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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Chef Robotics

Food Assembly Robot Startup Chef Robotics Raises $43M Series A as it Reaches 40 Million Meal Milestone

Chef Robotics has raised $43.1 million in a Series A round to accelerate deployment of its AI-powered food assembly robots, the company announced today. The funding brings the San Francisco-based startup’s total capital to over $65 million, including equipment financing. Avataar led the round, with participation from Construct Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and others.

Founded in 2019, Chef Robotics is building what founder and CEO Rajat Bhageria calls an “AI platform for food.” Rather than building a single-purpose robot, Chef’s system is designed to work in diverse food production environments—learning and adapting through software to new tasks like portioning, topping, or filling.

When I first got a peek at Chef’s system last year, I was intrigued because the company had struck a balance that seemed to elude many food robotics startups. While startups in this space seemed to make either high-volume solutions with limited customizability or use off-the-shelf robotic arms that aren’t made for true high-production, Chef has built a flexible and scalable robotics platform that can be customized for any number of high-volume food production environments.

That’s because while many robotics companies focus primarily on hardware, Chef’s approach centers on a software layer that enables “Embodied AI”—giving physical robots the intelligence to operate autonomously in real-world conditions. Chef’s system combines a robotic arm with AI models trained on millions of real-world examples. These models, powered by production data from early customers like Amy’s Kitchen and Fresh Prep, allow the robots to generalize across new ingredients and dishes. To date, Chef Robotics has helped assemble over 40 million meals.

From the company’s announcement: When we thought about starting with restaurants, we ran into the chicken and egg problem – to enable robots that are flexible enough to add value, we need a highly capable AI, but to get a highly capable AI, we need real-world training data from the customer sites…. Thus, we decided to initially deploy robots in high-mix (read as highly flexible) food production and manufacturing environments where Chef could partially automate a food operation and thus add value in production to customers without requiring 100% full autonomy from the get-go. We built Chef’s systems on modern advancements in AI to make them highly flexible and adaptable enough to “pick” and plate almost any ingredient, no matter how it’s cut, cooked, or grown; this makes them an ideal solution for assembling or plating food.  

The new capital will support scaling up deployments and building out Chef’s sales and marketing teams. The company is currently active in the U.S. and Canada, with plans to expand into the UK next year.

The Food Tech News Show: Food Tech Funding Down in 1H 2024

The Spoon has launched a new podcast!

As listeners of the Spoon Podcast know, it’s been both a long-form interview show and a news show. Since those who listen to interviews aren’t always the same as those who want their weekly dose of food tech news, we thought a dedicated news show made sense.

Meet the Food Tech News Show podcast! You can subscribe to the new The Food Tech News Show on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeart Radio, and via RSS.

On this episode, Michael Wolf and Carlos Rodela welcome Peter Bodenheimer, a longtime food tech investor and operator, to discuss the current state of food and ag tech funding. In this episode, they delve into:

Tune in to The Spoon’s new dedicated weekly food tech news show!

Those who would like to watch the video version of the show can check it out below.

The Food Tech News Show

Chef Robotics Comes Out of Stealth to Show Off Robot and Reveal Early Customers

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.

Chef Robotics Founder Rajat Bhageria Unveils his Company's Robot and Talks About The Future

Chef Robotics Hits 10M Meal Milestone in Under Two Years. The Secret? AI-Powered Robots Trained With Lots of Field Data

This week, food automation startup Chef Robotics told The Spoon it had reached the ten million-meal milestone, less than two years after the company’s first robot was deployed in June 2022.

If you think that type of growth is achieved by steady month-over-month increases in production over time, you’re wrong. In fact, according to founder Rajat Bhageria, after taking nearly a year to reach its first million, the company’s been on an up-and-to-the-right full-throttle ride of hockey stick exponential growth ever since. The next million took about one hundred days, the next after that three weeks, and, nowadays, Bhageria says it takes just about two and half weeks or so per additional million food items.

