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Startup dishes out food cooked by robotic kitchen

A Bengaluru-based startup Mechanical Chef has designed a robotic kitchen that can cook a variety of Indian dishes ranging from matar paneer to bisi bele bath without any human intervention.

The startup founded by a team led by a former Machine learning researcher at Microsoft and an aerospace engineer who worked on the moon rover at Team Indus, have built a prototype that can cook over 20 Indian dishes.

The robotic kitchen was developed with funding from Department of Science and Technology, is undergoing user trials and hopes to launch a commercial product that would be as big as a microwave oven next year.

“We are trying to save two hours (of a person) in a day. Our biggest customers are going to be bachelors, or young couple who are both working,” Cohan Sujay Carlos, cofounder of Mechanical chef. “Once the loading is done, the robot and the software takes care of the cooking”.

“Unlike the recipes in the west, Indian food is unique because it is a multi component cuisine with at least three dishes for every meal - dal, rice, and subzi,” he said.

The firm has broken down the entire menu to programme it into the computer; with flexible boxes that can spill the different powders to cook food, while it requires a person to fill in the bulk food like rice or vegetabes. It also has detachable parts that help in easy cleaning, says Arpit Sharma, an aerospace engineer and co-founder of Mechanical Chef.

The concept of robotic kitchen is not new. Spice, a restaurant opened in Boston this week priding itself of dishing out food cooked by a nine-foot long, 14-foot wide robotic kitchen developed by four MIT engineers. Moley Robotics, a British company has built a fully automated cooking robot.

In India, two Bengaluru engineers - Raghav Gupta and Rohin Malhotra, have showcased Julia, a mechanised cooking pot that can dish out Indian food in twenty minutes.

The Boston Consulting Group predicts that the spending on robots worldwide is expected to jump from just over $15 billion in 2010 to about $67 billion by 2025.

Mechanical Chef’s Carlos claims that its product is designed for homes in India, who prefer local cuisine. He looks the mechanical chef to be as big as a microwave oven, programmed to cook local dishes such as Upma, sambar and toor dal tadka. Not everyone is impressed with a robotic kitchen for Indian homes.

R Prabhakar, considered the father of “Darshinis,” the concept of self service eateries that dot Bengaluru, says the biggest challenge for a robotic kitchen in India is to meet local tastes.

“The cuisine in India tastes differently every 100 kms While a robotic kitchen can cook hygienic food consistently, the biggest hurdle it would face is keeping with the different taste choices of people,” says Prabhakar.

“If the menu is programmed in the system, so it would not allow taste variations. This concept would work in hospitals and five star hotels where the food taste is consistent or due to diet restrictions and not at homes” However, Carlos says his expertise in machine learning would be the differentiator. 

He says the device would learn of taste variations as it progresses and would cook food based on individual tastes.