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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Mezli

Mezli’s Containerized Robot Restaurant Opens to Public This Weekend

Mezli, a maker of containerized robotic restaurants, is having a grand opening of its first restaurant this Sunday, August 28th, in San Francisco. The restaurant will open at the Spark Social food truck park located in the city’s Mission Bay area and run every weekend from Friday through Sunday.

The opening of Mezli comes after about two years of development after being conceived of by three Stanford graduate students. The three co-founders – Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele, and Maxwell Perham – set up shop at KitchenTown, a food innovation hub and development space based in San Mateo, where they worked on their containerized robot in a large small warehouse area and developed the food across the street in KitchenTown’s commissary kitchen.

Now the company is ready to start taking orders. The way it works is the Mezli refrigerated container houses prepped and pre-cooked food made by humans in a centralized kitchen. Once customers order via a touch screen kiosk on the side of the container or on a mobile app, food is heated and plated, garnishes are added, and plated food is placed into smart lockers on one end of the Mezli container for customer pickup. According to Kolchinski, the Mezli system is able to pump out up to 75 meals per hour.

The Mezli team claims their restaurant is the world’s first fully self-contained robotic restaurant that serves a fresh and customized menu. While we don’t necessarily agree that Mezli is actually the first – after all, we’ve seen startups like Bolk are already serving up simpler bowl food offerings via their robotic kiosks around Paris, and Hyper Robotics has its fully automated robotic pizza restaurants-in-a-box serving up pies for Pizza Hut Israel – we can say that the Mezli is the first self-contained automatic system we’ve seen dishing up these kinds of complex multi-item plates of Mediterranean food.

And for the record, the food is pretty good. When I visited the Mezli team last December and had a falafel platter, I found the portion sizes generous as my meal was larger than what I got at Eatsa or through a Chowbotics-style kiosk, and included a tasty mix of proteins, rice, vegetables, and sauces.

Mezli’s meals start at $7 per meal. If any of our readers in the Bay Area stop by, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

You can watch our conversation with Mezli CEO Alex Kolchinski before last year’s Smart Kitchen Summit below (Mezli was the winner of the SKS 2021 Startup Showcase).

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Mezli, a Maker of Robot Restaurants, Wins the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase

Mezli, a maker of robotized container restaurants, has won the 2021 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase.

The company, which currently operates a prototype restaurant in San Mateo’s KitchenTown, was started after two of the company’s cofounders, Alex Kolchinski and Alex Gruebele, met while studying at Stanford. Like most college students, the two were always on the hunt for food to fuel their studies but usually found the options lacking.

“Both of us had this problem that we’re trying to solve that it was really expensive to eat good food out,” said Kolchinski from the Smart Kitchen Summit virtual mainstage. “We were pretty busy as Ph.D. students, we can cook all the time. But if we wanted to eat out, it was kind of a choice between going to McDonald’s, which didn’t make us feel great if we ate it every day, or going places like the Stanford dining halls.”

So alongside a third cofounder, Max Perham, they got to work on building a robot restaurant. Unlike many robotic restaurants or kiosk concepts, the trio decided to create a completely customized robot purpose-fit for the job.

“We’ve got kind of a lot of opinions on how to do things in a way that makes the most sense for the problem we’re solving, which is making good with meals on-site that tastes great that are good for you and we do it efficiently,” said Kolchinski. “We’re not using any robotic arms. We’re using custom hardware, some of which we’ve designed in-house and filed some patents on. And some of which we’re adopting from off-the-shelf things. We’ve done some pretty hacky things in here. And I think we’re going to continue to take this kind of hybrid approach in the future too.”

And what does that future entail?

“We’re building up to where we have a whole fleet of these across the country, even across the world, where these are all over the place because they’re cheaper and smaller than restaurants, you can put them in more places.”

According to Kolchinski, Mezli plans on building thousands of containerized restaurants, starting with their current Mediterranean bowl concept and experimenting with other ideas along the way.

“We are building the robotics in a way that can do a lot of different stuff. Basically, anything that goes in a bowl of soup, salads, you name it, curry bowls.”

Mezli joins a series of other innovators participating in the industry’s longest-running food tech startup showcase. In its seventh year, the Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase has been a launching pad for a variety of food tech startups such as Tovala, SAVRPak, Bostrista, Cultured Decadance, Millo and Freshstix.

You can watch Alex Kolchinski’s full interview below.

Mezli Wins 2021 Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Showcase

SKS 2021: Meet Mezli, Maker of Robotic Containerized Restaurants

Over the next couple of weeks, The Spoon is featuring interviews with leaders from the Smart Kitchen Summit 2021 Startup Showcase, and this time up we have Alex Kolchinski, the CEO of Mezli.

Mezli builds containerized robot restaurants they call auto-kitchens. The company’s fully autonomous restaurants-in-a-box offer a menu of Mediterranean grain bowls, sides, and drinks. Mezli’s version 2 auto-kitchen is complete and the company is getting ready to launch v3 publicly next year.

If you’d like to connect with Alex at the Smart Kitchen Summit, hop on over to Hopin where we are hosting our virtual event and pick up your ticket today!

The Spoon talks with Mezli, Maker of Robot Restaurants-in-a-Box

Mezli Building a New Robo-Restaurant in a Shipping Container

Shipping containers area already being used to make hip residential homes, and in the not too distant future, you’ll see them pop up as fully automated robo-restaurants, too.

Mezli is the latest startup working on such a robot-restaurant-in-a-box concept. The San Francisco Bay Area startup has already launched the restaurant part of the equation, operating a human-powered Mezli that makes Mediterranean-style bowl meals out of a ghost kitchen in San Mateo, California.

But at the same time, Mezli is also busy building its robotic restaurant. When completed, the container restaurant will be fully autonomous, cooking, plating and packaging the food. The first version of the robotic Mezli will hold 15 ingredients and will be able to place items inside a container rather than just mixing them altogether or layering them on top of one another.

Mezli Co-Founder and CEO Alex Kolchinski told me by video chat last week that a robo-Mezli can go 48 hours or make 300 meals (whichever comes first) before needing to be serviced by a human. Kolchinski wouldn’t disclose what types of heating/cooking methods it was using, but did say that the robot allows users to write their name (or whatever) in sauce on their food. Once cooked and packaged up, food will be deposited in a cubby that a user will unlock with their phone. By using robotics, Kolchinksi plans to keep costs down and be able to serve meals for as little as $4.99.

When asked whether Mezli was a technology company or a restaurant company, Kolchinski was quick to say they were definitely a food company. Mezli has developed its own menu and plans to focus on launching its own line of Mezli robo-restaurants.

This owner/operator approach is a little different from Highpper, an Israeli company that is also building a fully autonomous restaurant in a shipping container. Instead of creating its own chain of restaurants however, Highpper is licensing its technology out to other restaurant brands (first up will be a pizza restaurant launching in June).

Mezli is still very early on in it’s ambitions, Kolchinski couldn’t even say how many meals its robot will be able to make in an hour. But the company has secured a pre-seed round of funding and plans to bring its first robot-powered Mezli online in just over a month.

If Mezli’s first autonomous spot is a hit, there’s a good chance a shipping container restaurant will be popping up in your neck of the woods someday soon.