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Hyphen

December 7, 2023

With Launch of Bowl Food Robot, Cibotica Points to Dispensing Technology and Small Footprint as Differentiators

This week, Canadian food robot startup Cibotica announced that its first food robot is fully operational in a multi-brand ‘digital food hall’ called Food Republic in Vancouver, Canada. According to the company, the fully robotic makeline named Remy can assemble up to 300 salads per hour utilizing the company’s proprietary dispensing technology.

Images of Remy, Cibotica's food assembly robot

Cibotica cofounder Ashkan Mirnabavi says that after he opened his first restaurant in 2019, he experienced the challenges firsthand around finding and training employees to keep his restaurant up and running. The former engineer turned restaurant operator started looking at available automation technology but felt none of the available solutions fit what he was looking for, so he joined forces with his two other cofounders, Darius Sahebjavaher (CTO) and Soroush Sefidkar (co-CEO), to start a food robotics company.

Once they started looking at different technologies, such as robotic arms, Mirnabavi said they knew they had to build a system that integrated with existing restaurant operations. They soon started thinking about building a robotic makeline and focused on a system that had the flexibility to do a variety of ingredients and fit into existing restaurant kitchen spaces.

“We learned that the biggest hurdle is the dispensing and accurately dispensing ingredients,” said Mirnabavi. “All these other solutions that existed, you had to have different technology for different ingredients, which makes your assembly line much bigger. And that’s where we said, ‘okay if we can come up with one solution that is capable of basically all types of ingredients with different characteristics and a different temperature,’ we might be able to solve it.”

With the system now operating in his Food Republic digital food hall, Mirnabavi and his partners are eyeing a variety of future applications and partners that can utilize its robot.

“Quick service restaurants, salad bowls, they were like an entry point for us,” said Mirnabavi. “Fresh produce processing centers, where they go through tons and tons of ingredients. Meal kit companies, there is a lot of manual work. There are markets where there are assembly lines, where people scoop different ingredients into these small, smaller, pre-packaged meals and put everything in a box. Application-wise, the market is huge.”

The market’s getting crowded quickly, with a variety of players such as Hyphen, Lab37, Eatch, and TechMagic offering robotic food assembly for a QSR’s back of house. Cibotica believes their focus on flexibility and small footprint should garner interest from restaurant partners who want to use automation for bowl food assembly in their restaurants.

As for business models, Mirnabavi says, at least for the time being, the company plans to offer a flexible model for its early customers, either through a robotics-as-a-service monthly payment plan or through the purchase of the machines. As time passes, he says they may choose to use one model over the other. The company is currently raising money for their next round of investment.

August 23, 2022

Bite Ninja’s New Funding Shows Operational Efficiency Is What’s in for Restaurant Tech in 2022

Despite the constant flood of doomsday headlines as the dark clouds of recession gather overhead and consumer behavior regresses to the mean post-pandemic, not all news is bad news these days when it comes to restaurant tech. In fact, some startups seem to be doing just fine, particularly those whose mission it is to help restaurants save money.

Take Bite Ninja, who this week announced an $11.3 million funding round. The company allows fast food restaurants to outsource their drive-thru through Bite Ninja’s cloud-labor platform. Bite Ninja employees can remotely staff a drive-thru from their home anywhere in the country and can also work multiple drive-thrus during the course of their shift.

The ability to spread a single worker across multiple restaurants and treat drive-thru labor as an “elastic” resource that can be spun or down dynamically during the course of a day is a radical rethink of a core part of a fast food restaurant, coming at a time when most fast food restaurants are struggling to hire employees. According to the announcement, Bite Ninja is currently running trials at five of the top twenty quick-service chains in the US.

Other companies that help restaurants and retail become more efficient and bring cost-savings to operations continue to thrive and get new funding despite what many see as a large-scale downturn in food tech funding. For example, Galley Solutions, a company that helps restaurants more accurately predict and optimize their food inventory, raised $14.2 million this spring. Hyphen, a startup that is building plug & play automated makeline solutions, raised a $24 million Series A in February and saw additional follow-on investment by Chipotle in June. That same month, food waste reduction startup Goodr raised a $8 million funding round in early summer. Last month, Afresh, a company that enables food retailers to optimize their fresh food inventory and reduce waste, raised a $115 million series B.

If 2021’s restaurant tech funding was all about ghost kitchens and digital transformation, the big buzzwords for 2022 are operational efficiency and cost savings. Startups that can help streamline operations using automation, cloud computing, AI, and other transformational technologies will continue to do okay, particularly those that help restaurant operators deal with acute labor shortages and rising costs of doing business during rising inflation and persistent supply chain disruptions.

February 18, 2022

Hyphen Wants to Be The Shopify for Restaurant Robots

Imagine you’re a culinary student with dreams of owning your own restaurant.

In days past, that journey towards restauranteur would take 10 to 20 years as you cut your teeth, gained experience, and saved enough money.

