Chef Robotics automates labor-intensive processes in the food and beverage industry–starting with manufacturing–by deploying robotic systems that replicate human actions while increasing productivity and maintaining high-quality standards.
Founded: 2019 in San Francisco, California, USA
Size: ~40 employees (Series A)
Reduced debugging time from hours to minutes.
Reduced development cycles up to 40%
Reduced downtime through first-level triage by field staff.
“We’ve been using Foxglove every day for almost three years now—it’s become an indispensable tool for us.” Vinny Senthil, Senior Software Engineer, Chef Robotics
Chef Robotics specializes in automating labor-intensive processes in the food industry–the third largest labor force in the US and the number one largest labor shortage–starting with food manufacturing. By deploying AI-enabled robotic systems, Chef transforms the production of the food we eat every day.
Chef’s goal is to deploy robots in every commercial kitchen worldwide. To bootstrap a dataset and overcome the AI cold-start problem, the company is initially focusing on high-mix food manufacturing—such as ready-to-eat meals for grocery chains, direct-to-consumer meal delivery services, airline catering, hospital meals, and meat packing.
Chef’s systems replace manual assembly tasks, ensuring precision, efficiency, and safety in demanding environments like refrigerated warehouses. This automation is particularly impactful, as assembly tasks account for approximately 60-70% of labor in commercial kitchens.
The team at Chef is made up of an extensive amount of robotics experience, enabling them to create efficient, accurate, and collaborative robots that work on high-speed conveyor lines for dynamic food manufacturing. Operating on a mesh network architecture, Chef robots continuously communicate to coordinate tasks like ingredient placement. When a robot identifies a task, it evaluates parameters such as the position of the target on the conveyor and its own workload. Once assigned, the robot broadcasts its task to the network, allowing others to adjust their assignments accordingly. This real-time communication ensures synchronized operation, maintaining smooth workflows even as conditions change.
The system leverages spatial awareness and real-time perception data to map conveyor layouts, detect items, and assess robot positions. Using 3D object detection, robots create bounding boxes around bowls and identify orientations, compensating for tilted conveyor belts common in manufacturing facilities. Robots collaborate on complex scenarios, dynamically redistributing tasks to prevent bottlenecks when specific areas become overloaded. This integration of perception, spatial awareness, and real-time multi-robot communication ensures that Chef Robotics’ systems meet the demands of food manufacturing with unparalleled precision and adaptability.
“Visualizing data being sent from one robot to another, as well as on the host itself, has definitely improved our ability to iterate–it has been essential.” Vinny Senthil, Senior Software Engineer, Chef Robotics
From its inception, Chef Robotics recognized the need for a scalable visualization and robotics development platform to manage the complexities of developing and debugging their robots. Tasks such as sensor integration, calibrating robots, and managing robot-to-robot communication required a tool capable of handling 3D data, visualizing state transitions, and monitoring multi-robot coordination.
Foxglove’s 3D and State Transitions panels became essential for the intricate dynamics of multi-robot communication. Debugging such a system requires precise, moment-by-moment insight into how robots share information, handle task assignments, and coordinate spatially. Engineers can visualize the exact state and communication patterns, pinpointing any bottlenecks or misalignments. This insight allows engineers to quickly identify and resolve miscommunications, ensuring that the system returns to optimal performance.
Foxglove’s visualization also enables side-by-side comparisons of system behavior before and after updates, providing clear insights into how changes affect communication efficiency, task allocation, and overall performance. Interactive and customizable layouts unify views of task assignments, conveyor alignments, bounding boxes, and robot-to-robot message logs into a single interface, streamlining collaboration across software, hardware, and field operations teams. By eliminating the need for fragmented tools and reducing debugging workflows from hours to minutes, Foxglove empowers Chef Robotics to iterate rapidly and deploy enhancements with confidence.
“No one quite has that multimodal, all-of-the-different-inputs experience. We’ve been using it every day—I can’t remember a day the software team didn’t use Foxglove.” Vinny Senthil, Senior Software, Chef Robotics
Chef Robotics’ remarkable growth—scaling 300% year-over-year—has been fueled by its ability to rapidly deploy, iterate, and optimize its cutting-edge robotics systems. As Chef expands operations to meet the growing demands of food manufacturers across North America, Foxglove provides the scalability and efficiency required to handle the increasing complexities. Foxglove’s ability to streamline debugging workflows and accelerate feature development enabled Chef to keep pace with its rapid growth without compromising on quality or reliability.
The impact of Foxglove is most evident in how it empowered Chef to iterate faster on new features, keeping their technology at the forefront of food manufacturing automation. For instance, introducing new perception models or improving motion planning algorithms do not require lengthy manual testing cycles. Instead, Foxglove’s intuitive visualization allowed Chef to implement and validate changes in minutes, not weeks, ensuring their robots continued to exceed performance expectations as they scaled.
As Chef scaled its workforce and operations, Foxglove played a key role in maintaining operational efficiency that increased Chef customers’ satisfaction too. Field technicians use Foxglove’s intuitive layout to diagnose and resolve first-tier issues on-site, reducing any burden on engineering teams. This allows engineers to focus on core development and higher-level problem-solving, ensuring that Chef can handle the demands of its growing customer base while maintaining the flexibility to innovate rapidly.
“Feature development and issue resolution time both dramatically improved.” Vinny Senthil, Senior Software Engineer, Chef Robotics
Ultimately, Foxglove has been a cornerstone of Chef Robotics’ ability to scale and grow year-over-year. By providing the tools needed to debug, analyze, and refine robotic systems efficiently, Foxglove has not only supported the company’s exponential growth but has also ensured that its robots deliver the precision, reliability, and efficiency demanded by customers across the food manufacturing industry. With Foxglove’s support, Chef Robotics is not just keeping up with its growth—it is leading the charge in transforming the future of automated food production.
