Burger Robot Startup Opens First Restaurant
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Just face it - you're automating a job. If your company succeeds, more people will become unemployed. That's not to say you shouldn't do it, but call it what it is and take responsibility.
We have folks living in tent cities.
12.8% is "on disability"
Yeah we're at full employment as long as you consider U6 rather than the old standard of U5.
June, 2018: "Disability Applications Plunge as the Economy Strengthens"
"The number of Americans seeking Social Security disability benefits is plunging, a startling reversal of a decades-old trend that threatened the program’s solvency. It is the latest evidence of a stronger economy pulling people back into the job market or preventing workers from being sidelined in the first place."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/business/economy/social-s...
Society shouldn't pretend these people don't exist but they're rightfully a different class of unemployed.
Which percentage of society should be permanently alienated from ownership and engagement, and who decides?
And it's a valid point! If people really are choosing not to take jobs that are readily available, then automating those jobs is a net benefit.
Now, we should not ignore the fact that this is stated as a hypothetical! Are there a mass of unemployed who are choosing not to work? And would all of the people who lose their jobs due to burger flipping automation be able to find new jobs or be happy with no job?
Those seem like the more relevant questions.
In any case, very few technologies (relative to everything that's created) actually make living standards better, mostly just things in healthcare. Almost everything else is pretty much a rats race fueled by business and profit, not by intentions of improving people's lives.
To make it a bit clearer...
Currently, humanity as a whole has the resources (materials, technology, etc), to provide good housing, education, food and healthcare for everyone on this planet. However, everyday we choose not to do that and do whatever else it is we do instead.
This is just an observation, not a moral judgement on anyone in particular. By the way, I'm personally not doing anything to change the current state of affairs, so I can't really point any fingers.
Hopefully the situation will change at some point.
U5 is at 4.6%... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
It is also, by definition, lower than U6.
Unless you plan on conscripting children, students, the disabled, stay-at-home parents, and the elderly into jobs (like Steve King[0]), we're at the long run full employment rate.
[0] https://twitter.com/stevekingia/status/967477703011119104
The unemployment rate has been manipulated for various reasons and in various ways for years by politicians whos reputation is directly linked to the number. Again, fact, not a conspiracy.
>The unemployment rate has been massaged and manipulated to the point where you need to stop citing it as a serious measurement of anything other than the scope to which otherwise intelligent people can be deluded.
>The unemployment rate has been manipulated for various reasons and in various ways for years by politicians whos reputation is directly linked to the number.
Uh huh.
In any case, you might want to take a look at the 25-54 LFP. It currently sits at 82%, the same as the rate during the 2000s and two points shy of the all-time high during the height of the dot-com bubble. Prior to 1986 it had never reached this level.
A reasonable statement would note that the labor participation rate was at about 59% from 1950 to 1965, rose over several decades and peaked around 67% in the 90s as women entered the workforce in droves, fell 1% in the 00s and 3% following the recession. It would further be worth noting that the recent fall could be a result of a variety of factors - poor wage growth (might change the calculus of stay-at-home parenting), increasing numbers of young men that prefer to live with their parents and absorb themselves in entertainment rather than "getting ahead" (possibly also affected by the prior wage issue), or baby boomers retiring in increasing numbers, causing a bump in people moving out of the work force.
As for blacksmithing, yeah, the artisanship side of that would be cool. However, considering you have no skill, you'd probably spend six months making horse shoes. If that seems like fun to you, well, you still probably couldn't get that work, because there's just not very much demand for blacksmiths these days. :)
> ...I've done a stint in fast food. He specifically mentioned a gourmet burger place.
> However, considering you have no skill, you'd probably spend six months making horse shoes. If you're doing blacksmithing for a living, most likely you're a farrier. Demand for custom ironwork is very low.
The only farrier I know isn't a blacksmith. Actually I don't remember what her full time job is.
And the only person I've ever known who did custom ironwork was a software tester.
Go figure!
Blacksmiths don't make horseshoes either, that's a farrier's job (who still buy them off the shelf and finish them by hand). Being a farrier is also not an easy job, take a 3 or 4 apprenticeship to become one. There seems to be this viewpoint I see a lot on Hacker News that blue collar jobs are unskilled jobs. Most skilled trades require a 3 or 4 year apprenticeship, you can't just learn how to be a fitter and turner, or a carpenter, or a blacksmith/farrier in a couple of weekends. It's this kind of arrogant attitude that causes the tradies to have no respect for the book-learned engineers straight out of university that think because they have a degree they know how to build a road.