But imagine if you could build a restaurant today or in the near future leveraging automation and software? There would be no big location remodel and a big loan to pay for it. Instead, you’d use a virtual restaurant model powered by fractional pay-as-you-go food robotics, food ordering apps, and third-party delivery, all allowing you to bring something to market in months instead of a decade?

That’s the kind of world that Stephen Klein wants to build. Klein’s company Hyphen announced this week that they’d raised a $24 million Series A funding round, and so I decided to catch up with him to hear about his vision for the company and the food robotics marketplace.

In short, what Stephen and his co-founder Daniel Fukuba believe they are building a Shopify for restaurant robots.

“Instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash,” said Klein.

According to Klein, the big delivery companies are sucking up data from smaller restaurants and using that to compete with them. He believes if the smaller and regional players – as well as new food entrepreneurs – were able to use Hyphen’s automation technology to scale up new offerings, they’d have a much better chance to compete with the big players.

“We’re basically removing the overhead of starting and scaling a restaurant,” said Klein. “You can kind of just do it from your home effectively. And that’s just a really cool place in our mind.”

That’s the vision, but the company first has to scale its own business to get there. From the looks of it, they’re off to a good start as the company has already taken preorders from 11 customers, a list which includes restaurants, ghost kitchen operators, food service companies, and copackers. The company plans to use its new funding to build its manufacturing factory, develop new capabilities, and deploy to customers.

And once they do hit scale, Klein believes Hyphen can help create that democratized food creator future by renting out food production capacity on their Makeline to aspiring food operators. He pictures everyone from culinary creators operating from their dorm to food influencers on TikTok and Instagram building a restaurant brand or multiple brands.

“You could do different categories or brands of bowls or salads and eventually burritos,” said Klein. “You can run Yum brands 2.0 from one location.”

If you’d like to hear my full conversation with Klein about his vision for the future of restaurants and food robotics, click play below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

August 11, 2021

Ono Food Rebrands as Hyphen, Launches Makeline Food Assembly Robot to Work in Tandem with Humans

One of the questions that always comes up when talking about food robots is what will happen to the human workers. Coming out of stealth mode today, Hyphen‘s answer is to have its robot work alongside people. Well, technically, to have the robots work underneath them..

Hyphen launched its Makeline assembly robot today, which is meant to help fast casual restaurants quickly and accurately make meals for pick-up and delivery without taking up any additional space. Perhaps the easiest way to think about the Makeline is to picture a Sweetgreen (Hyphen has not announced a deal with Sweetgreen, I’m just using it as an illustrative example). When you’re physically at a Sweetgreen, you order at a counter, and a worker there goes down the line with you, adding the ingredients you want to your meal.

With Hyphen’s Makeline, that counter of ingredients is still there, as is the person. But the magic happens underneath the counter, where a robotic system dispenses ingredients from the same trays used above the counter to assemble electronic orders. In effect, the Makeline is doubling the output of a restaurant’s counter system with humans taking in-person orders and the robot handling off-prem ones.

In addition to saving space, the Makeline is also modular, so restaurants can lengthen and shorten it as needed. Additional modules can be for more ingredients, and there are beverage dispensing modules, re-heating modules, mixing modules, lid and label modules, and staging modules that hold multiple items for pickup.

Hyphen’s Makeline is able to make 350+ meals per hour, and the initial cost is $10,000 for implementation and integration. After that there is an undisclosed per-use fee. In a video chat last week, Hyphen Co-Founder and CEO Stephen Klein told me that his company has signed deals with eight partners, seven of which are fast casual restaurants and one of which is a co-packer for a grocer.

But it’s not just a new robot that Hyphen is debuting today, Hyphen is actually the new name and direction for what was once Ono Foods Co. Ono made a robotic smoothie making system that fit in the back of a van so it could move to different spots throughout the day. Ono Food also had ambitions to be an owned and operated restaurant brand. But Ono launched in October of 2019 which, of course, was just months before the pandemic hit the U.S. in full force. So Ono retrenched, laid off staff and pivoted.

Klein said Hyphen was able to re-purpose its original technology. “We leveraged the same technology to make smoothies to make plates,” he said. Additionally, the company hasn’t lost those mobile roots, as Klein said Hyphen’s Makeline can still fit in a van. “The technology is still mobile [and] can fit in van or ghost kitchen, it doesn’t matter the environment,” he said. “A lot of our partners want to be in spaces that don’t have four walls. It might make sense to have a mobile kitchen.”

As it moves from smoothies to food assembly, however, Hyphen is facing a more competitive market offering a variety of solutions. Picnic‘s assembly robot offers a similar modular design that will eventually be able to accommodate foods like burritos and sandwiches, but it only works with pizza toppings right now. Karakuri and RobotEatz are more autonomous standalone kiosks, but can be customized to create a wide variety of hot and cold dishes.

The biggest selling point for Hyphen, however, will most likely be the space it saves restaurants. By adding a robotic layer to existing dish assembly workstations, Hyphen not only answers the question of what to do with human workers (keep them), but also solves the problem of where a new robotic system would go.

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