Restaurants Bet on Robots in the Kitchen

"Kernel, a New York City startup from Chipotle Mexican Grill founder Steve Ells, uses a robotic arm to flip plant-based burger patties and a conveyor belt to move dishes along the assembly line. Humans put on the finishing touches and package the meals for customers to pick up.

The robot arm on display and the restaurant's stark, industrial look confused curious diners at first. Ells temporarily closed the location in early July for around 10 days to add clues like seating, pictures, warmer colors and softer lighting to help signal that it actually serves food.

"People opened the door, they came in and they're, like, 'What is this?' Well, it's a restaurant, but it's not obvious," Ells said at the WSJ Global Food Forum last month. The restaurant, with a warmer vibe, reopened this week.

Restaurant companies are making multimillion-dollar bets that robots can be taught to cook. Taking a page from industries like auto manufacturing that pair automated systems with human workers to boost productivity, chains such as Chipotle, Sweetgreen and others are testing expensive machines to mix greens, cook burgers and peel avocados.

Restaurants face tough challenges in automating kitchens, and efforts so far have been halting. Unlike most auto parts, food is soft and sometimes slippery, requiring dexterity beyond the abilities of most of today's robots.

But rising labor costs will spur more automation in restaurants in the next decade, said Sharon Zackfia, a restaurant analyst at William Blair Equity Research. 

She predicts this will likely follow the curve of online ordering, with early adopters designing their own costlier approaches before outside players invent more mainstream offerings.

Chipotle tested a "Chippy" robot to make tortilla chips and an "Autocado" to cut, core and peel avocados before humans mash them into guacamole. 

The company passed on Chippy because the costs of setup and cleaning canceled out much of the labor savings, but Chipotle hopes to put the Autocado robot into restaurants by the end of this year.

Los Angeles-based salad chain Sweetgreen intends for robots to staff all of its new restaurants, in tandem with human workers, and is rolling out the equipment to new and existing locations. The proprietary robot shoots kale, cheese and other ingredients down tubes into bowls traveling on a conveyor belt, then spins the meals to mix them. A small crew of employees adds finishing touches such as avocado before placing the entrees on a shelf for pickup.

"We really do believe the next platform shift in restaurants is going to be automation," Sweetgreen Chief Executive Jonathan Neman said at a June investor event.

The restaurant industry has tinkered with automation for decades, though more on the service side. More than a century ago, automats dispensed hot meals from vending machines, fascinating urban diners until their decline in the 1970s. In Japan, sushi on conveyor belts caught on in the 1980s. McDonald's installed digital kiosks for ordering in its European restaurants in the 2010s, with the systems becoming common worldwide as restaurants looked to speed up service and shave costs.

In 2017, startup Miso Robotics debuted its "Flippy" robot, promising it would grill burgers and free up workers for other tasks. Early trials struggled and it took years of revisions, including switching to fries instead of burgers, to make Flippy reliable enough for more restaurants to consider testing it.

McDonald's dabbled in robotic fry cookers and other automation before deciding for now that humans do the work better. "We've spent a lot of time, money, effort, looking at this, and there is not going to be a silver bullet that goes and addresses this for the industry," McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said in a 2022 investor call.

But the Covid-19 outbreak drove labor costs rapidly higher, prompting some restaurants to give automation another look. Nearly one-third of restaurant owners said they are incorporating more technology or automation as a result of being understaffed, according to a National Restaurant Association survey of 800 operators conducted from October to November 2023. Around half of restaurant operators said technology and automation will become more common to help with labor, the trade group found.

In 2021, Sweetgreen bought restaurant-tech startup Spyce in a deal valued at about $50 million to bring the company's technology and expertise to creating its salads. Sweetgreen installed the salad-shooting robots, called the Infinite Kitchen, in two restaurants, with plans for nearly a dozen more this year.

Chipotle in 2022 started a venture fund now totaling $100 million, putting some of that money into a San Jose, Calif.-based firm, Hyphen, that used robotics to assemble food orders below a restaurant's counter. Chipotle is testing the system and hopes to have it in a restaurant later this year.

Flippy, now smaller, faster and more reliable than its earlier versions, is cooking fried items at White Castle and Jack in the Box restaurants. Asian chain Kura Sushi uses robots to apportion rice for rolls. It expects to soon pilot an automated dishwasher that will rack and clean plates before putting them on a conveyor belt for employees to grab without leaving their prep stations. Automated drive-through ordering is spreading, with chatbots now taking customers' burger selections at White Castle and Checkers and Rally's locations.

Unions representing workers fear the automation trend. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters asked Chipotle shareholders this year to vote on a proposal requiring the company to report on the impact of its use of automation on its workforce. Shareholders struck down the proposal, but the union aims to keep pressing against restaurant automation. "We are concerned that the goal of automation is to eliminate jobs, period," said Peter Finn, director of the Teamsters food-processing division.

Ells, who founded Chipotle in 1993 and stepped away entirely in March 2020, had long dreamed of a restaurant that curbed waste, eliminated unnecessary steps and required fewer workers. A tinkerer, he had spent time at Chipotle obsessing over the best way to engineer a tortilla warmer and conceiving a high-heat oven for a short-lived pizza concept.

While plotting his next move after the pandemic hit, Ells took a German-made Kuka robotic arm typically used in car manufacturing and linked up with an engineer to program it to work with food. Custom software that took nearly two years to build operates like an invisible team member, he said, taking customer orders, ensuring accurate delivery times and orchestrating complex sequences for robotic-arm movements and other specialized automation components.

"While the robot movements may appear random at times, the software functions as a sophisticated orchestration layer designed to support restaurant staff without rushing them," he said.

Ells raised $36 million to build Kernel, a fast-casual restaurant.

Instead of a dozen hourly employees at the typical fast-casual eatery, Ells decided he needed three per shift to put prepped food into the system and do final assembly. He pays the workers $25 an hour, significantly higher than wages in many other similar chains, plus health benefits and company equity to improve tenure.

Kernel's machines initially misfired after Ells opened the Manhattan restaurant in February. It is now very stable, he said, and Kernel aims to open its second Manhattan restaurant later this summer." [1]

Until the Tajiks do something dramatic to us, there will be no such robots in Lithuania. The Lithuanian is an inventive fool. It is incurable.

1. Restaurants Bet on Robots in the Kitchen. Haddon, Heather.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 July 2024: B.1.