Kernel’s robots take indefinite leave
The onetime robotic vegan restaurant is now a sandwich shop. Here's Kernel Foods COO Tom Cortese on the pivot — and how running Peloton helped him learn to run a restaurant.
I was fortuitously in New York last January when Kernel soft-launched, the latest in a string of restaurants on a stretch of Manhattan’s Park Avenue South working to optimize lunch. This one, dreamed up by Chipotle founder Steve Ells, hoped technology would help it manage and time orders perfectly, resulting in better food. It shared a wall with a location of Just Salad, mere steps from a Cava. Around the corner stood the original (and still best) location of Shake Shack in Madison Square Park.
Then, Kernel’s star employee — and centerpiece — was a robotic arm, tasked with moving food in and out of the oven as human employees assembled vegan sandwiches and other dishes. It was going for a futuristic vibe, I think. The walls were painted a strange shade of green. Employees deposited finished orders in locked cubbies that diners unlocked with their phones. At the time, a rep for the restaurant called it “frictionless.” But, as its leaders would later admit, it was not. The tech, at times, seemed to get in the way.
When a food robot launches, people generally have one of two reactions: They praise the bots for their efficient, novel, and/or potentially transformative technology, or they dislike them intensely, worried what it means to automate a process as personal and high-touch as restaurant food prep. Both are fair responses that demonstrate the hurdles any robot-touting restaurant needs to clear.
Tom Cortese, the chief operating officer of New York’s Kernel Foods, didn’t offer much in the way of consumer sentiment about robots when we talked last week. But he did walk me through the latest iteration of Kernel, which he dubs “2.0.” After all the fanfare surrounding Kernel’s debut, this version is conspicuously robot-free.
“In Kernel 2.0, we have moved the robot to the side,” Cortese says in an interview from Kernel’s Manhattan headquarters. “I’m actually looking at them right here,” nodding off camera. (They weren’t looking back at him, he added.)
Kernel, the restaurant concept, is gone, replaced by a concept called Counter Service. It’s a sandwich restaurant — Eater likened it to Court Street Grocers, a Brooklyn sandwich shop that’s since expanded to Manhattan — and a significant pivot from what Kernel once was. In the polarizing and technically challenging world of employee-assisting restaurant bots, it’s probably for the best.
Cortese is no stranger to robotics. He co-founded hit fitness platform Peloton over a decade ago, putting internet-connected exercise bikes with giant screens inside people’s homes and programming live and on-demand classes for a tech-assisted workout. He says Peloton used over a hundred robots in its own bike factories, then likens a restaurant “make line,” — using a term popularized by Chipotle, probably not ironically — to the same factory assembly line. If a robot can be trained to weld bike parts together, why not to automate and simplify much of the heavy lifting inside a restaurant?
“I thought it was a really smart way to go about it,” he says, “because it’s flexible, because it’s kind of infinitely programmable to do all sorts of different tasks.” And the bots could, in theory. But they weren’t without trouble. In December, the New York Times interviewed what sounded to me like a frustrated Ells, tending to robots that, for the duration of Kernel’s short existence, seemed to overshadow the food.
The logistics of installing and maintaining a highly sensitive robot are considerable, Cortese says. Employees need to be properly trained to interact with it, and it introduces a whole new set of safety rules beyond those of a typical restaurant kitchen. Then there’s the challenge of New York real estate:
“The subsurface of some of these floors were built in 1910… now I’m bolting a sensitive piece of robotics to it, and the floor shifts over time. That really messes up a lot of things,” he says.
I’ve not met nor interviewed Ells (yet!), but I’ve spoken to people who have, and it’s clear that he prioritizes delicious and well-sourced food. Kernel’s head chef spent time in the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park and made chocolate for Brooklyn-based Mast Brothers. Ells worked as a fine-dining sous chef himself under California legend Jeremiah Tower before launching Chipotle.
Kernel started as a vegan restaurant — this seemed hugely important to Ells’s initial vision — but eventually added chicken, thoughtfully Cortese says, due to customer demand.
“Steve stuck me in a car and drove me to somewhere far, far away in Pennsylvania to a chicken farm to… look the chickens in the eyes,” Cortese remembers. (For the record, Cortese also says Kernel’s early vegan menus were “absolutely delicious and would make a phenomenal little boutique restaurant.”)
Counter Service, Cortese says, is a “mini operation with mega aspirations.” The team is still honing the menu, and hours are limited. But eventually it’ll be an all-day sandwich spot with a set menu, serving New York-famous bacon egg and cheese sandwiches — probably multiple variations on the egg sandwich — until close at 7pm.
Some aspects of Kernel’s model will stay. It’ll use a hub-and-spoke model with a central kitchen handling much of the prep and serving up to 25 smaller storefronts. (Eggs for the BEC will always be fried in-house, he promises.) That structure is critical to Kernel Foods / Counter Service’s eventual scale — and, silver lining —the robots might even find a new, behind-the-scenes job inside the main facility.
“We’re consolidating our purchasing and logistics operations into one place, instead of into every single one of our restaurants,” Cortese says. “And then we are concentrating our culinary talent.” He likens it to the early days of Peloton, filming content with multiple fitness instructors inside one New York broadcast studio before scaling to millions of homes.
It’s only then I confess my Peloton allegiance, particularly thanks to instructor Emma Lovewell, who coaches with a certain intensity that I find incredibly motivating. But what could 12 years at a fitness company teach a longtime executive about running good restaurants? Outsiders who arrive to optimize the food business rarely fare well. I expected this to be a tough question.
As it happens, I set myself up for Cortese’s (admittedly good) answer. I should’ve seen it coming.
“Listen to what you just said,” Cortese answers. “You didn’t tell me how much you love your Peloton bike or the software or the hardware. I’m appreciative as hell that’s not what you said. You said you love Emma Lovewell, and that’s what you’re supposed to do… because that’s what matters. What matters is the content, the experience, and you as a consumer.”
The goal of a successfully scaled Kernel Foods, he says, is no different.
This edition of Expedite is adapted from Tom Cortese’s appearance on the latest edition of my podcast, The Simmer.