The Solution
A drop-in robotic cell that replaces two line cooks per shift.
Wheels into an existing kitchen footprint in one day. Sold as a service, no capex on the operator's balance sheet. Restaurant keeps the recipe; Forge runs the line.
deck
2. Pitch Deck (15 slides)
Investor Pitch
Forge
Autonomous kitchen cells that drop into your existing restaurant.
The Problem
American restaurants can't hire line cooks.
01
Open positions outpace applicants
180,000 unfilled line-cook roles across US fast-casual today. Stores cap hours because they cannot staff the line.
02
Labor cost has gutted unit margin
Cook wages up 28% since 2021 in major metros. EBITDA on a single store often gone before rent.
03
Turnover is a tax on quality
Annual line-cook turnover sits at 75%. Every retrained cook is a month of inconsistent food and worse reviews.
180K
unfilled line-cook roles
across US fast-casual today
The Product
Three pieces that make robotic cooking real in a working restaurant.
01
Manipulator arm
Six-axis arm tuned for the chaos of a kitchen line. Handles wok, tongs, ladle, sheet pan without re-tooling.
02
Vision + heat sensing
Sees the food and the pan in real time. Tracks doneness, browning, oil temperature without thermometers.
03
Recipe OS
Translates a chain's existing recipes into cell actions. No re-engineering of the menu, no retraining of operators.
Together these turn two cook stations into one cell that never calls in sick.
How it Works
From signed order to first plate in 14 days.
Site survey
One-day kitchen walkthrough. Forge picks the right cell type for the menu and the floor plan.
Cell delivered
Wheels in on a shipping pallet. Plugs into 240V single-phase. No structural work.
Recipe upload
Forge chef-engineers encode the chain's recipes into the cell in 72 hours.
Live service
Cell goes hot during a closed pilot shift with a Forge tech onsite. Operators sign off on output quality.
Production handoff
Cell joins the daily line. Remote ops monitors every cell every shift, 24/7.
Two weeks from PO to a cell on the line, with no kitchen downtime longer than one closed shift.
Features and Benefits
Designed for the operator, not the lab.
01
Drop-in install
One-day kitchen retrofit; no structural work or new gas lines
02
Recipe agnostic
Adapts to the chain's own SOPs in 72 hours
03
Remote ops 24/7
Forge engineers monitor and tune every cell every shift
04
98% uptime in pilot
Average uptime across three production pilots, last two quarters
05
Per-cell pricing
$6,000/month all-in. Includes service, parts, software, and remote ops
Business Model
Robot-as-a-Service. $6,000 per cell per month on 24-month contracts.
Main income
Per-cell subscription
- All-in pricing covers hardware service, software, spare parts, and remote ops.
- No capex on the operator's books.
Unit economics
Unit Economics
- CAC $18k.
- pilot-to-production 70%.
- payback 3.6 months on a $144k contract.
Go to Market
Land regional chains. Expand store by store inside the chain. Then unlock national.
01
Chain HQ deals
First contract is 1-3 stores; scale within the chain post-validation
02
Industry events
NRA Show and FSTEC reach every chain decision maker once a year
03
Foodservice integrators
Lease through Welbilt and Heritage; familiar contracts for operators
04
Founder-led sales
Andre runs ops conversations; conversion 4x vs cold rep teams
05
Pilot-to-production
Three paid pilots active; nine stores in production conversations
The Team
Apple industrial design, Sweetgreen ops, Boston Dynamics manipulation. Built to solve the kitchen-cell problem at every layer of the stack.
Mia Voss
CEO and Co-Founder
Industrial designer at Apple for nine years, led the Vision Pro thermal cell. Cooked professionally before Apple. Built Forge to put Apple-grade manufacturing precision inside a restaurant kitchen.
Andre Park
COO and Co-Founder
Ran East Coast kitchen operations for Sweetgreen during their hyper-growth from 30 to 180 stores. Knows what a line cook does, what franchisees pay, and what breaks at scale.
Dr. Hannah Wei
CTO and Co-Founder
Robotics manipulation researcher, ex-Boston Dynamics working on Atlas dexterity. MIT PhD in dexterous manipulation. Brings the technical credibility that gets the cell to actually pick up a soft tofu cube without breaking it.