A $7,000 Robot Made Me Coffee. Human Baristas Are Safe, for Now
The prototype I saw at CES isn't the Frazy Bot's final form, but there may be a future for coffee robots if you're particular about your brew.
The Frazy Bot is a $7,000 coffee-making robot that uses customized, premeasured ingredients to make coffee the exact way you want.
I'm lactose intolerant, so the frappuccino that the Frazy Bot made for me at CES 2025 wasn't exactly custom-built to my specifications. (It had whole milk.) And having drinks made to your exact preferences is kind of the Frazy Bot's thing.
The Frazy Bot is a coffee- and cocktail-making machine that will retail for $7,000, with shipment expected in September. Frazy will also lease it to you for $99 a month. What I saw was a prototype, which Frazy reps said was about three times the size of the final product.
"This is definitely the concept stage, for sure," Frazy founder Balaji Krishnan told me. The night I tried it was the first time Frazy demonstrated the machine for the media, and Krishnan said the company is learning from the feedback it got.
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The coffee it made was complex, even if it wasn't my preferred recipe.
The recipes for the Frazy Bot are designed to somebody's tastes, and the drink I had was Jeff's caramel frappuccino. To make it, you scan the QR code on the box with the scanner on the machine and pour all the ingredients -- they're individually packaged in the box -- into the appropriate spots. In this case, that included some whole milk and a chocolate drizzle for the top. Then, with a few taps on the touchscreen, it started churning away.
The coffee produced by the Frazy Bot comes from premeasured ingredient kits designed to your needs.
It wasn't the fastest coffee prep I've ever seen. The machine took some time to warm up before it started spitting coffee into the cup. Then, with the help of a (human) Frazy rep, it moved over to the area where the chocolate drizzle happened (with the human-optional addition of whipped cream first). The chocolate drizzle part of the machine included a kind of coffee elevator, as it lifted the drink up to be close to the dispenser.
Eventually, Krishnan said, the human assistance won't be necessary. "We are working on it now," he said. "We don't want you to do any work. That is the whole idea."
Then it was time to drink.
It tasted like, well, a bit like a Starbucks caramel frappuccino. It was late, and I needed caffeine, so it was nice to get some coffee, but I'd want more coffee flavor in the recipe. And perhaps something not dairy.
While the prototype is perhaps not the most efficient way to make coffee, the company's goal is to have something that can replicate an exact drink over and over and over again by premeasuring and standardizing all the ingredients. So you'll get a box of ingredients in the exact ratios you want, and you'll be able to order that kit. Customization is the endgame.
That customization isn't as flexible, though. The premeasured ingredients can make it difficult to change up drinks on the fly -- if you have a lactose-intolerant guest, say. So if you get the same thing every single day at the coffee shop and you're very picky about how many shots of caramel syrup you get, maybe a high-tech coffee robot will be able to deliver.
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