Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
What happens when a tech titan decides to cook your lunch?
One e -commerce giant has launched its first no -chef, no -dining take -out restaurant in Beijing.
It's fresh, it's fast, and it's cooked by robots.
Could this be the next big shake -up in China's food delivery industry?
streak. Coming to you live from Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm He Young. For today's program, I'm joined by Steve Hatherley and Yuxian in the studio.
First on today's show, JD .com, one of China's biggest names in e -commerce, is making a surprising offline move.
It just opened its very first brick -and -mortar takeout restaurant in Beijing.
And get this, the food is cooked fresh by robot machines when customers place online orders.
No dine -in seats, no servers, just a tech -driven kitchen built for speed and scale.
JD says it plans to open 10 ,000 of these across the country, hoping to challenge eateries that rely on pre -packaged or half -cooked meals.
So, with a major online giant stepping into the food game, could this shake up China's massive food delivery scene.
Let's start with what exactly JD has cooked up literally, and what makes this place different from the average takeaway joint.
It happened very recently on July 22nd, when Chinese e -commerce giant JD .com opened its first seven fresh chicken, sorry, seven fresh kitchen restaurant in a commercial building in central eastern Beijing's Dongcheng district.
And every dish that they cook is freshly stir -fried by smart cooking machines in one open kitchen that's visible through glass panels, making it really clear.
They're trying to kind of like make an open kitchen concept.
Yeah, we're not serving pre -cooked meal.
These are all cooked on site.
And here's how it works.
So staff, they load pre -prepped ingredients into the machines and in just a few minutes they come out with a freshly cooked dish to boost consumer trust in the meantime they also put not only the transparent on -site glass box to show everything that's done inside there but also live streamed via the JD app using HD surveillance cameras so that you can see like how your food ingredients are being washed being cut, being stir -fried?
Yeah, it's kind of a cool idea because the open kitchen concept, when they do that in quote -unquote normal restaurants, it's so that customers can see inside, watch the chefs preparing the food, and I guess it just establishes a different level of trust. So when you have the transparency there, that would be for the offline customers, but having it live streamed through the app, that would be for the online customers establishing that trust there too.
It's kind of a cool idea.
Yeah, because they're trying to develop this whole supply and delivery chain as well.
It's all under the company's umbrella that they cook the stuff.
You can come and pick it.
And also it offers delivery from online orders as well.
And also this guy, Lil Ben, who is in charge of the business previously, reviewed that in order for them to ensure food safety, they also teamed up with major ingredient suppliers and to make Make sure that everything is traceable from source to your plate.
And also you can, like you said, Steve, you can literally see how your ingredients are washed, chopped and packed in certified facilities.
And then delivered via cold chain logistics that also belongs to JD .com.
And that's just one way for them to eliminate the need for in -store preparation and just cutting down contamination risks.
Sure. And yeah, that's all traceable too, right?
So again, establishing that trust. with the customers um the business itself it's available uh now on the food delivery channel on the JD app itself and it currently covers so it's not you know a huge wide range around the city but they do cover a six kilometer range which is pretty impressive um the dishes are priced really reasonably between 10 and 20 yuan after subsidies and that includes things like pasta and fried rice and noodles and stir -fried dishes and yeah it's a bit of an extensive menu yes indeed and it just seems like jd .com has really done some thorough market research in this sense
and as a chinese food delivery app user i can tell that uh saying that we're doing exactly the opposite to pre -cooked dishes that's users hack number one and then number two we're really um quieting your food safety concerns.
Number two, these are key concerns for Chinese eaters these days.
Everyone. Yeah, like these are really key points, sore points that they are really massaging and making it good for people.
And it's become a big selling point.
JD isn't the only tech player eyeing the food scene.
How does this machine -cooked model stack up against traditional delivery and you know like delivery giants such as Meituan which has more or less established itself here as well?
