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Because of #2, you will still need a backup method of cooking your burgers manually. This might be done on the machine or a standalone grill. You will still nee
by Kagerjay 8y ago
Because of #2, you will still need a backup method of cooking your burgers manually. This might be done on the machine or a standalone grill. You will still need a commercial griddle more than likely (usually a 24" or 36") as a backup. Whereas something like misorobotics only performs the flipping, so this is unnecessary.
Onto the actual comments of the video itself. The author mentions 5 minute breaks to read books, etc. Those sound really great but in reality people come to their job to pay the bills. Employees already abuse smoke breaks so its going to be abused as well. This wouldn't fly for part time employees especially too. If you've run a restaurant you would know this to be true.
Another issue with this machine is how big of a footprint it is, and that it needs to be displayed somewhere openly. If you intend to go with a machine like this, you have to 100% know it will be in place before the store even opens. Because of this only a franchise would invest in this machine. Restaurants generally have a few different patterns for kitchen design layouts, and they vary based on the actual building size. For instance, some restaurants might have a square-ish foot print space, some would have a rectangular-ish layout spacing. Some might have prebuilt interior walls, others might not, so these are contributing factors.
Basically, if you buy this machine, you better bet everything you have on it and make your whole concept revolve around it as well. This means training staff, having trained technicians on hand, parts for JIT supply through nearby vendors or in house stock, etc.
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Also, there is still lots of innovation going on in the restaurant industry still. You don't hear about it on the news, but one item that is really penetrating the market right now is dropin induction based cookers here http://vollrath.com/Vollrath http://vollrath.com/Vollrath, drastically reducing maintenance costs and improving safety. Its currently being discussed with Chipotle as a replacement for their warmer line (e.g. the place where you order all your food and look through the sneezeguard, etc). Most newer concepts revolve around the Chipotle-style serving process, so it has large market implications.
One item that is actually "high tech" that actually works (for 5+ years) in the market is smart combi convention ovens. Its been around for some time, here's a youtube demo of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5I3JcA5bA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb5I3JcA5bA. The reason why it works is because it simplifies many operators task and produces a variety of menu items that pass for a 5 star gourmet restaurant. It also has a small footprint so the cost is usually justifiable (Usually 20k to 30k range), and many times its used in banquet, senior homes, and a la carte style cooking. The reason it works is because it enables the chef to also perform ANY type of cooking method (parbroil, partial frying, steaming, baking, roasting, saute, etc).
Other things that are currently being adopted by the market because they are solving issues related to cooking itself(not assembly line processes) - sou vide based cooking, vacuum based smoke injection, air frying, etc
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TLDR
I think AI based commercial food equipment is interesting. I can 100% tell you experienced restaurant owners prefer stupid-simple equipment that handles one task extremely well. I don't believe this type of assembly robot will hit it as big as kiosks designed for hostess / cashier replacements, delivery food robots / servers, or dedicated robots like misorobotics for handling singular tasks. Many of these items I have just listed don't have a huge investment cost in terms of footprint, or maintenance, and have a lower risk portfolio. Many of these are already being tested in california and parts of Japan (or have for some time).
You need to understand what the problems restaurants actually face. While every restaurant faces issues of food consistency, these can be solved with many types of equipment in the market already. The other issue that many restaurants face is customer-service quality - e.g. staff are trained poorly, staff don't add the order to the system, servers in rush hour are doing too many things at a given time, etc. It actually makes a lot more sense to automate this as much as possible, with services like opentable, smartRobots, etc. Lastly, restaurants always have to deal with potential health code violations, infestations, and poor reviews on yelp / google.
Building a burger is not a problem almost any restaurant faces IMO. Assembling a proper burger requires little to no skill at all, can be fucked up and still works fine (e.g. look at McDonalds). However cooking a burger patty does require some skill but again there is equipment that handles that. Misorobotics does solve this issue because the operator does have to be present to physically flip the burger, else it burns over. I really wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to cook a burger like you would on a pizza conveyor toaster, but I have not seen it yet. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBgNEbQDX3k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBgNEbQDX3k.
Those are the reasons why I don't believe assembly-line based burger production is going to be a big thing. Not only that, if you dig back a little into another prominent industry, most car companies aren't even using pure assembly-line production either (e.g. The Toyota Way).
Or if you want a programming based example, assembly line production is like a sequential based process. Its can be slow because you have to wait for one step to finish before doing another. However, concurrency based approaches (Async JS / NodeJS, GO-lang concurrency, hyperthreading) lets you process tasks much faster. That's how restaurants operate and the ones who do it best are the ones you actually know about today.