£100 a week for a year with Tesco's delivery service comes in at about £26,000 cheaper
Ah, but where's the Marmite?
Are you the sort of gullible idiot with millions of pounds or dollars to splurge on a “robot kitchen”? No, us neither. Hey, when you have a vaporware “startup” offering something like this, what's reality got to do with it? Moley – for that is this startup's name – is punting a robotic kitchen, which it claims can rival …
Doubt the robot comes with Marmite either. On a serious note though, Unilever trying to hike prices by 10% when a significant number of their products are made in the UK, from materials sourced here, should be treated with outrage. For once I agree with Tesco.
Having checked the Daily Fail's list of 200 brands now absent from Tesco's shelves, I was quite amazed to discover that I don't use any of them.
I realise I'm a bit of a fringe shopper, but this surprised even me.
More worrying is the fact that apparently sterling is now worth less than a used Tesco Everyday Value bog roll.
Under the circumstances, the prospect of a thirty-grand-a-year "robot kitchen", or anything else, seems even more laughable.
@Oh Homer
Having checked the Daily Fail's list of 200 brands now absent from Tesco's shelves, I was quite amazed to discover that I don't use any of them.
You don't buy Marmite? You must be some seriously warped, unpatriotic sicko!
And I'm tempted to give you a downvote for luring me to the Daily Fail website - OMG! it's worse than I remembered - won't someone think of the children (and people with working brains)?
@Pen-y-gore: At the risk of starting another Marmite flame war...
I tried to like Marmite, I really did, but ultimately the closest I came to nearly tolerating it was when I tried to use it as the bouillon base for a gravy, with predictably tragic consequences. Seriously, I couldn't think of anything else it might be appropriate for, at least in terms of human consumption.
Perhaps it has some useful medical application, say as an alternative for electric-shock therapy, or maybe in the pest control industry, but voluntarily eating for pleasure, something that looks and smells like it may have been used in the construction of the M25, just doesn't seem feasible.
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welllllllll, bear in mind...
tesco's notorious reputation for screwing suppliers down to minuscule overall margins or even into loss, dairy farmers are quite outspoken on the subject
plus the supermarket industry's appetite for rebates//bungs/ransoms/whatever you call them, exacted from suppliers to place product in more favoured positions
...and it's possible that just a few % cost increase pushes unilever underwater
tesco is playing the pr game to paint itself as the defender of consumers, but without knowing the facts rather than the spin, i'd treat anything either side says with a heavy dose of scepticism
welllllllll, bear in mind...
Actually we do have as near to facts as we're ever likely to. The Ombudsman has reported on Tescos treatment of suppliers, and was on the Today programme just a few days ago reporting that the era of sharp practice is indeed behind them.
As for dairy farmers, that's deeply misleading media spin. Several supermarkets were fined for overpaying them in response to that campaign.
And in any case, Unilever is far too big to be bullied by Tescos.
I wonder if the fact that Tescos current CEO was recruited from Unilever has any bearing on it?
Tesco and Unilever are big enough to look after themselves, and I'm sure they will find some settlement that leaves a reasonable margin for both parties. It's the small suppliers that are going to feel the squeeze.
Harry, if you look carefully at your keyboard you'll find a key labelled with "shift" or an arrow or something which, when carefully applied will convert tesco into Tesco and enable you to start sentences with capital letters.
"Unilever trying to hike prices by 10% when a significant number of their products are made in the UK"
Yes, but the BBC article quotes the drop in the Pound's value as 16%, so maybe they've factored the UK production into the 10% rise?
The details are unclear about what exact products Unilever wants to increase the price of (is it everything) but, given the complexity of the pricing (cross charging, volume discounts and promotional charges etc.) maybe the simplest thing was for Unilever to ask for a 10% increase on all products?
You missed off Mayonnaise because as a country we don't produce any eggs and have to import them from Europe.
Nice timing though to coincide with the high court challenge, anyone would think it was a setup.
I think everyone missed the memo on sarcasm in the comments on this site, of course we produce eggs. I will also say that what a fine day that was to introduce the indyref2 for Scotland and I said "anyone would think it was a setup."
