I sit down with Rajat Bhageria, founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, to discuss why he believes robot labor is the only way to keep American food supply chains onshore. There are 1.1 million food prep jobs unfilled in the US — the #1 labor shortage in the country. When companies can’t staff those lines, they offshore.

We get into why traditional automation has never solved food prep, how Chef’s AI learns from 100+ robots deployed in real production environments, and why Rajat thinks the future of robotics looks like the LLM stack — shared intelligence on the bottom, vertical-specific embodiment on top.

Enjoy.

Recording date: June 18, 2026

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

02:40 Millions Of Unfilled Jobs In Food

06:46 Robotics Is Required To Keep Supply Chains Onshore

09:58 Automation Challenges In Food Manufacturing

14:50 Generalized vs Specialized Robotics Systems

27:41 Training And Real-World Data In Robotics

32:13 Rajat’s Journey Into Physical Robotics

37:22 Vision For Chef Robotics

38:38 Robots As A Service

41:10 Chef’s Approach To System Integration

44:44 The Future Of The Food System

49:41 Vertical Integration vs Contract Manufacturing

52:06 HPP Technology

53:13 Rapid Fire

Follow Jordan on X:

* https://x.com/jrwolfe

Connect with Rajat Bhageria:

* Chef Robotics: https://www.chefrobotics.ai/

* Email: rajat@chefrobotics.com

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajatbhageria/

Remember to go direct!

Jordan

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