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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Kitchen United

Three CEOs on How Tech is Transforming the Restaurant Experience

When the famed L.A. institution Canter’s Deli opened an outpost in the first Kitchen United (KU) location, the first visitors were two elderly ladies. They had read about the new Canter’s location in the paper and stopped in for some piping-hot matzo ball soup. “That’s when I thought ‘Uh Oh,’” said Jim Collins, CEO of KU.

What these ladies didn’t understand is that restaurants operating out of KU commercial kitchen spaces are delivery-only, meant to give kitchens a low-cost way to serve the growing demand for food delivery without having to open up a new location.

The advent of cloud kitchens is just one of the trends is just one of the topics tackled during the Future of Restaurants panel at our L.A. food tech meetup yesterday. Also onstage was Alex Canter (yes, that Canter), CEO of Ordermark (and heir to the aforementioned deli), which helps restaurants streamline delivery order fulfillment, and Christine Schindler, CEO of Pathspot, which makes a device that uses visible fluorescent spectroscopy to scan restaurant employee’s hands to check for foodborne illness. Here are a few of the most salient points (and questions) the speakers raised about the evolving restaurant world — where we are, where we’re headed, and what has to change to get us there.

Restaurants need to adapt fast, or prepare to fail
Not all restaurant owners are tech-savvy — they’re incredibly busy, and some think that technology is just one more thing to add to their overly-full plate. But in a world where more and more people expect their favorite joints to offer services like delivery and online reservations, resistance can prove fatal.

“Brick and mortar businesses are learning to become digital businesses,” said Canter. Which isn’t always an easy transition — or one that restaurants one to take. He said that while there are 800,000 restaurants in the U.S., only 12 percent of them offer delivery. Part of the reason for this is because they don’t want to have to take on the tricky task of managing multiple delivery ordering services.

For Schindler, it’s critical to get adoption from both restaurant owners and workers. And she has a lot of out-of-the-box ways to get people to use PathSpot. “We put a lot of games in our device,” she said. Employees can win prizes for getting clean hand scans, and they also encourage friendly competitions between stores to see whose hands are cleaner.

Collins, however, isn’t willing to spend as much time encouraging restaurants to adopt. “My job isn’t to convince someone that the future is coming, my job is to help someone face the future they already recognize is upon them.” Deep, yes; dramatic, yes — but in a world where the majority of restaurants fail and the remainders survive off of razor-thin margins, survival will most likely mean embracing technology.

Where is there room for innovation?
For Collins, the answer is simple: personalization. He compared restaurants today to the search engine marketplace of 30 years ago. Search engines used to display results based on who paid them the most, then “The Big G” (as Collins called them) came in and started showing results based on what was most relevant to the user. (Full disclosure: Google is an investor in Kitchen United.) “These days, we serve a consumer that’s interested in their own dietary preferences,” he said. “If you’re gluten-free, why do you see menu where 80 percent of the items have gluten? Why don’t you see one that only shows the 20 percent that’s not? That’s what I’m looking for.”

Canter pointed to the gig economy, but not in food delivery. “I’d like to see more [on-demand economy] for labor,” he said. While companies like Pared are leveraging the sharing economy to provide short-term BOH workers, like dishwashers and line cooks, “it’s pretty nascent,” said Canter.

Schindler, unsurprisingly, had her eye on food safety. “We need a holistic sanitation solution,” she said. “It’s crazy that the best solution now is an Employees Must Wash Hands sign.”

Do you have to be from restaurants to help transform them?
“If you don’t understand restaurants, you can’t be in the business of serving restaurants,” said Collins. His point was that restaurant management is just too complex: if you don’t have a deep understanding of what it means to work in a restaurant — from busboy to bartender — it’ll be very difficult to successfully run a restaurant.

But sometimes an outsider’s perspective is valuable. Schindler had never worked in the restaurant industry before founded Pathspot. But while working in rural Tanzania, she saw a problem (food-borne illness) that could be solved by the pathogen-spotting technology she was working on in her healthcare job. By applying tech previously silo-ed in the healthcare world, she could help prevent an issue that has been plaguing food companies — especially as of late. Maybe more technologies developed for other markets (blockchain, anyone?) could have a lasting impact on the restaurant world, too.

Thanks to all who came out to ToolBox LA for our food tech meetup yesterday! Keep an eye out for future meetups on our events page.

We’re Taking Our Food Tech Meetups on the Road to Los Angeles!

