Did a robot cook your Uber Eats meal? Miami’s new AI-driven chef is on your delivery apps (original) (raw)

The robot chef from Better Days Robotic Kitchens puts an order into one of the four ovens at the Coral Gables delivery spot run by husband and wife team Cem and Ece Kinay.cjuste@miamiherald.com

The newest robot chefs to hit Miami can’t churn out pizza or burgers yet, and we have yet to see them make a croqueta. In fact, they’re still flummoxed by sushi.

But they can — and are — infiltrating the world of delivery and takeout in a healthy and affordable way.

The latest innovation in robot cuisine comes from Better Days Robotic Kitchens, which uses proprietary AI robotics to cook nutritious and well-rounded meals and serve them at fast-food prices. Customers order from Better Daysthrough apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash or GrubHub, pick up the meals or have them dropped off and revel in the fact they’re not eating chicken wings for the third night in a row.

As the AI trend spreads across more fields, robot chefs are slowly popping up around Miami, most recently at Florida International University, which introduced Beastro, a commercial self-contained robotic kitchen, to its dining hall on the Eighth Street campus earlier this year. The university’s hospitality school also experimented with a robot bartender named Cecilia in 2022.

The Better Days robotic chef is different than Beastro — its cooking algorithm is more intricate — but the concepts share a similar philosophy: they aim to offer healthier choices. While Beastro gives FIU students and staff alternatives in a dining hall setting, Better Days founder Yegor Traiman said the driving idea behind his concept was to create a more affordable and healthy alternative to delivery and takeout fare.

Ece and Cem Kinay, who operate a takeout and delivery spot in Coral Gables, use the Better Days robotic kitchen to expand their menu beyond hamburgers and pizza. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com

“I came to this space trying to solve the problem of how to make healthy food affordable and accessible to most of the people,” said Traiman, whose background is not rooted in the restaurant or service industry but in engineering. “I spent the last decade in the robotic space. I really knew what robots can do and what they cannot. The idea was let’s maximize what robots can do the best and where robots can outperform humans. And that is in precision.”

The process begins at the Better Days commissary kitchen and does not eliminate the human element. Fully human chefs create the recipes and prepare the food — chopping and blanching vegetables, seasoning meats — and putting it into specially designed packaging. At the franchise locations, the AI-powered robot puts the food in cold storage and waits for an order to come in. After an order, the arm grabs the container and transfers it to the robotic ovens.

The precision comes in the cooking process. The AI algorithms and sensors calculate the exact weight of each dish as well as any other parameters, such as how well done a customer wants the dish. It also calculates when the delivery driver will pick up the item and travel time to the destination. There’s even an extra thermal scanner at the end of the process to make sure the dish is cooked throughout.

The end result doesn’t taste like fast food. It tastes like lemon dill salmon and tandoori chicken, meatballs and mac and cheese. A spicy rigatoni that is neither too spicy nor too bland. Sides like a crunchy, nutty rice pilaf or vegetables like lemon pepper corn or turmeric roasted cauliflower. There are even desserts on offer, though we are sure the surprisingly light Basque cheesecake does not fall into the “healthier” category.

Spicy rigatoni and lemon pepper corn are two of the items available through Better Days, which offers an entree and two sides at a cost between 12−12-12−15. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com

The dishes range in price between 4and4 and 4and10, with the “Better Meal” deal priced between 12−12-12−15 for a main dish and two sides, vegetables or dessert.

At the moment, there are three Better Days franchises, one in South Miami and another in Brickell. One of the robots has also been franchised to a small takeout-only restaurant run by husband-and-wife team Cem and Ece Kinay in a former Pizza Hut location at 3830 SW Eighth St.

Cem Kinay sees the Better Days robot — which he calls “R2D2” — as a sort of sous chef to help expand the business’s offerings. Better Days provides the robot and the prepared meals, and all the Kinays need to do is hand them to customers or curious delivery order drivers (who, Ece Kinay says, love taking videos of the robot).

“The options we have right now are in the fast food category,” Cem Kinay said (the couple also sells burgers, hot dogs and wings on the delivery apps). “There’s a lot of demand, but this neighborhood is surrounded by offices and different businesses. If I were someone who worked in an office here, I don’t know how many times a week I would want to get a burger for lunch. We were considering coming up with our own concept, but then we came across Better Days, and it’s a fully automated solution that covers the cuisine gap we had.”

Cem Kinay prepares an order to be picked up after it was cooked by the robotic chef from Better Days. The business serves the surrounding neighborhood and offices with takeout and delivery. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com

In addition to nearby workers, the Kinays get a lot of business from students at the neighboring University of St. Augustine Health Sciences, according to Ece Kinay.

“We get feedback from the students, and they’re grateful we’re here because of the price point,” she said. “And the best part is the robot is fully autonomous. It does all the work. All we need to do is grab it and put it in a bag.”

The Kinays use four ovens and one armas part of their Better Days package, a configuration that can handle 60 orders an hour, Traiman said. Franchisees can add ovens as needed.

“We don’t have any limits,” he said. “But as a location grows in sales, we can add additional ovens and additional robots.”

Traiman imagines there are other applications for the robots, such as in a grocery store or gas station that wanted to offer to-go meals or a hotel that might want to offer meals after the kitchen is closed. He doesn’t see it as an innovation that will eliminate jobs but as a way of supplementing entrepreneurs who want to expand menus and revenue streams.

“It’s far away in the future,” he said of the idea of a fully automated robot doing all the cooking for a fine-dining restaurant. “As of now, I really believe the application is not taking something away. It’s empowering what exists.”

Husband and wife team Cem and Ece Kinay sample the meals prepared by their robot chef. “I can eat here every day,” Ece Kinay said. Carl Juste cjuste@miamiherald.com

This story was originally published November 1, 2024 at 4:30 AM.

Connie Ogle loves wine, books and the Miami Heat. Please don’t make her eat a mango.