The Story of Chefee with Assaf Pashut – The Spoon

There’s been no shortage of cooking robot startups in the past few years, but most are focused on commercial kitchens. It’s for good reason: consumers tend to like appliances we’re familiar with, and the idea of having a robot make our food seems, well, like something out of a science fiction future.

But these hurdles didn’t scare away Assaf Pashut, who, after years of being a restauranteur, started to think about how robots could help us make better food at home. That ultimately led to Chefee, a home food robot that’s different from any before it. It’s not a countertop appliance or a system with big robotic arms attached to the wall. With Chefee, the robotics recede into the background.

In this conversation, Assaf discusses those early days and how he came up with the idea for Chefee, the choices he made around design, the story of pitching Chefee on Shark Tank, and his vision for the future.

You can listen to the podcast clicking play above or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also watch the video of my interview with Assaf below.

Assaf will be talking about Chefee at the Smart Kitchen Summit on June 5th. If you’d like to hear his story in person, you can get tickets here.

The transcript of our conversation is below.

Michael Wolf
All right, I’m excited to have Assaf Pashut here in the studio today to talk a little bit about what you’re building with Chefee Robotics. Chefee is a really interesting company in that it’s actually making a home cooking robot. That’s a tough category. We’re going to dive into that, but before we do, let’s hear a little bit about your background. Tell people, you know, your journey and how you got to where you are today.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I grew up on food since I was, I mean, my mom cooked for me and my brothers every single day growing up. Homemade foods. I grew up in Israel so food is just a huge part of our culture. And yeah, I ended up going to Berkeley, studied neuroscience, learned a little bit about engineering, some biology, some chemistry, some, a lot of different, a lot of different things. And then I ended up going into the obvious next step, which is open restaurants.

Michael Wolf
I thought you were going to say the obvious next step is making a food robot.

Assaf Pashut
That’s like 14 years later. I opened restaurants, and my parents were surprised, as you can imagine. And so was everyone else. But I just thought that the food industry was broken. I think now there are so many documentaries about that. But back then it was, most people didn’t understand really what was going. And yeah, I wanted to fix it. I wanted to create some healthier brand and sell and just kind of promote that. And really, my dream was to kind of tackle McDonald’s, to compete with McDonald’s. So yeah, pretty ambitious. And then I had that for many years, and did very well in Silicon Valley. And then during COVID, everything just nose dived.

I took a year off and went to live in Israel. My mom was there, a lot of cooking again. You can see a common theme. And then, at some point, I think I was looking at my kitchen and just thought, how freaking cool would it be if I could just talk to it and it can cook for me? That was the crazy epiphany.

Michael Wolf
Right. That was. That was epiphany, and you know, so interesting that you decided to head into the consumer kitchen because you spent so much of your career in restaurants, which, by the way, I think some of the most successful food robotics entrepreneurs have started restaurants and then done that. John Haw with Bear Robotics is a good example of where he created his little mobile waiter robot. But you decided to go into the consumer kitchen, not make a back of house restaurant chef robot. Why did you look at the consumer space?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, so we actually started our V1 was a commercial kitchen. We built this entire commercial kitchen with a robotic arm on a rail. I’ll show you the video, but we basically we saw something that most people don’t see, which is everyone’s going in this direction. Commercial restaurants, fast food. And I hate fast food, personally. I just don’t think that’s something I want to contribute to or help. I don’t think it’s good for people, animals, the world in general. And so I don’t want to contribute my time there. And then, looking at the house, nobody’s touching it. Everybody knows there’s going to be robotics in the home. Everyone knows that.

Michael Wolf
It’s why you wanted to kill McDonald’s.

Assaf Pashut
But no one touched the home. And it’s a hard space, you’re right. It’s at what price point you come in, and there are so many different segments of consumers. But the appeal of one being the first, two, offering people this Jetsons kind of dream where you walk into your house, talk to your kitchen and it cooks for you. That was a sexy idea. That was something worth working for.

And I’ll tell you the first time that Chefee I ever talked to Chefee and it started cooking was just like a mind shift. It was weird. It was really, really cool. And that’s kind of when we knew that this is, this is happening. This is real.

