I used to work in a kitchen, so maintaining food service grade of cleanliness on robots, sounds frighteningly expensive to me.
Maybe everything won't be automated all at once, but if the economic incentive is there, it will happen. Pizza making robots are already a thing. There's no reason the shake machine can't measure its output to the cup instead of pulling a lever; drink machines in many places already do this. Dispensing the cup too is not a big step.
That machine is, like, 5 machines including an oil moat. With all of them together it makes up something like half the entire store's footprint. It's only remotely viable because that shop mostly only makes one thing. No breakfast sandwiches in the morning, no burgers at lunch time, just donuts.
Plenty of employees are still required just to make the different types of donuts and donut-adjacent items (and also presumably to be there in case a monumental grease fire starts, or the dough machine blows a gasket starts spewing dough all over).
> Pizza making robots are already a thing
Presumably making the frozen ones sold at grocery stores, which might be a meaningful percentage of all pizza sold, but effectively 0% of any other pizzas?
This is an entirely different thing than a McDonalds.
Yes, I could trivially make an automation machine to cook meat, we have them, they're called a charbroiler, similarly, toasting buns is pretty easy. The hard an expensive part is assembling all the parts into a package.
French fry hoppers automatically filling baskets from a frozen mini-closet. Out comes fresh fries.
Same for the cups that they can use in drive-throughs.
I think it’s up to the franchises to buy/install them. Depends on volume/space whether its worthwhile/possible.
Or they just push it to the customer to do it.