Thanks for the down votes but it seems I was indeed right but wrong story.
Next time you see some brexit story think of buses, they always come in three's.
For this amount of money you can hire a granny from one of the less affluent European Countries to do the cooking and have Tesco/Sainsbury/Ocado/Morrisons deliver the supplies for her to your door.
It will taste significantly better than robot cooking too. You will have to stick a the badge on your door to signify that your house is not Ju^H^HEuropenFrei as per StandartenFuhrer Rudd new Purity guidelines though.
Not for long you can't - and not just because the granny is on Rudd's untermensch list.
Wait until that dollar priced fuel starts reflecting the approaching parity and see if you can afford enough to get free home delivery.
Of course we'll be ok just as soon as we start exporting more cheese and milk - Andrea "two brain cells" Leadsom has verified that Liz Truss was quite correct in identifying lactic exports as the future of the new Britain.
Maths Genealogy project has no mention of him. Pics of his thesis or GTFO.
On an unrelated note, I heard that many foods come in different sizes, so when the robot observes the human with a carrot, it might not be exactly the same size as the next one the robot has. How do they deal with this little problem?
They don't and they never will.
This whole thing is a scam and the CEO is going to disappear with all the money as soon as he's met his personal target of however many millions he wants to bilk.
The company started three weeks ago, and it give it nine more before it folds. Any more than that, and the scam risks becoming too blatant even for the gullible.
Quite. I suppose the Reg would not keep an eye out on it's lifetime would they? Not sure about the nine, obviously this is an exist when adequate cash raised strategy, so the dynamics of that might be difficult to predict (although I agree with their probable end goal)
"The company started three weeks ago, and it give it nine more before it folds. Any more than that, and the scam risks becoming too blatant even for the gullible."
And yet a quick Google search yields this BBC article from April 2015:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32282131
where apparently the tech was being demonstrated later in the year... Something doesn't add up here.
Edit: they have a video of the robot arms working there. Yeah, that's not going to work in real life.
Whether it's cheaper to buy this system, or just eat at Michellin starred restaurants on a full time basis?
Not that I'd do either; I'm one of those old fashioned people that prefer the food un-deconstructed, un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate, and most particularly, in quantities large enough to provide nourishment. With chips.
"Not that I'd do either; I'm one of those old fashioned people that prefer the food un-deconstructed, un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate, and most particularly, in quantities large enough to provide nourishment. With chips."
You won't get chips, and it might be in a pile on an interesting plate, but you are absolutely full after a 9 course tasting menu. And drunk too, if you went for wine with each course.
"un-in-a-small-pile-on-an-interesting-plate"
That's a generous assessment, if my experience of such restaurants is anything to go by. I recall the one time I spent $50 at one of these places, and was served 3 evenly-spaced peas, a carefully sculpted quarter of a potato, a teaspoon of spinach and a rump steak that might have been cut from the hindquarters of a fieldmouse, with a perfectly Spirographed drizzle of sauce, precisely centred on a huge, dazzlingly white plate the size of a semitrailer hubcap.
Which necessitated a further $10 trip to the local fish and chippery afterwards for something resembling an actual meal, instead of something you'd expect to see hanging on the wall in an art gallery.
that was because I couldnt find a url that wasnt a million characters long and looked dodgy , so i went thought the "Let me Google That For you" site to get a shorter one, albeit with unwarranted sarcasm in this case (thats the lmgtfy bit of the url.
Good site to know though - next time the office 'Captain of the Bleedin Obvious' asks a stupid question - reply with lmgtfy link :)
And this line right here is what shows that: “The basic concept of the invention is that the machine records the motions of a human chef, then recreates them. So the robot will only do what a human chef did.” Because everyone with an ounce of knowledge about process automation and machine learning know that recreating human motions for a variable process is inefficient at best and usually just plain doesn't work. That sentence shows there are NO engineers involved in the project, only people who though: "How hard can it be? We'll just throw some money at an engineer and he'll fix it". Any engineer I know (and I work in a large company surrounded by mechatronics, mechanical, electrical and every other flavour of engineer you could wish for) would probably politely decline the job. Even though this project would be right up "my" companies alley.