On November 27th we’re taking our food tech meetups on the road to the sunny Los Angeles area! We’re teaming up with hardware VC firm Make in L.A. for this a half-day event highlighting innovative makers, startups, and investors that are leveraging technology to shape our relationship with food. Here’s what we have in store:

  • Short talks and Q&A’s from the founders of Ordermark, Pathspot, and Kitchen United, plus a panel with all three companies on how they’re shaping the future of the restaurant.
  • The founder of Somabar will talk about how robots can help us live, eat, and drink better.
  • DishDivvy’s CEO will discuss how her company is democratizing home food businesses and bringing the sharing economy to dinner.
  • We’ll wrap things up with a VC panel on strategies for investing in companies disrupting food industries with leaders from Make in L.A., Upfront Ventures and Valley Oak Investments.

Oh, and there will be plenty of time for networking and lunch from a taco food truck, of course.

If you’re in the L.A. area and are interested in the food tech space we’d love to have you join us. The event will be from 10am-2pm  at MiLA’s innovation hub Toolbox LA in Chatsworth, CA. Registration is free thanks to our sponsors Fenwick & West and the Silicon Valley Bank. See you there!

Expect More Robots and Fewer Menus in the Restaurant of 2030

We all know technology is changing the restaurant, but what that looks like varies from business to business. Wired’s Joe Ray dug deep into this hotly debated topic at the Smart Kitchen Summit this week, speaking onstage with a trio of seasoned restaurant vets: Eric Rivera, a master chef who runs addo:incubator in Seattle, Jim Collins, CEO of commercial restaurant space Kitchen United, and Bear Robotics’ CEO, John Ha.

Having watched these four hash it out onstage, it’s clear there’s no simple answer to what kind of role tech should play or how big that role ought to be. That said, the group covered some key areas where this question will play out in the coming months and years:

The Robots Are Coming
Collins had a litany of items that are working for his company when it comes to tech and automation in the kitchen. Among them, he noted POS in the cloud, self-ordering tablets, facial recognition for customers when they order, and predictive kitchen display systems (KDS). He also talked about small changes that make restaurant kitchens more efficient, like major restaurant suppliers like Sysco shipping pre-cut veggies and in the process saving cooks time on the line.

Rivera, on the other hand, disagreed that something like pre-cut veggies was a benefit in the kitchen, noting that Sysco might be capable of sending pre-cut carrots, but as a chef, he himself has far superior skills with a knife. “I just want to find out how I can create something custom for [the guest]. It’s my job to collect all the breadcrumbs and make a meal out of it.” He did, however, agree that using tech to make the kitchen more efficient has a lot of value, particularly for “menial tasks” like taking out the trash.

Ha landed right in the middle on this debate. He may run a robotics company, but as someone who’s also a restaurant owner, he doesn’t believe we can automate the entire restaurant and expect to deliver the kind of experience guests want. “It’s such a dynamic environment and I don’t think a robot can do [everything] yet,” he said. The strength of AI and robotics will come into play in the front of house, he noted, where robots can do simple tasks like running food to tables.

The Delivery Debate Rages On
At one point, Ray steered the conversation towards the restaurant industry’s most hot-button issue right now, food delivery. Here, as elsewhere, panelists had fairly different viewpoints. Rivera, more a chef and artist than cook, pointed out that people come to his restaurant to see him at work, and that experience for the guest should be the number priority in an establishment like his. “[People aren’t] just coming to hang out,” he said of his clientele, who’s paying for things like tasting menus and watching those knife skills.

As someone who operates space for virtual restaurants, Collins was a little less skeptical around the role of delivery. “People can eat anywhere, and they can get good food anywhere, and that’s going to get more and more prevalant.” He added that “delivery is here, it’s radically changing the restaurant landscape.”

2030 Is Around the Corner
On that note, panelists had lots to say in terms of predictions for the restaurant of 2030. Collins believes we won’t see paper menus in 10 years’ time, and that ordering food will be so personal you won’t be shown anything you don’t like or can’t eat. If you hate broccoli, you won’t have to pretend to be allergic to it anymore, for example.

Rivera’s restaurant has already gotten rid of paper menus. Meanwhile, he relies a lot on social media to find out his guests preferences and glean inspiration for his next dish, which he aims to make as personal as possible for each individual guest. His version of the future is far less automated than that of Collins, but the level of personalization he aims for is nonetheless proof of technology’s reach over the whole restaurant experience.

Personally, I think the industry will sit somewhere in the middle, along the lines of Ha’s vision, with robots managing the repetitive stuff and humans focused on providing a personable and personal meal for the guest — whether that’s online or in-house. “I have to make sure they’re happy,” he said of his guests. “If I’m busy running food, I can’t do that.”

A Quick Tour of Kitchen United’s Virtual Kitchen Operation

When we first wrote about Kitchen United, a commercial kitchen space where restaurants can open delivery-only expansions, we thought the idea was a good one. Businesses like Kitchen United provide a way for eateries to capitalize on the growth of delivery, but don’t require a huge chunk of capital.

