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Chowbotics has arrived in SF!

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member
It was only a matter of time. Starbucks is next!

Chowbotics develops robots for food service. The company’s first product, Sally the Salad Robot, creates custom salads that are ingredient driven, chef inspired, and robot delivered.

[video=youtube_share;81YyxrSudAc]https://youtu.be/81YyxrSudAc[/video]

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 9, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Food robotics company Chowbotics received $5 million of Series A funding from Techstars Ventures, Foundry Group, Galvanize Ventures and the Geekdom Fund. The company also announced a name change from Casabots to Chowbotics. Foundry Group is considered one of the leading hardware investors in the United States, with past investments in Fitbit, Makerbot, FormLabs, Sphero and Occipital. Techstars Ventures is considered a leading early stage investment firm, with seed investments in Twilio, Uber, SendGrid and Sphero.

"The use of robotics in food service is an exciting new area. We believe Chowbotics is the number one company in this emerging space and are thrilled to invest in its growth," says Jason Mendelson of The Foundry Group.

Chowbotics uses robots to solve several problems in food service including compromised cleanliness and inefficiency. It is targeting cafeterias, restaurants and hotels. Its first robot, Sally, offers fully-customized, fresh and healthy salads. Sally's proprietary technology dispenses measured quantities of more than 20 ingredients – refreshed daily – to create a ready-to-eat meal any time of day. The technology, with several patents pending, is also applicable to other cuisines, such as Mexican and Indian, and respective robots will follow.

"Techstars helps entrepreneurs succeed, and we've been working with Chowbotics since their early days in the Techstars Austin accelerator. We've been incredibly impressed with their progress. We invested in their Seed Round and are excited to invest in their Series A," says David Cohen, Founder and co-CEO of Techstars. Cohen and Mendelson will join Chowbotics' Board of Directors.

Chowbotics was founded by Deepak Sekar, Ph.D., an inventor with more than 100 issued patents, to make food preparation fun by automating tedious, repetitive tasks with robotics. Rich Page, an Apple Fellow who joined Steve Jobs as a Co-Founder and VP at NeXT, serves as the Executive Chairman of Chowbotics. The team includes alumni from companies such as Rambus, Apple, TGI Friday's, Denny's, Arby's, McDonald's, FANUC Robotics and Disney; as well as universities such as MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Indian Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University.

Chowbotics raised its seed funding round of $1.3M from the Central Texas Angel Network, Techstars Ventures, Galvanize Ventures, Geekdom Fund, v1 and an owner of 15 McDonald's restaurants.


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OK, there is certainly the fun or wow factor, however having worked at a restaurant and eaten at many restaurants, the one big point missing with this salad robot is the arrangement or presentation of the food artistically on the plate or bowl. Humans, like me, value the presentation of the food, along with the nutritional value, and finally cost. This first generation of salad robots is simply dropping bits of salad into a bowl without much concern for the presentation.

If this company can make a salad robot that produces visually appealing food, then they are really onto something.

I suspect that this robot costs thousands of dollars, and requires some human to place fresh ingredients into it, clean it, maintain it, so I'm a bit leery of the ROI on such a novelty.
 
Assuming this robot enables cheaper salad, or enables greater convenience(more stores in more places), i think enough people wouldn't mind the presentation(which is nice), and this company would be sucsessful.

Also: another such machine that makes not only salads ,but cooked food(from the startup spyce):

[video=youtube;yc8D-CnDMiE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8D-CnDMiE[/video]
 
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