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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cooking Robot

GoodBytz Unveils Modular Robotic Kitchen That Can Make up to Three Thousand Meals Per Day

GoodBytz, a robotic kitchen startup based in Germany, debuted its new kitchen robot last week in its hometown of Hamburg at the INTERNORGA 2023 trade fair.

The GoodBytz food robot is a modular system that can be tailored around different food types and menus:

  • The refrigerated storage module can hold up between 24 and 72 different ingredients and sauces and feeds into different food assembly robots.
  • The food assembly robot modules can measure ingredients, fill bowls, place toppings, and perform cleaning functions.
  • A separate topping module can plan up to 24 ingredients and sauces into the bowls. GoodBytz offers a ‘cooking zone’ module that can output up to 3,000 meals per day if an operator wants a system set up for hot food.
  • The serving module makes up to four different types of bowls available for serving, and the output module presents the finished food ready for delivery to the customer.
  • A dishwasher module

Below is a schematic that shows the standard GoodBytz system. At 12.75 square meters – a little less than 200 square feet – the system has quite a large footprint, but that’s not that surprising given it’s essentially a self-contained professional food service kitchen.

The robot is centered around an internal chamber in which a couple of robotic arms maneuver around to gather ingredients, cook and place them into bowls. Once an order is placed, a robotic arm positions a cooking pot under the ingredient dispensing station to gather ingredients, dispense sauces and then place the pots on a shelf where they are rotated and cooked. The cooking shelf is reminiscent of the Spyce cooking system, in which the pots are spun in place to ensure proper heat and ingredient distribution.

Once the food is finished, the robotic arm picks up the cooking pot and pours the finished food into the bowl. From there, a separate robotic arm maneuvers the bowl under a dispensing station that puts vegetables and other items to complete the bowl and then places the bowl onto a conveyor belt so it can be rolled out to be picked up for serving.

GoodBytz Robotic Kitchen

The cooking robot’s sensors measure ingredients and adjust cooking times based on the dish being prepared, and the system features a touchscreen control module that allows for recipe customization. GoodBytz claims that the system, which can integrate with different ERP systems, can monitor food ingredient inventories and track ingredient freshness.

GoodBytz CEO Hendrik Susemihl told The Spoon the company uses a robotics-as-a-service business model, where the customer pays a fixed monthly service fee for the robots and an additional price-per-produced dish. The pricing varies depending on the configuration, with a cold bowl configuration differing from a configuration where meals are cooked in a convection oven.

The company’s prototype robotic kitchen was operational just three months after the company was founded in August 2021 and opened up a ghost kitchen in June 2022 to test the robot under natural conditions. GoodBytz plans to start cooking meals for its first big customer, Sodexo, in Q3 of this year. At INTERNORGA 2023, GoodBytz announced partnerships with system suppliers Palux and Winterhalter.

GoodBytz is first targeting the European market, but Susemihl said the company is eyeing expansion into the Asia and North American markets next year. The company has raised a €4 million seed round and is starting to raise its series A.

Else Labs Announces Pro Kitchen Focused Oliver Fleet As It Pauses Rollout of Home Cooking Robot

Else Labs, the company behind the countertop home cooking robot called Oliver, announced today the launch of Oliver Fleet, a commercial kitchen reimagining of its original core product.

The new Fleet solution is a respin of its original standalone Oliver home cooking robot into a solution that allows multiple units to be used and managed simultaneously in professional kitchen environments to automate cooking tasks. According to company CEO Khalid Aboujassoum, while the Oliver Fleet units look the same from the outside as the original consumer unit, they’ve been built to withstand the more rugged requirements of the professional kitchen.

“It might look like the household unit from the outside, but the guts of the Oliver Fleet are different,” Aboujassoum said. “The Fleet units are designed for back-to-back cooking, for that harsh environment in the commercial kitchen compared to the household.”

With the pivot to a food service focused solution, Else is pausing the rollout of the home Oliver. According to Aboujassoum, the decision to make the change was largely driven by the supply chain disruptions and associated component shortages and price changes. While some backers of the Indiegogo campaign eager to get their home Oliver may not be happy with the switch, Aboujassoum said the company would give them the option of a full refund, or they can choose to continue to wait until the company restarts the consumer unit rollout.

While the focus on commercial automated cooking comes after a pandemic where restaurant businesses have faced increasing challenges around labor, Aboujassoum told me the company started hearing interest in developing a commercial version of the Oliver before COVID.

“It was an initial modest conversation at an exhibition late in 2019 where the Oliver got the attention of one of the food service companies,” Aboujassoum said. “The composition of the Fleet was born out of these conversations.”

The pandemic put everything on hold, but eventually, Else Labs started to hear more requests as things began to normalize. “As the dust settled, those conversations revived again,” Aboujassoum said. “We started receiving an influx of inbound requests all the way to the CES participation (earlier this year).”