If working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week sounds like fun to you, then I'd totally recommend it.
You'd probably spend most of your day cutting potatoes and washing dishes though, rather than actually cooking burgers. And even if you did get to cooking, you'd be making the same half a dozen menu items day in, day out. You won't have any creative control, you're a production line worker.
About the last part of your statement though: society has already implicitly accepted the crappy minimum living standards (at least in the US) that it's willing to accept. That doesn't make it right for the people stuck having to live according to that minimum.
Of course much of that drop is also demographics; the baby boomers are starting to retire en masse.
Still, the illusion of job abundance does not hold.
In fact the unemployment rate is low because the economy has produced an extraordinarily vast number of jobs. In May alone the US economy nearly produced a million new full-time jobs (solidly contracting the part-time count). The full-time job count is at an all-time record high. The US economy has produced 14 million full-time jobs in just the last six years. [1] And the median full-time income in the US is about $50,000, among the highest on earth.
> notice the record numbers of homeless on the streets?
The US homeless rate per capita has plunged dramatically and is at an all-time record low. [2] You're entirely fabricating your claims, both about jobs and homelessness.
The total homeless count has declined by roughly 27% in just 13 years. From ~760,000 in 2005, to less than 550,000 for 2018. The US added about 10% to its population over that time simultaneously.
How is that possible? Everyone knows the US sucks and has no safety net or support systems. Except, that's a lie. The US welfare state is now more generous than either the Canadian or Australian welfare states. [3]
[1] https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12500000
[2] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-16/the-u-s-s...
Like c'mon. Working for less than a livable wage is just called making America worse. It would be much more productive to kill yourself and reduce the leverage employers have over the proletariat.
"Each month, highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees contact the 60,000 eligible sample households and ask about the labor force activities (jobholding and job seeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the survey reference week (usually the week that includes the 12th of the month). These are live interviews conducted either in person or over the phone. "
It might be a better indicator of "how well is the economy serving the needs of the people", depending on what you value.
It's not even close, which is why it is easy to keep burger flipping jobs find without high wages even when unemployment is relatively low.
> This has been said countless times, but it's worth noting that although there are very few blacksmiths or peat cutters today, somehow we are still pretty close to full employment.
Because “full employment” is a decreasing-over-time share of the population that is actually working (and an even smaller decreasing share actually self-sufficient from work, as a large portion of the working population is dependent on public aid.)
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is a problem that people point to “near full employment” with advancing automation as an excuse to argue against the continued advance of social support structures necessary to make the declining share of the population working (and also the declining share self-sufficient from work) both nearly “full employment” and anywhere close to tolerate conditions.
FTFY
"Some operators even say Uber is taking its toll. 'We have seen a number of our line cooks leave and say that they can make more money driving for Uber,' says Stacy Jed, co-owner of San Francisco’s Bluestem Brasserie. 'And if you think about it, the barrier to entry for Uber is much lower. All you have to do is know how to drive a car. And they can make more money and work less.'"
https://medium.com/@foodrepublic/how-can-restaurants-fix-the...
Don't you need to own a decent car too?
Imagine an employee at the burger place offering event planning services, not just catering. Or knowing that you have family coming in town next weekend for a baseball game and the gamw gets delayed and you're starving after the game, and the employee texts you "Hey, saw your game got delayed, hungry? I can have some burgers sent to the house for the whole family!"
It is automating a job, but I prefer to word it as reallocating resources to improve the experience.
I agree that the founder should be more straightforward. But take responsibility for what? As a business you don't have any moral or legal requirements to employ x people.
Getting rid of this menial jobs will push people to look to do other stuff. It's good for them and for the society. Flipping burgers like a machine all day long is not healthy.
But the founder, Vardakostas, is a person- not a business. A person ccan always consider the morality of the likely outcome of their decisions.
Being truthful.
And of course advantages for the restaurant owner, but also a bit for the employees : more space, generally. The whole kitchen seems to be the size of a small car. That's pretty good.
[1] https://bestlifeqatar.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/20171031_1...
Everytime there are stories on burgers why do so many feel it is ok to run down people who are working and attempt to debase and dehumanize them. Is it some kind of perverse pleasure in running down others?
Why should a random commentator decide what is worthwhile for other people to do, what people should earn or what is the value of their job. Why is it more worthwhile to write html code, do hft trades in office or peddle surveillance and spyware all your life? How come no one else is running them down.
