Peter Lowe and Chris Hockenbrocht discuss their startup Fresh Bot, a food automation platform that uses robotics and machine learning to reduce labor costs and make food more affordable. They discuss the importance of "jedi mind tricks" when launching a business, the trend of unhealthy food in America, the potential of automation in the food service industry, the challenges of automation, the difficulty of hardware startups in Silicon Valley, the potential of automated delivery, the idea of a burrito cannon, the technical risks of building a restaurant automation platform, the importance of owning the experience, their own diets, the idea of eating what our ancestors ate, the Amish and their cautious approach to new technology, the limitations of reductionism when it comes to food and nutrition, and their shared values and goals.
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Chris and Peter
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[00:00:00] hi, I'm Bryan and I'm John. And we are hosting the Pioneer Park Podcast where we bring you in-depth conversations with some of the most innovative and forward-thinking creators, technologists, and intellectuals. We're here to share our passion for exploring the cutting edge of creativity and technology. And we're excited to bring you along on the journey. Tune in for thought-provoking conversations with some of the brightest minds of Silicon Valley and beyond.
John: Welcome to Pioneer Park. Today we're shooting live from South Park Commons. Our guest today are Peter Lowe and Chris Hockenbrocht. And Peter is an expert in hardware and product. Chris is an expert in machine learning and cryptography.
They're both members here at South, Park Commons, and they're building a new startup called Fresh Bot. Peter and Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris: Hey, thanks John.
Peter: Welcome. Thank you. Glad to have you. How are y'all doing today?
Bryan: Good with a little bit of setup for our first live feed. You know, both of you were here for some of that, so we're working out the kinks of getting [00:01:00] on microphones and getting videos set up.
So, uh, you know, first time's a charm or maybe the third time's a charm. We'll find out.
Chris: Yeah.
John: Yep. All right. So we're super excited about the work you guys are doing and it entails both robotics and food. So, do you wanna tell us a little bit about what you're working on?
Chris: Yeah one of the things that we really see as a trend is food costs rising.
And so one of the questions is how can you even reduce that? And the way we see tackling that is through automated, front end in food service. So I wouldn't call it robotics, but a lot of different automation techniques that can be applied to different sorts of food preparations that hopefully can reduce the cost of labor going into the food.
And hey if we can solve that, then we can start to think about bringing down food prices.
Bryan: Interesting. Yeah, I just read recently that there's a suspicion that there's some collusion in the egg industry that is causing the massive rise of if egg prices that we've experienced the past couple years, [00:02:00] but obviously that's further up the production pipeline than what y'all are doing.
So concretely, what is Fresh Bot?
Chris: Right now? Currently we're looking into a variety of different products for food automation. We have a MVP on smoothie automation and other drinks. So there's a lot of different PE components that we put into a machine and it allows us to dispense liquid solids, do blending.
And so we could conceivably put a lot of different things. One of the things I really like about this is that it's customizable. So you take individual machine and we can stock it with different things and we can tailor actually to the particular market. But we can do liquid solids powder dispensing. We can recombine these into any sort of drink that you might want,
Peter: One reason yeah, starting with this kind of drinks platform and starting with smoothies, which are one of the hardest drinks to make is interesting. Like for reference Starbucks and Dutch Bros, like about 75% of their drink sales are their cold beverages at this point.
They're, cold brew coffee, [00:03:00] frappuccino you know, juice drinks and stuff. So, I all of that is gonna be very easy to automate with the platform that we're making. Just for a little bit of market orientation reference there. Gotcha.
Bryan: And I recall, so I think several of us have had the pleasure of being part of some test exercises with Fresh Bot, and it wasn't exactly Fresh Bot, but it was Peter testing your smoothie recipes here at South Park Commons. And at the time, I believe you just sort of brought in raw ingredients and you were just mixing on the spot and sort of having a few different offerings.
And I guess that was just sort of a, a menu taste, a menu testing. Is that right?
Peter: Yeah, yeah. I mean I think this kind of comes from having gone to the Stanford D school and taking on this product mindset which is, has been a sort of useful mindset and tool set, it's very difficult.
Hardware is so complicated and so difficult to make that your engineering instinct is that you want to start building something immediately. But that's not necessarily the fastest way to get the answer to the questions that you have, right. About a startup addressing whatever your key risks are.
And with a lot of the prototyping that we've done, it's actually. Not necessarily involved a soldering [00:04:00] iron at the first blush. Right. You know, one of the key questions was like, are people interested in food and the venues that we're interested in, do they want food or what, maybe which items resonate more with people, you know, did they want the sugary thing or the healthier thing? You know, getting some of this broad thick data, from users about like how they think about food, what they like.
Bryan: I love you've shared with me over the past month or so, some of the stories from the front lines of your testing. I think some of them are really fascinating. How many places have y'all been kicked out of so far?
Chris: Well, I mean, as far as I recall there's been two. We went to a mall, it was a security guard. He came up and said, you just can't be doing this here. Right.
Bryan: I guess we should, uh, we should give people the setup. Mm-hmm. So what are you doing when you go to test these on site?
Chris: So yeah the machine was taken to a mall. It wasn't actually a fully functioning prototype. What we were trying to do is gauge interaction. Would people simply walk up to the machine, interact, attempt and order
Peter: mm-hmm. . And this was sort of not a machine, it was really sort of a fridge with a sticker on it. Yeah. It looked like pre-engineering. Yes.[00:05:00]
Chris: Yeah. And security wasn't very happy about that. But you know, the only regret I think we have is not walking out in handcuffs, hey, it would've made for a great great PR stunt there. The other time was we were more recently at San Jose State University. We went right into their food court and we successfully got about two hours of sales done. Students were coming up, people were enjoying it, and then over time, one person would come up, they would go talk to their manager, go talk to this person.
