Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, September 6th: AI is gradually penetrating the catering industry.
AI cooking robot company Xianglu Technology recently announced that it has received nearly 200 million yuan in strategic investment from JD.com and has reached a comprehensive strategic cooperation with it. This is also the latest round of financing since JD invested millions of yuan in December last year.
Our shareholders Tencent, JD.com, IDG, Source Code, etc. have given us great confidence and help. The AI cooking robot industry is an industry that emphasizes research and development and investment. Without the support of numerous shareholders, it is difficult for us to supply high-quality products to society Recently, Yang Jiancheng, co-founder of Xianglu Technology, was interviewed by reporters from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily.
In addition to JD.com, reporters from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily learned that the shareholders behind Xianglu Technology currently include Tencent, IDG, Source Code Capital, and others. Yang Jiancheng admitted that JD's continuous capital investment has made the company more attractive and given it greater freedom to invest in technology.
In an interview, Yang Jiancheng told reporters that the emergence of stir frying robots has actually reconstructed the human model and production relations of restaurants, improved the enterprise's clean food system and socialized clean food system. "This is an urgent problem that needs to be solved in the industry at present
According to data from Caixin Xingkuang, there is currently demand for stir fry robots in both B and C. There are five companies in A-share market, including Supor, Tuobang Co., Ltd., Jiuyang Co., Ltd., Baiao Intelligent, and Ruide Intelligent. Yu Yihong, founder of Future Food and Beverage Strategic Planning, told reporters that whether stir frying robots can be widely promoted depends on comprehensive factors such as the improvement of the social clean food system, the decrease in equipment prices, and the increase in labor costs.
Tencent and JD.com are both betting
Yang Jiancheng graduated from Peking University and is a specially appointed researcher at the School of Integrated Circuits at Peking University. He has successively served as the Product Director of Qunar.com and the Technical Director (CTO) of Shangri La Group.
According to Yang Jiancheng, while working at Shangri La Group, he noticed that there were issues with informationization, personnel management costs, and standardization of dishes in the expansion process of the restaurant. Robots can help food and beverage brands improve efficiency. The hotel and catering industry has a big pain point, which is the difficulty in recruiting chefs, high turnover rates, and the difficulty in career development and training
On November 30, 2021, Xianglu Technology announced the completion of a billion yuan angel round of financing, with Source Code Capital as the sole investor; Less than half a year later, Xianglu Technology announced that it had received hundreds of millions of yuan in Pre-A round financing, led by industrial capital and well-known VC investors, with old shareholder Source Code Capital following suit. According to the reporter's understanding, Tencent and IDG were the industry capital and well-known venture capital leaders at that time. And JD.com has made two heavy bets in less than a year.
At the end of last year, Xianglu Technology received tens of millions of Series A financing from JD Group. In July of this year, Xianglu Technology once again announced a nearly 200 million yuan financing from JD Group and reached a comprehensive strategic cooperation.
Yang Jiancheng told reporters from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that there is no doubt that JD's investment will help Xianglu Technology. In his opinion, there are over 8 million chefs in China, but only 10% of them are top masters, and cooking robots can solve this problem with the help of AI. We hope to help restaurants reduce the difficulty of management through more automated and intelligent methods. At the same time, we also aim to help chefs with long working hours and the highest degree of occupational disease to reduce workload
The emergence of AI cooking robots is not a replacement for humans, but a substitute. Yang Jiancheng believes that it replaces the heavy labor and harsh environment that people dislike. The data shows that compared to the average age of only 25 for delivery drivers, the average age of chefs is 40 years old. According to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the total demand gap for Chinese chefs in the next five years will reach over 4 million, and the difficulty of recruitment is a common resonance among catering managers.
The goal of robots should not be to beat everyone, but to surpass the majority in areas where some people are unwilling and unable to do well, "said Yang Jiancheng.
At present, AI cooking robots are still in and have been in the first stage for a long time
In Yang Jiancheng's view, the stir fry robot industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, with increasing attention to stir fry robots and changing perceptions of them. The outside world has changed from whether robots can stir fry dishes, whether they can cook as delicious as humans, to whether they can stir fry even better than humans.
According to Yang Jiancheng, with the attention of the general public, more social resources such as capital have been invested in cooking robots. And the stir fry robot has also introduced many technologies that have been validated or are still under development, thus solving the product problems that have not been overcome in the stir fry machine industry.
We have explored more in the field of stir frying robots and have achieved very good results. The iteration of these technologies has clearly created a significant generational gap between us and existing products, "Yang Jiancheng told reporters.
In Yang Jiancheng's opinion, in order to "replicate" the level of a chef, there are two core indicators for a stir fry robot: whether a dish can be stir fried on 10000 machines to ensure consistent production; Is it the same every time a recipe is stir fried 10000 times in one machine.
So these two indicators are the core and key to our technological research and development, "Yang Jiancheng told reporters. At this stage, controlling the over temperature curve and measuring the accuracy of spraying are the most difficult algorithms, and they are also the technical links with high barriers.
