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Microsoft pinball arcade music5/4/2023 Sunkara’s aha moment came from beer tasting, when he realized that automated beer production leads to uniform aromas, flavors, and balance from draft to draft, bottle to bottle. It all harks back to the inspiration for the robot chef: consistency. If a customer complains that a pizza was too salty or a pad thai too spicy, it will use that data in future production. Sunkara explained that the robot tracks all inputs, including customer feedback. “Multiple senses all provide data in a way that we can make an intellectual decision,” Sunkara says. It’s as if the robot is constantly in a culinary school class, but remembers every detail from the homework. The senses send feedback to the OS, creating a learning loop similar to a human’s, which logs all information for future use. What they built is a robot that not only learns intellectually as a human would, but can pull from all five “senses.” The robot chef can touch, smell, see, hear, and even taste, thanks to a tasting bar that mimics the human tongue. Sunkara recruited friend and chief technology officer Vijay Kodali to employ machine learning for the robot’s operating system, dubbed Yum OS. His foundational product, Nala Chef, is a multi-cuisine, customizable robot chef that serves a range of dishes at Nala’s three proprietary restaurants in Naperville, Ill.: One Mean Chicken, a fried chicken concept Surya Tiffins, a South Indian eatery and Thai 76, a fast-food Thai spot.Ĭore to Sunkara’s automated chef is artificial intelligence. Sunkara, who now serves as the company’s chief executive officer, said that he saw an opportunity to innovate in the back of the house in food service until then, most new products for the hospitality industry focused on point-of-sale, reservations, and guest experiences. Pizzaiola is the newest product from Sunkara’s Nala Robotics, the kitchen robotics company he founded in 2017. ![]() ![]() “We reduced the scale of it from industrial to something that can fit in a normal commercial kitchen.” “There are robotics in the food industry, but in factories, meat-processing centers, and packaged food processing,” Sunkara tells Fortune. It’s fulfilled in real time and can even have an individual jumbo slice ready to go through the Slice Factory drive-thru in minutes. When a customer places a pizza order, Pizzaiola will select, press, and stretch the dough add the sauce, cheese, and toppings then cook, slice, and box the pizza all to the customer’s specified preferences. The robotic chef monitors more than 1,200 parameters every microsecond, from managing food quality to the point-of-sales machine. That’s the vision of Ajay Sunkara, who launched the Pizzaiola autonomous chef, an A.I.-driven, voice-controlled pizza maker that’s making its way to Chicago-based regional pizza chain, Slice Factory.
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