Meal kit delivery services are proving to be quite popular, but … you still have to cook the ingredients yourself. The Chefee home robotic chef is intended to take things further, by actually preparing hot meals that are ready to eat when you get home from work.
Currently in functional prototype form, Chefee is being developed by Austin, Texas-based startup Chefee Robotics. It's designed to be installed in a typical home's existing kitchen, and can be removed when the owner moves to a different house.
The system consists of two components.
Up top, alongside the kitchen cupboards, there's a refrigerated pantry that stores both perishable and dry ingredients in slide-out plastic bins that are refilled by hand.
Directly beneath that unit is the other component, the three-element cooker. It takes the form of either a countertop device or a pricier module that's recessed into the counter.
Users start by utilizing an accompanying app to make up a weekly meal plan. There are currently over 5,000 recipes to choose from, plus we're told that users can program in recipes of their own.
The Wi-Fi-connected Chefee then proceeds to order all of the necessary ingredients from a grocery delivery service – they can even be ordered pre-chopped, pre-sliced, etc, if desired. That said, users can also opt to supply and prepare the ingredients themselves.
Once the pantry has been loaded up, the app is used to set the date and time when each day's meal should be ready to eat. Following that schedule, Chefee proceeds to dump the appropriate ingredients out of the underside of the pantry, into a bowl which is held by the cooker's robotic arm.
That arm transfers the ingredients into one or more of the cooker's three heated stainless steel bowls, where everything is robotically stirred and simmered until it's meal time. An AI-enabled downward-facing camera on the pantry supervises the cooking process.
According to the company, the cooker has the capacity to prepare four to six portions of any given recipe. Both the bowls and the bins are dishwasher-safe, plus two sets of bowls are included (so one can be used while the other is still dirty).
As an added bonus, the cooker can be utilized manually when users want to cook for themselves. Additionally, in order to minimize waste, the app will suggest recipes based on perishable ingredients that the user already has on hand.
Chefee Robotics is now taking refundable US$250 deposits from prospective buyers, towards a final price starting at $14,995. It is hoped that deliveries will commence this December.
CEO Assaf Pashut and colleagues provide more information in the following video, in which the system can be seen in action.
Source: Chefee Robotics