Since opening in downtown Pasadena on June 1, Kitchen United has built out its 12,000 square foot facility and now houses eight different restaurants including Pizza Plant, The Lost Cuban, Mama Musubi, Canter’s Deli and Barney’s Gourmet Burgers.

During my recent trip to Los Angeles I stopped by Kitchen United, where its Chief Culinary Officer, Massimo Noja De Marco, gave me a tour. I went during the day, so it wasn’t as busy, but there were enough cooks doing prep work to get a sense of how it all works.

Here’s what I saw:


Kitchen United is big, taking up a serious chunk of an entire city block. In addition to the rows of cooking spaces rented out by the restaurants, there is also cold and dry storage. Kitchen United offers its own staffers to take care of stuff like dishwashing and expediting orders, so restaurant workers can focus on making food.

Most of the restaurants are slotted into galley-style kitchen spaces. They have ovens, fryers and cooktops, but can bring in their own specialized equipment (like a particular pizza oven), which Kitchen United will help install.

There are also smaller, cubicle-like spaces for food entrepreneurs to experiment with their personal (or grandma’s secret) recipe. This took me a little by surprise. When I last talked with Kitchen United, the company was focused only on restaurant delivery. Perhaps there was enough demand or incremental revenue to open it up to smaller operations, who pay by the hour.

Kitchen United was built to accommodate a steady stream of delivery drivers coming and going throughout the day and night. As such, there are 62 parking spaces where drivers can pull up, run into the building and drive off without needing to circle the block for a spot or hold up traffic.

Once inside Kitchen United has big signs and screens up to help make sure the right drivers get the right order. Food is packaged up and brought out to a series of racks in the back where drivers can grab them and go quickly. There are also attendants on duty to help make sure the orders are fulfilled properly.

De Marco said that currently Kitchen United is fulfilling “hundreds” of orders each day, and that busy times can vary by restaurant (Pizza Plant, which serves a vegan pizza, is evidently busiest after 10 p.m. on weekends). Kitchen United only delivers within a 3 – 5 mile radius (that goes out to 20 miles for catering jobs).

The company has 12 more locations in the works across the country and is growing at a time when Pilotworks, another commercial kitchen on demand startup, closed two of its locations. However, companies like The Food Corridor, and former Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick’s cloud kitchen operation, offer similar services.

We should be able to get more information about the commercial kitchen and delivery space from Kitchen United CEO, Jim Collins, who will be speaking on the future of restaurants at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle in October (get your ticket today!).

Delivery Is Making These Restaurants Literally Redesign the Way They Do Business

As the country’s appetite for food delivery grows and the market inches towards a projected $15.9 billion by 2020, restaurants are under pressure to adapt.

More and more, that means altering the physical restaurant space so it can better accommodate this influx of new orders. Extra meals require extra bodies to cook and package the food, after all, not to mention extra space for third-party devices, and somewhere to put completed orders waiting to be picked up by a delivery driver.

It’s wishful thinking to believe that a food delivery industry standard will emerge, since every business has its own unique space — and therefore, its own unique needs. Instead, restaurants are trying out different approaches; some on a large scale, some on a smaller one. A handful of promising ones have emerged when it comes to creatively solving the space issue.

For those with room to expand, creating a separate entrance and/or delivery area is one option.

Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen just opened a location in Ft. Worth, TX that includes “Cheddar’s first dedicated carry-out area.” It’s close to the kitchen but separate from the main dining room and has its own entrance with direct access to the parking lot. For a Grubhub or UberEats driver, this is a potentially huge timesaver, as picking up an order no longer involves weaving through crowds around the bar and flagging down an employee’s attention.

Velvet Taco conceptualized a separate entrance for to-go orders long before the delivery boom went off. The Dallas, TX-based chain offers its famed “backdoor chicken” order, where customers stroll up to the back door, hand over $20, and get a bag of goodies in return, rotisserie chicken and tortillas included. Adjusting for more delivery orders was just a matter of routing them along the same path. Third-party services (Velvet Taco works with several of the usual suspects) collect orders at the back door of the chain’s Austin, TX location. Meanwhile, a brand-new Dallas, TX location also includes a pickup window that can be accessed via a dedicated parking lot.

If a second door isn’t an option, there are still plenty of ways to work with space inside the restaurant’s four walls.

