This week, SJW Robotics, a maker of robotic kitchen technology, publicly demoed its robotic kitchen prototype for the first time.
When we first covered SJW earlier this year, the company was still keeping the cooking robot under wraps since patents had yet to be filed. With all their patent applications in the mail, I caught up with company CEO Nipun Sharma on a zoom call to get a virtual walkthrough of the Toronto-based company’s first product, a robotic wok-centered kitchen and consumer-facing kiosk called RoWok.
Sharma started by punching in his order on a large touch screen on the front of the large kiosk. Once entered, the robot got to work by dropping pre-cut ingredients such as chicken cubes, green onions and julienne carrots from segmented storage siloes in customized proportions onto a perforated steel tray. The tray shuttled through a steam tunnel via a conveyor belt (“like a car in a carwash.”). Once warmed, the food was dropped into an oiled wok for cooking. After it was cooked, the food was put into a bowl, sauces added, and then the meal was prepped for serving. Currently the robot has a station for humans to put the bowled food on a counter, but Sharma says the plan is integrate cubbies where the prepared meals can be placed for pickup by the customer.
According to Sharma, it takes about 80-90 seconds for each meal to be prepared and cooked. The current prototype has two woks in it, but the plan is to eventually have six woks and reach a throughput of about 60 meals per hour.
The system can hold enough ingredients in the siloes for up to 320 meals total before they need to be refilled. And because the system is entirely autonomous and can operate without a human, it closely monitors the ingredient inventory levels and can even create special promotions if, say, chicken or another ingredient is set to expire within the next 24 hours.
When I asked Sharma how he came up with the idea for a fully autonomous wok-centered kitchen, he told me the idea came to him after he had trouble finding a skilled wok cook for on a restaurant concept he was developing for Canadian grocery chain Loblaws.
“A wok is a specialized skill, and it’s hard to find people to do it,” Sharma said. “So everything I’ve done, this was my bottleneck. I’m like, I wish there was a way to automate the wok system.”
But there wasn’t, so he decided to build one. And the first thing he did was to start to put together a team of experts and they would build one. His first addition was adding a CTO in Brian Walker, who had been a long-time executive at automotive supplies conglomerate Magna International.
Sharma said they are currently in talks with one of the world’s largest airport food service concessionaires and he hopes to have a RoWok in an airport sometime in 2022. He said now that the company has demoed the RoWok, the company will begin the process or raising its Series A and begin engaging with a manufacturer that Sharma says “will mostly likely be in Atlanta.”
RoWok is the latest in a long-line of fully automated robotic kitchens that are in development. Last month we heard about Nommi, and we’ve also been watching as Hyper Robotics, RoboEatz, Mezli, Now Cuisine, Cala and others slowly but surely bring their robotic kitchen concepts to market. With all this activity, it’s looking like 2022 could be the year of the automated robotic kiosk.
