Chef Robotics's AI-enabled robots just achieved a major milestone as of January 2024: more than 10M meals in production! As far as we know, this is more meals in production than any other intelligent food robotics company today!
Chef had its first production runs at customer sites in June 2022 and it took Chef 314 days to get to 1M meals in production. But growth is continuing to accelerate; it took 100 additional days to reach 2M, an additional 21 days to get to 3M, 18 additional days to get to 4M, and now a bit over 2 weeks to get each additional 1M meals.
This compounding is critical since for Chef, there's no AI training data that one can download from the internet (as if to train a LLM). The training data has to be created from real-world data at customer sites. Overtime, this becomes a flywheel where we can continually manipulate more and more ingredients, adding and more value to our customers.
At Chef we believe that AI’s biggest impact will be on the physical world, representing 90% of Global GDP. In the food industry, for example, in 2023 there were 1,137,000 jobs unfilled in food preparation and service (Bureau for Labor Statistics). These growing labor shortages are forcing food companies to leave millions of dollars on the table every year in unmet demand. As this pain becomes more acute, food companies are more aggressively seeking out alternatives, including off-shoring more and more parts of the food supply chain to other countries where there is more labor available; this of course comes with its own significant risks for the US.
Chef is deploying AI-enabled robotics to help food companies overcome the labor shortage while helping keep the American food supply chain on-shore. If you’re interested in real-world deployments of AI, we’d love to chat! https://lnkd.in/df8SifTG
