Chef Robotics escapes the cooking robot from the grave and says it’s thriving — here’s why

Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria likes to tell people—rightly so—that his industry is a veritable startup graveyard. When you talk Chowbotics, a start to make the salad obtained and finished shutting by DoorDash, or Zume, a $400 million attempt to “disrupt” pizza delivery that collapsed in 2023the effort to automate a process that once required opposable thumbs and a brain drain doesn’t always go smoothly.

Bhageria thought he knew the solution. The premise is simple, even if the implementation isn’t: functionality AI powered robot arms to take work away from large-scale food production. At first, Chef wanted to do that with fast casual restaurants, the kind that litter America’s cities. But the company pivoted early, finding success instead in food production, where it now serves business customers like Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay, and works with one of the country’s largest school lunch providers.

Today, the company says it has passed an important milestone: 100 million services. What exactly is “service”? A company spokesperson describes it as “a portion of food that our robots deposit in a food tray.” So it’s not a meal, per se, but it represents “a part” of a whole meal, the representative said. The takeaway: in ditching more traditional dining spots and instead courting larger, institutional customers, Chef is busier than ever.

Bhageria says the company’s next step is to expand into what it calls “small kitchens.” Just like how kitchens look, the definition may surprise you. He told me that one of Chef’s recently signed small customers is “one of the largest airline catering companies in the world.”

Other types of areas are also pursued. The company says it has plans to expand into “ghost kitchens” — operations without any actual restaurants that supply food for the likes of DoorDash. Eventually, the company wants to expand into fast-casual restaurants, stadiums, and prisons, Bhageria added.

Bhageria also said that the data obtained from 100 million servings is fed to it AI models for food and packaging management, helping those models become smarter and more efficient. The “inherent nature of food”—a slippery and easily digestible product with no predictable proportions—makes it difficult for robots to handle it, he offered. With its models, Chef hopes to continue to develop technology so that robots can be better at their jobs, which will help the business to rise.