And eventually the building manager came who was in charge of all the food court. And he said, you just can't be here doing this. Like, you know, essentially people pay to come in. Like the restaurants that are there paying, you can't just come in. And Peter here was doing a really great job of deflecting them. You know, just, just, uh, it's really great if you change somebody's focus they start thinking about things in a whole different light. Like, if they're like, what are you doing here? Well, we're making healthy smoothies for people and then, you know, we really [00:06:00] care about people's health. You know, you end up in this place where, now they're like, pitting two goods against each other.
Either I'm doing my job or I'm like supporting Healthy Smoothies. It's this cognitive dissonance that they have to resolve. And so it wasn't until we got to like a really serious manager who just came and told us that we had to leave that, uh mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah. Just to be clear too, I I have the, food safety handler Safe Serve certification. We're not breaking any food safety rules with any of this stuff. We do take health and you know, proper process seriously. Yeah. So yeah, we just can't pay the rent. Right. Yeah. Early testing phase.
John: Jedi mind tricks are crucial to, to launching this kind of business.
Peter: Yeah. I mean, I suppose really any startup, I guess there's a good reason why, you know, YC asks essentially, what's the biggest sort of non code, hack you've ever pulled off. Right? So there's a lot of hacks necessary sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Bryan: yeah. So I'm curious to connect this back to the larger theme of health and access to [00:07:00] healthy food in America, and whether or not your efforts in this area are based in some sort of critique or analysis of what's happening in that space.
Chris: Well, there's certainly a long running trend of food towards less healthy things, and there's probably a few different components playing into this. One is just taste preference, right? Less healthy food tastes better. People like sugar. Sugar. When it sits on the tongue, it is just, hmm, that's good.
And it's hard to avoid. And so the products that you end up seeing at the supermarket, it CPG that is, or the products that you're getting from any sort of restaurant might be laced with additional sugars or additional fats. Things that just really, make it taste good. And so it's hard to satisfy the desire for healthy and balance that with taste.
Another factor is, there's this industrial farming situation where we have a bunch of subsidies that go towards different sorts of crops and being subsidized now and being produced in mass. [00:08:00] Well, why don't we just shove it into everything? Soy is a really key component. Corn is a really key component, and corn doesn't just satisfy food things with high fructose corn syrup.
But you, there's a lot of non-food uses of corn that are really subsidized. Ethanol production is a big thing that goes into gasoline, and so there's, I would say there's a little bit of a incentives, misalignment for actual food to be healthy. It's, and the question I think still remains like, will people really accept healthy food on mass?
Which. We're trying to get to, one of the things that we're working on is perfecting recipes that actually taste good, which still have a good balance of health. Just not putting additional sugars into things. You know, no high fructose corn syrup. No other weird additives, preservatives.
We want to focus on just really presenting the base foods in the healthiest manner that we can.
Peter: Yeah. One [00:09:00] a thing that's interesting to think about is, you know, Chris mentioning that our palates are naturally warped to want, salt, fat and sugar ratios that, are not healthy for us, and there's the perverse incentive because those are very cheap ingredients, for third parties that are preparing our food to just load up on that. Cuz that's a cheap way to, to bulk up the product and it tastes good. But we also know that it's not healthy, which is why we have this, kind of mental mindset that we go home to eat something healthy, right?
You make something that has the amounts of that that, you know, that would be good for you. Maybe it doesn't taste, quite as rich but that is, what we know that we're supposed to do generally, at least, depending on what group you're part of. It's a gradually growing awareness of that. I believe it was the the National Institute of Health recently published a report, but basically we need to eat, more fruits and vegetables is essentially their largest prescription to move the standard American diet toward healthier direction, reduce the amount of diabetes and obesity and heart disease.
But one thing that's interesting is, that we've thought about relative to this a bit is working with like lower quality ingredients, is a way that you can save cost. And, having less operations happen in a restaurant particularly something like a large fast [00:10:00] food chain, which is kind of relying on the very lowest paid, tier of labor right? Is also a you save cost, but with kind of doing less of the preparation fresh, because you honestly can't run a chain that has tens of thousands of locations with people who aren't paid enough to care.
Right? You need to take the control away from them, move things upstream. Things are now less fresh. Maybe you're working with lower quality ingredients to save costs too. And so the food doesn't taste good naturally, right? And so it needs to have all kinds of alchemy applied to it. Particularly adding a lot of salt, fat and sugar to make it taste palatable.
Which is kind of how we got our our sort of fast food situation that we have now. But one thing that is sort of interesting about how maybe technology could be applied here to fix this is if you can engineer preparation techniques using automation, that will prepare the food the right way, every time you can trust them.
I mean, they will work as well as they're engineered too. You can then push more of the food preparation out to, the point of consumption. Things are now being prepared more fresh. They taste better because of the very significant cost savings this can offer on labor and other parts of the overhead costs, [00:11:00] right?
You can still be extremely profitable, but use a higher grade of of ingredients, so that it tastes better. And so that can be, a fairly large lever just to essentially make good food taste better. I was recently running a test in central Pennsylvania just at a, essentially a cafe and making different smoothie recipes and things for the owner and trying them out on customers.
And, know, the owner just couldn't believe that these things were not made with added sugar. And so he'd asked for the recipes cuz he, essentially didn't believe it could be done. That you could make things that taste this good, that don't have the fillers and junk that a number of things are reliant upon nowadays.
