This is an English adaptation of a historical article archived by FoodBud and originally published on February 16, 2023. The original reporting — interviews, the on-site visit and the cost calculations with Richard — was conducted by Traveldaily China (环球旅讯).
A cooking robot from Oak & Egret Technology is being positioned as a way to standardize hotel back-of-house cooking.
In about six months, the company’s Meishanshi cooking robot moved into hotel kitchens across Central China, South China, North China and other regions. Some of the hotels using it most maturely had already recovered their investment, according to the article.
Oak & Egret Technology is less famous in the hotel sector than its two founders: Lao K, also known as Guo Qing, formerly a Meituan S-team member, executive chairman of the sales committee and head of the hotel and travel business; and Yang Jiancheng, formerly CTO of Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts and product director at Qunar. Lao K helped build Meituan’s hotel business and reshape China’s online travel competition, while Yang built key systems for Qunar during the OTA wars.
In the second half of 2021, Lao K, who had originally been an angel investor in Yuanjing Technology, Oak & Egret’s predecessor, formally joined Oak & Egret as co-founder and CEO. Yang Jiancheng became co-founder and CPO. After the organization was set, the company shifted its focus from “Robot + Delivery” to “Robot + Food.”
Robotics is a hard-tech category driven by product quality, so R&D demands are high. One employee from a leading domestic appliance company told Lao K that if developing an air fryer has a difficulty of 1, developing a cooking robot is 100. Lao K thought that was exaggerated: “50, roughly.”
Oak & Egret had invested more than RMB100 million in cooking-robot R&D. Meishanshi contains hundreds of core components and supports automated ingredient and seasoning dispensing, precise temperature control, and public-cloud plus private-cloud recipe deployment. For Chinese stir-frying, where “wok hei” is central, the company says Meishanshi can standardize chef capability so even inexperienced kitchen staff can quickly produce dishes comparable to those made by skilled chefs.
The company’s stated mission is to help large-scale foodservice, including hotels, reduce labor costs while using robots to produce fresh, made-to-order, wok-hei-style food. Lao K describes the vision more vividly: building an “Iron Man” for the back kitchen.
Despite the pandemic pressure on restaurants and hotels over the prior three years, and a cooler primary financing market, Oak & Egret still raised two rounds in July 2021 and April 2022 from Source Code Capital, Tencent and IDG, totaling several hundred million yuan.
Rational was founded in Bavaria, Germany, in 1973 with 18 people. After developing the combi-steamer in 1976, it built a major business around a single category. By 2019, Rational had reached the milestone of 1 million combi-steamers sold globally and 130 million meals produced per day.
According to the article, Rational’s combi-steamer occupies only 1 square meter, combines multiple steaming and baking functions, is easy to use, can clean itself automatically, and saves up to 70% energy compared with traditional equipment. It can cook 90% of dishes on professional kitchen menus worldwide.
Lao K’s hotel-side ambition is to build the Chinese-cuisine version of Rational.
Meishanshi’s core use cases include chain hotels, chain restaurants, premium group catering and food courts. Lao K estimated that China has 10 million foodservice businesses, of which 3 million could use cooking robots. Among 500,000 hotels, about 100,000 have kitchens and food business licenses and could apply the technology.
The hotel opportunity is nearly 30 times smaller than general foodservice, but the pain points are pronounced.
Foshan Hilton, the largest Hilton hotel in the Greater Bay Area, has 700 rooms, 1,500 square meters of meeting space, and capacity for 800 people dining at a buffet at the same time. It also has a Chinese restaurant, banquet hall and four staff meals per day, requiring a well-staffed food and beverage team.
Hiring difficulty, training difficulty and high turnover have long been key pain points for hotels, especially in hotel kitchens.
China’s chef shortage had continued to widen. At the end of 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security listed chef among China’s 100 most labor-short occupations for the third consecutive year. Reports cited in the article said the shortage of Chinese-cuisine chefs had reached 4 million. A recent trending discussion on whether college students could fill the restaurant labor gap also triggered debate over the age break in chef staffing. Due to limited career upside, heavy labor and lower professional fulfillment, many young people are unwilling to become chefs.
Different hotel types also face foodservice challenges that are difficult to reconcile:
The article argues that these problems can now be addressed with robots.
Before using Meishanshi, Richard had examined cooking robots on the market for two years. He summarized three major issues with earlier products.
First, most still required manual loading of ingredients and seasonings, saving labor only during the stir-frying step. “Originally one chef could cook one wok; it became one chef rotating among three woks, with only a tiny change in overall efficiency.”
Second, earlier robots lacked wok hei. Chinese cooking has high heat-control requirements, and different cuisines and dishes require different heat levels. Some previous robots used electric or gas heating from the bottom, but because the wok rotated while heating, temperature was uneven and heat control was insufficient.
Third, they were not smart enough. Many manual steps remained, and it was hard to capture chef experience.
These were the core problems Oak & Egret worked on throughout 2022.
Meishanshi’s process is designed to replicate Chinese stir-frying while standardizing all actions and quantities. A chef or ordinary operator places ingredients into the loading baskets, selects a recipe on the machine panel, and the robot executes the cooking process. Mr. Huang of Xiamen Juncheng Hotel said: “This is a robot that even my security guard, a cooking beginner, can operate.”
Lao K said Meishanshi combines electrical science, magnetism, fluid mechanics and engineering physics. Heating control, wok coating and quantitative dispensing all need to be both fast and precise.
For example, the power deviation of home kitchen appliances is around 10-15%, while Meishanshi needs to control error within 1%. Chinese cooking expressions such as “a little starch slurry” also had to be translated through physics and fluid mechanics, while correcting flavor errors caused by bubbles during dispensing.