Well I'm glad you mentioned that because here in China we already had this very sophisticated system for online ordering ordering food, and also for the delivery system.
So I'm just going to quickly go through some numbers and then I'll do the comparison later.
So here, the number of online food delivery users in China that has already reached 592 million by the end of 2024, and that accounts for 53 % of the total internet users here in this country.
And that's confirmed by the China Internet Network Information Center and also data from Xinhua news agency also indicates that from January earlier this year around 56 ,000 online food orders that are delivered every minute here in China so that's how big the scope it is already here to compete with that I think what the 7 fresh kitchen is trying to offer here is of course we're freshly cooking your meal rather than doing pre -processed food like some restaurants have been practicing this whole time ever since the pandemic and it's kind of become like a standard in some chain restaurant franchise
as well that as long as you make sure that the food is secure it's allowed to do so but still people want fresh cook fresh cooked meals and that's what JD .com's platform is trying to offer so that's one one major difference and also for the kitchen facility itself here they have transparent kitchen they have real -time monitoring so that you can literally see how your meals are being cooked versus if i just simply place an order of food online there's no way i can see how they actually put it together another significant difference i think is that this new concept They have their own supply chain system
when talking about ingredients, and they cooperate with big suppliers, and again, all of that can be traced, whereas your traditional food delivery restaurants, they may buy their ingredients from different outlets, which would mean different qualities and different standards, too.
too. So there's a standardized system in place for the source of the ingredients.
The prices, well, you could probably, it's difficult to talk about big price differences because we said that it's about 10 to 20 yuan per dish after subsidies, but you can find that in other food delivery places too.
It just, the price varies so much, right?
Yeah. Speaking of price, I think the restaurants that's offering food delivery, they also have their own standard when it comes to pricing because for some restaurants, they just have more pricier foods to offer so the price that you order from the the apps are naturally going to be higher right but here in the seven fresh kitchen case they're doing everything in one systematic say process so everything is kind of it's meant to be cheap yeah it's meant to bring the prices down right yeah and also jd .com is uh notorious in keeping everything in keep in running the show itself And keeping everything
sort of self -operated.
Oh, yeah, and that's, you know, from day one that this e -commerce company has established that.
So it's interesting to see how even with its so -called restaurant, takeout restaurant endeavor, it's not inviting any, it's not adopting the franchising model.
It's not inviting individuals or companies to join in the operation to help you run the show.
it's merely this we can go into a bit detail later it's only asking people to give me your recipes and i'll pay handsomely for it so this is an interesting thing and we'll get into that and guys we've looked at numbers we've looked at uh reports how is this new business or this new arm of business doing so far um the app showed that the outlet received more than five thousand orders within the past six days and they've got some of the more popular dishes that have popped up already.
They were originally priced around 30 yuan but then with the subsidies the prices dropped to about 15 yuan.
So the more affordable dishes are the top selling dishes so far.
The store itself is located near some residential communities and office buildings So they have a pretty well -established customer base for daily dining, which is an important thing for a restaurant, right?
One thing, though, and I guess this is maybe to be expected, they did appear a little unprepared for the sudden surge in the amount of orders they got around noon, which is a really, really, really busy time for people to order food, right?
There were a lot of delivery drivers apparently outside waiting for dishes in the store.
And the staff that was on site, they advised as well that the order volumes are higher during lunch hours and delays might occur.
And they suggested that if you are going to try the shop, which of course they want you to, that you place your order outside of peak times.
Yeah, it's true. At lunchtime and around dinnertime, if you try to order food, you're probably going to wait a little bit longer.
That's where I kind of have these questions, and let's say it's a curiosity too.
Are their food going to taste all the same?
Because we mentioned earlier how it's cooked by machines.
Isn't that the whole point?
Yeah, theoretically.
I mean, they have, say, formula for certain dishes.
For example, if I want to order a green pepper stir -fried eggs, okay, there's the formula for that.
And then how about green pepper, stir -fried chili pepper or green pepper, stir -fried beef?
