I am a foreigner running a rival food automation venture in Guangdong. I had resigned from HN participation but thought to rejoin and post thoughts as this is quite close to our area.

The venture under discussion Qianxi Robot Catering Group (千玺机器人餐饮集团系) who are owned by real estate group Country Garden (碧桂园 / 02007.HK) who invested 2.4B RMB (USD$33.5M) in the company. It has four subsidiaries including Zhiyuan Technology (智源科技), Bijiashun Kitchen (碧家顺厨), Youbisheng (优碧胜) and Biyouwei (碧有味).

Background is that the parent group sees the combination of robotics, agriculture and real estate as a growth area.

It reportedly spent USD$87M on robotics research in the first half of 2019 and will spent "at least" 80B RMB or USD$11.2B on robotics research in the next 5 years. This includes another company in the group '博智林机器人' (Bright Dream Robotics).

For the current robotics restaurant group, in January 2020 it reports that it will "refine its mass production plan and expand its stores nationwide in 2020."

Includes welcome robots, frying robots, dessert robots, burger robots, bartending robots, claypot rice robots, wok robots, cloud track systems and ground delivery robots, etc.

32 wok based cooking robots and a claypot robot that can make 24 claypot meals at the same time.

My own investors have visited this venture and reported that there were technical problems prohibiting its automatic operation. It seems condiments are supplied by the numerous staff, rather than automatically, and many specific robot interfaces are also handled by staff. For the wok robots, it is reported there are 32 dishes made by robots, and it appears that each wok only makes one (fixed program). Note that the packaging for drinks appears to be the largest and most expensive type of take-away cups available which are presumably selected in order to minimize precision, rigidity and consistency related issues with cheaper plastic lid pressure application processes. There is no evidence of self cleaning. The burger frying robot appears to have the following structure based on two Kuka standard light weight industrial robot arms. The left side focuses on parallel burger frying in sets of three. The right side combines the deep fried (fries, possibly 'fish cakes'). The process is as follows.

A uniform shaped, pre-cut half-bun is grilled and then placed on a new sheet of packaging. Pre-chopped lettuce is added by extracting an apparently weight-measured portion from an apparently hidden rotary dispenser. A chicken burger is fried and then lifted by pneumatic suction. Apparently either the burger or the top of the bun can have sauce applied, or the algorithm has changed. The top is placed on the burger then it is packaged by a complicated folding mechanism. Finally the result is stuck together with a sticker then lifted and placed in the output queue.

Esimate cost of burger system: 2 linear motion systems + 2 robot arms + custom aluminium + grippers + pneumatics + stock framing + heating systems + industrial control systems + air extraction system + frying system + deep frying system + sauce dispensers. Conclusion: expensive, likely over USD$40,000 in parts before labour and design.

Our venture - Infinite Food - retain what we believe to be a global technology lead in the sector and look forward to launching our world first service supplying personalized food retail from a network of kiosk form factor automated restaurants. invest at 8-food dot com if interested.