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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

TechMagic

Japan’s Most Successful Food Robot Startup is Eyeing Humanoids As The Next Big Thing

One of the defining characteristics of early successful food robots has been focus.

Whether it’s the Flippy burger-flipping robot, Bear’s front-of-house robotic waiters, or the Autocado avocado-coring and processing robot, the ability of these focused-task robots to automate one or two core functions hyper-efficiently has been a – if not the – key ingredient for success that has set these machines apart from their less successful peers.

But as the world of AI and robotics increasingly talks up humanoids as ready for primetime, are multi-function robots that more closely resemble humans – both in appearance and in their seemingly unending ability to tackle different kinds of tasks – set to take the baton as the next big thing in food robots?

If you ask Yuji Shiraki, the CEO of one of Japan’s fastest-growing tech startups and a darling of the food robotics world, the answer is a cautious yes.

The idea to build a food robot first came to Shiraki during a visit with his grandmother. Over 90 years old, Shirak’s grandmother could not cook for herself, and so he started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. 

I first met Shiraki in 2022 at his roboticized pasta restaurant in Tokyo, E Vino Spaghetti, located across from Tokyo Station. Inside, its P-Robo robot boiled pasta, heated sauces, plated dishes, and even handled cleanup, all in just over a minute.

After the pasta restaurant, TechMagic built Oh My Dot, a ramen restaurant in Shibuya, where a robotic system prepared noodles using modular flavor packs. In both cases, the goal was to test the products with real customers while showcasing the company’s robotics to potential partners.

And the partners came. The company began working with KFC Japan, Nissin Foods (the company behind Cup Noodles), and most recently announced a partnership with Lawson.

One of the key reasons for the company’s early success was that its robots were highly tailored to specific tasks like preparing pasta, ramen, or bowl food. But now, as TechMagic and Shiraki look to the future, they see a path forward built around robots that are, like humans, much more adaptable and multi-functional.

The company outlined some of those functions in a recent announcement, saying they envision humanoids expanding human “hands” and “judgment.” Specific functions include automating repetitive tasks such as serving, sorting, and transporting food in restaurants and factories; flexible food preparation that uses AI-driven “hand technology” to perform complex cooking tasks; and customer interaction, where humanoids would optimize service and store operations using emotion and behavior recognition.

Shiraki offered clues to his bigger vision for TechMagic’s humanoid plans in a post on Facebook:

“When we began developing cooking robots in 2018, many said the ‘chances of success were slim.’ Yet today, we’ve grown to the point of competing for the top global share of operating units. The hurdles for humanoid robots may be just as high, but in the long term, we believe this is an extremely rational strategy. And beyond that, the development of humanoid robots is full of dreams and romance.”

Part of Shiraki’s motivation is to help position Japan as a leader in developing humanoid robots.

“While China and the U.S. are leading the way, we intend to contribute to labor-strapped industries with a Japan-born humanoid robot and expand globally.”

He says the company is hiring and looking for partners. One of the first steps is working with existing humanoid robots such as those from Unitree in the TechMagic development lab. Shiraki even showed off a video of the Unitree robot on Facebook.

Shiraki told me they are eyeing around a three-year time horizon to develop their first humanoid for the food business and that the company is now busy raising its next funding round to help fund the development.

“TechMagic is taking the technology it has cultivated in cooking and service robots to the next level, fusing it with humanoid robotics to create a new ‘future of food’,” said Shiraki. “We aim to build a social infrastructure that frees people from boring, harsh, and dangerous tasks, enabling them to live more creatively.”

With Launch of Bowl Food Robot, Cibotica Points to Dispensing Technology and Small Footprint as Differentiators

This week, Canadian food robot startup Cibotica announced that its first food robot is fully operational in a multi-brand ‘digital food hall’ called Food Republic in Vancouver, Canada. According to the company, the fully robotic makeline named Remy can assemble up to 300 salads per hour utilizing the company’s proprietary dispensing technology.

Images of Remy, Cibotica's food assembly robot

Cibotica cofounder Ashkan Mirnabavi says that after he opened his first restaurant in 2019, he experienced the challenges firsthand around finding and training employees to keep his restaurant up and running. The former engineer turned restaurant operator started looking at available automation technology but felt none of the available solutions fit what he was looking for, so he joined forces with his two other cofounders, Darius Sahebjavaher (CTO) and Soroush Sefidkar (co-CEO), to start a food robotics company.

Once they started looking at different technologies, such as robotic arms, Mirnabavi said they knew they had to build a system that integrated with existing restaurant operations. They soon started thinking about building a robotic makeline and focused on a system that had the flexibility to do a variety of ingredients and fit into existing restaurant kitchen spaces.

“We learned that the biggest hurdle is the dispensing and accurately dispensing ingredients,” said Mirnabavi. “All these other solutions that existed, you had to have different technology for different ingredients, which makes your assembly line much bigger. And that’s where we said, ‘okay if we can come up with one solution that is capable of basically all types of ingredients with different characteristics and a different temperature,’ we might be able to solve it.”

