Fast-food worker replacement machine
momentummachines.com
momentummachines.com
The big problem isn't keeping cheap sh*tty food cheap, it's keeping the restaurants clean enough you don't feel dirty when you leave. That is a social and managerial problem, and you don't fix it with magical meat grinder machine.
The conveyer belt would have to have a wax paper or laminated sheet wrapped around the belt and affixed in place.
The only thing that would have to be cleaned is the cooking surface and grinding mechanism, which should be trivial.
You basically would need one employee to fill the device hoppers with fresh ingredients in the morning, babysit the device for the day adding more ingredients as necessary and then break the machine down at night and set it up again for the following day. I estimate 20 minutes labor in the morning and 40-60 at night. A huge savings for the ability to pump out 3600 decent burgers over a 10 hour work day.
Many of the founders' angel.co profiles don't show any other employment but beyond that I haven't seen much else from these folks, on twitter or otherwise.
Anyone know?
Frees them up for what? Unemployment?
That'll be the future. People groaning at minimum wage jobs for repairing current-day minimum wage jobs.
I can guarantee this machine would never make that metric. And I'd really like to see what this machine looks like after making 40 burgers, much less 400 or 4000. 40,000? Forget it.
Cooking and handling animal protein is a very messy job. Letting semi-skilled workers load raw beef into a hopper? That's a non-starter right there for a company like McDonald's.
A group like McDs has had half a century to figure out the most effective way to make this stuff, make it cheaply, and make it safely (for both crew and customer). This is not a direction anyone like them would take.
Once the machine proves effective, they are likely to identify impeding factors like labor cost of cleaning and figure out how to minimize those costs.
A simply food-safe inner-laminated (possibly PTFE) non-woven material would be perfect for these machines. Easy to package and ship in collapsed form to McD's around the country and extremely cheap to manufacture, especially at McD's scale.
The main factor preventing McD's from adopting this is the cost of ingredients. This machine most likely requires all beef chuck, without fillers to achieve the desired quality level.
Is every burger going to be well-done?
I'd go as far as saying a non-trivial proportion of service sector jobs is only necessary to keep deprecated business models going, not because they are indispensable or add actual value to the economy.
The cynical conclusion to draw is that the common man will always be a working debt slave. A history of over 200 years of automation seems to support this conclusion, as people only have to work more and more to make ends meet.
We're not going to reach that utopia if there's an anti-capitalist revolution first.
This is entirely different from the imagined pitch to investors: same food, cheaper production, higher profits.
It will be fascinating to see what they come up with and how they productize - it sounds like they think equipment sales is just an ancillary revenue source or something they "might do later" at present, but perhaps they'll change their minds if and when they have functioning burger bots.