The newest employee at BONAPITA, a fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant in West Roxbury, isn’t one for conversation. But it is consistent.
This food prepper can put together a custom salad order in a few minutes, switch between serving tools, select the correct amount of ingredients and can work continuously, as long as there’s an outlet nearby.
Meet Alfred: An automated food preparation robot created to alleviate labor shortages and improve operating efficiencies in the food industry. Alfred is the creation of Charlestown-based Dexai Robotics, which spun-out from The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in 2018. The robot made its public restaurant debut late last week at BONAPITA’s West Roxbury location.
Dexai CEO David Johnson said Alfred uses AI and computer vision to manipulate utensils and ingredients. The company doesn’t have its own recipes, Johnson said, and Alfred learns the different meals of the chefs it works with. The robot is given a recipe and it practices picking up the ingredients with different utensils until it can get the right quantity successfully.
Johnson said it takes about two minutes for Alfred to make a salad.
“It’s actually a little slower than what a person does, but it just keeps going and going and going. And it’s getting faster all the time,” Johnson said.
As Alfred makes more meals, Johnson said it learns how to handle ingredients and gets faster. It also automatically shares its learnings with other Alfred robots. The goal is to teach Alfred to make all different types of cuisines, from salads to poke bowls to burritos.
Dexai raised a $5.5 million seed round in March 2020 led by Hyperplane Venture Capital. The company has 20 employees and tests and builds the Alfred robots in its Charlestown location.
BONAPITA is Alfred’s first restaurant job. Alfred robots started shipping out in December and three are already at work on a military base, in a commercial kitchen and at a cafeteria. The company has an agreement with the Department of Defense to send 10 Alfred robots to multiple U.S. military bases across the country.
Dexai is pursuing a robotics-as-a-service business model, Johnson said, which means the company’s customers are charged a fee for each dish the robot prepares.
“When the robot is making a lot of orders, you pay for those orders,” Johnson said. “But when the robot is not doing anything, you don’t pay for the robot.”
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Ilan Barniv, the owner and chef of BONAPITA, said he was interested in hiring Alfred due to pandemic-induced labor shortages.
“I started to look for some technology and automation for the kitchen,” Barniv said. “And this is how we ended up here.”
Barniv said he hopes to bring in more Alfred robots to this BONAPITA location, as well as its other location in Downtown Crossing. As the robots learn how to work with different tools and ingredients, he wants them to take on roles using the griddle and fryolator.
Dexai has its own plan for rolling out Alfred robots. Johnson said the company has interested customers across the U.S., and he thinks this first location will allow the company to show off Alfred’s capabilities.
“Now that we’ve got this one rolled out, we can have a lot of other customers see it and see how it works, and then we’ll ship a lot more,” Johnson said.
