Or in the current tight labor market, it would allow for redeployment of team members to being "no longer being seriously understaffed and not quitting to go somewhere else better."
Seems fine with me. Fast food is pretty horrible and the worst part are the employees. Let them do other, more interesting jobs.
I once ordered a Big Mac and the employee forgot to put in the meat. Someone did that. They put it in the bag and handed it to me. When I returned it, no one apologized, some other employee shrugs and went back and got another one.
The service will be much better with robots. And the remaining employees can be paid more, thus be smarter and happier.
But they won't. And they could already be paid more (see McD in Norway and McD in the US, drastically different minimum wage but basically the same prices), but aren't.
Not very thoughtful. Do you think fast food workers are aware of a vast number of more interesting, higher paying jobs they are able to get and are simply working at minimum wage over a deep fried for the fun of it?
What jobs are there, especially for somebody who may quite bluntly not be the sharpest tool in the box? The labor market is not prepared to absorb these workers.
Chick-fil-a has people walking around and smiling and asking people if they need anything. Picking up trash, giving refills, whatever.
Every fast food place is understaffed right now (eg, Burger King has a help wanted sign over their drive through menu) so I think the robots will pick up the slack from all the missing humans.
No, I would say the opposite, but I would also say that's the problem. We have deliberately tried to make every entry level job idiot proof.
100+ years ago, industries weren't solved yet. Customer interaction was improvised, food service involved actual cooking skills, products were still hand crafted. Today jobs that involve customer interaction are scripted. Food and commodity production use preprocessed, packaged ingredients, and the process is pipelined. Entry level jobs today have no wiggle room for creativity, and very minimal amount of training that is portable across jobs, because that's what maximizes profits.
What? You just got done explaining why the human employees suck at their job, and your conclusion is that they'll be paid more now? Maybe you mean by going and doing a different job?
One is to replace the people, ideally reducing cost assuming the bot, and it's programming, maintenance, etc... are less than the labor cost was.
The other is to augment the people, maybe replace a few, but for the most part the people get repurposed to tasks they can do much better than the automation can.
In the first case, it's all about optimization, and the cost is generally a more rigid organization, but a very lean, efficient one. This leads to much lower costs, assuming the scale and savings make sense.
In the second case, it's all about quality and or expanding the scope of business. The potential for rigidity is still there, depending on how the robots and people work. In general, resources are there for the people to work smarter, and or on other tasks, products, improvements, and the like.
So about a year ago, Whole Foods introduced some bicycles that carry some little trailers. A delivery person can probably deliver 3 times as much as before. That means two thirds of them could be redeployed to not work for Whole Foods (Amazon?) anymore.
500 years ago, some guy invented the printing press. With it, one person could produce more books in a month than 100 scribes. Which soon found themselves redeployed to not working anymore.
Given what I think the operations are likely going to face -- how to swap out one bot for another when it breaks. How to fill in the line when there's a gap. How to service the bot.
This is actually an area where automation has some significant potential. Taking orders with a menu on a webpage or an app is a classic at this point. I remember seeing not just vending machines, but a vending wall at Amsterdam Central train station where a chef would fill transparent boxes with freshly fried snacks, to be sold automatically.
Cooking is an enormous working-class employer and it is getting automated — will it lower demand for work? Most people still cook their own food, so there‘s a lot more cooking service that could be sold, but at this point, the economies of scale point at fewer people manning the frier, and just one person monitoring several robots.
If it's cheaper to make food using automation, then some complimentary component of food service is going to capture some of the dollars saved. For example, we could see food trucks that make your food while en route and the truck pulls up and delivers it fresh.
Or, more simply, we could see commissaries/"ghost kitchens" capable of serving a larger variety of food with fewer people pop up in suburban strip malls. Maybe they could have a rotating menu. A small restaurant like that could pull down a few million in revenue each year even in less populated states, which is more than enough to pay good wages if the number of operators can be kept to <4 people.
Most of them now have several operators making a limited selection of food.
Couldn't we have self-driving food trucks, each specializing in a specific food? People could have events and schedules a couple of food trucks to drive by while cooking food on the way. Fast food takes on a new meaning (fast vehicles cook+deliver food on demand).
No more need for fast food restaurants because they just can transformed into a fleet of trucks.
The vast majority of working class people used to work toiling the fields to grow food. Now that entire process is done by a tiny number of people managing fleets of machines.
History is full of clues of how this story is going to play out over the next few decades.
