"Robotic restaurant that serves healthy fast food": this is exactly how Eatsa used to pitch itself (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/upshot/restaurant-of-the-...)

Turned out things didn't work out too well for Eatsa, but I think it was more due to errors in execution (hyper fast growth with nation-wide expansion, and lots of time and money spent on developing custom hardware) rather than a lack of product/market fit.

Best of luck to Mezli!

(Disclosure: former Eatsa employee)

Are you aware of the fact that most molded containers, just like the ones you use (the 'cardboard' where you put the food) can be dangerous? As greases, especially hot, destroys common cardboard those containers usually contain PFAS, a chemical which is the reason why those containers are so difficult to soak up. This is a widely used product, for example on clothes, to waterproof things. However using it on material coming in contact with food, especially hot or greasy, may be dangerous because the product leaches into the food. Previously used molecules in this family are named pfos and pfoa, are now already classified as dangerous (for human health) and global pollutants, and not produced anymore in most countries. There is now a major concern about PFAS found in drinking water in a growing number of nations, including the US, some class actions may follow, and it may become one of the most prominent food scandal.

To be on the safe side may imply to really check that the containers do not contain such molecules.

"Bowls"? You mean something like an automatic wok machine?[1] Those are common in China.

1964 technology for automated fast food: AMFare: [2]

[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Commercial-Wok-machin...

[2] https://youtu.be/1Xop9py8zBY

This sounds a lot like Spyce, a robotic grain bowl restaurant that's been open in Boston for a few years. Not a criticism, there's obviously room for more than one of this kind of place in the world, but were they an inspiration for you? Even your motivation for starting the company is similar to the Spyce founders: https://boston.eater.com/2018/4/27/17290330/downtown-crossin...

Good luck to you!

One huge frustration I've had as a customer is the unavailability of healthy fast food. I spent five months in Berkeley and ate at Sweetgreen all the time.

Now, I'm back in Columbia, SC where I work at a large university. If there was a Sweetgreen, or something similar, near campus then I would eat there 1-2x a week.

So I'm hoping that your efforts will lead to healthy and fast restaurants opening in places where they aren't currently viable.

I’ve heard the idea of automated restaurants for a long time, but there are still overhead costs and labor costs.

You would still need proper permits/licenses and real estate/rent. Insurance. Utilities.

The prep and cooking of the ingredients still needs to be done, and then those items transported in a chilled/heated manner for food safety.

And if there are perishable goods like produce or meat, the machine will need to be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized regularly, which would require labor, a sink, etc. Unsold food at the end of the day needs to be stored/chilled properly back at the central kitchen. Ingredients will need reloading, machines may get jammed, etc. So it doesn’t seem like it will be labor-free.

Even in the best case scenario, like the sandwiches or muffins at Starbucks, or even deli items at the grocery store, the prices aren’t all that low, so I am curious to see if this can be done profitably.

I'm very excited by this.

It sounds like you have really analyzed your cost models. It's really fascinating to see the breakdown of labor and rent.

Walmart and Amazon have proven that people respond to cost more than anything, even if there is evidence those purchasing choices weaken their local community businesses and tax collection.

But, having said that, if there were a way to pay $7 for a bowl that had an innovative way to bring innovation to local employment AND had robots doing things in trucks that didn't have to pay rental in downtown, I would happily pay for that bowl over a $4 one that removed the labor entirely. Just my $0.02

I wish you all the best. My kids love Sajj's chicken shwarma bowls. They split a $12 bowl because it is large, but the family bill still comes to $40/meal. Looking forward to halving that! Request your next location to be in Mtn View - San Antonio Center- near Walmart

How do you handle health inspections for fully automated food prep? did you have to get special approval from the Board of Health? and what do you do if, say, a rat jumps into a bowl?

This is very cool, and I wish you all the best!

I relate 100% to your problem statement. It's even harder if you have dietary restrictions you're trying to accommodate, for example non-dairy, gluten-free, or low-carb. You spend a lot of your life prepping food, paying a ton of money for the small number of fancy restaurants that serve what you want, or else compromise and eat food that isn't what you want to be eating.

If there was a low-carb robot kitchen in my neighborhood serving $5 meals I'd probably be visiting that 10-20 times a week.

I could see tech like this also helping in underserved communities where healthier food is not only not affordable, it's simply not available. Lowering the capital requirements and unit cost could mean a better supply of healthier meals in neighborhoods that currently have few choices.

That being said, it's hard not to also feel a tinge of concern when reading announcements like this. Automation is coming for a _lot_ of jobs (in this case the ~14 million Americans who work in restaurants). I'm an optimist about such things, but I do also sense a concern that for a lot of people there aren't many "good jobs" left (where "good job" is defined by something that you could learn/train on the job without requiring special skills or higher education, and eventually make median income or better).

