BEIJING, November 4 (TMTPOST) — Chinese autonomous cooking robot maker YesFond Smart Technology Group announced that it has reached a partnership with Meituan’s drone unit. It is reported that cooperation aims to replicate master chefs’ dishes using autonomous technologies and deliver delicacies to consumers using drones.

Chinese lifestyle service provider Meituan started to explore using drones to deliver food in 2017 to increase logistic efficiency and experience. The drone arm hopes to revolutionize food courier service by integrating on-ground human couriers and drones, aiming to provide a 15-minute-guaranteed food courier service for users within a radius of 3 km.

Autonomous cooking robots enable Meituan to further increase efficiency as one YesFond cooking robot can theoretically finish cooking four dishes in two minutes. This means that from placing an order on a food delivery platform to receiving the order, the entire process will take less than 20 minutes. In comparison, it usually takes consumers 30 to 60 minutes to receive the order they made.

Founded in 2018, YesFond Smart Technology Group specializes in making AI-powered cooking robots and owns its own unmanned restaurant brand Yihexian that uses the company’s self-developed cooking robots. YesFond’s newest 11th gen cooking robot takes up an area of 1.6m² and is equipped with four pans. On average, it takes the cooking robot only around 1.8 minutes to complete cooking a dish and two minutes to finish four dishes. The robot currently supports making over 700 dishes. One human worker can operate two YesFond’s cooking robots. The human workers will be responsible for preparing cooking pre-processed cooking ingredients for the robots. According to YesFond, the company’s cooking robot solution can help provide standardized food quality and higher area effectiveness for catering businesses. In addition, the cooking robots can save catering businesses from going through the trouble of finding qualified cooks.

YesFond received a RMB10 million angel investment from China Prosperity Capital and SeekDource in February 2021. It later completed its Pre-A round financing in October this year.

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