History is also full of hard times with high unemployment, where skilled and unskilled workers failed to transition and struggled to feed their families.
Long story short: there's a lot more going on with service industry than "just make it more factory automated to reduce labor costs" and any attempt at "disrupting" the industry that ignores that is going to do little better than be a more expensive vending machine.
Apparently they went out of fashion everywhere, except the Netherlands, probably because of the strong presence of the ‘FEBO’ franchise from the 1960ies onward, a fast food brand built in part on having these machines. So it’s hardly new to see them in Amsterdam!
Next: get your bag from a chute in the drivethru lane. No humans in the store at all!
I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. Made-to-order food, always the same, packaged without anyone ever touching it, for a good price. Would be hard to beat.
I'm envisioning a bank drive-thru. Multiple lanes, place your order on a screen, chute/conveyor belt delivers your food.
Alternately, the drive-thru version of an Automat. Drive up to a wall of boxes, each of which has a meal. Scan a QR code / punch a code in, the box with your meal pops open. Robots deliver meals in the background continuously. The boxes keep the meals warm, but JIT ordering would also work. This allows scaling operations up and down around peak hours without additional resources.
To increase efficiency, have a separate "ordering" line and a "pick-up" line. People who order on the app just go to the pick-up line.
Other than the contactless/app part of it, I saw McDonaldses with this tech decades ago. It hasn't seemed to be a game changer until now. What I see here of promise is maximizing parallel service with the minimum amount of land usage. Since you'll need room for multiple cars (and in America today, that means unreasonably giant SUVs), I'm not sure how much benefit you'd get from robot cooks. Without a dining area, it would probably be a relatively spacious kitchen.
Franchises care a lot about the experience so they're not gonna roll the dice with "lite" formats until they can guarantee consistency and quality befitting their brand at those small scales. You can just about fit an entire fast food restaurant worth of equipment in a semi truck. You can't fit it and have it be anywhere near reasonably operable though. Sufficient automation could change that.
If you reduce the foot print enough you can fit a store that can serve the whole menu into a food truck (or sea can, or construction trailer) format and do it with acceptable results that opens up options.
Imagine renting a McDonalds for your sporting event, concert, oil drilling rig or forward operating base the same way you rent a big genset, rock crusher or any other equipment that gets mobilized on a semi truck.
I don't see it happening in the next decade without some yet unforeseen change that makes the tech cheaper, the engineering cheaper or the recurring cost of labor for running a manual restaurant more expensive.
I beg to differ about the experience part. The drive-thru experience is already nearly contactless. There's no 'experience' other than waiting in line and shouting into a can.
As for automating food preparation, there's already factories that produce TV dinners and whatnot. There's nobody in those factories (doing food prep). It's not a matter of technology; i'ts a matter of format and deployment.
Better still: B2B Food As a Service. Get a hose under every office worker's chair delivering necessary nutrients directly to the digestive system through the anal orifice. Needs some infrastructure to install the hoses etc, but that's pretty much already there in most office floors for cables etc.
That way really nobody touches the food, not even the person eating it. In the new capitalist utopia, food touches you.
I've been wondering: if this robot is only flipping fries, could it be made by putting the basket on a simple track, and adding an actuator to move the basket along a track? Why need an arm?
My speculation: a robotic arm makes for a great press release. Actuator + track feels like a factory.
Advantage of an articulated arm like this is that it can more easily be retrofitted to existing stores with existing equipment. The photos look like they are selling more than just an arm add-on but its hard to say where they landed with the White Castle contract. Could be just something they hang from the ceiling and use existing fryers.
After looking at this when it was posted a few weeks ago, I thought the exact same thing. Why couldn't there just be a chain/belt driven pickup that is filled with uncooked fries from a chute above, puts it in a static cook position, then raises & dumps in appropriate bin. That seems way easier than a 3 axis robot? I would think the high motion robot would be way more prone to being out of service, too.
I wonder when the costs of scale will start to come in? This is interesting because it retrofits an existing kitchen, but it can't be much cheaper than just having something that was built from the ground-up to be an automated grill?
Those arms are also usually in cages or somewhat enclosed for safety reasons, are employees just expected to walk around it?
More photos on their product page, the arms are behind plexiglass. OTOH, they show an employee standing next to it while it handles baskets of hot oil. I would hope it had better safety lock-outs than that...
I'm skeptical that Miso Robotics can actually deliver a useful product that outperforms or matches human labor at the same price point. They don't show clear videos of what exactly the robot is capable of, and keep buying Instagram ads to invest in their company.
