Robots are brewing up a storm in the kitchen

Ghost Kitchen, A cloud kitchen The company has invested in a range of automated products that have transformed the kitchen into a semi-automatic workbench. An automated cooking station, and not a human chef, calls the culinary shots.

think about automatic cooking station As a robot that can create mouth watering things with amazing stability. It doesn’t have the robotic arms we see in manufacturing plants, but it has web-connected pots, stoves and other appliances that can help with cooking. Recipes are programmed into machines and a human chooses what needs to be cooked on the screen and feeds the raw materials to the barrel. The robot does the rest.

Vegetables and meat are still adequately cooked; spices are added in proportion; Fragrant biryani gets ready in time. Rotis and flaky parathas are cooked to the ideal temperature and quickly dropped from the e-pan onto the plate in seconds; Falafel and fries placed in a motorized basket automatically descend into a smart fryer; Food quantity and temperature are accurately measured at all times. Many orders received online are ready to be packed and delivered within 10-15 minutes.

“Cooking is like choreographing a symphony. The timing, measures, and coordination must be perfect and consistent for an exquisite and ephemeral experience for the consumer. It is very challenging to provide consistency of taste, quality and quantity across time outlets.” Automation helps us solve these to a great extent.

Ghost Kitchen has 20 restaurants in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune. Robotics in its four kitchens and artificial intelligence (AI) based tools. “The bots are easy to use. After six weeks of handholding, my human chefs are ready to work with AI-powered machines,” Tanna said.

Tanna is one of the many tech entrepreneurs who have tasted AI Kitchen. The feeling, like Tanna Signal, is simple but deep. Even the best chefs are not consistent. Robots, on the other hand, are both coherent and can work tirelessly. human cook Take lots of smoking breaks. Robots do not. Human cooking can be unhealthy. Robots require cleaning but can minimize hygiene issues. And cooking on an industrial scale, contrary to popular belief, isn’t really creative. This is a repeatable task and, therefore, the playground of automation.

“IoT (Internet of Things) and AI-powered smart devices are changing the scene like never before. Machine learning models now make real-time decisions on cooking. Amit Kumar Gupta, Chief Technology Officer, Rebel Foods, said, “Advanced technologies have helped us run multi-brand operations and scale up across multiple countries.

In October this year, Rebel Foods The sovereign wealth fund achieved a $1 billion valuation after raising $175 million in a funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority. The company now operates in more than 10 countries with approximately 4,000 ‘Internet restaurants’ under more than 45 brand names.

Kitchen robotics, however, is still a nascent industry and is well under way. Although robotic arms are not very common in Indian kitchens, they are in trend in many parts of the world. Fully automated robotic arms mimic the motion of human arms. Last December, London-based Mole Kitchen Robot unveiled the world’s first robotic kitchen, promising that the robot “cooks from scratch and cleans afterwards without complaint”. The brainchild of Russian computer scientist Mark Olenik, it promises to cook and serve standard meals in restaurants.

It all underscores one brief fact: The future of cooking will be very different from what we see and experience now.

a salty market

So, how big is the kitchen robotics market now?

An analysis by Grand View Research reveals that the global smart kitchen market crossed $11 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.6% during 2021-28. A report by ‘Markets and Markets’ states that the global food robotics market size was $1.9 billion in 2020 and may grow to $4 billion by 2026. This is a CAGR of 13.1%.

The mass production of packaged food products, especially in countries such as the US, Japan, France and Italy, has driven the market for food robotics. In most large scale food manufacturing plants, processes are being automated to ensure quality and consistency. China also adopted mechanization in cooking, with automatic sauce dispensers and beverage brewers. Indian cuisine, with its complex cooking processes and flavours, is a late entrant in the automation club. Kovid-19 has accelerated its adoption.

“The pandemic has transformed the food and beverage (F&B) industry and one of the most disruptive changes has come with the development of cloud kitchens,” said Eshwar Vikas, co-founder and CEO, Mukund Foods. The company manufactures kitchen automation solutions.

“To grow and register revenue growth in this (restaurant) market, a company needs to be present in at least 20 locations in a city like Bengaluru or Chennai,” he said. This will require the hiring of many high quality chefs, training of manpower in each location. Not an easy task. “Furthermore, there is a need to reduce the time of food preparation to deliver quickly. These factors are driving the adoption of automation in cooking,” Vikas said.

The time taken to prepare food, especially on weekdays, is a hassle in almost every urban household. Some robot makers are clearly targeting the consumer market, albeit small now. For example, Bengaluru-based Euphotic Labs has developed Nosh, a cooking robot for home consumers.

“Cooking is the most time consuming and laborious task. An average housewife spends up to 253 minutes per week cooking in the kitchen, while a professional cook spends even more. Saravanan Sundaramurthy, Founder and CEO, RoboChef, said, Automated robots can save you a lot of time.

