> It might not be the best burger I’ve had in my life, but it’s certainly the best at that price. A lot of that comes from the savings on labor and kitchen space afforded by a robot cook. “We spend more on our ingredients than any other burger restaurant.”
That's a great elevator pitch. Fluff-free and obvious ex post facto.
Lots of fluff in that. A well run small kitchen can run rings around something this size. It'll still need walk-ins to store the produce and beef, plus room for buns (which take up a crap ton of space).
Other than the beef, all the other components are standard for a decent restaurant. Fresh baked buns aren't anything special, nor is custom grind meat. And bragging about spending more on your food cost is dumb. It shows that he has no real idea about the day to day of keeping a restaurant financially afloat. He'll find out when the VC money runs out.
Food, laundry and house cleaning: Things that have not kept pace with technological advancements.
I really hope they are successful. The second order effects of this automation, especially for a busy family like ours are hours of saved time, that can be spent with the children.
Dryers are so energetically wasteful though, and the advantage to line drying can be low (barring high humidity climate or lack of space). There should be a better solution.
Personally I think we'll see these tasks automated after we automate surgery. The value added accomplishing these tasks is low, the cost of robots is high, and the difficulty of a robot doing them is high. It is difficult for robots to manipulate things autonomously, doubly so for flexible objects, and all these tasks require manipulation of flexible objects. Indeed the reason why Creator's robot dispenses burgers in two halves might be that they do not have the manipulation capability to do so. Maneuvering a flexible bun on to a flexible stack of meat and vegetables without damaging the bun or spilling ingredients is very hard. Surgery also involves unstructured inputs and manipulation of flexible objects and manipulation also involves the cutting and sewing of said objects among other things. This makes surgery just as difficult as these tasks, but the value added is much greater. We can now get away with selling a few very expensive robots rather than a large amount of moderately priced ones.
House cleaning is getting pieces mostly solved. I've used a Roomba and now a neato for a few years and the only real improvement I'd want is for the container to get automatically emptied into a larger can so I only have to empty it weekly/monthly
No, it's really not. Fast food workers clean themselves. They tend to notice when they develop gangrene. Machines, not so much. That stray piece of lettuce that got caught in a machine joint for 6 weeks? Hope you enjoy E. Coli.
Robotic fast food is basically inevitable. It's the same exact process, rarely do menus really change. Burger actually looks pretty dang good, and for $6? Heck yes.
I would be interested to see some blind taste test data to determine if a majority of people can distinguish a burger made with beef that was ground 1 day before cooking vs. 1 minute before cooking.
That's a moot point if you can't tell the difference or if the one that was pre-ground ends up tasting better in a blind taste test. I agree, however, that the freshly ground one should taste better.
I think very few people will be able to tell the difference.
However, IMHO, the source of the beef can trump all that. I used to buy a year's worth of beef from a local farmer all at once. Even after a year in the freezer, a burger made from his grass-fed beef tasted better than one made from meat bought from the grocery the same day. When you start out with high quality meat, it takes a long time before the flavor degrades.
OTOH, "regular" store bought ground beef tastes nasty after being frozen for a few months.
The biggest factor is in fresh vs frozen, and in N out is on the correct side of that divide. I'd be interested in a blind comparison between burgers made with high and low end pieces of beef, but it'd be very difficult to eliminate the confounding variables. Getting fat percentage equal would be tough.
In N Out uses factory-farmed, garbage-fed, antibiotic-saturated beef from cows who have no room to move and stand in their own shit all day. I can tell the difference between that kind of stuff and a good healthy grass-fed cow by smell alone. Seriously, I wonder if you have ever even had healthy beef.
Interesting. How did you come to the conclusion that you can tell the difference just by smell? Can you do that after it's been cooked? It's easy to see certain differences in uncooked, whole cuts of beef, but I'm impressed that you can smell the difference.
To your point about high end and low end pieces of beef, steaks are usually priced by the tenderness of the beef, which tends to have an inverse relationship with flavor (of course, there are other factors as well, and some people just prefer a mild-tasting cut).
As you might have inferred by now, good burgers are typically made from cuts like brisket and chuck that are tough, inexpensive, and high in flavor. Using high-end steaks for burgers is simply a waste, doubly so for well-marbled ones.
The fat percentage would not be difficult. Any good butcher would probably be happy to help you set such a comparison up. That is, if they don't warn you that it's a waste to use that T-bone on a burger first.
I'm interested in using the same cuts of meat from different grades of beef. The higher degree of marbling in higher-end beef will make it difficult to get the same amount of fat.
Unless they speed up the machine (possible with future versions) or add multiple machines (which increases the required retail space as well as capital expenditures), they're limited by the robot's 5 min throughput. Serially cooking is no way to run a restaurant.
A grill at Red Robin operates in parallel and can easily beat this thing at throughput.
This sounds like quite the Rube Goldberg machine; if it becomes a reality and is economical, that's great news.
I have to think there is lower hanging fruit in the fast food industry, though. I just really want McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts to turn their POS machine around so I can key in my own order, or maybe they could cut a deal with Amazon or Apple to start using Siri or Alexa. The failure rate on the biological natural language processors currently in use are shockingly high.
McDonald's already has ordering kiosks in some of its restaurants. They also have a mobile app that allows you to order and pay before you walk in the door, just show up and walk out with your food.
This handles the transactions really well, but now you get 40 people standing around the cash registers waiting for their order grumbling about how this process sucks. It feels like a bread line.