This is no place for such debased comments on other human beings in civilized discourse and the mods here usually on top of things should consider the impact of perpetuating this kind of gratuitous disparagement on entire groups of people.
To be fair, the whole quote (in the article, not the video) is: “We’re playing around with education programs for the staff. Five percent of the time they’re paid just to read. We’re already doing that. There’s a book budget. We’re paying $16 an hour. As opportunities come up to fix the machine, there’s a path we’re going to offer people as repair or maintenance people to get paid even more.”
That is quite different from "when I make these people redundant, they will have time to read".
Their demo unit is very fun, and adds to the gimmick, but like most industrial equipment ease of access is more important than appearances. I'd hate to have to take apart what they demoed for routine cleaning.
And while it is laudable that they're taking the savings and using them on better ingredients, that only lasts until a competitor appears who is going to just lower the price (e.g. "50c burgers here!").
If it manages to actually lower operating costs then it will lower prices in all the segments but it won't just get rid of segments
If you want a more expensive burger, then buy the more expensive one. Of you want the cheaper one then buy that.
It's not "laudable". It is responding to the market and providing a different product.
I wasn't calling engineers less clean. I was saying paying for repairs and maintenance from experts might offset the cost savings (relative to minimum wage, minimum qualified, employees) in the long run.
Self-checkout machines seem to work because the technology is simple enough to be reliable enough. In this case you have moving parts, sensors, and food particles on everything.
I'm skeptical that this machine adds enough value to justify its costs for the aforementioned reasons, but also because of the decreased flexibility. Other fast food restaurants can introduce new dishes and flavors easily, but if they want to do the same they may need to modify the entire machine. For example, adding two patties instead of one, using differently shaped buns or meat, wraps instead of burgers.
In the real world, tomatoes come graded. You pay a lot more if you want them all exactly the same size. They need to be washed, and frequently have woody stems that need to be excised. I didn't see that happening automatically.
And onions don't come pre-peeled in restaurant quantities. The pickle tube is going to jam. The condiments might signal you when they're out, but the nozzles are going to need a good cleaning.
I wonder if they're planning on going Juicero and selling their franchisees preloaded tubes.
Clearly, the observation was, just make the cutting mechanism work like a deli slicer, as opposed to a knife or whatever else the OP had in mind.
Clearly the observation is that these robots are blades that dont need handles because they do everything a handle-using human does without requiring an actual handle. See what I'm getting at? You're telling them they should use a better handle when handles have nothing to do with the actual subject at hand.
The hard part is picking up the vegetables and moving them without damaging them, filtering out the product that went bad after QC at the farm, measuring how much force to apply to both ends to keep it from falling apart, keeping an eye on gunk and cleaning it before it becomes a mechanical problem or food safety hazard, and on and on. You know, the things that you need humans for, not deli slicers.
That's what the OP had in mind. Not what kind of kitchen utensil to use.
Seriously, go back and read the original post. It's all about how hard it is to cut various vegetables. Not the stuff you mentioned. Think you better calibrate, son.
Early on in the food making robot game it will move fast, new versions will come out all the time. Noone wants to eat at the place with last year's robots.
Early on, competing will be intense if the new versions also cut costs heavily. No restaurant that has gone automation will be able to survive if using too far outdated robots in the beginning at least, until it is refined after many iterations.
Humans are self-cleaning and maintain on their own time. Robots will be like any other kitchen equipment, probably very nasty unless there are humans there to clean them on the regular, good policies or really good self-cleaning technology.
Eventually there will be robot upgrading and maintaining third party services, but at that point are you really getting a difference across restaurants other than ingredients? Sometimes people like chefs cooking because it is unique and harder to replicate. We already get lots of food made by robots, they are frozen foods that aren't all that great compared to food made on the spot by real people.
I'm not sure that gives them much, though -- restaurants are pretty capital-intensive, and on those economics the marginal savings of not having burger-flippers doesn't add up to a lot of advantage. Maybe it would be better to sell your machines, to become "the Coca-Cola of burgers" rather than another McDonald's.
Established players don't want to develop these machines in-house, but if you provide clearly better value they can and they will catch up. They'd probably rather buy the technology, though.
Outside of places like San Francisco the few dozen square feet per machine isn't going to be a big deal.
On top of that it can produce multiple burgers at the same. I assume the revenue per machine is potentially 5x of that (or more) which is $691200 per year.
Making money seems like the lowest priority item on the very long list of potential problems with this machine.
Cleaning and restocking? Those are still unsolved and might even be impossible. Making more money merely requires "revision 2: now 30% more efficient!" or just building more than one machine.
