By PYMNTS | October 20, 2026
Highlights
Chef Robotics, a San Francisco startup, said its AI-guided robot arms have handled more than 120 million servings.
Café Spice doubled or tripled output on each line and cut excess food in trays by 67%, while Amy’s Kitchen reported a 17% gain in labor productivity.
Chef rents its robots as a service and has signed an airline caterer, while Appetronix builds autonomous kitchens for airports, hospitals and universities.
For a long time, robots made little economic sense for food manufacturers juggling many recipes, each with its own mix of ingredients. Chef Robotics, a San Francisco startup that sells artificial intelligence (AI)-guided robot arms to food plants, now says its robots have handled more than 120 million servings in production. A serving is one portion a robot deposits into a meal tray, so it counts a meal component rather than a whole meal, TechCrunch reported.
At Café Spice, a New York maker of Indian and South Asian-inspired meals, Chef’s robots and a new conveyor doubled or tripled output on each line, Chef Robotics said in a case study. The same study said there was a 67% cut in excess food in trays. Amy’s Kitchen, a maker of organic frozen meals, saw a 17% gain in labor productivity at its Santa Rosa, California, facility, AgFunderNews reported.
Café Spice Lines Now Average of 30 Trays a Minute
Café Spice lines now average 30 trays a minute, up from 10 to 15, Chef Robotics said in the case study. Before the robots, workers shifted bowls down a table instead of using conveyors, which capped output near 12 trays a minute and took eight to 10 workers per line.
Chef designed a utensil to handle meat chunks suspended in Café Spice’s curry sauces, and its robots record the weight of every deposit, the case study said.
At Amy’s Kitchen, the assembly line needed an average of 12 people per shift before Chef’s robots, which each take up the space of one worker, Automation World reported. The robots also cut repetitive motions that had led to strain injuries and workers’ compensation claims, the same report said.
Physical AI Handles Recipes Fixed Automation Could Not
Physical AI gives robots the ability to perceive, learn and respond to more complex environments. Unlike traditional automation, Chef’s robots adapt to different ingredients, recipes and portion sizes and support quick changeovers, the company wrote.
Several earlier startups failed in the category, TechCrunch reported. DoorDash acquired salad robot maker Chowbotics and later shut it down; and Zume, a $400 million bid to automate pizza delivery, collapsed in 2023. Chef survived by changing course. It began in fast-casual restaurants and moved to food manufacturing, where its customers include Amy’s Kitchen and Chef Bombay, a Canadian food maker.
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Chef Robotics CEO Rajat Bhageria told TechCrunch the data from its servings feeds the AI models that guide food handling and packaging, and the models improve as volume grows. The company called that data the world’s largest dataset of real food manipulation.
Rented Robots Reach Airline Kitchens and Airports
Chef rents its robots as a service, so customers do not front the capital cost, Bhageria told AgFunderNews. The company has raised $65.6 million since 2019, including $22.5 million in equipment financing that pays for those robots.
Chef’s next market is smaller kitchens, Bhageria told TechCrunch, and a newly signed customer there is “one of the largest airline catering companies in the world.” The company is also planning ghost kitchens and, eventually, fast-casual restaurants.
Appetronix is taking people out of the kitchen entirely. The London, Ontario, startup builds fully autonomous stand-alone restaurants rather than automating existing human kitchens, CEO Nipun Sharma told BetaKit. Its first, a kitchen for Ohio pizza chain Donatos at John Glenn Columbus International Airport, opened in June 2025 and runs 24 hours a day, Robotics 24/7 reported.
Appetronix bought Vancouver-based startup Cibotica, which makes a bowl and salad assembly system, in March. It plans more pizza robots plus stir-fry, burrito bowl and cafe robots for airports, entertainment venues, hospitals and universities.
Chef and Appetronix reach customers by different routes. Chef places AI-guided robot arms on existing meal lines under a service contract, while Appetronix builds stand-alone kitchens for high-traffic venues such as airports.
Research firm IMARC Group expects the global food robotics market to more than double by 2034, driven by labor shortages, new technology, stricter food safety laws and demand for efficiency, BetaKit reported. For Chef, that growth points back to where it started. The company that left fast-casual restaurants for factory floors plans to return to them, this time with more than 120 million servings of data behind its robots.
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