With the system now operating in his Food Republic digital food hall, Mirnabavi and his partners are eyeing a variety of future applications and partners that can utilize its robot.

“Quick service restaurants, salad bowls, they were like an entry point for us,” said Mirnabavi. “Fresh produce processing centers, where they go through tons and tons of ingredients. Meal kit companies, there is a lot of manual work. There are markets where there are assembly lines, where people scoop different ingredients into these small, smaller, pre-packaged meals and put everything in a box. Application-wise, the market is huge.”

The market’s getting crowded quickly, with a variety of players such as Hyphen, Lab37, Eatch, and TechMagic offering robotic food assembly for a QSR’s back of house. Cibotica believes their focus on flexibility and small footprint should garner interest from restaurant partners who want to use automation for bowl food assembly in their restaurants.

As for business models, Mirnabavi says, at least for the time being, the company plans to offer a flexible model for its early customers, either through a robotics-as-a-service monthly payment plan or through the purchase of the machines. As time passes, he says they may choose to use one model over the other. The company is currently raising money for their next round of investment.

Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurants in Japan Will Soon Use a Fry-Cooking Robot

TechMagic, a Tokyo-based restaurant robotics startup, has signed a development deal with Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan to build a robot to automate the entire process of cooking french fries.

According to company CEO Yuji Shiraki, preliminary testing of the TechMagic fry robots is complete and is the company is moving into the development phase, where they will focus on productization and in-store installation. The fry-bot will manage fry-feeding, frying, bagging, storing, and arranging the french fries. The company is also working to reduce the size of the frybot so as to enable deployment into space-contrained spaces of existing Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

Shiraki says they are aiming to introduce the robot in some Japanese locations by this fall.

Spoon readers may recall that TechMagic has already been working with restaurant operators to deploy its back-of-house food robots in restaurants in Japan. I had a chance to visit one, the P-Robo, last September when I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. The robot is a multi-function robot that automates nearly the entire process of creating pasta. It preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner, and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is plated and a human does the final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleansthe prep bowls. The entire process takes less than two minutes.

You can see the P-Robo in action below:

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The Tokyo restaurant where P-Robo slings pasta is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan food and beverage conglomerate Suntory. When I interviewed Shiraki last summer, he indicated that they were also working with a large well-known Japanese food brand (presumably KFC Japan) and noodle giant Nissin.

For those wondering if this move means we’ll see KFC deploy robots stateside, I wouldn’t hold your breath, mainly because KFC Japan is operated by Mitsubishi, whereas the U.S. fried chicken chain is operated by the holding company Yum Brands.

A Robot-Powered Pasta Restaurant in Tokyo is Just the Beginning for Startup TechMagic

Back in 2017, I was in Tokyo for the first SKS Japan and thought I’d look around to see if I could find any robot-powered restaurants. I didn’t have much luck. In fact, about the only one that showed up during my search was a tourist attraction in Shinjuku, which wasn’t so much a robot restaurant as it was a dinner theater show that could only be described as Care Bears meets Mad Max Fury Road

Five years later, things have sure changed. Not only have automated mini-restaurants like Yo-Kai popped up around town, but there’s also a robot pasta restaurant slinging plates of noodles right across from Tokyo Station. That new restaurant, called E Vino Spaghetti, pumps out plates of pasta at a rate of over one per minute with its 3-axis robot.

Called P-Robo, the robot was designed by a Tokyo-based startup called TechMagic. The company spent three and a half years developing the robot, says company CEO and founder Yuji Shiraki.

TechMagic CEO Yuji Shiraki

The restaurant is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Suntory. Pronto has over 300 restaurants around Japan, and TechMagic is working to deploy robots at 50 or so over the next three years. And that’s just one project; according to Shiraki, the company has deals to build robots for several large corporations, ranging from a large and well-known Korean company to Cup Noodle giant Nissin.

As for the P-Robo, I was impressed with how quickly it worked in a fairly small space. The robot preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is put on a plate, and a human worker does final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleans the prep bowls.

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The idea to build a food robot first came to Shiraki when he visited his grandmother. Over 90 years old, Shiraki saw she could not cook for herself and so started to think about how a home cooking robot might help her. However, he soon realized that Japanese kitchens were too small to build the type of robot he envisioned, and he started thinking about building robots for restaurants. It wasn’t long before he quit his job as a management consultant and founded TechMagic.

That was five years ago. Since then, the company has raised $23 million in funding (including a $15 million Series B last September), received a patent for its pasta-making robot, and plans to create its own chain of robot-powered franchise restaurants.

At the rate Shiraki and his team are going, Tokyo might just be filled with restaurant robots when I come back for SKS Japan 2023. And who knows, someday soon, I may even see a TechMagic robot closer to home.