Of course there are other expenses such as maintenance, deployment, development and upgrades. But those are the things this company is likely trying to optimize.
I get it, there is a long history of such robots failing economically.
However, automating food assembly could free a huge number of people from menial restaurant work.
Perhaps we would see an explosion of food culture and personalization that simply doesn't exist when you have several fast food chains operating tens of thousands of stores worldwide and the cost of opening up a unique restaurant is greater than many people's lifetime earnings.
I hope this problem is solved one day in my lifetime, and that we all benefit from lower food assembly costs and increased dietary options.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrying
https://thoroglove.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/trappers-hurrier...
Simply put: if a job is so repetitive that it can be automated out of existence, it's in the interest of humanity overall that it should be.
Quite a different way of framing it than your original comment. Here you tout how it's good for "humanity" in general. Before you were touting how this is good for the people being put out of work.
You'd order a complicated dish and watch in amazement as the robots prepare it in front of you.
The founder cares about people's wellbeing, and seems to have a mission. He's been grinding this out for 8 years. It doesn't sound like the other automation food startups out there.
IMO I'd rather have spent less money at the neighboring Chipotle for better food.
Also-- There's more than one company doing that?? Or just one with several locations
It's like in the Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano: there are certain services where people enjoy the human touch; I think food service is one of those.
I might care my first time going, but anytime after that, I just care about getting my food and eating it.
You could pretty much automate the sub construction process since the ingredient prep process is done at an industrial scale and just shipped in bags to each Subway location.
As a person who cooks, 50% of the time is spent cleaning up. I can see gunk, pieces of stuff, residue messing with the machine. A normal person notices and cleans each bit as they go, whereas a machine like this (unless engineered to clean itself) will be cleaned periodically (most likely after business hours). So my point is, I feel like food made by humans is still cleaner and safer.
Also what happens when something needs to be cleaned or replaced mid-lunch? You shut down the machine and open it up... the restaurant loses $. In a normal kitchen, you wipe things up, wash a knife, or grab a new one and keep going.
And as anyone who's worked fast food knows, the higher tech the food prep device, the more delicate it is. Cooking beef results in grease, which gets everywhere. You can put gaskets, physical barriers etc etc, and grease particles will coat everything. Then things will break down.
Add in robotic mandolines for the tomatos/onions, the necessary refrigeration of all the components and you've got something that won't be robust, reliable, or efficient.
Then there's tamper resistance. This thing will need to be hermetically sealed to keep people from doing the usual fsckery that happens in kiosks etc.
And the economics looks "challenging." From the article, it looks like it stocks 30 buns. 30 burgers at $6 is $180 in revenue before someone needs to restock it. And restock the beef. And make sure the artisanal beef deliveries are handled properly. Sounds like a prep cook... Then you'll need cashiers, and people to clean tables, and restrooms, and all the other accoutrements of restaurants.
Yeah, it looks cool, and people do like to see their food cooked. The novelty will attract people at first. Then the lines will deter them. Restaurants are all about volume. And at $6 a burger, you'll need to crank them out fast.
But to answer your question, no. I don't think they've addressed these obvious issues.
Then the parents decide to step away from the business. Their children take over the business, and want to put their stamp on it. Modernize it. They update the menu; redo the decor. Aim for a better clientele. Try to remove the difficult parts of the business with technology. And the business fails. Because they didn't understand the myriad small decisions that lead to its initial success.
Restaurants are incredibly hard to start and run successfully. That's why franchises are so popular, they take some of the guesswork out, at the expense of giving up control and individuality.
At the end of the day, people want tasty food, at a reasonable price, served quickly, and in a decent atmosphere. If this robot can provide that, it'll succeed. I don't see that it can satisfy the second and third criteria. If they get that down, and the cost of the robot isn't higher than a staffed and equipped kitchen they'll succeed.
There's a reason most kitchens are full of stainless steel with smooth edges and nothing that can capture soil.
There's wood in this appliance.
Wood is often used in food prep; cutting boards, butcher blocks, stirrers, rollers and scoops/paddles are often made of wood. Wood surfaces have been shown to have anti-microbial properties that make them well suited for the use:
That's a great elevator pitch. Fluff-free and obvious ex post facto.
