Instead, Tortoise uses a take-rate model, where it provides the robot and software for free and takes 10% of the gross sales.
To date, Tortoise has implemented 40 mobile smart stores in the US, Shevelenko said.