Yeah.
John: Yeah. Just playing back. So what you're saying is if you use low quality ingredients and you have low skill staff, you essentially make up for those things by filling your food with a bunch of salt, sugar and oil. And it doesn't have to be that way. Yes. Okay.
Chris: Yes.
Bryan: So I guess one of the things that's relatively alive for me right now is something from the All-In podcast and some of the more libertarian leaning members of the [00:12:00] Silicon Valley tech scene who have criticized the minimum wage and the growth of minimum wage in California specifically for restaurant workers.
I believe that there was a bill that was proposed, To allow specifically fast food workers to have a higher minimum wage than other industries. And you know, this is a lot of back and forth and maybe there's goodwill there to like, you know, looking out for the, some sector of employees, but then there's also this fact that why only this specific industry does it make any sense at all?
And some of the people that I've heard talking about this, were criticizing this, saying that this is pushing the incentives of automation or the incentive of restaurant companies in the direction of automation faster than it would otherwise be. And I'm kind of just curious to hear, what are the trends in automation of food processing from farm all the way to table? What are we observing nowadays?
Chris: Well, it's really complicated and you're touching on a key point, but it's already happening. We have to be real, like, They are pressing for a increase for large [00:13:00] chains fast food chains from the $15 minimum wage to 22.
Now the way I feel about that is a little bit mixed. I mean, obviously to your point, we want to see people be paid fairly, but at the same time, food costs too much and we're just making it cost more. And the people who eat fast food predominantly are people already unable to pay for good food. So honestly, if they're getting the bottom of the barrel and now they're having to pay more, we're pitting two goods against each other.
And to the point of, automation, well, McDonald's already doing it. At the beginning of this month they launched their semi-automated location in Texas. No, it's not fully automated, but you don't see people, you order at a kiosk front end. and you get an automated delivery. The thing about burgers though, is that they're really hard to automate.
You know, you end up building a Rube Goldberg machine, and one of the concerns they have about that specific [00:14:00] food class is, how reliably can you automate it? But the truth is, it's happening. They're probably gonna push forward on it. They probably have the capital to invest in specifically burgers.
And I see this going for every food chain. If they can't build it, they'll probably buy it because there's already other people out there making these things. There's creator, there's miso, and they're specifically focused on these chains.
Now, one of the factors that has to be accounted for in the supply chain for fast food in particular, is that they already centralize a lot of their labor. A lot of the patties are preformed in central depots, fries are precut. In-and-Out is a little bit of an outlier in that they, you can see them take the potatoes and rip the thing down and get the fries ready. But most of them, all the ingredients are pre-prepped, just ready to throw in a fryer or on the grill.
And so one of the questions is like how do you solve that last mile issue in terms of automation? How do you make a burger flipper? How do you make a fry cooker that's [00:15:00] fully automated? And how do you then get those packaged up into your little paper basket and served in a bag and the way that people are at least expecting today?
And that's the, that's one of the things that I would be, curious to see where it goes. Cuz that's not a food class I think I want to personally work with. It just seems very Rube Goldbergian to be back to that.
John: Well, maybe an implication of that is, is it possible that, with these movements, say the minimum wage gets much higher, McDonald's traditional method doesn't work as well.
They try to switch to these Rube Goldberg machines. But it's possible that hamburgers are just not a good format for automation. Is it possible that they will essentially be counter positioned by other automated food options that are just much more amenable to being automated?
Chris: That's our thesis.
Yeah. You know, we are pre-selecting foods that we think can be fully automatable, and I think one of the risks that we have to work on is understanding people's food preferences for these [00:16:00] categories. But yeah, but things like soups are actually a lot more highly automatable. We've been working on drinks.
Drinks are something that's actually relatively straightforward. Other groups have worked on bowls, keynote bowls, the kae bowls. Yeah. Those seem to be more amenable to automation than any of the, the current fast food offerings. I think, fast food had to do with a cultural zeitgeist that existed and is only continued like the burger is American.
Or you know, with KFC and the Colonel's fried chicken, he made a method for fried chicken in seven minutes and that was his thing. And it played to the tastes of people. Now we're in a period where tastes are changing, where we are rapidly encountering all sorts of foods.
I think one of the things growing up in a small town that when I go back and go visit very small towns along the way, driving through I've noticed is that there's now a lot more global food options. And it's not just the cities that have these options. It's everywhere. And so I think that there's a [00:17:00] first, a preference and change that allows us to even consider these things.
But from an automation perspective, , there's a class of foods that are going to be automatable and there's a class of foods that really are, you're at very least gonna struggle very hard to make them work. Mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah. There's kinda just a broad idea in robotics or I guess automation in general of like structured versus unstructured environment.
Right. I mean, why data is so automatable is because it's very structured, right? As, as rules, you can interact with it. Mm-hmm. You know, the physical world tends to be, unstructured, which is, why we have yet to see useful home robots or other things. Right.
You know, there's unpredictable things. We still don't have autonomous vehicles, we don't know when that'll happen. And so, you know, if you're dealing with, particularly unstructured food or the sort of, the more unstructured the food is, obviously the harder it is to automate.
If you can, deal with food that tends to be more structured. That's the lower hanging. Fruit, no pun intended in terms of yeah. You know, you're gonna be able to reliably automate at scale.
Bryan: Mm-hmm. , I'm curious, obviously this is a little bit out of the purview of the work you're doing now, but [00:18:00] one thing that is sort of, a holy grail of automation and for of the food chain for me is thinking about the massive numbers of people that are employed, just picking vegetables and doing, probably the lowest tier work in America.
