These robots prepare meals for a non-profit organization in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District

This ai ropes potato salad Chefs don’t take anyone’s jobs. Not yet, anyway. They are only here as volunteers.

Project Open Hand, a nonprofit founded in 1985 by local grandmother and HIV awareness advocate Ruth Brinker, prepares and packages meals to meet the diverse nutritional requirements of people who need them. The effort began in response to the AIDS crisis, but the nonprofit has since expanded the meals it offers to people with conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or chronic kidney disease.

But it takes a lot of people to prepare these meals, and the Open Hand Project has struggled to attract volunteers to help fill the meal kits. The organization’s headquarters are located in a four-story building in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. During peak hours, the place feels like a big operation, and is usually packed with people. Some of them are there in need of free meals, and some are employees and volunteers there to prepare the food and keep the place running.

The process of assembling medically designed meal boxes can get complicated. Different patients have different needs, so donated meals cannot be one-size-fits-all and must take into account allergies and nutritional requirements based on people’s needs and medical conditions. This is where robots come into play.

“It’s not even that they’re faster,” says Alma Cáceres, a sous chef who works in the meal prep operation at Project Open Hand. “The problem is we don’t have the volunteers.”

Chef Robotics is a San Francisco company that makes “physical AI for the food industry.” It is one of many companies focused on building robots that can better handle physical objects. The chef robots focus specifically on plating – no cooking or cutting – just the process of placing food on a plate on a large scale. It has customers for its machine-made meals, such as Amy’s Kitchen and Factor, the frozen meals company. Chef Robotics is also training its robots to eventually handle more complex tasks, such as assembling hamburgers piece by piece.

The partnership with Open Hand came about as a result of a chance conversation between employees from the two organizations at Bay Area Rapid Transit. When I presented the idea to him, Paul Hepfer, CEO of Project Open Hand, said the cost of renting the robots would be worth it. (Yes, they pay a subscription fee.)

“Nonprofits often operate under a scarcity mentality, and I think that’s a disservice to the people we serve, because you’re not looking for innovations or improvements in quality,” Hepfer tells WIRED. “There’s not a lot of robotics, artificial intelligence, and innovation in tenderloin, I’d wager.”