Text | Wei Wen
Editor | Peng Xiaoqiu
36氪 was informed that the cooking robot company “Zhigu Tianchu” recently completed an angel round of financing of tens of millions of yuan. This round of financing was exclusively invested by Xirong Shandao, a good investment institution. It is reported that this round of financing will be used for team expansion, market expansion and product development and production.
“Smart Valley Tianchu” was established in 2018, focusing on the research and development, production and sales of intelligent cooking equipment for Chinese dishes, and providing overall solutions for smart kitchens. “Zhigu Tianchu” currently has a database of more than 1,600 typical Chinese dishes. Relying on precise temperature control, automatic high-precision seasoning adding system, uncoated intelligent stirring pots and other technologies, it supports Sichuan, Hunan, Shandong, Cantonese and other major cuisines are automatically cooked.
Standardization is a long-term problem that plagues large-scale chain operations of Chinese catering enterprises. Geng Kaiping, founder of Zhigu Tianchu, observed that the catering industry is a livelihood industry with a market size of 5 trillion and nearly 30 million employees. But in such a large-scale industry, workshop-style production and cooking based on personal experience are the norm. The back kitchen staff work long hours, the environment is hot and humid, the social status is not high, and the back kitchen staff have poor occupational happiness. It is increasingly difficult for traditional Chinese kitchens to attract young people, which is also the fundamental problem that needs to be solved in food safety.
Zhigu Tianchu products
Based on the desire to improve the above-mentioned industry environment, “Zhigu Tianchu” provides 14 cooking robots for Chinese catering companies, covering small catering stores to buffets, various small, medium and large canteens, the price is equivalent to 6-8 chefs in the back kitchen monthly salary. These cooking robots have already entered the back kitchen of chain catering restaurants, and are also used in schools, government canteens, and group catering companies. They can cook in a single pot for 5 minutes and can accommodate up to 200 people.
Zhigu Tianchu products
“Zhigu Tianchu” not only provides cooking robots, but also provides a smart kitchen system for the transformation of “back kitchen”. First of all, on the menu development system, enterprises can develop dishes that meet their own tastes on the mobile app or PC, and new dishes can be remotely distributed to all the stores of the group with one click, which solves the problem of slow menu updates, chef training, management problems.
Secondly, in response to the problem of food safety management in the back kitchen of chain catering enterprises, “Zhigu Tianchu” has developed a food safety smart cloud kitchen platform based on multi-sensor intelligent monitoring and fusion perception technology. Geng Kaiping believes that the most important thing about Chinese food safety is prevention, not punishment afterwards. Based on the smart kitchen, Zhigu Tianchu will obtain a set of big data about Chinese tastes. After understanding the big data of user tastes and consumption preferences, it can provide more value-added services for enterprises in the future.
Geng Kaiping believes that in the cooking robot industry, the repurchase rate of users, that is, whether it can be commercialized or not, is the key competition point. “F&B bosses are the type of entrepreneurs with the clearest accounts, and they pay attention to the input-output ratio.” In the next step, Zhigu Tianchu will add a robotic arm to the cooking robot. In addition to cooking robots, Zhigu has also developed and piloted an automatic food sorting machine around the smart kitchen, which will replace part of the work of the canteen auntie.
Zhigu Tianchu automatic food sorting machine
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Ye Yuchen, founding partner of Xirong Shandao, said, “People take food as their heaven. In the intelligent process of the catering industry, whether it is marketing to attract customers, queuing, take-out cashiers, or the replacement of front office waiters by intelligent robots, all are The transformation of the ‘front hall’; only in the scene of ‘front hall’, dozens of unicorn startups have been born, and there are listed companies such as ‘Meituan Dianping’ with hundreds of billions of dollars. However, for the catering industry , the most important and core scene is in the ‘back kitchen’, the intelligent process of ‘back kitchen’ is far behind the ‘front hall’; this is the biggest obstacle to restricting the scale of Chinese catering enterprises to the scale of ‘10,000 stores’. The smart kitchen system provided by the kitchen with smart cooking as the core and supplemented by food safety management and cloud kitchen data management will systematically solve the problems of Chinese food standardization and food safety, and reduce the management complexity caused by the large-scale expansion of catering enterprises. It is expected to help Chinese catering to achieve a real ‘Wandian’ operation. We believe that Zhigu Tianchu represents the future of Chinese catering and Chinese kitchens.”
Xirong Shandao Social Value Committee said that in the interview with Zhigu, the founder repeatedly emphasized what should be given up by the company? What should be left? How to provide greater value? In terms of customers, we insist on providing safe, stable high-quality and high-performance products and solutions; in terms of suppliers, we will establish fair and just relationships; respect employees and create a comfortable working environment for them; for local communities and schools, Elderly care institutions, etc., study the recipes of nutritional matching, and output delicious, healthy and safe dishes more intimately. Zhigu has established its own social committee. At present, the company’s internal cohesion and external appeal have been greatly improved.
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