The UI is also awful. You have to touch in opposite corners for each successive selection or choice. It takes sooo much longer than saying a "#5 medium to go" > insert card > they finish > remove card. It is a reasonable choice if there is already a line of 4 people in front of you and you are waiting anyway.
The thing I'd really like is a combination of voice (the above is trivial to parse) and a history of my last 6 orders to one touch order.
If I were looking to invest in one of those, the biggest questions I'd have are around reliability, cleaning routines, and maintenance. For example I could pay minimum wage for someone to cut veggies, or pay significantly more for an engineer to repair the unit because it isn't dispensing tomato right.
Their demo unit is very fun, and adds to the gimmick, but like most industrial equipment ease of access is more important than appearances. I'd hate to have to take apart what they demoed for routine cleaning.
And while it is laudable that they're taking the savings and using them on better ingredients, that only lasts until a competitor appears who is going to just lower the price (e.g. "50c burgers here!").
That's still allows you to segment the market. I like McDonald's but can't get it where I live because the majority of the people prefer higher priced fare. The McDonald's couldn't compete with a mid tier burger joint down the street and got replaced by an upscale Korean restaurant.
If it manages to actually lower operating costs then it will lower prices in all the segments but it won't just get rid of segments
And I imagine two huge components of the pricing floor for restaurants are property cost/rent and labour. Potatoes are dirt cheap and oil can be reused a few times, yet to buy basic fries near me at a non-franchised fast food place would be $5+. Doesn't feel like much of a race to the bottom.
It’s distressing how much life is starting to resemble a Harry Harrison novel. All were missing are porcuswine served at these establishments and well hit the high notes.
Because the market by itself is just the law of the jungle, it has no moral compass. The market has to be encouraged towards a good outcome for humanity.
Do you pay an engineer to come out and fix your car or copy machine? It's not like paid employees are any cleaner... That's why the ice cream machines are "down" half the time
I wasn't calling engineers less clean. I was saying paying for repairs and maintenance from experts might offset the cost savings (relative to minimum wage, minimum qualified, employees) in the long run.
Self-checkout machines seem to work because the technology is simple enough to be reliable enough. In this case you have moving parts, sensors, and food particles on everything.
We don't have quite enough detail, but I wonder how much in the way of sensors it would need if the ingredients were standardized - if every burger weighs 300g, cook them for 130sec per side, etc.
Do fast food burger places use meat thermometers? I suppose better kitchens are more likely to, but then they also allow you to order 'rare' or 'well-done' (which sounds like it is v2.0 for the bot).
Anecdotal, but I know quite a few chefs and none of them would ever use a meat thermometer, it would be an insult to their well-honed ability to feel the cook.
I have many of the same questions too. In industrial robots one of the most important numbers is mean time between failures(MTBF). If the MBTF is too low, that is the robot breakdown or otherwise fails, you spend more on fixing the robot or its mistakes than the cost of the robot itself, the cost of programming it, and the value the robot provides. Cleaning is a huge issue. If they don't clean things properly and someone gets food poisoning this could kill their company and perhaps even the automation of fast food. And if cleaning is time consuming enough it could greatly increase operating costs.
I'm skeptical that this machine adds enough value to justify its costs for the aforementioned reasons, but also because of the decreased flexibility. Other fast food restaurants can introduce new dishes and flavors easily, but if they want to do the same they may need to modify the entire machine. For example, adding two patties instead of one, using differently shaped buns or meat, wraps instead of burgers.
I have a better idea than cleaning: build a machine that builds these so quickly and cheaply that you can throw them away every night when you're done.
You're getting downvoted and you used what I think is a "sarchasm" tag but this isn't a terrible suggestion. Lots of industries use disposable parts for sanitation reasons. Many of the instruments used for medicine and dentistry are now disposable. Food workers wear disposable gloves and food comes in disposable packaging. It's not unreasonable to think that they might use disposable parts for everything that touches food.
How does that blend with the garbage problem the world seems to be having since China stopped importing trash? Is it economical enough to recycle the used machines?
You’re right that they’re not impossible to recycle or decompose. I asked about the economics of getting that done..There’s already a huge problem now that the Chinese are no longer buying trash to recycle cheaply. If the cost of recycling is factored in, do these once-use products remain affordable and profitable? They’re not made from paper, but from plastics and metals, which take specialized recycling.
Low MTBF is why I've tossed all my household robots (Roomba vacs, Roomba floor mopper, and about half a dozen different cat litter robots). They save time T when they work, but they create new problems that require 2T to fix. It's a net loss.
The benefit of it all being transparent and visible to customers is, as any dirt will be visible, they can sell or franchise the machines and the buyers can't skimp on cleaning.
Bacteria isn't always particularly visible, and that's the part you have to worry about. I'm curious how they keep the meat and other ingredients chilled in those transparent tubes, especially if sunlight is anywhere near them.
Speaking of tomatoes -- all the tomatoes in that tube were beautfully colored, exactly the same shape and size. (And beefsteak variety, so nearly tasteless. That's a different issue.)
In the real world, tomatoes come graded. You pay a lot more if you want them all exactly the same size. They need to be washed, and frequently have woody stems that need to be excised. I didn't see that happening automatically.
And onions don't come pre-peeled in restaurant quantities. The pickle tube is going to jam. The condiments might signal you when they're out, but the nozzles are going to need a good cleaning.
I wonder if they're planning on going Juicero and selling their franchisees preloaded tubes.
