Tablets at restaurants: Applebee's, Chili's race to eliminate human interaction | Hacker News Reader

Tablets at restaurants: Applebee's, Chili's race to eliminate human interaction

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32 pointsrobg51 comments

These restaurants have already eliminated cooks, so this move isn't all that surprising. In case you didn't know, most "food" at chain restaurants is prepared in advance, sealed in pouches, and re-heated via microwave. In other words, expensive leftovers.

They also employ techniques like sous-vide cooking (temperature-controlled immersion bath) which eliminate a huge amount of health and safety issues in busy kitchens. Almost every restaurant, from Michelin-starred chefs to the lowly Taco Bell to the beloved Chipotle stores use this production method among others.

Okay, you don't like the food. But there's nothing wrong with how it's made.

I know Chipotle uses immersion circulators, but the scale of their use is a far cry from "almost every restaurant." Taco Bell most certainly does not use immersion circulators.

Sorry, misspoke there. Not recirculators but retherm baths.

If you remember Taco Bells from the 1970s, the beef was cooked in large open vats by store employees. Now it's cooked in a central kitchen and shipped refrigerated to stores where it's held at serving temperature in a water bath.

Changing to this technique eliminated a huge amount of employee accidents (burns, slips) and boosted their health inspection ratings, not to mention product consistency.

And profits? Probably forget the biggest reason why they did it.

Hopefully better product results in greater profit, yes.

I doubt it would amount to a better product - a safer product perhaps, sure. If you think pre-cooked and frozen would make a better product than fresh and freshly cooked.. then we have different ideas of what better means.

Par-cooking (preparing food ahead of time, storing it, then reheating it) is a common cooking technique and if done properly does not change the composition or quality of the food one bit.

These are not sodium and preservative-laden frozen meals we are talking about. These are products made in large commercial quantities for quick preparation.

I do indulge in Taco Bell from time to time and, let me tell you, I'd rather have the food prepared by a quality-controlled system than the stoned kid in the back that may or may have not remembered to add the seasoning when it was time.

Don't disagree regarding food preparation, though I've tasted a meal that's pre-cooked chicken vs. fresh chicken, and quite the difference exists in many characteristics of the chicken. It was a smaller place, and perhaps their methods weren't the best - though I'm not sure how you prevent the effects of frozen water damaging the chicken and making it taste different, texture wise too..

Read up on vacuum sealing. That's a key step in this kind of food preparation. A lot of times the par-cooked food doesn't go to frozen, or it's not frozen for long, so freezer burn is not a factor.

It's Taco Bell fast food. Food quality will be universally better if it doesn't rely on the local staff of minimum wage earning kids. Fresh and freshly cooked? You've clearly never eaten at a Taco Bell throughout the decades. Their prep and presentation today is much, much better than say 30 years ago.

What do you guys think about using immersion circulators as a general cooking technique for the average person? I see that you can buy one for $300 or so. Is it worth it?

What about from the energy-savings aspect? Right now it makes more sense to buy a gas stove vs. an electric stove because of the cheap gas prices. How does an immersion circulator compare with the two?

I'm a fan of sous-vide cooking. I gave up on plans to build my own rig and bought a Dorkfood DSV for $99. Best investment I've ever made in the kitchen.

I believe almost all SV equipment uses electric heat. I've never encountered a gas-powered model.

Energy savings wise I'd like to believe that it's about as energy efficient as you can get. The food is brought up to temperature and no higher - no excess energy is wasted in lost heat. Although one of the benefits of sous-vide cooking, the very long hold times, can result in an energy loss if you decide to start your steak at 8am and then not finish it until 6pm. Circulators use a bit more energy, a PID controller on a crock-pot will get you almost as good a result.

For the average person, it's just not ready yet. I've done work with a large home appliance manufacturer and their belief is that it will be a niche cooking technique for a long time to come. There's too much up-front work with prep and sealing and a lot of families don't plan ahead 4-8 hours when making family meals. They're too busy getting the morning routine accomplished to think about dinner.

There is potential in offering pre-sealed meals that can be thrown into a water bath all day, but that's a whole different set of problems.

I'm probably naive but that doesn't sound true. I've seen that kind of thing at McDonalds, et Al, but not "fast casual" like the subjects of this thread.

Sysco.com sells factory-produced food for small restaurant businesses. Large businesses have their own in a company version.

Yes, even small independent restaurants rely heavily on Sysco products. On the plus side, you don't need an experienced chef. On the minus side, your chef never gets experienced.

Is the food prepared by machine, too?

Industrial-level automation, yes.

As these machines gain prevalence in America, maybe it will end the tipping culture. By placing an order through a machine, perhaps patrons won't feel obligated to leave a tip.

A different article I read said that tips actually went up.

The system doesn't eliminate human interaction, it just streamlines certain things. Eliminating paper marketing for drinks and desserts could end up saving them a lot of money.

For whom would a tip be left?

The software developers? :-)

The person that cleaned the table, the person that brought you your food, the person that fetched you a new fork because you stopped one, the person that pointed the way to the restroom, the person who asked if everything was to your liking.

Software matters. Here's a historic record of my attempt to eat at uWink, Nolan Bushnell's touchscreen restaurant: http://lemonodor.com/archives/2008/05/uwink_a_cold_greasy_pl...

I ate at the Mtn View uWink a few times before it died; it seemed to suffer from a few procedural issues:

* People didn't understand how to use the tablets, so you needed staff to explain things to them.

