#One. There is a person who can cook 50 chickens in an hour. A bone-in chicken is fried in 8 minutes and 30 seconds, and a boneless chicken in 6 minutes. This is the ‘Robert’ cooking robot. Roboarte, a start-up, started a franchise business last month with a one-man chicken brand called ‘Roboarte Chicken’. By supplying a cooking robot for a monthly rental fee of KRW 1.1 million, the shop owner’s labor burden is greatly reduced.
#2. The ‘Expire Date’ service operated by Startup Needs indicates the expiry date of the products in the fridge. When you put food ingredients in the fridge, you can check and manage ingredient status and expiry dates with the app just by scanning the barcode. It also provides a service that allows the franchise headquarters to check and manage real-time inventory data of all franchisees.
Up until two or three years ago, the domestic catering industry was the industry with the slowest digitisation. The proportion of self-employed on a small scale is greater than in other countries. Many business owners did not even dare to introduce hardware tools like kiosks or even basic business management solutions. Then, as crises such as minimum wage increases and the spread of Corona 19 overlapped, ‘smart restaurants’ became a survival strategy. As robots, the Internet of Things (IoT), software as a service (SaaS), and artificial intelligence (AI) permeate the areas of restaurant reservation, food purchasing, cooking and serving, and delivery, competition among high-tech startups is heating up up.
○ The cost of renting a robot is cheaper than the cost of labor
Gopizza, a one-person oven-operated pizza brand, bakes six pizzas in 3 minutes. You can make 100 plates in an hour. Through the ‘Goven’ patented automatic oven and the ‘AI Smart Topping Table’ which puts pizza toppings on it. Go Pizza, which has surpassed 100 domestic outlets, has also entered Singapore, Hong Kong and India.
XYG (formerly Lolfa Lab), which developed the world’s first manual drip robot, ‘Paris’, entered the indoor delivery robot market by acquiring Cobot, an autonomous driving robot company. ENI.I completed the pilot operation of the hamburger production automation robot system, and Future Kitchen completed the design of the robot’s automation of chicken cooking for delivery.
With the development of autonomous driving technology, the commercialization of serving and delivery robots is trending beyond cooking robots. Woowa Brothers (Baedal Minjok) developed a ‘Delivery Plate’ serving robot in partnership with American robot startup Bear Robotics, and also released a rental service in June. The rental fee is 34,000 won per month. Bear Robotics was founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by CEO Ha Jung-woo, a former Google engineer.
The autonomous delivery robot ‘Newby’ made by Newbility has completed short-distance delivery trials in downtown Seoul and Incheon. The golf course is already in commercial use. Twiny has secured outsourced specialist robot technology for moving objects weighing 60 kg or more.
According to the market research company Databridge Market Research, the global food robot market was estimated last year to be worth US $ 1.4 billion (about 2 trillion won). It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.4% in the future to reach $3.83 billion (about KRW 5.46 trillion) in 2029. In Korea, as large corporations such as LG Electronics, Doosan Robotics, and Samsung Electronics compete in the food technology robot market, they joined new businesses with the competition too.
○ Reserve and manage restaurants, one smartphone
A few years ago, after searching Naver blog reviews to find a restaurant, they called the restaurant to make a reservation. ‘Catch Table’ and ‘Table Manager’ are representative restaurant reservation services. Restaurants that don’t take orders had to wait in front of the store, but that’s no longer necessary. Waiting arrangements can now be made through mobile apps such as ‘Now Busking’, ‘Tableling’ and ‘Touch Be Waiting’.
The competition for store sales management apps is also fierce. ‘Cash Note’, operated by Korea Credit Data, is a business management app used in 1.2 million businesses. Sales management is basic, and it also publishes tax calculations and employee pay stubs. Korea Credit Data entered the card payment terminal market by becoming the largest shareholder of I’m You, a company specializing in POS (point of sale) in March this year.
Woowa Brothers also entered the sales management data market with a ‘Baemin ledger’ similar to Cash Note. The food note service is getting a good response as a ‘book ledger’ book sales service for the self-employed in delivery shops.
○ 55 trillion won in the food and drink market
According to the Korean Food Material Distribution Association, out of the 205 trillion won in the domestic food material distribution market, the restaurant food material market is estimated to be worth 55 trillion won. Among them, the market share of large companies is about 10%, and the majority are small and medium distributors. It is evaluated that digital transformation is still slow.
The digital transformation of the food delivery market is underway in two axes: cost management software and order delivery. Marketboro is the No. 1 SaaS company in the food delivery sector. Since the launch of the food material platform ‘Market Bomb’ in 2016, the cumulative number of distributors has reached 17,000, and the cumulative transaction amount has exceeded 2.4 trillion won. Spoka runs a restaurant food material cost management app ‘Kitchen Board (formerly Dodo Cart)’. A fridge management app, ‘When is the expiry date’, has also been released which lets you know the expiry date and inventory by taking a picture of the receipt with your smartphone .
With the digitization of the food delivery market, self-employed business owners have a wider choice of distributors, and competition among companies to shorten food delivery time is intensifying.
Baemin Sanghoe, run by Woowa Brothers, Poong, acquired by Korea Credit Data, and Foodist’s Food King, acquired by private equity fund VIG Partners from Hanwha Group in 2020, are managed grocery shopping malls directly. As an exchange shopping mall to buy after comparing the prices of all food distributors, Delivery Lab’s ‘Order Hero’, XbaX’s ‘Order Plus’, and ‘Food Pang’ which connects middlemen and restaurants in Garak Market. Dermamma secured a small and medium market in the neighborhood and turned it into an online platform.
○ Grow vegetables in smart pots in the kitchen
The digital transformation of restaurants is accelerating in many ways. This is the case with the Internet of Things (IoT). The technology to control kitchen appliances such as ovens and fridges with smartphones has already become a daily routine. Abroad, new businesses have also appeared that place cameras inside large refrigerators to identify food stock and expiry dates, or attach sensors to tableware and packaging containers to analyze food materials for allergy sufferers.
The ‘smart garden’ market, where vegetables can be grown indoors, is also growing rapidly. Although large corporations such as Kyowon (Wealth Farm) and LG Electronics (LG Tianun) have entered the plant grower market, new businesses such as Dr. Plants have also joined. According to the Korea Invention Promotion Association, the domestic plant grower market is expected to grow from 60 billion won in 2020 to 500 billion won by 2023.
As the number of eco-friendly consumers increases, related startups such as ItGreen, which provides a recycling service for multi-use containers for distribution, and Poduk, a cleaning and rental company for multi-use containers, are also attracting attention. Various platforms have also appeared, such as Puddin and Dalicious, which regularly delivers food from famous franchises and restaurants, Front 9, which provides a breakfast and side dish delivery service for apartments, and It’s Go, which specializes in food trucks.
The global food technology market grew from $211 billion (approximately 301 trillion won) in 2017 to $272 billion (approximately 388 trillion won) last year, growing at an average annual rate of 7% as technology investment increase in production, distribution, distribution of food in general. , and use. It is expected to grow to $360 billion (about KRW 513 trillion) by 2025.
Reporter Heo Ran why@hankyung.com
