Welcome to Freebirds. The robot will take your order.
The Austin food chain has inked a purchase order with Dallas-based robotic restaurant solutions startup Now Cuisine. As a part of the strategic partnership, Now Cuisine will launch a pilot batch of automated burrito bowl ordering stations, making Freebirds' food more accessible across the region.
“We're trying to address problems that the restaurant industry has, many of which have been exacerbated in recent months and years, and also trying to address consumer problems at the same time,” said Adam Cohen, Now Cuisine founder and CEO. “And we're doing it through a robotic and AI solution, which involves an automated kiosk that… can serve a freshly made, customized, restaurant-quality meal to people, wherever they already are.”
The startup is looking to provide more efficient, off-premises dining solutions to restaurants while increasing customers' access to healthy food in a concept Cohen calls distributed dining,
Now Cuisine plans to initially set up about six of its patent-pending robotic meal makers in places like multifamily buildings, offices and college campuses as part of the deal. Machines will likely hit locations in late 2022. Cohen added that Now Cuisine aims to be “aggressive in rolling out” more machines with Freebirds and other brands in the near future.
“If you could put food at people's fingertips in their environments… then you can reach people that otherwise wouldn't come to the restaurant, wouldn't pay for delivery,” Cohen said. “Moreover, you can sell at times that restaurant couldn't sell at anyway because they're closed. So, we're talking a 24/7 solution to get food when you want it.”
Also as part of the agreement, Freebirds World Burrito CEO Alex Eagle is joining Now Cuisine’s advisory board.
The move comes at a time with the restaurant chain is looking to grow. It currently has about 55 locations throughout Texas and hopes to double that number over the next five years.
Now Cuisine is also looking to grow. The company has been bootstrapped and solely-run since Cohen founded tit in 2018 when he built the startup’s first machine in his garage. He said Now Cuisine will be looking to start raising its first round of outside funding in the next few weeks, which will allow the company to further develop its AI-powered technology and bring its headcount to between six and eight. Cohen said he considers the company to still be in the pre-revenue stage.
“The grand vision is this distributed dining idea where high-quality, affordable food is accessible to people where they are,” Cohen said. “That can be done by taking the ingredients and putting them into compact, automated machines that can go just about anywhere.”
For a customer encountering one of Now Cuisine’s machines, they would see a three-feet deep by six-feet wide kiosk with a touchscreen. After customizing their order and a moment’s wait, the machine pops out their burrito bowl.
On the inside, the machine keeps food sealed, separated and temperature-controlled to keep out contamination.
Now Cuisine will provide servicing to the machines and helps with site selection and placement, while brands will be responsible for keeping the machine stocked. Cohen said that by focusing on remote kiosks rather than in-store ones, restaurants reach more customers while the locations that are chosen offer it as an amenity.
With a background in 3D printing, engineering and robotics, the concept for Now Cuisine came to Cohen in the mid-80s. While working on a documentary about the history of robotics, he was dining in Paris and wanted a way to bring delicious, affordable food to everyone. He said it took years for the technology to catch up.
The company launched the beta version of its machine in 2020 — grain bowl-making machines at a couple of local Venture X coworking locations. Cohen said that allowed him to tweak the machine for commercial use, making it able to operate unattended and adding features for things like credit card transactions.
“We basically started by asking the question of how to do this the right way, and didn't jump into a solution, as I think some other folks have done,” Cohen said. “We asked first the principles of how this should be done, then figured out a way to do it.”
Cohen said the company is in talks with a number of other brands, adding that Now Cuisine’s technology can house multiple restaurant’s food in the same machine, as long as it’s bowl-related. The company is seeing tailwinds from the pandemic. In addition to consumers looking for more contactless dining options, restaurants are increasingly seeing demand for off-premises dining — a trend Cohen said had increased even before the pandemic and will continue after.
“In terms of industry trends, there's, obviously, the off-premises pivot, there's more digital ordering and that fits extremely well with what we're doing,” Cohen said. “The whole industry is in flux now. A lot of things that were happening were greatly accelerated by COVID.”
