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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Lab37

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.

Scoop: Travis Kalanick is Building Restaurant Robots With Help of Uber’s Former Head of Self-Driving Cars

For the past half-decade, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been endeavoring to reimagine how restaurants operate by building a nationwide network of ghost kitchens under a business called CloudKitchens. That business, which he and his team constructed stealthily under a holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS), was joined at the hip by another technology business called Otter, which sells restaurant order management software.

Now, the Spoon has learned that Kalanick’s CSS is building its own restaurant automation and robotics business under the name Lab37. According to company sources and a blog post quietly published by the company in September, Lab37 has built its first restaurant robot, a bowl-making robot called (what else?) Bowl Builder.

The Bowl Builder, which makes hundreds of hot or cold bowls per day, is fully NSF-certified and its dimensions are 20′ wide by 9′ deep. The system can handle the entire process of making bowl food, as bowls run on a conveyor belt under 18 different dispenser modules for ingredients and sauces before getting sealed, utensils added, and bagged up for pickup.

The Spoon has learned that Lab37 is headed up by Eric Meyhofer, an executive and automation innovator who formerly ran Uber’s self-driving car unit for years (and racked up quite a few patents during that time). Meyhofer, who is listed on LinkedIn as a co-founder of Carnegie Robotics – a robotics development lab that helped to give birth to Uber’s self-driving car unit – also served as a commercialization specialist at Carnegie Melon University, his alma mater and widely recognized as the world’s leading robotics research university. Meyhofer does not list Lab37 on his LinkedIn profile.

Lab37 is located in a warehouse on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The location includes a commercial research and development kitchen, fabrication shop, engineering office, electrical engineering lab, assembly lab, and testing lab.

Lab37 has been trialing the Bowl Builder out through its Hungry Group virtual restaurant division, which is described as a R&D kitchen company building “the future of dining, where diverse options, cutting-edge convenience, and technology unite.” According to the company, the Hungry Group’s R&D kitchen is in the same warehouse where the Bowl Builder food robot was designed, tested, and assembled.

The Spoon has learned that the early trials with the Bowl Builder have gone very well, and locations that have tried it out have seen substantial increases in revenue. According to a Lab37 spokesperson, the company plans to trial the Bowl Builder in additional locations in the coming months, including more CloudKitchen locations.

One potential customer of Lab37’s Bowl Builder is Salted, a fast-growing bowl-food startup that has leaned heavily into the ghost kitchen model in recent years. While Salted has several physical brick-and-mortar locations, its CEO, Jeff Applebaum, has indicated that much of the company’s future growth will come via ghost kitchens. The Spoon has learned that Salted is a customer at a number of CloudKitchen’s locations.

Interestingly, this news comes just a few weeks after Spain-based Remy Robotics announced they were also working with CloudKitchens for its US entry. The Remy robot, which uses a robotic arm and looks to have a smaller footprint than Lab37’s Bowl Builder, debuted in the US under Remy’s Better Days virtual restaurant brand in the New York City market.

Stepping back, this latest revelation about Kalanick’s push into food automation shows his current journey is not too dissimilar from the one he took with Uber. As with his former company, Kalanick is moving from a startup concept that rethinks the traditional usage model of a long-standing industry (it was taxis and travel with Uber, and now it’s restaurants with CSS) and is building enabling technology as the second (or third) act to help realize this vision. He’s using the well-worn tech industry playbook of building “picks and shovels” for an industry, but only after spending time showing the industry there’s a way of doing things that’s is much different than the long-standing model.