Looking for robot food?
They’ll be changing your favorite fast food joint soon
When I was a kid, a bazooka bubble gum comic strip showed a restaurant sporting a sign that read: Our food is untouched by human hands! The next frame showed a plate of food being served by a chef-gorilla. Hah!
Today, it is no joke. It’s just that the gorilla is being replaced by a robot.
The fast food/standardized food restaurant industry was always destined to turn to robots. The repetitive nature of the work, the focus on process, and the low wages (which nonetheless represent high costs of operation) make this industry an obvious target. People have been working on it for some time. The implications are huge, but before we get to that, let’s look at some examples of deployment.
Chipotle is testing a machine called “chippy” that automatically makes fresh corn chips in the restaurant. It cooks them, seasons them, and salts them to exact specifications using artificial intelligence. The vision is to enable staff to avoid the monotony of repetitive work and contribute at a higher level. But that’s just so much baloney. It’s the first step to replacing staff altogether.
Wing Zone, a company with 61 stores at this time, is also adopting a robot, this one called “Flippy” to help in its deep frying of wings. Wing…
