Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria joins Audrow Nash to discuss food automation, startup strategy, and deploying AI robots in production kitchens.
Bhageria traces his interest in physical-world AI to his earlier computer vision work at ThirdEye. After speaking with food businesses, he found that difficult conditions and repetitive tasks worsened labor shortages, while assembling meals required more labor than preparation or cooking. He says assembly accounts for about 60 percent of labor in commercial and industrial kitchens.
Chef initially pursued fast-casual restaurants such as Chipotle and Sweetgreen, where workers handle many ingredients and tasks. A robot that covered only a few ingredients could not free a worker to take on other duties. Bhageria says higher-volume meal factories offer more specialized roles, letting Chef start with a handful of ingredients and build capability from real production use.
Food varies across ingredients, batches, and customers, making rigid rules and simulation less useful for flexible handling. Chef measures portion weight, placement, speed, and reliability using cameras, force-torque sensors, and scales. Production data helps improve the robot policies, and Bhageria says demonstrations and imitation learning can shorten the time needed to introduce new food types.
Chef uses a common robot setup across customers, with a small set of interchangeable utensils and software that can support different components. Bhageria describes field-replaceable parts, outside service technicians, and hardware changes such as upgrading to more water-resistant scales after washdowns caused damage. He also explains that real sites bring surprises, including sloped floors, shifting conveyors, changing ingredients, and workers who need clear visual guidance.
Bhageria argues that robotics companies need to focus on a costly customer problem because hardware and deployment make iteration slower than in software. Chef gathered customer requirements, agreed on performance tests, and secured contracts with deposits before building systems. He also describes using equipment financing for deployments and says a strong team, customer understanding, and investment in data and testing tools help manage production challenges.
Briefs summarise talks and interviews; timestamps open the video at that moment. Claims in a talk are the speaker's own.
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.
At a live event between Austin and San Antonio, Audrow Nash interviews UT Austin PhD student Kyle Morgenstein about safer legged robots, Durin Mining operations lead David Venegas about automating mineral exploration drilling, and BotBuilt co-founder Barrett Ames about robotic home framing.
Jenny Read, program director at the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), tells Audrow Nash about a roughly £50 million program to advance robot dexterity hardware and the organizations working on it.
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.
Agility Robotics CTO Melonee Wise talks with Audrow Nash about Digit’s warehouse work, humanoid robot design, labor and AI, and the path to broader uses.
