TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

So once again, thank you so much for listening to this and sharing it with your friends and family, for rating and reviewing it wherever you’re listening, and for following TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I’m DOING on all that social media. So I ask you this…if imitation is the highest form of flattery, what exactly then is recreation? Master artists are out there right now, expressing themselves through music and dance and written word and all kinds of performance, with students and observers out there who will undoubtedly try and emulate and get closer to mastery. Surely, if you also now add AI and machine learning models into this, this process can get accelerated, deepened, and definitely push a lot of boundaries.
Now how about if the artistic substrate that’s being recreated is a basic human need like food? Not just for the instant gratification, because if I could have a pav bhaji from Sarafa in Indore or a chaha from a Dadar mumbai chaiwalla or a cheese slice at V and T’s pizza on the Upper West Side, I’d move the mountain to get that done. But also for the access and allowing for food experiences to be recreated anywhere… and for anyone. So to help think about these questions, it was truly great to catch up with Nikhil Abraham, the co-founder and CEO of CLOUDCHEF. Nikhil is an IIT Bombay graduate and now lives in Palo Alto, CA. Now he’s a music lover and just like you can search and experience and download music from a worldwide catalogue on Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon, Nikhil started asking the question of how to exactly do this… with food. In 2018, he co-founded CloudChef and now also serves as CEO. His vision is to enable consumers to redefine culinary boundaries by taking signature delicious food by any chef from across the world and have that meal recreated locally. CloudChef uses AI to codify recipes from any chef and reproduce them in their cooking facilities, using both software automation and humans in a “co-botic” way to execute the outcome. So far, the concentration has been on Indian food, with award winning high profile chefs and culinary experts as investors, but the hope is to eventually scale to a variety of cuisines and options. CloudChef has brought to life over 200,000 meals so far, and the concept has forced creating new frameworks around things like “chef royalties” and “new distribution models for scaling” and even redefining “recipe ownership”. And while the first layer of intrigue is experiencing a signature dish from a renowned chef delivered right to your door, the second layer may be recreating your own family’s signature dish and automating it at scale! So I was fortunate enough to catch up with Nikhil and in fact we met at Copra, the new San Francisco restaurant of Michelin Award winning chef Shri Gopinathan, who was a previous guest on the podcast and now a CloudChef creator! Nikhil and I chatted about everything from nostalgia to a new era of the food experience to lessons learned, but we started out importantly by talking about whether the art of food should get measured…by purity?