Remy Robotics, an automated ghost kitchen startup, came out of stealth this week as it opened its third autonomous robotic kitchen.
Remy, based in Barcelona, creates custom-built robotic kitchens tailored for the food delivery industry. For the past year, the company has been operating two dark kitchens, one in Barcelona and one in Paris, and is opening its third kitchen in Barcelona this week.
Until this point, the company has been delivering food under its own virtual kitchen brands – including a flexitarian food brand called OMG – and has cooked and sold 60 thousand meals. Now, with the launch of its third kitchen, Remy is opening up its kitchens to other restaurant brands. According to the company, its system has the flexibility to install a new robotic kitchen and have it operational in about 48 hours.
If a brand is thinking about launching a new delivery-centric virtual brand with Remy, they shouldn’t expect to use their chefs and employees to make the meals. Remy believes that automated kitchens work better when the food is optimized for robotics from the ground up.
“We maximize what robots can do,” Remy CEO Yegor Traiman told The Spoon in a Zoom interview. “The main mistake of most robotics companies is they’re trying to mimic the human and teach robots how to do the things a human would do.”
Instead, Traiman says that they configured the entire process of food making to be done by robots, developing recipes and cooking techniques based on a variety of parameters, including the shape of Remy’s own packaging and how much moisture is lost during the cooking process. The company claims that their robotic systems decide autonomously how and for how long to cook a dish, based on where a customer lives and how long the delivery will take. They also utilize “computer vision and neural networks” alongside “smart ovens and sensors controlling temperature, moisture, weight and other key parameters.”
“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman said. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”
A Remy robot-powered ghost kitchen can fit up to ten brands into the same space that one human-powered kitchen can operate, and, according to Traiman, it shouldn’t be a problem adding new partners.
“There is huge interest at the moment in Spain and in France,” Traiman said. “Almost every neighbor at these cloud kitchen facilities a knocking on the door asking ‘guys, can we do something together?'”
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