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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cala

Our Ghost Kitchen Future Will Be Automated

Back at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, Adam Brotman, the CEO of restaurant tech startup Brightloom, suggested if he was a young entrepreneur and wanted to start a restaurant business, he’d create a ghost kitchen powered by a food making robot.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment ever since.

The combination of food produced via robots with a ghost kitchen model makes so much sense, in part because both are new approaches that help reduce two of the most significant cost drivers of the legacy restaurant business: real estate and labor.

Consider the real estate costs of starting a new sit-down restaurant. Some estimates put the typical down payment required for the commercial space somewhere between $150 to $350 thousand dollars in a market like LA. And that’s before you even get to the cost of renovation and installing a new kitchen, which can cost up to a quarter of a million bucks.

And then there’s labor. A typical fast-food restaurant has to factor in about 25% of sales will go to labor. A fine dining restaurant will pay even more, often up to 40%. For a spot that generates a million dollars a year in top-line revenue, this translates to $400 thousand annually in labor expenses.

That’s a lot of money, and no doubt a big part of the reason about one-third of restaurants don’t make it in normal times, let alone in an era ravaged by a pandemic.

And so, in 2021, it’s not that surprising to see several groups experimenting with ways to combine the idea of new dark kitchen models with automation. Here are just a few:

Pizza HQ: The founders of Pizza HQ are experienced sit-down pizza restaurant operators, but they are betting the future on a robot-powered dark kitchen model. The company is creating a centralized pizza production facility in New Jersey that will utilize up to four Picnic pizza robots and also develop a network of smaller fulfillment centers around the greater northern New Jersey area.

800 Degrees: Another pizza chain, 800 Degrees, is betting its future on a combination of ghost kitchens and automated pizza production. The company is working with ghost kitchen operator Reef to expand to up to 500 ghost kitchens over the next few years, many of which will include Piestro’s robotic pizza kiosks.

Cala: This French company has created a unique pasta-making robot that enables both customer pick up and third-party delivery of its dishes. This model of automated production via kiosk as well as delivery will be a popular hybrid model that enables operators to tap into multiple customer dining revenue streams.

Hyper-robotics: Hyper has created a containerized robotic pizza kitchen that can plug into a dark kitchen model or be used in a hybrid ghost and delivery/consumer pick-up restaurant.

Kitchen United/Kiwibot: While Kitchen United hasn’t announced any deals automating their food production via robotics, the ghost kitchen pioneer has started experimenting with the use of delivery robots to ship food produced in their kitchens to customers.

Nommi: Nommi is a new joint venture creating a bowl-food robot that can be utilized in a variety of ghost kitchen formats. According to company president Buck Jordan, the company also plans to work on technology that could eventually hand robot-produced food to a delivery robot to create an “end-to-end” food robot model from production to the customer doorstep.

These are just a few examples, and we haven’t even gotten to the dozens of food robot startups building systems that could power food production in a ghost kitchen space. Companies like Beastro, Mezli, Middleby and others are working on self-contained food-making robots that could serve as enabling platforms for an entire new industry built around centralized automated food production made exclusively for digital orders.

One could argue the first company to try a robot-powered ghost kitchen model was Zume. The once high-flying startup raised hundreds of millions to create a roboticized dark pizza kitchen model to deliver pizza around the bay area using its high-tech oven equipped trucks. The company eventually shut down its robot pizza business, in part because like many pioneering startups, Zume never figured out an operating model that works (in retrospect, developing custom-built delivery trucks was probably an unnecessary use of venture funding).

But now, many of the companies following in Zume’s wake are building interesting and what looks like more sustainable businesses, in large part because they are working in partnership with restaurant operators who know the business and are savvy in building virtual restaurant businesses optimized to use third party delivery. While some of these models may eventually fail, it’s pretty clear that robotics and ghost kitchens are a combination that will play a big role in the restaurant industry’s future.

Cala Raises €5.5M Seed Round To Fund Autonomous Pasta-Robot Restaurant

Cala, a maker of autonomous pasta-robot restaurants, announced it has raised a €5.5M Seed funding round led by BACKED VC, according to a release sent to The Spoon. The new funding follows a €1M angel round raised in 2019 by the Paris-based startup.

