Ivan Tregear, CTO and Cofounder of KAIKAKU - the startup building robots for restaurants!

0:00Okay, welcome. I'm here, open court at Local Globe, and I'm joined by Ivan of Kaikaku.

0:06Ivan Tregear:Yes. Can you just give us a quick introduction into who you are and what Kaikaku is? Sure thing. Well, thank you very much for having me. Very exciting. So I'm Ivan. I'm the CTO and one of the co-founders of Kaikaku. And we make robots for restaurants. So we've been going for a couple of years. And we basically knew that the restaurant industry was lacking. and no innovation had really happened for decades. But we didn't really know exactly what it needed to be other than robotics and automation. So we made our own restaurant, hired some engineers, started making our own robots. And that has been our story for the last year and a half.

0:42And we've got one out there. Yes. I've seen it on the floor.

0:47Ivan Tregear:Yes. It's sort of not how you'd expect. You know, I had watched some videos before, but when you talk about robots in restaurants, I don't know, you kind of get this picture in your mind of almost like Optimus robot. or something like chopping onions. But it's like a big, it's almost like a huge kitchen unit. Can you talk a bit about the structure and the design of it and how it works and how it kind of does the work that a kitchen would have done before? A hundred percent. So I think that comes down to our philosophy a lot here. We're not the first people to try and do robotics for restaurants.

1:19Ivan Tregear:A lot of other awesome startups and companies have tried it and are doing it now. And when we started, we had that decision. Do we go down general purpose robotics route of robot arms, probably a bit premature for the humanoids, but something like that. Or do we focus on sort of how they're doing it in industrial warehouse food prep, which are really specialized machines targeted to do one activity? That's the route we've gone down. Joseph, CEO and co-founder as well, he loves to say a phrase of when we got rid of horses, we replaced them with cars, not mechanical horses. And so when you're in the restaurant and you've got humans doing this and scooping stuff around, why would you replace that with a robot arm replace it with a machine that is tailor made to do that so that was the philosophy we started with and then it became well what do we actually do and we basically from having started with our own restaurant we ended up quite quickly becoming the customer of ourselves and therefore feeling the pain points first hand and knowing what were the worst parts where the most mistakes were made or the most tedious and laborious aspects of the job were And so that's how we started with making our robot Fusion.

2:30Ivan Tregear:And that is what underpins all of our tech direction ever since. Assembly is core to basically every food prep. Before you cook, you have to assemble. And so that's what it does at the moment. It basically takes raw or pre-prepared, pre-cooked ingredients and brings them together at service. And that's kind of the use case at the moment, right? It's like bowls. And so, you know, when I've watched it, it's almost like a bowl comes through and different food kind of gets dropped in. and then it kind of comes out as like a meal. Yeah. Are you doubling down on bowls specifically or are you starting to imagine other use cases within food where you'd like to expand?

3:05Ivan Tregear:This is, I would say, the tip of the iceberg. It's basically kind of like a skill tree. You start at the bottom, master the basics that are probably useful for everything and then progress one step at a time. So at the moment it's bowls. Bowls are great because there's a few cuisines. You've got salads, you've got poke, you've got burrito bowls. and then it's not a huge stretch to go to ramen or maybe regular burritos, maybe topping a pizza. And so sort of we're in this journey where we've started with these ambient held prepared ingredients and then we'll go to hot holding or cold holding and then actually heating and cooking and then slowly we'll layer up the entire process.

3:42Ivan Tregear:But very importantly, it's about doing what is actually a pain point that a customer want at a time instead of just cool gimmicky features. Yeah, yeah, got it. And you mentioned that you've got your restaurant. Yes. You are essentially your own customer. Is that going to be the strategy that you take? Were you kind of in this phase where you're being your own customer as you're learning and iterating? Or do you essentially want to then be able to take it and sell it to other restaurants as opposed to just opening up more of your own? Halfway. So the reason we started our restaurant was because we needed a laboratory.

4:11Ivan Tregear:But, you know, the test subjects are regular paying customers. So we need them. So we had to make an actual restaurant. So we treat it as a living lab. And it is a real restaurant. It's in the Brunswick Centre near Russell Square. You could come along and eat food, but we just mess around in it all the time, safely. You know, putting in new iterations of the robot, we have cameras doing computer vision, we've got our own kiosks. It's a playground and a sandbox to test. It's not the long-term end goal. And we thought about, you know, selling to other restaurants and stuff, but we'd rather capture the entire reward, essentially.

