Gordon, one of the largest regional foodservice distributors in the US, is trialing a bowl-food robot from Dexai Robotics.
Dexai (a Smart Kitchen Summit finalist in 2018), makes an articulating-arm robot named Alfred. According to the post, the company installed an Alfred bowl-making salad station at Gordon’s test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
You can see the Alfred in action below:
“We help operators with efficiency,” said Dexai CEO Dave Johnson. “They can load up a table with ingredients and let the robot assemble 100 grab-and-go chicken Caesar salads. You no longer need to have a body to do that, the machine doesn’t take breaks or call in sick. … It really goes to labor savings.”
While the partnership involves a single test location today, it’s easy to see how it could blossom into a bigger collaboration for Dexai. Gordon could deploy the bowl-food robot in a managed cafeteria or in one of its nearly 200 stores it operates in the US and Canada.
For Dexai, the news comes on the heels of the Massachusetts-based startup’s deployment of Alfred to 10 military bases across the US. According to Johnson, the company plans to continue developing new robots to handle tasks such as plating food and serving drinks, which could expand the locations the robot finds itself in the future.