Food Prep

A prep cook arrives before service and works through a list: onions diced, chicken portioned, sauces made, herbs picked. The knife work alone is a problem for robotics. The cook holds the blade one way for a chiffonade and another for a brunoise, adjusts for a soft tomato versus a hard carrot, and changes speed based on how sharp the edge is right now. Food prep is full of this kind of tactile adaptation.

The first-person camera captures the knife, the board, and the hands as they move through each item on the list. It also captures the peeler, the mandoline, the immersion blender, the scale, and the deli containers that get labeled and stacked. The footage runs through full prep shifts in working restaurants, so you see the interruptions, the cleanup between tasks, and the trip to the walk-in.

Fixed cameras over the prep table and across the kitchen add a third-person view, synchronized to the head camera. A researcher can watch a cook claw-grip a vegetable from above while seeing the blade angle from the cook's own eyes.

Episode segmentation diagramONE EPISODE01Wash02Cut03Portion04Label05StoreEACH STEP: LANGUAGE LABEL · OUTCOME TAG · OPTIONAL HAND / OBJECT TRACKS
A typical food prep episode, cut into the steps your labels attach to.

We segment each prep item into an episode with steps labeled plainly and tagged for success or failure, which includes uneven cuts and dropped product. Hand, knife, and ingredient tracking can be added. Data is delivered in your schema to your storage. Cooks are consented and paid, and we film in five countries.

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