Chef Robotics CEO and founder Rajat Bhageria talks with Nathan Lens on The Cognitive Revolution about building robots and a food manipulation model for commercial kitchens.
Chef Robotics starts in food manufacturing, where robots handle assembly tasks such as scooping ingredients into meal trays. Bhageria says assembly accounts for about 70% of labor at food companies and describes mobile modules with one collaborative arm that fit into existing production lines.
Workers select a meal on a touchscreen, attach the recommended utensil, and let the robot tune itself to the day’s batch. For new ingredients, customers can upload meal cards and describe properties such as noodle length and stickiness; Chef combines those details with production data to create a starting policy.
Chef tracks portion weight, placement quality, and reliability, then adjusts its handling policy based on the results. Bhageria says human workers may have 4 to 5% weight bias for common ingredients, compared with about 1% for Chef; humans may have 16 to 18% coefficient of variation, while Chef averages 7 to 8%.
Bhageria says internet image and language data do not teach robots how to move, and simulation struggles with wet, sticky, deformable food. Chef uses production data and imitation learning to train a generalized food manipulation model, with faster ingredient onboarding as a key goal for increasing robot use and generating more data.
Chef charges a recurring fee for its robots, which Bhageria says is lower than the cost of the staff they replace. He imagines customizable meals made in lower-cost ghost kitchens and delivered by robots, potentially making home kitchens optional for many people.
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Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, joins Jordan on Going Direct to discuss food manufacturing, robot labor, and the path from factory assembly lines to more flexible commercial kitchens.
Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria joins Audrow Nash to discuss food automation, startup strategy, and deploying AI robots in production kitchens.