The way Aboujassoum sees it, the Oliver Fleet can help food service companies move away from centralized food production in a central kitchen by pushing the ability to cook from raw ingredients on-site using automation.

“When I talk to (food service) clients, they’ve set up operations where they may have a huge central kitchen with a production plant, and they are shipping to maybe 50 locations,” Aboujassoum said. “We are talking about decentralizing the central kitchen. How much money can you save by deploying the Oliver Fleet and decentralizing the central kitchen? It’s a very transformational proposal.”

Aboujassoum says the Oliver Fleet system is available now and they will have announcements of deployment partners very soon. You can see a video of the Oliver Fleet system in action below.

Sony Invests in Analytical Flavor Systems To Help Our Robot Chefs of the Future Better Predict What We Want to Eat

When Analytical Flavor Systems (AFS) CEO Jason Cohen talks about his company’s technology, it usually involves a story about helping a big food company. In particular, how AFS’s AI flavor platform, Gastrograph AI, can predict how a new product such as a bag of chips or energy drink might perform in a new country or with a new demographic group.

Ask him to tell you about his company’s flagship product in the future, though, and the conversation might well include discussing how it helped a robot chef decide what exactly to make us for dinner.

That’s because the New York-based startup has recently taken a corporate investment round from Sony, which late last year announced a dedicated project focused specifically on developing food focused AI and robotics technology.

According to Cohen, Sony’s investment team believes AFS’s technology could help them achieve their goal of creating robot chefs that know exactly what to cook.

“Once you get a food robot up and running, you don’t know what people are gonna want to eat, what they’re going to prefer, like and dislike,” said Cohen in a Zoom call.

But with a technology like Gastrograph, robots of the future might be able to more accurately predict flavor combinations consumers better than humans themselves.

“Consumers have no idea what they like and dislike,” said Cohen. “They’re actually really bad at determining whether, say, they want more vanilla in their vanilla cup. You ask them and they say ‘yes’, you put it down and they want less. Sony recognized that and that’s what part of this investment is for: future innovation and growth, to help them accomplish their goals of getting cooking robots into every home.”

In addition to Sony, AFS also took on corporate investment from BASF. According to Cohen, the German conglomerate’s plant breeding and genomics program is interested in using Gastrograph AI to help them in seed development so they can ultimately predict with a higher success rate with the crops they are breeding.

“It takes a really long time, anywhere from a year to a couple of years, even decades, on some crops, in order to breed in specific traits,” said Cohen. “And so they work with us to rapidly screen and profile the fruits that they are market leaders in, or the fruits that they want to become market leaders in, and to breed better seed stock that they can then sell to farmers in different countries around the world.”

While Cohen wouldn’t disclose the amount of investment from Sony and BASF, he did say that this was an in-between “corporate”round that they had been discussing with the two strategic investors before COVID hit, so when everything shut down in March of last year things were “already in place.” Next year, said Cohen, he expects the company will raise a Series A round of funding.

Speaking of COVID, I asked Cohen how his company did this past year, and he said their core business of working with CPG innovation teams actually benefitted because as companies wanted to keep the innovation pipelines moving during a time of severe travel restrictions and AFS’s technology allowed them to do that. Since the normal big food practice of testing products in-market with focus groups curtailed during lockdowns, some companies relied on Gastrograph AI’s technology to predict how a new product might do.

This recent investment follows a 2018 seed round investment of $4 million.

Suvie Debuts Second Generation Countertop ‘Cooking Robot’

Suvie, a maker of smart automated cooking appliances for the home, has debuted its second generation appliance, the eponymous Suvie 2.0.

So what’s different about the first and second generation Suvie? A whole bunch.

First things first: Suvie 2 is a heck of a lot smaller. That’s mainly because the second generation appliance has reduced the Suvie from being a four-chamber cooking appliance to a two-chamber machine. This change is made possible because each cooking chamber is now multifunctional, which means instead of having chamber specifically for sauce, protein or veggies, each of the two chambers can broil, steam, sous vide, slow cook as well as roast and bake (these last two cooking modes are new to the Suvie 2).

And just like the first machine, the Suvie 2 has a built in compressor-based refrigerator that chills the food until is is ready to cook. This was one of the draws of the original Suvie — being able to store your food safely in the machine while you were out all day, until it was time to cook it.

While the Suvie 2 has a smaller countertop footprint, the cooking capacity per chamber has actually gone up. According to Suvie CEO Robin Liss, cooking pans are 21% larger than in the previous generation.

To help slim down the new appliance, Suvie also removed the “starch’ chamber and created a separate, optional Starch Cooker. The new add-on, which Liss affectionately called “starchie” (but insisted is not the official name), features the same “patented” autodrain capability and can cook rice, pasta, beans and other starchy foods.

