In the mid-eighties, Adam Lloyd Cohen was in Paris working on a documentary about ancient robots as a project during his senior year in college. After steeping himself in the history of automation during the day and dining on French cuisine at night, he began to think about how we might use robots to make food.
Nearly forty years later, Cohen is finally bringing his vision to life.
In 2018 he got to work on a beta prototype of a food-making robot that he and his new company Now Cuisine trialed in late 2020. That trial helped him secure a deal with a popular burrito chain in Texas called Freebirds World Burrito to run a three-month pilot with six new automated robotic kiosks called Takeout Stations. The robots will be deployed in different office buildings and multifamily housing units throughout Dallas.
Cohen sat down with me recently to discuss his decades-long journey on the Spoon Podcast. In this podcast we discuss:
- How he came up with the idea for his food robot
- Why he decided now was the time to bring his vision to life
- The deal with Freebirds and how he sees his robots being deployed in the future
- The business model for his unattended food making robots
- Where he sees the food robotics industry going
You can listen to my conversation with Cohen below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
