Shinkei Systems is deploying AI-powered ikejime robots on fishing boats — and the fish tastes three times better

it? I don't know. Not yet. But we have our uh our only guest of the Friday show. Surprise guest. Surprise guest. Bring him in on the walk-in cam. Whoa. Blowtorrch going. Let's go. Let's go in the jacket. We love it. Save himself. Welcome to the founder CEO of Shink. Fish robot man. The fish robot.

We're doing a taste test. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? First time eating on the show.

Oo yeah see how this goes to happening how are you been a while welcome to the show how you doing the show gentlemen see you okay nice director of culinary amazing good afternoon cool we got a few things to show off here what do you got we got this little sidebyside action we got um some sushi pieces for you guys to try lovely sushi let's get on the mics so people can hear you and uh yeah welcome to the show guys When were these when were these caught, by the way?

So, if you take a look over here, um going in clockwise order from uh the piece close to John, uh you'll see. So, you have one of our pieces, fresh uh frozen. Uh then on the top right, uh you have just a a piece from Whole Foods that we bought this morning. Comparing comparing and contrasting.

You're going to try the side by side right now. We're trying both of them. Like, we're going to try the Whole Foods one, too. I'm a little worried about I'm really a little worried about shots of Jeff Bezos. I don't know. The Whole Foods I don't know.

Whole Foods Whole Foods the the whole the falloff of Whole Foods needs to be studied. So, let's do it. We can get the bucket pole bucket out of here. We can also get the reindustrialized shyola clock out of here. Really clean out this whole area. So, yes. Give me some fish. I want to try the sushi. Let's see.

So, for this species, what we like to do is Okay. What is this species? So, this is black cod. Uh, you know, we source everywhere from central California all the way to Washington and Alaska, you know, later this year. Okay. Caught on a traditional fishing boat. Yeah. It's like fully traditional.

You know, we have anywhere from 35 ft to 80 ft, you know, uh, across all our different partner boats. Um, if you recall, basically the way that we work is we give the machines to fishermanmen for free. We pay them more to use our handling process. And then, uh, we're vertically integrated.

We sell the fish uh directly to a a retailer or wholesale to a distributor that would go to a restaurant. And is the is the machine that you build on the actual uh the ship on the boat? Yeah, it goes directly deployed at sea so that they don't need to keep the fish alive forwarded robot. Forward deployed robot.

We'll love to see it. Okay. Uh and then uh about how old do you think this fish is then? So our fish is going to be 9 days old. 9 days old. Yeah. And you're going to be able to still eat it raw and it'll probably taste better than anything else you ever had. Fantastic. Pretty crazy.

And then the whole food stuff we just got this morning. Okay. So we don't So it could be like a couple years old, right? Oh, really? Putting putting whole foods. Basically, these four are ours and the three are the the the frozen. Fantastic. Whip up the chopsticks or you can just rot with your hands. Okay, there we go.

And if you are one of those people that loves sauce cuz we're Americans, that's a miso sauce. And this is like a what you would call like a kabiaki, like an eel sauce. Okay, great. Great. Here we go. Here we go. There we go. Here we go. Okay. Tell me where to start. I'll start with the whole I'll start with these guys.

Yeah. Tell you which is which. Oh, you won't. Yeah, I think I just did. But whatever. Sit there paying attention. All right. Here we go. Okay. This is just seared just to bring the fat out and change the texture of black cod, but that you can taste the fat as what happens with that species.

And then when you're ready to try those guys. Okay. Okay. Back to back. Back to back. Got the baseline. This is good. I always get hungry during the show. Good. I'm glad to feed you. Wow. Night and day. So, this is yours and this is Exactly. So, the the whole food one just tasted like kind of wet rubber. Yeah. Yeah.

It's more like it's more like homogeneous texture, I feel like. Also, no no flavor at all. Yeah. It just it just was like, "Okay, I just ate something that was just wet. " Yeah. Um versus this one is like I'm not a fish expert, but it has like like it's more there's like layers to it. Yeah.

I feel like this is this You can have the next Whole Food one. I feel like this I feel like this is introducing me to this particular type of sushi. I don't I don't usually order. This is what type of cod? This is black cod. Black cod. Yeah. So sable fish is another name. Start ordering this.

