I don’t know that the food I’ve had from Tigawok has any discernable wok hei, but it is good and economical. However, I haven’t tried the fried rice or the noodles, where you’d expect to see the most of that flavor.
There’s a graveyard of culinary robotics companies though, seems like a space where it’s harder than expected to get good results and economics. I’m sure Next Robot isn’t the only company using a subscription/rental model to reduce up-front costs for customers and create a long term revenue source.
I think they’re smart to focus on things that take skill and experience to execute consistently.
Agreed, there’s already a ton of automation in fast food, and tackling things higher up the skill chain that are both time consuming and difficult for humans to execute with consistency seems promising. It grinds my gears that they have to do the whole AI-empowered, product as a service dance, but TBH they probably have to in order to attract venture capital funding to stay alive. At least they didn’t work the blockchain into it 