When you visit restaurants in the future, your salad might be made by a robot named Sally – at least, that’s the goal of San Jose’s Chowbotics.
Chowbotics, Inc. recently landed $5 million in Series A funding to bring its restaurant robots to market. The company’s food service robots are primarily designed to prepare food in restaurants. The company is aiming the robots at restaurants, cafeterias, hotels, and food courts anywhere from airports to malls to hospitals.
Sally – a salad-making robot – is the company’s flagship product. That robot uses 20 canisters of food to prepare and serve different types of salad. With the press of a button, Sally can prepare a flawless salad using one of 1,000 different recipes.
Chowbotics – which just recently changed its name from Casabots – just announced its name-change alongside the fresh injection of Series A funding. That funding round was led by Techstars Ventures, Foundry Group, Galvanize Ventures, and the Geekdom Fund.
Foundry Group is thought to be one of the leading hardware investors in the United States. In the past few years, they’ve invested in Fitbit, Makerbot, and Sphero, among others. Meanwhile, Techstars Ventures offered seed investments in Twilio and Uber, among others.
How Does The Chowbotics Robot Work?
The Chowbotics salad-making robot isn’t some prototype invention: the company has already created a working model of the robot. Sally debuted at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago in May 2016.
You can watch a video of the robot in action in their website.
Sally – and other Chowbotics robots – can dispense and dish out food. Sally, for example, gathers ingredients from 20 different tubes, dispenses them into a bowl, and then sends the bowl out of the machine.
It’s easy to see the value for the food prep industry: restaurants could replace humans with robots and save money. Robots could serve up perfectly pre-measured doses of each ingredient, customized to each customer’s order. So if a customer doesn’t want croutons on his Caesar salad, the robot could create a salad according to that specification.
Can Be Used For All Types Of Cuisine
Chowbotics explains that their robots are being designed for use in all different types of cuisine – including Indian, Chinese, and Mexican food. As a recent VentureBeat.com article explained, “We can expect Sally to sprout some siblings in the future.”
So far, Sally is the company’s only working product that’s been debuted to the public. With the latest round of funding, however, we could see new Chowbotics robots appear in the near future.
Chowbotics Review Summary
Chowbotics was invented by Deepak Sekar, Ph.D., an inventor who has more than 100 issued patents to his name. His goal was to make food preparation fun by automating tedious, repetitive tasks using robotics.
Instead of having a Michelin-starred chef wasting his time with boring food prep, for example, robots could allow the chef to focus on more skill-intensive parts of the cooking process.
One key member of the Chowbotics team is Rich Page, an Apple Fellow who joined Steve Jobs as a Co-Founder and VP at NeXT. Jobs serves as the Executive Chairman of Chowbotics.
Meanwhile, other members of the team include former members of leading food industry giants like Arby’s, Denny’s, TGI Friday’s, and McDonald’s. Other team members come from diverse backgrounds like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Tsinghua University, and Apple.
The company is based in San Jose.
Stay tuned for more information about Chowbotics. We’ll have to wait and see what the company accomplishes with this latest round of financing.
