What are these things for?

I used the upgrade merchant to get the glass filled with blue liquid, then I went to the hoi poi mixing master guy to get a golden capsule with that item and it had a few golden boxes in it. what does the boxes and that brown circular thing do? is it some type of ingredient for a recipe or something?
also, what are these things used for?

you know, those things that drop from the robot bug things that spawn all over the place. i saw that u can upgrade these things to get different stuff from the event manager guy. How to do that? Also, how to get the key for the chest that you get from the event manager do? I thought that it would upgrade the golden nugget thingies to an even bigger golden nugget, but that didn't work out too great
