CloudKitchens is rolling out its bowl builder with five customers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 5:11

   that basically makes different cuisine types with bowls so like think of like like sweet greens like what they yeah we're not working with these brands specifically but i'll just sort of it's a good analogy like think of chipotle or kava or sweet green or you get the idea we created test brands that were like those things and built the machine at the same time as we were building an actual restaurant and we built that restaurant to prove that the machine works then we have our customers now touring, checking out. We're rolling out with five customers in April that are using the machine. And the way it's going to go down is they will come into... And of course, we have the real estate. So we have kitchens, tens of thousands of kitchens around the world. They will come into one of our kitchens in a facility. It's a delivery-only restaurant. They'll prep the food

2. 6:09

   in the morning, and then they will leave. And the machine will... People order online, DoorDash, tuberets, et cetera. They'll order online the way they do. Build your own bowl exactly as you want. And the bowl gets all the ingredients dispensed, hot or cold, sauce, et cetera, gets lidded. The bowl goes into a bag. The utensils go into the bag. The bag is sealed. And then it comes out on a conveyor belt. And machine gets the bag. It goes to the front of the facility, gets put into to a locker, that locker then is sitting there, DoorDash, Uber Eats driver comes, waves their phone with an app in front of a camera and it pops open the locker that has the food that you're supposed to get.

3. 6:54

   That's so cool. So like if you're a restaurateur, the grind of the on-demand meal, which is the restaurant world, goes away. You basically prep and that's asynchronous from when people order food. The machine does the final assembly or what's known as plating, essentially. Do you think there's a service in the future where my physiology, I can share that with you, with CloudKitchens, and you guys just can always be optimizing my food based on what I know is good or bad for me?

4. 7:30

   So first, what we do is we serve the restaurants. So what happened, so Chamath, you'll be sharing your dietary preferences with Uber Eats or Or DoorDash, or Sweetgreen, or somebody. Like our customer promise at our company is we serve those who serve others. Or put another way is infrastructure for better food. So we are either the AWS or the NVIDIA or whatever you want to call it, but for food. It makes sense we're behind the scenes, we're the infrastructure.

5. 8:02

   And so you'll give your preferences. It should be a brand like then Sweet Greens or whomever, Chipotle, that says, hey, guys, share with me like an encrypted hash of your dietary restrictions, needs, whatever, your lipid panel, and I'll customize this thing. And then you enable that on the back end. Yeah, it's pretty close, Chamath, right? You can do that, authenticate your Apple Health. That's really awesome.

6. 8:24

   You just authenticate Apple Health. When these bowls come off the line, and you see how I talk, it's like an assembly line. When these bowls come off the line, on the label, on the bowl is how many grams of every ingredient is in it, plus a picture of what it was before we put the lid in, that can be sent to the person while the bowl's on its way via a courier, right? What do you think, Travis, about this whole Maha movement and just the food supply itself?

7. 8:49

   So then how does that change? Do restaurants embrace more farm-to-table stuff? I think, look, I think like what we see with supply chains in a bunch of different industries it's just going to get super wired up. So right now we're at the point of manufacturing, but what happens? So you go, okay, we're doing assembly. Then you go, okay, what about prep? Then you go further upstream and you're like, what about supply chain, like Cisco, US foods? And then you go further up and you're like, well, how does, how does the mechanization occur on farms and in agriculture? And then how does that all get wired up to serve the customer and sort of what they're looking for.

8. 9:25

   So like you really can know exactly what kind of wheat was put into that food, whether it was organic for real or not, like what was the actual field that came from, things like this. You can imagine like really getting tight about supply chain as it relates to dietary stuff. And as it relates to like Maha, like hell to the yes. I mean, I ordered a couple different, I went to RFK Jr.'s website and they have like the, he has merch.

9. 9:57

   He has Maha merch. I have the green Maha merch hat. I should have worn it today. I'm all about it. Did you get the onesie? Yeah, that's amazing. The onesie was crazy. Your bowl builder, Friedberg, you tried to do this, right? Itza. Itza. We had a bowl builder 10 years ago or 2015. Yeah, 2016. Diego saw it. He actually visited it when we built it. and we designed the system around a canister mechanism so all the food prep was done in a similar sort of like commissary model and then it was loaded in bulk and then put into little canisters and there were 30 slots in the canister dispenser and then the canister would move down the device open up and you could assemble bowls with rice and beans and all sorts of stuff the whole thing was automated and we were in the process of building out our first automated

10. 10:49

    store when i actually took a medical leave of absence from itza and ultimately the company did not get it into production but it we had great working demos and it was a very yeah i mean it was just definitely a no-brainer that you must love this you love this yeah and at the time we were we actually had i'll tell you guys this we actually had a term sheet with chipotle this was nine years ago to actually put this into chipotle stores and then we were in the early conversations with sweet green at the time as well and obviously jonathan and team have gone on to develop their own system but you know basically you can reduce so much of like qsr down to this bowl-based system and automated as travis is doing so it's just a no-brainer and it's it's certainly necessary in a time when there's either a labor shortage or labor price

11. 11:35

    inflation that's causing a real issue with the ability and yeah this is the original automats in new york yeah and uh in the early 20th century i love this but yeah they had a commissary behind that wall and they made like plates of food you put in there you put a quarter in you turn the knob and you get your meal out it's the classic that's the classic artificial artificial intelligence right this is like the mechanical turk thing i mean look here's the thing here's a little nuance it's super interesting Thank you.

12. 12:00

    about automation in QSR or restaurants is that they have an existing brick and mortar that's built a certain way. That layout is meant for humans and for those humans to work in certain processes in exact and very specific way. Every square inch of that kitchen and that space is dialed. When you go and put a machine like this in, it changes the whole thing. And so just to get going, you've got to like do, you've got to like, if you're to replace the front line at Chipotle, you got to, you got to take out that front line. You got to demo it. Yeah. You got to put in a new machine. That's the challenge that they all had. And so now it's like a huge amount of CapEx. My store's down for two to three months and the economics start to not work. And by the way, I still have to have humans in that brick and mortar. And so, you know, look, we have

13. 12:50

    a different take we're in that delivery only model so these are it's true infrastructure for making food behind the scenes for delivery so you don't have these issues and of course our setup our infrastructure these kitchens are designed for these kinds of machines to be in them and vice versa we've designed the machine to be in them when we did this early at itza it was