Introducing Bowl builder
Posted by Lab37 on 09/20/2023
Our first kitchen automation equipment is FINALLY ready for prime time!!
Allow us to introduce our bowl assembly machine, we call it "Bowl Builder". Once we can prove Bowl Builder works, we’re looking forward to partnering with existing businesses, big and small, to enable Bowl Builder for your brands and concepts. Click here to get more info or reserve a Bowl Builder production slot.
So how does Bowl Builder work?
It places an empty bowl onto a conveyor system that then takes the bowl on a journey to be filled with goodness.
The bowl traverses below 18 different dispenser modules that contain thermally controlled food, either hot or cold.
The dispenser feeds a bowl the proper amount of each of the 18 components, thereby reducing food waste. It then passes beneath a module that drops a 2 ounce container of various sauces into the bowl, just in time for the bowl to get a lid applied on top.
Now Bowl Builder prints the customer information onto a bag, opens the bag, and puts the bowls and utensils inside.
After the bag has been stuffed, Bowl Builder closes the bag and seals the deal with a label. Now it’s ready to be delivered to your hungry customers.
Safety First. The Bowl Builder has its NSF field evaluation certification and once our production ramps up we will ensure it has full NSF certification.
Size matters. Taking only [60] square feet of your valuable space and making hundreds of bowls per day, it does a lot with very little.
Multi-brand >> Single-brand. We believe Bowl Builder will be able to build bowls of multiple cuisines in parallel. Bowl Builder should be able to do many 100’s of orders per day… more than enough capacity for many brands at the same time from the same kitchen!
Please reach out to us if you would like to try to build your own restaurant with our technology or brands.
About Lab 37
It all begins with an idea.
Posted by Lab37 on 06/01/2023
Home builders possess a passion for the art of constructing homes. In times not too distant, their craft relied solely on the humble union of hammer and nail. The advent of power tools, bestowed the ability to execute their work with efficiency, rendering the dream of homeownership an attainable reality for many.
Chefs in a kitchen face a similar situation. They love the creative process of working in the kitchen, designing enticing menus, and preparing delectable delights that find their way into your belly. However, there's one thing they don't enjoy: staying up until 2 a.m. performing repetitive tasks that can easily lead to grueling failure.
The restaurant business is very difficult. The National Restaurant Association estimates a 20% success rate for all restaurants. About 60% of restaurants fail in their first year of operation, and 80% fail within 5 years of opening. A successful restaurant is a mixture of good tasting food, the supply chain management of ingredients, menu design, cost of goods, freshness, brand to market fit, and much more. With labor costs skyrocketing, and employees becoming even more scarce, keeping a reliable team in place is more challenging than ever. With complexities like these, how can we give operators the best chances of success?
Driven by our passionate chefs and the nerdy engineer mindset, we created a food lab to build automation tools that can help the restaurant operator deliver tastiness, authenticity, and everyday convenience all while making a better living doing it! Our first technology will focus on the automated assembly of bowls.
How we approached it
We began building our lab in an empty warehouse a few miles north of Pittsburgh. This is called Lab37, a subsidiary of City Storage Systems (CSS). Now fully functional, Lab37 has a commercial research and development kitchen, fabrication shop, engineering office, electrical engineering lab, assembly lab, and testing lab. It is where the food technology equipment is designed, manufactured, and tested. On one side of the building ideas are born, on the other side they are brought to life.
Our R&D kitchen company The Hungry Group will be our vehicle for creating test brand concepts that we use to validate whether our technologies will ultimately work for established restaurant chains in different cuisine types and customer segments. So far we have tested our technology on The Hungry Cowgirl (a tex-mex bowls test concept) and our upcoming Mediterranean bowls concept. The idea is, if we can prove that our technology works with test concepts, then we know we can reach out to applicable restaurants to use our technology for your brands and concepts (click here if you’re one of them :))! Once the base technology is operational, adding additional capabilities gets easier as we go, allowing us to make new cuisines even faster.
Our next step is to get set up in Pittsburgh's first CloudKitchens, where we will pilot our food automation technology with The Hungry Cowgirl and additional cuisines to determine how well it works with certain concept/cuisine types in a commercial kitchen infrastructure environment.
Does it actually help the restaurateur succeed? We’re launching this winter. Stay tuned!
Nerdy like us?
Oh, did we mention we are hiring geeks who love robots and food? jobs@lab37.us