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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

If I were looking to invest in one of those, the biggest questions I'd have are around reliability, cleaning routines, and maintenance. For example I could pay minimum wage for someone to cut veggies, or pay significantly more for an engineer to repair the unit because it isn't dispensing tomato right.

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!").

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I have many of the same questions too. In industrial robots one of the most important numbers is mean time between failures(MTBF). If the MBTF is too low, that is the robot breakdown or otherwise fails, you spend more on fixing the robot or its mistakes than the cost of the robot itself, the cost of programming it, and the value the robot provides. Cleaning is a huge issue. If they don't clean things properly and someone gets food poisoning this could kill their company and perhaps even the automation of fast food. And if cleaning is time consuming enough it could greatly increase operating costs.

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.

I have a better idea than cleaning: build a machine that builds these so quickly and cheaply that you can throw them away every night when you're done.

You're getting downvoted and you used what I think is a "sarchasm" tag but this isn't a terrible suggestion. Lots of industries use disposable parts for sanitation reasons. Many of the instruments used for medicine and dentistry are now disposable. Food workers wear disposable gloves and food comes in disposable packaging. It's not unreasonable to think that they might use disposable parts for everything that touches food.

How does that blend with the garbage problem the world seems to be having since China stopped importing trash? Is it economical enough to recycle the used machines?

Disposable, used-once items are not automatically impossible to recycle or decompose.

You’re right that they’re not impossible to recycle or decompose. I asked about the economics of getting that done..There’s already a huge problem now that the Chinese are no longer buying trash to recycle cheaply. If the cost of recycling is factored in, do these once-use products remain affordable and profitable? They’re not made from paper, but from plastics and metals, which take specialized recycling.

The Diamond Age

Burgerworld by Delos?

Low MTBF is why I've tossed all my household robots (Roomba vacs, Roomba floor mopper, and about half a dozen different cat litter robots). They save time T when they work, but they create new problems that require 2T to fix. It's a net loss.

Speaking of tomatoes -- all the tomatoes in that tube were beautfully colored, exactly the same shape and size. (And beefsteak variety, so nearly tasteless. That's a different issue.)

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.

And tomatoes can be difficult to slice; too ripe, and they splatter, making catsup in that nice, clear tube. Too tough and they bend the blades of your mandoline. Onions are even worse. They seem to have realized that lettuce won't be easy to cut (so they use shredded) but that will wilt/brown much faster.

Anyone who's ever been to a Brooklyn deli can tell you none of those are that difficult: just run them through the deli slicer.

Its not automation if a human is standing there feeding the slicer and carrying it to wherever it needs to go. The hard part in automation is almost always material handling, not cutting.

Of all the things you could have taken from my comment, you came up with that? You seriously thought I was advocating having a human run laps around the machine with a deli slicer?

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.

Do you know what a knife is? A blade with a handle. Do you know what a deli slicer is? A blade with a bigger, heavier, mechanized handle.

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.

Um, do you know what a deli slicer is? Hint: they don't typically have handles.

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.

When you buy a can of diced tomatoes, how do you think were they diced? Do you think it was done manually? I'm pretty sure slicing and dicing vegetables is a problem that has been solved at industrial scale a long time ago.

Industrial canned food production is a completely different scale compared to an automated restaurant. We're talking sorting, cutting, and packing machines each the size of the average McDonalds restaurant. Dont think its realistic to fit all of that in a drive through burger location

In addition to maintenance, don't forget about upgrades, newer versions and installation/maintenance of those.

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.

Coat them in something anti-bacterial like silver? It's pretty cheap, and apparently safe for human consumption?

This is a somewhat common technique used in, for example, beverage dispensers. Food-grade anti-microbial coatings are available and apparently quite useful.

There are concerns that silver ingestion would upset the balance of intestinal bacteria that we depend on for digestion.

Honestly, I hope he gets competitors. How great would fast food be if it was all made exactly the same way every time, with high quality ingredients?

Compared with 50 years ago, it already is.

No reason to stop improving though

As long as we can see the ingredients it seems like a great idea, better than what is on offer currently. My suspicion is that the machines otherwise would look like the inside of McFlurry machines rather soon.

Providing people with different options isn't bad.

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.

What a pity that responding to the market isn’t leading humanity anywhere good.

Because the market by itself is just the law of the jungle, it has no moral compass. The market has to be encouraged towards a good outcome for humanity.

And now we just need someone to tell us what that good outcome is we should be moving toward.

And yet, so many people want to leave most things up to "the market".

We ought to realize that we ARE the market.

For varying degrees of "the market". Most people represent an insignificant part of it.

If I were looking to invest, I wouldn't give a crap about reliability, cleaning, and maintenance. I'd want to see his business plan, and how he thinks he's going to make money when the highest amount of revenue this thing can produce is $72/hour, when it runs flawlessly.

You can have more than one running at the same time?

Then you have 2x the capital costs, plus less room for seating etc.

Stack them vertically to save space?

There is more than one restaurant in the world.

Yeah, "America is a big place" covers a lot of ground for this company.

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.

Looks to me that you can have more than 1 burger going at once.

Outside of places like San Francisco the few dozen square feet per machine isn't going to be a big deal.

5 minutes residence time in the machine per burger, not one burger per 5 minutes output.

$72/hour * 160hours/month * 12months/year = $138240/year

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.

If your restaurant grosses $138K/year, you're out of business pretty fast.

True, but you don't have the same expenses. Hopefully less direct human labor hours, able to run 24x7 at times when human costs could be higher, way less real estate and more viable locations than a restaurant, as well as just lower utility bills.

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.

Yes, I think you are right, the race to the bottom is inevitable unfortunately...

That's still allows you to segment the market. I like McDonald's but can't get it where I live because the majority of the people prefer higher priced fare. The McDonald's couldn't compete with a mid tier burger joint down the street and got replaced by an upscale Korean restaurant.

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

Well McDo has been introducing electronic kiosks to order, while reducing the number of cashier stands.

But there hasn't been a race to the bottom in food. There are restaurants at huge ranges of price points.

And I imagine two huge components of the pricing floor for restaurants are property cost/rent and labour. Potatoes are dirt cheap and oil can be reused a few times, yet to buy basic fries near me at a non-franchised fast food place would be $5+. Doesn't feel like much of a race to the bottom.

Do you pay an engineer to come out and fix your car or copy machine? It's not like paid employees are any cleaner... That's why the ice cream machines are "down" half the time

> It's not like paid employees are any cleaner

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.

We don't have quite enough detail, but I wonder how much in the way of sensors it would need if the ingredients were standardized - if every burger weighs 300g, cook them for 130sec per side, etc.

Hard to do that with vegetables as per here.

The benefit of it all being transparent and visible to customers is, as any dirt will be visible, they can sell or franchise the machines and the buyers can't skimp on cleaning.

Bacteria isn't always particularly visible, and that's the part you have to worry about. I'm curious how they keep the meat and other ingredients chilled in those transparent tubes, especially if sunlight is anywhere near them.

To be honest, this machine looks mostly like a gimmick. I wonder how version optimized for speed (but still from fresh ingridients) would look like.

It’s distressing how much life is starting to resemble a Harry Harrison novel. All were missing are porcuswine served at these establishments and well hit the high notes.

Any year now, a stainless steel rat will be born. :D

I like to thing I am a burger pro, but I know I am not an automation pro. A burger shouldn't take more than 10 minutes from cooking to being served. This thing looks very slow. Is that the current state of this sort of line automation?

It takes 5 minutes.

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