Chef Robotics

Chef Robotics equips off-the-shelf robot arms with proprietary utensils, depth cameras, and weight-sensing platforms that allow the robots to detect food topology and location, and to pick and dispense accurate portions into trays, plates, and bowls. Each Chef robot occupies the same footprint in the kitchen as a human does; to operate, all it needs is 120V, compressed air, and a WiFi connection. Kitchen operators simply slide Chef onto their food lines as a plug-and-play solution, and the robot can be transferred between lines during a shift to meet production demands. Chef can be configured to work with any ingredients, cooking methods, portion sizes, trays, and conveyors; its cameras constantly scan the remaining food and use analytics to determine when supply is low. ChefOS is the underlying software that drives the robot arm’s decisions.

The company offers its solution through a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model: Rather than purchasing the robots, customers pay a flat annual fee for an end-to-end service that includes hardware, software, shipping and training, service and maintenance, downtime and onsite support, upgrades and updates, parts replacement, and 24/7 real-time monitoring. Customers’ Finance teams see better cash flow management because they’re only paying operating expenses, and they realize ROI in year one.

“With a RaaS model, customers don’t need robotics experts in-house,” says Founder and CEO Rajat Bhageria. “RaaS also directly incentivizes us to deliver benefits, which contributes to improved customer satisfaction. That simply can’t be said for capital purchases. And as our AI model continuously improves through training data, it optimizes everything from deposit consistency to spillage reduction across all of our customers at once. That’s one enormous benefit of an interoperable system.”