Other than the beef, all the other components are standard for a decent restaurant. Fresh baked buns aren't anything special, nor is custom grind meat. And bragging about spending more on your food cost is dumb. It shows that he has no real idea about the day to day of keeping a restaurant financially afloat. He'll find out when the VC money runs out.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE&t=545s
It was most likely cracy expensive just as these news machines are compared to a ordinary restaurant grade kitchen and you still need people going around unstucking things that get stuck.
Bringing industrial processes into street food seems ... unpractical.
That one from the 60s actually looks more impressive, wow!
Edit; I missed that he's paying his employees $16/hour (good for him). So if he has 2 employees fulltime, he's got $32/hour + payroll taxes/unemployment insurance etc to earn before he can pay off the R&D for this, his rent, his food cost, his utilities, his advertising, and then have an ROI for his investors.
And he has "experience" and a family in the business! Why they didn't talk him out of this is beyond me.
I have to imagine a big complication in starting an independent restaurant is the overhead of hiring/managing/supporting employees (i.e. wait staff, cooks, dishwashers, etc.). A large employee base probably requires a large franchise with economies of scale to distribute the cost of centralized HR over many restaurants.
Without that overhead, entrepreneurial restauranteurs can focus on differentiating the food, the location(s) of the restaurant and the ambiance.
Plus the article does hint the robo-restaurant still has employees to manage customers, clean, load the machine and presumably sort out issues with it on a not-infrequent basis...
Once you have the size down to where you just need one person at a time operating it, I bet the big fast food companies will swarm all over the opportunity to create tens of thousands of micro-franchises.
Why drive for Uber when you could set up a mini McDonalds wherever the health department lets you get away with it?
Japanese Vending Machine Unboxing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Z80J3jOao
I really hope they are successful. The second order effects of this automation, especially for a busy family like ours are hours of saved time, that can be spent with the children.
However, IMHO, the source of the beef can trump all that. I used to buy a year's worth of beef from a local farmer all at once. Even after a year in the freezer, a burger made from his grass-fed beef tasted better than one made from meat bought from the grocery the same day. When you start out with high quality meat, it takes a long time before the flavor degrades.
OTOH, "regular" store bought ground beef tastes nasty after being frozen for a few months.
As you might have inferred by now, good burgers are typically made from cuts like brisket and chuck that are tough, inexpensive, and high in flavor. Using high-end steaks for burgers is simply a waste, doubly so for well-marbled ones.
The fat percentage would not be difficult. Any good butcher would probably be happy to help you set such a comparison up. That is, if they don't warn you that it's a waste to use that T-bone on a burger first.
The point is that it's faster than a burger at a specialty burger restaurant, like Red Robin.
A grill at Red Robin operates in parallel and can easily beat this thing at throughput.
5 minutes is latency. The article says nothing about throughput, but the video shows multiple burgers pipelined on the machine's conveyors.
This place is in San Francisco. Where are these "dozens of places" for a really good burger <$6?
But where are the "dozens" of places?
After about a year or two of engineering sketches and business planning I gave up on it because it would take a few years for the technology to be capable and people to be ready for a wholly automated restaurant - with one person there for QC/fixes. Plus it would probably be 1-2M just for a prototype. Sure enough in 2011 Momentum machines came out with their prototype, and now 7 years later they have a new brand and a working shop.
Kudos to them. If they do it right, these guys could automate field to table and drive food costs to zero with minimal waste.
What I'd like to see more from this kind of startup is a desire to ensure that anyone that loses a job due to their product has the opportunity for retraining. Sure, it won't be great for profits, but if we're heading towards a time where low-paying jobs are to be automated then I'd love to see a trend start where people who will lose their jobs to automation can opt to move into management or train towards an entry-level job in the engineering required to run these tools.
What I really don't want is some smug SV type spouting a load of bullshit about how automation makes peoples jobs easier. It only makes them easier by relieving them of their duties.
The key would be to ensure that anyone that is to lose their job in the future through it being automated by innovative tech be given the opportunity to retrain for a better job. This kind of enforcement means that the job market isn't swamped by mass redundancy, and a consistent time period of retraining for people to re-enter that job market.
One thing that struck me as humorous though is the founder's comparison to self-driving cars (from Bloomberg's article): “What you’re watching is a technological feat. Self-driving cars need a lot of mileage before they become reliable. You’re seeing something similar here”
Not to dismiss the challenges with automating burgers, but its pretty straightforward compared to self-driving tech - there's basically no unknowns!
I always assume things are more complicated than they appear on the surface, so this is a surprise. You sound like you've explored this topic thoroughly. What is involved in having a robot produce a hamburger (not just the patty, of course)?
