Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria isn’t trying to sell the story like it’s smooth sailing. He likes to point out—correctly, too—that automating food work has been a pretty classic startup graveyard.
Whether you’re talking about Chowbotics, a salad-making startup that was acquired and later shut down by DoorDash, or Zume, a $400 million attempt to “disrupt” pizza delivery that collapsed in 2023, the idea of replacing people doing food prep with machines has never exactly been easy.
Robot arms, not restaurant tables
The core premise from Chef is simple: use AI-powered robot arms to take the labor out of large-scale food production.
The company first aimed for fast casual restaurants—the kind that dot America’s cities—but it pivoted early.
That pivot landed in food manufacturing, where Chef says it now serves enterprise customers like Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay.
It also works with one of the largest school lunch providers in the country, and that’s the part that makes the whole “robot cooking” thing feel more grounded. Instead of trying to get a machine to behave in the chaotic rhythm of a dining room, Chef focused on repeatable production.
Now, Chef says it has passed an important milestone: 100 million servings.
A spokesperson defines a “serving” as “a portion of food that our robots deposit into a meal tray.” So it’s not a full meal, per se—more like “one component” of a full meal, the rep says.
Still, the takeaway is clear: by shifting away from traditional dining venues and toward institutional-scale customers, Chef is finding consistent demand.
I can’t claim the smell in a school kitchen is the same as a restaurant—maybe it’s even better or worse depending on the day—but you get the idea. The work is steady, and that matters when you’re trying to automate it.
Scaling with “smaller kitchens” and better models
Bhageria says the next move is to expand into what it calls “smaller kitchens.” And the definition isn’t exactly what you’d expect. One of Chef’s recently signed smaller customers is “one of the largest airline catering companies in the world.”
Other venue types are in the pipeline too.
Chef says it has plans to expand into “ghost kitchens”—operations without any actual restaurant that supply meals for the likes of DoorDash.
Eventually, Bhageria says, the company would like to expand further into fast casual restaurants, stadiums, and prisons.
The longer-term bet is that all this volume—those 100 million servings—creates data that can train the company’s AI models for food handling and packaging.
Bhageria says the data is being fed into those models so they can become smarter and more capable.
He also points to the “inherent nature of food,” calling it a slippery and malleable product without predictable proportions, which makes it difficult for robots to handle.
With its models, Chef hopes to continue improving the technology so the robots get progressively better at their job, which should help the business scale.
Maybe that’s the real story here—not just reaching a milestone, but using it.
And if it works, the kitchen floor plan doesn’t have to look like a restaurant at all.
It’s just… getting the robots to do the right thing, at the right speed, without making a mess that nobody has time to clean up.
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