Think of like you know miso black cod from Nou. Yeah. This is the exact same one. We actually we we're uh partnering with you know like 40 mission stars across you know all the different restaurants we work with now. Um and like for most of them they're saying that this is the best black coffee about that one.

Insane with the sauce too. Yeah. So good. Those things with that species that that sauce everything really works hand in hand. Yeah. So the reason what were you doing before this? Oh uh I've been a sushi chef for over 30 years. Well yeah. Yeah. When did you were you like 2 years old when you started?

I quit culinary school and became a Japanese apprentice at a Japanese restaurant and uh worked my way out of the dish pit all the way to start doing sushi. And then I I tried to quit in 2015 and um really got into like aquaculture. Tried to quit. He's addicted.

You always you're always on the precipice of going back into the business. But um I went into aquaculture. I started looking behind and trying to find really good I I've been obsessed with finding good fish, good quality fish.

Uh that led me down to Baja and looking at aquaculture projects and really seeing getting behind in like what fish could be. I wanted to get more local fish. Um and then I got a call one day from one of our uh uh investors and was like I've got something for you. It's going to blow your mind.

And uh I I met Safe and he told me the whole thing and I was obsessed like right from day one. Tell me how we can do this. You should tell the story of your time at Fish trying to source uh was quality.

So, my my chef partner and I, we had a a restaurant in Culver City here, and our whole thing was trying to source as as good as local fish as possible. Nothing against Japan, but I wanted something more local. We have great stuff off our coast.

We just the perception is that the Japanese stuff is just so much better, which it is, but at the same time, it's like you're flying it all the way over here, you're paying this money. So, we wanted to have something that was just a representation of local fish.

Um, and so we were buying from some local fishermen that were doing EKG and bleeding. Oh, really? But the hard part is now we're competing with the other LA chefs. No, I wouldn't I wouldn't I the cost wasn't the thing. It was it was competing with everyone else.

So it was really hard to menu that because you could only if you're on the text thread and you were a little late, everyone else is getting So that local fisherman, hey, I've got this stuff and by the time you answer, oh, no one's built a SAS platform for trading. Yeah.

I could only get my hands on like three to four fish at a time. Yeah. Yeah. So, um it was really hard to menu have it basically every week and so this to me was like, "Oh, this is a no-brainer. This is for us. This is basically a love letter as chefs that want this kind of quality, but at scale now. Now I can So, yeah.

So, talk about scale cuz you you said you're going into Michelin star restaurants. That feels like a little bit of an unfair comparison because I don't usually go to a Michelin star restaurant and say, "Oh, yeah. This is better than Whole Foods. " You know, that's not really the com.

I'm excited about the future where I get Michelin star quality at just, you know, the Whole Foods equivalent or wherever you guys are distributing. So, what are the next steps? How much do you have to scale this up? What's the volume and what's the plan for actually getting this like widely available? Yeah, for sure.

So, great question. We are focused right now on the Michelin star restaurants because they are the taste makers. Totally. But this is, you know, I don't know if you're a believer in trickle down economics, but this is kind of the same thing. Yeah, it's a it's a loose analogy. Yes. Very loose. Yeah.

But I mean the premise is we're we're finding this market market that has a segment the willingness to pay for the quality and then basically use that to get more scale and then you can yeah and we're actually moving and making that transition now.

So like you know you know earlier this year we're doing like you know couple thousand pounds a week. Now we're like you know in eight figures now of like uh just like tens of thousand pounds. Is the bottleneck uh like capital or actually people to build more machines? We cannot build machines fast enough.

We can't build machines fast enough. What's the bottleneck to building more machines? Technicians, if you're listening, reach out, please. Field engineers for deployed equipment. You want to build killer robots. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Reach out. So, yeah. What What What does a technician actually do?

Are they like assembling different parts that have been cut on a CNC or something and piecing together your machine from parts that have been machined themselves? So, we do very very light fabric, but most of it is just assembly in house.

And we work with local machine shops all, you know, in, you know, uh, local to Southern California. And then you know the intention of course is like we're going to build out you know full team that is doing all the assembly work you know and also diagnosis test engineers whatever have you.

Uh right now we're still early days but we're doing you know machine every two weeks at this point. Is there a world where you partner with someone else to help build the machines? We were just talking to Yeah.