4:47Ivan Tregear:And so the longer-term thing is to essentially help and take over distressed restaurants, roll them up, use our tech to change their single digit low margins into, you know, 30, 50 or more EBITDA performing restaurants. That's so interesting. So it's like a private equity play. Like, I don't know, that's a really interesting model. So you're both trying to find struggling businesses, bring them in-house and improve them through the tech that you've built. Exactly. Super interesting. And what needs to happen, I guess, to get you to the point where you're then thinking, okay, let's find these distressed restaurants.

5:23Ivan Tregear:So there's only so much I can sort of say, but stuff is happening as we speak. No way. And basically we've been at this point where we've had common room, our lab, for about a year. That was excellent to test one robot with one set of kiosks, one location. And, you know, it is a lab, but if you squint, you get good margins out, especially when the demand's really high. Now it's to test it across multiple locations, actually prove the scalability of it. We want to go from one to, you know, over 10 sites. And then we're going to go into other cuisines and then other markets, other restaurants, robots, food, everything.

5:55World domination.

5:56Ivan Tregear:World domination, a conglomerate. Amazing. And when you're in common room, when you're in your restaurant, how many people do you need on the ground to run it? Yeah, yeah. So that's very important. We're not actually trying to get rid of everybody. We do not want to make a vending machine. We've seen other people go down that route. We don't think that's the future. so a typical restaurant or a typical restaurant of our size might need between 6 to 10 people to service a busy lunch rush kind of depends massively on where it is we only need 2 or 3 maybe conservatively 4 people but you definitely are saving at least a couple of people per store at some of the busiest stores you'd be saving up to 6 people and are those kitchen staff and therefore people are freed up for like service front of house that kind of stuff that's 100 % the point the point is not to remove anybody is to ensure that the people who are still there, they don't have to do menial jobs like portioning stuff into a bowl, but instead they can talk to people and bring it to more of a hospitality experience again.

6:56Ivan Tregear:One of the things I think is already becoming evident is that actual interaction with a human is already becoming quite precious. Think about when you use customer service and you just have to fight and try and say buzzwords and stuff to get yourself to a person. That's awful. It's an awful experience. AI has not helped the consumer there. Yeah, definitely not. And we think that there's a risk of going down that route and making it awful and soulless with a vending machine. But our goal is to use AI and robotics and tech and everything to actually preserve that human element. And do you think that's the way that the industry as a whole is going to move?

7:27When you look at hospitality, do you think that front of house experience is going to be really important and that's the bets that other people are going to make? Or do you think you're taking the contrarian approach?

7:37Ivan Tregear:I'm not sure what they're thinking at the moment, but I'm certain that that is what is going to have to happen. those that do make vending machines that do bring people out of it, they're only going to appeal to a subset of the market. And everyone eats food. You need to be able to appeal to everybody. It's quite obvious when you go to some places where they've just got kiosks, is that's good. But where there's a kiosk or set of kiosks with no one to even help you out, they are losing customers. We see lots of people who are maybe older generations or aren't visiting on holiday and need some assistance.

8:06Ivan Tregear:That part's still really important. Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned things like pizza. Now, at the moment, you're building meals from pre-cooked ingredients. How much more complicated is it to then bring in real-life cooking of a pizza oven or something? It is going to be exponentially more complicated. I mean, it sounds really simple because humans are amazing at it. But basically, all we're doing is moving some ingredient from here to here, which you would be able to do quite easily. But that's actually such an insanely difficult problem in robotics. Not only do your foodstuffs change material properties over time, they change temperature, they change consistency, all this kind of stuff.

8:48Ivan Tregear:On a day-to-day basis, they're chopped different sizes. All these small things which humans, with their eyes and excellent perception, are able to deal with easily. Like immediately, yeah. It's quite hard with robotics. So we've got that sorted now, and now we've got robots that can dispense as accurately, if not more so, than a human. But yeah, there's many other problems to overcome as we go. Very exciting. I want to ask, what are you doing here at OpenCorp? Well, we're coming and hopefully just showing off our robot and hopefully making some salads for everybody. Like I said, the important part is hospitality and human experience.

9:19Ivan Tregear:So seeing people interact with the robot is really cool. We don't want to leverage it as a gimmick and a novelty. So we're not really coming, you know, especially in our restaurants, we don't want people to come with the robot. But it is really nice to see people interacting with this and enjoying it and hopefully getting a good experience out of it. Amazing. And how did you get into this? Well, so this is sort of the first thing I started doing out of uni. I did mechanical engineering at Imperial down the road. And I met Joseph at a robotics conference. And he convinced me to do this instead of going off to a larger tech company that I was going to head off to in about 20 minutes.

