In this pitch and informal Q&A, Timothy Chen, CEO of Sereneti Kitchen, presents the company’s vision of a kitchen appliance called Cooky, paired with the Foodie software platform, that functions like a "Keurig for food." The device uses pre‑portioned fresh‑ingredient trays (akin to coffee pods) and a data‑driven recipe ecosystem to produce one‑pot meals at the push of a button. Chen draws analogies to the iPod/iTunes model and the music‑distribution shift of the early 2000s, arguing that food can be similarly personalized and distributed. He outlines a social component where users can share and monetize recipes, likening it to a Thingiverse‑style community. The discussion covers hardware realities—rapidly rising tooling costs, the need for 3D‑printed prototypes, and the challenges of moving from software to hardware. Chen describes the small founding team, their participation in the Highway One accelerator, and the recruitment of a dedicated mechanical engineer. He emphasizes the importance of data: capturing cooking manipulation data, user taste preferences, and integrating it into a feedback loop to personalize meals. The go‑to‑market plan includes pilot deployments in San Francisco workspaces, leveraging meal‑kit competitors like HelloFresh for context, and a cautious fundraising strategy that avoids premature crowdfunding. Throughout, Chen positions the product as a supplement for busy millennials, aiming to democratize fresh, affordable, one‑pot meals while creating a new content‑distribution platform for food.
Chapters
So we built a cooking machine. So it's like a Keurig for food, right? So instead of trays of fresh ingredients— I mean, I'm sorry, instead of a coffee pod, you put in trays of fresh ingredients into the device, you push a button and sync a recipe from your smart device into the device, and it makes food for you. It's that simple. But we're going for the iTunes and iPod concept married with a Keurig concept to deliver you good food. And these days everybody wants fresh ingredients, they want better food. But it's hard to do that when you're working all the time because millennials are getting busier, they don't have the time, the acuity, and sometimes even the ingredients to actually get that done for you. And we see another phenomenon happening that's tremendous because back in the '90s and 2000s, early 2000s, you had all these large labels in music that did content distribution. And then this came along that said, we take all your content distribution, put it in here, and make it happen for you. So all you have to do is push a button. Same thing is happening in food right now.
I have a question.
Please.
I really like to cook like 2 or 3 times a week. How do you see this product?
More as a supplement for the days that you're too busy? Yep, so part of it is that, and if you like to cook, it's a Thingiverse environment where if you make a great recipe, you socialize it out, you tweet it out, she eats your— Did you say Thingiverse?
I'm sorry?
Did you say Thingiverse? Thingiverse.
Oh.
Yeah. So if she likes your recipe and she takes your recipe and then we send her food, you get to monetize off that. It's just like the music environment where you can monetize off of your creations. And there are 2 billion chefs around the world.
That's interesting.
Yeah, so, so we think the socialization and building the next great platform is very important to us. This is the phenomenon that I'm talking about. You have all these companies springing up to deliver you exactly what you need. This is the same thing that happened in music from the '90s to the 2000s, delivering you the exact thing that you need, content and distribution. Because before, food was organized into vertically integrated channels. You had the suppliers, you had the distributors who distributed into the stores, and that was about it. You don't have any other choice. Now you can personalize. There are over 100 companies that do that now. The environment is coming. phenomenon that we've seen. You know, most of you guys will probably not remember any of these devices. I sure did. I had every one of these devices.
Me too.
But it was all replaced by one, right? You do most of your functionality using software, but one piece of hardware that's able to actually capture the attention of all of these desires that you have. Look around your kitchen. We believe the same thing is going to happen in the kitchen. Taking all these complex functionalities, Put them in processes or simple functionalities that can get you almost part-cooked food or fresh ingredients that you can push a button and get what you want. We're building this for the family, for the home kitchen, because, you know, anybody in hardware here? Raise your hands. So a couple, right? So whether you do software or hardware, I was a software convert into hardware. Something that you learn really quick is that it gets expensive fast. 3D printing gets expensive, even though it's much cheaper now than before. If you're gonna do tooling, I mean, that's tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands right there. You know, you're throwing that money out, and you get one chance to do it right. 'Cause if you don't do it right, by the time you go back to do it again, you just sunk all your costs. So it's a very different dynamic than software.
That's why you have 3D printing now, so you can do a lot of mockups and testing before you actually start.
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's why when you're in Highway 1 or another hardware accelerator program, those things are very important to you. Because there's information all over the world. Right now, people are asking for better things. And I think the hardware revolution is just starting to begin. So even if you're in software, you'll start finding yourself interacting with a lot of hardware to make things happen. So we intend to actually have a cookie in every kitchen. So our device is called Cooky, our software is called Foodie, mirroring iTunes and iPod. And the food that you actually get out of it is one-pot meals. So people just say, well, you just stir, right? Well, if we just stirred pastas, sauces, soups, salads, stews, you can do scrambled eggs, you can do 60% of the world's food in this. And when you go to places like Asia, 80 to 90% of their meals are one-pot meals. Some of you said that, uh, you know, 3D printing of food, it's a great technology, right? But it's really taking food and you're mushing it into a paste and then trying to reconstruct something. How do you do that for lettuce? How do you do that for meats? How do you do that for, you know, let's say the, the tenderloin from, from, from, from beef or pork? It's very difficult. So we think that people should eat better We should think that technology should enhance the process that you currently do now, not to do something that's completely foreign. So we believe in better food and better ingredients makes better meals. We want to put a device in every home and then deliver ingredients to the home so that you can actually eat the way that you want without spending a lot of money. Because, and there's one of the parallels that we've seen in food and music is that before, you know, music A CD used to cost you $13 to $20. Now you can get the songs for $1 or $2. And if you look at food, if you get the ingredients proportioned out to per proportion, it's actually about $1 and $2, $3 worth of ingredients turned into a $15, $20 to $25 meal right across the street. Why is there such a big disparity? It's because of infrastructure and manpower that actually makes the food for you. So could you use robots to help you do that? And if you can, could you settle in between that and still make a large percent of margin? We believe we can. Finally, there's big data in play. And, you know, we're all in the connected world, so there's so much data going on. But look in your kitchen. What data are they really taking and what are they really receiving from what you have? There's not much, right? It's a little bit of time and temperature, and then you usually expunge that after every time you cook a meal. Even the smartest of all foods don't necessarily give you a data chain. But if you think about what a chef does when they cook a meal, they use manipulation. And manipulation data is one of the biggest constraints of whether you can make a great pot of food or you don't. Based on the ingredients that you have. So every time you move around, there's an X, Y, and Z coordinate every nanosecond because that's the love that you put into it. Can we emulate that data from some of the top chefs? Can we emulate that data from your grandmother or your mom to actually make great food? And if we can have all of that data, we know what you eat, what you don't like to eat, what your cuisine preferences are, what your salt, spice preferences are, Those are extremely powerful data that can be circled back into a feedback loop, for those who choose to participate, for brand new meals.
