These Robots Are Making Meals for a Nonprofit in San Francisco’s Tenderloin

These AIs that throw potato salads bosses don’t take anyone’s job. Not yet, anyway. They are just here as volunteers.

Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization founded in 1985 by Ruth Brinker, a local grandmother and HIV awareness advocate, prepares and packages meals to meet the diverse nutritional needs of people who need them. The effort began in response to the AIDS crisis, but the nonprofit has since expanded the range of meals it prepares for people with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or chronic kidney disease.

But it takes a lot of people to prepare these meals, and Project Open Hand has had difficulty attracting volunteers to help fill the meal kits. The organization is housed in a four-story building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. At peak times the place feels like a big operation, usually full of people. Some of them need free meals, others are employees and volunteers to prepare the food and operate the establishment.

The process of preparing medically adapted meal boxes can be complicated. Different patients have different needs, so meals for donation cannot be one-size-fits-all and must take into account allergies and nutritional needs based on people’s needs and medical conditions. This is where robots come in.

“It’s not even that they’re faster,” says Alma Caceres, a sous chef who works on the meal preparation process at Project Open Hand. “It’s because we don’t have any volunteers.”

Chef Robotics is a San Francisco company that makes “physical AI for the food industry.” It’s one of several companies focused on building robots that can better handle physical objects. The chef’s automated robots focus specifically on plating – no cooking or chopping – just putting food on a plate on a large scale. It has customers for its robot-prepared meals, such as Amy’s Kitchen and Factor, the frozen meal company. Chef Robotics also trains its robots to eventually handle more complex tasks, like assembling a hamburger piece by piece.

The partnership with Open Hand grew out of a chance conversation between employees of the two Bay Area Rapid Transit organizations. When presented with the idea, Project Open Hand CEO Paul Hepfer said the cost of renting the robots was worth it. (Yes, they pay a subscription fee.)

“Nonprofits often operate in a scarcity mindset, and I think that does a disservice to the people we serve, because then you’re not looking for innovation or quality improvements,” Hepfer told WIRED. “There’s not a lot of robots and AI and innovation in the net, I’d wager.”