What came next wasn’t automated at all. The human arrived with a separate bowl of rice and sliced cucumber. (The machine is capable of dispensing rice, Chen explained, but not yet in the neat way that this restaurant prefers.) The worker mixed my robot-dispensed ingredients manually, dumped them into the bowl of rice, then seasoned the mixture by hand with sesame seeds and crispy onions. I tucked in, and it tasted like any other salmon poke bowl I’ve had.
Kaikaku isn’t the first company to attempt to automate salad assembly. Sweetgreen acquired a startup called Spyce Kitchen in 2021, attempting to do a very similar thing. It didn’t take off, and the company sold it off last year. But according to Chen, a convergence of factors happening now specifically means that Kaikaku has a shot at success—including robotics parts becoming cheaper, an innovation in food-safe 3D printing, and human labor becoming more expensive. Kaikaku uses proprietary machine learning systems that make use of recent advances in AI to accurately weigh and dispense food, he says. The company’s machine, called Fusion, can theoretically handle 360 bowls per hour—far more than even a team of humans at full pelt. What I witnessed, during an admittedly low-footfall lunch hour in London, was significantly more sedate than that; maybe one bowl per minute.
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