This is basically a precision automated assembly line, and to be honest plenty of things just as complicated as burgers have been assembled automatically.
Self-driving cars, OTOH, have to work with nice smooth roads, or potholed monstrosities, or ice & snow, deer jumping out right in front of the car, or idiots tailgating you at 70 mph while you're trying to maintain distance from the car in front of you. Their environment is always changing, and not generally in a predictable fashion.
A $10B valuation company better understand the profit between $1 sale of SaaS and $1 sale of food ...
(I don't necessarily think they'll ever be worth $10Bn, but... eventually, some company doing something similar will be)
Is this for real? I don't think I've ever had a burger that required "harsh chewing".
Previous statements from the company included Our alpha machine replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better and that US restaurants can save USD$150,000/year on staff salaries. Current reality: many staff, USD$16/hr each, manual finishing, manual preparation of sides and drinks, manual cleaning.
In 2016 I founded Infinite Food here in China. We're developing a fully automated model more akin to a wholly owned and operated network of futuristic vending machines and logistics fleet than a restaurant. Consumers order and pay through an app. Starting from fresh ingredients stored in a fridge within each unit, we cook noodle, pasta and soup dishes to taste, with an average 3 minute hot meal preparation, packaging and retail time and mere seconds for cold dishes. Think ramen/soba/udon/nyangmyeon/pho/pad thai/laksa/various pasta/various Chinese noodles with total customization. In addition, we provide real time nutritional feedback on personalization, allow for ordering in any human language and 24x7x365 availability. Our core idea is to get physically closer to the high density Asian urban consumer than any other food retail option, and offer a broader choice of fresher food.
Early on we looked at the whole problem took the strategy of simultaneous innovation at the appropriate layer: central facility, logistics network or service location based upon available technology and allowable tradeoffs. There's no public evidence any of the US players have much investment in this area, whereas we have a provisional business method patent filed for our solution with more on the way. Currently we are relocating across the Pearl River Delta from Shenzhen to launch operations in Zhuhai and take advantage of the new HK-Macau bridge while hedging regulatory risk across three launch markets (HK/Macau/Guangdong - China's most populous province) and are raising Series A to deploy 300 locations next year.
Total relative spend vs. MM/Creator: ~5% + 1/3 time. Some of the things we've achieved they haven't: full personalization, zero in-field maintenance, true self-cleaning, automated packaging and cutlery provisioning, logistics innovations. Estimate net profit/sale in initial markets: ~USD$2+. Max hot sales/hr: 80. Max cold sales/hr:200+. Meals/restock: 200+. Parallel meal prep.: Up to 4x. Footprint: 2x1 square meters. Prospective investors are welcome to check us out at http://infinite-food.com/ or email in profile.
care to elaborate your pov please ?
This is a bunch of human workers deciding how the mechanical work should be done (i.e. with a robot).
Restaurants aren't food factories, not even mcdonaldses. We food factories too, but this doesn't appear to be for them. This was to be more about whether or not people would like to have their burger made by a robot. Price-wise, I'd wager its much of a muchness.
She could pick out what she wanted to buy on a touch screen in the wall, it would come out pre-heated in a slot nearby, and there was a "bar" of sorts were one could sit and eat, that would basically dump anything left on it into the trash upon leaving.
Non-fiction citation needed. One of the points in the article is that those humans take up space that you need to rent.
https://qz.com/911968/bill-gates-the-robot-that-takes-your-j...
I can tell you people want to buy the cheapest stuff possible to get stuff done. Unless they've tried the cheapest stuff possible, and realize that paying more for extra features might be worth it(but not always sometimes the cheaper things are better). The only end users that would use this are high-end establishments willing to invest in both footprint space, maintenance, and high upfront cost. The 2nd market would be for the marketing appeal in an open kitchen and the cool robotics. The 3rd market would be for someone who wants to cook patties but need a self contained hood system, and those run for about $10k, so adding an initial investment might be worth it.
Some of the problems that this robot solves are solved by independent machinery already.
- There's already machines that cut, slice, and toast buns on a timed conveyor belt. Examples: http://www.bellecocooking.com/services.html . These are used in panera bread
- Someone dedicated to burger flipping is generally cooking multiple patties all in one go. There are also few pieces of machinery that broil on both sides at specific cooking curve temperatures, so you cook a patty like you would a panini. This eliminates the need for "flipping burgers" producing a more consistent dining experience, with an operator needing to attend to the beeping noise when the burger is finished. http://www.taylor-company.com/en/products/commercial-grills/...