What is your ultimate goal with this? Because if I look at this image, I think like they want to use something like big data and how you sleep and what your schedule is for this day to really calculate how much calories and how much healthy stuff you need to really make that first meal of the day for you and provide you with the kind of nutrition you need. And then already have the cooked meal for dinner at home. Where you can go to wherever you want. There you go.
That's all possible, right? Because it's all about establishing a data ecosystem so that every one of the things that you just talked about can be plugged onto it.
That's interesting.
That's very, very powerful because then it can suggest, hey, you had this in the last 4 months, we think that you'll like this meal from maybe the diner across the street, where instead of they deliver you a final meal, it's almost like slopping you leftovers, they can give you fresh ingredients and then you can teach the machine how to do it. So they can freshly replicate it in your house, whether you live in the Netherlands or whether you live here. That's the beauty of data-driven food. We're a small team right now. We're 3 people. You know, when we first came into Highway One, we had 2. It was just myself and Jesse, because my sisters, they were younger, and being in an Asian family, they wanted them to go to school, go to college, right? Because I'm sure many of you have faced that dilemma as well. They're going to college. And so we're here working on the device. And we were 2 weeks away from the program. We decided to finalize the program, and we decided to go with Highway One. We had a mechanical engineer lined up, because they advised us we had to have someone who's a maker. Because they divide up the teams. Typically, you have to have a hustler. You have to have a software guy who can actually get the thing done and do the firmware. and someone who's actually hardcore on the technical side, on the mechanical. So our team member backed out last minute. At first he was super gung-ho and then he backed out. And we decided that, you know what, we gotta go back to the drawing board. So within a week, we circled back with all of our contacts and found an amazing mechanical engineer who said, alright, I'm quitting my job, I'm moving out here with you guys. We gave him the— our sales pitch to him was that, you know, you have a million reasons not to join us, but there's one reason, which is to live a dream. And I think that's the reason that you guys are all here today. We have an amazing set of advisors because we knew that we were technical. We've worked in robotics, machine learning, but we had to surround ourselves by people who make up our weaknesses, which is food, operations, logistics. So we quickly took in people who were able to actually help us with those aspects. And then we knew that Highway One can get us from where we were, which was almost like a science fair project, to a prototype, to talk in front of investors, and then to actually get it into manufacturing.
Which country is HelloFresh from?
HelloFresh is German.
German?
Yeah, so it's a German company that serves 4 million meal kits a month.
Yeah, I know them because in my university in the Netherlands, they serve fresh food every Tuesday.
There you go. There you go. This is such a big movement that's happening. You know, it's crossing borders. They started in the US about a couple of years ago, and they're one of the largest purveyors of food meal kits. So right now we're raising a small amount of money to actually get us into the market. And part of our market strategy— a lot of companies say, hey, you know what, we're going to make X, and we're going to throw it on crowdfunding and see how things are. I think there's a couple of people in this room that are doing that. We said, OK, that could be great, because we tested that. On day one, but we had to shut it down right away because we— when we went live at TechCrunch Harbor Battlefield, we instantly got questions about, okay, so you have a big prototype. We see, kind of see where you want to go, but exactly how big is it? Exactly what kind of form factor is it? Because when it comes to the kitchen, it's premium real estate on your countertop. So people want to make sure that you can get this thing right. So we shut it down immediately on the day. And we said, okay, let's redo this when we're closer to launch because There are too many companies out there that have a concept, that throw it up, but they don't launch. What Saroya talked about was that, are you gonna have enough money to get through the process? People think that if you raise, you know, a couple hundred thousand or even just, you know, early millions, you may not be able to actually have enough to get through the process and deliver that product. So what we're advising, what we've been advised is that, wait. Get a good product out. Know your stuff. And then when you launch, everybody will love you. So we're taking that strategy. So in between, to mitigate that and to learn about our consumers, what we're really doing is going into places that— places like this. People are busy. People want great food. People want to have a certain type of diet. Why can't we serve the food that goes into here for about half to a third of the price of what restaurants do? We can actually disrupt that, and so far we've seen the market respond. Some of the top workspaces in San Francisco, you've probably heard of all these, are gonna be a part of our ecosystem. We're gonna put a machine there, we're gonna serve them food every day, and we're gonna learn from that experience. That's very valuable in hardware because you get one chance to make it right. You get one chance. 'Cause once you launch, people say you— this is not good, you're pretty much just done. In software you can iterate, but in hardware you gotta get it right. So, Tim,
