T-Chef Technology is a global leading high-tech enterprise of cooking robots. It focuses on the R&D, production and sales of intelligent cooking equipment for Chinese dishes, and provides customers with overall solutions for smart kitchens. The company supports the automatic cooking of thousands of dishes in Sichuan, Hunan, Shandong, Guangdong and other major cuisines nationwide, relying on precision temperature control, automatic high-precision seasoning adding system, uncoated intelligent stirring pot and other technologies. Founded in 2018, the company is headquartered in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, and has received two rounds of tens of millions of investment since its establishment.

Difficulty in eating under the background of aging

According to the national census data, there are 264 million elderly people in China, accounting for 19.7% of the total population. Among them, the number of elderly living alone and empty nesters has reached 118 million, and it is estimated that the number of elderly living alone and empty nesters will exceed 200 million by 2030. Aging has become one of the major social problems that China will face. With the increasing number of empty nest elderly, the problem of difficult meals for the elderly has also surfaced, such as mobility inconvenience and inability to cook independently, time-consuming and labor-intensive cooking, small food consumption and easy waste, special needs for food and nutrition, limited ability to pay, and so on. In view of these pain points, elderly care service communities and institutions are looking for innovative elderly food aid service technologies and exploring the "last mile" solution for elderly dining.

Using machines to solve the problem of difficult dining for the elderly

On June 2 this year, New Xiaoyuan Home based Elderly Care Service Center of Dongjun Community, Lotus Garden Street, Furong District, Changsha City introduced the cooking robot equipment of Zhigu Tianchu, and the first newly built intelligent robot restaurant for the elderly officially opened. Nearly 60 elderly people from the community lined up in order to get their meals.

The intelligent cooking robot adopts Internet cloud recipes and intelligently controls all cooking processes, which not only simplifies the dependence of the restaurant on the chef, but also provides the elderly with a nutritious and age appropriate diet package based on scientific formula and standard process. The diet for the elderly should pay attention to nutrition matching and diversification of meals to ensure that the elderly can obtain rich vitamin, calcium and other needs. Considering the physical preference of the elderly, the meals should be based on 'soft, rotten and broken' to ensure the taste, health and safety of Chinese food on this basis.

In addition, machine cooking can reduce the input of kitchen staff, protect the health problems in the food cooking process, and enable the elderly to eat heartwarming food.

According to the person in charge of Hunan Elderly Care Service Company, the company plans to replicate smart canteens for the elderly in 20 communities across Changsha, so that the elderly in Changsha can eat the same high-quality meals no matter where they go. We also sincerely look forward to the promotion of this business model in other regions of the country to benefit the elderly and protect the happiness of the elderly.

Photo source: Red Network Moment

Expand applications in other fields

The application of T-Chef robot in the community is not only limited to the elderly canteen, but also the same logic can be applied to schools, communities, enterprise canteens, etc. At present, T-Chef Technology has launched campus cafeteria business in Guangdong and Guangxi. Through joint research and development with experts on nutrition balanced youth catering, it has produced hundreds of recipes to maximize the delicious food on the basis of ensuring nutrition. On the other hand, for the problems of less lunch choices in white-collar parks, more online restaurants and expensive prices, T-Chef Technology is also expanding its business in the future to provide clean, hygienic, affordable, healthy and nutritious staff canteens.

Future of pension industry

The presence of cooking robots in the elderly care community is just a microcosm of the elderly care service. As an expert of service-oriented science and technology track, Xirong Shandao will continue to improve the quality of life of the elderly through science and technology in the future, and invest in and empower the good enterprises of related track.