Hyphen’s Makeline Might Just Be the Restaurant of the Future
Hyphen’s Makeline Might Just Be the Restaurant of the Future
Why big brands are lining up behind Stephen Klein and Daniel Fukuba
Step into Hyphen’s rather unadorned office in the back of a San Jose office park and your first thought is: dang, these guys really like hardware. The flotsam and jetsam from 40 years of Bay Area progress adorn the common areas… micro LED displays, a museum of 3D-printed dispensing arms, controller boards aplenty and miles of ethernet cable.
But look a little closer and you’ll notice that there’s more to this collection than just random parts: there’s an original Apple Macintosh - it still boots up, a hand-built homage to the iconic Segway, paraphernalia from the OG iPod. This office is a shrine to the technology that’s changed the way the world works. And with Hyphen, co-founders Stephen Klein and Daniel Fukuba are hoping to build something just as transformative for the way the world makes and consumes food.
But if there’s one thing we’ve seen in the world of food tech, neat hardware might get your idea off the ground, but you need to actually get the food part of the equation right if you want to get some actual traction.
"Food is hard. Unlike deterministic materials such as metal or plastic, every ingredient presents unique challenges due to its variability in preparation, cooking, and storage. These challenges have also become our greatest opportunity as we digitize food. Every meal made enhances our Ingredient Composition Index, helping us refine digital twins of each ingredient's material properties and characteristics," said Klein.
Behind the techy visage, Hyphen’s assembled a bit of a culinary dream team. Stephen started a text-to-deliver froyo business back in college, before going on to work for the likes of Instacart and CafeX. Daniel’s first job was dishwashing for a catering company, before getting into robotics at Middleby’s L2F. Chief of Staff Carter Branch was previously at Sweetgreen. Then you’ve got Lucy Augusta Voigt, Director of Culinary Operations, who left cult LA’s cult favorite Moon Juice to join Hyphen back when the concept, then known as Ono Food Co, was focused on stuffing the whole machine in an automated food truck. It doesn't stop there, most others across the team have first-hand foodservice experience: from delis to dishwashing.
It’s those restaurant bonafides that have helped the company collect a serious war chest, even in the face of a tough macro environment. While Chipotle’s Cultivate Next fund may garner the most attention, Hyphen’s also raised from the likes of Toast co-founder Steve Fredette, The Cheesecake Factory’s former chief culinary officer Donald Moore, Kitchen Fund, the founders of smaller FCRs like Chopt and Mixt, as well as AgFunder and Tiger Global. All told, the company’s garnered $58M in investments and is actively raising its Series B.
The Hyphen Makeline
Enough about the company, who’s hungry? Hyphen calls its machine the Makeline, because that’s exactly what it is, the familiar stainless steel prep table, full of refrigerated or heated ingredients, that you’ve seen at any salad, bowl, sandwich, burrito, or pizza chain over the past few decades. Currently, Hyphen’s makeline is designed to be 1:1 with industry standard setups, geared towards easy installation in existing restaurants and commissaries, not forcing restaurateurs to build whole new sites to accommodate the machine.
Peering inside the sleek box’s operations, you start with an empty compostable bowl, familiar to anyone that’s had a fast casual salad this century. That’s dropped onto a small robotic manipulator that rotates the bowl underneath the first container of ingredients, likely some greens or grains, that are then servo metered by the dispenser above and weighed in the robotic manipulator. The bowl is then rotated over to the next station, where say your tomatoes or cucumbers are dropped in. You can repeat this ad nauseam — more little arms positioning the bowl under more containers — to your heart and stomach’s delight. In fact, the system is essentially infinitely expandable; you could have a menu of endless complexity, if your margins allowed it.
“We’ve designed and built our robotic manipulators from the ground up to give customers the flexibility to develop their recipes and the freedom to precisely portion and plate, while maintaining consistency, accuracy, and throughput. Everything, from the hardware to the motion planning software, was developed in-house to ensure it meets the exacting standards of the foodservice industry and delivers on our customers' culinary standards,” notes Archana Kashikar, Senior Controls Engineer.
Once the bowl is complete, a tiny little elevator brings it up to counter height, where a human can add some dressing and package it up. The whole order can be controlled by an integrated tablet, or tied directly into a brand’s POS, KDS, or third-party delivery app, meaning that as soon as Joe Luncheater punches his favorite meal into a restaurant’s app, the Makeline can get to work.
But the real ingenuity of the system is that while the machinery is building bowls below, a human can be working alongside it above. If deployed at the front of house, and a customer walks in and orders a salad, they’ll likely want to see a human making it. From the in-store perspective, the fact that there are robots at work is nearly imperceptible. Instead, patrons just see restaurant staff sliding their bowl along the stainless steel top, adding in veggies and waiting for the customer to say “ooh, can you throw in a couple more of those mandarin slices?” Klein adds, “We’ve always taken a human-centered approach to design, with a belief that we should improve tools and spaces that kitchen staff are already familiar with.”
This integrated form-factor and workflow has a few other benefits. For starters, workers replacing ingredients don’t need to complicate their routines: you simply swap out one depleted plastic tub of garbanzos for a full one, whether they’ve been used up by man, machine or both. It also means that these Makelines can be integrated into existing kitchens; while Sweetgreen’s got a somewhat similar idea with its Infinite Kitchen — humans serving in-store customers while the machine makes delivery orders — Hyphen’s solution avoids the need to sink an extra half million dollars into building a new, oversized storefront.
Building a Business to Last
All of this sounds pretty obvious in retrospect, but the path to automated culinary greatness has been anything but smooth. Stephen and Daniel’s initial business idea — the aforementioned Ono Food Co — was seeing quick traction until the pandemic killed off the big crowds their truck was designed to chase. Getting the componentry on this new machine just right has taken years of refinement: what sort of gear shape can properly dispense various fruit slices without bruising? How do you subtly communicate to bored workers that there’s a jam in cabinet three? You’d be amazed how many custom tools, and hungry tinkerers from the likes of Apple, Walt Disney Imagineering, SpaceX and Tesla it takes to get it all right.
Even with the technical challenges sorted out, there are still plenty of unknowns that will only become visible as deployments scale; right now Hyphen’s only delivered about 50 modules. In an era where hybrid work seems to have become the permanent new normal, how many downtown lunch joints are going to be busy enough to necessitate this juiced up throughput? Will college campuses — another key target market of Hyphen customers like Aramark and Compass — warm to the technology, or will campus activists see it as taking away student jobs? Will the cost projections — Hyphen thinks that eventually their Makeline will cost just as much as a boring ol’ non-automated one from the likes of Avantco or Beverage-Air, thanks to using less metal and more standardization in manufacturing — bear out? Has the restaurant industry been burnt by too many startups promising the world and then leaving operators high and dry with broken machinery?
Plenty of food automation companies have raised hundreds of millions just to fall flat on their faces, many not even making it as far as Hyphen has. Stephen, concentrating on product and operations, and Daniel, heading up hardware, are fully aware of the pitfalls of their industry, and seem awfully mindful of where the giants have stumbled. “Build with empathy” is something I heard them both say more than once throughout my tour of their facilities. While nothing is certain in the wild world of foodtech, I can say one thing for sure: the custom strawberry spring salad the Gen 2 Hyphen Makeline made me was a damn good lunch.
