The following report is by Michael Wolf of The Spoon:
For the past half-decade, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been endeavoring to reimagine how restaurants operate by building a nationwide network of ghost kitchens under a business called CloudKitchens. That business, which he and his team constructed stealthily under a holding company called City Storage Systems (CSS), was joined at the hip by another technology business called Otter, which sells restaurant order management software.
Now, the Spoon has learned that Kalanick’s CSS is building its own restaurant automation and robotics business under the name Lab37. According to company sources and a blog post quietly published by the company in September, Lab37 has built its first restaurant robot, a bowl-making robot called (what else?) Bowl Builder.
The Bowl Builder, which makes hundreds of hot or cold bowls per day, is fully NSF-certified and its dimensions are 20′ wide by 9′ deep. The system can handle the entire process of making bowl food, as bowls run on a conveyor belt under 18 different dispenser modules for ingredients and sauces before getting sealed, utensils added, and bagged up for pickup.
The Spoon has learned that Lab37 is headed up by Eric Meyhofer, an executive and automation innovator who formerly ran Uber’s self-driving car unit for years (and racked up quite a few patents during that time). Meyhofer, who is listed on LinkedIn as a co-founder of Carnegie Robotics – a robotics development lab that helped to give birth to Uber’s self-driving car unit – also served as a commercialization specialist at Carnegie Melon University, his alma mater and widely recognized as the world’s leading robotics research university. Meyhofer does not list Lab37 on his LinkedIn profile.
Lab37 is located in a warehouse on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The location includes a commercial research and development kitchen, fabrication shop, engineering office, electrical engineering lab, assembly lab, and testing lab.
Lab37 has been trialing the Bowl Builder out through its Hungry Group virtual restaurant division, which is described as a R&D kitchen company building “the future of dining, where diverse options, cutting-edge convenience, and technology unite.” According to the company, the Hungry Group’s R&D kitchen is in the same warehouse where the Bowl Builder food robot was designed, tested, and assembled.
The Spoon has learned that the early trials with the Bowl Builder have gone very well, and locations that have tried it out have seen substantial increases in revenue. According to a Lab37 spokesperson, the company plans to trial the Bowl Builder in additional locations in the coming months, including more CloudKitchen locations.
One potential customer of Lab37’s Bowl Builder is Salted, a fast-growing bowl-food startup that has leaned heavily into the ghost kitchen model in recent years. While Salted has several physical brick-and-mortar locations, its CEO, Jeff Applebaum, has indicated that much of the company’s future growth will come via ghost kitchens. The Spoon has learned that Salted is a customer at a number of CloudKitchen’s locations.
Interestingly, this news comes just a few weeks after Spain-based Remy Robotics announced they were also working with CloudKitchens for its US entry. The Remy robot, which uses a robotic arm and looks to have a smaller footprint than Lab37’s Bowl Builder, debuted in the US under Remy’s Better Days virtual restaurant brand in the New York City market.
Stepping back, this latest revelation about Kalanick’s push into food automation shows his current journey is not too dissimilar from the one he took with Uber. As with his former company, Kalanick is moving from a startup concept that rethinks the traditional usage model of a long-standing industry (it was taxis and travel with Uber, and now it’s restaurants with CSS) and is building enabling technology as the second (or third) act to help realize this vision. He’s using the well-worn tech industry playbook of building “picks and shovels” for an industry, but only after spending time showing the industry there’s a way of doing things that’s is much different than the long-standing model.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Restaurants and eateries are all across the board being replaced with robotics and automation, therefore laying off its staff, as these major franchises and corporations continue to put of business small family-owned eats; as more people are coddle to faster and faster convivence, and cheap prices, who also are unable to even service themselves. It’s such a joke. I’ve written about this trend in a number of other articles.
The slothful hideth his hand in his bosom; it grieveth him to bring it again to his mouth.
Proverbs 26:15
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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One of the reasons why finding a job is so hard. Everything is trying to mimic the Jetsons with automated Rosie the robot service, the only work for mankind in these industries will be maintenance and occasionally, cleaners.
Hmm, so much for the chef tasting the meal to make sure it’s not too salty or spicy, or actually tastes good. Well no more tipping either.