When Shin Starr got down to build an autonomous kitchen, the company knew that the automatic cooking trick wouldn’t achieve success. Which would mean Shin Starr Korean BBQ food truck OLHSO success lies in having the ability to cook and deliver a hot, fresh and tasty meal at a reasonable price.
“At the end of the day, customers don’t care about the kind of rocket science that’s in your truck or in your kitchen,” Kish Shin, co-founder and CEO of Shin Starr, told TechCrunch. “They care about the value they get.”
Han Sungil, a chef with greater than 18 restaurants in Korea, got here to the United States to guide Shin Starr’s culinary operations, which include brick restaurant in San Mateo — so food expectations are high. We cannot say from experience whether this food is a hit, but we’ll definitely taste test the wagyu galbi and tteokbokki when the food truck rolls as much as TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, where Shin Starr will be a part of Startup Battlefield 200.
Companies like DoorDash are experimenting with autonomous delivery robots, but Shin Starr is doing the opposite: the truck is driven by a human, but the vehicle’s body is equipped with the company’s “Autowok,” a modular AI-powered robotic system that automates cooking, serving and cleansing. Once Han prepares the ingredients, Autowok will care for the rest.
As the truck drives down the highway, Shin Starr’s robotic system retrieves prepared, fresh ingredients from the refrigerator and then places them on a conveyor belt. They are then dropped into a tilted cylindrical container, which heats up like a wok and rotates to cook the food. Once the food is cooked and placed in its packaging, the system can clean and sanitize the container and then return it to the stream to be cooked.
“It was designed to be able to serve food and cook along the route,” Shin said. “So if you ordered a wagyu beef dish from your location, let’s assume the truck was quarter-hour away. It takes us eight minutes to cook the wagyu beef [so it] it won’t start cooking your food until it is inside seven minutes of your location, so when you receive your food, it will literally be freshly cooked.”
Other food processor startups have struggled to search out product-market fit, but Shin Starr thinks it could find its area of interest in airports. The company will soon open an OLHSO micro-restaurant at a leading California airport, and if all goes easily, the company will have other airports interested in implementing the technology.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Since their airport micro-restaurant does not should be staffed by humans, it may operate at any time of the day.
“At 11 p.m. all restaurants close. There is no food for the next eight hours, and yet 10% of all people fly to the United States during these hours, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” said Tord Olav Dønnum, Shin Starr’s chief marketing officer. “This device will finally give you a fresh, high-quality, restaurant-style meal without having to buy a Snickers bar from the vending machine or a dry sandwich.”
Shin Starr hired Gower Smith as CPO, a clever hiring decision because few people in the world know as much as Smith about high-tech automated retailing. He is a serial entrepreneur in the space and, most recently, a leader Fastwhich partners with corporations like Best Buy and CVS to create luxury vending machines in places like train stations and airports. Thanks to this, brands can arrange stores without involving human labor or taking over significant space.
Smith said the automated nature of micro-restaurants makes it easier for customers to predict how long it will take to organize their order; this is useful in places like the airport where people are rushing to catch a flight. A micro-restaurant requires periodic worker intervention to restock the refrigerator and prepare ingredients, but should otherwise operate independently.
“We’ll start in airports, but we’ll move on to hotels; people are hungry at 2 a.m. when they come back from a trip, and they want a high-quality meal,” Smith told TechCrunch. “If it’s happening in a hospital or on a college campus at 2 a.m.… There are a lot of environments where we can provide that type of experience.”