And tomatoes can be difficult to slice; too ripe, and they splatter, making catsup in that nice, clear tube. Too tough and they bend the blades of your mandoline. Onions are even worse. They seem to have realized that lettuce won't be easy to cut (so they use shredded) but that will wilt/brown much faster.
Its not automation if a human is standing there feeding the slicer and carrying it to wherever it needs to go. The hard part in automation is almost always material handling, not cutting.
Of all the things you could have taken from my comment, you came up with that? You seriously thought I was advocating having a human run laps around the machine with a deli slicer?
Clearly, the observation was, just make the cutting mechanism work like a deli slicer, as opposed to a knife or whatever else the OP had in mind.
Do you know what a knife is? A blade with a handle. Do you know what a deli slicer is? A blade with a bigger, heavier, mechanized handle.
Clearly the observation is that these robots are blades that dont need handles because they do everything a handle-using human does without requiring an actual handle. See what I'm getting at? You're telling them they should use a better handle when handles have nothing to do with the actual subject at hand.
The hard part is picking up the vegetables and moving them without damaging them, filtering out the product that went bad after QC at the farm, measuring how much force to apply to both ends to keep it from falling apart, keeping an eye on gunk and cleaning it before it becomes a mechanical problem or food safety hazard, and on and on. You know, the things that you need humans for, not deli slicers.
That's what the OP had in mind. Not what kind of kitchen utensil to use.
Um, do you know what a deli slicer is? Hint: they don't typically have handles.
Seriously, go back and read the original post. It's all about how hard it is to cut various vegetables. Not the stuff you mentioned. Think you better calibrate, son.
When you buy a can of diced tomatoes, how do you think were they diced? Do you think it was done manually? I'm pretty sure slicing and dicing vegetables is a problem that has been solved at industrial scale a long time ago.
Industrial canned food production is a completely different scale compared to an automated restaurant. We're talking sorting, cutting, and packing machines each the size of the average McDonalds restaurant. Dont think its realistic to fit all of that in a drive through burger location
In addition to maintenance, don't forget about upgrades, newer versions and installation/maintenance of those.
Early on in the food making robot game it will move fast, new versions will come out all the time. Noone wants to eat at the place with last year's robots.
Early on, competing will be intense if the new versions also cut costs heavily. No restaurant that has gone automation will be able to survive if using too far outdated robots in the beginning at least, until it is refined after many iterations.
Humans are self-cleaning and maintain on their own time. Robots will be like any other kitchen equipment, probably very nasty unless there are humans there to clean them on the regular, good policies or really good self-cleaning technology.
Eventually there will be robot upgrading and maintaining third party services, but at that point are you really getting a difference across restaurants other than ingredients? Sometimes people like chefs cooking because it is unique and harder to replicate. We already get lots of food made by robots, they are frozen foods that aren't all that great compared to food made on the spot by real people.
This is a somewhat common technique used in, for example, beverage dispensers. Food-grade anti-microbial coatings are available and apparently quite useful.
If I were looking to invest, I wouldn't give a crap about reliability, cleaning, and maintenance. I'd want to see his business plan, and how he thinks he's going to make money when the highest amount of revenue this thing can produce is $72/hour, when it runs flawlessly.
Yeah, "America is a big place" covers a lot of ground for this company.
I'm not sure that gives them much, though -- restaurants are pretty capital-intensive, and on those economics the marginal savings of not having burger-flippers doesn't add up to a lot of advantage. Maybe it would be better to sell your machines, to become "the Coca-Cola of burgers" rather than another McDonald's.
Established players don't want to develop these machines in-house, but if you provide clearly better value they can and they will catch up. They'd probably rather buy the technology, though.
On top of that it can produce multiple burgers at the same.
I assume the revenue per machine is potentially 5x of that (or more) which is $691200 per year.
Making money seems like the lowest priority item on the very long list of potential problems with this machine.
Cleaning and restocking? Those are still unsolved and might even be impossible. Making more money merely requires "revision 2: now 30% more efficient!" or just building more than one machine.
True, but you don't have the same expenses. Hopefully less direct human labor hours, able to run 24x7 at times when human costs could be higher, way less real estate and more viable locations than a restaurant, as well as just lower utility bills.
Of course there are other expenses such as maintenance, deployment, development and upgrades. But those are the things this company is likely trying to optimize.
As long as we can see the ingredients it seems like a great idea, better than what is on offer currently. My suspicion is that the machines otherwise would look like the inside of McFlurry machines rather soon.
I like to thing I am a burger pro, but I know I am not an automation pro. A burger shouldn't take more than 10 minutes from cooking to being served. This thing looks very slow. Is that the current state of this sort of line automation?
I'd go for it as long as they use fresh undamaged and proper ingredients completely devoid of preservatives, corn starch etc. The cleaning of the machine has to be top notch too and done several times a day I think.
If done properly it could be great, nothing turns me off food more than seeing a sweaty cook drip sweat onto the food while making it (yes it has happened, the food went into the garbage).
I don't really understand the appeal of these restaurants. While living in Boston I went to the MIT "automated" wock-esque' restaurants a few times. It wasn't even that, "automated" per-se outside of the wock-cooking. Humans still handled a majority of meal prep, stocking machines, and dealing with payment problems.
IMO I'd rather have spent less money at the neighboring Chipotle for better food.
