[JoeAltmaier]

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.

[0xbadcafebee]

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.

[wildrhythms]

Taco Bell already has some concept art depicting a contactless lift system to deliver orders to waiting customers -

https://www.fox19.com/2021/08/14/taco-bell-future-new-4-lane...

[jrootabega]

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.

[throwaway0a5e]

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.

[JoeAltmaier]

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.

[cheese_goddess]

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.

[jamiek88]

I’d pay extra for guaranteed no human touch.

But then if I was rich enough I’d be Howard Hughes.

[0xbadcafebee]

You don't need to be rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori