Robots Are Taking Over Chinese Kitchens. Is This What We Want?
This article was written for the Chinese version of Esquire Magazine and was recently published on their account. It is re-published here in English with their permission.
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They presented it to me like it was the future: a white articulated arm in a glassed-in kitchen, retrieving a basket of noodles from boiling water, shaking them dry and then dumping them into a bowl. I was on the campus of a well-known university in Zhejiang, at the new partially automated canteen, where students can now order robot-assisted noodles (but I’m not allowed to say which one).
In the adjacent kitchen, another robot arm moved clay bowls to burners to be heated. In the back, in a production kitchen, a larger yellow robot arm moved trays of fish into a steamer oven and lowered eggplant into a fryer.
It was underwhelming. Instead of the future, it felt like the past, or, generously, the present. Robotics in kitchens are not new. In the last decade, companies from Japan to the United States to Europe have been borrowing ideas from the automotive industry to, as they say, increase efficiency.
In Tokyo, Connected Robotics has built an almost fully-automated soba noodle kitchen, complete with a dishwasher, as well as the Octochef, a takoyaki-making robot. In the US, an overhead arm on rails, nicknamed Flippy for its first iteration turning burgers, operates the fryer section at some White Castle outlets.
In 2023, McDonald’s opened an automated drive-through and take-away restaurant in Texas, and, like many fast-food chains, has been experimenting with AI to take orders. Most ridiculously, a British company has invented a pair of robot arms, with hands and fingers, that hang above a burner in your home kitchen and mimic the actions of a professional chef.
For the most part, however, this has happened in a western food context. Automation in Chinese food has been limited to simple chao cai ji, rotating drums that spin like washing machines to simulate a chef stir-frying with a wok.
But this is changing. Now a handful of Chinese companies are competing to standardize and automate the Chinese kitchen.
“I’ve always suspected that there’s something particular about Chinese food that makes it ripe for automation,” Hong Kong chef and restaurant owner Lucas Sin told me. “The recent technological push has focused on making the tossing and temperature control of the automatic wok work.”
Shenzhen’s Botinkit, started in 2021 with help from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology professors, is one of those companies. In just its latest fund-raising cycle, the company received RMB 100 million in investment in a Series A+ round, based on its cooking robot. A kind of advanced chao cai ji, it’s used in Walmarts in Shenzhen, Sichuan fast-food chain Delibowl in Singapore, and, most recently as the system underpinning Tigawok in Los Angeles, a quick-service Chinese restaurant serving more traditional dishes like mapo tofu and tomato-and-egg.
Sin notes the flattening effect of technology. “Operators end up having to pick and choose dishes that fit the system; usually, they are dishes that are cooked in one go (without the removal and readdition of ingredients), continuously tossed, and visually uniform,” he says. “That’s when the breadth of the cuisine gets narrowed down; everything becomes a stir-fry.”
Across the border, Rena Li and her husband got into the restaurant business about a decade ago in Hong Kong and quickly realized that finding enough chefs and achieving consistency were harder than they thought, especially if they wanted to branch out from their one Hunan-style restaurant to become a small chain. So with help from a team of newly graduated engineers, also from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Li developed a prototype robot that she says cooks 95% as good as her best chefs, and can achieve the same wok hei (锅气) as a traditional restaurant.
Today, her company, Hestia Kitchen, makes a complete automated kitchen suite, with a “particular focus on Chinese food”, including an induction-driven chao cai ji for stir-frying (“No Chef. No Space. No Problem.”), an automatic fryer, a touch-free dispenser for portioning out sauces and seasonings, and an integrated larder. Taken together, the Hestia Kitchen system moves prepared food from the refrigerator to the fryer or stir-fryer via a conveyor belt, and, according to the company, for $6,000 USD a month, can replace the work of 2-3 chefs. All five of her restaurants in Hong Kong are now automated.
For Li, the important thing to preserve was not the cooking skill of the chefs but the fact that each dish is stir-fried to order, she told me. Despite having a system she says is built for Chinese food, she is focusing on the Japanese and North American markets, with clients in Tokyo and New York City. “Our research shows that in mainland China,” she told me, “a shortage of skillful chefs is not really a pain point.”
Back in Shanghai, where I live and have worked as a chef, I went for lunch one day to an “AI canteen” run by Shanghai-based technology company Xixiang. Two cooks and an automated kitchen serve up to 500 people a day at this neighborhood spot, filling a buffet with 20 dishes that rotate daily. In its first month, customers were wary of the technology, the manager told me, but they quickly got over it; for the past three years, it’s been packed with elderly residents from the area and white-collar workers from nearby buildings looking for a bargain.
