Cali Group, Miso Robotics, and PopID, announced today that they are soon opening CaliExpress by Flippy™, the world’s first fully autonomous restaurant.
One of the big hallmarks of restaurant cooking is “uniformity”. Its the idea that you want every single piece of any given ingredient to be exactly the same. There are entire schools of thought on how to dice an onion. Contrast that with home cooking where even a lot of “real” chefs will acknowledge they prefer to have a somewhat non-uniform chop so that they have texture and flavor variety.
Same with how everyone and their mother loves the idea of a sous vide because having a cabinet full of almost done steaks at varying done-ness levels is good eating.
So for fast food or even the vast majority of restaurants? This is what people want. They have made it clear over the decades and will even bitch and moan if a “human touch” was involved.
You’ve obviously never worked in food service before. Let me throw a few things out there that come to mind with regards to fast food the way described in this article:
Oops, the fry cookbot accidentally dumped too much salt on a batch of fries
Inconsistent mixing of spices into the beef patties before forming
Inconsistent shape of pre-cooked food
A variety of clogging issues in anything transporting condiments
I wildly high number of ways for things to break and cause kitchen fires
The only way you could have a completely autonomous running restaurant as described here is if you remove any and all work related to any sort of quality control completely from the localized loop, so…everything frozen. If you just want to reheat lackluster and frozen food, stay at home. The novelty of having a robot-made meal is the only draw and can see here, and how long do you imagine that lasting? That’s essentially all those awful Sysco Foods restaurant chains are about, and their demand has been in decline for decades now.
Yes… the robot is more likely to dump too much salt on a batch of fries than the underpaid worker who is likely on at least one illicit substance to make it through the day.
As for the rest? Increasingly that is done at corporate by, you guessed it, a robot. Because (no idea on the youtuber but the process looks about right, just a lot cleaner and less frantic), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVRlYugm69Y is how modern fast food actually works.
Because those variances actually do matter and human beings are a lot more likely to have problems maintaining consistency. And too thick/thicc of a patty and you likely have a pink-ish center and some boomer loses their god damned mind over not eating shoe leather at a burger king.
You are correct regarding cleaning issues, which is where this almost always falls apart. And that is true whether we are talking about the factory where the food is made BUT NEVER FROZEN!!! or the restaurant itself. But that needs far fewer workers than to actually run the assembly line itself. Same with having someone on call with a fire extinguisher (although, not having humans in the loop means it is a lot easier to automatically dispense food safe, but not human lung safe, gases that can even be pumped out and theoretically reused if the human isn’t in the loop… and you maybe slip the fire marshall a benji).
I assume the hill you are going to die on is t hat it is “not completely automated because there is still one person sitting around” and I really don’t care to have that discussion because it isn’t one. But I do strongly encourage actually watching training videos (and even just promotional youtubes) for how fast food works. Workers are already being dehumanized to the point of bringing the definition of “robot” into question and “Three shakes of the seasoning shaker” is just as easy to tell a human versus a robotic arm.
I’ll add on. If you think Billy at McDonald’s is tasting every batch of fries to make sure they are perfectly seasoned, I have a bridge to sell you. Ignoring the hygiene issues with that, their manager would immediately lynch them for wasting food and slowing down the process. And, Billy probably does a hundred or more batches of fries a day. They wouldn’t be able to taste shit after the first hour.
Instead, the logic is that if your fries are improperly seasoned you will probably be ten miles away before you realize. And even if you dine in, odds are you have enough social grace to not be the person who cuts in front of the line and insists to speak to the manager because your fries don’t meet your high standards.
Why not?
One of the big hallmarks of restaurant cooking is “uniformity”. Its the idea that you want every single piece of any given ingredient to be exactly the same. There are entire schools of thought on how to dice an onion. Contrast that with home cooking where even a lot of “real” chefs will acknowledge they prefer to have a somewhat non-uniform chop so that they have texture and flavor variety.
Same with how everyone and their mother loves the idea of a sous vide because having a cabinet full of almost done steaks at varying done-ness levels is good eating.
So for fast food or even the vast majority of restaurants? This is what people want. They have made it clear over the decades and will even bitch and moan if a “human touch” was involved.
You’ve obviously never worked in food service before. Let me throw a few things out there that come to mind with regards to fast food the way described in this article:
The only way you could have a completely autonomous running restaurant as described here is if you remove any and all work related to any sort of quality control completely from the localized loop, so…everything frozen. If you just want to reheat lackluster and frozen food, stay at home. The novelty of having a robot-made meal is the only draw and can see here, and how long do you imagine that lasting? That’s essentially all those awful Sysco Foods restaurant chains are about, and their demand has been in decline for decades now.
Yes… the robot is more likely to dump too much salt on a batch of fries than the underpaid worker who is likely on at least one illicit substance to make it through the day.
As for the rest? Increasingly that is done at corporate by, you guessed it, a robot. Because (no idea on the youtuber but the process looks about right, just a lot cleaner and less frantic), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVRlYugm69Y is how modern fast food actually works.
Because those variances actually do matter and human beings are a lot more likely to have problems maintaining consistency. And too thick/thicc of a patty and you likely have a pink-ish center and some boomer loses their god damned mind over not eating shoe leather at a burger king.
You are correct regarding cleaning issues, which is where this almost always falls apart. And that is true whether we are talking about the factory where the food is made BUT NEVER FROZEN!!! or the restaurant itself. But that needs far fewer workers than to actually run the assembly line itself. Same with having someone on call with a fire extinguisher (although, not having humans in the loop means it is a lot easier to automatically dispense food safe, but not human lung safe, gases that can even be pumped out and theoretically reused if the human isn’t in the loop… and you maybe slip the fire marshall a benji).
I assume the hill you are going to die on is t hat it is “not completely automated because there is still one person sitting around” and I really don’t care to have that discussion because it isn’t one. But I do strongly encourage actually watching training videos (and even just promotional youtubes) for how fast food works. Workers are already being dehumanized to the point of bringing the definition of “robot” into question and “Three shakes of the seasoning shaker” is just as easy to tell a human versus a robotic arm.
I’ll add on. If you think Billy at McDonald’s is tasting every batch of fries to make sure they are perfectly seasoned, I have a bridge to sell you. Ignoring the hygiene issues with that, their manager would immediately lynch them for wasting food and slowing down the process. And, Billy probably does a hundred or more batches of fries a day. They wouldn’t be able to taste shit after the first hour.
Instead, the logic is that if your fries are improperly seasoned you will probably be ten miles away before you realize. And even if you dine in, odds are you have enough social grace to not be the person who cuts in front of the line and insists to speak to the manager because your fries don’t meet your high standards.