GoodBytz Unveils A Simple Robot Kitchen That Can Make Up To Three Thousand Meals A Day
GoodBytz, a kitchen robot startup based in Germany, unveiled its new kitchen robot last week in its hometown of Hamburg at the INTERNORGA 2023 trade show.
The GoodBytz food robot is a modular system that can be configured for different types of food and menus:
- The freezer storage module can hold between 24 and 72 different ingredients and sauces and includes different food mixing robots.
- Food-mixing robot modules can measure ingredients, fill containers, place toppings, and perform cleaning tasks.
- A separate pouring module can organize up to 24 ingredients and sauces into containers. GoodBytz offers a ‘cooker’ module that can produce up to 3,000 meals per day if the operator wants a system that is programmed for hot food.
- The serving module makes four different types of dishes available for serving, and the output module produces the finished food ready for delivery to the customer.
- Dishwasher module
Below is a schematic showing a typical GoodBytz system. At 12.75 square meters – just under 200 square feet – the system has quite a large footprint, but that’s not surprising considering it’s a self-contained food service kitchen.
The robot is focused on an inner room where several robot arms move to collect ingredients, cook them and put them in containers. Once the order is placed, the robotic arm places the cooking pot under the dispensing station to collect the ingredients, remove the sauces and place the pots on a shelf where they are rotated and cooked. The cooking shelf is reminiscent of the Spyce cooking system, where the pots are rotated to ensure proper heating and distribution of ingredients.
When the food is finished, the robot arm picks up the cooking pot and pours the finished food into the bowl. From there, a separate robotic arm guides the container under a dumping station that places vegetables and other ingredients to complete the dish and then places the container on a conveyor belt to be rolled away to be picked up for serving.
The cooking robot’s sensors measure ingredients and adjust cooking times based on the dish being prepared, and the system has a touchscreen control module that allows recipe customization. GoodBytz says the system, which can integrate with different ERP systems, can monitor ingredient lists and track ingredient freshness.
GoodBytz CEO Hendrik Susemihl told The Spoon that the company uses a robotics-as-a-service business model, where the customer pays a fixed monthly service fee for the robots and an additional meal for each product produced. Prices vary depending on the configuration, with the preparation of the cold dish differing in the way the food is cooked in the convection oven.
The company’s robot kitchen prototype was operational just three months after the company was founded in August 2021 and opened a ghost kitchen in June 2022 to test the robot under natural conditions. GoodBytz plans to start cooking food for its first major customer, Sodexo, in Q3 of this year. At INTERNORGA 2023, GoodBytz announced a partnership with system suppliers Palux and Winterhalter.
GoodBytz is targeting the European market first, but Susemihl said the company is looking to expand into Asian and North American markets next year. The company has raised a seed round of 4 million euros and is starting to raise its Series A.
