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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Nommi

Our Ghost Kitchen Future Will Be Automated

Back at the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2019, Adam Brotman, the CEO of restaurant tech startup Brightloom, suggested if he was a young entrepreneur and wanted to start a restaurant business, he’d create a ghost kitchen powered by a food making robot.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this comment ever since.

The combination of food produced via robots with a ghost kitchen model makes so much sense, in part because both are new approaches that help reduce two of the most significant cost drivers of the legacy restaurant business: real estate and labor.

Consider the real estate costs of starting a new sit-down restaurant. Some estimates put the typical down payment required for the commercial space somewhere between $150 to $350 thousand dollars in a market like LA. And that’s before you even get to the cost of renovation and installing a new kitchen, which can cost up to a quarter of a million bucks.

And then there’s labor. A typical fast-food restaurant has to factor in about 25% of sales will go to labor. A fine dining restaurant will pay even more, often up to 40%. For a spot that generates a million dollars a year in top-line revenue, this translates to $400 thousand annually in labor expenses.

That’s a lot of money, and no doubt a big part of the reason about one-third of restaurants don’t make it in normal times, let alone in an era ravaged by a pandemic.

And so, in 2021, it’s not that surprising to see several groups experimenting with ways to combine the idea of new dark kitchen models with automation. Here are just a few:

Pizza HQ: The founders of Pizza HQ are experienced sit-down pizza restaurant operators, but they are betting the future on a robot-powered dark kitchen model. The company is creating a centralized pizza production facility in New Jersey that will utilize up to four Picnic pizza robots and also develop a network of smaller fulfillment centers around the greater northern New Jersey area.

800 Degrees: Another pizza chain, 800 Degrees, is betting its future on a combination of ghost kitchens and automated pizza production. The company is working with ghost kitchen operator Reef to expand to up to 500 ghost kitchens over the next few years, many of which will include Piestro’s robotic pizza kiosks.

Cala: This French company has created a unique pasta-making robot that enables both customer pick up and third-party delivery of its dishes. This model of automated production via kiosk as well as delivery will be a popular hybrid model that enables operators to tap into multiple customer dining revenue streams.

Hyper-robotics: Hyper has created a containerized robotic pizza kitchen that can plug into a dark kitchen model or be used in a hybrid ghost and delivery/consumer pick-up restaurant.

Kitchen United/Kiwibot: While Kitchen United hasn’t announced any deals automating their food production via robotics, the ghost kitchen pioneer has started experimenting with the use of delivery robots to ship food produced in their kitchens to customers.

Nommi: Nommi is a new joint venture creating a bowl-food robot that can be utilized in a variety of ghost kitchen formats. According to company president Buck Jordan, the company also plans to work on technology that could eventually hand robot-produced food to a delivery robot to create an “end-to-end” food robot model from production to the customer doorstep.

These are just a few examples, and we haven’t even gotten to the dozens of food robot startups building systems that could power food production in a ghost kitchen space. Companies like Beastro, Mezli, Middleby and others are working on self-contained food-making robots that could serve as enabling platforms for an entire new industry built around centralized automated food production made exclusively for digital orders.

One could argue the first company to try a robot-powered ghost kitchen model was Zume. The once high-flying startup raised hundreds of millions to create a roboticized dark pizza kitchen model to deliver pizza around the bay area using its high-tech oven equipped trucks. The company eventually shut down its robot pizza business, in part because like many pioneering startups, Zume never figured out an operating model that works (in retrospect, developing custom-built delivery trucks was probably an unnecessary use of venture funding).

But now, many of the companies following in Zume’s wake are building interesting and what looks like more sustainable businesses, in large part because they are working in partnership with restaurant operators who know the business and are savvy in building virtual restaurant businesses optimized to use third party delivery. While some of these models may eventually fail, it’s pretty clear that robotics and ghost kitchens are a combination that will play a big role in the restaurant industry’s future.

Meet Nommi, a Robotic Bowl Food Kiosk Designed by Wavemaker, C3, and Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Today Wavemaker Labs announced the launch of a new startup and bowl-making robotic kiosk concept called Nommi. Nommi will be “a standalone robotic kitchen that is able to produce and dispense any grain-, noodle- or lettuce-based dish through a fully integrated cooking system.”

Nommi is the latest robot startup concept to emerge from Wavemaker Labs, the food automation incubation studio behind Miso Robotics (Flippy, a back-of-house fry and grillbot), Bobacino (boba drinkbot), Future Acres (farm assistant) and Piestro (pizza kiosk). What’s unique about Nommi is the company is a product of a partnership between Wavemaker, C3 and chef Masaharu Morimoto, each of whom hold equity in the new company.