I recently left the Bay Area to live in a major city in another state, and now that it's a little easier to see the tech forest through the trees, I see that for now, very few people want a lot of these types services outside of usual tech centric hubs.
It's like in the Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano: there are certain services where people enjoy the human touch; I think food service is one of those.
Certainly automation of food service was a problem solved in the early 1900s for those that wanted fast food and coffees without being asked by someone if they'd like fries or a muffin; just turned out that in most situations it was actually a less successful business model...
Honestly, when it comes to slices of pizza or a burger (fast food in general), I couldn't care less about the human touch, and I've been to some of the best pizzeria's / burger joints in NY/LA/SF.
I might care my first time going, but anytime after that, I just care about getting my food and eating it.
Machines don’t put mustard on when you tell it no mustard. Machines don’t give you attitude either. Machines don’t spit on your food or do any number of disgusting things that fast food workers have been known to do.
Machines will never comply with "Can I please have more than the two ketchup packets that management woefully let's you give me?" or "How are you doing?"
I think what's kind of interesting is if this actually makes it easier to start a restaurant. Assuming at some point, some food robot maker steps up and starts selling the robot itself to independent restauranteurs, instead of selling hamburgers to end consumers, do these robots put the power back into the hands of the small business/restaurant owner?
I have to imagine a big complication in starting an independent restaurant is the overhead of hiring/managing/supporting employees (i.e. wait staff, cooks, dishwashers, etc.). A large employee base probably requires a large franchise with economies of scale to distribute the cost of centralized HR over many restaurants.
Without that overhead, entrepreneurial restauranteurs can focus on differentiating the food, the location(s) of the restaurant and the ambiance.
I think getting the location right has always been the biggest obstacle to being a successful restaurant. And there's only so much you can change the menu and "ambience" when you're supplying self-service burgers.
Plus the article does hint the robo-restaurant still has employees to manage customers, clean, load the machine and presumably sort out issues with it on a not-infrequent basis...
I kinda see what you’re saying, but I think for the economics to work at scale (another person mentioned location) then the device should be small enough to fit in a food truck or a street vendor stand.
Once you have the size down to where you just need one person at a time operating it, I bet the big fast food companies will swarm all over the opportunity to create tens of thousands of micro-franchises.
Why drive for Uber when you could set up a mini McDonalds wherever the health department lets you get away with it?
Yeah kind like a super duper high end vending machine at locations where there might be a person that normally is tasked with doing other stuff could do minimal burger robot maintenance (i.e. refill, clean at the end of the day, etc.). Like at a gas station, corner mom and pop grocery store, wework office lobby, etc.
I think these kinds of machines could potentially be mainstream someday, at least in fast food, and I see a lot of potential in both cost-savings and food safety improvements.
One thing that struck me as humorous though is the founder's comparison to self-driving cars (from Bloomberg's article): “What you’re watching is a technological feat. Self-driving cars need a lot of mileage before they become reliable. You’re seeing something similar here”
Not to dismiss the challenges with automating burgers, but its pretty straightforward compared to self-driving tech - there's basically no unknowns!
>> Not to dismiss the challenges with automating burgers, but its pretty straightforward compared to self-driving tech - there's basically no unknowns!
I always assume things are more complicated than they appear on the surface, so this is a surprise. You sound like you've explored this topic thoroughly. What is involved in having a robot produce a hamburger (not just the patty, of course)?
OP is referring to the likelihood that a blizzard blows through the prep kitchen as opposed to the likelihood of a hard rainstorm on the 101 during the morning commute. Self-driving cars have to reliably cope with a wider range of uncertainties than a robot cooking burgers in a carefully controlled (by comparison) environment.
I’m not saying it’s easy- there’s probably a reason no one’s done it yet. But the comparison seems a little off. There’s no decades long darpa research grants required, and probably very few phds. There’s no predicting what other humans will do, there are no lives at stake (other than food safety precautions). The amount of capital alone that’s been invested in self driving tech (and it’s still not good enough) compared to the amount invested in burger tech makes pretty clear how hard one problem may be.
This is basically a precision automated assembly line, and to be honest plenty of things just as complicated as burgers have been assembled automatically.
Process automation (a field I've been involved in for around 20 years) is vastly easier because the environment doesn't change by much. You can pretty much say "move this thing over here, verify that you moved it over there, add this chemical, and mix, verify that the chemical was added and then mixed" and be pretty confident that it will work in all likely scenarios.
Self-driving cars, OTOH, have to work with nice smooth roads, or potholed monstrosities, or ice & snow, deer jumping out right in front of the car, or idiots tailgating you at 70 mph while you're trying to maintain distance from the car in front of you. Their environment is always changing, and not generally in a predictable fashion.
It looks hard to clean and does not look like it uses a lot of common off-the-shelf industrial parts. I'd want a very impressive service contract to go along with it.
This seems like it would quickly devolve into health hazard without constant maintenance. Idk, at this point, it seems like it would be a headache just to have this running smoothly. It's cool and all and yeah maybe robots will make our food in the future, but this machine is not something that I'm especially stoked about.
As a person who cooks, 50% of the time is spent cleaning up. I can see gunk, pieces of stuff, residue messing with the machine. A normal person notices and cleans each bit as they go, whereas a machine like this (unless engineered to clean itself) will be cleaned periodically (most likely after business hours). So my point is, I feel like food made by humans is still cleaner and safer.
Also what happens when something needs to be cleaned or replaced mid-lunch? You shut down the machine and open it up... the restaurant loses $. In a normal kitchen, you wipe things up, wash a knife, or grab a new one and keep going.
