I find it hard to believe that installation + maintenance + unexpected maintenance + still some people to prepare ingredients would be cheaper than cooks.
24 square feet sounds impressive though.
24 square feet sounds impressive though.
Assuming a reasonably busy location where there is no such thing as a "slow time" (airport, central metro area, etc), that means you have to pay six people around $8 an hour for 8 hours. Works out to $384/day on kitchen labor, give or take.
$2688/week, $139,776/yr. (And that's before taxes, local wage variances and so on - this is a very rough, very conservative estimate)
There's no way this thing will cost less than $150k - a shake/ice cream machine costs aroud 50-75k for a much, much more simple set of parts (liquid pumps, an auger, and a compressor). And that's before you get into maintenance costs and the cost of having a single point of failure.
Example: One of your kitchen guys gets sick, you can usually call in a replacement, shift someone from elsewhere in the store, or just run one person down and deal with it. The Burgermaker 9000, on the other hand, say the tomato slicer breaks? You're down. Completely and totally.
Combine that with the insane time to break even and see even a penny of ROI.. it ain't happening. Not anytime soon.
The reality is that the more the income gap grows between the servers and those served, the less profitable automation becomes. There is a reason low wages jobs are growing, not shrinking in the US.
Have you looked inside a mcdonalds kitchen lately? They've automated quite a bit of it already.
I don't forsee a machine handling the entire process anytime soon. There are too many edge cases.
(And I remember quite a bit of expletive-laden rage at the automation we did have when I worked there.. when it breaks, it's annoying. Fry dispenser not loading baskets, things getting stuck in the bun toaster and holding up the whole line, timer buttons on the holding cabinets failing so you can't tell what's been there for how long..)