Image: Bolk.
In the era of quick commerce and meal deliveries during lunch breaks, Bolk is launching a robotic canteen concept. A promise of flexibility and speed assumed by its founder, Nicolas Jeanne, to rethink the company cafeteria.
The machine looks like a huge vending machine, barely taking up 2m2 on the ground. It’s not much, but she delivers meals at a good rate, up to 60 meals an hour and about 150 meals a day. This is quite enough for a medium-sized company, looking for alternatives to the traditional company canteen, to stick to the era of the hybrid and the reduction in the number of employees present on site.
A few companies have already been seduced, starting with Veepee, which hosts two Bolk machines on its premises.
A V3 in the deployment phase
These automated mini-restaurants are currently only distributed in Ile-de-France, but the Bolk team wants to expand to France in 2023. An opening strategy that will require reviewing the production capacity of the start-up. For the moment, it operates the assembly of its machines in its small Parisian workshop, located in the Cap18 industrial zone.
Bolk’s kitchen is also set to expand. To fill the machines with fresh produce, the company’s delivery people make round trips to customers two to four times a week, depending on needs.
“Freshness and taste are two pillars of our project,” Bolk founder Nicolas Jeanne told ZDNet. And you have to see it when you pass the machine: as on the shelves of a supermarket, the food products used to develop the recipes, previously cut and prepared at Bolk, are arranged in transparent tubes placed vertically. Then these tubes turn and activate to compose the recipe of the dish that the customer orders via the touch interface.
In a few minutes, the dishes are therefore assembled automatically on site. To be more efficient, each movement has been carefully studied, confides Nicolas Jeanne. Even the shape of the automatic machine has evolved. First, the entrepreneur had thought of a rounded design – certainly pretty, but very impractical, he admits. It is through the “successive iterations” that the V3 of the machine – and its some 1,400 assembled parts – saw the light of day. It is this model that Bolk is beginning to industrialize and deploy to its customers.
Up to 300 custom builds
The previous V2, built with parts off the shelf, had been tested by four pilot companies to correct any errors encountered. “There always are. If the dish has defects, then an error message is displayed on the screen, and the customer is refunded instantly,” describes Nicolas Jeanne.
The team works to ensure that this error rate is as marginal as possible. However, if the equipment breaks, Bolk maintains the parts. Repairs are included in the rental package paid monthly by client companies.
For the rest, Bolk is paid on the sale of meals. You have to pay on average between 4.90 euros and 7.90 euros for a dish. “It’s cheaper than having your meal delivered from outside,” says Nicolas Jeanne. On the menu: pasta and quinoa salads, with or without meat, and optional dessert. For the sauce, everyone chooses the desired quantity. Ditto for the size of the plate. The hot and cold dishes change throughout the year to respect the seasonality of the products. About ten recipes are available in a machine, but customers can also personalize their plates (up to 300 personalized compositions).
Three years of R&D
This flexibility has a price: the start-up has not finished raising funds to refine its product and its recipes, in a food market saturated with express delivery players and dark kitchens. After 4 million euros raised last February, Bolk is targeting “between 20 and 30 million euros” in the next stage of its investment plan. The start-up takes on board around sixty business angels, but its founder assumes a “pragmatic” vision of business. “We are going gradually,” he said.
According to Nicolas Jeanne, Bolk is a “complementary service to canteens and connected fridges for companies with more than 500 people”. After the business world, he wants to reach other places such as local shops and hotels.
“This is just the beginning,” says the entrepreneur. With few direct competitors (like Cala and Pazzi on the French market), robotics does not attract mass investors, because “the technological barriers to entry are high and require mastery of hardware and software”, underlines Nicolas Jeanne.
In the case of Bolk, the deployment phase comes after three years of R & D. At the start, Nicolas Jeanne had relied on a consulting firm to solidify the foundations of the project, before setting up an in-house technical team. It is now headed by Ludovic Houchu, former technical director at Softbank Group, in charge of the development of the Pepper and Nao robots, specifies Nicolas Jeanne.
Even with the best robotics in the world, “it’s for the taste and the price that customers come back to Bolk”, notes Nicolas Jeanne. Fresh meals and automated production at an affordable price: will this recipe make Bolk a success? It is in any case the bet of its founder.