- Cutting onions, tomatoes, and lettuce is a completely unnecessary step. Most places would buy from sysco or another food distributor that precuts it at a factory.
When we look at labor intensity of making a burger, tasks are generally divided into the following approach
- 1. One person flips burgers and handles raw meat only (Cross contamination)
- 2. Another person assembles the burger + the precut veggies + adds sauce + assembles + wrapping it.
- 3. Another person handles the register (Cross contamination)
- 4. Same person usually calls number and delivers person the order
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While one person can fulfill multiple roles, you have to swap out gloves constantly (cost of swapping tasks), so its more feasible to have a dedicated person to each task. The most important step in making a burger is the patty itself, its the MVP and the longest step in the process. Assemblying the burger is already fairly precise as well, there are specialized squeeze bottles for dispensing specific amount of sauce, everything is precut, etc.
The actual burger bot production line style is not new. There are a few pieces of specific foodtypes that capitalize on assembly line production inside of a restaurant, these are the following:
- Donut production (Krispy Kreme). Step 1 would be dipping the donut in a fryer, step 2 is coating it with sugar and frosting, etc. When you think of assembly line production inside a physical kitchen, this is the first thing that comes to mind. They machinery operates automates step 1 in the process. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l013vVp3OU
- Japanese restaurants in Japan. Or go to a fancy McDonalds, Wawa, airport restaurants, etc in the states. Many times you'll see step 3 automated, because let's face it I'd rather deal with a kiosk that never makes an ordering mistake over some fresh hire from some high school. Step 4 is sometimes automated in Japan as well with conveyor belts, especially in sushi restaurants. You'll see steps 1 and 2 automated with specialized sushi packing rice machines and rollers. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R47tfK1dna8
- Sandwich prepackagers for grocery stores. Tesco is a good example. This is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS_hnmHWEcg. But the thing with this though, when you scale to an industrial level - your demands for production are consistent and predictable. This is not true for restaurants. Some hours are incredibly crazy while some are incredible dead (3pm to 5pm). Certain reasons might be booming others might be slow, depending on a number of factors. Not all restaurants cater to the same crowd - some cater to locals, others tourists and convention goers, etc.
- In addition, Step 4 is currently being automated by many companies. Servers and hostsess are generally not the MVP in a fast casual dining restaurant, people come for food not service. Think of delivery based robots, there's a couple of them I can't remember their names offhand.
- Burgerfi merges step 3 and 4 so the service staff knows where you are sitting for that order.
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This machine is looking to do both assembly and cooking. Unless this robot provides more value than its costs (upfront cost, maintenance, footprint oppurtunity cost) vs 2 waged employees, most business owners won't go for it. There are machines such as the misorobot that capitalizes only on the raw meat step, https://misorobotics.com/.
You can't really compare this same process to something like subway. Everything at subway is already either precooked so cross contamination with raw meat is not an issue.
Next, lots of moving parts or generally relying on one "assembly line" production has a few fatal flaws. Namely, these are the following:
- 1. Lots of moving parts means potential for many things to break.
- 2. If your entire burger making process relies solely on the machine, you are screwed if it breaks on rush hour. Anyone who throws their eggs in one basket doesn't know risk management.
- 3. The veggies are not refrigerated. This is a health hazard if you aren't moving enough burgers at a time. Looking at the prototype this could be implemented though, since veggies are all roughly next to each other. This unit comes to mind when I saw the burger bot https://www.silverking.com/project/lettuce-crisper-dispenser...
- 4. You might be limited in variations of what burgers you can make. Manual labor cooking allows for infinite customization, machines do not. Many burger chains are going for "green" based low-fat burgers as well, where you use lettuce leafs over burger buns. In addition, a few burger chains also stamp their logo on the bunn by burning part of the top. Some customers might request things like no pickles, double onions, etc. Machines wouldn't account for it probably.
Onto the actual comments of the video itself. The author mentions 5 minute breaks to read books, etc. Those sound really great but in reality people come to their job to pay the bills. Employees already abuse smoke breaks so its going to be abused as well. This wouldn't fly for part time employees especially too. If you've run a restaurant you would know this to be true.
Another issue with this machine is how big of a footprint it is, and that it needs to be displayed somewhere openly. If you intend to go with a machine like this, you have to 100% know it will be in place before the store even opens. Because of this only a franchise would invest in this machine. Restaurants generally have a few different patterns for kitchen design layouts, and they vary based on the actual building size. For instance, some restaurants might have a square-ish foot print space, some would have a rectangular-ish layout spacing. Some might have prebuilt interior walls, others might not, so these are contributing factors.