This is work that is overwhelmingly immigrant labor is overwhelmingly used for this. It's, you know, we're in California just a, a hundred miles into the Central Valley, and we can just be in the densest agricultural sector maybe in the world. Do y'all have any sort of insight opinions about the way that automation, or the degree to which automation can affect the low skill labor of picking, picking strawberries?
Mm-hmm. , which is to me some like holy grail of. Sensitivity in robotics and making robots really work at that level?
Chris: Well, I just saw the coolest thing on YouTube the other day. It was a group of researchers working on gecko skin which combined with some particular joint mechanisms will allow effectively plucking a fruit.
Now, like to your point, there's always [00:19:00] been a sensitivity issue, but I think with the combination of the gecko skin and this particular sort of joint that they're using, it's very conceivable that they can softly pull things. But the greater trend that I see is actually more in robotic robotic driven and vertical farming.
So I think the thing is right now you have an existing model of a farm and do you want to apply robotics to it? You can turn the problem on its head. And this is what I think where a lot of the success will come from is actually designing the farm for the robot. . And so you certainly have to solve these problems of like, how do we pluck fruit in a very careful way, but you're looking at large tracks of land that are spread out, like the efficiency really comes, I think, from compactness as well.
And so vertical farming is, I think one of the other key pieces to this. It's really unfortunate. I'm so excited about this. I've been excited for about a decade about this and just [00:20:00] wondering, you know, how to push forward on these things. I think there's a lot of groups that have this solved though, so not a problem I'm eager to touch right now.
Peter: Yeah. Which relates to that idea of, you're structuring the environment, you're structuring the farm to make it more friendly for an automated system driven by logic and whatnot. The desk in my office I acquired from the liquidation sale of Abundant Robotics, which was a strawberry picking robotics startup. Last year or so they went outta business.
And yeah, I mean it's, some of these things can be very hard to do. Seen some things recently about a soft robotics company that's essentially using the compliance of their gripper, which is, made out of alasteric material to just help account for the fact that even pose estimation and grabbing stuff is a pretty hard problem.
And that's actually some stuff that I worked on a fair bit in the robotics lab for some very large tech company concerned with this sort of thing. Essentially, grippers that essentially have mechanical logic that makes the actual grabbing easier because the gripper is so grippy.
Bryan: I think it's a good segue into talking about hardware as a [00:21:00] startup, like, I think in Silicon Valley there's a really strong software bias. There's really strong reasons why software is preferred. It's way easier to test, it's way easier to build. Hardware is hard problem.
Chris: Margins are also higher, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, what would you like to know?
Bryan: I'm curious, what gives you a conviction to pursue something that, you know, is sort of hard? Is it this sort of thesis about the opportunity? Is it a thesis about the impact? Is it maybe a fascination with the technology?
What kind of drew you into the problem made you willing to commit to that harder problem?
Chris: Well, for me personally, I can just sum this up real quickly. I'll say it's incremental, but monumental increment that automation can offer food service.
We've been talking between ourselves about automated delivery as a particular thing that's going on. And we've been watching for five or six years is all these companies pile money into just automated driving, self-driving cars. [00:22:00] But when you talk about delivery and there's a number of different mechanisms of delivery, like we can talk about trucking, long, long haul trucking, or we can talk about taxi services or we can talk about food delivery.
I think each of these has some really big problems, insurmountable problems that really rely on humans. And well the question always is how do we get the food to the human? But for us it's about how can we place it in a space that can prepare it for you.
How can we be small, nimble and put a machine down that's really highly functional, whereas we're not gonna solve, like driving a car and then, having to deal with the actual drop off problem, right? Mm-hmm. , like you think about being in a city with automated delivery, if you're on VanNess and your customers there, like where do you park? And then who takes the food from them? Do you park two blocks away and force 'em to come? Like, that's even worse than the current solution with a human. So, how do you get the food from the car to the person? And there's just a lot of [00:23:00] things where there's a human need.
Peter: Yeah. From talking to some actually other SPC members who have worked on this problem and you reading about it, we have particularly applied to this question of food where like some discussions we've had with investors, where they've been excited about our approach because, the default assumption about the future of food, at least a large part of that future, was assumed to be, we have our automated delivery overlords. Right. And this stuff, comes by, whatever automated, planes, trains, and automobiles, you know, the burrito flies in your window from the regular restaurant that's, across town and taco Yeah. Taco copter...
Bryan: right, burrito cannon, you know. Yeah.
Peter: But it was sort of like, you know, right, we're gonna have this, it's gonna be so cheap, it's gonna be ubiquitous. Like this is the default future that we sort of believed in and accepted.
And then, essentially the magic fairy dust to, to make this technology come, has been very slow incoming. I mean in the sense of solving, know, the edge cases for automated driving. But then there's also just like practical constraints. Like, you know, there's still two to $300,000 of special hardware to make a, an [00:24:00] autonomous cargo, right? And that's, it's not necessarily clear that that's just gonna become, much cheaper immediately, which makes the viability, the economics simply very poor. You, or maybe you're cheap drone, know, it's like, well, okay, you know, there's, there's regulation.
I mean, what, what about when it falls on people's heads and kills them? Or, you know, the constant buzzing, right? Like that seems a bit stuck. So kind of saying, okay, so maybe this sort of thesis about the way the world was gonna be it appears as now kind of coming crashing down as, Argo gets out of this, Amazon gives up on the delivery, right?