Culiver City, CA-based Tender Greens divides its customers into two lines: one for walk-ins, one for delivery and order-ahead takeout. That logic applies to the kitchen as well, where cooks are split into two separate lines so those prepping in-house orders aren’t bogged down by the number of tickets for delivery. At the chain’s El Segundo, CA location, even the furniture pulls double duty: a bartop functions by day as a counter for preparing to-go orders, then becomes communal seating for sit-down customers. Ditto for Tender Greens’ flagship NYC location at Union Square, which features 14-foot shelves, separate from the dining room, where third-party delivery services can grab their designated orders and go (a nearby area provides the same convenience for customers picking up food).

Some restaurants are scrapping dining room altogether. Enter the ghost kitchen, the cloud kitchen, or whatever you want to call it. These establishments operate with delivery-only models, where there’s no front of house and cooks serve up orders solely for delivery drivers to pick up.

The Green Summit Group gets a lot of press in this space for its commissary kitchens in NYC and Chicago, which work exclusively with Grubhub. These guys basically run multiple “restaurants” whose operations are housed in the same kitchen and whose food is cooked by the same chefs.

There’s an economical attraction to ghost kitchens, of course. Those using ghost kitchens don’t have to worry about buying equipment, hiring a new staff for every new location, or even providing simple things like cutlery and tablecloths. Businesses who can’t, or don’t want to, deal with these elements or lock themselves into a 10-year lease and buy their own equipment can also look to folks like Kitchen United, who operates a shared kitchen space available for hourly or monthly rent which can house up to 15 restaurant operations. “When a restaurant operator comes to a KU kitchen, they get a virtual restaurant solution,” Kitchen United CEO, Jim Collins told Chris Albrecht a few months ago.

So is the dining room dying? Absolutely not. Dining out as an experience will be with us until customers run out of money or the Food Network runs out of celebrity chefs to create. Anyway, delivery wasn’t designed to replace the Michelin star, or (probably) even the Olive Garden; it’s just an easier, faster way to get a basic dinner without having to go to much trouble. Restaurants are starting to realize its importance and adjust their spaces accordingly.

Kitchen United Launches to Help Restaurants Meet Delivery Demand

There is no shortage of people ordering restaurant food for delivery. And there is no shortage of services who will gladly deliver those people restaurant food. There is, evidently, a shortage of kitchen space to make all that restaurant delivery food.

That’s where Kitchen United aims to make a difference. The company bills itself as a “culinary on-demand startup,” and today it opened its first commercial kitchen space targeting restaurants that want to increase, or keep up with, the volume of delivery orders.

Located in Pasadena, CA the 12,000 sq. ft. space can house 15 different clients (or “concepts,” as Kitchen United describes them) and features a delivery-specific infrastructure. Restaurants get access to a kitchen with standard equipment (burners, ovens, fryers, fridges, etc.), as well as Kitchen United employees who will wash dishes, manage inbound orders and assist with expediting food to the correct delivery service.

“When a restaurant operator comes to a KU kitchen, they get a virtual restaurant solution,” Kitchen United CEO, Jim Collins told me.

Because Kitchen United was created to help facilitate delivery orders, the building itself is designed to handle the literal traffic generated by the steady stream of drivers. The building has dedicated parking spots for delivery drivers, there are video screens to direct people to the proper pick-up, and attendants to confirm that the right food is going to the right people.

The Pasadena location is the first of 20 to 30 planned Kitchen United centers to be built across the country next year. To help fund this rapid expansion, Kitchen United also announced today that it has raised and undisclosed Series A round from Cali Group, Avista Investments and other private investors.

Unlike other virtual or “ghost” kitchens, where restaurants can experiment with new cuisines, Kitchen United’s main mission is to help national and local restaurant chains keep up with demand for their existing menus. Restaurants that want to sign on with Kitchen United can either pay straight rent, or, if Kitchen United believes it can hit the right numbers, there is an option for revenue sharing.

The Pasadena location has already signed on its first batch of tenants, including Neal Fraser’s Fritzi Coop, Mama Musubi, Barney’s Gourmet Burgers and Canter’s Deli. In a nice bit of synergy, Kitchen United is using Ordermark, the delivery order ticket management system founded by Alex Canter (of the aforementioned deli).

There are many players in the commercial kitchen co-working/rental space, all of whom seem to be growing. PilotWorks, The Food Corridor and Commonwealth Kitchen are all expanding their commercial kitchen services. Those players, however, seem to be targeting food entrepreneurs, and smaller players looking to build a food business.

Collins told me that Kitchen United will serve those type of clientele as well, but its focus on restaurants is a smart differentiator. For the most part, restaurants already know what they’re doing, and since they are focusing on existing menus, already know how to do it. This should reduce the actual amount of work and assistance that Kitchen United needs to supply.

It’s also a smart play for restaurants who can dedicate resources on both the delivery and in-store aspects of their business to ensure the best experiences for each.