Robot Kitchen Confidential

How a food truck startup got caught in the pandemic and survived to create the future of foodservice

It’s hard to think of an industry that’s been more impacted by the pandemic than restaurants. According to The National Restaurant Association, more than 1 in 6 have permanently closed. For the ones that haven’t, there have new challenges every day. Restaurants were asked to shutter with little notice; when they could welcome customers back, restrictions meant providing costly outdoor space and distancing tables, reducing the number of customers they could serve in a day. Many customers opted for take-out and delivery, having to navigate the numerous delivery apps to find what they wanted. For restaurants, this meant quickly adapting to a massive influx in digital business which came with egregious fees and operational challenges. On top of this, there’s ensuring that orders go out on time, food is of consistent quality, and is, of course, safe to eat. All this to think about on top of the industry’s historically razor-thin margins (3–5%).

A Promising Start

No one knows how fast a restaurant idea can go from boom to bust more than me. My name is Stephen Klein, and I launched a mobile restaurant concept called Ono Blends in late 2019 with a relentlessly resourceful team of five. (That’s right, our team started one of the hardest businesses at the worst possible time, but keep reading, this story has a happy ending.) The idea behind Ono Food Co. was simple — bring delicious food to everyone using software and robots to reduce the cost of serving the food. This new platform would provide fresh food for the price of fast food. Simple right? People agreed. They lined up around the block. Fast forward a few months and we were growing by 20% week-over-week and our NPS was sitting at 94. People loved the taste. They loved the price. And they loved the vibe and hospitality provided by our staff. They also loved the robotics — I judge that by the number of people who willingly pulled out their phones to post to their stories.

Then everything changed. COVID hit and California issued a stay-at-home order. All of a sudden eating in public wasn’t as appetizing. The areas we were serving became ghost towns overnight. After countless sleepless nights of designing, building, turning wrenches, strategizing, and developing recipes, our business came to a halt. To make matters worse, we had to pause raising our Series A. So with the stock market down 30% and less than six months of runway, we made the extremely difficult decision to lay off most of our staff and go into cockroach mode.

The Pivot

We took a breath and realized we had been trying to do too many things at once — launch a successful food truck brand, automate the production of food, and build multiple apps to serve our customers and support our team. It was too much, too fast. But the thing we realized when doing this is just what restaurants today are facing. The razor-thin margins. The logistics. The supply chain. The inelastic operations. The customer service. We had a unique insight into where we could fit in the foodservice stack. After meeting with a number of restaurant chains and foodservice operators, we found some major pain points we could solve with our existing platform. We also discovered a form factor that would adapt to any environment whether that’s a restaurant, ghost kitchen, or food truck.

So we decided to pivot, from trying to create a great restaurant to helping existing restaurants be great. From bringing high-quality food to people everywhere, to helping food be higher quality and available anywhere. From being chefs that create on our own, to empowering chefs to create on their own. This vision led us to create Hyphen.

Introducing Hyphen

Hyphen is a foodservice platform designed to help restaurant owners, operators, and budding chefs move their business forward by putting their kitchen operations on autopilot. Our first product, an automated makeline, upgrades the industry staple with advanced robotics and a customized OS to give busy kitchens a reliable and precise way to make and fulfill orders.

*If you’re not familiar with the kitchen, a makeline is a production line, traditionally used to assemble food by hand. Think the front of Chipotle when you’re ordering or the back of a busy salad chain.

We named the company Hyphen because hyphens link words together to create a relationship between them, and to create new meaning. Similarly, we see Hyphen as a connective tool that bridges the gap between digital and physical. We believe Hyphen fits our unique time, where kitchens need to move faster, but not at the sake of quality, accuracy, or hospitality.

Our heroes:

Restaurants — looking to scale

Hyphen is for kitchens with a dream — to supercharge their ability to prepare and assemble high-quality food consistently, while eliminating order defects, making sure food is cooked safely, and the meal is plated perfectly, the way the chef intended. We believe kitchens should be able to grow and scale, and not be held back by old infrastructure and ways of doing things.

Chefs — looking to create

Hyphen is here for chefs who have a restaurant idea or brand concept, but need to get it up and running simply and easily. We believe starting and running a restaurant should be as simple as creating and managing a website. Think Shopify, but for food. There are so many great food ideas out there, chefs shouldn’t be limited by their location, their fixed costs, or the slim margins of their industry.

The Team

These two groups are our passion, and we know when we build with empathy, towards their needs and goals, we can’t go wrong. That’s why we’ve hired specifically within the restaurant industry. To get our mise en place, we brought in Derek Pietz, former Head of Automation at Sweetgreen as our VP of Automation, and Abram Simon, a restaurant owner/operator in a past life, as our Director of Software Engineering. We also welcomed a number of others that have either started their own restaurant or worked within the foodservice industry. With veterans like these, alongside myself and my co-founder Danny Fukuba (who has helped build rockets, food robots, and more), we keep Hyphen focused on the massive ops opportunities that live within the foodservice space. The future of foodservice is bright.

A lot has happened since we pivoted in June 2020. Just three months later, we landed our first partner with ~30 restaurants. A couple of months after that, we signed with three partners that do over $100M in systemwide sales across a total of ~70 restaurants. Today, within a year of the pandemic, we have eight partners doing over $1B in systemwide sales across hundreds of restaurants. This is all part of our plan to be the foodservice industry’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable platform.

We know the streets will not be deserted forever. With vaccinations on the rise and COVID numbers falling in many cities, we’re betting on restaurants, entrepreneurs, and chefs to succeed and breathe life back into the cities that we all love. We’re happy to report we’ve hired back our staff (and then some). And we’re betting on ourselves to help them seize the moment, and upgrade their kitchens with technology that will help them be smarter, more innovative and creative, and create healthier food for all.

Join our waitlist

If you’re interested in getting Hyphen for your restaurant(s) or food brand, please sign up for the waitlist on our site and we’ll be in touch. If you’d like to hear more about Hyphen behind the scenes and where we’re going, feel free to reach out to me at stephen@usehyphen.com.

Thanks for reading — stay safe and sanitized!

Stephen

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A word on automation

At Hyphen, we believe automation is at its best when it’s helping people, by removing repetitive tasks and increasing productivity in the kitchen. We want to replace processes, not people — so staff and chefs can focus on what matters most, creating delicious dishes and providing outstanding hospitality.