Like many New Zealanders, Sasha Mates left work almost every day to grab a meat pie at the local bakery. In fact, he and his coworker Vincent Wong made the trip so often that his bosses at My Auto Shop, a startup that provides an online marketplace for auto mechanics, wondered where he and his mate headed every day for lunch.
That’s when he and Wong wondered if they could find a way to bring the pies to work using technology. They had stumbled upon a Yo-Kai hot ramen vending machine while visiting San Francisco and wondered if they could use automation to sell hot food that resonated in the New Zealand market.
“We were like, ‘Hey, why don’t we bring the pies to work?'” Mates told The Spoon.
And so that’s what they did, and soon after they built a prototype for a machine that served hot meat pies, they realized the product, called the PieBot, could be the start of a new company. Mates and Wong, who both previously worked on software development for My Auto Shop, had been batting around the idea of launching their own startup. With their first product idea fully formed, they decided to make the move.
They placed the first PieBot prototype at a construction site. For Mates and Wong, the location made sense because while meat pies are a lunch staple for many in New Zealand, trade workers (called tradies in New Zealand) are exceptionally devoted to the food.
“I know pies are probably a foreign concept in the States, but in New Zealand, it’s really what you could say New Zealand is built on: a pie and a Coke,” said Mates. “And tradies live and breathe pies.”
The machine is loaded up every morning with fresh-cooked pies that are kept warm until they are purchased over the next couple of hours. Leftover pies are taken out, and the machine is replenished with fresh pies the next morning.
In a sense, the PieBot is closer to something akin to a Byte Technology smart fridge than a Yo-Kai machine, only instead of holding refrigerated food items, the food is kept warm and needs to be replenished daily. And it’s this hot food replenishment, which Mates describes as the “hot food supply chain,” that’s the startup’s biggest challenge and focus for product development as the PieBot evolves.
According to Mates, they plan to continue to evolve the machine and hope to enter the US market at some point, even as they work on expanding their presence in New Zealand. Mates says the machine can be used to store and serve up other types of fresh, warm food, and they hope to work with companies in the US to experiment with new kinds of food.
“We see the PieBot as a step into the robotics game, and then ultimately can provide robotic solutions to companies in the States.”
