Chef Robotics

This week, Chef Robotics, the San Francisco-based food robotics startup founded by Rajat Bhageria, stepped out of stealth mode and into the spotlight by unveiling its robot and disclosing some of its high-profile partnerships.

In an interview with The Spoon, Bhageria, an investor and technology founder, showcased Chef, a food robot that assembles cooked and ready-to-eat food in high-volume environments. This focus, says Bhageria, is much different from the bulk of robots in the market, most of which focus primarily on prep and cooking in restaurants and food service.

“Restaurants have low volume, making automation difficult because jobs are generalized,” Bhageria explained. “In high-volume operations, jobs become specialized, making automation feasible. We focused on getting robots into the field quickly to gather real-world training data, improving our food manipulation AI.”

Bhageria, a master’s graduate of Penn’s Robotics and Machine Learning Lab, started his first company in high school, a social network for young writers. During college and grad school, he founded Third Eye, a company using computer vision to assist the visually impaired. This project opened his eyes to the immense potential of AI and computer vision. “Computer vision and AI are immensely powerful. Even back in 2014, I saw AI’s potential impact on our lives.”

Along the way, Bhageria started an early-stage venture capital company called Prototype Capital with an investment thesis that helped shape his own company: applying new innovations to old industries. The organizing principle here was that big ideas and proprietary data sets were not just confined to Silicon Valley but seeded in older communities built around these mature industries that would benefit most from technology transformation.

While he and his Prototype partners invested in businesses nestled in rust-belt epicenters and other mature communities, he continued to work on – and crystalize – his idea for Chef. As he interviewed executives from these companies and asked about their pain points, he realized that food preparation is one of the most labor-constrained sectors in the US. As he dug deeper, it dawned on him that food assembly and plating were more labor-intensive than prepping and cooking (which often only needed a single employee for each).

“Prepping and cooking can be done in bulk, but assembly scales linearly with output,” Bhageria said. “Automating assembly can save labor and increase volume and revenue.”

Bhageria believes his approach to food assembly first mirrors that of Tesla, which tackled the high-end, high-performance sector with the Roadster before moving on to mass-market production models.

“Going to restaurants is like trying to build the Model 3 from the get-go,” said Bhageria. “If Elon and Tesla tried to build the Model 3 from the start, it probably wouldn’t have worked.”

However, Bhageria believes that the lowest-volume, most distributed form of cooking robot – a home robot – isn’t in the cards, at least for his company.

“I am kind of of the opinion that at-home robots for food will not be a thing. People don’t want to maintain a robot in their house, buy it, refill it, or take care of it. They prefer having meals made in ghost kitchens by robots and delivered to their homes.”

Bhageria believes in the future, consumers will be touched by food robots, but only in a world where robot-assembled food in centralized kitchens will mean more variety and lower cost food for everyone.

“Cooking will go to people who still cook because they love it,” Bhageria predicted. “But more and more of the world will get their food made in ghost kitchens by robots, delivered by robots.”

In addition to revealing his robot and his company’s approach to food automation to the world, Bhageria also disclosed some of his company’s early clients. He said his customers include Amy’s Kitchen, a well-known frozen prepared meal company, and Sunbasket, a direct-to-consumer meal provider with a substantial contract manufacturing arm. Another company Chef Bombay, a Canadian food company, has integrated Chef Robotics’ into their operations.

Bhageria said his customers span a number of industries, primarily those that need high-volume assembly of ready-to-eat meals. These industries include hospitals, airlines, delivery services, grocery stores, and frozen prepared meals.

“These environments are extremely manual, with people scooping ingredients for long hours in cold rooms. Our robots help automate this process, addressing labor shortages and increasing production volume.”

You can see my full interview with Bhageria below.