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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Remy Robotics

Remy Launches in U.S. With Robot-Powered Virtual Restaurant in NYC Called Better Days

This week, Remy Robotics opened in the U.S. with a robot-powered virtual restaurant brand in New York City called Better Days, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The launch comes after the Spain-based startup spent the last few years operating a hub-and-spoke model of robotic-enabled ghost kitchens in Spain and France, where the company says it has produced and delivered over 100,000 meals.

According to company CEO Yegor Traiman, he hopes to merge the convenience of fast food with the quality associated with fine dining, all powered by robots.

“Remy Robotics exists to do what was previously thought impossible – make high-quality, delicious food consistently, accessibly, and profitably at scale,” said CEO and Founder Yegór Traiman. “With the launch of Better Days in New York, we are taking major steps, we’re just starting to show what is possible. Our goal is to make good food at an affordable price available and accessible to everyone while creating better jobs and improving the work environment for chefs.”, said Traiman.

Readers of The Spoon may recall that Traiman and his engineers created an entire food production flow around robots instead of designing the robots to mimic human chefs. Remy has redesigned the cooking process to be more robot-compatible, focusing on the precision and consistency of machines. The result is a system where AI-powered robots prepare food based on algorithmic recipes that factor in delivery times and other logistical elements.

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman told The Spoon in an interview last year. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

According to the company, the new restaurant will utilize human chefs to prep the food in a central commissary before it is transported to what it calls “node kitchens” where robots do all of the cooking. The food is refrigerated before being transferred to an oven and cooked using what the company calls “algorithmic recipes” in robotic ovens. From there, Remy says AI algorithms work with sensors to control food’s quality by monitoring the food’s internal temperature and uses a scale that calculates moisture reduction. According to Remy, they can adjust cook times automatically for orders depending on whether they are placed for delivery, takeout, or dine-in.

While the company is calling Better Days a “restaurant”, it is, for the time being at least, what looks to be only a virtual brand, serving up meals through delivery via the company’s own app and third-party delivery companies such as Grubhub, DoorDash and Uber Eats. According to the announcement, Better Days will feature main courses built around meals with rice, veggies and proteins such as chicken and salmon. All the entrees are priced between $7 and $16.

If you live in the New York City market, you can check out and order a meal from Better Days via their website or their app.

For Restaurant Robots to Succeed, Remy Robotics Believes They Need to Be at The Center of The Kitchen

Ask Yegor Traiman about whether robots or humans are better at making food, and he’ll side with his fellow carbon-based lifeforms.

“What might be super easy for humans is very difficult for robots,” Traiman told The Spoon.

But this doesn’t mean the CEO of food robotics startup Remy Robotics thinks humans should prepare all our food. In fact, he thinks robots should an integral part of the kitchen. The answer, Traiman explains, lies in creating a world in which the robots can succeed. In other words, we need to build kitchens around the robot rather than force-fitting a robot into human-centered kitchens.

“To really reach mass market adoption and really solve the labor shortage, you need to put the robot at the center.”

For Traiman, that means having culinary engineers build systems with the robots in mind from the start.

“It’s not about a fancy Michelin star chef,” said Traiman. “It’s really about engineers from the culinary side which invent the new cooking methods, frameworks and techniques for the robots to make them as efficient as they can.”

As for the robots, Traimain believes they need to highly flexible, a far cry from what he sees from most of today’s food robotics startups.

“Most of the food robot startups end up automating just a single process like flipping burgers,” said Traiman. “But can you gain mass market adoption with a single process automation?”

According to Traiman, his company also started down that path and tried to automate high-volume processes like burger assembly and pizza cutting, but realized they needed to focus less on high-volume mechanical solutions and instead build systems with software-defined intelligence and flexibility.

“We quickly realized, it’s a short time to market, but it’s not scalable. We immediately switched to more complicated deep tech based on AI, a true smart robotics application.”

That flexibility allows Remy Robotics to cook a wide variety of food types, which is crucial to the bigger vision of the company. Today the company operates its own robot-powered dark kitchens in Barcelona and Paris and creates food under the company’s own in-house virtual brands which is delivered through third party service providers like Deliveroo and UberEats. Longer term, however, Traiman sees his company as a B2B platform for any restaurant operator who wants to leverage automation in a scalable way to use Remy as a kitchen-as-a-service.

“Even though there is hype, no one in this business has found a sustainable business model yet,” said Traiman. “Delivery service providers are struggling. Virtual restaurants are also kind of struggling. Without the help of disruptive technology, there is no way out and I really believe robotics can make it better, cheaper and more reliable.”

You can see Remy Robotics and connect with Traimain at the Smart Kitchen Summit next week (get your ticket here). You can watch our full interview with Traiman below.

The Spoon Interviews - Remy Robotics

Remy Robotics Unveils Robotic Ghost Kitchen Platform as It Opens Third Location in Barcelona

Remy Robotics, an automated ghost kitchen startup, came out of stealth this week as it opened its third autonomous robotic kitchen.

Remy, based in Barcelona, creates custom-built robotic kitchens tailored for the food delivery industry. For the past year, the company has been operating two dark kitchens, one in Barcelona and one in Paris, and is opening its third kitchen in Barcelona this week.

Until this point, the company has been delivering food under its own virtual kitchen brands – including a flexitarian food brand called OMG – and has cooked and sold 60 thousand meals. Now, with the launch of its third kitchen, Remy is opening up its kitchens to other restaurant brands. According to the company, its system has the flexibility to install a new robotic kitchen and have it operational in about 48 hours.

If a brand is thinking about launching a new delivery-centric virtual brand with Remy, they shouldn’t expect to use their chefs and employees to make the meals. Remy believes that automated kitchens work better when the food is optimized for robotics from the ground up.

“We maximize what robots can do,” Remy CEO Yegor Traiman told The Spoon in a Zoom interview. “The main mistake of most robotics companies is they’re trying to mimic the human and teach robots how to do the things a human would do.”

Instead, Traiman says that they configured the entire process of food making to be done by robots, developing recipes and cooking techniques based on a variety of parameters, including the shape of Remy’s own packaging and how much moisture is lost during the cooking process. The company claims that their robotic systems decide autonomously how and for how long to cook a dish, based on where a customer lives and how long the delivery will take. They also utilize “computer vision and neural networks” alongside “smart ovens and sensors controlling temperature, moisture, weight and other key parameters.”

“We develop all the equipment,” Traiman said. “Robots, freezers, fridges. Because again, in a world where everything was designed and built by humans, for humans, there is no place for robots. You’re not able to make the system flexible enough.”

A Remy robot-powered ghost kitchen can fit up to ten brands into the same space that one human-powered kitchen can operate, and, according to Traiman, it shouldn’t be a problem adding new partners.

“There is huge interest at the moment in Spain and in France,” Traiman said. “Almost every neighbor at these cloud kitchen facilities a knocking on the door asking ‘guys, can we do something together?'”