https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/07/12/the-rise-of-the-robochef

The rise of the robochef

Cooking bots are fast, reliable and don’t swear at their underlings

CREATOR, a new hamburger joint in San Francisco, claims to deliver a burger worth $18 for $6—in other words, to provide the quality associated with posh restaurants at a fast-food price. The substance behind this claim is that its chef-de-cuisine is a robot.

Until recently, catering robots have been gimmicks. “Flippy”, a robotic arm that flipped burgers for the entertainment of customers at CaliBurger in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, earlier this year is a prime example. But Flippy could perform only one task. Creator’s bot automates the whole process of preparing a burger. And it is not alone. Other robot chefs that can prepare entire meals are working, or soon will be, in kitchens in other parts of America, and in China and Britain.

Creator’s burger bot is a trolley-sized unit that has a footprint of two square metres. Customers send it their orders via a tablet. They are able to customise everything from how well-done the burger will be to the type of cheese and toppings they want. The robot grinds the meat, forms the patties, griddles them (a process tracked by 11 thermal sensors), chops tomatoes and grates cheese for those who want such accoutrements, slices, toasts and butters the bun, and dispenses seasoning and sauces. It then assembles and bags the finished product, so that it is ready to go.

Listed like that, the process sounds rather quotidian. In fact, it took eight years to perfect. As far back as 2012, a mere two years into the project, the machine was described as “95% reliable”, but that is not enough for a busy kitchen. Chopping tomatoes was a particularly tough challenge, but even details like the paddle which packs the burger into a bag without squashing it were tricky to master. Only now, with a machine they claim can turn out, reliably, 120 burgers an hour, do Alex Vardakostas, the engineer behind the project, and his co-founders, a mixture of technologists and caterers, feel confident enough to open their first restaurant.

What works for one sort of fast food can work for others. Though the business of pizza-making has not yet been robotised completely, Zume Pizza, also based in California, is getting close. It has a team of “doughbots” that speed up stretching the dough from 45 seconds to just nine. The toppings still have to be made the conventional way, but the firm has robotised the dispensing and spreading of them, and also the moving of topped pizzas into and out of ovens.

Over on America’s east coast, in Boston, a restaurant called Spyce offers more fashionable robot-created fare. Customers order from a touchscreen menu and can watch the robot measure, mix and cook dishes ranging from “Latin” (black beans and roasted chicken with chilli and avocado on brown rice) to “Hearth” (balsamic-glazed sprouts and sweet potato with kale on quinoa) in an inductively heated wok. Woks stand in a row beneath a conveyor belt, which automatically delivers the correct ingredients to each. They are then mixed and cooked before a human server adds toppings. As with Creator’s robot, speed is of the essence. Spyce’s bot can prepare dishes in three minutes.

In China, meanwhile, Li Zhiming, an entrepreneur, has developed a robot that can cook any of 40 recipes from Hunan province. Much of Hunan’s cuisine involves heating food rapidly in oil, a process that is difficult to mechanise because of the number of different ingredients which have to be cooked “just so”. Mr Li has spent four years developing robots that can do this. They work in a similar way to Spyce’s, by dispensing precise quantities of each ingredient from a series of hoppers in sequence, then stirring them in a wok over a gas flame at an exact temperature for a specific, recipe-dependent time. When a meal is complete, the robot serves it into a bowl, then cleans out the cooking pot ready for the next order.

Mr Li opened his first robot-catered restaurant in May, in Changsha, Hunan’s capital. Its kitchen is staffed by three bots and two human beings. Normally, he says, a restaurant of this size, offering that sort of variety, would have a kitchen staff of eight. Mr Li’s ambitions, moreover, reach far beyond Hunan. He thinks the main reason such delicious dishes as clay-pot rice with vegetables, pepper-fried pork and cumin-beef stir fry are not better known outside their native province is a lack of trained chefs. He hopes his robots will overcome that difficulty and make Hunan’s cuisine as easy to franchise as fried chicken and hamburgers—and as popular.

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This would be my FAVOURITE thing to automate, though at home rather than at restaurants. The rice cooker has lost its lustre.  :D

On one hand I don't like the idea of automating everything and taking work away from people but on the other hand, if they were to fire all the idiots at the Hardee's at 120th and West Center Road and replace them all with robots then I might be more inclined to go back there.  ;D

So this means we'll have robot waiters and waitresses? ???

I'd rather humans do these jobs does anyone realize it would be piontless to do anything anymore if robots did everything!!

I hope they don't start staffing the strip clubs nookie bars shake shacks gentlemen's clubs with robots.

On one hand I don't like the idea of automating everything and taking work away from people but on the other hand, if they were to fire all the idiots at the Hardee's at 120th and West Center Road and replace them all with robots then I might be more inclined to go back there.  ;D


Bad experience? ;D


I hope they don't start staffing the strip clubs nookie bars shake shacks gentlemen's clubs with robots.


But what if those robots could do *ahem* more than a real exotic dancer could do?  :-X

I hope they don't start staffing the strip clubs nookie bars shake shacks gentlemen's clubs with robots.


That would be interesting, a naked robot stripper. :o ;D

But what if those robots could do *ahem* more than a real exotic dancer could do?  :-X


A real exotic dancer does everything.

A real exotic dancer does everything.


Yes they do, They'll also give you lap dances too.