As Lao K explained, if several woks are cooking the same pork belly dish, and at the 30-second mark the temperature, spatula rotation speed or ingredient grams differ, one wok may be undercooked while another burns. Meishanshi’s job is to standardize those combinations across every machine.
Meishanshi had up to 500 general dishes covering China’s eight major cuisines. Because some foodservice companies cannot disclose their signature recipes, Meishanshi uses public-cloud plus private-cloud recipe deployment. Operators can use public-cloud recipes directly or customize and manage private recipes in their own private cloud.
Because the robot has fixed recipes, hotels can prepare cutting and portioning in advance. Richard said the time from order to finished dish is only 1-2 minutes, compared with 5-8 minutes for manual stir-frying. Wok cleaning is faster, measured in roughly ten-second units. Once basic stir-frying is handled by the robot, chefs can spend more time developing dishes and creating incremental value.
Beyond labor savings, Meishanshi’s other advantage is quantification and record-keeping, which can support digital upgrades in hotel kitchens.
From the guest perspective, the hotel restaurant journey includes obtaining dining information, ordering through a platform or at the hotel, dining, payment and repeat purchase. On the operations side, this touches multiple systems: hotel-owned membership and direct-sales channels, local lifestyle platforms such as Meituan and Douyin, OTA platforms, SaaS systems such as queueing, ordering, cashier and settlement, the kitchen production side, and procurement through online platforms, prepared-food companies and traditional wet markets.
Some key links in hotel restaurant operations remain disconnected, limiting efficiency. Meishanshi can begin cooking when a user places an order, reducing information gaps from ticket printing and handoff. As more actions are quantified and recorded, hotels can see the raw materials consumed by each dish, number of portions produced and even electricity use. That data can help avoid ingredient waste and spoilage.
Mr. Qiao, urban-area lead for the Ji Hotel Qingdao Financial Center property, said the machine calculates raw-material use down to the gram, improving procurement accuracy and efficiency and reducing disputes in procurement.
According to the article, today’s cooking robots can replace hotel chefs in the RMB6,000-8,000 salary band, before social insurance, housing fund, staff dormitory, uniforms, annual leave and other benefits. The full cost of one hotel chef can easily exceed RMB10,000 per month. Chefs in this band are also more likely to churn than highly paid head chefs whom hotels are willing to retain.
Richard calculated the economics for Traveldaily China using Foshan Hilton’s staff restaurant. The hotel serves four staff meals per day and would need at least 3-4 employees rotating morning, midday and evening shifts to cover a week. With a cooking robot that can operate 24 hours, the staff restaurant mainly needs kitchen assistants for cutting and prep. From a labor-cost perspective, he said purchasing a cooking robot could recover the investment in less than half a year.
Mr. Huang of Xiamen Juncheng Hotel also said Meishanshi worked well for breakfast and staff meals in economy and midscale hotels. After buying one unit, eight dishes that previously required one chef and one assistant for one hour could be completed by one assistant in half an hour.
Liu Yang said that while large five-star hotels such as Foshan Hilton may need four or more machines, a typical economy or midscale hotel covering only staff meals and breakfast can meet demand with one machine for 150 rooms.
At Oak & Egret’s office, Traveldaily China (环球旅讯), which conducted the original reporting, saw another Meishanshi version under testing: “Zhonggangpao,” a larger-capacity version compared with the current “Xiaogangpao.” That aligns with Richard’s need for larger-capacity cooking robots when hotels handle large banquets.
Another product under testing, “Feichi,” targets independent and economy hotels without kitchens. Its prototype resembles an unmanned snack cabinet: consumers scan a QR code on a refrigerator to select boxed meals, rice balls and other meals. A supporting microwave also has scan-to-start functionality: users scan the product barcode in front of the microwave camera to start heating.
For hotel scenarios, Lao K’s view is pragmatic: build useful tools steadily. Rather than only looking for a large market in hotel kitchens, Oak & Egret wants to find more niche use cases.
Across roughly 10 years at Meituan and Oak & Egret, Lao K said he had never really left the hotel industry and had kept thinking about how new technology could help hotels run better.
Over the previous seven or eight years, he used mobile internet technology to help hotels solve internet-marketing problems, bring in more guests and improve occupancy. Now he is using hard technology to help hotels reduce cost, improve efficiency, raise back-kitchen digitization and standardization, improve hotel satisfaction, and address foodservice design and production.
The hotel marketing landscape is now clearer, and it is hard for a disruptive platform to appear in the short term. As competition intensifies, hotels need not only guests but also solutions to staff turnover, declining operating quality and high operating costs. At the same time, customer traffic is increasingly valuable. Beyond serving guests who stay, hotels need diversified services to generate secondary revenue.
Lao K said some hotels previously lacked the capability to provide better food offerings, or found it too difficult and costly, leaving them at a competitive disadvantage. “But with cooking robots and smart food cabinets, we can help them fill the gap in foodservice capability; help the industry better cherish this hard-won traffic, improve hotels’ secondary revenue, and serve users better.”
Asked why the company is named Oak & Egret Technology, Lao K said the oak tree is known as one of nature’s longest-lived plants, able to live more than 10,000 years, while the egret symbolizes peace and happiness. “Our wish is to help people’s lives become better and happier over the long term,” he said. “The important precondition is creating more user value and social value; we hope to use hard technology to continuously help hotel back kitchens standardize and digitize, and promote the modernization of Chinese-style foodservice.”
Note: financing figures, product-testing status and other forward-looking details are historical as of the original February 16, 2023 publication.