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If I were looking to invest in one of those, the biggest questions I'd have are around reliability, cleaning routines, and maintenance. For example I could pay
by Someone1234 8y ago
If I were looking to invest in one of those, the biggest questions I'd have are around reliability, cleaning routines, and maintenance. For example I could pay minimum wage for someone to cut veggies, or pay significantly more for an engineer to repair the unit because it isn't dispensing tomato right.
Their demo unit is very fun, and adds to the gimmick, but like most industrial equipment ease of access is more important than appearances. I'd hate to have to take apart what they demoed for routine cleaning.
And while it is laudable that they're taking the savings and using them on better ingredients, that only lasts until a competitor appears who is going to just lower the price (e.g. "50c burgers here!").
- tyfon 8y agoYes, I think you are right, the race to the bottom is inevitable unfortunately...
- lovich 8y agoThat's still allows you to segment the market. I like McDonald's but can't get it where I live because the majority of the people prefer higher priced fare. The McDonald's couldn't compete with a mid tier burger joint down the street and got replaced by an upscale Korean restaurant. If it manages to actually lower operating costs then it will lower prices in all the segments but it won't just get rid of segments
- Amygaz 8y agoWell McDo has been introducing electronic kiosks to order, while reducing the number of cashier stands.
- acchow 8y agoBut there hasn't been a race to the bottom in food. There are restaurants at huge ranges of price points.
- prawn 8y agoAnd I imagine two huge components of the pricing floor for restaurants are property cost/rent and labour. Potatoes are dirt cheap and oil can be reused a few times, yet to buy basic fries near me at a non-franchised fast food place would be $5+. Doesn't feel like much of a race to the bottom.
- cfadvan 8y agoIt’s distressing how much life is starting to resemble a Harry Harrison novel. All were missing are porcuswine served at these establishments and well hit the high notes.
- taneq 8y agoAny year now, a stainless steel rat will be born. :D
- stale2002 8y agoProviding people with different options isn't bad. If you want a more expensive burger, then buy the more expensive one. Of you want the cheaper one then buy that. It's not "laudable". It is responding to the market and providing a different product.
- zepto 8y agoWhat a pity that responding to the market isn’t leading humanity anywhere good.
- ASalazarMX 8y agoBecause the market by itself is just the law of the jungle, it has no moral compass. The market has to be encouraged towards a good outcome for humanity.
- Guthur 8y agoAnd now we just need someone to tell us what that good outcome is we should be moving toward.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoAnd yet, so many people want to leave most things up to "the market".
- alfredallan1 8y agoWe ought to realize that we ARE the market.
- ASalazarMX 8y agoFor varying degrees of "the market". Most people represent an insignificant part of it.
- occams_chainsaw 8y agoDo you pay an engineer to come out and fix your car or copy machine? It's not like paid employees are any cleaner... That's why the ice cream machines are "down" half the time
- Someone1234 8y ago> It's not like paid employees are any cleaner I wasn't calling engineers less clean. I was saying paying for repairs and maintenance from experts might offset the cost savings (relative to minimum wage, minimum qualified, employees) in the long run. Self-checkout machines seem to work because the technology is simple enough to be reliable enough. In this case you have moving parts, sensors, and food particles on everything.
- blacksmith_tb 8y agoWe don't have quite enough detail, but I wonder how much in the way of sensors it would need if the ingredients were standardized - if every burger weighs 300g, cook them for 130sec per side, etc.
- Someone1234 8y agoHard to do that with vegetables as per here.
- hessenwolf 8y agoBetter for hygiene with a retractable, digital meat thermometer. (that's what she said)
- blacksmith_tb 8y agoDo fast food burger places use meat thermometers? I suppose better kitchens are more likely to, but then they also allow you to order 'rare' or 'well-done' (which sounds like it is v2.0 for the bot).
- gene-h 8y agoI have many of the same questions too. In industrial robots one of the most important numbers is mean time between failures(MTBF). If the MBTF is too low, that is the robot breakdown or otherwise fails, you spend more on fixing the robot or its mistakes than the cost of the robot itself, the cost of programming it, and the value the robot provides. Cleaning is a huge issue. If they don't clean things properly and someone gets food poisoning this could kill their company and perhaps even the automation of fast food. And if cleaning is time consuming enough it could greatly increase operating costs. I'm skeptical that this machine adds enough value to justify its costs for the aforementioned reasons, but also because of the decreased flexibility. Other fast food restaurants can introduce new dishes and flavors easily, but if they want to do the same they may need to modify the entire machine. For example, adding two patties instead of one, using differently shaped buns or meat, wraps instead of burgers.
- jrs95 8y agoI have a better idea than cleaning: build a machine that builds these so quickly and cheaply that you can throw them away every night when you're done.
- chrissnell 8y agoYou're getting downvoted and you used what I think is a "sarchasm" tag but this isn't a terrible suggestion. Lots of industries use disposable parts for sanitation reasons. Many of the instruments used for medicine and dentistry are now disposable. Food workers wear disposable gloves and food comes in disposable packaging. It's not unreasonable to think that they might use disposable parts for everything that touches food.
- alfredallan1 8y agoHow does that blend with the garbage problem the world seems to be having since China stopped importing trash? Is it economical enough to recycle the used machines?
