What if you could digitally record the best chefs in the world as they make their culinary masterpieces? And what if you took that knowledge and encoded it into software that enabled everyday kitchen workers across the globe to recreate these dishes without specialized training?
That’s the idea behind CloudChef, a new company that wants to create a “Spotify for food” with a cloud software platform that aims to enable culinary teams in remote kitchens to make a meal just as a master chef would.
“We started CloudChef with this whole notion that in the same way that you can record and playback audio and video, you can now record and playback taste,” said CloudChef founder Nikhil Abraham in an interview with The Spoon. “And if you could hypothetically record and playback taste, you could eat from the best chefs and restaurants and literally anyone from the world without having any location constraints.”
So how does it work?
According to Abraham, CloudChef has outfitted its capture kitchens with technology that closely monitors a chef working through a recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from the temperature of a protein to the moisture lost while reducing a sauce to the brownness of an onion and put it all into a machine-readable playback file that can be executed in a kitchen powered with CloudChef’s software.
“With our sensors, depending on what recipe it is, we can codify the intent behind the steps and also codify the intuition of the chef,” said Abraham.
On the “playback” side, how does CloudChef-enabled kitchen work?
Abraham said a CloudChef-powered kitchen is nothing but a standard kitchen, but the appliances are controlled by software. Modern appliances accessible via an API (like a newer Rational oven, for example) can connect directly and receive instructions from the CloudChef software. For appliances without the ability to interface with external software systems, CloudChef “opens it up, and we put an additional small amount of hardware in there to help us control the appliance with software.”
Abraham said that while CloudChef kitchens have the cooking guided by their software, humans still play a significant role in creating meals. The physical labor of moving food from station to station, taking stuff in and out of the freezer, and plating are all still done by workers without specialized training under the guidance of CloudChef.
“Every workstation in our kitchen is loaded with screens, and people have personal devices on them at all times,” said Abraham. “For example, they get tasks like ‘go to workstation two, and then the task would be to remove contents from this pan onto this other pan and put it inside the blast freezer.’ The physical action of moving stuff around in the kitchen, weighing things out the right way, is done by humans while all the cooking decisions are made by software.”
Abraham believes this ‘co-botic’ balance between software automation and humans is essential. For example, while he could envision a future where more cooking tasks are executed by robotics, he said the best results come when a human is involved.
“And at some point, we’ll have some amount of automation in the kitchen, but there are still a lot of different tasks in robotics that machines are particularly bad at, and humans are just instinctively good at,” said Abraham. “If you tell a human to scrape stirred rice from the bottom of a pan, it’s pretty intuitive. Most humans wouldn’t have a problem doing that. But teaching that to a robot takes time.”
Eventually, the company plans to open up the CloudChef platform to other kitchens via a licensing/SaaS model.
“The vision with that product is that if you’re a kitchen owner, you will give your kitchen spec via a web interface, and we will guide you on what all appliances you need to buy, or what all incremental things you need to put in your kitchen to make it CloudChef ready,” said Abraham. “So just like how Android has guidelines for hardware manufacturers, we will also have guidelines for kitchens that are CloudChef-powered
But for now, Abraham said the company’s current focus is on the “capture” side of things. They are working on recording as many chef recipes to the platform as possible – they currently have about 100 – which can be used in CloudChef-powered kitchens.
CloudChef currently has two company-owned kitchens, one in Mumbai and one in Palo Alto. The Mumbai location is an outsource kitchen for brands and has already served over 50 thousand CloudChef-cooked meals. According to Abraham, the brands have received higher ratings and retention rates compared with other kitchens. The Palo Alto location is operational and delivers meals via third-party delivery services like DoorDash.
While you may be partially correct if you think some chefs would resist the idea of having their cooking know-how put into a system that automates their work somewhere else, the company hasn’t had any problems getting high-profile Indian chefs like Srijith Gopinathan (Ettan), Thomas Zacharias (Bombay Canteen, Locavore), and Manjit Gill to record recipes on their platform. Part of the attraction, no doubt, is the royalty the chef receives each time one of their recipes is made. However, I imagine some may also be attracted to the idea that CloudChef technology could create a more chef-like version of their recipe, which may make them feel better about the idea of lending their name to food sent out via ghost kitchens which, if we’re being honest, don’t always have the best record of creating chef-like food.
CloudChef’s own investors include celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and Roy Yamaguchi, so they clearly also see value in the idea (though they haven’t – at least at this point – put any of their recipes on the platform).
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