Basically, if you buy this machine, you better bet everything you have on it and make your whole concept revolve around it as well. This means training staff, having trained technicians on hand, parts for JIT supply through nearby vendors or in house stock, etc.
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Also, there is still lots of innovation going on in the restaurant industry still. You don't hear about it on the news, but one item that is really penetrating the market right now is dropin induction based cookers here http://vollrath.com/Vollrath, drastically reducing maintenance costs and improving safety. Its currently being discussed with Chipotle as a replacement for their warmer line (e.g. the place where you order all your food and look through the sneezeguard, etc). Most newer concepts revolve around the Chipotle-style serving process, so it has large market implications.
One item that is actually "high tech" that actually works (for 5+ years) in the market is smart combi convention ovens. Its been around for some time, here's a youtube demo of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5I3JcA5bA. The reason why it works is because it simplifies many operators task and produces a variety of menu items that pass for a 5 star gourmet restaurant. It also has a small footprint so the cost is usually justifiable (Usually 20k to 30k range), and many times its used in banquet, senior homes, and a la carte style cooking. The reason it works is because it enables the chef to also perform ANY type of cooking method (parbroil, partial frying, steaming, baking, roasting, saute, etc).
Other things that are currently being adopted by the market because they are solving issues related to cooking itself(not assembly line processes) - sou vide based cooking, vacuum based smoke injection, air frying, etc
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TLDR
I think AI based commercial food equipment is interesting. I can 100% tell you experienced restaurant owners prefer stupid-simple equipment that handles one task extremely well. I don't believe this type of assembly robot will hit it as big as kiosks designed for hostess / cashier replacements, delivery food robots / servers, or dedicated robots like misorobotics for handling singular tasks. Many of these items I have just listed don't have a huge investment cost in terms of footprint, or maintenance, and have a lower risk portfolio. Many of these are already being tested in california and parts of Japan (or have for some time).
You need to understand what the problems restaurants actually face. While every restaurant faces issues of food consistency, these can be solved with many types of equipment in the market already. The other issue that many restaurants face is customer-service quality - e.g. staff are trained poorly, staff don't add the order to the system, servers in rush hour are doing too many things at a given time, etc. It actually makes a lot more sense to automate this as much as possible, with services like opentable, smartRobots, etc. Lastly, restaurants always have to deal with potential health code violations, infestations, and poor reviews on yelp / google.
Building a burger is not a problem almost any restaurant faces IMO. Assembling a proper burger requires little to no skill at all, can be fucked up and still works fine (e.g. look at McDonalds). However cooking a burger patty does require some skill but again there is equipment that handles that. Misorobotics does solve this issue because the operator does have to be present to physically flip the burger, else it burns over. I really wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to cook a burger like you would on a pizza conveyor toaster, but I have not seen it yet. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBgNEbQDX3k.
Those are the reasons why I don't believe assembly-line based burger production is going to be a big thing. Not only that, if you dig back a little into another prominent industry, most car companies aren't even using pure assembly-line production either (e.g. The Toyota Way).
Or if you want a programming based example, assembly line production is like a sequential based process. Its can be slow because you have to wait for one step to finish before doing another. However, concurrency based approaches (Async JS / NodeJS, GO-lang concurrency, hyperthreading) lets you process tasks much faster. That's how restaurants operate and the ones who do it best are the ones you actually know about today.
I have to think there is lower hanging fruit in the fast food industry, though. I just really want McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts to turn their POS machine around so I can key in my own order, or maybe they could cut a deal with Amazon or Apple to start using Siri or Alexa. The failure rate on the biological natural language processors currently in use are shockingly high.
The thing I'd really like is a combination of voice (the above is trivial to parse) and a history of my last 6 orders to one touch order.
One reason I don't like eating out much is who is touching my food?
That burger looks pretty good and $6 sounds pretty good.
Seriously, removing the dirty hairless ape element as much as possible from food prep is great all around!
I'm really really surprised everyone doesn't feel this way but apparently not. I do though. Can't wait for these machines to get rolled out.
Plus it's easier to keep a machine clean (which they no doubt will) than a fleet of fast food workers.
Besides, it's not real potential, it's how I feel about it. Bring the machine on I say!
If done properly it could be great, nothing turns me off food more than seeing a sweaty cook drip sweat onto the food while making it (yes it has happened, the food went into the garbage).