Chef Robotics’ Post

Join us on August 1 for A3's AI Smackdown webinar. See you at 12 noon with our experts: Sina Afrooze, Rajat Bhageria and Hugues Foltz! Registration details in comments.

Chef Robotics has unveiled a versatile AI-powered robot to revolutionize industrial food production and address labor shortages https://lnkd.in/euzRvnU6

Today is a big day at Chef! After working in stealth mode, we are finally lifting the veil on what Chef does. Until now, we’ve kept our heads down as we developed our first-of-its-kind food manipulation AI and robot system. Now, with a renaissance in AI, we find ourselves uniquely positioned as the market leaders in the food robotics space and are ready to tell our story. Over the past two years, Chef has done 20,000,000 servings in production, has robots deployed in 6 cities in the US and Canada, and has learned how to manipulate hundreds of ingredients. We're now scaling our AI-enabled robotic systems around North America. At Chef, we believe that the biggest impact of AI is going to be on the physical world. And we believe the best place to start is the food industry. With 1.137M jobs unfilled, the food preparation industry the #1 labor shortage in the country. Americans do not want to do this work. These growing labor shortages are forcing food companies to leave millions of dollars on the table every year in unmet demand. As this pain becomes more acute, food companies are more aggressively seeking out alternatives, including off-shoring parts of the food supply chain to other countries where there is more labor available; this of course comes with its own significant risks for the US. Chef has chosen to approach this problem in a systematic way. Rather than go directly to restaurants - as many food robotics have done - we've started in food manufacturing. Food manufacturing is a market that most assume to be already automated. But in reality, it's not. So anytime you have a burrito from Trader Joe's, a frozen prepared meal, a salad from Starbucks, a meal on an airplane, or a dish when you're at a large hospital system, it's likely made by humans in an industrial kitchen. At Chef, we've built an AI-enabled system that can slide onto existing production lines just like a human. Chef is built to be flexible so it can handle almost any ingredient, no matter how you cut, cook, or prep it. In these high volume operations, Chef can generate ROI for our customers, all while gaining valuable training data on how to manipulate food. Over time, Chef can leverage those AI models and deploy at more lower volume operations like ghost kitchens and fast casuals. We're now going public and talking about why we've chosen food manufacturing as a starting point, how exactly our robots work to help customers generate ROI, showing exclusive customer case studies, and talking about where we see this all going in both the immediate and long-term. Check out the links in the comments for: - Our new website which includes case studies from customers like Amy's Kitchen, Intelligent Foods (Sunbasket), & Chef Bombay - Our CEO Rajat Bhageria's blog post "Lifting the Veil on Chef" - Our Mission and Master Plan - Some great press and podcasts We are proud to be one step closer to accelerating the advent of intelligent machines in the world 🚀

Chef Robotics launches AI-Powered food robot to help overcome global labor shortage in the food industry. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/ebyGUhGQ #foodtechnology #foodautomation #robotics #restaurantroboticstechnology Carl Vause Joe Weber Rajat Bhageria Ray Martino

Robotics and automation are hardly new in food production, says Chef Robotics founder Rajat Bhageria. “The issue with traditional automation is that it’s not flexible.” Historically, observes Bhageria, who has been keeping a low profile since founding his AI-powered robotics startup in 2019, robots have been designed to automate specific tasks in ‘low mix’ production lines optimized for mass production of a single product. But they do not suit ‘high mix’ environments where companies are handling hundreds of SKUs or producing customized meals. In these more complex environments, or in situations where products are too delicate to be handled by traditional dispensers, he says, “traditional automation simply doesn’t work” and companies still rely heavily on manual labor. San Francisco-based Chef Robotics has found its sweet spot with these companies, which have a certain level of complexity, but a meaningful level of throughput, where it can deploy robotic arms armed with proprietary utensils trained to dispense accurate portions of food into trays through rapid ‘on-the-job’ learning, facilitated by AI. After experiments with leading brands including Amy’s Kitchen, Chef Bombay, and Sunbasket, Chef’ Robotics’ technology is now being rolled out across North America. #foodtech #robotics AgFunder