Launched in 2015, RoboChef is a Chennai-based company that manufactures kitchen robots. Its machines can cook over 600 items—preloaded into the machine—60% faster than the manual method. Robot chefs can be fed new dishes while existing ones can be customized. “At one go, it can cook up to 1,000 servings,” Sundaramurthy said.

As of now, the Indian restaurant industry, with over 70 lakh restaurants in the organized category and over 23 crore in the unorganized sector, is turning out to be a huge market for automation companies. Only less than 2% of players have adopted some form of automation to date. That means a long runway ahead. Industry watchers said many organized sector companies plan to adopt some level of mechanization in the next few years.

“We are trying to bring the right mix of man and machine to our kitchen. “Automatic pizza-making machines are on the cards,” said Karan Tanna of Ghost Kitchen.

click to cook

At the heart of a smart kitchen are many disruptive technologies. Machine learning, sensors, data analytics and computer vision are some of them.

Chaayos, a tea chain backed by Tiger Global, has automated its tea making process across all its 127 outlets by introducing an IoT-enabled tea machine called Chai Monk. The bot accepts orders through an app, can create 80,000 permutations and combinations of tea in less than two minutes, and has a point-of-sale integrated, which is connected to the cloud. The machine is also capable with facial recognition.

Nosh users can load raw materials such as water, oil and spices into individual boxes and punch in the name of the dish they want the robot to cook. As the AI ​​backbone and the front-end to the mobile app, Nosh can cook one-pot dishes like upma, matar paneer and fish curry. It can also track the calories in a recipe.

Nosh’s machine is enabled with a smart camera that looks at the cooking pan and can make real-time decisions. “It can be checked whether the onion has turned translucent or golden brown or the tomato is properly mashed. This adjusts the time for adding other ingredients,” said Euphotic Labs co-founder Yatin Varachia. Thus, the taste of the dish will never be compromised even if the quality of the vegetables changes,” he said.

In addition to cooking, AI is also helping commercial kitchen operators with quality control and optimizing processes. “In our kitchen, we have a sensor-enabled quality check station to check size, weight, appearance, temperature. The attendance portion includes visual AI and image analytics,” said Amit Kumar Gupta of Rebel Foods.

Multi-brand kitchen operations are complex in execution. Data analytics and machine learning also help in predicting and minimizing model wastage.

Will Chefs Become Obsolete?

Disruptive technologies raise a pertinent question. Like in manufacturing or service industries, will robots and bots steal jobs? If robots can cook with consistency, why do restaurants and cloud kitchens even need chefs?

Industry watchers said the chefs would not become obsolete. AI and robotics will not replace them but will enhance their productivity and creativity. New menus and customization of menus will still be designed by humans. Second, the F&B industry is plagued by a shortage of skilled workers and high attrition rates. The machines fit well here. Third, fully automated, unmanned kitchens are still the stuff of science fiction. The machines have not entered the pre-cooking stage. And packaging and delivery will remain the domain of humans for some time—of course, the drone ecosystem doesn’t mature any faster than expected.

“When a chef makes a biryani or noodle dish, the owners of Cloud Kitchen want to replicate it in their branches. Mukund Foods development said, “The machines come to the rescue here. The proof is in the sales of the company. Mukund Foods sold 600 units of its automatic machines in 2020. But in the second quarter of the current financial year alone, the company sold more. of machines compared to the whole of 2020.

Meanwhile, the machines are challenging chefs to hone their skills and think out-of-the-box – in a way they can stay relevant in an increasingly automated world.

“Culinary prowess combined with technology has driven us to create a memorable brand. When we launched Faasos, we wanted our customers to connect with the brand for its flavor and consistency. Hence, whether you have Mumbai or Wrapped in Bengaluru, it will taste the same,” said Gupta of Rebel Foods. Our team of chefs has curated some of the most loved customer dishes. We believe technology allows chefs to reinvent their recipes. Geographical,” he said.

Industry experts calculate that with the right mix of men and machines, cloud kitchens can reduce human resource costs by 15-20% and save about 7-10% in energy usage as robotic cooking. optimize. However, adopting automation is not always easy. Cloud kitchens face high upfront expenses. For example, RoboChef’s machines . are between 6 lakh more 40 lakhs. And lack of awareness among employees slows down the pace of expectation of entrepreneurs.

But things are changing as customers also like the things robots do. In fact, most do not realize that a non-human has cooked their meal. A social worker from Mumbai, K. Malini often orders from Ghost Kitchen brand Badmaash Biryani. When this writer mentioned the robo-chef, she received it with a mixture of amazement and disbelief.

“It’s fantastic,” she said. “I didn’t even know that the Hyderabadi Chicken Biryani I ordered was made by a robot. It was delicious.”