Then is that going to be cooked in the same way?
Of course, outside in restaurants, there are real human chefs that can decide on the different flavoring, what's to be added on different type of protein, how to make certain food ingredients taste better.
But here, after everything is standardized, I would assume that it's all going to taste the same.
The robots didn't create the recipes themselves, though.
Yeah, you program the recipe into the robot and the machine will do the cooking.
I mean, this is not a discussion that I would ever dreamt we would have on roundtable six or seven years ago.
I remember back then we talked about, oh, how come in China it's just so difficult to have standardized fast food?
How come we don't have a McDonald's?
And the essence about McDonald's is it's a standardized process.
And so many of these other food conglomerates from the West, they do this.
That is, no matter where you are, whatever franchise store you're at, no matter you're in Saudi Arabia or in South Korea, the Big Mac tastes exactly the same.
And people love that.
And with Chinese cooking, I remember giving the speech on the show, which proved to be completely false.
Now, I was like, there's no way that we can standardize the tomato fried eggs.
That's like a really standard, simple dish.
But every mom cooks it differently in every Chinese household.
But now you can, thanks to robots.
bots. Whenever you program the recipe into it, and then if you have like very standardized ingredients, like what JD promises to do, then in theory, you can kind of do that.
But since we're on that subject, can tech truly replicate the magic of a human cooked meal?
Or maybe, in this particular context, that's not the point.
Maybe the real question here is, can it reliably deliver food that is edible, safe, and affordable at scale?
What do you think? Wow, because based on what we've already touched upon, I think for the safety and for the basic price guarantee part, I think they are trying to guarantee that as a just least standard that they can offer people.
Otherwise, they have no competence with the existing market out there that's, you know, probably offering something better.
And for the taste part, that's a very good question, He Yang, because personally speaking, I would never replace human cooking styles and human chefs with something that's theoretically recreatable via robots.
You can use robots to replace a lot of jobs, as we have discovered in modern times.
But for cooking, everybody has different tastes, and people's tastes, maybe they can also vary by region as well.
well. And here, for example, if I place an order and I expect it's someone that's taking my order and cooking it accordingly, I can tell him or her that I want it less salty.
I want it without garlic.
I want to personalize my meal based on how I like it.
But for machines...
But do you do that when you're ordering food online?
Do you do that a lot?
A lot, quite a bit.
And people do that all the time.
They leave notes sometimes if the If the restaurants or the shop owners fail to do it accordingly, they can even place a negative comment or try to ask for a recook or like a compensate of sort.
So that's how the current system works.
It's all human to human conversation.
But now that we've come to the time that machine is trying to vastly replace all that and I don't know, maybe for some people it works.
I would think that some people that's going after the cheaper price and that they have something as a quick meal to just eat and feel safe that they're eating what they're being offered.
And of course, this is a very good option.
I was going to compare it to, pardon me, a convenience store, right?
When you go to a convenience store and you pick up a meal from there, you're not expecting Michelin level food because of the price point, right?
It's cheap, it's fast, it's affordable, and it does the job.
I think the price point here for this new venture is important because you're able to save money.
And I think from an emotional, psychological point of view, because you know you're paying for something that's a little bit cheaper, you know in your mind that it's clean, you know in your mind that it's fresh because all of that is traceable, you can watch them make it online through the app if you want to.
I think that's going to put a lot of people's standards perhaps a little bit lower than they would be for a chef that's making your meal, a human chef.
That's so weird to say.
A human chef that's making your food in a restaurant.
Maybe, maybe, maybe the standards will be just dropped a little bit, maybe perhaps.
Yeah. And that, unfortunately, is what we see in so many industries when there is a major technological upheaval.
And then it will replace the most likely it will replace the demand of or the job opportunities of maybe the, shall I say, entry or lower level.
And then, you know, whether what kind of impact it's going to have on the market is something interesting to see.