“As we started developing it, we really wanted to get partners to allow this to scale quickly, and really kind of stack the deck before we start playing,” said Buck Jordan, President and Co-Founder of Nommi and CEO of Wavemaker Labs, in a recent zoom interview with The Spoon.

C3, which has made a name for itself over the past couple of years for its aggressive expansion into virtual food haul concepts, has plans to order up to one thousand Nommi units over the next few years. While Jordan and C3 envision the Nommi augmenting some physical restaurant locations, the primary focus for the bowl food robot will be food delivery.

“We’re building this to be really delivery accessible,” said Jordan. “Delivery is going to double over the next five years, and so we want to be part of that.”

According to Jordan, while the initial machine will be designed to assemble food bowls that can be handed off to humans for delivery, Nommi envisions a future that will be roboticized from end to end.

The system is “designed and go through our system to be picked up by the regular delivery apps by human,” said Jordan. “But in the long term, we are trying to figure out a way to have a robotic transfer system to some of these robotic delivery machines out there to make a full end to end.”

Chef Morimoto will run the first Nommi, featuring menu items from his Sa’Moto restaurant brand. According to Jordan, Morimoto’s input had a significant impact on the robot design.

“Chef Morimoto wants really high-quality food,” said Jordan. “There’s no compromising when it when he puts his name on it.”

Because Morimoto wanted to delicately place ingredients in each food bowl, Nommi’s design team endeavored to build a robot capable of such high-fidelity food-making. This resulted in a wheeled cart system that moves around under food dispensing stations and rotates up to 360 degrees for precision ingredient placement. You can watch the Nommi assembling bowls via its wheeled cart system in the video below.

The Nommi Bowl Making Kiosk

Nommi fills a hole in Wavemaker’s portfolio for a fully automated bowl kitchen kiosk. Wavemaker’s most well-known food robot startup, Miso, makes back-of-house robots for fry and grill work. Piestro makes consumer-facing pizza robot kiosks. With Nommi, the company has designed a flexible bowl-food robot that, according to Jordan, is flexible enough to replicate a variety of menus from high-end chefs.

“There will be brands built from the ground up to be automated,” said Jordan. “And so we want to take the best in class food from Michelin star chefs and bring fine dining to the masses. We want to do in a fully automated way and be able to have a grain bowl made by Morimoto cost the same as a Big Mac.”

Each Nommi machine has a capacity for up to 330 bowls and lids. Each kiosk will come with up to 21 food lockers that hold finished bowls. Customers or food delivery workers can pick up the food at the kiosk using a QR code.

According to Jordan, the company hopes to start shipping its production unit in 2023.

A Conversation With Buck Jordan of Nommi

Wavemaker Labs Working on Nommi, an Automated Kitchen Robot

Corporate product development investor and incubator Wavemaker Labs is adding Nommi, an “automated delivery kitchen” robot to its portfolio. Wavemaker CFO Kevin Morris shared the previously unknown endeavor during a presentation at our ArticulATE food robotics summit yesterday.

Morris didn’t reveal much about Nommi other than an early rendering of a robotic kiosk and that it was being developed in partnership with a large hospitality company. Judging from the size of the machine in the rendering, Nommi appears to be something in between Chowbotics’ Sally and Spyce’s Infinite Kitchen. It holds a number of ingredients which are automatically dispensed and heated. Other renderings Morris showed illustrated how Nommi could also be installed in the back of a van, making it mobile, and inside a shipping container (a la Mezli).

Nommi is the latest food robot to be added to Wavemaker’s growing roster of automated food machines, which also includes Miso Robotics, Piestro, and Bobacino. As Morris explained during his talk yesterday, Wavemaker begins its process by identifying a problem in the food tech sector and then finds corporate partners to develop a specific solution. This approach helps hedge Wavemaker’s investment bets because there is already a customer for the robot in place once the product is done. In the case of Miso Robotics, for example, a fast food chain (presumably Caliburger) was looking to automate burger flipping and thus Miso Robotics’ Flipppy was born. Nommi is being developed in partnership with an undisclosed hospitality company which will help develop the menu, robotic capabilities and act as a first customer once the robot is done.

While Wavemaker is investing in and helping initially develop the Nommi, history suggests that at some point the bowl food bot will be turning to equity crowdfunding when it comes time to raise capital. Wavemaker companies Miso Robotics, Piestro, and Future Acres have all run equity campaigns over the past year.

Given the scant details that Morris shared with the ArticulATE virtual crowd, Nommi is probably still a couple years out from coming to market. But The Spoon will surely be covering it as it becomes a real thing.