Earlier this week, Chipotle unveiled its latest move to explore the use of more automation in its restaurant kitchens: The test of the “Autocado,” an automated system for peeling, coring and scooping avocados used to make fresh guacamole.
Behind the Autocado is an innovative new tech startup called Vebu Labs, which is based in Los Angeles, and was founded by Buck Jordan. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because Jordan is also a founder of the buzz-making tech company Miso Robotics, which is known for its flagship product Flippy, a robotic arm that can make burgers.
Flippy quickly became the star celeb of the robot world, and was later joined by Sippy, which pours and seals beverages, and, of course, Chippy, which Chipotle is also testing. Chippy is an automated system that fries and seasons tortilla chips—the very chips that will potentially be dipped in the guacamole made with the help of Autocado.
Jordan is also a founder of Pasadena, Calif.-based Miso Robotics. He stepped down as CEO of that company in 2020 but remained president. And Miso Robotics has continued to draw deep-pocketed investors, with some projecting that company could go public. Earlier this year, Miso won a multi-million dollar growth investment from Ecolab, for example, which is looking to collaborate on automated cleaning solutions.
Now Jordan is in fundraising mode with Vebu Labs, operating in the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Segundo. Vebu has about 65 employees, but is looking to expand, he said.
Chipotle made an unspecified investment in Vebu through its Cultivate Now venture fund, which Jordan said will help the new startup with its plans for growth.
Within the next three months or so, Jordan said the company will be able to announce other investors, including restaurant brands and people in the industry—though Jordan declined to say how much Vebu is hoping to raise at this stage.
“Our ideal investor is someone who has a stake in it,” he said. “Whoever invests with us gets a front-row seat.”
His goal is to build a company that offers what he calls “bespoke automation.”
Jordan hopes to work with more restaurant companies the size of Chipotle to help them develop a “roadmap for automation” that is specific to their respective brand.
Fundamentally, restaurants are looking for ways to ease the crush of labor costs and create more efficiency for their staff, he said. Vebu can come into a restaurant’s back of house and study the way workers move to address specific pain points and propose potential automated or robotic solutions.
At Chipotle, for example, each batch of guacamole takes about 50 minutes to make, but much of that time was spent peeling and scooping avocados, a tedious task that was widely disliked by workers.
The solution was creating a system that would take that hassle away, and still produce the fruit that human workers can use to hand-mix the guacamole in-house. The system has the potential of cutting the guacamole-making time in half, Chipotle said.
Autocado, like Chippy, is being tested in Chipotle’s Cultivate Center in Irvine, Calif., and both systems still need to pass the fast-casual chain’s rigorous stage-gate process to determine whether a rollout is viable.
Collaboration on automated projects like Autocado is just one aspect of what Vebu can do, Jordan said. The company will also create its own proprietary robotic products, like Miso has with Flippy, and expand into manufacturing.
One goal is to help restaurants identify “smaller-risk projects,” rather than developing products that require massive multi-year rollouts and huge investments.
Outside of the collaboration with Chipotle, Jordan said he could not reveal what restaurant companies the tech company is working with. But Vebu was involved in the engineering of automated systems for the automated boba-bar concept Bobacino, for example, and the pizza-making machines developed by Piestro, as indicated on the company’s website.
Jordan sees a gap in the market in the robot world.
“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done that’s bespoke,” he said. And there’s a tremendous need for one-stop solutions that involve “building it once and using it twice.”
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