9:53Ivan Tregear:And he said, I don't really have a super hardcore plan yet, but I know that restaurants are struggling. I love food. I kind of sympathize with that. And I want to get tech into it as quickly as possible by opening our own restaurant. And having worked, like done internships and R &D and stuff, I've been frustrated with how long it took for people to actually do something and get their tech into the wild. And so I was like, this is amazing. Absolutely. Let's do it. What have been the biggest challenges that you face so far? Running a restaurant is really hard. I don't think people probably I didn't appreciate that.

10:25Ivan Tregear:I think people don't understand that it's really hard and it just throws up so many challenges. More specific to the tech though We have a very very specific philosophy Of shipping as fast as possible Everyone says that We are legitimately shipping stuff before it works Purposefully So that when it goes out into the wild Our customers, you know people coming to the restaurant Can watch it break And watch it die in front of them Which is not only quite motivating To get stuff done But it's also the best filter For knowing exactly what to work on it's too easy as engineers to fall into the trap of okay we've got to get these 100 features out before we actually ship no 99 of them you didn't need you just need to focus on one or two things and the best way to give yourself clarity is to bring out broken embarrassing products you're ashamed of and fix them in the wild yeah yeah really interesting um talking about the public and public perception people seeing things break has there been any pushback to this type of to to your work, to your robotics?

11:26Ivan Tregear:Surprisingly, not too much. I think that's partly because again, this is not a vending machine soulless concept. There's still plenty of people around. What's quite interesting is that our current robot that you saw outside is a bit more low key. It looks like a restaurant counter. Previous gems that we've had, because we've had about four different, very different distinct versions in about a year. They've been quite loud and proud with big colored containers holding all the ingredients. And we've asked people, how's the food? Are you enjoying it? and they're like, it tastes nice. How did you feel that it was made by a robot?

11:58Ivan Tregear:And they're like, was it? Oh, nice. A lot of people don't care. A lot of people just don't care. Especially, I guess, in big cities, they're just here for a quick and reasonably priced meal. And are people, you know, what's the balance of people coming because it is like a robot kitchen versus people who are just like, oh, this is nice. I'd say there's some students nearby, we're nearby UCL and stuff, and there's a couple other startups nearby. They sometimes come along. Other than that, I'd say the majority of the people, It's just for the warmer experience, hopefully, and the fact that it's a little bit faster, things like that.

12:29Yeah, yeah. And how do you balance, you know, building a complicated hardware robotics company with actually just the logistics of running a restaurant, right? It's like you're trying to do two things at once and join them up at the back, but it must be two completely different kind of like plates you're spinning.

12:43Ivan Tregear:I think, so it definitely is, and it definitely just is the harder way of going about it. But in our opinion, it's the only way to go about it properly. Yeah. If you focus on one of them, Obviously, you can do restaurants, loads of people do that. But if you focus solely on making robots at restaurants, you're probably not going to make the right robots because you don't know what the problems are. So whilst it is definitely harder, we are absolutely steadfast in our opinion that it's the only way to get it right. Interesting. And can I talk a bit about fundraising, fundraising history, fundraising journey?

13:11I mean, hardware is having a bit more of a moment. Robotics is quite hot at the moment. You know, what's the ecosystem of, I guess, the funding? you know, how do you view the funding environment for like a hardware company?

13:24Ivan Tregear:Sure. I mean, it's hard to say. This is definitely a more niche play. And it's certainly in an industry that is quite high risk. We, you know, a lot of people would see restaurants facing a number of headwinds, recent tax changes and things. Labor's just really expensive. Actually, people are struggling to find labor, inflation. It's a terrible time for restaurants. So I think a lot of people are nervous. But actually, I think it's the incorrect mindset. These are all major tailwinds for us. For us, it's obviously a shame for restaurants. But, you know, our kind of goal is to stop the United Kingdom and world from losing all of these amazing restaurants.

13:59Ivan Tregear:This is our way to save them. So, yeah, I think a lot of people have the perception that it's difficult. We don't see it. We see it's the other way around. This is an excellent time. Yeah, perfect time, I guess. Yeah, but there's all these opportunities to help these struggling restaurants. And can you talk about, like, what's on your roadmap or priority for the next year or so? Is it testing the roadmap that you've got? Is it expanding? Is it looking at restaurants? Anything that you could share there? I think not so much, but there'll be some expansion. Very exciting. Well, look, I think I've been right out of time.

14:25Awesome. I'm super excited to see the robot in practice. And thank you so much for joining me.

14:30Ivan Tregear:Of course. Thank you very much. This was fun. Amazing.