Hello Robots, Goodbye Fry Cooks

Reliability will be the key issue with these systems, and probably is the main reason we have not seen these in wider use already. A restaurant kitchen is a hostile environment for electronics and precision mechanisms, and if the machine jams up at 12:05pm it's pretty much a disaster for the business.

A busy fast food restaurant will at peak times have four or five people working in the kitchen. All probably making < $10/hr so that's about $50/hr as your top labor rate for kitchen staff. Most of the rest of the day they will have one or two people in working in the kitchen.

In place of this staff you will instead need an "operating engineer" who can monitor, adjust, and if necessary quickly repair the machine. This person will require more expensive training than a fry cook and will command a higher wage or salary. You would also need to amortize the cost of the machine and its maintenance and depreciation to an equivalent hourly rate in order to really determine cost savings compared to human workers using simpler, cheaper cooking equipment.

In a large industrial setting such as an automobile manufacturing plant, robots are cheaper than highly-paid unionized laborors. In a smaller scale environment with low-skill, low-paid labor, like a restaurant kitchen, I'm not sure the case will be as clear cut.