TECHNOLOGY
TRAVIS KALANICK’S PLAN TO RESHAPE RESTAURANTS ISN’T ADDING UP Tech Check: The Uber founder and CloudKitchens CEO unveiled a new company, Atoms, which envisions a new Golden Age through automation. It’s starting with a bowl-making robot for restaurants.
BY JOE GUSZKOWSKI JOSEPH.GUSZKOWSKI@INFORMA.COM
U ber founder Travis Kalanick’s new tech company emerged from “stealth mode” last week after eight years of operating mostly in secret. The company, previously known by the generic name City Storage Systems, is now called Atoms. It encompasses Kalanick’s existing restaurant-related projects, Otter POS, Lab37 food robots, the Picnic office catering service and, of course, CloudKitchens, a network of ghost kitchens with locations in 30 countries. And, because all of that is apparently not complicated enough, Atoms also has two other verticals focused on transportation and mining. The goal of all three businesses is automation—of restaurants, cars and mines— using “gainfully employed” robots, i.e., robots that are designed to do one job rather than many. Atoms believes this robotic triforce will help bring about nothing less than a new Golden Age for civilization—a world where growing, making and moving physical things can be accomplished without human labor. In other words, it could not be more ambitious. In a lengthy mission statement on Atoms’ website, though, Kalanick acknowledges that we’re “less than a millionth of the way there.” And details about how it plans to get there are scarce. (The company has not responded to multiple requests for more information.)
That means for now, the buzz about Atoms is mostly tied to Kalanick’s past accomplishments. Kalanick is a controversial figure. He built one of the world’s most consequential and disruptive companies with Uber, becoming Silicon Valley royalty in the process. He was also accused of creating a culture of toxic masculinity at Uber and allowing harassment and discrimination to go unchecked. In his Atoms’ manifesto, Kalanick suggests that he was unfairly forced out of Uber, and he seems to have something to prove with his re-emergence. When a person like that turns their attention to restaurants, it demands attention, and scrutiny. We’ve dug into CloudKitchens extensively and have found some disturbing patterns and practices (a bit more on that later). But CloudKitchens is just one piece of Kalanick’s larger plans for restaurants. So let’s take a step back and lay out everything we know about what that could look like. Kalanick has variously described his vision for the food part of Atoms as “infrastructure for better food,” “automated burritos” and a “food computer.” He has said he wants to do for food what Uber did for cars, and that he wants to make restaurant delivery as affordable as buying groceries. (Some of this makes sense, as far as elevator pitches go. But then there’s stuff like “food computer,” which seems geared more toward the tech crowd than Atoms’ actual audience, which, presumably, is restaurant
operators. It makes me wonder: Who is all of this for, exactly?) The problem with restaurants, Kalanick says, is that they are like factories that never modernized. While manufacturing in other industries has become increasingly automated, restaurants still rely largely on human labor and all the costs and complications that entails. Labor typically makes up about 30% of a restaurant’s total expenses. “If you look at the labor statistics, etc., restaurants fit under manufacturing for obvious reasons,” Kalanick said during an interview on the tech podcast TBPN earlier this month. “It just hasn’t changed in 50 years.” (Let’s set aside for now whether this characterization is accurate and whether we really want to live in a world where restaurants become food factories. These are topics for another column.) Atoms’ first effort at a solution to this perceived problem is Bowl Builder, an automated assembly line that can churn out anything that goes in a bowl, such as rice, protein, grains and veggies. (No sticky or delicate substances or long noodles allowed, and yes, someone still has to prep all of the ingredients.) According to its website, Bowl Builder can produce 300 bowls an hour, or 200 if they’re being robotically bagged, while reducing marginal labor costs by 30% to 50%, which equates to about two workers on a five-person staff. Elsewhere, the site
40
RESTAURANT BUSINESS APRIL 2026
Powered by FlippingBook