In restaurant kitchens, the stoves once controlled by chefs are now being taken over by cooking robots one after another; however, in the home kitchen scenario, they are far from being widely recognized. The few who know about them often hold a skeptical attitude, considering them an expensive and troublesome "big toy". In recent years, chain restaurant brands have accelerated the introduction of cooking robots, and capital has also flooded in intensively, driving the commercial market onto the fast track. In contrast, although sales of home products have grown, they have never truly opened up the mass market. What restaurants need is cost reduction, efficiency improvement, and standardization, while what families expect is a complete "hands-off" experience. This mismatch in demand has led cooking robots to follow two distinctly different growth curves. As large models and robotics technologies accelerate their entry into the kitchen, can AI (Artificial Intelligence) bridge the temperature gap between commercial and home applications?
Commercial Market Accelerates at Full Speed, Home Market Remains "Lukewarm" 2025 is known in the industry as the first year of commercialization for cooking robots. Data from NCBD (Canbaodian) shows that in 2025, the market size of China's cooking robot industry reached 3.81 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate exceeding 20%. It is estimated that by 2030, the market size will exceed 12.5 billion yuan. In the back kitchens of major chain restaurants, cooking machines are gradually taking charge of the "big spoon". Xiaocaiyuan currently has nearly 300 stores introducing cooking robots, and disclosed in its prospectus that it plans to spend 100 million yuan to purchase 2,000 cooking robots; Xiangcunji has closed its central kitchen, shifting to a new model of collaborative fresh cooking by humans and cooking robots;
Seven Fresh Kitchen, under JD.com, has openly adopted cooking robots and plans to build 10,000 stores in three years. According to statistics from the Hongcan Industry Research Institute, in 2025, the penetration rate of intelligent cooking equipment among chain restaurant brands in China has reached 40%. It is expected that by 2028, the penetration rate of cooking robots in the group meal and fast food tracks will rise to 50%. At the same time, capital market attention to the commercial track continues to rise. After 2023, financing events for cooking robot companies have significantly increased, with some leading companies obtaining hundreds of millions of yuan in financing. For example, Xianglu Robotics has successively received investments from Source Code Capital, Tencent, IDG Capital, and JD Group, with a cumulative disclosed financing amount of hundreds of millions of yuan; BOTINKIT has also completed multiple rounds of financing, with investors including Xianfeng Venture Capital, Jiupai Capital, Clearwater Bay Fund, and Alphaist Partners. Meanwhile, industrial capital such as Guoquan Food and Robam Appliances has also begun to enter the market. With accelerated implementation on the industrial end and active layout on the capital end, the commercial track has fully entered a stage of high-speed expansion. In contrast, the home market appears somewhat flat. Data from NCBD (Canbaodian) shows that in 2025, the home market share of cooking robots was only 5.4%. According to information from AVC (All View Cloud), for the whole year of 2024, the online sales volume of cooking robots in China was about 124,500 units, a year-on-year increase of 38.38%, and the sales volume was about 274 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24.77%. Although the market is expanding rapidly, the base of 124,500 units is still somewhat underwhelming relative to the massive home market. The home cooking robot market is not lacking in corporate attempts, but many products have failed to translate into stable, scaled businesses for the companies.
In 2020, QCOOKER, under Chunmi Technology, launched the "Fully Automatic Multi-functional Cooking Robot", and the product secured 5.12 million yuan in crowdfunding proceeds within 14 days. According to the company's official website, Yang Hua, founder of Chunmi, once called it a "heavyweight weapon" to pry open a new round of kitchen appliance revolution at a media meeting that year, and when talking about sales targets, said, "Let's sell 100 million yuan first." However, at present, reporters can no longer find official purchasing channels for this product on mainstream e-commerce platforms. Some companies that entered the home cooking robot market early have shifted towards contraction and adjustment to varying degrees. The Fanlai M1 cooking machine once received widespread attention when it was launched, but with the discontinuation of the supporting fresh-cut vegetable business, the business closed loop built around hardware and fresh-cut vegetable distribution systems failed to continue, and the product has also been removed from mainstream domestic sales channels; additionally, according to previous media reports, Supor, which has long been at the top of category sales and has successively launched multiple cooking robot models, has also adjusted its product strategy and no longer promotes intelligent cooking machines as its flagship products. At the same time, Tineco, once a leading brand of home cooking robots, also changed course last year and entered the commercial field. The Shiwan series will no longer roll out new home models. A staff member from a market research institution told a reporter from China Electronics News that Tineco "spent a lot of money to push this thing, but actually didn't see much effect." On one side is the booming commercial market, and on the other side is the "lukewarm" home market. Why does this contrast occur?