Looks good, sounds good, seems to have reasonble prices.

Now combine it with something like this for the outlet/dispensing/sales:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEBO

http://blog.brillianttrips.com/2009/07/febo-dutch-fast-food-...

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-fast-food-snack-automat-re...

I remember them from decades ago in the Netherlands, while being there, stoned, and having the munchies.

I felt like I've been transported into the future!

Food in the wall! How cool is that?

I'd guess the Japanese have something similar in their cities.

Hi, Jan here from Aitme. We are currently working on our robotic kitchen and have our prototype up and running in Berlin. You are right, there are many advantages for a concept like this. We decided to use robotic arms for our product. They bring quite some flexibility and they are easily programmable. Regarding the dispensers I can confirm that there is some complexity. Especially when you want to dispense different kinds of food without making tradeoffs with the quality and reliability. Interesting perspective you bring in. We‘ve been working 20 months on our product and are currently showcasing the prototype. On our LinkedIn site „Aitme“ you will also find some videos. Like to hear from you guys

This is a great idea and the execution sounds perfect. I don’t know about the pricing model though. For me, I see several advantages to a robot prepared meal - being safer and more consistent (same portions every time, no hair or other gross human stuff involved), not having to interact with anyone to get food, and presumably a really modern and slick ordering experience. I don’t need it to be cheaper at all, as long as it’s good quality food.

Your goal of bringing healthy food more cheaply to people is great, but based on the other advantages this tech has, I think the price should be much closer. Eg if chipotle is selling it for $10, yours should be $8 or $9 not $5.

I'm curious about whether deliverability (and temperature control/container insulation) has any impact on /which/ kind of bowl style meals you'll target. 15 minutes out, there's not too much of an impact. But once you hit 45 minutes - 1hr or beyond, certain meals start to get off limits or sub-par. Mediterranean is nice because because it's tasty, healthy, and keeps well, especially as parts of it make sense cold (pickled veggies, etc). Curries reheat with relatively little flavor lost. But what about soups? And which kinds of grain bowls are more or less amenable to the outer margins of deliverability?

Very interesting. I have lots of questions.

How does last mile supply chain to deliver the pre-prepared ingredients work?

How does fresh/stale ingredients management work?

How cleaning of the insides of the machine work?

How frequently will it require servicing? Will the entire container go to service center (swap out the container without downtime for customers) or will a service crew visit to fix/service things at night?

Have you thought of doing this as a food truck? It might make things easier during the early days.

Are there any franchise opportunities?

If so, what do those details look like?

I'm curious about launching one of these in my area.

What's your plan to deal with monitoring and maintenance (cleaning)? I went to a robotic icee-style vending machine before, and while the robots happily performed their automated tasks, the end result was a puddle in a cup because something went wrong with the freezer portion. No one at the museum it was located in seemed interested in fixing or even calling someone about it, so instead it sat there costing money and brand rather than making it.

My thoughts on this:

This will be excellent for a certain type of person who likes cheap meals that are of the type that are simple to be assembled with robotic systems.

The holy grail here though I think is a cheeseburger or a pizza or a pasta bowl, which are so ubiquitous due to their immense popularity.

The TAM for bowls with lots of vegetables is a tiny fraction of that for less healthy food (that isn't expected to come all piled together in a single bowl, Patton Oswalt-style). It's probably better in a place like California where healthy food is more popular, and you have to walk before you can run, so I'm glad you're doing this in any case, but I imagine much of the market you're trying to eventually address either a) wants less healthy, more complicated food much of the time, or if they aren't in that group, b) isn't so price sensitive they care much about a $4 bowl vs an $8 bowl.

I could also be totally wrong about all of this, this is just my guess. It seems to me that in the wider market you're in (across the US) almost all of the super cheap food is also high in fat/salt/msg/sugar.

Maybe that's cost constraints, but maybe that's because the real volume is in junk food. It seems to me that the real value of robots is scale/volume, due to their nonlinear relationship of costs to output, unlike human labor, which is linear, and to eventually tackle that scale you'll need to be able to effectively and reliably produce the kind of hugely popular food types that do the most volume: the classic beeschurger and suchlike.

Great, now instead of wasting money on wages for local teenagers and low skill workers, more money can instead go to a global corporation!

>> They serve our menu of Mediterranean grain bowls for pickup and delivery, at a low price point enabled by our approach’s low costs.

Good luck with your startup.

What are "Mediterranean grain bowls"? I'm Greek (i.e. peak Mediterrannean) and I can't understand what that means. Could you share a few examples of the dishes on the menu?

Wow!

Are there any videos of the robots working? Or none yet due to the patent work?

I'm sure you're familiar with Eatsa, any reflections on how you might escape the same "fate" [1]?

