 From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering food IT, fork to farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Food IT Show at the Computer History Museum. Excited to leave the set, take a walk over to the small kind of expo hall and look at some of the crazy innovations that they're showing here. And we're really excited to have Deepak Sikhar. He's the founder and CEO of Chalbotics. Welcome. Thank you. But you've got kind of an interesting thing here. We have Sally, the automated salad robot. So first off, tell us a little bit about Sally. Sally is our first product. We build robots for food service. With Sally, you can walk up to Sally's touch screen and you can customize your salad the way you want. You've got more than 1000 options for building your salad and Sally automatically makes the salads for you and she puts everything into a bowl and she uses robotics technology for doing that so that you get precise weight of each ingredient in the salad. Okay, so it's basically like a carousel with a bunch of ingredients. You work the front keypad and it assembles the salad for you. Right, that's the simplified version of it. Yeah. Okay, great. So what's the main benefits to the... I mean, first off, who's the target market? Is this for me at home? Probably not. It's awfully big for my counter, but is it for commercial applications, restaurant applications? Where's some of the applications? There's actually a lot of markets this can address. With restaurants, we are working with some fast food restaurant makers right now, restaurant chains right now and they like it because today in their chains, they've got four types of salads, each having 500 calories or more and they're not able to attract a lot of demographics like women and families because these people don't always like to eat 1000 calorie burgers and with Sally, they can actually put 1000 salads on their restaurant's menu. You know the exact calories of your salad. You can customize things the way you want and the labor cost goes down as well. You know the exact weight of each ingredient. So you're seeing interest from the restaurant space for that. You're also seeing interest in cafeterias, in offices and universities. The value there is you get food 24-7 and many engineers who work late at night like I do, we like to get food to lunch at 11 PM or midnight and Sally doesn't need to sleep. She's available 24-7 and not just that, not many offices can afford to have a cafeteria. So a cafeteria makes sense today only if you've got more than 500 employees and a lot of offices out there don't have 500 employees. So with something like Sally, they can put it even into these small offices and Sally is a cafeteria which offers fresh food and so we're seeing a lot of interest in that market as well. You're seeing interest in convenience stores because a lot of them are losing tobacco revenue right now and if they put a Sally there, people can get fresh healthy food 24-7 over a period of a day or two and that's valuable as well. Okay, so you just do the machine though, we talked earlier, you don't have a service to reload the lettuce and those types of things. So how do people kind of manage that part of the process? With restaurants, they can go and refill Sally by themselves with other applications like office cafeterias and all. If there's a cafeteria, they can refill the machine. If there's no cafeteria, we actually partner with companies, we partner with companies like Compass Group which actually go and refill vending machines and now they're getting into fresh food as well and those people would take the fresh food from their commissary and they would go and refill it. And so yeah, we work with our partners to service a lot of these applications. So I have to say it reminds me of the Coke machine that you see popping up all over because it's got, it's got 20 bins that can be wet or dry but you've got prefabricated combinations of salads as well as you can make your own and you always have the little calorie counter that tells you whatever you're making, that's what it says. So it's really a lot of variety with really not that many inputs. Yeah, the variety is what is pretty interesting because there are lots of surveys which show millennials love customizable food and this provides mass customization. In fact, I had a guy from Coca-Cola come this morning at this show and he called this the freestyle for salads. So yeah. And then obviously the data component, the cloud component, how does that map in? Cause clearly that's a big piece of the puzzle. Yeah, we actually collect data on what type of salads are sold and we provide that to our customers as well. So if there's a small isolated restaurant somewhere in San Jose and they want to know what salads are popular, if they use one of our Sally machines, we tell them, hey, this is what happened all across the Bay Area. These are the kinds of salads which customers like and they can use that intelligence to craft better, higher selling salads in their own restaurant. Okay, great. Well, if you're not really a salad aficionado like me, you've got the choice to have the chef's established salad. So deep back, I'm going to kick you out and we're going to invite Kelly Olazar up. She's the chef, Kelly, come on up. So this is Kelly Olazar, you work for Chowbotics and you're the one that designs a fancy salad. I am. I enjoy coming up with all these fun, nutritious recipes that keep employees energized and ready to keep going. Now what's nice is that you can establish a recipe and this will give the exact proportions, the exact mixes of the different things that you want to put together to make a certain kind of a salad. Yeah, Sally's incredibly user friendly. So any chef out there that's come up with a great recipe and wants to showcase it as like a last minute lunch special or they want to showcase it that evening for a dinner special, you name it, he's about a minute or a minute and a half to go ahead and pre-program a new salad. So I imagine that there's got to be applications beyond salad, you probably make things beyond salad. Can you put other types of food in the bins? We've been working and discussing the different possibilities, definitely on the horizon. We love to be able to do like poke dispensing out of it and other cold food applications. And then when we do get into hot food applications, we've been discussing those possibilities as well. Okay, before I let you go, what's the best salad that Sally's currently making up? My favorite salad is the California love. I'm a kale lover, so I got to go for that one. I like to add cheese to it and then I use hot sauce as the dressing. And does the data supported that that's the most popular one or that's just your personal favorite? That's my personal favorite. The most popular one supported by the data will definitely be our chicken bot salad. Chicken bot salad. What's the bot in a chicken bot salad? It's a fun play on the name, which Cowabotics. So we got chicken bot and then we also have a powered chow. Very good, all right. So Kelly, thanks for taking a few minutes. So again, Jeff Rick, we're here with Sally. Sally can't speak, so we had Kelly talk, we had Deepak talk. Really interesting innovation, whether it's speed, portion control, or just another way to get a healthy snack to the folks and you don't have enough employee to hire your own Google chef, you can get Kelly, she comes with Sally. So thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Of course, thank you. All right, and thank you too. A Deepak off camera, cool invention. It's Sally from Cowabotics. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from FoodIT here at the Computers Museum. Thanks for watching.