The new Suvie will be available for a pre-order price of $399 for the main unit, and $300 for the starch cooking add-on. MSRP for the core unit will be $800. According to Suvie, the company will also offer a significant discount to customers of the first gen Suvie who want to upgrade.

Just as with the first gen appliance, the user will be able to cook Suvie-originated meals or their own food, but with the addition of quartz broiler heating elements (the same type of heating elements used by the popular Breville toaster ovens), which enables more consistent heating and allows for the user to bake and broil food.

To fund the rollout of the new Suvie, company Liss told The Spoon the company has raised a $11 million in seed funding (they previously has raised $725 thousand on Kickstarter). That funding will also help the company continue to expand its associated meal service.

The new funding and the debut of a second generation Suvie is a bright spot in a kitchen tech market that has seen some consolidation over the past few years. Since Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova for a quarter of a billion in 2017, the few exits for venture-funded kitchen tech startups have relatively quiet (like ChefSteps, Brava and June), while others – like Nomiku and Sansaire – have shut their doors.

Interestingly, the two startups still making a go of it in this space both eyed the pairing of cooking appliances with meal delivery, a business model that has the potential of long-term recurring revenue for companies also competing in what is a highly cost-competitive hardware market. For its part, Tovala announced a new $30 million funding round this month, less than a year after its previous round.

If you’d like to buy the new Suvie, you can pick it up now and, according to Liss, the product will begin shipping in twelve to fourteen weeks.

You can see the Suvie in action below.

Set It & Forget It: Creator of The Oliver Cooking Robot Hopes to Usher in the Era of Unattended Cooking

Forget Top Chef. The most interesting contest in the kitchen in recent years has been the battle to become the all-in-one cooking appliance.

Air fryers, smart pressure cookers, slice and dice multicookers and even stand mixers have been throwing elbows in the fight for countertop space and consumer dollars.

But what if an entirely different category of cooker won the hearts and minds of consumers as the indispensable kitchen helper? That’s the hope of Khalid Aboujassoum, founder of Else Labs, who makes a little device called the Oliver.

So what exactly is Oliver?

“It’s a smart cooking robot,” said Aboujassoum in an interview with The Spoon.

The kitchen robot is something we’ve been writing about here at the Spoon since early days and, while we all like to envision science fiction futures with a robotic chef cooking for us every night, the only kitchen robots that have found any success so far are uni-taskers like the Rotimatic.

But according to its inventor, Oliver can do much more than one thing really well.

“It’s a recipe library, meal planner, shopping assistant, and expert chef all in one,” said Aboujassoum,

While you wouldn’t exactly call the Thermomix or other digital powered kitchen multicookers “robots”, these appliances are popular with chefs and home cooks alike because they can do so much. And the thing is, they’re adding more functions all the time. The Thermomix recently added shopping capabilities that allows the user to essentially make meal kits and order them on the fly.

But according the Aboujassoum, the major difference between Oliver and the multicooker is how much they can do during the cooking process.

“They (multicookers) are guided cooking,” he said. “The Oliver can do unattended stovetop cooking.”

What he is talking here about just how much a device can do without the consumer being involved. According to Aboujassoum, Oliver can cook the entire meal while the user goes off to take a nap or watch some TV.

“The user basically browses the recipes, selecting a recipe, loads the ingredients and then walks away,” said Aboujassoum.

This is where it’s worth looking at how the Oliver works. The user preloads the prepped ingredients into dispensing chambers that sit on the lid. Once the user selects the recipe on a connected app and hits cook, the Oliver dispenses ingredients into the single pot cooking chamber where a stirring arm mixes the food.

Ultimately, a conversation about unattended vs guided cooking is one about where and when the consumer gets involved in the cooking process. Multicookers like the Thermomix guide a cook through a meal with step-by-step recipes, and can do pretty much everything including chopping and grinding ingredients.

With the Oliver, the unattended part is true but, because it doesn’t have a built-in blade, the user may need to do a little more up front work to prep ingredients in advance and put into the ingredient chambers.

I do think the concept of a home cooking robot is promising. I’m sure there are many busy folks who would be happy to let a robot do the heavy lifting while they go do chores or relax.

Consumers who want to get their own cooking robot will soon be able to back Oliver via crowdfunding. The device will launch on Indiegogo on September 29th and early backers can get in on the appliance for $530.

For those of you who are wary of backing hardware on crowdfunding sites, you might be assured that folks behind Oliver have been working on the product for a good part of a decade (an early generation prototype of the Oliver was on display at Smart Kitchen Summit 2016) and, according to Aboujassoum, the product is ready to go.

“We could have launched two years ago or three years ago,” said Aboujassoum. “We refuse to sell unfinished product. That’s kind of our story, our strategic execution philosophy. And today we are done with the product.”

Aboujassoum said backers of Oliver should expect to get their cooking robot in June of 2021.

With the Oliver hitting the market and the Nymble on its way as well, 2021 could prove an interesting year for cooking robots. Others, like the Gamma Chef, are still in development and could make an appearance.