Merchants Value Cost Reduction and Efficiency Improvement, While Families Pursue Convenience and Effortlessness The rapid implementation of commercial applications is closely related to the growth trend of the catering industry in recent years. Entering 2026, the demand for cost reduction and efficiency improvement in the catering industry has become increasingly urgent. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, national catering revenue in 2025 increased by 3.2% year-on-year, a drop of 17.2 percentage points compared to 2023. At the same time, overall industry prices have entered a downward range, and merchants are facing the dilemma of "increasing revenue without increasing profit". Starting in 2025, the "food delivery subsidy war", which lasted almost the whole year, led to a continuous drop in online catering prices, further increasing the price pressure on offline dine-in services. Coupled with the long-standing problems in the catering industry such as "labor shortage, high mobility, recruitment difficulties, and aging chefs", merchants face high labor costs. According to the "2025 China Catering Industry Annual Report" released by the China Hotel Association, the average proportion of labor costs to operating revenue for catering enterprises reached 22.2% in 2024, second only to raw material procurement costs, becoming a core cost for catering enterprises. The superposition of multiple pressures has made many merchants struggle to move forward. According to the "2026 White Paper on the Chain Development of China's Catering Industry" released by the China Chain Store & Franchise Association (CCFA), in 2025, the number of catering merchants marked as closed throughout the year in the Meituan system reached 3.39 million, an increase of 290,000 compared to 2024, a year-on-year increase of 9.4%. The market is winnowing the sand, and the industry is accelerating its reshuffle. Cooking robots have become a breakthrough path for some catering enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency. According to research by the Hongcan Industry Research Institute, one cooking robot can reduce the need for 1.5 to 2 chefs, boosting labor efficiency 2–3 times and production capacity 3–5 times, and cutting energy consumption by 20%~30%. In its disclosed application cases, Bawu Canteen equipped 2 to 4 cooking robots in each back kitchen, and the daily turnover of a single store increased by about 30%—50%. Different from the commercial logic of the catering industry focusing on cost reduction and efficiency improvement, the core expectation of ordinary consumers for cooking robots is still a qualified "ultimate lazy gadget". As Yang Jiancheng, founder of cooking robot company Xianglu Robotics, said: "The concept for home use is that the more foolproof it is, the better. No one wants to bring home a 'master' that needs to be waited on." However, at this stage, the vast majority of cooking robots on the market cannot achieve true fully automatic operation. Frying, stir-frying, stewing, and boiling, cooking robots are already proficient in all of them. However, outside the cooking process, the early complex and tedious preparation steps such as buying, washing, and cutting vegetables still require users to do it themselves. Consumers commented under relevant reviews, "I feel the most time-consuming part is preparing the ingredients and cleaning up the dishes. To be honest, the part I actually like the most is the cooking process." Some consumers also said, "I would rather have a vegetable preparation machine." In addition, price remains a core factor for ordinary consumers to consider. Currently, home cooking robots have formed a relatively clear price stratification: products in the thousands of yuan range are represented by traditional kitchen appliance companies such as Supor and Joyoung, focusing on automatic stir-frying, timed heating, and preset programs to solve the problem of needing to constantly watch the pot during cooking; products in the 3,000 to 5,000 yuan range are represented by smart kitchen appliance companies such as Tineco, adding digital recipes or automatic seasoning, extending the machine's takeover to ingredient feeding and seasoning; while some high-end models equipped with AI can reach tens of thousands of yuan. For daily kitchen appliances, this pricing obviously exceeds the psychological expectations of most families. Market data also confirms consumers' sensitivity to price: from January to August 2025, cooking machines priced below 1,074 yuan on the JD.com platform contributed 61.8% of the sales volume. Wang Hongji, head of China home appliance research at NIQ GfK, a global consumer research and retail monitoring institution, analyzed that cooking machines are currently still in a transitional stage from "internet-famous novelty items" to household rigid demands. "Compared to the low threshold, low cost, and multi-functional attributes of air fryers, cooking machines have the shortcomings of relatively high prices, insufficient dish adaptation, and tedious cleaning." In addition, home adaptations such as kitchen counter space and exhaust channel renovation are also factors hindering cooking machines from entering households. Wang Hongji believes that the core demands of consumers for home kitchen appliances are time-saving, ease of use, space-saving, and easy maintenance. "For new products to become popular, they must solve localized cooking adaptation and lower the barrier to use."
AI Optimizes Cooking Experience, Full-Chain Ecosystem Still on the Way As large model technologies accelerate their shift from software scenarios such as the internet and office to hardware terminals, AI is redefining a batch of products that were once "lukewarm", prompting the market to re-examine categories that have long been "applauded but not purchased". This includes cooking machines—with the addition of AI, new variables have emerged, and the automation capabilities of cooking machines are penetrating from partial links to the entire process. On the recipe supply side, some models are already equipped with generative large models, which can generate recipes in real time based on existing ingredients and users' taste preferences; on the cooking execution side, temperature sensors can continuously collect the temperature of the pot bottom and the inside of the pot, and dynamically adjust the heating power according to the preset cooking curve; the seasoning stage further reduces manual intervention, with some high-end models supporting automatic dispensing; self-cleaning solutions are also continuously iterating, expanding from a single cleaning procedure to refined processing covering multiple scenarios such as routine cleaning, deep cleaning, and dough residue cleaning. The combination of large models with sensing and control technologies is improving the personalization level and cooking stability of cooking robots. However, what AI can currently solve is more about "what dishes to cook" and "how to cook the dishes well", and it has not yet completely solved the "how to be completely hands-off" that home users care about most. In the view of Yang Jiancheng, founder of Xianglu Robotics, "The future of home intelligent cooking is not just about a single device entering the home, but a complete ecosystem entering the home." The next step for home cooking robots may not be simply connecting a large model to a cooking machine, but integrating the entire process links such as ingredient supply, food preparation, cooking, and cleaning. Fresh food delivery, fresh-cut vegetable supply chains, digital recipes, kitchen equipment, and after-sales service are all topics that enterprises will face. At the same time, the industry has also begun to explore other paths. In March 2026, Fotile released the world's first robot kitchen, relying on heterogeneous robots to complete part of the cooking and cleaning work respectively, demonstrating another possibility for full-process automation in the kitchen. Looking at the broader track, the home general-purpose service robot market is also booming, characterized by fierce competition. From a single smart kitchen appliance, to a fully automated full-chain kitchen, to a general-purpose robot, market and technological explorations are proceeding on multiple fronts in parallel. Whether the future consumer's kitchen will add a smart device or be completely taken over by robots remains to be verified by the market.
Author | Lu Mengqi, Hu Xiuqing (Intern) Editor | Qiu Jiangyong Art Editor | Malia Supervisor | Lian Xiaodong