36Kr has learned that the cooking robot company T-Chef Tech recently completed tens of millions of yuan in angel round financing, exclusively invested by Heroad Investments. It is reported that the funds from this round of financing will be used for team expansion, market expansion, and R&D.

Established in 2018, T-Chef focuses on the R&D, production and sales of intelligent cooking equipment for Chinese cuisine, providing smart kitchen turnkey solutions. Currently, T-Chef has a database of over 1600 typical Chinese dishes. With precise temperature control, an automated high-precision seasoning system, and non-coating intelligent stirring pots, it supports the automated cooking of various major Chinese cuisine styles such as Sichuan, Hunan, Shandong, and Guangdong.

Standardization has been a long-standing challenge for Chinese catering companies in achieving large-scale chain operations. Geng Kaiping, the founder of T-Chef, observed that the catering industry is a consumer industry with a market size of trillions of yuan and nearly 30 million employees. However, in such a large-scale industry, manual workshop production and reliance on personal cooking experience are the norm.

Kitchen staff in the back-end work long hours in a hot and humid environment, with low social status and poor job satisfaction. Traditional Chinese kitchens are finding it increasingly difficult to attract young people, which is also the fundamental issue that needs to be addressed for food safety.

Based on the desire to improve the above-mentioned industry environment, "Zhigu Sky Chef" provides 14 cooking robots for Chinese catering companies, covering small catering stores to buffets, and various small, medium and large canteens. The price is equivalent to 6-8 kitchen chefs. monthly salary.

These cooking robots have been installed in the kitchens of chain restaurants, and are also used in schools, government agency canteens, and group catering companies. They can cook in a single pot for 5 minutes and can serve up to 200 people.

T-Chef Products

T-Chef not only provides cooking robots, but also offers a smart kitchen system for the renovation of back-end kitchens. Firstly, in the dish development system, companies can develop dishes that meet their own tastes on the mobile app or PC end. New dishes can be remotely deployed to all stores of the group with just one click, solving the problems of slow menu updates, chef training, and management for chain catering companies.

Secondly, based on multi-sensor intelligent monitoring and fusion perception technology, T-Chef has developed a food safety smart cloud kitchen platform to address the food safety management problems facing chain catering companies' back-end kitchens.

Geng believes that the most important aspect of Chinese food safety is prevention, not punishment after the fact. Based on the smart kitchen, T-Chef will have a set of big data on Chinese taste, and by understanding user taste data and consumption preferences, it can provide more value-added services to enterprises in the future.

In the cooking robot industry, the key point of competition lies in the user repurchase rate and whether it can be commercialized. Catering bosses are the most accounting-savvy type of entrepreneurs and pay attention to the input-output ratio.

Next, T-Chef will add a robotic arm to the cooking robot. In addition to the cooking robot, around the smart back-end kitchen, T-Chef has also developed and piloted an automatic dish separator that will replace some of the work of cafeteria server.

T-Chef automatic dish sorting machine

Investment Point of View:

Yuchi Chen, the founding partner of Heroad Investments, stated that "Food is a basic necessity for people. In the process of intelligent transformation in the catering industry, whether it's marketing and acquiring customers, queue management, online ordering, or the substitution of intelligent robots for front-of-house staff, it all constitutes the transformation of the 'front-of-house' operations. Dozens of unicorn startups have emerged in this field, and there are already billion-dollar listed companies like 'Meituan Dianping'."

However, for the restaurant industry, the most important and crucial aspect lies in the “back-of-house” operations, which lags far behind the "front-of-house”advancements. This is the major obstacle that restricts Chinese-style catering enterprises from scaling up to a “chain of thousands of stores”. The intelligent kitchen system provided by T-Chef, with smart cooking at its core and complementary functions in food safety management and cloud kitchen data management, systematically solves the problems of standardization and food safety in Chinese-style cuisine. It reduces the management complexity that accompanies the scalability of catering enterprises and is expected to help Chinese-style restaurants truly achieve 'thousands of stores' operation.

We believe that T-Chef represents the future of Chinese catering and Chinese kitchens.

The Social Value Committee of Heroad Investments, states that in their interview with T-Chef, the founder repeatedly emphasized what should be abandoned by enterprises and what should be retained, and how to provide greater value.

Regarding customers, they adhere to providing safe, stable, high-quality, and high-performance products and solutions. With suppliers, they establish fair and equitable relationships. They respect their employees and create a comfortable working environment for them. In terms of local communities, schools, and elderly care institutions, they research menus with nutritionally balanced recipes and provide delicious, healthy, and safe dishes that are more tailored to their needs. T-Chef has established its own social committee, which has significantly improved internal cohesion and external influence.