So hopefully we’ll know soon if the era of unattended cooking is upon us.

Nymble Eyes 2021 Launch For Its Home Cooking Robot

Looking for a little help in the kitchen? Maybe Julia could help.

No, Julia isn’t your neighbor or a chef matched with you through some online marketplace. In fact, Julia isn’t a person at all.

What Julia is is a robot. A cooking robot.

Developed by an India-based startup called Nymble, Julia creates single pot meals using spice and ingredients chambers that dispense food into the cooking bowl, where a robotic arm mixes the meal within the pot. All of this is monitored by a built-in camera.

You can see a video of Julia cooking rice here:

Fried Rice - Julia in-built camera footage

The camera does more than just capture footage. It’s how Julia becomes a better cook.

“The camera provides us with a thermal image of the food which basically represents the temperature of every pixel in the image,” said Raghav Gupta, CEO of Nymble.

Julia uses precise measurements of temperature and location to closely regulate the heat of the food. It also uses the data to create a better quality cook over time.

“It helps us cook food with a repeatable and consistent quality irrespective of the nature and size of ingredient, geography and other external factors,” said Gupta.

Early on, Julia’s programmers hard coded their cook times for specific intervals depending on the recipe. Over time they’ve gathered more data from the camera and heat sensors, and this has helped Julia become of a feedback driven system. The developer team has also created tools for non-technical users, including a “recipe visualizer” that uses camera and sensor data to help create recipes.

While all this technical work is impressive, it remains to be seen if consumers actually want a cooking robot. It’s easy to envision most of us welcoming a high-end cooking bot like that from Moley, Samsung or Sony, but these concepts are still years off from the mass market. And while there have been systems similar in concept to the Julia, the Sereneti never shipped a finished product and Else Labs’ Oliver has yet to ship.

The only cooking bot that’s sold at volume is the Rotimatic from Zimplistic, which is nearing 100 thousand total units in the field. However, the Rotimatic – a unitasker that spits out flatbread over and over – is a much different type of device than the more complex Julia.

In short, since there hasn’t been a product in the market similar to Julia, it’s hard to say if consumers will embrace the idea. My guess is its success will depend on how well it works and how useful it is and whether it makes consumer lives easier. I am particularly curious about how well these systems with pre-loaded ingredient chambers work and if they are easy to clean.

Nymble will try to figure all of this out for themselves as it eyes a 2021 launch. To help do that, the company recently finished some field tests for Julia and is in the process of rolling out additional prototypes to alpha testers in its home market of India (apply here!).

Hopefully Nymble – and we – should know soon.

Nymble Labs Raises Funding for Julia, the Countertop Cooking Robot

Nymble Labs announced yesterday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-Series A money for its countertop cooking robot dubbed Julia. Investors in the round include WaterBridge Ventures, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and 021 Capital.

Inc42 reports that Bengaluru, India-based Nymble Labs combines robotics, machine learning and the internet of things to create the Julia. The device sits on a countertop and has different compartments for various vegetables, grains, meats and more, and can make bowl or pan-based meals like curries, noodles and turf rice. Julia will come with at least 150 pre-loaded recipes on its app at launch, and will use a combination of sensors and a camera to ensure proper cooking.

The new funding will go towards finishing the development of the Julia, which Nymble aims to launch in the U.S. in 2020. No mention of price.

Nymble Labs had a booth at the Startup Showcase at CES last month (see picture above), but it wasn’t doing any live demos. What Nymble brought actually didn’t feel that far along, so it’s heartening to see that it was at least at a stage where they could attract investors.

The Julia isn’t alone in its automated cooking ambitions. Over in Croatia, GammaChef is building a similar countertop robot that stores, adds, mixes and cooks up ingredients automatically. Elsewhere in India, Zimplistic’s Rotimatic is a countertop flatbread-making robot that can automatically whip up rotis, tortillas, pizza crust and is arguably the most successful home food robot in the world right now.

While we love all this home robot proliferation, the typical kitchen is a zero sum game. There just isn’t room for all these devices unless you re-architect your kitchen to be all countertop space. There will be home cooking robot winners and losers, now we’ll have to see if Julia can justify a place in people’s homes.

If you’re into food robots, you should definitely come to our ArticulATE food robot and automation summit happening in San Francisco on April 16th!

SKS 2016 Flashback: The Cooking Automation Continuum

With Smart Kitchen Summit 2017 just days away, here at the Spoon, we thought we’d revisit some of our favorite session from last year.

This session, “The Cooking Automation Continuum: From Guided Cooking to The Cooking Robot,” was a fun panel moderated by your’s truly that explored the various ways innovators are looking to apply automation and robotics to food and cooking.