The day I went, the technology seemed to fade into the background. A human-sized yellow robotic arm stood in a glassed-in kitchen behind the buffet but the customers barely glanced at it, more focused on that day’s dishes: red-braised pork with dried bamboo shoots, Shanghai-style fried rice with ham, sweet cubes of pumpkin.
Despite all the robotics used in the preparation, the serving process was decidedly low-tech: a crew of (part-time) human employees spooning a standardized amount of each dish from the buffet onto the plates of hungry customers. A camera sensor at the end of the buffet line, meant to read each plate and charge accordingly, was out of order; another (part-time) human acted as cashier. Even with the human help, the manager told me the robotics cut labor costs at the canteen by half.
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Is this what we want?
In my conversations with multiple kitchen robotics companies in China and abroad, in reading about them online and watching countless videos of robotic arms doing some simple kitchen task, the common reasons for the founders to get into this business, and the major challenge they identify in restaurants, is a labor shortage. Some talk about employee safety, consistency issues, inefficiency and hygiene. As a former chef who spent ten years working in restaurant kitchens of all kinds (although not fast-food), something doesn’t sit right with me.
The labor shortage is the most troubling.
If kitchens can’t attract people to work in them, isn’t the answer to make the job more attractive? Business models might have to change to accommodate higher pay, better working conditions, more sane schedules. Perhaps menus need to shrink to simplify the kitchen complexity. That’s a more humane solution than just “replace them with robots”. But now we are talking about the nature of capitalism, its constant drive for profits and “efficiency”, and political systems — a far way from dinner.
Kitchens are not easy places to work. And yet millions of us choose this profession, out of passion or necessity. How many more would join if the pay was a little better, if we didn’t have to work 12 or 14 hours a day, if we had holidays? Instead, China’s kitchens are emptying out as young workers choose to deliver food, work as couriers, or drive for ride-sharing companies, where they might work just as hard but earn more than a young cook’s salary.
I spoke to a Chinese chef with more than two decades of kitchen experience, who now works with a large kitchen robotics company, helping to train their international customers. Privately, he admitted he was conflicted about his job, wondering if he was working against his own interest and background.
“Business owners’ first question is always ‘How much manpower can I cut with this machine?’” he told me. “It’s not about consistency, which these machines are great at, or efficiency. It’s just about eliminating jobs.” As a chef, he didn’t think that should be the first answer. We talked about his company’s machines as a tool, but one that may divide kitchen workers into two very unequal categories: the one who creates the recipes, and the one who just follows the robot’s prompts to add ingredients to the barrel.
“I have been asking myself,” the chef confessed, “am I helping the chef industry?”
Call me biased, or defensive, but there is an undertone of disrespect among some of the tech class toward kitchen workers. The CEO of Circus Group, a German kitchen robotics company that has raised EUR 40 million in funding and is in talks with the Beijing university system to potentially supply thousands of its fully automated micro-kitchens, described professional kitchens to me as “pure chaos”.
Some talked about eliminating “mundane kitchen tasks” so that chefs can focus on creation and innovation.
“By integrating advanced technology, restaurants and foodservice operators can improve efficiency and consistency,” the Circus Group told me.
“We used to need professional cooks and yet the food we served was not good,” another says in a company promotional video. “But now [with a robot] … our efficiency and effectiveness are greatly improved.”
This is the talk of people who have never worked in kitchens, and further, it misrepresents what these robots can do. It supposes that the ultimate ambition of every cook is to be a great chef, spending their days inventing new recipes, and that there is no order to a kitchen service. This could not be farther from the truth.
In my experience, there are two kinds of cooks in our kitchens: creators and operators. Creators, indeed, have a vision. They have something to express. But they are a tiny minority. The vast majority of us, myself included, are operators. We get joy from the act of cooking, from executing a dish perfectly, from the meditative and flow states that come from repetitive work — the “mundane kitchen tasks” the tech world seeks to eliminate. We do not need to reinvent every recipe or create something no one has tasted before. It’s true we can be inconsistent. The pride comes in attempting to transcend that. We are only human.
As for service, think of the kitchen choreography like a basketball or football game. Without understanding what’s going on, it looks random, chaotic, “inefficient”. And yet every move in a good line cook’s night is strategic, calculated to get as much done with as little wasted effort. Time pressures demand it.
Of course, not every task in the kitchen is rapturously boring. Sometimes it’s just work. Dicing 50 kg of carrots or shredding a case of ginger into threads may not inspire us. These tasks might be better done by robots. But, alas, the robots don’t do this. Instead, in all of these fancy robotic systems, the ingredients must still be prepared by humans, cut into the shapes required, by hand, with a knife.