White Castle already ran a pilot with the Miso 1 and then the Miso 2. It seems they see value. Maybe the tasks are different for White Castle with many small burgers vs the fewer large burgers at other places?
The video that exists shows the Flippy only making french fries [1]. No burger cooking at all. And if you've seen how they do the burgers at WC [2], that's no small task for a robot yet.
The french fry station looks like an ideal place to start, anyway, since it's usually a task that doesn't get a dedicated worker unless the place is extremely busy. In the quieter times it's something nobody has time to work or monitor while doing other things. And then, suddenly, everyone is waiting on the fries to finish.
From a more critical POV, it's kind of a kluge but at least a human can take over. There have been products for a long time [3] that are more self-contained and can do smaller batches of fries but need a hell of a lot more maintenance and cleaning.
From the video, it actually seems as though White Castle burgers are even more optimized for process automation as their preparation doesn't even require flipping (TIL).
Ah, older articles were talking about it doing burgers too at white castle. This one only mentions the fries but doesn't mention burgers. Looks like maybe they transitioned to fry station only?
And the White Castle is easier to automate than other burgers. Small, sure but also limited toppings - no choices, no sauce. (McDonald's is surprisingly complex by comparison)
Walgreens run pilot with Theranos and see where it all went. Running pilot is usually done on the best machine they have under constant supervision of the second in line to the tech who built in. Different than deployment off the production line hundreds of machines without even knowing a real-life breaking ratio. Also the cost of operation is somewhat at $3,500 or some $17 per hour for a full shift, so much more than average cook takes (excluding tips which this machine won't get). Not to mention cooks very rarely just cook... they do all kind of in kitchen tasks that this machine cannot.
I guess we'll find out since this one is moving beyond the pilot. $17 per hour is less in many areas, considering cost to the company for a person also includes additional things like payroll taxes.
I saw the movie Harold vs Kumar and I've always wondered what was so special about these tiny burgers? Are they as good as it is portrayed? It's on my bucket list lol
So to give a more serious answer: White Castle burgers are very much in the style of the original burgers that became popular in the US in the 20s or so. These were sold at sporting events, fairs, etc, and were similar in concept to a hot dog: cheap fast hot meaty snack. They were typically cooked on griddles, and seasoned only with some grilled onion, served on whatever local sliced bun was available in quantity from a baker. The grease and such would build up over the day to where in later hours it was more shallow frying, particularly for the onions.
Anyhow, they're not everyone's cup of tea, and if you're expecting a miniature version of a $12 premium burger no, this ain't that. They're bare bones, and not for someone who dislikes the combo of beef and onion. But within that they're pretty tasty and satisfying.
The call the burgers sliders for a reason. They slide in, they slide out. Most people don't handle the grease very well. Some people swear by them, others curse them as never again until their next time out drinking all night. I don't personally care for them at all. My wife loves them.
But, I'll give White Castle credit. They know what they are and what their market is and they seem to do good business.
They are just cheap burgers but are good because you can get 12 for like $6 or so. You get a ton of food for not a lot of dime which makes it great when you are drunk or high.
The quality of food is exceptionally bad. After 2/3 sliders I did not want to eat anymore. Think of the worst fast food burger you've ever eaten. Think about the quality of the meat. Now imagine meat that is one or two grades lower and that is White Castle.
They are definitely unique when compared to other burgers. Greasier, with more of an onion flavor. I personally love them but don't get them more than a couple of times a year to save my digestive system the grief.
One defining feature before the last couple of years is that they were always open 24 hours. They are also nice if you are craving strong coffee that smells like grilled onions.
Interesting deal for Miso Robotics - per their website, the Flippy 2 starts at $3000 per month, so that's maybe a $7.5 million deal per year assuming 2 robots per location.
In terms of location costs, 2 machines with maintenance might be around $10k per month per location. Definitely a cost savings move for White Castle - I reckon 24 hour coverage with staff would be more than that.
I guess there's no avoiding this - with inflation the way it is, and the inability of certain businesses to raise prices (fast food burgers at $15 a pop?), and real estate going crazy, we are certainly moving to a Star Wars type future where "droids" of some sort will be in most aspects of our lives. All this money printing has a cost.
Bit sad that our kids won't have the experience of working in fast-food as their "summer job", nor will they have humans serving them from behind the counter. Cold and clinical...
The number of fast food burger and chicken joints I don't eat at anymore is pretty close to all of them.