Besides the obvious difference that you're fully automated, I mean how will you avoid the trap of "Hey it's a lot easier to sell this food tech to others than to be in the restaurant operations business!"?

1: https://sf.eater.com/2019/7/23/20706270/eatsa-closed-tech-co...

What’s odd to me is if automated kitchens are more efficient (?), the cost savings are not passed to consumers in my experience.

All of the automated restaurants I’ve visited were the same price as traditional restaurants.

Ah, smart move running the test process with people first, then rotating towards automation. What estimates do you have around cost reduction/efficiency gains with your approach (given capex)?

Stoked for you, would eat, bring on the robot-chow-giving overlords

I really hope you socceed and manage to spread globally. (I'd loev to have one of your restaurants around the corner in Maastricht, NL, where I live.

Can you explain how your central kitchen fits into this? Because you don’t mention any automation there. Are enough of labor costs concentrated in the in-restaurant prep such that it’s economical to automate that while still doing the central kitchen work with actual people?

This is amazing sounding. I wish nothing but the best for you guys.

Edit: just saw it's mediterranean food. Cheers

This is super unique, and very exciting stuff. Indian rice varieties will be a great fit for this model.

Good luck!

How do you handle failures? I like the idea, but am worried about my ability to shake a shipping container to make my stuck grain bowl fall out.

Other startups that went this route found they still had to have a person on-site.

Exciting stuff! So where's the $3 bowl on the menu? (chuckle) Its great to see each customization option doesn't have a separate price line on it though!

Super cool! 1. How many bowls can this produce per hour? 2. Do these machines have the capacity to hold two cuisines at once? E.g. Mediterranean and Indian?

On your website it says:

> Prepared at KitchenTown by Chef Eric Minnich, former Chef de Cuisine of Michelin-starred Madera.

I thought robots were preparing the food? What's this about?

What? $4.99? Is this a dream come true?!

Robotic food prep is a good bet if you believe that minimum wages will be sharply increased.

Awesome! Very excited to see this come together.

Would be nice to see videos of the prototypes

Can we have a look in the kitchen? :)

Sounds fun. Best of luck.

It looks like nobody learned the lessons of Juicero.

Spending millions of dollars to create special-purpose robots that can make a grain bowl that can trivially be prepared by humans. The cost of the robot would exceed multiple years of annual salaries for a full restaurant of this nature. And you didn't even manage to eliminate the need for human employees: you still need employees to maintain and service the machine, to clean up the facilities, to stand by when the machine fails, and to drive the robots around. And those employees will also be more specialized, and thus more expensive to pay, then the cheap line workers they would theoretically be replacing. Plus, there's the central food kitchen where humans would be doing the bulk of the actual food prep work.

Your other statements support the idea that you guys don't actually know how restaurants (or restaurateurs) work, and you're acting like being Stanford grad students gives you some sort of amazing insight that nobody else in the restaurant industry has thought of before, like digital signage (which every new restaurant in the past few years already uses), or using food trucks in parking lots to avoid paying for rent (food trucks have been around for a decade), or partnering with restaurant chains and chefs (few if any of whom would partner with you because it would irrevocably damage their brands). And let's ignore the magically fuzzy math on how a special purpose grain bowl robot is somehow cheaper than spending 5 minutes on training somebody to put grains, then toppings, then sauce, or how spending millions on robots up-front before the restaurant succeeds is somehow financially more prudent then paying for labor costs on an operational basis where said labor can be increased or reduced as necessary.

Like most restaurant chains, we do the bulk of our prep in a central kitchen Yes, fast food restaurant chains do this. Not salad chains, because there's a limited shelf life for freshness once you prepare grains and greens. It's measured in minutes. Nobody wants to eat limp greens or stale grains. You've basically just stated that your food will never be fresh, and that's an absolute restaurant killer in the healthy food space.

eventually develop multiple concepts so each auto-kitchen rotates to a new menu on a regular cadence. Many restaurants have launched with this idea. Few stick with it, because food waste is the second biggest controllable expense after labor costs. Changing the menu regularly means more food waste.

So, all in all, you've just created a business model doomed to failure: high startup costs, high operational costs, high prices or unrealistic VC-funded below-market pricing, and stale food. This might work in the Bay Area, but it won't take off anywhere else.

My advice would be to pivot away from this "special purpose" grain bowl maker and make something useful. Like a general purpose arm that can do everything a human chef could do. That would be valuable.

Your website is rather slow

there is no RANDOMIZED, controlled study that proves this kind of food is healthy. it isnt proven to be healthy. it likely isnt healthy. foods that are labeled "healthy" like orange juice and brown rice are likely very unhealthy and probably cause thousands of preventable deaths every year. if elon musk is not allowed to call his cars self driving, then people should not be allowed to peddle "healthy" food that isnt shown to be healthy.

"AWS for bowl-style meals" - I just don't understand YC anymore