Industrial Automation Magazine India

Chef's first-of-its-kind food manipulation AI model equips its robots with the flexibility needed to meet the demands of modern high-mix food production.

San Francisco, July 2024 – Chef Robotics recently launched a first-of-its-kind AI-powered flexible food robot made to help food companies overcome the global food labour shortage and increase production volume.

AI will have an immense impact on our world as the rise of foundational models like ChatGPT has shown. But the greatest impact will be on the physical world in the form of Embodied AI through robotics, given the physical world represents 90% of global GDP and the manual labour market accounts for half of all global GDP.

"We increased our capacity by just adding four Chef robots by just over 20%." ~ Chef Bombay President, Noorudin Jiwani.

With 1,137,000 unfilled jobs and an annual staff turnover rate of 150%+, the American industry most in need of AI-enabled robotics is the food industry. While traditional automation exists in the food industry, until now, robots have only been built to automate one specific task each. They're not flexible enough to deal with the variety fundamental to making meals.

To solve this, Chef is leveraging mostly off-the-shelf hardware and combining it with modern advancements in AI to make it flexible enough to provide labour supply in the form of robotic automation to help food companies overcome their labour shortage. The robot operates using Chef's original food manipulation software, ChefOS.

Notably, unlike other food robotics startups, Chef's go-to-market is food manufacturing (not restaurants) where Chef can partially automate a food operation and thus add value in production to customers without requiring 100% full autonomy from the get-go. This enables Chef engineers to train ChefOS on real-world data accumulated from robots deployed at customer production sites in 6 cities across North America. To date, Chef has already completed over 20 million servings in production.

With every meal the robots assemble in production facilities, Chef's core AI models for food manipulation improve. The robots essentially act as data ingestion engines to train Chef's AI models to better adapt to variances in food and plate almost any ingredient, of any portion size, in any container over time.

As the AI that powers Chef's robots becomes more and more autonomous, Chef plans to leverage these systems to go from applications like industrial food production to ghost kitchens and ultimately, to deploying AI-enabled robots in every commercial kitchen in the country.

Today, Chef's AI-enabled robots are actively generating RoI for the food industry's leading manufacturers. Notable public customers that Chef has case studies with include:

·Amy's Kitchen

·Sunbasket

·Chef Bombay

For example, Chef helped Chef Bombay reduce standard deviation by 30%, reduce food giveaway/wastage by 88%, increase labour productivity by 33%, and increase throughput by 9%. 

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