Robot.com partners with Sodexo to roll out more sidewalk delivery robots

Robot.com’s sidewalk delivery robot R-Kiwi has completed 2.4 million tasks across campuses and city sidewalks. | com Robot.com recently announced a seven-year commercial agreement with Sodexo Group.

This new agreement builds on a partnership that began in 2021 and that has expanded across select Sodexo-operated college campuses in North America. “Sodexo is an amazing partner, and it has around 400,000 employees globally, and 120,000 full-time employees in the U.S.,” Felipe Chavez Cortes, the co-founder and CEO of Robot.com, told The Robot Report. “It’s one of the companies that is suffering from labor shortages and has been unable to fulfill its open positions.” He noted that Robot.com and Sodexo’s long-standing relationship paved the way for the seven-year contract. “Seven-year contracts don’t come right away,” Cortes said. “It was a learning process for both companies on what it takes to implement robotics, and what it takes to add value on both sides.” This seven-year contract represents Robot.com’s largest single enterprise deployment. Cortes asserted that it also demonstrates Sodexo’s leadership in bringing practical, scalable technologies to complex service environments. “It’s important to say that Sodexo was the first company to implement food delivery robots on college campuses, and one of the first companies to scale up food delivery in general,” Cortes said. Register now and save on your pass to RoboBusiness 2026 How is Robot.com making sidewalk delivery work? College campuses have emerged as a proving ground for sidewalk delivery robots. In recent years, however, some providers have pulled back from these deployments. For example, Starship Technologies recently announced plans to wind down its campus deliveries in favor of groceries. San Francisco-based Robot.com, founded in 2017 as Kiwibot, is taking a different route. “I do feel that college campuses are a very good staging environment. You’re outside. You have people, but it’s not as crazy as urban,” Cortes said.