Moley Robotics: Innovating the Future of Cooking

Remember the Harry Potter world, where kitchens used to make dinner by themselves; well, it is not an imagination anymore. Moley Robotics has brought in a game-changing revolution in the cooking industry, with its first-ever Robotic Kitchen that can automatically cook your food in no time. Moley cookware and utensils were designed together with a leading Italian appliances handicraft company. Key features of this set-up include ergonomic thermoresistant handles, mirror-polished stainless steel, an inner aluminum layer, and a magnetic outside stainless steel layer, which makes the cookware adaptive to any hob. Meanwhile, exceptional design makes the cookware worthy of being used at the table as well.

Moley Robotics was founded in 2014 by London-based computer scientist, robotics, and healthcare innovator Dr. Mark Oleynik, who has created the world's first fully automated robotic kitchen unit. Moley Robotic Kitchen is a 3D cooking platform that allows the management of different cooking techniques (e.g., frying, steaming, boiling, baking, and adding ingredients on time to assemble the whole complicated dish from raw ingredients to achieve the highest quality result) and dish preparation stages in parallel and sequentially.

The Foundation of the Company

The need for RoboChef was identified in 2013 when Mark detected a gap in the current robotics market to radically change the volume of service, economics, and carbon footprint. Since then the company has had a long innovative journey from concept generation through system design, software, and hardware systems development to product launch in December 2020 during the only offline exhibition in Dubai.

The One Who Made it All Possible

Mark Oleynik, Ph.D., Founder/CEO/Interim CTO is an accomplished Ph.D. mathematician, computer scientist, and proven trailblazer. Mark has a truly exceptional vision for Moley Robotics. He has managed to patent robotic methods and manipulations in 12 countries and design patents and trademarks in 9 countries. He has invented a new system of robotic application not only in residential/commercial cooking environments but in other instrumental environments, where a system consisting of one and more integrated robotic arms can operate in all environments to complete multi-stage parallel and sequential process files.

Building a Better Future for the Robotic Industry

Moley Robotics is solving the problems of households seeking higher standards of nutrition but having less time and willingness to cook. Restaurant delivery helps only partially, however, it does not keep the freshness and quality of the meal. People need an automated solution for cooking in their kitchen. At the same time, restaurants and other commercial kitchens struggle from staff turnover, increasing labor cost and human mistakes as well as increasing hygiene kitchen standards. Commercial kitchens need an automated solution for cooking and replacing part of human labor. There are many institutions and locations where top-quality chefs won't work: hospitals, night shifts/breakfast service in hotels, senior houses, penitentiary, dark kitchens. The company has joined partnership with SCHUNK and Universal Robots.

The Challenging Phase of the Journey

The main challenge through the journey of Moley Robotics is price optimization. According to Mark, the robotics market is high-margin and low-volume, and there are no applications that are currently implemented into the mass market. The company's strategy is to gradually increase the range of products that it develops, which will allow them to decrease the price and enter the mass market, cascading from the highest price segment to medium into low through the pyramid of demand.

Moments of Achievement of the Company

Moley Robotics won the Best of the Best award during CES Asia in 2015. It has the strongest and oldest patent portfolio from 2014 with 8 granted patents as well as the first and only robotic kitchen in the world to be able to cook a whole dish from fresh ingredients. It is famous for its unique robotic hand developed and produced with SCHUNK, the world-leading robotic manufacturer. It has a cloud-based library of robotic recipes from world-class chefs along with the high-end design of the residential version. Moley Robotics integrated multiple recipe types and variations capabilities in one machine.

Future Endeavors in Robotics

Moley Robotics has finalized the platform integration into residential kitchens, which allows the creation of a wide functional map of the integrated kitchen, meeting the household requirements. The next stage is to increase the kitchen system performance and reliability, which will allow it to be used in commercial applications, where high productivity of food preparation based on the renowned chefs' various recipes is required. In the future, the company plans to integrate the platform into other environments: laboratory application, biotech, chemical, highly hazardous environment, medical, etc.