Cala’s robot is essentially a fully operational restaurant in a box. It preps and cooks pasta, plates it, and cleans up afterward using a cartesian coordinate system robot. While the company is on its gen-2 robot, you can get an idea of how the Cala bot works by watching the video of the gen one below. The current generation machine can prepare up to 400 pasta dishes in one hour.

cala - the future of restaurants

The company opened its first robot restaurant in Paris’ fifth arrondissement district in 2020 and, according to Cala, they’ve dished up 25 thousand servings of pasta so far. Customers can order their pasta at the kiosk using the touchscreen or through meal delivery apps like UberEats or Deliveroo. Interestingly, the company says about 95 percent of the meals made so far have gone to customers who ordered through delivery.

Cofounder and CEO Ylan Richard, who dropped out of college in 2017 at age nineteen to start the company with cofounders Julien Drago and Nicolas Barboni, said he was motivated to build his pasta robot restaurant because he was frustrated by the lack of affordable and healthy meals available to him as a student.

“Through our research, and driven by our own stomachs, we could see that the foodservice industry is broken,” said Richard in the announcement. “In fast food, the low-profit margin means that it’s impossible to use higher quality ingredients. We realized that if you could automate the meal preparation, you could rapidly increase the number of meals being produced and improve the economics.”

In some ways, Richard’s motivation echoes that of Now Cuisine’s Adam Lloyd Cohen, who started thinking about using automation as a way to democratize good food while also studying in Paris (what’s with France and food robots?).

The company plans to use the new funding to expand to new locations in France and around Europe. The company is also looking to add more employees across its engineering, product and operations teams.

Cala Raises €1M for its Vegetarian Pasta Making Robot

In addition to the coffee, smoothies, cheeseburgers, chicken tenders and pizza robots are making, you can now add pasta dishes to that list. Paris-based Cala has developed a pasta cooking robot, and recently raised €1 million (~$1.1M USD) in angel funding to help bring it to market early next year.

Cala’s pastabot will be the center of a self-contained mini-restaurant that measures 5 square meters (~53 square feet) and can make up to 800 dishes an hour. As you can see from the video below, the Cala bot uses Cartesian approach, rather than an articulating arm. The restaurant will be fully autonomous. Users order via mobile app, meals cost €6 with a drink (~$6.6 USD), and the robot prepares and plates all of the food as well as doing the cleaning.

“We want everything to be sustainable,” Cala CEO Ylan Richard told me in a phone interview this week. And that sustainability runs throughout the company and its robot. First, Richard believes that the only way to sustain a business of bringing healthy food to people quickly while making enough margin is through robotics.

Second, right now Cala bot only serves vegetarian dishes. In addition to being better for the planet, avoiding meat also cuts down on costs and complications associated with storing and cooking all the ingredients inside the machine. Richard says they use “a lot of organic things,” but says his bigger priority is to locally source all of their ingredients.

Cala ran a live test restaurant in Paris for four months and Richard said that from the test the company learned that it’s important for the robot to fade into the background once the meal is served. “If you don’t come just for the meal that means there is something wrong with the way we do things,” Richard said. This mission for the robot to merely be the means and not the star of a restaurant is pretty much the exact same thing that Creator CEO Alex Vardakostas told us at our Articulate Food Robot conference earlier this year.

What’s kind of funny is that France, famous for its hallowed culinary tradition, is now home to not one, but two different robot restaurant companies. Earlier this year PAZZI (formerly EKIM) raised €10 million for its autonomous robot pizza restaurants.

I asked Richard about any dichotomies around French companies building what is quite literally lifeless food preparation. He told me that sure, France is famous for its high-end cooking, but the French are also some of McDonald’s biggest customers. “Sometimes we just want to eat something quickly,” he said.

Cala will use its recent funding to bring its robo-restaurant back to the public at the beginning of next year. The company plans to own and operate its next location, which will be outside a university in Paris. Richard said that as the company grows, it will look at franchising, rather than licensing the technology out to a larger brand, and that eventually Cala will make more types of food beyond just vegetarian dishes and pasta.