Coffee Roasters Plan AI-Powered Cafe With Tech-Forward Coffee And Robot Baristas – CoffeeTalk

The Creamery, a popular San Francisco cafe in the 2010s, is set to be reborn this year with a new cafe called Coffee Wafflee. The cafe will feature a robot barista, mini waffles (wafflees), and AI-generated decorations. The 6,000-square-foot, 140-seat operation will open in late September, bringing the space back to life for the first time in five years. Founders Matt Baker and Vance Bjorn of Silicon Valley Coffee will sell blends from their local tech-forward roastery and feature a pared-down food menu of mini waffles and eventually Strauss Organic soft serve and waffle cones.

The cafe is divided between a screen-less, traditional cafe counter in the original Creamery space and a larger room that’s “all about AI.” In that room, everything from music to lighting systems to graphics on a giant screen fed by customers’ prompts is AI-generated. A robotic barista rig from Artly serves lattes to-go with the foam leaf pour intact. In addition to human hires, the founders are considering adding robot servers and a robot DJ.

Hours will initially be mornings and later add afternoons. The eventual goal is an 18-hour day from 6 a.m. to midnight, especially if robots can help reduce staffing costs. The menu features Silicon Valley Coffee from the founders’ roastery in San Carlos and its trade partnerships from Hawaii. There will be four to eight different cold brews on tap, allowing customers to have customized cold brew mixes from different origins.

Commuters to and from the Caltrain station will form a large part of Coffee Wafflee’s customer base, as well as employees of nearby SoMa tech offices. The cafe is signed to a shorter-term lease, and the surrounding neighborhood has become dramatically safer and vibrant in the seven months since the cafe site was broken into twice in 24 hours. What might otherwise have become prohibitive buildout costs have been managed with the help of programs such as First Year Free, which automatically waives the first year of permit licensing and other fees for new businesses.

The Creamery lore left an unexpected mark on Coffee Wafflee’s journey to opening. Amazon.com Inc.’s film studio MGM wanted to shoot a scene in the space for their upcoming movie “Artificial,” starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The founders estimated it would cost between $350,000 to $500,000 for the work to make that “two minute” scene.

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