Shin Starr’s robotic food truck kitchen will be serving up Korean barbecue at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

When Shinstar set out to build a stand-alone kitchen, the company realized that the robotic cooking gimmick wouldn’t work in this space. What makes Shin Starr’s OLHSO Korean BBQ food truck successful is being able to cook and serve a hot, fresh, delicious meal at a reasonable price.

“Ultimately, customers don’t care what kind of rocket science is 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 more than 18 restaurants in Korea, came to the United States to lead Shin Star’s culinary operations, which includes a brick-and-mortar restaurant in San Mateo — so there are high expectations for the food. We can’t say from experience whether the food is a hit or not, but we’ll definitely be taste-testing some wagyu galbi and tteokbokki when the food truck arrives at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, where Shin Starr is part of Startup Battlefield 200.

Companies like DoorDash are experimenting with autonomous delivery robots, but Shin Starr is doing the opposite: A human drives the truck, but the body of the vehicle is equipped with the company’s “Autowok,” a modular, AI-powered robotic system that automates cooking, serving, and cleaning. Once Han prepares the components, Autowok takes care of the rest.

As the truck heads down the highway, Shin Star’s automated system retrieves freshly prepared ingredients from the refrigerator, then places them on the conveyor belt. It is then dropped into a tilted cylindrical tray, which rises to high temperatures like a frying pan and rotates to cook the food. After food is cooked and placed in its package, the system can clean and sterilize the package and return it to the flow for cooking.

“It’s designed to be able to serve and cook on the go,” Shane said. “So, if you ordered a wagyu beef dish from your location, let’s say the truck was 15 minutes away. It takes eight minutes to cook the wagyu beef.” [so it] It won’t start cooking your food until it’s seven minutes closer to your location, so when you get your food, it’s literally cooked fresh.

Other robotic kitchen startups have struggled to find product-market fit, but Shinstar believes it can find its niche in airports. The company will soon open an OLHSO bistro at one of California’s leading airports, and if it goes smoothly, the company has other airports interested in implementing this technology.

Since their little airport restaurant doesn’t need to be staffed by human staff, it can operate at any hour of the day.

“At 11 p.m., all restaurants close. There will be no food for the next eight hours, and yet, 10% of all people in the United States travel during those hours, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.,” said Tord Olaf Donum, marketing director at Shin Starr. “This thing will finally give you a fresh, high-quality restaurant meal, without having to buy a Snickers bar from a vending machine or a dry sandwich.”

Shane Starr chose Gower Smith as CEO, a wise hiring decision, since there are few people in the world who know as much as Smith does about high-tech automated retailing. He’s a serial entrepreneur in the space, most recently leading Swyft, which partners with companies like Best Buy and CVS to create luxury vending machines in places like train stations and airports. This allows brands to set up shop without having to devote human labor or leave a large physical footprint.

Smith said the automated nature of the bistro makes it easy to give customers an expectation of how long it will take to cook their order; It is useful in an environment such as an airport, where people may be rushing to catch a flight. A small restaurant needs periodic intervention from a human operator to restock the refrigerator and prepare ingredients, but other than that, it should be able to operate smoothly on its own.

“Airports are where we’ll start, but we’ll go to hotels; people are hungry at 2 a.m. when they get back from traveling, and they want a high-quality meal,” Smith told TechCrunch. “If it’s in a hospital, or on a college campus at 2 a.m. … there are a lot of those environments where we can provide that kind of experience.”

If you want to learn more about Shin Starr from the company itself — while also checking out dozens of others, listening to their demos, and hearing from guest speakers on four different stages — join us at Disrupt, October 27-29, in San Francisco. Learn more here.