Michael Wolf
No one’s broken into this space because it is, like you said, difficult. There have been some early temps like Moley, which started back in 2015, and the last couple of years, there have been a lot of countertop folks building essentially some level of automation within a self-contained countertop appliance. Your’s is different than what I’ve seen out there in that it’s not this big robotic arm. It’s not something that fits on the countertop. It looks like maybe some of the kind of robotic make lines I’ve seen in a sense for the commercial space, but not quite. Because it does fit into a granite countertop or whatever. It’s embedded essentially into the kitchen. Talk a little bit about that, why you decided to do what you did with your design.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, like I said, we started with a big robotic arm, right? And I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours with it. And one, they’re expensive. Two, they’re difficult to maintain. Three, they’re dangerous. This thing, the first time we turned it on, we got it from China, and their safety setting was like the lowest possible safety. So it started grinding itself into the table on which it was standing. Dangerous stuff, man. And you don’t want that in your house with your kids and you’re in. Yeah.

Michael Wolf
That’s not good. o.

Assaf Pashut
And so, and then beyond that, the idea is that I think technology shouldn’t be in our face. It should be hidden, embedded in our walls, kind of like electricity. We have it, it’s the best thing ever. We don’t even realize it because it’s just in the walls, right? And then we use it when we want to use it. That’s kind of the vision.

Michael Wolf
It’s very on trend, by the way. We’re seeing that in the kitchen space. Like a lot of big appliance brands are thinking about this idea of the invisible kitchen, essentially where technology recedes into the background. You thought about it, but in a robotic context.

Assaf Pashut
Blend in. So instead of throwing some big thing at you, it’s more like, no, we’ll blend into your existing kitchen design, which people really, really spend a lot of time and thought into their kitchen designs. So we want to blend in.

Michael Wolf
When will I be able to buy this? When can I go out and say, hey, Chefee, come in and install this? And what does that involve? Does this involve a couple of folks showing up and installing it and tearing apart my kitchen a little bit?

Assaf Pashut
No, no, so not exactly. So, first of all, we’re already taking paid reservations. So there’s a bunch of people that already paid $250 to reserve their Chefee. Late next month, we’re going to be showcasing our Beta 2 model, which is basically what your Chefee would look like, stainless steel, so forth, the beautiful kind of vision. And at that point, we’ll be taking deposits. So 50% down, 50% upon delivery.

And when Chefee arrives at your door, yeah, we install it. But here’s the beauty. It doesn’t require any permanent damage to your kitchen. So the way we do it is we just remove the doors from your upper kitchen cabinet. That’s like four screws. And we slide Chefee in. And that’s it. Basically, within two hours, the whole installation takes two hours. And you have now an autonomous kitchen in your house.

Michael Wolf
What was it like going on Shark Tank? Obviously, going in front of the sharks is like a once in a lifetime experience. I know that some of them are notably robotic skeptical. Mark Cuban, probably being the most so. Tell us a little about that experience going on there and what happened.

Assaf Pashut
The experience, it’s hard to describe, man. It was the hardest day of my life. Most people, you know, a lot of companies, they come with this little app or a little gadget or whatever. We built a kitchen set ourselves. My team and I built the whole set. We’ve never done it before. We had to ship all of our equipment and Chefee to Los Angeles, stayed in our investor’s home, and built it in his backyard. It was wild.

I spent two months practicing the pitch over and over. We have a bunch of videos we’re going to release where I’m like doing push-ups and reciting the pitch. My friend is kicking me and like slapping me in the face literally to get ready for the pressure because you only have one chance. He went to the Israeli army. So he was like, he’s like, we’re going to do this. This is how we’re going to do it.

Michael Wolf
It was Shark Tank Bootcamp.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, the moment itself was so stressful. So many things could have gone wrong. We had to ship it from one, we have to move it from one set to another. And then once we were there, they tell you, you only have one shot. It’s the Eminem song, right? You got one shot, don’t blow it. And then like, what if the wifi or the Bluetooth doesn’t work? And everything worked smoothly. The sharks are really, really nice. I think Mark was in a bad mood.

I think he was, he was kind of in disbelief that we could have built something like this that’s actually has some IP in it without spending millions of dollars, which is most, most companies do. And I get it. I mean, I come from the restaurant industry. Who am I? I’m, you know, to him, I’m just like a restaurateur. I’m not an engineer. But yeah, we’ve been able to do it. So it was pretty exciting.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, I mean, he probably saw, I mean, if you look at the track record, right, like the Zumes of the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars from SoftBank, and you’ve seen others race, you know, tons of money to build these things and to they burn through it. So, you ultimately did get a deal with Kevin O’Leary. Talk about that.

