This week, Canadian food robot startup Cibotica announced that its first food robot is fully operational at a ‘digital food hall’ called Food Republic in Vancouver, Canada. According to the company, a fully robotic line named Remy can assemble 300 salads per hour using the company’s material distribution technology.
Cibotica founder Ashkan Mirnabavi says that after opening his first restaurant in 2019, he experienced firsthand the challenges of finding and training staff to keep his restaurant running. The former engineer turned restaurant operator started looking at available automation technologies but felt that there were no available solutions that fit what he was looking for, so he teamed up with his two co-founders, Darius Sahebjavaher (CTO) and Soroush Sefidkar (co-CEO), to start a food robotics company.
They have started to look at different technologies such as robotic arms Mirnabavi said they know that they have to create a system that is integrated with the operation of restaurants. They immediately began thinking about building a robotic line and focused on a system that had the flexibility to make a variety of ingredients and fit into existing restaurant kitchens.
“We learned that the biggest obstacle is extracting and extracting the ingredients correctly,” said Mirnabavi. “All these other solutions that were out there, you had to have different technologies for different ingredients, which made your assembly line very large. And that’s when we said, ‘okay if we can come up with one solution that can basically handle all kinds of ingredients with different properties and different temperatures,’ we can solve it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVV60jcJIFE
With the system now running in his Food Republic digital food hall, Mirnabavi and his colleagues are looking at a variety of future applications and partners that could use its robot.
“Fast food places, salad bowls, were like an entry point for us,” said Mirnabavi. “Fresh product processing facilities, where they go through tons and tons of ingredients. Meal kit companies, there’s a lot of manual work. There are markets where there are assembly lines, where people pick different ingredients from these small, small, pre-packaged foods and put everything in a box. By application, the market is huge.”
The market is filling up fast, with various players like Hyphen, Lab37, Etch, and TechMagic offering robotic food assembly behind the QSR house. Cibotica believes that their focus on flexibility and small steps should win the interest of restaurant partners who want to use automation to assemble dish meals in their restaurants.
In terms of business models, Mirnabavi says that, at least for now, the company plans to offer a flexible model to its first customers, either through a monthly robotics-as-a-service payment plan or through equipment purchases. Over time, he says, they may choose to use one model over another. The company is currently raising money for its next investment round.