Yang Jiancheng believes that in the next decade, AI cooking robots will present three stages of development: replicating dishes, assisting recipes, and generating recipes. Currently, AI for replicating recipes is only the first stage and will remain in it for a long time. Yang Jiancheng said that at present, customers are willing to digitize their cooking needs in the physical world, which provides valuable cooking data for Xianglu's robots. "So, these are the two main factors that enable our stir fry robots to achieve relatively fast and rich growth in cooking skills
This stage is based on the decision tree logic of knowledge graph, and AI robots are mainly used to replicate the taste of masters. The core is temperature control, and machine learning (LP) and computer vision (CV) are not involved at this time.
Using autonomous driving as a comparison, current AI cooking robots can only replicate and spread the chef's skills completely. This is assisted driving, for example, people who can drive do not always want to drive, and chefs do not want to "cook" 24 hours a day. This is the significance of the existence of AI cooking robots.
Yang Jiancheng stated that the next stage of AI cooking robots is auxiliary research and development, which means that cooking robots can guide chefs on how to adjust the taste and cooking parameters of dishes. This stage mainly explores the application of CV and LP in recipe development, where CV is used for various elements of cooking techniques, added and chemically reacted according to the timeline. Our current logic is positive, which sets the output based on input conditions. The chef's job is feedback based, adjusting dishes through experimentation and observation. We believe that the greatest value of CV lies in its feedback logic
In the second stage, AI cooking robots will provide many modular functions for the kitchen, and kitchen operators can call these functions to assist in the generation of recipes.
In Yang Jiancheng's view, the structural changes and urgency of domestic consumption may be far superior to those abroad. Currently, Xianglu Technology mainly serves the domestic social catering and group meal markets, and the international market is not currently the company's core market.
According to Xianglu Technology, it will continue to expand the construction of the industry's largest AI stir fry robot factory, comprehensively improving the factory's production line automation and detection automation level; At the same time, actively seeking to establish a second production base north of the Yangtze River to improve response and delivery speed to customers in the north and Yangtze River Delta, and meet the growing shipping needs of customers.
There is an alternative location, and the corresponding automated production line equipment is already being introduced. According to Yang Jiancheng, the new generation of vision based products from Xianglu Technology will also be released in 2025.
When will the era of cooking robots arrive?
According to the National Bureau of Statistics and industry public data, the market size of the catering industry will reach 5289 billion yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 20.4%. The domestic catering store base is huge, and according to 10 million domestic catering merchants and 2 million overseas applicable restaurants, the future market space for stir frying robots is expected to exceed 100 billion yuan.
Improving dining efficiency is the key to the development of Chinese catering chains. With the increase in store opening costs, the trend of "machine substitution" in the catering industry is inevitable.
From the perspective of brands with a high degree of chain operation, many brands use stir fry robots instead of chefs to reduce the operating costs of their stores.
Anhui Cuisine Unicorn Small Vegetable Garden disclosed in the prospectus that it has started to use cooking robots in some stores since 2023 to achieve accurate operation, seasoning and stable taste of dishes, and said that it plans to purchase 3000 cooking robots for part of the funds raised from the listing.
(Small Vegetable Garden prospectus)
After simple training, new employees can proficiently operate these devices, reducing their dependence on professional chefs. "Xiaocai Garden wrote in its prospectus that one robot can replace the work of several chefs. Especially during peak hours, one operator can monitor multiple robots simultaneously.
With the help of a stir fry robot in the kitchen, the Hunan style covered rice "Bawan" has increased the efficiency of its stores several times. Currently, it has nearly 400 stores. It is reported that each store of Bawan Gaima Rice will be equipped with about 3 stir fry robots in the kitchen. Employees only need to prepare the ingredients according to the standardized menu and put them into the machines, waiting for a few minutes. The Bawan store usually completes the entire process from receiving orders to serving within 15 minutes.
At present, many companies are beginning to layout and tap into this market. According to Tianyancha data, there are currently 327 companies related to stir frying robots in China.
According to data from Caixin Xingkuang, there are five companies in the A-share market, including Supor and Jiuyang, that have deployed cooking robots. In response to investors, Baiao Intelligence stated that there are similarities and differences with Stanford's stir fry robot, as well as differences in the classification and delivery of dishes, and stir fry technology is only one part of it; Tuobang Corporation stated that its commercial stir fry robot products have been shipped in bulk.
However, there are also challenges that need to be overcome in robot cooking. The person in charge of Bawan once stated in a media interview that using robots to stir fry dishes, although it can be standardized and replicated, with a uniform taste and no need for chefs to handle spoons, can help stores reduce the standard of kitchen staff and reduce the number of kitchen personnel. However, it cannot avoid individual dishes being affected by the process, and it is necessary to constantly update and iterate the stir fry robots to solve this problem.
I don't think it can replace chefs, but it's more than enough to replace chefs, "Yu Yihong, founder of Future Food and Beverage Strategy Planning, told Caixin reporters. Currently, stir fry robots are quite strong in the fast food market as a substitute for chefs, but they are still lacking in star rated restaurants that require higher taste in all aspects of catering.
In Yu Yihong's view, the critical point for the large-scale promotion of stir frying robots is reflected in three aspects: first, the improvement of the upstream clean vegetable supply chain system; The second is that the equipment itself can be mass-produced with a decrease in scale and price; Thirdly, labor costs are sufficiently expensive.
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