That’s a whole lot of meals made in a short time, which made me wonder what type of customers and food facilities the company serves with its robotics. Bhageria says their typical customers are those running centralized food processing facilities, where Chef Robotics assembles the type of yogurt parfait or protein platter SKUs you might pick up at your local coffee shop. Other end-products include airline meals, hospital food service, and other pre-packed meals. In other words, Chef Robotics’ robots aren’t making salad bowls or pasta from a menu in a restaurant, but instead assembling pre-packed meals at high volume across a wide variety of food types.

“If Tesla’s core technology is batteries, our core technology is food manipulation,” Bhageria said. “Which is to say, we need to be able to go from shredded chicken to diced chicken, to cubed chicken, and from julienne onions to chopped onions to sticky cheese grits in marinara sauce. The whole point of Chef Robotics is to be as flexible as possible.”

Bhageria says their food assembly and manipulation systems differ from traditional dispensing systems, which are limited by a hardware-centric approach and lack sensitivity to the variability in food ingredients. He says Chef Robotics focuses much more on software while leveraging a combination of computer vision, motion planning, and a robotic arm equipped with various utensils. This technology integration mimics the dexterity and intelligence of human food handling, enabling the robots to adapt to different ingredients and recipes rapidly.

Chef Robotics’ CEO says that the company has essentially overcome the infamous AI “cold start” problem by accumulating a massive amount of data by having its robotics in the field enable it to become more flexible over time and understand the different challenges around different types of food manipulation. He says this has resulted in what they call its (what else?) ChefOS.

“ChatGPT can basically just download the Internet,” Bhageria said. “But there’s no training data for food manipulation. You can’t really do it in the lab because the way one customer, julienne’s an onion, is very different than the way another customer, julienne’s an onion. The way to learn how to manipulate food is you have to deploy robots.”

The more robots you have in the field, the more data you have, which makes the AI smarter, which means the existing robots work faster and faster; in other words, it’s the virtuous circle of scaled automation and AI.

When I asked Bhageria the names of his specific customers, he told me they aren’t disclosing who they are because the companies using Chef Robotics technology wish to remain under the radar for now. We do know that the company has robotics in five cities across the US and Canada and plans to triple its fleet of robots this year.

With this type of growth, it won’t be long before Chef Robotics’ robots are pumping out a million meals assembled in just a matter of days.

Chef Robotics Raises $14.75M To Automate Food Assembly in Commercial Kitchens

We’ve been tracking Chef Robotics before it was even called that when the company’s CEO and founder, Rajat Bhageria, spoke at The Spoon’s food robotics conference ArticulATE in 2019.

At the time, Bhageria was still in stealth on what would become his restaurant robot company, but he had hinted that he was up to something when we talked to him and convinced him to come and speak at the conference as an investor for his investment shingle, Prototype Capital. Since that time, Chef Robotics has exited stealth and the company is actually selling its robot (Bhageria says that company revenue has doubled between 2022 and 2023) and, as first reported by Techcrunch, the company has raised a new $14.75 million combo debt/equity round of funding.

From Techcrunch: Rajat Bhageria tells TechCrunch that Chef distinguishes itself from the likes of Miso by focusing on food assembly, rather than cooking specifically. The company is also touting ChefOS, the underlying software driving its robot arm’s decisions. “[F]ood is very highly dimensional: depending on how you prep the ingredients (e.g., julienned onions vs chopped), cook the ingredients (e.g., sauteed, baked, broiled), store the ingredients (e.g., cooked, room temp, frozen), the material properties radically differ,” the company notes. “And these properties change daily based on who is prepping and cooking. To deal with this, Chef uses various sensors – like cameras – to collect training data and then trains models that help Chef learn how to manipulate a large corpus of ingredients.”

When he spoke at ArticulATE in 2019, Bhageria discussed the importance of better and cheaper computer vision and the growing power of AI to help power useful robots in food service and beyond.

“In my head, computer vision is absurdly important here,” said Bhageria. Now you have better sensors with cameras, better computation with GPUs, cloud computing, and deep neural networks, and better actuation.”

You can watch the food robotics panel with Bhageria and other food tech investors below.

Articulate 2019: Investment Opportunities in Food Robotics