You don’t need a passport, private jet or even an in with the chef to eat dishes from the best restaurants around the world. You just need software and sensors.
A Palo Alto-based food tech startup has built the technology to impeccably recreate dishes from any chef and have it delivered to you. CloudChef, which launched Jan. 31, has started this feat of “food and aroma on the Internet” with a small yet impressive group of chefs in the Bay Area and India, including Thomas Zacharias, formerly of New York’s three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin and Mumbai’s Bombay Canteen, named one of the 50 Best Restaurants in Asia. And the chefs haven’t been able to differentiate their dishes from the CloudChef version in a blind taste test.
CloudChef is currently available in the Palo Alto area via DoorDash. State Street Market, the food hall in Los Altos, is CloudChef-enabled but is temporarily closed. The company is launching in San Francisco in the coming months, with plans to scale nationally after that.
How it works: Chefs like Zacharias pop into a CloudChef-enabled kitchen, much as a musician would enter a recording studio. They prepare a dish once, and as they do so, sensors monitor their magic, synthesizing the recipe into a machine-readable file that can be re-created in any CloudChef-enabled kitchen. By anyone. No experience required. The software adjusts to ingredient and location variability, too.
Founders Nikhil Abraham, Mohit Shah and Atish Aloor have not disclosed how much CloudChef has raised since its founding in Mumbai in 2018, but this startup — which is being called Spotify for food — has some big-name backers, including celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson.
Head there now — on DoorDash, it’s listed as “India’s Top 20 by CloudChef” — and you’ll see near-perfect ratings for dishes like chicken slow-cooked in ghee and Kundapuri spices by James Beard award semifinalist Srijith Gopinathan of Ettan in Palo Alto and about a dozen others.
Together with Zacharias, CEO Abraham and CTO Shah recently demonstrated a cooking session in their Palo Alto kitchen, where each ingredient is measured and scanned. Screens attached to appliances tell the user when to stir, wait or add the next ingredient.
Afterward, we sat down to learn more about the implications of this software, which may someday be available in your home.
Q. So, how does the technology work exactly?
Abraham: A chef comes into our kitchen and cooks their recipe like they would in their own kitchen. Through a variety of sensors — cameras, infrared, scales — the tech codifies the chef’s intuition, so people who have absolutely no context for this dish can re-create it. These are things that are very hard for humans to pick up and often get lost in written recipes, but it’s straightforward for sensors.
A chef like Thomas (Zacharias) may not cook his onions the exact amount of time every day, but he will cook them to the same level of brownness every single time. The camera looks at the contents of the pan or other appliance and checks that against what was happening during the recording. It does things like measure the consistency of the dish or amount of water lost to the atmosphere.
Q. What are you hoping this technology will accomplish?
A. We are trying to reimagine the food industry, where the chef gets credit for their recipe and is not tied down by the constraints of brick and mortar. Chef Zacharias is arguably one of the most iconic chefs in all of India. And now, consumers here in Palo Alto can eat his food. And he can exist like a musician and get a royalty of 3 to 15 percent for each order.
Q. Why did you start with Indian food?
A. Indian food is the books to our Amazon. We had to start with a category. Historically, Indian food has been supremely under-documented. It’s a type of cuisine that relies on a lot of intuition of the chef, and the recipes are not scientifically broken down. We wanted to prove that this technology works, so we went and picked the cuisine that’s the most intuition-heavy. What might be next is other iconic dishes or people, like The Best of New York or food by people like (social media sensation) Uncle Roger. Something you want to eat, but you can only look at it on YouTube.
Q. How many chefs have joined the platform?
A. Our current open-beta was with eight creators, but we have hundreds of recipes recorded from 40-plus creators that we’ll make available to consumers over the weeks following the launch. We’ll be closer to 14 creators live, with about 30 recipes consumers can order on-demand and another 40 or so that they can get on pre-order.
Consumers can also request a recipe they’d like to see on the CloudChef catalog. If there is demand for a particular dish, CloudChef will reach out to the chef or restaurant to partner with them to make it available for order.
Q. Are creators limited to restaurant chefs?
A. No. Chef Zach has 150,000 followers on Instagram and 200,000 on Twitter. When he shared that he was coming to the U.S., people asked if they can meet him, so we did a meet-up here, and hundreds of people came in with food they made that they wanted him to taste. A few of those recipes are making it onto the platform. They were made by home chefs from Fremont and San Ramon.
There are creators all over TikTok who show you food and talk about food, but you never taste their food. We want them to have distribution through CloudChef. Even your grandmother’s food that you never get to eat, because she lives far away, can be recorded on CloudChef as a way to preserve the recipe, so it tastes exactly like it does when she makes it.
Q. Do you think this technology has the potential to save fine dining?
Zacharias: Yeah, because it’s an additional source of revenue. And especially now in the age of social media, chefs and restaurants finally have a fan base around the world. In India, if a Michelin-starred chef has a pop-up, it sells out and for top dollar. But imagine if that could be accessible perpetually.
Abraham: Look at Apple. None of the Apple stores are necessarily profitable. But the idea is that they have built such a great brand, they can monetize it around the world. These amazing chefs and restaurants have brands, but they don’t have distribution. We want to do that for restaurants.
NIKHIL ABRAHAM
Title: Co-founder and chief executive officer, CloudChef
Age: 28
Education: Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
Professional background: Prior to CloudChef, he co-founded Sound Rex, a Bay Area startup that is building the next generation of wireless audio transmission. Nikhil is also a former member of Alchemist Accelerator.
Residence: Palo Alto
Family: Single
FIVE THINGS ABOUT NIKHIL ABRAHAM
— Nikhil is more foodie than cook, but his favorite dish to make is Kerala fish curry.
— If he could have the recipes of any chef in the world on the platform, it would be Rene Redzepi, executive chef of Noma. He is disappointed that he won’t be able to visit the famed Copenhagen restaurant before it closes in 2024.
— As for non-restaurant creators, he’s been watching a lot of Binging with Babish and would love to try his dishes, especially his Croque Monsieur inspired by Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
— A musician, Abraham previously played keyboard with Mumbai progressive rock and metal bands Disciples of the Old Monk and Symphony Novel.
— He loves going to concerts. His favorite bands are Daft Punk and Porcupine Tree.
