If anyone knows an expert on Japan (or other non-Chinese Asian nations') noodle typologies and preparation, please put them in touch. We aim to open 300 robotic service locations across three markets next year.
Good luck.
https://digjapan.travel/en/blog/id=11660
There are many opportunities for disruption in Japan; this does not seem like the easiest or most profitable one.
And one would imagine there'd already be a noodle stand sitting there since they've had ~80 years to find the optimum spots (going by TFA).
Brings back memories of when they opened a Taco Bell close to the Humboldt State campus and then had to hire 24/7 security to protect it from the anti-corporate vandals who didn't appreciate having tasty tacos within walking distance from campus. I can certainly imagine the mobile robonoodle stands will suffer many an unexplained breakdown when they try to displace another noodle stand.
While resistance to vandalism is a design consideration with any public facility, mainland China has extremely small rates of petty street crime relative to, say, the US or UK. Besides, our business model is not "displace another noodle stand" but "serve frustrated demand wherever it exists" which is typically somewhere else.
I remember either around 2010 or 2011, CCTV ran footage about a famous teenage entrepreneur that was making 6 digits from less than 10 food carts in Shenzhen around Laojie station, when the passage in between first and third line was still above ground.
I myself tried their noodles once when I was transiting through China on my way to or from Singapore. Those were very generic Taiwanese style noodles: shanks, sinew, innards, with tomatoes and a lot of spices. Just what a labourer would want after a long day. I remember, there was like 10 metres long lineup. The price was 18 CNY and 25 for extra large serving, that was a lot back then.
The story of totally mind boggling HEEKCAA tea chain is very similar as I know. The collective that became the company I work in now once pitched them to manufacture their kitchen appliances.
I think nobody can tell what will become the next instant hit of street food. Those things are almost like fashion trends. But I suggest anybody taking on that market to still try going the "single dish restaurant chain" approach. Once you get you fame, you can diversify, but going the other way around is not the best idea money-wise.
That's not so much about cost as such, but about cost of making a good impression. I hope you don't underestimate how much of a foodie an average Chinese person is. Even the demographic of middle age bachelor labourers is quite choosy and will vote with their wallets.
Earning not even bad but just "so so" rep for a restaurant... I believe, for most it is easier to close and start anew than to rehabilitate a brand. That's why I personally believe that going with the best dish you can make, and one with strongest popular appeal is the safest bet to get strong initial impression.
That is easy to see in action when you go to any "food street" in any Asian city. Among many stalls, try to find some with "generic fried noodles," and compare the lineup in front of them with ones with fancy decor and more original dishes.
Do you? Or do you plan to? Careful with the present tense, there, it can be misleading.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be the typical HN middlebrow dismissal guy, and I know you're trying to hustle, but this subthread began with you asking for "expert(s) on Japan (or other non-Chinese Asian nations') noodle typologies and preparation." Your team page lists lawyers and programmers, but no one who apparently knows anything about Asian cuisine. To me, this doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that you can break into which might be an already ruthless market.
Your idea seems obvious... so obvious that I wonder why, if it's such a good idea, no one local has beaten you to the punch yet.
Your idea seems obvious... so obvious that I wonder why, if it's such a good idea, no one local has beaten you to the punch yet.
We've thought about it too and have a huge competitive intelligence database. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to attempt something this aggressive in terms of automated food preparation and retail globally. Most less ambitious, tangentially related ventures fail due to high cost of iteration, poor choice of initial market, poor product, insufficient uniqueness versus established competition, insufficient staying power to negotiate regulatory hurdles, no commitment to total automation, or some combination of the above. I've actively sought out the counsel of founders of such ventures, and had long and interesting telephone calls to obtain the benefit of their experiences.
Have a look at the following businesses, then compare them to ours (we are preparing to manufacture after 2 years with a fully automated solution requiring 2m2 of footprint). 8 years and 25M USD finally got Momentum Machines / Creator a loss-leading semi-automated restaurant. 7 years and 4M EUR has almost got Ekim.fr one 45m2 restaurant with a plan to re-sell at 0.5M EUR/site, likely a small portion of which is profit owing to largely outsourced hardware. 5 years and 3.8M USD got Spyce a semi-automated restaurant with no clear scaling strategy. One observation would be that none of these businesses are particularly scalable because they are not fully automated. Another would be that none of them are in markets this large, and none of them can iterate as cheaply or as quickly on hardware as we can, because we are based in China. In addition, numerous central kitchen model based reheating vending machines lack choice, freshness and personalization and suffer from reduced storage and supply-chain bandwidth due to the prepackaged model.
So why isn't there more competition? Perhaps because it's an area dismissed readily for hand-wavey reasons. Maybe because it requires nontrivial amounts of capital and technical knowledge across multiple disciplines? Perhaps a combination of the above? The attention of the masses is, after all, rather fickle.