Cooking robots for home kitchens: what exists in 2026

Two machines, both about $1,500, both of which want you to chop the onion first. That is the entire shelf of cooking robots for home kitchens in August 2026, and I can find no evidence the second one has reached a buyer.

Everything above that price is a robot arm you cannot get a number for without booking an appointment, or a company whose order page has gone dark. Everything below it is a slow cooker.

What you can order

Prices read from the makers' own pages today unless the row says otherwise. Anything sold as a robot chef for the home is on this table.

Machine	Maker	Price (2026-08-07)	Can you order it	What you still do
Posha	Posha (US)	$1,500 limited-time, $1,750 list, $25 reservation	Yes, next batch September 2026	Chop, weigh, load, wash up
Nosh One	Nosh Robotics / Euphotic Labs	$1,499 with $29 down; $2,000 retail cited	Reservation only	Chop, load cartridges
Oliver (home)	Else Labs	no price published	Waitlist only	Not stated
Robotic Kitchen	Moley	no price; £248,000 with arms at its Dec 2020 launch	"Book an appointment"	Slice and dice beforehand
Chefee	Chefee Robotics	last published $14,995 or $399/mo	Site not serving	n/a
Thermomix TM7 (guided, not autonomous)	Vorwerk	$1,699	Yes	Follow the screen

What $1,500 actually buys

Posha is a countertop box about the size of a large microwave: an 1,800 watt induction cooktop, one robotic arm with swappable spatulas, a camera watching the pan, a motorized spice tray, and dispensers for oil and water. You prep the ingredients into four containers, pick a recipe on the touchscreen, and leave. It flings each container in on cue, seasons, stirs, and adapts to what the camera sees.

The Verge's Jennifer Pattison Tuohy lived with one for three months and scored it 6 out of 10 on December 13, 2025. The good part: "It took complicated and time-consuming dishes and turned out restaurant-quality cuisine with minimal effort on my part." The other column is why this article exists. Expensive, plus a subscription. Still have to prep. Software can be buggy. Requires an internet connection.

That subscription is $14.95 a month, or $179.40 a year, for the full recipe library; without it you get 50 recipes. The machine will not start a cook without Wi-Fi, because the recipes run against a cloud model.

The rest of the numbers come off Posha's order page today: $1,750 list, $1,500 as a limited-time price, $25 to reserve, the balance charged when the unit ships. The company raised an $8 million Series A led by Accel in May 2025 and shipped its first batch that January.

A Posha owner cooks fish by hand on the machine and eats leftover borscht it made from its own recipe (@earthman1, 2026-06-08)

The one in a sealed box

Nosh One is the same idea with a door on it. Five ingredient cartridges, eight spice compartments, a 2,000 watt induction plate, and a sealed chamber so the splatter stays inside. The maker is Euphotic Labs of Bengaluru, selling in the US as Nosh Robotics Inc.

It launched on Kickstarter at $1,499, The Verge reported on March 10, 2026, with shipping promised for "this summer." CNET's David Watsky saw it at CES in January, came away skeptical, and noted the campaign ran to March 25, 2026 with shipments "expected in early summer 2026." He also printed what it cannot do: no baking, roasting, boiling, searing or steaming. It weighs 57 pounds.

It is August 7. The US site still sells a reservation rather than a robot: "Reserve Nosh for $1499 by Paying $29." I can find no published account of a backer receiving one.

The recipe count is worth a look too. The homepage advertises "500+ recipes." The product page one click away says the machine "can cook more than 120 dishes" in one paragraph and "more than 200 recipes" in the next. Three numbers, one website, same afternoon.

Six figures, and you still dice the onion

Moley is the ceiling-mounted twin-arm kitchen that every "robot chef" article has used as its photograph since 2015. When it went on sale in December 2020, The Spoon reported £128,000 for the kitchen and £248,000 with the robotic arms attached. Today moley.com publishes no price at all, and the call to action is "Book an appointment" at the London showroom.

The useful page is the FAQ, where the marketing stops. On whether the user has to prep the ingredients first: "A brief preparation of ingredients, such as slicing or dicing, is required from the user beforehand." A quarter-million-pound machine with five-fingered hands, and the onion is still your problem.

Chefee is the cautionary rung. After its Shark Tank appearance its site took a $250 refundable reservation against a system starting at $14,995 or $399 a month, and gave "Est. December, 2024" as the delivery window. The Wayback capture of February 26, 2025 still showed that date, two months after it passed. Today chefeerobotics.com redirects to chefee.com, which answers with HTTP 402 and a hosting notice reading "App unavailable."

Else Labs sells its Oliver system to commercial kitchens; the home version is a waitlist with no price.

What none of them do

Every machine above is a pot with a smart lid. It stirs, heats, times and seasons. It does not shop, chop, plate, load the dishwasher, or wipe the counter. Posha dices nothing, and it will not sear a steak or a salmon fillet, because whole proteins do not fit the container-and-fling model. Nosh cannot bake or roast. Moley asks for pre-diced onions.

The real job description is unattended one-pot cooking, with five to twenty minutes of knife work on your side and a sink full of containers afterwards. If your week is mostly curries, stews, stir fries and pasta, that is an hour back most evenings. If it is roast chicken and salad, it is a very large object on your counter.

The humanoid answer is not close

The robot people picture when they search for a robot chef is a humanoid at the stove, and that machine has no published cooking record at all. Our chore-by-chore ledger has a row for "cook a meal" and nothing to put in it. Tesla's closest showing was Optimus handing out popcorn at its Los Angeles diner in July 2025, widely assumed to be at least partly teleoperated.

1X sells the only home humanoid you can order, at $20,000 or $499 a month (Neo tracker). The FAQ on its order page lists the question "Can my NEO cook?" and the answer text does not render.

Michael Wolf of The Spoon made the structural argument on March 17, 2026: for the next several years the kitchen robot is a contained countertop appliance rather than a walking one, and Posha's Raghav Gupta describes his own product as "Thermomix plus plus." That comparison holds financially, since a Thermomix TM7 is $1,699 on Vorwerk's US site today, within $200 of both robots.

Robot cooking at scale is real, and commercial. Chef Robotics portions food into meal trays for customers including Amy's Kitchen and has passed 100 million servings, one motion repeated forever in a room built around the machine.

Before you put money down

Price in the subscription and the cloud. Posha is $1,500 plus $179.40 a year and will not cook without an internet connection. Nosh's recipe tier, Culinary+, is a subscription too, free for life on the Kickstarter pledges. Both are startups selling a machine that stops being a machine if the servers stop.

Gupta has an answer for that, given to The Verge in December 2025: should the company ever fold, it will push an update that frees the hardware from the servers. "We will never let a Posha become a paperweight." Plenty of the dead robots in our graveyard had founders who promised something similar. The promise costs nothing while the funding lasts, which is exactly when it gets made, and the only version worth anything is an offline mode shipped before anyone needs it.

The sorting rule from what actually works in 2026 holds in the kitchen too: narrow beats general. A one-pot cooker that never claims to be a chef is a product. A kitchen with arms is still a showroom appointment.