Like, we're all kind of like, returning to earth on, what's really possible there. And besides just the problem too that like, who loves when their food gets delivered and how it's not the right temperature, right? I mean, maybe you can help with that problem, maybe you can't, but it's not fresh anymore. That's kind of the bottom line.
So this alternative thesis of, okay, so maybe the food is actually made on site, right? And you use, technology that we have a pathway to build it today and maybe that's more what the future is like. It's local and automated.
Chris: You know, one of the things I love that you touched on is this capital, right? Like from [00:25:00] a, if a delivery car or automated delivery car costs a quarter million, like that's a huge capital investment for something that's gonna be gonna achieve 10 20 orders a day. Cause it still has to go to the restaurant and pick up the food and take it to you. That's a 30 minute, at least round trip. What we can do is if we have a machine that's on a vending machine, capital expenditure level, like maybe it's a little bit more because there's definitely a lot more going on in it, but 10 to $20,000 for the same price, we can put down 10 15 of these machines. And well now they're just everywhere, and you don't think about where am I gonna go get food? There's a machine that offers something that's close to you. Maybe it's in your building, if you look in an highrise or maybe it's, in your office space or in the hospital, or X, y and Z. There's, put 'em everywhere.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. An initial problem we're thinking a lot about, right? Like right here in this building. If we want to, if we wanna get food, which we, get lunch every day, we have the unique advantage often of having food, shipped from across town, from a [00:26:00] good restaurant.
But if you're in the typical office worker scenario, I need some lunch or a snack, right? It's like, what's the nearest thing? Well, a couple blocks that way, there's massage. That's a pretty good, reasonably healthy, affordable ish lunch option. There is like one burrito spot, but then other than that, it's like grilled cheese.
There's like the fancy French cafe, if you want a smoothie, there's really no place to get a smoothie. But essentially your lunch options are pretty poor here. Like, if you work here you're gonna be pretty dissatisfied pretty quick. And that's true a lot of places there's just so many places that you spend time and regular restaurants aren't serving them because maybe it's hard to find a location.
I mean, you know, building a restaurant, for a typical fast casual, you're looking at on the order of half a million bucks you can't really operate a restaurant with less than two people. So that's at least $500 of expenses a day. Versus the automated economics.
It's a totally different picture. And so it, it completely changes the opportunity landscape.
John: So you've kind of talked about the technical risk that you're not taking, which is, you're not automating delivery. What do you view as being the technical risk of this endeavor?
Chris: Still, they're machines and they have to be reliable. [00:27:00] Like, think 9, 9, 9, 5% reliable, we want a failure out in one out of 2000 to 20,000 cases because you don't want to have a problem where you have to keep going on site just to fix things. Now if you have to restock, that's a great opportunity to, to refix.
So you want, you probably want your failure rate to be a lot lower. And so it comes down to testing, and testing is time. And that's, I think, really the difficult thing about bringing a product like this to market is it has to be pretty damn reliable.
John: . And is it the case that you're able to assemble what you want out of off the shelf components?
Peter: Yeah. There, there are some key systems that we're working on, getting IP for for like this initial platform. Each platform is going to rely on at least some of that. And especially as we move into, our later food categories, it's gonna become more and more technically complex.
As we move in, into other types of food that may be less straightforward to automate.
John: So if the parts are available off the shelf, how come no one's done this before?
Chris: I mean, you still have to [00:28:00] solve for reliability.
There's another factor that there's been a regulatory inhibition. This hasn't been a poet class that the regulatory frameworks have really addressed. The recent developments and the regulatory frameworks have only just allowed this to come on the scene. And it's still not even universally true across the United States.
There's still food codes that need to change to accommodate the existence of this product category.
Peter: Yes. Yeah. Another thing too, just in the sense that we're dealing with automation, robotics and food, there's a lot of technical discipline that's necessary to execute this, but then there's a lot of product type thinking, culinary type thinking, et cetera.
It's much more difficult than building your typical SaaS product in terms of the amount of expertise that you need to consult and things that you need to not f up. And so from the earlier waves of companies that have tried to enter this space we've seen a lot of key errors.
Probably the most common one has been the food hasn't been very good, right? They've been working so hard on getting the machines working that something key gets screwed up [00:29:00] with the culinary aspect of this, right? And from seeing how these companies have talked about themselves and what they focused on, right?
They were, they thought of themselves as robotics companies. And that's not what you are, if you're serving food, like the customer ultimately does not care right outside of how it affects their experience. The thing they're getting from you is food. The food has to be good. Health matters, cost matters, convenience matters, right?
How you get there is not ultimately important to them, right?
Bryan: So I'm curious whether you think of yourselves as building a platform for people to enable their recipes to be served, or really whether you want to take the responsibility of develop recipe development as well as the product development, as the robotics development.
Chris: I think it's both, right? Like flexibility of having automated food. is that we can offer the chance to customize. We're talking about healthy food, right? But what if someone does want to go, have fun one day let's make it a little bit more sugary today. Or, you know, up the salt, why should we stop them?
You know, people are ultimately [00:30:00] responsible for the health. And so by having this system of automation, there's a lot of key points at which people can start to customize to their own flavor profile. In fact, we think that personalization is one of the key things down the road that is something that we can facilitate and will make this more attractive.
Peter: Yeah. But with respect to that question, we believe owning the experience is gonna be the way to really unlock this opportunity, particularly at first until we have a very good framework. So ChowBotics was one of the early companies in this space.
And they, rightfully were hesitant about owning both essentially the culinary aspect of their machine as well as the technical. And so they wanted to just be an equipment provider. Their machine was essentially an automated salad bar, was what the intention of it was.