There’s no doubt that cooking automation is a continuum. We see basic automation in hugely popular cooking devices today such as the Instant Pot and Thermomix, while there are those exploring the outer boundaries of how to apply automation and robotics to create fully cooked meals.

We talk about all of this in this session.

The panelists for this session are Darren Vengroff, the (then) Chief Scientist of Hestan Smart Cooking, Timothy Chen, CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, and Ehsan Alipour, the CEO of Oliso.

We will be exploring cooking automation and robotics at this year’s Summit. If you’d like to see these sessions, talk to the innovators and become smarter about the future of cooking, you can still get tickets at the Smart Kitchen Summit website. Use the discount code SPOON for 25% off of tickets. 

Smart Kitchen Startup Else Labs Raises $1.8 Million

While no one has quite figured out what the robot cook of the future looks like, it’s not for lack of trying.

While some labor to create a fully functional transformer-meets-home-chef like Moley, others see a path filled with single-function robots spitting out tortillas and mixing drinks.

And then there’s Else Labs, which sees a future for cooking automation that fuses timeworn cooking concepts like a slow cooker with modern advances such as a smart dispenser system and app control.

Else founder Khalid Aboujassoum first presented the concept for his automated cooker on Stars of Science, a Qatar TV show similar to Shark Tank. At the time, he only had a rough working prototype of the product that would eventually come to be known as Oliver, but he received enough encouragement to start working with a San Francisco design firm and keep on developing the product.

Illustration of a user preparing food for the Oliver cooking chambers. Source: Else Labs

After participating in last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit’s Startup Showcase, the team continued to work on Oliver’s development. They created another early prototype and started doing one-on-one cooking sessions with consumers in their homes to refine the experience. And now, with the company’s goal of bringing the product to market in spring of 2018, they have raised a seed round of $1.8 million.

I emailed Aboujassoum to ask him a few questions about the funding and the company’s product:

Wolf: Who were your investors?

Aboujassoum: Yellow Services, a wholly owned subsidiary by Qatar Development Bank, is the institutional investor. YS manages a $100M fund dedicated to innovation startups and SMEs that can contribute in diversifying Qatar’s economy.

Wolf: How much total has Else Labs raised?

Aboujassoum: $1.95 million. (ed note: The company raised an angel round of approximately $150 thousand)

Wolf: Where is Oliver in terms of development and expected ship date? 

Aboujassoum: We have an advanced working prototype that we are using to conduct 1-to-1 sessions with early adopters in their homes. Those sessions are helping us in refining the user experience and prepare for the pilot program that we are working on launching soon.

The pilot will inform our crowd-funding and overall launch strategy. Our target launch date is Q2 2018.

Wolf: Who are the key members of your team?

Aboujassoum: myself (ed note:Aboujassoum is founder & CEO), Tariq Maksoud (cofounder & lead mechanical engineer, and Abdulrahman Saleh Khamis (cofounder & lead electrical engineer).

Wolf: There hasn’t been a successful product in the robotic/automated cooking category yet. Why will Oliver be different?

Aboujassoum: We believe that the main reason it’s been difficult to crack the market is because the cost has been too high or the product has been simply too intimidating or different from what a user is accustomed to in a kitchen appliance.

We were determined to keep lasersharp focus on engineering Oliver to be cost effective and enhancing what is already familiar to the user in what to expect from a kitchen appliance. With Oliver, we were able to build the necessary functions of automated dispensing, mixing, and heating that meets its futuristic robotic function, but yet familiar in its form to the user.

Finding the balance between performance, form, and cost was a challenge that we were able to overcome with the technology we have developed. Overcoming this challenge was the key to opening the door to designing a user centred product in this space. This is what makes Oliver different.

We know that we still have a long way ahead of us, but we believe Oliver is the perfect balance that will be inviting to users in and will bridge that gap between traditional kitchen appliances and the future of cooking.

Else Labs was one of 15 startups selected for the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase. To find the next big thing in cooking, you won’t want to miss the Startup Showcase at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of any ticket.

Can This Self-Driving Car Pioneer Crack The Code On Cooking Robots?

The home cooking robot market is, shall we say, in the early innings.

Not that folks aren’t trying. Companies like Sereneti and GammaChef are working on creating full home cooking robots, while others like Rotimatic and Bartesian are applying robotics more narrowly to tackle single-function machines to make flatbread or cocktails.

But it’s pretty self-evident at this point we’ve only just thrown out the first pitch.

So when the father of the self-driving car puts out a feeler for a new project he’s working on in the area of home cooking robotics, needless to say it piqued my interest.

According to Business Insider, Sebastian Thrun, the man behind early autonomous car effort Stanley, is building a team for a project that will develop “technology to modernize how we prepare daily healthy and tasty meals at home.” The company’s stealth name is SVFactory.