- 8y ago
- michaelt 8y agoThe benefit of it all being transparent and visible to customers is, as any dirt will be visible, they can sell or franchise the machines and the buyers can't skimp on cleaning.
- mnem 8y agoBacteria isn't always particularly visible, and that's the part you have to worry about. I'm curious how they keep the meat and other ingredients chilled in those transparent tubes, especially if sunlight is anywhere near them.
- dsr_ 8y agoSpeaking of tomatoes -- all the tomatoes in that tube were beautfully colored, exactly the same shape and size. (And beefsteak variety, so nearly tasteless. That's a different issue.) In the real world, tomatoes come graded. You pay a lot more if you want them all exactly the same size. They need to be washed, and frequently have woody stems that need to be excised. I didn't see that happening automatically. And onions don't come pre-peeled in restaurant quantities. The pickle tube is going to jam. The condiments might signal you when they're out, but the nozzles are going to need a good cleaning. I wonder if they're planning on going Juicero and selling their franchisees preloaded tubes.
- greedo 8y agoAnd tomatoes can be difficult to slice; too ripe, and they splatter, making catsup in that nice, clear tube. Too tough and they bend the blades of your mandoline. Onions are even worse. They seem to have realized that lettuce won't be easy to cut (so they use shredded) but that will wilt/brown much faster.
- workinthehead 8y agoAnyone who's ever been to a Brooklyn deli can tell you none of those are that difficult: just run them through the deli slicer.
- civilitty 8y agoIts not automation if a human is standing there feeding the slicer and carrying it to wherever it needs to go. The hard part in automation is almost always material handling, not cutting.
- workinthehead 8y agoOf all the things you could have taken from my comment, you came up with that? You seriously thought I was advocating having a human run laps around the machine with a deli slicer? Clearly, the observation was, just make the cutting mechanism work like a deli slicer, as opposed to a knife or whatever else the OP had in mind.
- drawkbox 8y agoIn addition to maintenance, don't forget about upgrades, newer versions and installation/maintenance of those. Early on in the food making robot game it will move fast, new versions will come out all the time. Noone wants to eat at the place with last year's robots. Early on, competing will be intense if the new versions also cut costs heavily. No restaurant that has gone automation will be able to survive if using too far outdated robots in the beginning at least, until it is refined after many iterations. Humans are self-cleaning and maintain on their own time. Robots will be like any other kitchen equipment, probably very nasty unless there are humans there to clean them on the regular, good policies or really good self-cleaning technology. Eventually there will be robot upgrading and maintaining third party services, but at that point are you really getting a difference across restaurants other than ingredients? Sometimes people like chefs cooking because it is unique and harder to replicate. We already get lots of food made by robots, they are frozen foods that aren't all that great compared to food made on the spot by real people.
- gwicks56 8y agoCoat them in something anti-bacterial like silver? It's pretty cheap, and apparently safe for human consumption?
- ovao 8y agoThis is a somewhat common technique used in, for example, beverage dispensers. Food-grade anti-microbial coatings are available and apparently quite useful.
- workinthehead 8y agoThere are concerns that silver ingestion would upset the balance of intestinal bacteria that we depend on for digestion.
- greedo 8y agoIf I were looking to invest, I wouldn't give a crap about reliability, cleaning, and maintenance. I'd want to see his business plan, and how he thinks he's going to make money when the highest amount of revenue this thing can produce is $72/hour, when it runs flawlessly.
- jt3 8y agoYou can have more than one running at the same time?
- greedo 8y agoThen you have 2x the capital costs, plus less room for seating etc.
- dmitriy_ko 8y agoStack them vertically to save space?
- throwaway76543 8y agoThere is more than one restaurant in the world.
- repsilat 8y agoYeah, "America is a big place" covers a lot of ground for this company. I'm not sure that gives them much, though -- restaurants are pretty capital-intensive, and on those economics the marginal savings of not having burger-flippers doesn't add up to a lot of advantage. Maybe it would be better to sell your machines, to become "the Coca-Cola of burgers" rather than another McDonald's. Established players don't want to develop these machines in-house, but if you provide clearly better value they can and they will catch up. They'd probably rather buy the technology, though.
- maxerickson 8y agoLooks to me that you can have more than 1 burger going at once. Outside of places like San Francisco the few dozen square feet per machine isn't going to be a big deal.
- here-for-karma 8y agoHonestly, I hope he gets competitors. How great would fast food be if it was all made exactly the same way every time, with high quality ingredients?
- ISL 8y agoCompared with 50 years ago, it already is.
- here-for-karma 8y agoNo reason to stop improving though
- thunfischbrot 8y agoAs long as we can see the ingredients it seems like a great idea, better than what is on offer currently. My suspicion is that the machines otherwise would look like the inside of McFlurry machines rather soon.
- Amygaz 8y agoI like to thing I am a burger pro, but I know I am not an automation pro. A burger shouldn't take more than 10 minutes from cooking to being served. This thing looks very slow. Is that the current state of this sort of line automation?
- maxerickson 8y agoIt takes 5 minutes.
- krzat 8y agoTo be honest, this machine looks mostly like a gimmick. I wonder how version optimized for speed (but still from fresh ingridients) would look like.