Sold the machines for about $30,000 to a customer who was then responsible for running the machine, restocking it. They had a relationship with a big food supplier, so they could, order things to fill the machine with, but they were responsible for all aspects of that experience.
And from the conversations I had with customers, that was not a good experience [00:31:00] for the venue customer which then trickled down to the eater customer. It was not a good experience for them. And so ultimately ChowBotics was acquired by DoorDash possibly not with essentially a giant exit, which was then subsequently shuttered about a year or so after acquisition, right?
So it's essentially the experience was not strong enough to get the kind of growth to really justify um, the investment that had gone into the company. So, anyway, the experience is really important and we are intending to own that at this point.
Bryan: Hence you perfecting your smoothie recipes on a live audience,
Peter: so, yeah.
Yes.
Bryan: Yeah. I'm curious to kind of dig in a little bit to your own diets. Do you make a habit of trying the latest in food technology? Be it hue or, you know, uh, yes. Or well, or either of you been vegetarian or vegan or, uh, carnivore?
Chris: I have a weird thing, you know.
First off, I have to say, I don't have a problem eating the same food every single day [00:32:00] in a row. When Soylent first hit the scene, I was incredibly excited because I'm like, this solves a problem for me. I don't want to think about having to go get food and I don't want to pay for a meal.
Like, this is cheap, fast. I don't have to think about it.
And it's ostensibly healthy.
Ostensibly healthy. Let's be clear there. I started doing this before it was actually a mass market product and there was this whole community around DIY Soylent. And so I did the people chow, I don't know if you guys know about this, but there was a whole series of recipes that people put together.
So I and a couple other people I knew in university did people chow. We would mix it all ourselves and like have a weak supply or whatever. And when Soylent that came out, when I finally started getting the subscription, I was like, you know, this is good. now, there was a lot of variation as they came up with different versions.
Some of it wasn't particularly upsetting to my system, but some of the later versions, especially as time went on and I was running a startup, like it was kind of a little bit violent on my stomach. It caused a lot of inflammation. [00:33:00] It was very disruptive to, I think, overall gut health.
And so after about a year so I'd probably been having swelling two years maybe, but and how much of your diet? Not completely. So it was about one to two meals a day. But at some point the recipe was just so bad. I just couldn't do it. It was just, it, I like version 1.4 I think was like the magic recipe in some sense, but they started really going really soy heavy and there was just a lot of disruptive factors in it.
It, I don't know that a lot of people can do it. Might be a good and a pinch now that you can go to seven 11 and get one, but, it's not something I would really choose to eat.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I did a, I said I did a diet in college. I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease didn't want to go on the standard treatment cuz my brother had had a sort of a mysterious health problem, been exposed to that and then developed the known type of cancer that's linked, was linked to that type of drug.
And so when I was actually diagnosed with Crohn's and the doctor was saying, okay, so this is the, treatment. I was like, [00:34:00] that's, um, not appealing to me right now. Given that this was, whatever diagnosis had been whatever about two years ago. My brother is fine now, thankfully after, a lot of treatment and and whatnot.
So I was interested to find out about any other alternatives. Found out about a diet called the specific carbohydrate diet that's actually been around for around a hundred years. It was kind of developed empirically essentially just, trial and error for primarily children with Crohn's and even since I had done the diet microbiome science has become more developed and it's, become more understood about how this works. That essentially by restricting certain kinds of carbohydrates that are favoring the particular loss of biodiversity and an upset that's happened in the biome of someone with one of these autoimmune digestive type disorders, right?
You're essentially selectively re-reading the microbiome by disfavor the bacteria that are causing the inflammation. So it was very effective for me anyway, but it was very, it required essentially a fanatical strictness of adherence, because, you give them one shot of their fuel and they're powered back up again.[00:35:00]
So essentially like weed these guys down to almost extinction and let the natural order recover. It took, about two years during which I was having to cook a lot of my own food. Because one of the things I had to avoid was added sugar, right? It's like that's in, you read labels, that's in almost everything.
Also grains and starches. So, and it was basically super effective for me. Got me really good at cooking. Yeah, so for me that was the big eye-opener of like, wow diet can really shape health outcomes. Particularly if you have a disorder. But anyway, not to go too deep into that, but that was a big inspiration for me with diet.
Now, I mean, I'm open to trying new kinds of things. I'm gonna have some impossible patties in my freezer. I'm actually not eating them right now. I'd had a couple of 'em and then kind of got a weird headache and I don't get headaches very often. Okay. Suspicious. I don't know if it was, related to that, but anyway,
But but despite, essentially our focus on robotics and automation and all that I'm actually kind of a Luddite when it comes to my beliefs about food in the sense that, this food that we've been eating, since, since we began, since, humans were [00:36:00] there's a lot of optimization that's happened. Right. And, given the complexity of biological systems, I don't know if we'll ever really understand, everything that's important about the way that these natural foods interact with our bodies, right? Mm-hmm. , you know, there's probably, things and things and things beyond microbiome and all that about the way that food nourishes us, that it's ultimately like, This food has nourished us and our ancestors very successfully for a very long time.
Also, we're used to eating it and we like it. So there's not so much the the risk of the seems to be reckoning right now with know, kinda the fake meat where it's like, okay, maybe, consumers are not really adopting this. There's this question of is it as good for you?
Is it just too strange to be eating fake meat? Mm-hmm. , not that I'm inherently opposed to it, but it is a risk of adoption. Yeah.
