When Shin Starr set out to build an autonomous kitchen, the company knew that the gimmick of robotic cooking wouldn’t carry the business. What would make Shin Starr’s OLHSO Korean BBQ food truck successful is if it could cook and deliver a hot, fresh, tasty meal at a reasonable price.
“At the end of the day, customers don’t care about the type of rocket science that is in your truck or in your kitchen,” Kish Shin, co-founder and CEO of Shin Starr, told TechCrunch. “They care about the value they’re getting.”
Han Sungil, a chef with over 18 restaurants in Korea, came to the U.S. to lead Shin Starr’s culinary operations, which includes a brick and mortar restaurant in San Mateo — so, there’s high expectations for the food. We can’t say from experience whether the food is a hit, but we’ll certainly be taste-testing some wagyu galbi and tteokbokki when the food truck rolls up to TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, where Shin Starr is part of the Startup Battlefield 200.
Companies like DoorDash are experimenting with autonomous delivery robots, but Shin Starr is doing the reverse: A human drives the truck, but the body of the vehicle is outfitted with the company’s “Autowok,” a modular, AI-powered robotics system that automates cooking, serving, and cleaning. Once Han preps the ingredients, the Autowok handles the rest.
While driving on the highway, Shin Starr’s robotic system retrieves the prepared, fresh ingredients from a refrigerator, then places them on a conveyor belt. They’re then dropped into a tilted cylindrical canister, which climbs to high heats like a wok and rotates to cook the food. After the food is cooked and tipped into its packaging, the system can clean and sanitize the canister and put it back into the flow for cooking.
“It was designed to be able to serve food and cook en route,” Shin said. “So, if you have ordered a wagyu beef dish from your location, let’s say the truck was 15 minutes away. It takes us eight minutes to cook wagyu beef [so it] won’t start cooking your food until it has moved seven minutes closer to your location, so that when you get your food, your food is literally freshly cooked.”
Other robotic kitchen startups have struggled to find product-market fit, but Shin Starr thinks it can find its niche in airports. Soon, the company will open an OLHSO micro restaurant in a leading California airport, and if that goes smoothly, the company has other airports interested in implementing the technology.
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Since their airport micro restaurant does not need to be staffed by humans, it can operate at any hour of the day.
“At 11 p.m., all the restaurants close down. There’s no food for the next eight hours, and still, 10% of all people fly in the U.S. during those hours, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” said Tord Olav Dønnum, Shin Starr’s CMO. “This thing will finally give you a fresh, high-quality restaurant type of meal, without having to buy a Snickers bar from a vending machine, or a dry sandwich.”
Shin Starr snagged Gower Smith as CPO, which is a wise hiring decision, since there are few people in the world who know as much as Smith does about high-tech automated retail. He’s a serial entrepreneur in the space and most recently lead Swyft, which partners with companies like Best Buy and CVS to create luxury vending machines in places like train stations and airports. This allows brands to set up shop without devoting human labor or a significant physical footprint.
Smith said that the automated nature of the micro restaurant makes it easier to give customers a prediction of how long it will take for their order to cook; it’s useful in a setting like an airport, where people may be rushing to catch a flight. The micro restaurant needs periodic intervention from a human worker to restock the fridge and prepare the ingredients, but otherwise, it should be able to run smoothly on its own.
“Airports is where we’ll start, but we’ll go into hotels; people are hungry at 2 a.m. when they get in from travels, and they want a high-quality meal,” Smith told TechCrunch. “If it’s in a hospital, or on a college campus at 2 a.m. … There are lots of these environments where we can bring this sort of experience.”
If you want to learn more about Shin Starr from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of others, hearing their pitches, and listening to guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27 to 29, in San Francisco. Learn more here.
