These days, there’s a lot of excitement in the automation space about “smaller” improvements, mechanisms that slot in to a restaurant’s existing workflow and improve a cumbersome, laborious process, or a machine that allows brands to sell proven products in new locales. That’s not to say there’s anything sub-scale about their achievements, they just offer a much quicker ROI than say launching a nationwide fleet of trucks that prep pizzas on the go. Over the past few months we’ve heard from the likes of Rotender, Baozza and Omm; today we’ll get the DL from Tom Zhang, founder of Chicago-based smoothie machine startup Zenblen.
Ottomate: In your own words, tell us about Zenblen.
Tom Zhang: Zenblen is a Chicago based food tech startup and we’re on a mission to make healthy eating more accessible with our robotic smoothie bar.
O: What’s your background and what inspired the creation of this solution?
TZ: I come from a business background, I studied economics at the University of Chicago and started my career in strategy consulting. Health & wellness has always been important to me as I was a college athlete and currently attempting triathlons. I’ve been drinking smoothies every day for over 10 years, in fact I was known as the smoothie guy back at my office job. As the smoothie guy, I lobbied my way into starting a smoothie bar right in the office! We called it Smoothie Fridays where I would stop by the local supermarket in the morning on my way to work, buy ingredients, and blend smoothies for my colleagues. I did this religiously for over a year and it was during this experience that I noticed how much my colleagues loved fresh smoothies, but were still not making it themselves. Today’s consumers are busier and more health conscious than ever, and smoothies are a great solution to this - but there’s high friction in today’s options that’s leading the market to be tremendously underserved. I also noticed the rise of food robotics and automated retail around the same time, add the two together and that’s where the concept of Zenblen’s robotic smoothie bar came from!
O: What kind of milestones has the startup hit so far?
TZ: Our first robotic smoothie bar is in the field serving customers 24 hours/day! We served over 2500 smoothies to delighted customers in 2023 and are off to a blazing start to 2024. We currently have over 100 locations on our waitlist and recently signed a pilot with the largest food service provider in North America. We are also proud graduates of the Chicago Booth New Venture Challenge, alongside notable alumni like Grubhub & Braintree.
Meet Tom, and other tech innovators, this March 28-29 at Curbivore in Downtown LA. OttOmate Pro subscribers get complimentary admission.
O: Where do you envision placing these machines? What’s the differentiator you see for someone picking Zenblen versus a competitor, or versus using human labor?
TZ: We target to place our kiosks in locations that are part of our customers daily routines: residential buildings, commercial offices, fitness facilities etc. We pride ourselves in the quality of our customer experience and with a consistent delicious product every time. Our automation technology and compact footprint allows us to operate 24 hours a day ubiquitously so a fresh, healthy smoothie becomes more accessible than a cup of coffee.
O: Can you tell us a bit about the tech stack, how the machine works?
TZ: The reason we call it a “robotic smoothie bar” is because we’ve automated every step of a traditional smoothie bar.
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