Swallowing difficulties are significantly impacting the physical health and quality of life of older adults.

If it is hard for you to empathize with this description, just imagine the lack of joy and satisfaction when you struggle to swallow your beloved milk tea, instant noodles, hotpot, rice, or even a delicious plate of spicy chicken… Can you imagine the utter absence of happiness in such moments？

01.

 "Smart Elderly Care" Mode Is On

To address the issue of difficulty in elderly dining, the government has released the “Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the High-Quality Development of Elderly Care Services” (referred to as the “Opinions” hereinafter).

To actively respond to the aging population and the overall low quality of elderly care services, inadequate comprehensive regulatory mechanisms, and weak elderly care service capabilities, the “Opinions” propose 26 specific measures, primarily focused on five aspects:

1. Promoting the enhancement of elderly care service supply capacity.

2. Vigorously promoting the integrated development of medical care and elderly care.

3. Advancing the quality, efficiency, and coverage of elderly care services.

4. Striving to optimize the business environment for elderly care.

5. Improving the regulatory and security system for elderly care services.

Under the third point of the “Opinions” concerning the promotion of the quality, efficiency, and coverage of elderly care services, the government has put forward specific measures in seven aspects, including the implementation of AI in elderly care, adapting environments to the needs of the aging population, expanding the scope of subsidies for elderly care services, constructing community senior canteens, promoting the system of “Elderly Care Service Advisors,” and strengthening the establishment of senior universities.

Thus, it is evident that the “Smart Aging” model, endorsed by the government, offers future solutions to the aging-related issues resulting from the increasingly severe trend of population aging.

Inside the Sanmin community in Jianghan District, Wuhan, there is an elderly care service center called "Jiniangyue" (吉年颐悦). It houses an independent kitchen that provides meals. This is a type of "Senior Canteen" created specifically for the elderly by Shenzhen T-Chef Technology Co., Ltd.

What sets it apart from regular canteens is that the kitchen in a regular canteen is operated by multiple chefs who cook in a smoky and bustling environment after undergoing professional culinary training. The standardization of the dishes becomes challenging. In contrast, the "Senior Canteen" uses cooking robots programmed in advance to replicate the skills of top chefs, achieving standardized and intelligent cooking.

It breaks through the limitations of traditional chefs providing services to the elderly within a limited time frame and a fixed menu. This ensures that each elderly person can enjoy standardized and customized dishes and also taste delicious cuisines from different regions, thus enhancing the variety of food options.

The development of the "Elderly Canteen" menu is jointly undertaken by the T-Chef brand and its culinary research and development center, along with chefs and nutrition experts. It is specifically customized to cater to the taste and health requirements of the elderly.

The menu includes various cooking methods such as roasting, braising, stewing, boiling, and simmering. It aims to ensure that the dishes are both tender and retain the original flavors and nutrition of the ingredients.

Furthermore, this intelligent and modernized canteen also helps prevent kitchen safety issues that may arise when elderly individuals cook alone. It can be said that it is a convenience and welfare service, allowing the elderly to enjoy the benefits of modern technology.

However, the T-Chef brand aims to go beyond this.

02.

Leave Professional Matters to Professionals

Throughout history, Chinese cuisine has been perceived as an abstract art rather than a concrete science for many people.

What does "eight parts heat" actually mean? How much is "an appropriate amount" or "a small amount"? What exactly is "wide oil"? And what is meant by "Wok hei"?

In the context of a highly nuanced culinary culture, the language surrounding Chinese cuisine is more implicit and reserved, often giving rise to coded language and secret jargon that outsiders may not understand. This creates a division between those who are insiders and those who are outsiders, commonly referred to as the "Chu River and Han Border".

This also contributes to the mystique and charm of Chinese cuisine. However, when it comes to standardization in the Chinese restaurant industry, it has always been a challenging task for businesses to achieve.

Especially a decade ago, the estimation of liquid seasonings, temperature control, cooking time, and other factors in Chinese cooking heavily relied on experience and could not be quantified.

Geng Kaiping, the founder of T-Chef, noticed that in the consumer industry with a market size of 5 trillion RMB and nearly 30 million practitioners, manual workshop-style production and reliance on personal cooking experience are the norms.

Chinese cuisine is a physically demanding job, with chefs working in hot and humid environments, handling pots, pans, and various cooking utensils, as well as dealing with oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar every day. Most of the back-of-house staff perform monotonous and repetitive tasks, leading to low job satisfaction.

In order to improve this situation, T-Chef  has been dedicating itself to the research and development, production, sales, and overall smart kitchen solutions for intelligent cooking equipment specifically designed for Chinese cuisine. They have been developing and refining cooking robots for 18 years.

The company gained significant attention since its inception and received tens of millions in investment from two rounds of venture capital funding. The majority of team members are born in the 1990s, bringing in passion, energy, and leveraging the advantages of top talents and advanced technology to deeply cultivate the field of intelligent catering.

T-Chef is dedicated to leveraging technology to empower culinary skills and providing the catering industry with a standardized big data platform. Their goal is to create a new catering industry ecosystem service system based on cooking robots, smart kitchens, cooking big data, and cloud computing. By implementing intelligent structural cooking and promoting standardized culinary practices, they aim to address the current needs of professionals in the catering industry and enhance job satisfaction.

The T-Chef brand offers a lineup of 14 cooking robots designed specifically for Chinese cuisine enterprises. They also provide intelligent vending systems and smart kitchen systems. With over 50 patent applications, 24 of which have been granted, T-Chef has been recognized as an "Outstanding Innovation Leader 2021" by the Economic Observer and an "Outstanding Manufacturing Innovation Enterprise."

Currently, T-Chef has established marketing and operations centers in various cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing, and Changsha. They have gained popularity in the catering markets in mainland China and Hong Kong, and their products are also exported to overseas markets, such as Singapore, Southeast Asia, and the United States. The brand has formed deep partnerships with renowned enterprises like Cafe DE Coral, Xi Bei Catering, and Tao Heung.

Entrepreneurs, as pioneers of innovation in the catering industry, play roles as service providers, equipment and platform suppliers, creators of diversified experiences, and practitioners of digital economic transformation.

The introduction of cooking robots signifies lower operating costs, more stable food production, standardized management, and faster replication and expansion for restaurant managers.

From a technical B perspective, this also validates the predictions made in McKinsey's 2016 Industry Automation report:

“Accommodation and food services are the most likely to be automated out of all jobs and industries. Because of the high proportion of predictable manual labor in such services, machines are perfectly capable of doing their jobs.”

Cooking robots, empowered by technology, bring forth more avenues and possibilities for the culinary world.

Whether as a technological innovation or the next stage of digital transformation in the food-service industry, they not only bring forth standardization, efficiency, and value but also possess the ability to continue telling stories.

Because technology spares us from sharing inaccurate stories, but stories still remain our way of comprehending life.