Robotic kitchen offers new restaurant model

In fact, he said, the sector has no choice but to adopt advanced technology like robotics, as restaurant profit margins have steadily declined for 20 years and the industry has effectively stopped growing when factoring in inflation.

“It’s becoming more of a necessity in the industry,” Shin said. “The core value is that you should always give a satisfactory experience to your customer …. the value that consumers are getting now is lower and lower, so the restaurant industry has to make it cheaper and more affordable but still the best quality.”

Shin and his co-founder, Kish Shin, founded their robotics kitchen startup Olhso several years ago in Seoul, Korea, with their technology eventually landing in the employee campuses of Samsung.

While the firm still has an office in Korea, it has since moved operations to the Peninsula and just launched a robotic kitchen food delivery truck in Foster City, which calculates the route to a customer’s location and begins cooking based on the timing of the estimated arrival.

As Korean restaurants have become more popular in the United States, the duo decided to focus on the well-known barbecue cuisine as part of its food truck and soon-to-open restaurant in San Mateo.

“We wanted to harmonize our startup with Korean food … if you think about Korean barbecue, the core of it is eating while it’s getting cooked fresh and hot. That's why we traditionally use tabletop grills to serve our food to customers,” he said.

Prior to co-founding the company, Shin was an investment portfolio manager, focused on technology firms and became increasingly interested in robotics technology and how it was starting to be used not just for industrial purposes but for consumer applications as well.

“2017, 2018 was a tipping point for industry. Before that, robotics was just used for industrial means,” Shin said. “But now more development on robotics applications is getting cheaper and cheaper so you’re seeing it more outside of industrial areas.”

The flagship restaurant will use a robotics kitchen for certain items but will still employ kitchen staff, which is a win-win for both employee satisfaction and the business’ bottom line, Shin said. With margins increasingly getting squeezed and turnover only getting worse industrywide, technology like Olhso’s mitigates staff burnout.

“Can we say these jobs are healthy jobs if there is this [turnover]? They are not facing a labor surplus, they are facing a labor shortage, because no one in the younger generation wants to work in the restaurant industry,” he said.

Currently, the food truck delivers within Foster City though the company plans to expand with another truck in the near future. The truck only requires a driver, with the technology cooking meals while en route to customers’ locations.

Food trucks have also grown in popularity and not just because of consumer demand. With such a tough barrier to entry for brick-and-mortar establishments, many entrepreneurs are opting to start with a food truck and expand to a traditional location once they see modest success. But with robotics-augmented kitchens, Shin said the traditional risks are not as applicable.

“At the end of the day, I don't think robotics are coming to the market just to replace the jobs. Humans have to start to use it to make a more efficient society, whether it’s a restaurant or whatever industry you’re in,” he said. “We have our philosophy from the get go, that if we are making our food through our robotic kitchen, then we want to make sure that our food is greater than what humans are doing right now.”

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