CloudChef Wants to Capture a Chef’s Knowledge in Software to Recreate High-Quality Food Anywhere
What if you could digitally record the world’s best chefs as they practice their culinary art? And what if you took that knowledge and put it into software that allowed everyday kitchen workers around the world to recreate these dishes without special training?
That’s the idea behind CloudChef, a new company that wants to create a “Spotify of food” with cloud software that aims to enable cooking teams in remote kitchens to make food just like a professional chef would.
“We started CloudChef with this whole idea that the same way you can record and play audio and video, now you can record and enjoy playing,” said CloudChef founder Nikhil Abraham in an interview with Spoon. “And if you can record and taste the performance, you can eat from the best chefs and restaurants and anyone from the world without having any geographical restrictions.”
So how does it work?
According to Abraham, CloudChef has equipped its virtual kitchens with technology that closely monitors the chef working on the recipe. Sensors and cameras monitor everything from protein temperature to moisture loss while reducing sauce to onion browning and put it all into a machine-readable file that can be used in a kitchen powered by CloudChef software.
“With our senses, depending on what the recipe is, we can piece together the intention behind the steps and piece together the chef’s intuition,” Abraham said.
On the “play” side, how does a CloudChef-powered kitchen work?
Abraham said that a kitchen powered by CloudChef is nothing but a regular kitchen, but the appliances are controlled by software. Modern appliances accessible via API (like the new Rational oven, for example) can connect directly and receive instructions from the CloudChef software. With electronics that don’t have the ability to communicate with external software programs, CloudChef “opens it up, and we add another little piece of hardware to help us control the software.”
Abraham said that while CloudChef kitchens have cooking guided by their software, people still play a big role in creating food. The physical work of moving food from station to station, putting things in and out of the fridge, and cleaning are all still done by employees without special training under the guidance of CloudChef.
“Every work area in our kitchen is full of screens, and people have their devices with them all the time,” says Abraham. “For example, they get tasks like ‘they go to the second workstation, and their job is to take the contents of this pan into this other pan and put it inside the blast freezer.’ The physical act of moving things in the kitchen, measuring things correctly, is done by humans while all the cooking decisions are done by software.”
Abraham believes that this ‘co-botic’ balance between automated software and people is essential. For example, while he could envision a future where more cooking tasks are done by robots, he said the best results are achieved when a human is involved.
“And at some point, we will have a certain amount of automation in the kitchen, but there are still many different tasks for robots that machines are not very good at, and humans have the ability to do them naturally,” Abraham said. If you tell someone not to scrape the rolled rice off the bottom of the pan, it makes perfect sense. Most people would have no problem doing that. But teaching a robot that takes time.”
Eventually, the company plans to open up the CloudChef platform to other kitchens through a license/SaaS model.
“The idea with that product is that if you own a kitchen, you’re going to provide your kitchen with a web interface, and we’ll guide you on what appliances to buy, or what extras you need to put in your kitchen to make it CloudChef ready,” Abraham said. “So just as Android has guidelines for hardware manufacturers, we’ll also have guidelines for CloudChef-powered kitchens.
But for now, Abraham said the company’s current focus is on the “capture” side of things. They are working to record as many chefs’ recipes on the platform as possible – they currently have around 100 – that can be used in CloudChef’s powerful kitchens.
CloudChef currently has two corporate kitchens, one in Mumbai and one in Palo Alto. The Mumbai location is an outdoor kitchen and has already served more than 50,000 CloudChef meals. According to Abraham, the brands received high ratings and retention rates compared to other kitchens. The Palo Alto location also operates and delivers food through third-party delivery services such as DoorDash.
Although you may be partially right if you think that some chefs would resist the idea of having their culinary knowledge put into a program that automates their work elsewhere, the company had no problems getting top Indian chefs like Srijith Gopinathan (Ettan), Thomas Zacharias (Bombay Canteen, Locavore), and Gill speaker Manjit to record their recipe. Part of the appeal, no doubt, is the royalty the chef receives each time one of their recipes is made. However, I think some would be attracted to the idea that CloudChef’s technology could create a chef-like version of their recipe, which would make them feel better about the idea of lending their name to food sent by ghost kitchens that, to be honest, don’t always have the best track record of creating chef-like food.
CloudChef’s investors include celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and Roy Yamaguchi, so they clearly see the value of the idea (although they haven’t – at least not yet – put any of their recipes on the platform).
