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 ri
