Korean kitchen automation startups' US advance gains traction

South Korean kitchen automation system developers are eyeing the US as their next key market as demand for automated restaurant operating systems in the world’s largest consumer market is growing rapidly amid severe labor shortages and surging labor costs there.

According to sources in the Korean startup industry on Sunday, Monthly Kitchen, the operator of the Korean digital restaurant platform MONKi, recently signed an $8.15 million contract with POS Partner Inc., a New York-based all-in-one point-of-sale (POS) supplier, to export its digital restaurant operation platform packed with cloud-based kiosk, POS and order-taking systems.

Monthly Kitchen has also added a customer relationship management (CRM) tool and an automated calculation system for different US states' sales taxes and tips to the platform, which will be provided to restaurants, bakery shops and cafes in New York starting this month.

The digital restaurant operation platform by Monthly Kitchen boasts immense store data that can enable fully automated order-taking and payment, said Kim Hyuk-kyun, chief executive officer of Monthly Kitchen.

In 2018 Kim founded Monthly Kitchen, which also offers shared kitchen services, anticipating that staff-free restaurant operations would gain traction at home and abroad. The company currently has 130 restaurants as members of its shared-kitchen service in Korea.

Demand for automation in kitchen operations is expected to grow further in the US, which is grappling with labor shortages and a supply/demand mismatch exacerbated by the pandemic.

According to Korea Center for International Finance, excess demand for labor in the US has increased to about 5.3 million since the COVID-19 outbreak. Coupled with this, inflation has further hiked minimum wages in the country, while recently California has been embroiled in controversy since the state proposed a bill to bump up its minimum hourly rate as high as $22.  

Industry observers said that the labor mismatch in the US food and dining industry is expected to create new business opportunities for Korean startups developing kitchen automation systems.

ROBOT SERVERS AND COOKING MACHINES

Bear Robotics Inc. currently supplies serving robots, Servi, to 40 states in the US. It manufactures the serving robots in Korea. Its latest serving robot, unveiled last month, can deliver 16 dishes simultaneously.

Bear Robotics was founded by John Ha, a former senior software engineer and technical lead at Google, in 2017.

RGT, Korea’s homegrown serving robot developer, in March signed a contract with a major restaurant chain operator in the US to supply its artificial intelligence-powered serving robot SIRBOT to restaurants in Hawaii and Georgia.  

Aniai Inc. is also preparing for a full US debut with its cooking robots. The Korean startup last year gained an opportunity from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce to demonstrate Alpha Kitchen, a fully automated burger cooking robot, in a number of New York City restaurants.

Its burger grilling machine is powered by AI and optical sensors.

The Korean startup was founded by Hwang Gunpil three years ago.

Write to See-Eun Lee at see@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.