Just imagine how fast this could spread food borne illnesses. Unless the meat grinder is cleaned between each burger, that's a huge potential risk. Just a little e. coli on the outside of the beef, and each blade will be contaminated.
And as anyone who's worked fast food knows, the higher tech the food prep device, the more delicate it is. Cooking beef results in grease, which gets everywhere. You can put gaskets, physical barriers etc etc, and grease particles will coat everything. Then things will break down.
Add in robotic mandolines for the tomatos/onions, the necessary refrigeration of all the components and you've got something that won't be robust, reliable, or efficient.
Then there's tamper resistance. This thing will need to be hermetically sealed to keep people from doing the usual fsckery that happens in kiosks etc.
And the economics looks "challenging." From the article, it looks like it stocks 30 buns. 30 burgers at $6 is $180 in revenue before someone needs to restock it. And restock the beef. And make sure the artisanal beef deliveries are handled properly. Sounds like a prep cook... Then you'll need cashiers, and people to clean tables, and restrooms, and all the other accoutrements of restaurants.
Yeah, it looks cool, and people do like to see their food cooked. The novelty will attract people at first. Then the lines will deter them. Restaurants are all about volume. And at $6 a burger, you'll need to crank them out fast.
Worked in food service for 16 years, started my own restaurant. So not a layman... (yes I know this is a logical fallacy; appeal to authority. So what)
But to answer your question, no. I don't think they've addressed these obvious issues.
Why the hell wouldn’t they have addressed those issues? It’s so fundamental that they’d be stupid to not have thought of what you’ve described. These people probably know a thing or two about what they are doing — this isn’t some kid’s science project. Other people have worked in restaurants too — I am pretty sure your concerns aren’t novel.
I knew a lot of people whose parents worked in the industry. Their kids would "help" out a bit (the parents hoped to pass on the restaurant) by working the front of the house, or doing some bookkeeping etc. This gave them a sense of the business without learning the hard side of it. The really long hours, the fear of going broke, the hassles of employing people. The endless cleaning, stocking, menu planning, working with vendors. The million details that all have to be done for the business to run smoothly.
Then the parents decide to step away from the business. Their children take over the business, and want to put their stamp on it. Modernize it. They update the menu; redo the decor. Aim for a better clientele. Try to remove the difficult parts of the business with technology. And the business fails. Because they didn't understand the myriad small decisions that lead to its initial success.
Restaurants are incredibly hard to start and run successfully. That's why franchises are so popular, they take some of the guesswork out, at the expense of giving up control and individuality.
At the end of the day, people want tasty food, at a reasonable price, served quickly, and in a decent atmosphere. If this robot can provide that, it'll succeed. I don't see that it can satisfy the second and third criteria. If they get that down, and the cost of the robot isn't higher than a staffed and equipped kitchen they'll succeed.
The wood appears largely limited to non-food-contact surfaces.
Wood is often used in food prep; cutting boards, butcher blocks, stirrers, rollers and scoops/paddles are often made of wood. Wood surfaces have been shown to have anti-microbial properties that make them well suited for the use:
Who says a Creator restaurant needs to only have one of these robots per restaurant? If you have two, then you can run them active-passive, with the cold one being cleaned by an employee. Switch the machines as necessary. It ups the square footage of the restaurant, somewhat, but not by that much.
It was most likely cracy expensive just as these news machines are compared to a ordinary restaurant grade kitchen and you still need people going around unstucking things that get stuck.
Bringing industrial processes into street food seems ... unpractical.
On top of that the article says it takes around a full five minutes from ordering to your burger being ready, and all those ingredients in tubes look pre-prepped to some extent. Plus it can't be easy to clean.
That one from the 60s actually looks more impressive, wow!
LOL. 5 minutes a burger, at $6/per. So this thing can sell $72 worth of burgers per hour. At that rate and price, there's no way this will ever be profitable. Even with add on sales of artisanal, hand shaved potato chips with bespoke cream soda bumping the cost up to $10 a customer, this is DOA. Interesting technology, but as a business, DOA.
Edit; I missed that he's paying his employees $16/hour (good for him). So if he has 2 employees fulltime, he's got $32/hour + payroll taxes/unemployment insurance etc to earn before he can pay off the R&D for this, his rent, his food cost, his utilities, his advertising, and then have an ROI for his investors.
And he has "experience" and a family in the business! Why they didn't talk him out of this is beyond me.
5 minutes to make a burger from start to finish isn't the same as making 12 burgers per hour - the machine can probably prepare multiple burgers at a time (just speculation from the video, of course).
It seems apparent the Creator machine was designed with form over function in mind, to be seen and photographed and to visually communicate the concept of "automated food assembly" while looking aesthetically appealing.
Actually, exactly the opposite is more likely. All else being equal, the electromechanical assemblies are more likely to fail and are harder to change than the computer.
Everyone is obsessing about the detail when there's already a company that pretty much does this - Subway!
You could pretty much automate the sub construction process since the ingredient prep process is done at an industrial scale and just shipped in bags to each Subway location.
Yeah I'm actually really surprised Subway hasn't at least tested an automated restaurant. Seems like they would be perfectly positioned to do it. They even pre-portion many of their meats to make it even easier.
A typical Subway has a lower staff count than most fast food joints, I think. At most times, when I worked at one, we needed fewer than three heads on the line.