John: So when you say you're a Luddite, does that reflect a certain perspective on what a diet should be? Like? Does that look like Paleo or is there a way that you would summarize it?
Peter: Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I guess just in the sense like, you know, and Ludi applies too to standard American diet. I mean, in the sense that you like, look at, look at any black and white picture from your [00:37:00] family's history. Right? Those people are all really skinny and like healthy because this diet that's arisen over the past 50 or 70 years, right?
That we're so surrounded by that, we think it's normal. It's not at all normal. It has nothing to do with our history. And we're eating this way and we're getting diabetes and obese and cancer and cardiac problems, right? I mean this diet has nothing to do with humans and what humans eat.
So I guess a Luddite in that way essentially that kind of the simple, like if your grandparents don't recognize that as food, like Right. It probably isn't. Yeah.
Bryan: I think Michael Pollan's takeaway as something like, eat what your parents eat mostly vegetables. Yeah. Maybe it should be extended to eat what your grandparents ate.
John: Now the parents aren't a good Exactly. Anymore.
Bryan: You've had a generation of people raised on factory farm food or whatever, processed food. .
Chris: Like almost two or two generations now. Two generations. Yeah. Mm-hmm. sixties, seventies is like when this really came about.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I think he says "eat food" and then he, gives his definition of food and it's like, mostly vegetables not too much or whatever. This is sort of summary of his philosophy, which Yeah. I mean, it's [00:38:00] sort of like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And it's, it's clear that what we're doing now is very broke and what, know, our ancestors did is not very broke, you know, blue zones and all that stuff.
John: Yeah. It is kind of mysterious though, cause it's not exactly the case that our ancestors ate, just like what we would now consider to be health foods all the time or something. Yes. I mean, like, if you look at it like, at the traditional breakfast is like greasy eggs and bacon and potatoes or something, right?
Mm-hmm. gross. But there's like something about, there's something about the way people were eating or I feel like there's something we really don't understand about why that was like reasonable and like the new
Peter: stuff. Yeah, we had the cholesterol craze, you know, at some point where it was like, oh my God, eggs are bad.
Chris: One of the funny things is a lot of this has to do with some trends in the temperance movement 120 years ago. So, wow. Breakfast wasn't a category that we had, it was very indistinct from most other meals until we started formulating, cereals.
So there was this man named Kellogg, of Kellogg's fame. . Okay. And [00:39:00] he he had this sanitarium, he had some really weird health ideas. And one of his things was like I'm trying to figure out how to say this politely. Eating cornflakes stops men from masturbating. Okay. I'll just put it like that.
You know, like that was part of his philosophy. And, It probably wasn't a good marketing tactic. Maybe it was in the highly Christianized, pious world of there.
John: It was Victorian. Mm-hmm. .
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. The Victorian sensibilities.
Peter: So the Amish my parents live in Pennsylvania not far from like Lancaster and places where there's a lot of Amish. I'd read something a while back about, the Amish, which at least according to the group that this journalist was studying, it was kinda like, they're not inherently opposed to new technology, but they're very cautious about it.
And so if there's like a, an enthusiastic early adopter person, they get to try the thing and then the elders watch them and then try to come to this holistic conclusion about whether that thing is truly good for their life. And, it turns out, I guess they usually decide not, but you know, that the Amish are much less expo.
I mean, the sense of like, you know, how many Amish, kids being raised on iPads, who don't have social or you know, hand-eye. I [00:40:00] mean, I wonder what's gonna happen, over time as we get, deeper and deeper there could be divergence. Right.
Really .
Bryan: What would be y'all's rule of thumb for the way that experimenting with diet makes sense. So for instance, like the critiques of fake meat, the critiques of huel and of soylent, it these sort of things are, or almost like scientifically produced and derived versus something that maybe the emergence of a fusion cuisine, like the sushi rito. Right. Do you personally have a rule of thumb that you're like, okay, like that still fits some model of like food versus this is like scientifically produced protein matter?
Chris: Well, I mean, we have to just question just science know. Anything you know about food is just complicated. And one of the things that, I think scientific fact that really speaks to our ignorance is we, our bodies produce about 30,000 of the 300,000 necessary proteins for us to survive. Where did the other 270,000 come from? And, one of the suspects now is that [00:41:00] it's really the complex gut biome mm-hmm. , that they're responsible for doing, for producing the requisite proteins. And just getting into the exploration of that, we're just touching the surface, so to speak to a principle about how to approach this.
I think that, and this is double-edged sword, because human tastes are also faulty, right? We like sugar, we like fat, we like salt, but I think we listen to our bodies. I think there's a way that if you are in tune with your body, you can kind of understand what's good for you. And it's not the same. Diet's gonna be good for everyone.
There's a lot of complexity in that, but I think greater just body awareness, and this is like a personal thing is something that we need to get in tune with ourselves. We need to stop ignoring ourselves and externalizing ourselves with technology.
John: You were saying like, oh, well we have these kind of desires for these foods that aren't good for us, but that is quite different from listening to your body, right?
I mean, so I might want a McDonald's burger or something, but then I might listen to my body later and my body might be telling me, oh, like, that was like, not what we really needed. And I'm sure having one, one a week or something probably is [00:42:00] fine, right? But it's like, your body's different from your urges.
Bryan: I'm sure that Crohn's disease is an illustration of that all the time. Your urges of what tastes good versus your experience of actually dealing with it.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a particular pathology that means essentially if you're dealing with an extreme imbalance I'm not gonna say everybody needs to avoid grains. That's, that doesn't seem to be the case. But I guess there's the question of like, the Irish are sort of inseparable from the idea of potatoes or, you know, Italians from tomato sauce. I mean, those are no new world foods. I mean, it's maybe a little bit difficult even to really ascertain exactly what diet was, in a truly ancient fashion.