* Certain things (like drink refills) that are high-frequency are easier handled by human intervention, than by calling up the "order refill" option and waiting for someone to appear

* Food was expensive (presumably to account for the cost of POS systems plus a full staff) and not great (not really an issue for Applebee's / Chili's as they've made an empire out of mediocre food)

* As mentioned above, a fair share of software glitches - so you need IT support in addition to kitchen / service staff.

It didn't really seem to solve a problem - you replaced the customer-staff interaction with a customer-staff-computer-staff interaction.

I'd like the ability to page my server, but that's about it.

And it is only a matter of time until McDonalds is effectively a brick and mortar sized 3D printer of food-like compounds with a Siri interface...

Vending restaurants are already pervasive in Japan. There might still be a human cook involved, but you order with coins at a machine.

It has been a few years, but my impression of the coin-operated stand-up ramen shops I frequented in Tokyo was that the cook and cook's assistant were the only people working there, and they often had no time to spare dealing with money. If labor costs must be reduced, it seems better to cut the cashier than the cook.

They probably do reduce the staff workload by some amount (although there doesn't seem to be any obvious difference in staffing levels between Japanese restaurants that use "shokken" and those that don't).

I've also sort of assumed that one of the reasons they use them is because they make it a little easier to avoid "trouble": typically you pay first when you use a shokken, and you pay after your meal when you don't...

Personally I think its great most of the time. Human interaction should still be an option, especially when it comes to specialty orders. I always felt something like this could work well at places that have a lunch rush in America. A string of machines that don't accept substitutions and only credit cards, along with a line for people who want a human to take their order.

This has already happened in countless other industries (airlines, banking to name a couple which have moved most customer interaction to the web). There's no reason it shouldn't happen with the food industry, there is just too much inefficiency in the current process.

This was called automat in the USA, popular in the 1970s.

how about an app and a drone that dips a fry into ketchup and drops it into your mouth.

Arby's tried this sort of ordering system back in the 90's. They had a touch screen CRTs at the point of sale. Customers placed orders by choosing from an on-screen menu. The system was setup to where an Arby's employee stood behind the machine, waiting for you to finish the order. There was no communication with this employee and so it made for quite an awkward experience.

The system only lasted for a few months and they went back to taking orders using traditional methods.

Here's a link to the system Arby's used..

http://www.quirks.com/articles/a1991/19910602.aspx

I've seen plenty of gas station restaurants use a touch screen to order, it works fine except there's a high risk of eating gas station restaurant food afterwards.

Airports too. This is at JFK. http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/jetblue-cibo-express-foodcour...

I like this idea. In China, there is a Japanese owned Italian join called "Saizeriya". They have call buttons for the servers who had palm pilots to send the orders to the kitchen. It was insanely efficient, and they passed the savings on to the customers. It was a sit-down a la carte experience with fast food pricing. I'd call it Walmart meets the Olive Garden.

I am not sure where tablet ordering makes sense:

It would move fast food upscale, and not really increase cost.

From a service experience, it is about the same as a diner where you pay on exit.

It is a service downgrade for Applebee's / Chili's where it is common to customize orders.

I had my first experience with tablet ordering in the US at an airport bar. It was great. Rather than worrying about paying the bill in time, it was pre-pay and I chatted with the bar tender instead of exchanging credit card paperwork.

They still need people to take the food from the kitchen to the table, or will they make drones for that?

There is a Japanese restaurant not far from me that uses a system like this. Your table/booth has an ipad you place orders on. Staff bring out the food to your table. You walk out at the end and pay. It worked really well.

who would want to dine at a place like this? and i use the word 'dine' vs 'eat' on purpose. if you think of food as fuel then this makes sense. if you enjoy dining out, this is a huge step backwards. bring on the franchise wars - i wonder if taco bell will actually win... (bonus points for naming that mostly bad 80s movie)

Our local Chili's has had this system for a while now. It hasn't reduced our interactions with the waitron, we still order and pay our bill face to face. If anything it has increased their load as the kids keep badgering them for an extra console or for help when one locks up.

Quick back off the envelope:

    100 Tablets ~ $10k

Guessing that this is roughly the number of seats a waiter can wait, this leaves a few thousand dollars for an automated delivery system per year. ( I hope something that involves a catapult.)

A single waiter for a hundred seats ?? Thats an order of magnitude mismatch; a 100 seat venue needs a bunch of waiters, and every "waiter needed" means multiple waiters working in shifts because most waiters don't work 12 hours per day 7 days per week.

Probably, I have next to no idea how many waiters are needed. So I took a number where I am quite certain that I overestimate. So with realistic numbers, the situation looks certainly worse for waiters.

The order taking part has always been error prone, I would have thought that a fast food chain like McDonalds would have been first for this, their queue-order-collect system seemed more streamlined and ready for a pre-order by mobile system.

My favorite fast food ordering innovation was routing all drive through orders to a call center in Utah or somewhere.

And so on, and so forth, as minimum wage proponents seek to end all opportunity for unskilled workers.

I don't think minimum wage is really in important issue. If a person is really worth less than the minimum wage, there are plenty of ways to get around the restriction.

Just as raising the minimum wage isn't the silver bullet that it's proponents claim, neither is lowering or eliminating it.

Would you truly prefer to go to a bank branch/human teller over an ATM for cash?

For cash, no. For any other type of transaction I prefer it.

A tablet costs perhaps $200 a year.. (replace a cheap one every year or a pricier one every 2-3 years) --- really not sure what "wage" you had in mind there..

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