At that first university, as we walked back into the production kitchen to see the yellow arm move trays from a rack to an oven, I peeked into the dishwashing room. Four men in hairnets labored with dirty trays, scraping them clean and loading them into a dishwashing machine. Many young kids have dreams of growing up to be cooks and chefs; no one dreams of being an institutional dishwasher. But, alas, robots don’t do this.
No, instead the tech world focuses on the sexy side of cooking, the part that involves fire (or used to) and skill (or used to), the final assembly in a cooking vessel — the part that requires taste. But, alas, robots don't do this either — yet.
Botinkit’s founder has said the company is “developing multimodal sensors that can also detect flavors and smells.” The ultimate goal, she said, is to “leverage artificial general intelligence so its robots can understand human preferences and refine cooking processes based on data feedback.” No one wants to talk about “disrupting” the dish pit or “innovating” the nightly clean. The focus is wrong.
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I am not against kitchen technology. I use a microwave at home, and when I was still cooking full-time, a programmable digital oven that could control both temperature (to the degree) and humidity (to the percent). If a chao cai ji can produce the same (or better) than an average chef, then it’s just another tool. If it becomes the tool that frees cooks from long split-shifts, then even better. But as these machines become more developed, at what point do they stop serving us and we begin serving them?
When do we become the robots, using our human knife skills to cut eggplant, to then feed into the machine for fish-fragrant eggplant, or human gophers to refill the flour hopper when the university noodle station’s noodle extruder runs out? When does their programming replace our ability to cook?
More worryingly, what are the implications for society? As our institutions — hospitals, universities, nursing homes, train stations and airports — prioritize efficiency over human working conditions, the divisions between social classes will only deepen. The less fortunate will eat robot food, while human-cooked food will become a luxury.
In fact, it’s already happening, Rena Li of Hestia Kitchen pointed out to me. Fast-food restaurants are supplied by automated food factories, and their technology has quietly advanced to the point that just three or four workers are necessary to run a busy KFC, for example, as I saw recently while waiting for some fried chicken at the Yinchuan airport. They don’t write flashy press releases trumpeting their mechanical achievements; they just whittle down the labor cost with ever-more advanced kitchen tech. Your French fries are not washed, peeled, cut, fried, frozen or packed by hand.
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It’s a cliche to talk about “cooking with love” and, beyond that, a fantasy about how the professional kitchen works, much less institutional kitchens that create 20,000 or 30,000 meals a day. Cooks battle the chatter of the kitchen printer or the stream of new order tickets, working through task after task until service is over; they are not driven by love for the people in the dining room, who they most likely never even see, and whose only connection to the kitchen is the order printed on that slip of paper. The working kitchen is not your grandma’s house.
And still, something is lost when cooking becomes standardized, automated, impersonal. Chefs might not love you but they do care about how their food tastes. They automatically adjust to the natural variations in ingredients: ripeness, size, quality, appearance. They don’t need machine learning to recognize a brown spot in an apple or a piece of connective tissue on pork. Regular intelligence, not AI, is enough to know how the temperature of the wok will interact with the amount of oil in it, and how that will affect the cooking process.
But these don’t seem to be conversations that business owners want to have. There are hundreds of companies in China, if not more, making automated kitchen tools like chao cai ji and others making robot arms, and there must be thousands of customers. Yet in researching this article, it was almost impossible to find any restaurant willing to admit they use the machines. (Xixiang, which operates the AI canteen, is an exception.)
One restaurant owner who uses full automation in their restaurant chain told me “I don’t think customers are interested” but I sense there’s more to it than that. It seems to be an industry secret.
“The development of robotics in Chinese cooking mirrors ongoing trends of industrialization in other aspects of cuisine,” Sin, the Hong Kong chef argues. “Menus at sit-down quick-service restaurants are now concentrated on singular dishes instead of regions and flavors.”
He calls it “a reduction of Chinese cuisine, in the name of operational simplicity, control, and ultimately profitability.”
“I don’t think robotics is the only sector where this is happening,” he says.
I left the university canteen with a sense of disappointment at the state of kitchen robotics — an industry that has thrown billions of dollars at research and development but still has little to show for it besides mechanical arms doing the most basic of tasks, like transferring noodles from a basket to a bowl. But my sourness quickly turned to hope as I added up all the humanity in those noodles.
A human had made the broth, had sliced the meat and diced the peppers and cooked the spicy beef topping, had placed both within reach of the machines that portioned them out. There were fingerprints of humanity everywhere. The robot was the dumbest link in the chain. For all the advances, and all the press releases, and the chao cai ji silently multiplying in kitchens across China, and the world, there’s still no one better at cooking than a cook.