And maybe a little bit of a limitation of applying the, essentially like eating what, four generations back ate is like, maybe some foods, right? Like a lot of cured meats, right? You know, we understand may have a cancer tie-in which, you know, given that life expectancy, has only, recently risen above like 40, right.
You know, worked for them obviously up to 40 at least. And then you say, okay, well, you know, maybe cancer wasn't a problem that overtook them. So they did fine with that. So [00:43:00] there's some limitations of knowledge there. I mean, empirically speaking, you can look at places like Blue Zones and how they eat.
and then it's like, okay, at least a diet is a component of what they're eating. Or at least, if their diet was that bad, it would be killing them sooner. Places that, oh, these places where people live, I don't remember. Essentially above 90 or something. But like Japan is a blue zone and there's, different ways of studying these diets where there's a lot of fresh food, a lot of natural food and so on. So yeah, if the food was that bad, it would be killing them sooner. So, you can empirically conclude that food is working pretty well for those people in those places.
Bryan: I guess thematically it seems like a little bit of pushback against an effort to be reductionist about that, you know, a pushback against the intellectual hubris that we understand it all and we just can chop it up into these basic components and more empirically driven by traditional, traditional foods that seem to be working well for populations of people that are healthy.
Chris: I mean, you know, recipes, some processes, communal traditions, developed over hundreds or thousands of years and [00:44:00] cooking particular foods to remove the toxins just by breaking down, or disrupting the proteins that are toxic. And they don't know why, but we iterated to a point that found something that worked.
So yeah, I think the important thing is exactly what you're saying is like there's sort of, um, an then empiricism that we just need to have. I mean, ultimately what are we looking for? We're looking for outcomes anyway. So let's start with the outcome. Let's not start with breaking it down into a reductionist sort of framework.
Peter: Yeah. You mean reductionism obviously has had a lot of, benefits and gains right? To, to the western world and beyond. I certainly observed that today though in the sense of particularly in a place like San Francisco, right? People are, very eager to hop on this sort of idea of scientific bandwagon, you know, where everything is scientific and it's like, but you see that this is very noisy, right?
And it's one day we think one thing's true, the next, it's not true, right? I mean, science as a way of learning has its limits. Maybe an under-appreciation for, essentially the wisdom that's been accumulated up to this point, basically by [00:45:00] humanity
Bryan: I'm curious to kind of switch gears a little bit, how you both joined SPC at separate times for both members here. How did y'all find unity on this project? How did you come to find yourselves collaborating?
Chris: As soon as I got here, I was putting myself in front of everyone I could and just hearing out ideas and sharing my own ideas and I've had some theses about where the world is going. You know, I have some concerns about recession and about global supply chains, and the longevity of the global economic framework that we have lived in for 30 years now maybe depends on how you take a look at it, but 50 years. And so I saw this thought that I should focus on something that's really a base base economic activity, food, agriculture, transportation, and look at things that can be solved there and improved there because we're never gonna not need those.
And so that was my inspiration. As soon as I encountered Peter and he had this focus on food and food preparation, I'm like, this is something that I can really get behind that I see a lot of value in for a lot of [00:46:00] people. I think people are struggling with the economics of food today, and I think it could get worse talking about eggs earlier, you know, I just want to see people be able to meet their basic needs.
Peter: Yeah. So yeah, Chris and I started talking and realized pretty quickly that we were aligned in, in terms of a lot of our values and goals and just, you know, having a lot of fun talking about different topics. Yeah so we started doing the, you know, kind of co-founder dating process. I think we used some of the materials from whichever SBC alum, put together things like areas of responsibility matrix and, things like that just to help think through essentially if, we were the right fit to work together. And yeah.
Bryan: So, we like to wrap it up with a recommendation. So I feel like we've mentioned a few things, but is there anything sort of top of mind to you that if anyone was listening that you'd recommend they'd go read or watch or listen to anything that's been on your brain recently?
Chris: Well, something to listen to good music. There's a great album that I've been riffing on for about a year now. It's this very unknown album, prophet. It came out I think 2018. [00:47:00] But, it's got this song called Party on there. I want to be your man. It's just this really weird crossover of like eighties r and b and modern, electronic music that just makes me want to dance. Uh, .
Peter: Cool, cool. Nice. Yeah. So something that Chris and I watched recently relating to the food thing too. We watched a documentary that somebody had put together on the auto map which was actually largely a significant inspiration for actually one of the first companies in the kind of food automation renaissance thing.
Um, itsa. I was trying to do at least a format that was somewhat like that, although the cuisine was very different. But anyway, it was very interesting to watch in the sense of it was, this restaurant chain was around for nearly a hundred years. It served a huge fraction of the New York City and Philadelphia population. It was the largest restaurant entity for a very long time by volume. I guess some of the things that resonated with us were I think like the, just the really, the fundamental ness of treating people well, of making good food of figuring out a good strategy to essentially do [00:48:00] good, you know, by all the stakeholders involved. And just essentially how long they prospered as a result of taking care of people.
Bryan: Thanks for the recommendations. it's been a pleasure chatting with you all today.
Chris: Oh, the pleasure's been ours. Really enjoyed this, so thank you.
Peter: Yeah, thanks.
John: Thanks so much. I learned a lot.
Bryan: Me too. That's all for Pioneer Park this time.
Getting kicked out of the SJSU Food Court with Peter and Chris