Chef Robotics Escaped the Kitchen Robot Graveyard and Says It’s Thriving—Here’s Why

Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria likes to tell people, correctly, that his industry is a veritable startup graveyard. Whether you’re talking about chowbotics, a salad startup that was acquired and then close by DoorDash, or Zume, a $400 million attempt to “disrupt” pizza delivery that collapsed in 2023The effort to automate a process that until now required opposable thumbs and a sensitive brain hasn’t always gone so well.

Bhageria believes he has discovered the solution. The premise is simple, even if the execution is not: use AI-powered robotic arms eliminate labor from large-scale food production. Originally, Chef was looking to do that in fast-casual restaurants, the kind found in American cities. But the company pivoted early and found success in food manufacturing, where it now serves enterprise clients such as Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay, and works with one of the country’s largest school lunch suppliers.

Now, the company says it has passed a major milestone: 100 million servings. What exactly is a “serving”? A company spokesperson defines it as “a portion of food that our robots place on a food tray.” Therefore, it is not a meal per se, but rather represents “one component” of a complete meal, the representative says. The bottom line: Having abandoned more traditional dining venues and instead courted larger clients on an institutional scale, Chef is busier than ever.

Bhageria says the company’s next step is to expand into what he calls “smaller kitchens.” As for what those kitchens are like, the definition may surprise you. He tells me that one of Chef’s recent smaller clients is “one of the largest airline catering companies in the world.”

Other types of places are also being looked for. The company said it plans to expand into “ghost kitchens,” operations without any actual restaurants that supply meals for companies like DoorDash. Over time, the company would like to expand further into casual restaurants, stadiums and prisons, Bhageria adds.

Bhageria also says that the data generated from his 100 million servings is being incorporated into his AI models for food handling and packaging, helping to make those models smarter and more capable. The “inherent nature of food” – a slippery, malleable product with no predictable proportions – makes it difficult for robots to handle, he says. With his models, Chef hopes to continue improving the technology so that the robots progressively get better at their work, which will help scale the business.