And even high -tech kitchens can get jammed, as we talked about.
What challenges does JD face in scaling this model to 10 ,000 outlets is what they want.
And they're only at number one shop just now.
So what do you think?
Yeah, we've already kind of touched upon how the current existing outlet is already crowded with delivery riders waiting for their dishes to come out, the dishes that they're about to deliver to come out in peak hours.
And that's one thing, of course.
And also for the taste, it's really hard to decide how good or how basic, how satisfying the machines can get.
And also one other thing I'm thinking about is that now that JD .com, the platform itself, is in charge of almost everything, what if, just what if, one step at the frontier of this whole chain goes wrong?
For example, if the food chopping machine is broken or maybe the food delivery patch arrived late, is it going to cause further delay or just simply shut down the whole store for a day?
Like what kind of further impact can be caused or be casted on these individual outlets if there are 10 ,000 more to come in the future?
Yeah, so things can break down in the kitchen, right?
More machines, more buttons, more things to break.
Also, you think about regional tastes, right?
I'm not an expert on Chinese cuisine, but as far as I know, there are different tastes around the country.
So if they're going to standardize a menu, you know, your menu in Beijing might work very well here.
But if you put that same menu in Guangzhou, then maybe it might not work so well.
But that problem could be solved by varying the menu around different locations.
But that is a potential problem, I guess.
and that's a potential issue that they should sort out i think you know you guys make a lot of sense in that way but in theory i don't think it's that hard it's pretty easy to solve i think also you know beijing's so big you know like guangzhou's so big it's worthwhile to come up with like a a special menu for a special recipe for that region and i'm sure like with an e -commerce or essentially tech giant what JD is, you can sort this thing out, can't you?
If you can't, then, well, that's a terrible job.
And there's an interesting thing that I realized, while looking at some of the comments of people who've already ordered from this venture, saying that, yeah, currently, maybe it's there's the novelty of it.
And then people, yeah, Chinese Chinese people, I've said this before, I'll say it again, we have this Star Trek attitude towards technology.
Whenever there's a new gadget, a new tech out there, even if it asks for a lot of data from us, a lot of Chinese people, especially the impressionable, don't know better young people, they just throw themselves at it.
And they want to try it out.
unlike you know you can argue in the west or some of the other developed countries when you've got more of a black mirror kind of attitude when it comes to tech anyhow so right now the orders are lined up for this venture but when the novelty shine uh wears off could this be something that you're still willing to try out and then some people say they're not that satisfied with the taste.
Because I well, as we've mentioned before, like the pre ordered the pre cooked foods is is considered as a terrible thing to have in cooking in recent years.
The bad rep is garnered is astonishing.
Once on our show, we only had the words pre cooked meal in our podcast title and we got a one out of five stars bad review for that really yeah just saying that round table you're talking about pre -cooked meals how dare you we said it's not good we're essentially on the same side as you apple podcast user what's wrong with you that person gave us a one star out of five i'm counting the stars anyway so it just shows that maybe they were a chef Yeah.
People really don't like it.
And surprisingly, you know, we were saying we mentioned if it's robot machine cooking, it's cooked fresh, quote unquote, then it's supposed to be good.
It's supposed to taste wonderful.
But people are saying, no, it doesn't taste all that different from pre -cooked meals.
How astonishing is that?
I wonder if that's fair, though.
And the reason I say that is because there might be preconceived notions.
emotions there might be expectations that are in that customer's brain already right if you were to do a blind taste test right is the and give give the customer you know five different meals the same dish right your stir -fried eggs and peppers and say which one is cooked by a robot now that would be the real test right but if you're if you're asking a customer to order food from a a restaurant where they know that it's made by a robot and in their mind that seed was already planted oh i don't think i'm gonna like this you sean you already said oh i don't know about this because will it taste
good you've already got that seed in your mind so when you actually try it that might influence your decision about the food right i'm just saying that's a possibility right so we have to take those comments with a grain of salt maybe some other feedbacks are saying that the food tastes very oily, which I kind of curious how oily is their level of oily.