We were just talking to uh Chris Power over at Hrien and he was saying like every company will need a Hrien style factory. Of course he's focused on defense technology and ship building and all of that stuff. So he's saying like I'm going to go to a company.

He didn't mention anyone by by name, but you could imagine he goes to Anderoll or Loheed Martin or SpaceX and says, "Okay, you need a new factory to build this stuff at scale. We will set that up for you. We will manage it. It lives on our balance sheet.

" Like how do you think about where the long-term uh like asset sits because that's more of like a capital structure question, right? The machines pay themselves back in 12 weeks very fast and you know, so we're very capital light.

Yeah, there is definitely a world where we could go for CM if we decide that, you know, we're making hundreds of machines. Uh I don't think we'll ever reach that production capacity speed because I don't think we'll need to.

It might we might fragment, you know, if we decide to expand internationally, you know, in different countries have different factories, but you know, in the core factory here in in Southern California, you know, I really doubt we're going to be making hundreds of machines a year. How much does the machine like weigh?

How big is it? It's like Yeah, so it's about you know, you know, it's about as big as this table, right? It's actually much smaller now. Um yeah, it's like the size of like a large refrigerator, you know, 6 feet tall. So you could in theory make that in America and still ship it to Japan if it's totally doable.

And again, that's as a percentage of the cost. Like machine is pretty heavy. It's like 750 pounds. It's going to be frayed. It's going to be on a boat for a month or two, but but it's going to be on boats for a long time. It'll permanently be on boats.

Where uh if people want uh to try which are you allowed to talk publicly about the rest like the various Michelin stars? All our fish are sold under our brand and grade ceremony grade. Um, and so kind of like a nod to ceremony grade matcha right there. So if you go to ceremony. com spelled with an s and with an I.

Uh, we actually have a list of all the restaurants. You'll see all the different ones. We're in every major metro. So like Miami, Austin, Denver, Colorado, uh, Minneapolis, as well as all the coastal cities of like, you know, uh, every every single one you can think of.

Um, and so we'll have like our key restaurant partners there. If you're based in LA and you want, you know, a few buddies of ours, you can go to Yes. downtown in uh, you know, they they do, you know, that's a great story there.

You know, a Japanese chef who came here to the US and she taught a lot of the local fisherman how to do EKG and then started using our product.

He's the guy we really wanted to get to the the uh I I I would save his approval and and we did, which was a huge I think he almost started crying when he came out when we when we I I forget when we actually met. Was it a year and a half ago or two years ago? And you were you it was just you on the team.

You maybe had one other person, two engineers, and you were b you were laying out this plan of like you were going to make the machine. You were going to get it on boats. You were going to like actually produce the fish and then sell it to the end restaurant.

And it sounded uh pretty unhinged to like verticalize basically like go that quickly and own the full process.

But uh it's absolutely the progress when you have such such a huge difference in the fish like it's a no-brainer because you know we actually initially started doing the go to market in uh you know more like a robotics as a service business where you'd pay for every single fish that you would process this way. Sure.

Uh what we found was when we'd work with fishermen you know they're out you know on their Nokia in the middle of the ocean with no like cell service. They're not gonna be sitting there like trying to like post on Instagram some, you know, some fun real about how they cook their fish this way. Sure.

Uh and basically what we would have to do is do all the same work we're doing now of talking to distributors, talking to retailers, teaching them about the technique, you know, across like more nutrition, more shelf life, more weight retention, like all these different benefits.

And so rather than us having to do all that work and and having to share that um for reduced risk with the fisherman, we thought let's just go risk on. And so we basically like build all the machines ourselves. And then uh we owe and maintain them on our balance sheet. Fishermen make more money.

You know, in some cases, we're literally doubling their take-home margins. And you know, obviously this increased shelf life. You know, all those other benefits like trickle down across the entire supply chain and everybody wins. Very cool. Amazing. Awesome. First ever tasting on TV live tasting.

You guys knocked it out of the park. This is a highstakes demo. We might have you might have got it wrong. We might have been like, "Oh, yeah. You guys crushed it. Appreciate you coming out. Thank you for bringing sushi on sushi on the set. Fantastic. Progress is amazing. All right. Well, thank you for having us.

We can we can close out the show together with with the boys here. We'll see you Monday, everybody. Have a fantastic five star on Apple Podcast and Spotify. And uh have a great weekend everybody. D Monday.