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, with Kevin. I mean, at the end of the day, he saw what we saw, which is there’s a high end market. So we’re starting at the high end as a high end product. Obviously, our goal is to be in millions and millions of homes. And that’s what’s going to happen, but we’re going to start like this because we don’t want to have thousands of orders right off the bat. We’re not going to be able to deliver, and we’re going to have recalls, and it’s a common mistake that many hardware companies make. Let’s go slow and steady and actually pay attention to each customer. And then as we ramp up production, we’ll lower the prices and so forth. And frankly, there are people lining up to have a Chefee at this price point.

Michael Wolf
It’s the early Tesla strategy.

Assaf Pashut
I mean, we’re actually very, very, very reasonable relative to, let’s say, Moley, for example. Or even just high-end premium appliances in the home. People are spending $50,000 on a range hood. They’re spending $100,000 sometimes on La Cornue, Wolf and Sub-Zero.

Michael Wolf
What will this future channel look like? One of the things I’m trying to conceptualize and think a lot about, as we look 10 years in the future is, ‘hey, I want this cool cooking robot. Maybe I can’t cook, or maybe I’m getting older, and it’s just harder for me. How do I get this thing in the kitchen? Is it a matter of saying, hey, there’s a home system integrator for food robotics? Is it like there’s an appliance, like maybe a GE Whirlpool ultimately acquires Chefee, or builds a competing line, or you become like the next Whirlpool? Does a customer go to a Best Buy, see it and then have someone come and install it? What does this channel look like in the future?

Assaf Pashut
I mean, honestly, we’ve designed it, like I said, to be installed in existing kitchens. We want this in tiny kitchens, large kitchens, large homes, and small luxury apartments in Manhattan. It doesn’t matter. We fit into existing standard kitchens. Where it’s going to go, I don’t know. I think, I think Chefee can maintain a very high quality of the product. That’s, that’s important to me. That quality is super important. Whether it’s going to be available at Home Depot or Best Buy in the future, only time will tell. But ultimately, it’s probably going to be built in, kind of like standard ovens in microwaves and fridges that you have in every kitchen. You walk into somebody’s home in 15 years, and if they don’t have a Chefee, it’s like they’re in the Stone Age. That’s how I see it.

Michael Wolf
Yeah, people walk into like a modern high-end kitchen today, they see Wolf appliances, they see Jenn Air or whatever. You think that new status symbol 15 years from now will be a Chefee. Is that what we’re talking about?

Assaf Pashut
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to be ubiquitous. It just doesn’t make sense that it doesn’t. You have to experience it to kind of feel it. When we started cooking with Chefee, then I went to my mom’s house, and there’s like pans and pots and all these things and like a mess in the kitchen. I’m like, I don’t know, my mind has just shifted. Like this is the old way and now there’s a new way. Obviously there’s a nice hybrid middle ground there where you can still cook.

It’s not like you have to give Chefee every single meal to make. Cooking is fun, I love cooking. It’s just that I don’t have time every single day to do it in a good way, in a high quality way.

Michael Wolf
You said you are starting at the high end. As you guys grow – obviously this is your first product out there – if we look a couple years down the line, five years down the line, is there going to be a range? At some point you have a countertop thing that people would just buy and plop down or take with them? What does that look like?

Assaf Pashut
A lot of things are possible. We want to make sure one, we’re not spreading ourself thin, right? Once you spread yourself thin, quality goes down. And second, is we don’t want to go to the Vitamix, the, the, what are they called? All these little countertop, nimbals and stuff, right? We want to stay, the value proposition of Chefee is it’s restocked once a week and you walk away.

You go to the gym, you go to the office, you go hang out with your kids, you go watch Netflix. That’s it once a week. As soon as you dumb it down and you bring it down the volume and so forth, and now it’s just a countertop, then again, you have to restock every single meal. You have to think a lot more about every single thing, which is, it’s just, it defeats purpose. So, yeah.

Michael Wolf
Great. Hey, well, I’m looking forward to hearing you and connecting with you in Seattle in June at the SmartCat to Summit. And where can people find out more about what you’re doing at chefee.com?

Assaf Pashut
You too.

Chefee.com, yeah, yeah, we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re online.

Michael Wolf
That’s easy. And for those of you just listening, it’s chefee.com, right?

Assaf Pashut
That’s it. Thank you.