Miso Robotics today announced CookRight, a new software product for restaurants that delivers the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cooking of its Flippy robot — without the robotic hardware.
The new CookRight platform uses cameras mounted above a grill along with a tablet computer. The cameras look down at the food being prepared and use a combination of computer vision, thermal detection and AI to identify a cut of meat, its thickness and cooking progress. It’s the same software system used by Flippy, only instead of a providing instructions to a robotic arm, its guides a human cook. A display on the accompanying tablet shows what CookRight is “seeing” and gives instructions for each item on the grill. Miso says that CookRight currently works with burgers, chicken, fish, steak, sausage, hot dogs, and more.
Miso Robotics Chairman and President, Buck Jordan, told me by phone last week that using CookRight can help reduce foodborne illnesses by ensuring food is cooked properly, and with the guided cooking, turn just about any cook into an expert griller with no extensive culinary training.
Additionally, CookRight integrates with a restaurant’s POS and ordering systems to automate coordination of meal prep. So if an order comes in for delivery through an app like GrubHub, CookRight will know when the driver is on their way and be able to time the grilling accordingly.
With CookRight, Miso is aiming to expand its market base with a lower cost automated cooking solution than Flippy. Though the price of Flippy has steadily come down from $60,000 upfront to $2,000 a month, that’s still a lot of money for hardware that needs to be installed in existing kitchen spaces, maintained and have workers be trained on. Additionally, smaller mom n’ pop restaurants may not have the space necessary for a Flippy installation. The biggest customer for Flippy at this point has been White Castle, which will be operating the robot at 11 of its locations.
With its minimal hardware setup and a subscription cost of $100 a month, CookRight is a much more affordable option for smaller and medium-sized restaurants looking to automate some of their processes. This, in turn, will allow Miso to scale to more restaurants more quickly.
There are other players in the restaurant tech space like Dragontail Systems, which uses AI to coordinate and optimize order workflow in the kitchen. But with CookRight, Miso is taking that automated integration and optimization a step further into the actual cooking of the food.
If you want to see the future of automated cooking, then you should definitely check out Articulate, our food robotics and automation virtual summit happening on May 18. Buck Jordan will be speaking as will execs from restaurant robot companies like Karakuri, Blendid, Piestro and Mukunda Foods. Get your ticket today!
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