For now, Kaikaku is focused on conquering salads and selling its technology to other chains, while also operating its own restaurants.
Beyond the Common Room, it is planning to open more in London.
Kaikaku believes that customers are willing to pay more for the kind of freshly-made salad produced by the machines in the Common Room, yielding a higher profit margin for sellers.
In the longer run, the company is also working on applications such as slicing, cooking and rolling – and eventually wants its technology to make it possible for anyone to serve specialised foods, including the Chinese cuisine made by Chen in his youth.
“There’s a training barrier with a certain set of foods,” says Millar, “which is essentially: can you train an 18-year-old to do this in two weeks?”
“Making an omelette is quite hard, because it’s not just ‘do this for X number of seconds, weigh this out’. You have to track the consistency, track the heat in the pan, stir it around.
“With Chinese restaurants, there’s no really big Chinese restaurant chain in the UK. There’s a few in the US, but they’re not very good. And it’s because you’re going up against families that have been cooking on the wok for their whole lives.
“So the long-term evolution is imbuing those really expert skills into a robot – and then you can bring a whole category of food down into the fast-food market.
“Imagine if you could get steak and eggs on your way to work, because someone can do a medium rare steak every time, perfectly?”