Thrun’s entry into this market is exciting if for only his proven ability jumpstart new industries through innovation. Not only did his work at DARPA eventually lead to his shepherding Google’s early work on autonomous vehicles, but Thrun also went on to found Google’s so-called ‘moonshot factory’, Google X, and has been instrumental in helping to democratize the education market through the founding of Udacity, a hugely popular online learning site.

But while Thrun clearly has an ability to make futuristic technology concepts more market ready, he has his work cut out for him with consumer cooking robots. It remains to be seen how robotics can be applied to home cooking in a way that makes consumers feel, well, at home. Futuristic efforts like that of Moley are intriguing, but I’m not entirely sure how mass market and practical putting two giant robots arms would be in a normal home.

Still, count me as excited about the entrance of a heavy hitter like Thrun into the market. Let’s hope he can hit a home run or two.

A Conversation Dražen Drnas, CEO of Robotic Chef Startup GammaChef

Late last year, one of Croatia’s biggest packaged food conglomerates, Podravka, invested in a robotic home chef startup called GammaChef.

It’s an interesting move for such a storied company. Podravka, which was founded in 1934, started as a fruit factory before eventually becaming nationalized as part of Yugoslavia in 1947. With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, Croatia gained independence and soon the company was privatized. Now, nearly 80 years after its founding, the company has invested in its first startup, a robotic home cooking company.

The investment made me want to learn more about GammaChef and hopefully figure out why one of Croatia’s longest-running food companies was interested in consumer cooking robots. I recently caught up with GammaChef’s CEO, Dražen Drnas. Below is my interview edited slightly for readability.

Can you tell me more about the investment by Podravka?

Drnas: Podravka is one of the leading food companies in the SouthEast, Central and Eastern Europe. Unfortunately I can not disclose the financial details but it was in terms of standard seed rounds. This seed round with Podravka is for us more than just a financial investment; it is also a strategic partnership. Podravka is going to actively support GammaChef project with its R&D and know-how. They are also involved in design of disposable food cartridges and ingredients needed for preparing meals in Gammachef.

Is the product mainly for Croatia, or do you have plans to distribute/sell in rest of Europe or USA?

Drnas: The product is planned for a global market. Since Croatia is part of EU, we will probably target EU first. The US market is also in our plans.

Tell me more about the product.

Drnas: GammaChef is robotic chef capable of preparing any one pot meal. At its core is a digital recipe. Based on that recipe, GammaChef will prepare you fresh, homemade and tasty meal at any desired time. It is capable of preparing risottos, pasta, gnocchi, stews, soups, any meal prepared in one pot.

Basically, it follows the steps of a real human chef, adding right amount of ingredients at the right time. It also controlls other parameters of cooking, like stirring and setting temperatures.

It is not a closed machine, you can digitalize your own recipe simply by switching the robot to TeachMe mode, cook your favorite dish on GammaChef and save it. Later you can share it with your friends and they can have your authentic meal prepared your way on their GammaChef.

The Robotic chef will come with some digital recipes, but also you can download new recipes or whole cookbooks from our store, it will be some kind of ‘Kindle for cookbooks’.  It is fully connected via WiFi, so it can be controlled by your smartphone or even Amazon Echo. It has some handy features like personalised taste (more or less salt or spices) or calculation of calories intake.

What about pricing and availability?

Drnas: We still don’t have the final price, but our calculations and plans are setting a price within the price range of a better kitchen appliances, it will not cost more than some good quality oven. We are planning to start with first pilot series next year and later go into serial production.

Robotic cookers haven’t taken off. We haven’t really seen one that really works well. How will the Gammachef differ?

Drnas: Yes, robotic cookers are a new category of devices, not many companies even tried, so far none have really delivered. Unlike some other robotic cookers, we chose somewhat different and more pragmatic approach. GammaChef is designed more like a household appliance, and not like a humanoid robot. That makes it less costly, easier to put in your kitchen, and sometimes less scary.

Also, functioning of GammaChef does not depend on food delivery of prepared ingredients. Yes, we are planning to have food cartridges with our partner, but also you can refill the containers with your own food and cook your favorite recipe. That means we are not constrained and limited with logistic problems of profitable food delivery worldwide in the first phase.

And the final and most important thing, GammaChef is cooks tasty meals. We ran a test where we invited to a cooking contest between the robot and good human chef, after the blind test of meals, shrimp risotto made by robot won human made risotto by 12:6 in votes.

We believe it is time to bring 21st century into our kitchens, but our approach is not to dehumanize kitchen by filling it with automatization like some car factory. We need a pragmatic approach that is going to help us eat healthier. We believe our solution will enable working families to eat homemade meals together. That will unload part of the burden from our working moms like the washing machine did.  But also a device that will unleash our creativity, there is no reason why you couldn’t have your favorite grandma’s stew prepared just in time when you come home from work.

What is your background? Do you have someone (maybe you) who is the robotics lead/expert helping to design?

