MaC Venture Capital’s Post

Today is a big day at Chef! After working in stealth mode, we are finally lifting the veil on what Chef does. Until now, we’ve kept our heads down as we developed our first-of-its-kind food manipulation AI and robot system. Now, with a renaissance in AI, we find ourselves uniquely positioned as the market leaders in the food robotics space and are ready to tell our story. Over the past two years, Chef has done 20,000,000 servings in production, has robots deployed in 6 cities in the US and Canada, and has learned how to manipulate hundreds of ingredients. We're now scaling our AI-enabled robotic systems around North America. At Chef, we believe that the biggest impact of AI is going to be on the physical world. And we believe the best place to start is the food industry. With 1.137M jobs unfilled, the food preparation industry the #1 labor shortage in the country. Americans do not want to do this work. These growing labor shortages are forcing food companies to leave millions of dollars on the table every year in unmet demand. As this pain becomes more acute, food companies are more aggressively seeking out alternatives, including off-shoring parts of the food supply chain to other countries where there is more labor available; this of course comes with its own significant risks for the US. Chef has chosen to approach this problem in a systematic way. Rather than go directly to restaurants - as many food robotics have done - we've started in food manufacturing. Food manufacturing is a market that most assume to be already automated. But in reality, it's not. So anytime you have a burrito from Trader Joe's, a frozen prepared meal, a salad from Starbucks, a meal on an airplane, or a dish when you're at a large hospital system, it's likely made by humans in an industrial kitchen. At Chef, we've built an AI-enabled system that can slide onto existing production lines just like a human. Chef is built to be flexible so it can handle almost any ingredient, no matter how you cut, cook, or prep it. In these high volume operations, Chef can generate ROI for our customers, all while gaining valuable training data on how to manipulate food. Over time, Chef can leverage those AI models and deploy at more lower volume operations like ghost kitchens and fast casuals. We're now going public and talking about why we've chosen food manufacturing as a starting point, how exactly our robots work to help customers generate ROI, showing exclusive customer case studies, and talking about where we see this all going in both the immediate and long-term. Check out the links in the comments for: - Our new website which includes case studies from customers like Amy's Kitchen, Intelligent Foods (Sunbasket), & Chef Bombay - Our CEO Rajat Bhageria's blog post "Lifting the Veil on Chef" - Our Mission and Master Plan - Some great press and podcasts We are proud to be one step closer to accelerating the advent of intelligent machines in the world 🚀