P!ing / The Robot Coffee Drive Thru Disrupting the $50B Business | Rob Whitten & Jane Lo

P!ing / The Robot Coffee Drive Thru Disrupting the $50B Business | Rob Whitten & Jane Lo

From Fell Into Food Podcast by Jeff Fell

June 15, 2026 · 47 min · Episode 74

About this episode

Rob Whitten and Jane Lo discuss their robotics-powered coffee company p!ng and the challenges of automation in the coffee industry.

Rob Whitten and Jane Lo are the co-founders and co-CEOs of p!ng — a robotics-powered coffee company building 120-square-foot autonomous pods that take your order before you arrive and hand you a finished drink in under 30 seconds, with no one behind the window. Rob is a West Point graduate and former robotics leader at Amazon and iRobot. Jane is a brand strategist and Booth MBA who spent her career inside customer experience at Forrester and SharkNinja. Together, they're going after the $50 billion coffee industry with an idea that sounds like science fiction until you realize how much of the modern drive-thru is broken. They didn't start with the robot. Rob ran a food truck first — flipping eggs on two four-foot griddles — just to learn the food business from the inside before he ever touched automation. And in the early pilot, when customers pulled up to what looked like a fully automated pod, Rob and Jane were behind a curtain inside, making the drinks by hand, Wizard-of-Oz style, just to prove people would actually want this. The twist? When customers found out there was a person inside, they were disappointed. They wanted the magic to be real. That tension — building real…

People in this episode

Host: Jeff Fell

Guests: Rob Whitten, Jane Lo

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: p!ng, Amazon, iRobot, Forrester, SharkNinja

Places: West Point

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