Subway was the first one I quit and that was back in the early `80s. McDs was around the turn on the century. Burger King & Jack in the Box, ect were somewhere in between those. I've had a few Arby's sandwiches since then, they're not great but were still edible last time I ate there, and that's been a couple years now.
Good food will make you feel good. Those fast food joints don't do that. You notice this more when you're working physically hard. They just don't provide any real fuel to get you through that, and that's why I quit eating at those places.
I for one would welcome automation in fast food industry. Besides the fact that a teen standing in front of a vat of hot oil cooking fries and flipping burgers is a waste of time if we could automate it humans should be free of this kind of useless service, I would also enjoy getting exactly what I ordered. The robot isn’t going to accidentally add pickles or forget to add gravy or dip. I would welcome the day I don’t have to inspect my order. On my first point the only problem I see is people need money and those have forever been entry level jobs. What would replace those incomes I don’t know but standing in front of oil is not very good way to spend your time.
OTOH the human can deal with a bunch of requests that probably will never be coded into the robot's interface. Automated systems often have a frustrating lack of flexibility.
Also teens who don't need money are concentrated around the areas where their parents stoke demand for service labor. There aren't enough teen workers to bank on.
Back in the early 2010s, I was consulting with a then-budding startup called Momentum Machines (now Creator.rest), in which I was tasked with market validation for their Rube Goldberg-esque 6mx1mx2m burger-making machine (not a robot). When I'd speak with both independent and multi-franchise QSR owners, the resounding sentiment was that they absolutely craved an automated solution to replace line cooks, but they could not imagine replacing cashiers, who they believed were the face of the brand.
But in speaking with the few corporate offices that would bother to even respond to us, we'd be brushed us aside as nothing more than a novelty, as they considered any introduction of automation anywhere in the food-assembly process to be a hit to their brand promise of "freshness" and "quality."
Now with the Great Resignation giving employees a bit of an upper hand, I'm pretty sure the corporates are changing their tune in displacing the $15+/hr/unit meat suits ASAP. They're just waiting for the regional/tier-3 QSRs like White Castle to go all-in before making the plunge themselves.
I would hazard a guess that the economics of franchising made it so that corporate's priority was for franchisees to be dependent on their existing centralized and proprietary systems (equipment, supplies, etc.) - and therefore unless you could carve out a sweetheart deal like the unmaintainable McFlurry machines you were not desirable. After all, introducing anything new is just a risk to the existing, profitable business model. Much like how working from home was "impossible" until it was required.
Fast food has been in need of a shakeup for some time, anyhow. The quality bar across restaurants as a whole has kept getting pushed upwards but there's hardly any difference between the fast food chains of 1980 and now, other than brand designs, a token "healthy" option, and recipe changes for cost.
> but they could not imagine replacing cashiers, who they believed were the face of the brand.
I love places with ordering kiosks (or places that let me order using my phone). It's like going to the supermarket, I'd rather wait in line to order myself even if a real person was available to take my order right away.
But that auto fruit has mostly been picked already (at many places at least). McDonalds is even getting rid of its front line cashier staff now at many locations (with just one person to occasionally take cash from those who don't want to pay with a card).
Whoever you were talking to back then were probably just pretty closed minded and set in the ways of their industry. I think if you were to have these discussions today there would be a lot more people biting since there are some examples already of automated restaurants. Customers will pay extra for this novelty and you can even continue to price your item at a premium point while reaping the savings on real estate and labor:
I don't think humans evolved to do the job of a robot. At least not as much as the industrial revolution and mega corporations would have them do. I believe humans need/want some mix of mindless (cathartic) and some creative (mentally difficult) tasks.
For the last ~100 years now we've optimized our ability to create jobs that are mindless because this makes hiring easier. The side effect of this is a workforce full of people who never get to work creatively and go home feeling drained, worthless, and depressed
I'm optimistic about all automation because it relieves some of the pressure of mindless work off of humans and frees them up to be creative. Now if only we had a social system in place to redirect some of the profits from automation toward supporting fellow citizens who want to do legitimate hard work on a brand new idea...
Would White Castle have more demand with even lower prices? Is price and not quality the factor in most people's decision to eat at White Castle or not? It seems like this won't end well for employees or the corporation because the root cause is that White Castle just isn't that tasty.
Plenty of people find it tasty. Is it $20 burger tasty? No. Is it more tasty than some $20 burgers? Yes. Does it taste like garbage to some people? Yes. Does it taste great to others? Yes.
