A robot fries chicken as an employee prepares to serve food to customers at a Robert Chicken restaurant in Seoul on June 13, 2023.ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Call me old-fashioned, but I may need some extra time to get my head around having my to-go meals prepared by someone – or rather, something – called Chippy or Flippy.
Those are the given names of two of the newest robots that are the automated backbones of the next generation of fast-food restaurants. Faced with widespread labour shortages exacerbated by the lingering stigma around “burger-flipping” and comparable low-wage jobs, chains are moving aggressively to automate as many aspects of the ordering and meal-preparation process as possible.
Chipotle, the Colorado-based Tex-Mex chain, announced recently that over the course of this year, it would use robotic technology to fill certain online orders, including a robot named Chippy to make its signature tortilla chips, a popular staple. Designed and built by Hyphen, the collaborative robot – or cobotic – system is being tested at the Chipotle Cultivate Center in California.
White Castle, the iconic, century-old, Ohio-based chain famous for inventing the slider, is experimenting with a Miso Robotics robot called Flippy to – you guessed it – flip burgers. Its success in tests in a Chicago store in 2020 spawned a son – Flippy 2 – that is being rolled out to the chain’s 350 locations around the United States.
Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and former CEO, is re-entering the business with a completely new, meat-free, sandwich-shop concept called Kernel, which is designed around robotic automation. The first store will make its debut early this year in Manhattan, with a dozen more planned across New York in the following two years.
The use of robots in food preparation isn’t new. Big chains such as McDonald’s, Sonic and Checkers have been shifting to more mechanical processes to streamline ordering and fulfilment over the past few years.
But the postpandemic labour shortage and rise of digital ordering have pushed companies to accelerate their plans to incorporate more automation technology into their stores.
Strategically, the industry should get kudos for the pivot – and for using deep pools of customer data to guide their moves. Chipotle, for example, says about 65 per cent of all digital orders are bowls or salads, which can easily be prepared by robots.
With such monotonous mechanical tasks taken care of, employees will have more time to serve humans at the front counters. The use of robots is also expected to increase the chain’s capacity to fulfill digital orders during peak periods and potentially improve order accuracy, which is particularly subject to human error in busy times.
At White Castle outlets, 17 Flippy 2 robots have been installed as of mid-October. Jamie Richardson, vice-president at White Castle, said the robots have helped order accuracy and the speed of service.
Bravo on the strategy and the execution. As for customer comfort, if you’re of a certain generation, the idea of friendly robots doing domestic tasks such as serving meals is still science fiction. Think the robot (named Robot) catering to the Robinson family on Lost in Space or Rosie the mechanical housekeeper in The Jetsons. And what about the food replicators in Star Trek, capable of creating any favourite dish from across a wide spectrum of intergalactic cuisines?
Like so much new technology, the uptake and acceptance of robotically prepared meals will probably skew along generational lines.
When I raise my discomfort with my college-aged daughters, they roll their eyes and mutter something about living in Jurassic Park. They are of a generation where the instantaneous delivery of whatever experience they want trumps any interest of how the food is made or delivered.
They don’t give a whit that a machine makes their chips or bowls or burgers, in the same way that they really don’t care if their favourite shows are written by AI rather than humans. If it’s there in a nanosecond and sates the appetite, that’s all that matters.
Further, they actually like the idea that a robot will make their favourite Chipotle bowl the same way every single time. No room for human error. This one will taste exactly the same as the last and the 10 before that. “That sort of certainty, after all, is what technology-enhanced fast food is all about, Dad,” said my older daughter Liz, a huge Chipotle fan and aspiring lawyer.
Call it certainty or monotony, depending on your point of view, but robot food is no longer science fiction. And as White Castle’s Mr. Richardson said, it’s “not unfathomable to think” that the company might some day use robots in more ways than currently planned.
It may take me some more time to get comfy with the idea of a robot’s cold steel claws on my hamburger patty. But there’s a bright side: I won’t have to tip it.