> When I ask how a startup launching one eatery at a time could become a $10 billion company, Creator co-founder and CEO Alex Vardakostas looks me dead in the eye and says, “the market is much bigger than that.”
A $10B valuation company better understand the profit between $1 sale of SaaS and $1 sale of food ...
I know you guys all like to feel so clever by saying that, but it's not as if their burger business is some big money-loser that they are propping up out of sheer altruism.
I would be curious to see what the actual economic case is for burger automation like this. What's the labour cost savings here, all in?
Restaurants aren't food factories, not even mcdonaldses. We food factories too, but this doesn't appear to be for them. This was to be more about whether or not people would like to have their burger made by a robot. Price-wise, I'd wager its much of a muchness.
It could be a draw for the novelty and consistency. I hate having an amazing experience destroyed by the follow up visit, where someone decides to check out for their shift.
Labor costs are by far the most expensive costs for a restaurant. Employee turnover is also a significant problem. You typically aren’t able to hire A players to make burgers.
I'm not very impressed with this. It automates some steps, but they need to take this to the next level, where everything is prepared in a compact, self-cleaning machine. I know people love the art of cooking and there's the question of jobs, but honestly, I hate that my food is created in these chaotic, dirty kitchens. People get tired, apathetic, etc, and the consistency really suffers. How many times have you had an amazing meal only to be completely disappointed the next time.
I want to see a high-end robot restaurant that's run as a work of art rather than a race-to-the-bottom. Think Benihana, but run by KUKA robots. You'd sit facing a kitchen behind a glass wall and watch the robots fling things around dangerously -- knives, cutting boards, frying pans, etc.
You'd order a complicated dish and watch in amazement as the robots prepare it in front of you.
I'm really curious how something like that would be received. Is Benihana entertaining to watch because of the tricks themselves or because it's impressive that a human has learned to perform the tricks consistently?
If I ever had the chance to go see a robot doing Benihana tricks it would definitely be worth going at least once. Perhaps I have more appreciation for the degree of engineering that would go into something like that though.
Heh, unrelated but my wife and I decided to visit the "Robot Restaurant" in Shinjuku Tokyo expecting exactly this. Turns out it's a glorified strip club with lasers.
I had the idea for the Sub sandwich version of this on my way home from Iraq in 2010. I wanted a sub sandwich, and was still on middle east time, however Baltimore airport didn't have anything open at 2AM when I landed. So the thinking was, why not have a completely automated sandwich shop, that cut everything fresh as it was ordered? The thinking goes, that if you automate the ends of the farm to table process, cooking/service and Growing/picking, then automating the logistics (transport) will make more sense.
After about a year or two of engineering sketches and business planning I gave up on it because it would take a few years for the technology to be capable and people to be ready for a wholly automated restaurant - with one person there for QC/fixes. Plus it would probably be 1-2M just for a prototype. Sure enough in 2011 Momentum machines came out with their prototype, and now 7 years later they have a new brand and a working shop.
Kudos to them. If they do it right, these guys could automate field to table and drive food costs to zero with minimal waste.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadThat's a great elevator pitch. Fluff-free and obvious ex post facto.
Other than the beef, all the other components are standard for a decent restaurant. Fresh baked buns aren't anything special, nor is custom grind meat. And bragging about spending more on your food cost is dumb. It shows that he has no real idea about the day to day of keeping a restaurant financially afloat. He'll find out when the VC money runs out.
I really hope they are successful. The second order effects of this automation, especially for a busy family like ours are hours of saved time, that can be spent with the children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg
One reason I don't like eating out much is who is touching my food?
That burger looks pretty good and $6 sounds pretty good.
Seriously, removing the dirty hairless ape element as much as possible from food prep is great all around!
I'm really really surprised everyone doesn't feel this way but apparently not. I do though. Can't wait for these machines to get rolled out.
Plus it's easier to keep a machine clean (which they no doubt will) than a fleet of fast food workers.
Besides, it's not real potential, it's how I feel about it. Bring the machine on I say!
However, IMHO, the source of the beef can trump all that. I used to buy a year's worth of beef from a local farmer all at once. Even after a year in the freezer, a burger made from his grass-fed beef tasted better than one made from meat bought from the grocery the same day. When you start out with high quality meat, it takes a long time before the flavor degrades.
OTOH, "regular" store bought ground beef tastes nasty after being frozen for a few months.
As you might have inferred by now, good burgers are typically made from cuts like brisket and chuck that are tough, inexpensive, and high in flavor. Using high-end steaks for burgers is simply a waste, doubly so for well-marbled ones.
The fat percentage would not be difficult. Any good butcher would probably be happy to help you set such a comparison up. That is, if they don't warn you that it's a waste to use that T-bone on a burger first.
The point is that it's faster than a burger at a specialty burger restaurant, like Red Robin.
A grill at Red Robin operates in parallel and can easily beat this thing at throughput.
5 minutes is latency. The article says nothing about throughput, but the video shows multiple burgers pipelined on the machine's conveyors.
This place is in San Francisco. Where are these "dozens of places" for a really good burger <$6?
But where are the "dozens" of places?
I have to think there is lower hanging fruit in the fast food industry, though. I just really want McDonald's or Dunkin Donuts to turn their POS machine around so I can key in my own order, or maybe they could cut a deal with Amazon or Apple to start using Siri or Alexa. The failure rate on the biological natural language processors currently in use are shockingly high.