Well, if they're saving money on labor that money can be spent in better quality ingredients. They could then sell a better quality product at the same cost and increase overall profit by, presumably, increasing sales.
Completely agreed that maintaining low quality is a path to irrelevance for most of these places, regardless of automation.
On one hand I'll be able to go to the restaurants for faster and better food which is cool for people like us with not a lot of free time, and robots are cool.
On the other hand there will be a very large portion of society who will become obsolete with absolutely nothing useful for society to do.
We have a huge trades shortage and COVID might force a lot of supply chains to come back at least in part to the US. The demand for new construction has never been higher either.
A large portion of society that doesn't want to work on hot, dusty, dirty worksites might become obsolete with nothing useful for them to do. But there are absolutely jobs that are accessible to no-skill workers with only 1-2 years investment in schooling.
>On the other hand there will be a very large portion of society who will become obsolete with absolutely nothing useful for society to do.
Almost everyone has something to contribute. The problem is that society structured in a way where most forms of productivity are undervalued. A great example of this is art. Nobody in their right mind could imagine a world without art yet there's the stereotype of a starving artist. Burger flipper robots aren't going to make or break the world.
It says it's $3,000/mo. For a full time employee, that's $18.75/hr. Presumably it's most useful in places that are operating more than 40 hours a week.
The tradeoff is that it can't pick up other tasks when things are slow.
Downside is if an employee "breaks down" you can just call the next person on your call sheet, if a flippy breaks down, then what? You close? You have to have 50% more for resiliency?
There's been plenty of innovations that have failed because while the initial price tag looks like a saving, the long term maintenance has changed the calculation.
I'll be interested to see if places like White Castle are still using them after a year or two.
This is what I'm wondering as well. Automation can do all sorts of cool things but my experience in manufacturing has shown me that machines break down all the damn time. When that happens, some poor tradesperson or engineer is under the gun to get it back up and running again because money is being lost by the minute. I'd imagine a machine running in a hot, greasy environment would need pretty extensive cleaning and routine maintenance to be reliable. Those things cost money and require diligent workers, and this is a company looking to lay off people that they're paying minimum wage.
This just looks like some corporate process improvement project that is doomed to fail but looks good on someone's resume.
Google says fast food labor cost is about 25% of cost. I just don't know if that is really enough savings overall with the added expense and risk of a machine.
This is kinda silly because I bet they could've made burgers with a robot long ago (mass produced and shipped in) and just heated it up from a frozen stage when you order. Part of me suspects the whole 'combining the meat with the bun' at-location component is kind of superfluous and is just there to make the food feel freshly made (despite being heavily produced). So this robot with that in mind is kind of silly.
There's a significant quality difference, even with mass-produced burger patties, cheese and sauce.
Bread and meat don't respond well to the same treatments, and as anyone who's had a service-station pre-prepared sandwich knows - bread absorbs moisture and goes soggy/damp if prepared more than an hour or two before use. With fillings that need to be re-heated it gets worse. There are various ways that they try to fix this, generally by putting more fats/oils on.
IMO I would rather have them prepared separately and combined at purchase time, even if it is the same ingredients that would be on a pre-prepared burger.
There's a real quality difference between a burger that's been reheated with bun next to meat and one without. The bun sucks a ton of moisture from the meat and makes it chewy, while becoming soggy itself. The burger is a lot colder in the center, while the outer edge of the bun becomes dry. You really do get a better experience heating them individually, even if just reheating the burger.
Right, I bet you could make a Jimmy-Dean vending machine that has an air-fryer conveyor belt on the way out, but you'd have a hard time finding investors because your robot isn't replacing fry-cooks. Actually I'd be surprised if this didn't already exist at truck stops next to the hot dog rollers.
Big fan of White Castle food, but they have the worst organized kitchens of any fast food place I've ever gone to. When I go there, I expect to wait as long for my food as it would take to cook it at home. Employees are confused about the menu, about who's responsible for what, they communicate with each other awkwardly, and there are probably half again as many as they need. It seems like they've put no effort into process at all.
Any effort would result in service improvement.
White Castle's burgers are weird and small, standardized and square, and cooked from frozen. Not exactly a general case for a burger-robot; sliders seem like they could easily be made in a vending machine. My bet is that somebody connected with White Castle is an investor, and this is a publicity stunt.
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I... doubt it? It seems like it would allow the redeployment of team members to "no longer working at White Castle".