Our story
Built in Paris to solve an unsolved problem.
Cook-e was founded in 2024 by a small team with backgrounds in embedded hardware and food service operations. The observation that triggered Cook-e: the gap between kitchen-closed and venue-closed is served by nothing, and the economics of staffing a cook through it do not work.
What we are building
A new category: the intelligent hold cabinet.
The hold cabinet has existed for decades. Its function is to keep cooked food at serving temperature until it is plated. What it has never done is monitor its own contents, classify doneness state independently per tray, or alert the operator when a tray exceeds its hold window.
Cook-e adds those three capabilities to the hold cabinet. The result is a device that can operate in unattended settings where a conventional hold cabinet requires a cook to watch it.
Vision-first
Doneness classification from sensor data, not from a clock alone.
Hardware-software product
Owns the full stack from cabinet hardware to cloud monitoring to operator dashboard.
Operator economics
Pricing designed around what operators can justify, not around venture-backed subsidies.
The team
Three people, one product.
Raphael Theron
CEO, Co-founder
Former operations director at a multi-site food service group. Identified the unattended kitchen gap from seven years running sites with inconsistent late-night service economics.
Selin Kaya
CTO
Builds embedded systems with a focus on sensor-driven vision pipelines for commercial hardware. Brings years of working through the constraints of camera housing in high-heat, high-humidity environments, the same conditions Cook-e operates in. Leads hardware design and the vision pipeline at Cook-e.
Tom Ashworth
Head of Product
Product manager with previous experience at a hospitality software company. Owns the operator dashboard, alert logic, and the data export formats. Based between London and Paris.
How it started
A late-night bar. A hold cabinet. A timer that meant nothing.
Raphael first ran into the problem managing a concession at a Paris venue that stayed open until 02:00. The kitchen closed at 22:00. The hold cabinet was loaded at close and left to run. By 01:00, the bar staff had no reliable way to know whether trays were still within the safe service window.
A manual timer on the cabinet told staff when the hold window started. It did not tell them whether the food had reached temperature correctly before the timer began, and it did not flag individual trays. The timer was reset by whoever walked past it, not by a doneness event.
Cook-e replaces the manual timer with a system that actually monitors the food. That is the whole product.
Get in touch
Questions about the product or deployment?
We respond to operator enquiries directly. No sales team, no funnel. Send a message and one of the founding team will reply.