The thing I'd really like is a combination of voice (the above is trivial to parse) and a history of my last 6 orders to one touch order.
Their demo unit is very fun, and adds to the gimmick, but like most industrial equipment ease of access is more important than appearances. I'd hate to have to take apart what they demoed for routine cleaning.
And while it is laudable that they're taking the savings and using them on better ingredients, that only lasts until a competitor appears who is going to just lower the price (e.g. "50c burgers here!").
If it manages to actually lower operating costs then it will lower prices in all the segments but it won't just get rid of segments
If you want a more expensive burger, then buy the more expensive one. Of you want the cheaper one then buy that.
It's not "laudable". It is responding to the market and providing a different product.
I wasn't calling engineers less clean. I was saying paying for repairs and maintenance from experts might offset the cost savings (relative to minimum wage, minimum qualified, employees) in the long run.
Self-checkout machines seem to work because the technology is simple enough to be reliable enough. In this case you have moving parts, sensors, and food particles on everything.
(that's what she said)
I'm skeptical that this machine adds enough value to justify its costs for the aforementioned reasons, but also because of the decreased flexibility. Other fast food restaurants can introduce new dishes and flavors easily, but if they want to do the same they may need to modify the entire machine. For example, adding two patties instead of one, using differently shaped buns or meat, wraps instead of burgers.
In the real world, tomatoes come graded. You pay a lot more if you want them all exactly the same size. They need to be washed, and frequently have woody stems that need to be excised. I didn't see that happening automatically.
And onions don't come pre-peeled in restaurant quantities. The pickle tube is going to jam. The condiments might signal you when they're out, but the nozzles are going to need a good cleaning.
I wonder if they're planning on going Juicero and selling their franchisees preloaded tubes.
Clearly, the observation was, just make the cutting mechanism work like a deli slicer, as opposed to a knife or whatever else the OP had in mind.
Clearly the observation is that these robots are blades that dont need handles because they do everything a handle-using human does without requiring an actual handle. See what I'm getting at? You're telling them they should use a better handle when handles have nothing to do with the actual subject at hand.
The hard part is picking up the vegetables and moving them without damaging them, filtering out the product that went bad after QC at the farm, measuring how much force to apply to both ends to keep it from falling apart, keeping an eye on gunk and cleaning it before it becomes a mechanical problem or food safety hazard, and on and on. You know, the things that you need humans for, not deli slicers.
That's what the OP had in mind. Not what kind of kitchen utensil to use.
Seriously, go back and read the original post. It's all about how hard it is to cut various vegetables. Not the stuff you mentioned. Think you better calibrate, son.
Early on in the food making robot game it will move fast, new versions will come out all the time. Noone wants to eat at the place with last year's robots.
Early on, competing will be intense if the new versions also cut costs heavily. No restaurant that has gone automation will be able to survive if using too far outdated robots in the beginning at least, until it is refined after many iterations.
Humans are self-cleaning and maintain on their own time. Robots will be like any other kitchen equipment, probably very nasty unless there are humans there to clean them on the regular, good policies or really good self-cleaning technology.
Eventually there will be robot upgrading and maintaining third party services, but at that point are you really getting a difference across restaurants other than ingredients? Sometimes people like chefs cooking because it is unique and harder to replicate. We already get lots of food made by robots, they are frozen foods that aren't all that great compared to food made on the spot by real people.
I'm not sure that gives them much, though -- restaurants are pretty capital-intensive, and on those economics the marginal savings of not having burger-flippers doesn't add up to a lot of advantage. Maybe it would be better to sell your machines, to become "the Coca-Cola of burgers" rather than another McDonald's.
Established players don't want to develop these machines in-house, but if you provide clearly better value they can and they will catch up. They'd probably rather buy the technology, though.
Outside of places like San Francisco the few dozen square feet per machine isn't going to be a big deal.
On top of that it can produce multiple burgers at the same. I assume the revenue per machine is potentially 5x of that (or more) which is $691200 per year.
Making money seems like the lowest priority item on the very long list of potential problems with this machine.
Cleaning and restocking? Those are still unsolved and might even be impossible. Making more money merely requires "revision 2: now 30% more efficient!" or just building more than one machine.
Of course there are other expenses such as maintenance, deployment, development and upgrades. But those are the things this company is likely trying to optimize.
If done properly it could be great, nothing turns me off food more than seeing a sweaty cook drip sweat onto the food while making it (yes it has happened, the food went into the garbage).
IMO I'd rather have spent less money at the neighboring Chipotle for better food.
Also-- There's more than one company doing that?? Or just one with several locations
It's like in the Kurt Vonnegut book Player Piano: there are certain services where people enjoy the human touch; I think food service is one of those.
I might care my first time going, but anytime after that, I just care about getting my food and eating it.
care to elaborate your pov please ?
This is a bunch of human workers deciding how the mechanical work should be done (i.e. with a robot).
I have to imagine a big complication in starting an independent restaurant is the overhead of hiring/managing/supporting employees (i.e. wait staff, cooks, dishwashers, etc.). A large employee base probably requires a large franchise with economies of scale to distribute the cost of centralized HR over many restaurants.
Without that overhead, entrepreneurial restauranteurs can focus on differentiating the food, the location(s) of the restaurant and the ambiance.
Plus the article does hint the robo-restaurant still has employees to manage customers, clean, load the machine and presumably sort out issues with it on a not-infrequent basis...
Once you have the size down to where you just need one person at a time operating it, I bet the big fast food companies will swarm all over the opportunity to create tens of thousands of micro-franchises.
