원본보기 아이콘

This is the analysis given by Seonggeun Cho, Principal Investment Manager at Capstone Partners, when asked about the competitiveness of Korea’s cooking robot industry.

By country, efforts to foster cooking robots as an industry remain limited. Each nation is focusing on different areas: the United States on general-purpose robotics and defense, and China on manufacturing automation. As a result, the cooking sector is relatively a niche area.

However, this structure is unlikely to last long. With rapid advances in humanoid development, such as Tesla Optimus and Figure AI, the scope of robotics applications is expanding. Cho commented, "Humanoids are advancing quickly, but it will still take a considerable amount of time before they are actually connected to cooking."

Jaehoon Choi, Senior Investment Manager at LB Investment, shared a similar perspective. After recently visiting humanoid robotics companies in Shenzhen and Hangzhou, China, he noted, "China has an edge in certain aspects, but the gap is not yet significant," adding, "It will take more time to move beyond hardware and achieve actual cooking implementation."

Hyunki Jung, CEO of BeyondHoneycomb, approached the issue from an application environment perspective. He explained, "Kitchens are typically small spaces with repetitive processes, so equipment optimized for specific tasks is more efficient than humanoid robots," and predicted, "For the time being, equipment-type robots are likely to be predominant." Ultimately, over the next few years, the process of installing products in real stores and accumulating data will likely determine competitiveness.

원본보기 아이콘

Experts cited 'data' as one of the key competitive factors that companies must secure before the market fully opens. Once hardware performance reaches a certain level, competitiveness will inevitably be determined by the quality of training data.

Choi emphasized, "Chinese robotics companies are already focusing on data acquisition, continuously collecting and training with local cooking data."

Hyunjun Jung, Director of the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement, also stressed, "It's important to accelerate learning by securing a large volume of high-quality data and developing physical simulators tailored to cooking."

Beyondhoneycomb's 'Grill X' grilled pork belly. Beyondhoneycomb homepage

원본보기 아이콘

Beyond Honeycomb's 'GrillX' dashboard provides information on the cooking process and result analysis. Photo by Seoyul Hwang

원본보기 아이콘

Director Jung also introduced a strategy that leverages Korea’s strength in K-recipes. He noted, "For Korea to lead in food tech robots and humanoids, it will be essential to secure a wealth of tacit knowledge and recipes from skilled cooks." He pointed out that demand can only be sustained if taste itself is well-established.

Kiwoen Lee, Professor of Food Biotechnology at Seoul National University and President of the World Food Tech Council, said, "When the era comes where AI can provide customized recommendations that match consumer preferences, food tech will also be linked to intellectual property (IP)," and suggested a model where cooking robots are branded with recipes from celebrity chefs or entertainers.

He explained that the core asset of K-cooking robots will be the datafication of not only standard cooking manuals, but also the tacit, hard-to-quantify skills of famous chefs, celebrity recipes, and the intuitive judgments of seasoned cooks.

Students are lining up to eat the dinner menu made by the cooking robot at the Seoul National University Gwanak Campus student cafeteria. Photo by Daehyun Kim.

원본보기 아이콘

One way to quickly accumulate data is through the public sector, with large-scale catering systems serving as a representative example due to their repetitive, high-volume cooking operations.

Professor Lee explained, "Unlike small self-employed restaurants, catering services must prepare meals for 100 or 1,000 people in a short period of time. This is difficult for humans and inevitably raises hygiene and quality issues, making the use of cooking robots highly beneficial." He added, "It is important for the public sector to act as an initial customer during the early development stage," citing schools, nursing homes, and the military as examples. The idea is that children exposed to food made by cooking robots at school will more naturally accept it later in life.

Such environments not only serve as sources of demand, but also play a critical role in technology validation. They help resolve issues arising during actual operations and in establishing maintenance systems. CEO Jung said, "For physical AI cooking robots to be adopted in real life, there are high hurdles for on-site installation, maintenance, and certification," stressing the need for increased government support for field testing.

Suhan Park, Professor of Robotics at Kwangwoon University, emphasized the importance of space design. He stated, "It is crucial to design the layout for optimal efficiency when deploying cooking robots-ensuring tasks such as salad ingredient preparation and refrigerated storage occur in the most streamlined workflow within a single space." Professor Park believes this process automation will ultimately serve as a bridge to the era of humanoids.

원본보기 아이콘

However, many in the cooking robot startup space believe that, more than regulatory improvements or government support, companies must develop their own capabilities to compete on the global stage.

In particular, actuators, the core components of robots, account for a significant portion of overall costs. If components are sourced externally, prices rise, directly impacting product competitiveness. Production bases are also increasingly moving to overseas locations such as Vietnam and the Philippines. In a structure where key components and manufacturing are outsourced, the share left for domestic companies is inevitably limited.

Jeongsu Song, CEO of Leapids, said, "In Korea, regulatory issues in the cooking robot sector are not that significant. In fact, the bigger challenges are technological development and production." He continued, "When costs accumulate at the component stage, the final product price increases significantly. Ultimately, how much costs can be reduced becomes the key variable" and noted, "Most domestic companies are still combining existing components without proprietary technologies and simply adding application layers."

The menu selection button appears on the 'AlphaGrill' dashboard of ENI. Photo by Daehyun Kim

원본보기 아이콘

There are still no major competitors, and the golden time remains. The government also recognizes that K-food tech and K-cooking robots are facing a historic opportunity, driven by the global meta-trend of K-culture. With bibimbap, bulgogi, and ramyeon now on tables worldwide, the government is formulating policies to export not only the food but also the robots that make it.

Misun Yoo, Director of the Food Tech Policy Division at the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, stated, "K-food exports are thriving, and one of the government's major plans is to export robot technology together with K-food," adding, "We are at the stage of structurally incorporating food tech into export support policies." In other words, the strategy of bundling food and robots as a "K-package" is being concretized at the policy level.

The ecosystem for the cooking robot industry is not much different from a kitchen itself. If the key players-startups driving innovation, VCs providing capital, academia developing and verifying technology, and the government supporting the market-fail to work in concert, it will be difficult to secure industry competitiveness. The cooking robot industry has only just moved beyond its initial stage. Actual demand is being formed, products are being introduced to the field, and data is being accumulated in real time. In the end, only the ‘K-robot chef’ that endures and hones its technology in the harsh realities of the kitchen will remain.

<End of Series>