Because again, different people from various locations of China have a very different standard on how salty and oily and how sweet certain food tastes.
And yeah, that's not based on merely on the online comments to determine on the quality of these dishes as per now.
Yeah. And now let's talk about recipes and revenue.
In what JD calls the dish partner model, it's offering a guaranteed base payout of one million yuan for a signature dish.
But will chefs and restaurants actually hand over their crown jewels?
Or is it, you know, just too much to ask in this cutthroat market?
I think, well, when I hear that to be their partner, you only need to provide your recipe and also collaborate with JD .com on the R &D part of the dish and don't need to do anything else.
And just simply hand over the recipe to the platform to have them figure out how to replicate it.
I started to have questions, you know, like for bigger franchise, for bigger restaurants, they some of some of them rely on their top, not only top price, but also top reviewed dishes to make a living.
A lot of people go to these restaurants for that particular dishes.
and also for smaller restaurants it's like well why would jd even want to give you a 1 million yuan if you're just a smaller restaurant and doesn't have that dish that everybody knows so it's like both sides are it's just hard it's a lot of money to imagine it's a lot of money it's a pretty big incentive to get chefs to hand over a recipe right and you'd think oh there might might be some reluctance on the side of a chef to just sell your recipe like that but that's over a hundred thousand dollars right a million a million yuan so that's that's a lot of money for for somebody to to receive for that and that's
guaranteed isn't it yeah it's guaranteed base pay but also bear in mind JD is not stupid it will only want because it's very selective with with these so -called signature dishes slash recipes.
And if you haven't established yourself as a super well -known chef with this super great dish, it wouldn't give you the money.
So for like small potatoes, you have no chance in this.
But for the big potatoes, no pun intended, big, you know, chefs with these well -known dishes would they hand over their secret recipe it's like for coca -cola would it give away its secret sauce no like that is the money maker that is what i'm gonna let my grandchildren inherit and forever inherit and that becomes the money maker that's a fair point but jd they announced its initiative to recruit dish partners for 1 000 signature dishes so if they can pull pull this off, right?
If they can get 1000 quality dishes and they can, they can guarantee the standard because as you said, the eggs and peppers to use that as an example, again, you order it from one place.
It's amazing. You order it from another place and this place isn't really that good.
But if you know that it's in a McDonald's sense, you're going to get the same taste from all of these different places and you're paying a lot of money for these recipes.
Now, obviously they're going to be super selective about the recipes that they choose right um i think this can be successful i think this can be really really successful why people are reluctant now is because it's new right we're not used to this concept so i think uh if it gets to be well established this could be you know all for the the good or bad of it i think it could work but again if i am just a customer and i know that this restaurant offers the best green pepper stir -fried in the world that I always go to this particular restaurant for this one dish and now that JD .com is trying to
replicate some copycat on their platform that I know borrowed the recipe from this restaurant are our customers really willing to pay to get that copycat when that original dish is right there yeah so you're kind of potentially competing with with the chefs and restaurants that JD's spent, let's say, one million yuan to buy the recipe from.
I don't see the appeals here on attracting more demographic into their business.
You know what? This part, the partner model part, could just be the gimmick.
That's the marketing strategy.
Get us talking. And then essentially, it could just be, okay, is opening all these offline brick and mortar takeout restaurants and the company name itself is shiny enough to grab people's attention and this is something of an offline business they're trying out and these days yeah they i think all companies want to find like new growth points or something like that.
And with nearly 600 million users and 56 ,000 orders a minute, China's food delivery scene is massive.
In an industry built on speed and convenience, food delivery in China is already a tech power beast. JD's moves shows that, well, Well, this is what's going to happen when platforms start cooking.
Whether it's scales or not, the lines between e -commerce, dining, and automation just got a lot blurrier.