Why drive for Uber when you could set up a mini McDonalds wherever the health department lets you get away with it?
Japanese Vending Machine Unboxing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Z80J3jOao
One thing that struck me as humorous though is the founder's comparison to self-driving cars (from Bloomberg's article): “What you’re watching is a technological feat. Self-driving cars need a lot of mileage before they become reliable. You’re seeing something similar here”
Not to dismiss the challenges with automating burgers, but its pretty straightforward compared to self-driving tech - there's basically no unknowns!
I always assume things are more complicated than they appear on the surface, so this is a surprise. You sound like you've explored this topic thoroughly. What is involved in having a robot produce a hamburger (not just the patty, of course)?
This is basically a precision automated assembly line, and to be honest plenty of things just as complicated as burgers have been assembled automatically.
Self-driving cars, OTOH, have to work with nice smooth roads, or potholed monstrosities, or ice & snow, deer jumping out right in front of the car, or idiots tailgating you at 70 mph while you're trying to maintain distance from the car in front of you. Their environment is always changing, and not generally in a predictable fashion.
As a person who cooks, 50% of the time is spent cleaning up. I can see gunk, pieces of stuff, residue messing with the machine. A normal person notices and cleans each bit as they go, whereas a machine like this (unless engineered to clean itself) will be cleaned periodically (most likely after business hours). So my point is, I feel like food made by humans is still cleaner and safer.
Also what happens when something needs to be cleaned or replaced mid-lunch? You shut down the machine and open it up... the restaurant loses $. In a normal kitchen, you wipe things up, wash a knife, or grab a new one and keep going.
And as anyone who's worked fast food knows, the higher tech the food prep device, the more delicate it is. Cooking beef results in grease, which gets everywhere. You can put gaskets, physical barriers etc etc, and grease particles will coat everything. Then things will break down.
Add in robotic mandolines for the tomatos/onions, the necessary refrigeration of all the components and you've got something that won't be robust, reliable, or efficient.
Then there's tamper resistance. This thing will need to be hermetically sealed to keep people from doing the usual fsckery that happens in kiosks etc.
And the economics looks "challenging." From the article, it looks like it stocks 30 buns. 30 burgers at $6 is $180 in revenue before someone needs to restock it. And restock the beef. And make sure the artisanal beef deliveries are handled properly. Sounds like a prep cook... Then you'll need cashiers, and people to clean tables, and restrooms, and all the other accoutrements of restaurants.
Yeah, it looks cool, and people do like to see their food cooked. The novelty will attract people at first. Then the lines will deter them. Restaurants are all about volume. And at $6 a burger, you'll need to crank them out fast.
But to answer your question, no. I don't think they've addressed these obvious issues.
Then the parents decide to step away from the business. Their children take over the business, and want to put their stamp on it. Modernize it. They update the menu; redo the decor. Aim for a better clientele. Try to remove the difficult parts of the business with technology. And the business fails. Because they didn't understand the myriad small decisions that lead to its initial success.
Restaurants are incredibly hard to start and run successfully. That's why franchises are so popular, they take some of the guesswork out, at the expense of giving up control and individuality.
At the end of the day, people want tasty food, at a reasonable price, served quickly, and in a decent atmosphere. If this robot can provide that, it'll succeed. I don't see that it can satisfy the second and third criteria. If they get that down, and the cost of the robot isn't higher than a staffed and equipped kitchen they'll succeed.
There's a reason most kitchens are full of stainless steel with smooth edges and nothing that can capture soil.
There's wood in this appliance.
Wood is often used in food prep; cutting boards, butcher blocks, stirrers, rollers and scoops/paddles are often made of wood. Wood surfaces have been shown to have anti-microbial properties that make them well suited for the use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_board#Wood
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE&t=545s
It was most likely cracy expensive just as these news machines are compared to a ordinary restaurant grade kitchen and you still need people going around unstucking things that get stuck.
Bringing industrial processes into street food seems ... unpractical.
That one from the 60s actually looks more impressive, wow!
Edit; I missed that he's paying his employees $16/hour (good for him). So if he has 2 employees fulltime, he's got $32/hour + payroll taxes/unemployment insurance etc to earn before he can pay off the R&D for this, his rent, his food cost, his utilities, his advertising, and then have an ROI for his investors.
And he has "experience" and a family in the business! Why they didn't talk him out of this is beyond me.
You could pretty much automate the sub construction process since the ingredient prep process is done at an industrial scale and just shipped in bags to each Subway location.
A $10B valuation company better understand the profit between $1 sale of SaaS and $1 sale of food ...
(I don't necessarily think they'll ever be worth $10Bn, but... eventually, some company doing something similar will be)
Restaurants aren't food factories, not even mcdonaldses. We food factories too, but this doesn't appear to be for them. This was to be more about whether or not people would like to have their burger made by a robot. Price-wise, I'd wager its much of a muchness.
You'd order a complicated dish and watch in amazement as the robots prepare it in front of you.
After about a year or two of engineering sketches and business planning I gave up on it because it would take a few years for the technology to be capable and people to be ready for a wholly automated restaurant - with one person there for QC/fixes. Plus it would probably be 1-2M just for a prototype. Sure enough in 2011 Momentum machines came out with their prototype, and now 7 years later they have a new brand and a working shop.
Kudos to them. If they do it right, these guys could automate field to table and drive food costs to zero with minimal waste.