Drnas: Me and my cofounder Đulijano Nola are both electronics engineers. We’ve been playing with electronics and robots since late 80’s. Later we switched more to software development. We have entrepreneurial experience in setting up and running digital companies. We built some successful products like Gohome.eu, a real estate search engine and CrnoJaje.hr, the no.1 daily deal site in Croatia. For the GoHome project, we raised VC investment for expansion into EU market.

We are both amateur chefs and since we are passionate about technology almost as we are passionate about food. We started building a robotic chef almost for fun as a side project in our free time. When we managed to build the first prototype and discovered how well GammaChef cooked, we decided to go full speed in that direction. When we see how well people are reacting to the food and to the robot, we’re convinced we are on the right track.

To achieve our vision, we’ve continued to build out our team. We’ve added a small agile team of software developers, mechanical engineers, designers and chefs helping the design.

 

The Year In Food Robots

When you hear the words ‘food’ and ‘robot’ in the same sentence, chances are something like Softbank’s Pepper pops to mind, a modern Rosie-the-robot like humanoid with the hands and feet required to move around a kitchen and flip a pancake or two.

But when it comes to the kitchen, reality hasn’t quite caught up with the world envisioned by Hanna-Barbera, at least not yet. While there are companies who seem pretty serious about creating human-like creatures to take over our kitchen, the kitchen robot invasion, at least for the foreseeable future, will most likely consist of many more single-function machines that can automate tasks like drink mixing or stirring food in a pot rather than machines that act as a humanoid master chef (with one or two exceptions).

There’s also a big difference between what’s happening in the consumer kitchen compared to the pro kitchen.  While consumers will witness a slow and subtle invasion of single-purpose devices into our homes, in the pro kitchen we’re likely to see a variety of robotic systems put into use in restaurant environments over the next few years.

Below we take a look at what happened in food robots in 2016 and what to expect in 2017:

Consumer Cooking Robots in 2016: Failure To Boot

When it comes to consumer multifunction cooking robots, 2016 was mostly a non-starter. Despite showing at this year’s CES, Sereneti never shipped their product. OneCook, coming off a high-profile Kickstarter campaign in 2015 in which they raised over $100 thousand, missed its August ship date and has paused production without an update in months.

If you really want the closest thing to an all-in-one cooking robot today, your best bet is something like the Thermomix, a multi-cooker that I’ve been trying out and have discovered it does a whole lot of things and does them well. Sure, it may not have robotic arms to peel garlic or slice potatoes, but did you think you could automate everything in the kitchen?

Bartenderbots

If after a crazy year you feel you could use a drink, here’s some good news: the bartenderbots are coming.

Two startups, Bartesian and Somabar, are both in the process of bringing drink mixers to market that automate the process of making a cocktail.  Both use chambers to hold spirits, while the Bartesian uses a pod-based system to add flavors a la Keurig, while the Somabar has an infuser chamber to hold flavors that are added to the drink in the mixing process.

Both have told The Spoon they are planning to ship in first half of 2017.

Breadbots 

If drinking isn’t your thing, perhaps you’d like a breadbot.

The Rotimatic, a robot that makes roti (Indian flatbread) and wraps began shipping in August. The wrap-robot is made by Zimplistic, a Singapore based startup that first showed off the product in January 2015 at CES. The company is working towards shipping the product to the US in 2017.

Another automated breadmaker, the Flatev, launched their Kickstarter campaign for a pod-based tortilla maker in May and indicated this month they are on track for an August 2017 ship date.

Ok, So Maybe We Do Have A Chefbot: Moley

If you’ve seen a story about a full kitchen robot in 2016, chances are it was about Moley. The startup, which touts itself as makers of the first robotic kitchen, has created a prototype of robotic chef that uses two fully robotic arms to mimic the movements of BBC master chef Tim Anderson.  While Moley appears to be the kind of robot that would work well in a pro kitchen, particularly if it was surrounded by a supporting cast of sous chefs to prepare ingredients (the Moley robot only prepares the final meal, but doesn’t do prep work or cleanup), the company envisions a consumer version of the Moley robot complete with two robotic arms, a built-in oven, a cooktop and a touchscreen to control the system.

While the idea of a fully robotic cooking robot is intriguing, I have my doubts about the readiness of the concept for consumer kitchens in 2017. Partly for practical considerations, as the Moley robot will require a large footprint, will require professional installation and, at this point, only performs part of the cooking process.  My biggest concern, however, is cost: while the company has yet to release pricing, I suspect it will cost somewhere north of five thousand (maybe much more) given it has a built in cooktop, stove and, oh yeah, robotic arms. All of this built-in tech means only those willing to spends lots of money on a futuristic concept will buy a Moley, provided it works well (and that’s a big if).

Despite these concerns, I am excited for the work Moley is doing, even though I’m not convinced the consumer market is ready for the product just yet.

You can see the Moley prototype at work below:

The robotic chef - Moley Robotics

Here Come The Probots

While the consumer cooking robotics market has surprisingly bare shelves in late 2016, the pro kitchen saw significant progress in 2016. There are a number of different ‘probots’ being developed for the restaurant and professional kitchen. Below are a few of the food (p)robot innovators we watched closely in 2016:

Casabots

Casabots is a salad assembly robot company that began in 2014 after founder and CEO Deepak Sekar had experimented with creating a food robot for his home. He soon realized that a more practical application of robotics was in professional environments and, before long, Sally was born. Sally, the company’s salad-assembly robot, looks a little (or a lot) like a refrigerator and allows the user to pick their ingredients using a touchscreen. Sekar told me that they are working with corporations like Aramark that run cafeterias to have Sally installed in high-volume work environments and expects to have Sally ready for market in early 2017.

Momentum Machines

Back in 2012, a new company emerged from food tech startup incubator Lemnos Labs with the goal of not helping humans in the world of fast food, but replacing them all together.

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” said Momentum Machines co-founder Alexandros Vardakostas in an interview with Xconomy. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

A couple of years later, the company unveiled a prototype of a machine that could make up to 400 hamburgers per hour. The device, the tech details of which the company has kept largely under wraps, is described in the diagram below:

momentummachines-0

What’s fascinating about Momentum Machines technology is that while it works at industrial speed, it’s not mass producing the same burger over and over. It’s creating up to 400 custom burgers per hour. That’s right: up to 400 uniquely crafted, cooked, assembled and bagged hamburgers per hour.

And now, after going silent since 2014, the company created a buzz in June when it was discovered they’d applied for a building permit to create its first restaurant in San Francisco. While the roboburger joint has yet to open, we’re excited to head there in 2017 to try out a fully robot-produced hamburger.

Zume Pizza

The craziest – and perhaps most brilliant  – of all the pro food robots is from Zume Pizza. Founded by former Zynga President Alex Garden, Zume utilizes robotics in two points in the process (production and distribution) to get fresh machine-assisted artisan-style pizzas to consumers.

The pizza production process utilizes three robots and a conveyor belt system to produce pizzas at a fast rate for consumption in-restaurant or delivered to the home. The process includes three robots for production (Pepe for sauce dispensing, Marta for sauce spreading, and Bruno for loading and unloading pizza into the oven).  Humans work side-by-side in the Zume pizza kitchen, adding ingredients to the pizza, correcting any errors by the robots.

If you think the robot’s job done at Zume once it comes out of the kitchen, you’d be wrong. The company is working on creating large pizza trucks that utilize what it calls “Baking on the way” technology, a patented system that employs 56 individual ovens that are wired to initiate a cook just minutes before the arrival at the consumer’s door to give them an “out of the oven” experience.

The company, which opened its first restaurant this year, has applied for permits to operate its mobile pizza ovens on wheels and just this month raised close to $23 million in equity financing, so there’s a good chance we’ll see more restaurants – and possibly some pizza ovens on wheels – from Zume in 2017.

Starship 

While Starship isn’t really a food robot, there’s a good chance it’s robots – or ones like it – will help bring food to us in the future. That’s because Starship, a company cofounded by Skype cofounder Ahti Heinla, makes sidewalk delivery robots that are already being put into trials by large grocery stores to deliver food to consumers.

When I spoke to Heinla earlier this year, he made it clear he thought robotic delivery had huge advantages over the traditional method of humans and cars.

“With robots,” he said, ”the cost is in technology, manufacturing, and maintenance. The safest bet you can do is that technology is getting cheaper all the time. It’s just a question of time before this (delivery) will be one dollar, fifty cents.”

What’s interesting is Starship robots still require humans to control them – much like today’s drones – in the process of a delivery. Heinla envisions a human remotely controlling up to 10 or so Starship sidewalk delivery robots at some point, but unlike cars or even drones, what makes these robots ready for delivery deployment today is how slow they move.

“With a sidewalk robot, when a robot encounters a situation that is too complicated for the automatic system to handle, the robot can simply stop on the sidewalk and call up the (human) operator to help. This is the beauty of using a robot moving at pedestrian speeds on a sidewalk.”

Looking Forward

2016 saw significant advancement in food and cooking robotics. While the professional kitchen is further along in the food robot revolution in part because efforts to add robotics to centralized and professional food production facilities have excited for decades, we think 2017 could be an exciting year for the consumer market too as Moley, bartenderbots and even cooking robots like Sereneti finally make their debut. Investor interest in both sectors seems to be rising, so we also expect some new companies to debut in 2017 and beyond that bring robotics to the kitchen.

Lastly, there is a whole bunch of innovation going on in cooking automation and food 3D printing, areas which often overlap with kitchen robotics (take the pancakebot, for example). We expect those areas to be equally exciting in 2017.

Stay tuned and check back here at The Spoon as we cover the food robot revolution – and more – in 2017.