7 ms·

Burger robot poised to disrupt fast food industry

41 points by sirteno 12y ago

comboy 12y ago
I find it hard to believe that installation + maintenance + unexpected maintenance + still some people to prepare ingredients would be cheaper than cooks. 24 square feet sounds impressive though.
- kristopolous 12y ago
  but if the aggregate long term (think 24 month) price projection is lower, then price sensitive establishments will take the bait. Have you looked inside a mcdonalds kitchen lately? They've automated quite a bit of it already.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Everything they can, at least. Still, someone has to load the fryers/grills, assemble the sandwiches (of which there are at least three different basic kinds, and many, many more variations, even some more then in some places), and wrap/package the result. I don't forsee a machine handling the entire process anytime soon. There are too many edge cases. (And I remember quite a bit of expletive-laden rage at the automation we did have when I worked there.. when it breaks, it's annoying. Fry dispenser not loading baskets, things getting stuck in the bun toaster and holding up the whole line, timer buttons on the holding cabinets failing so you can't tell what's been there for how long..)
    - fred_durst 12y ago
      Exactly. McDonald's has never been afraid of automation. If this were really that viable, they would already be doing it.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Thinking about the numbers.. the average McDonald's kitchen, at a midsize store when I worked there many moons ago, all by itself, had between 2 and 6 people in it. At full staff, there were two assembly lines with two people each, one guy on the grill, and one guy starting orders by preparing the buns (the initiator). At low times, one guy on the line, one guy on the grill. Assuming a reasonably busy location where there is no such thing as a "slow time" (airport, central metro area, etc), that means you have to pay six people around $8 an hour for 8 hours. Works out to $384/day on kitchen labor, give or take. $2688/week, $139,776/yr. (And that's before taxes, local wage variances and so on - this is a very rough, very conservative estimate) There's no way this thing will cost less than $150k - a shake/ice cream machine costs aroud 50-75k for a much, much more simple set of parts (liquid pumps, an auger, and a compressor). And that's before you get into maintenance costs and the cost of having a single point of failure. Example: One of your kitchen guys gets sick, you can usually call in a replacement, shift someone from elsewhere in the store, or just run one person down and deal with it. The Burgermaker 9000, on the other hand, say the tomato slicer breaks? You're down. Completely and totally. Combine that with the insane time to break even and see even a penny of ROI.. it ain't happening. Not anytime soon.
  - shiny 12y ago
    In that case, Seattle's $15/hr minimum wage may help spur innovation in this space.
    - fred_durst 12y ago
      You're still only at $247,715 The reality is that the more the income gap grows between the servers and those served, the less profitable automation becomes. There is a reason low wages jobs are growing, not shrinking in the US.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
smacktoward 12y ago
> Of course, businesses are free to spend their savings however they like. For some, that may mean more quality ingredients or services. For others, it might be competing with other restaurants by maintaining the same level of service and ingredients but offering even lower food prices. Or it could mean management just stuffing the money into their pockets. Somehow I think this is the most likely outcome.
- ams6110 12y ago
  You've not worked in fast food I take it? It's highly competitive. There is no margin for "stuffing pockets"
afafsd 12y ago
So instead of paying some bozo minimum wage to flip burgers, you have to pay someone to fix the burger robot every time it screws up. Which it probably will, frequently, because it's got a zillion moving parts and a bunch of loose messy ingredients which can get stuck in them. Replacing people with robots works great if you're replacing large numbers at the same factory, because firing workers and hiring robot repairmen still saves you a lot of money. If you're only going to replace one or two workers per site, though, it sounds pointless.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Restaurant kitchens are also rather hostile to precision mechanisms. They are greasy, hot, and stuff gets thrown around without a lot of care.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    Wouldn't robots fix the "without a lot of care" aspect?
- asdfologist 12y ago
  That's exactly what people said about self-checkout lanes.
  - wmeredith 12y ago
    You know what's empty every time I go to Home Depot and Costco? Self checkout lanes. The Costco by my house just took out half of them and added more staffed stations.
    - harmegido 12y ago
      I don't think one data point is enough to say that self-checkout lanes are a failure and waste of money.
    - MrFoof 12y ago
      There are varying implementations. Stop and Shop supermarkets have Symbol guns running Windows CE, and an iOS/Android app. You scan as you shop. When you get to a register you scan the "End Order" barcode on the register, then scan your Stop & Shop card. That's it. Pay. They even recently revved their software to speed up the process and reduce processing delays. I can check out an entire cart in about 40 seconds, and everything is already bagged the way I want it.
beejiu 12y ago
It's a cool machine, and I'd buy a burger from it for the novelty factor, but I'm not sure the economics of it stack up. For each burger sold, the staffing cost is probably no more than 10 cents. This machine would have to be sold rather cheaply to be able to replace those staff. I've never had a problem with service time in most fast food restaurants, so I'm not sure this will improve experience for the customer. It'd be cool to see something like this applied to busy bars, where it could make any drink you wanted.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Labor is typically about 25% of sales, a very high volume restaurant might do a little better.
- DanBlake 12y ago
  It is pretty well understood that 25-30% percent of costs of operating a restaurant was the labor. Dont forget that things like payroll tax, health insurance, overtime, etc.. goes into that. Food is 25-40% and the rest is rent/profit.
  - fred_durst 12y ago
    The machine still has an equivalent annual cost to compare to the workers salaries. Some things that you now have to pay for with machine labor compared to human labor below: 1. Up front payments: Parents and schools subsidized the manufacturing cost of human workers. With machine labor that cost is passed on to the buyer. 2. Energy: Employees feed themselves via their salary, or is often the case with subsidized food stamps. With machine labor the cost of energy falls entirely with the owner. 3. Replacement: If employees die or are otherwise unable to work do to catastrophic events, they can be replaced immediately with little on-boarding cost. If machines fail catastrophically the investment is lost(or needs to be backed up with insurance). Also, on-boarding the new machine requires specialized higher wage human labor. 4. Repair and modernization: As machines age they incure greater upkeep costs. They also become obsolete by newer machines. As employees age and become less capable of performing their duties, they can be let go, free of charge, for poor performance and replaced with a younger worker. Much like was discovered with slavery and indentured servitude, ownership of labor and free labor can be fairly close in cost if you know how to really exploit workers effectively. Harvesting in agriculture is an interesting place to look at how competitive exploited human labor can be compared to machine automation.
slurry 12y ago
Automation tends to hit at the middle, not the bottom. For example, blacksmiths got replaced by automation. Highly skilled labor, replaced by machines + lower/unskilled labor. Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile. But I would put my money on new waves of automation that disrupt skilled labor. There may come a day when we reach the bottom of the pile and utopia/dystopia is realized, but I don't think that day is today.
- erichocean 12y ago
  > Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile. Automatic dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuums, automatic car washes are all widely known examples of replacing low-skill labor with machines. There's also the enormous amount of low-skill labor that's been removed in agriculture and the building trade (think: digging ditches by hand, which they still do in 3rd world countries). Even food preparation labor has been dramatically reduced already at home thanks to the microwave and the logistic possibility of shipping and storing frozen foods (not to mention the proliferation of restaurants). Low-skill activities are almost always the easiest things to automate (that's why we call them "low skill"). Things that require fuzzy human judgement, like managing people, are hard—if not impossible—to automate.
  - LukeB_UK 12y ago
    I'd say cooking requires human judgement. Mainly in the "nope, that's going to kill someone" category.
  - fred_durst 12y ago
    Managing people is absolutely, 100% for at least the last 10 years, being aggressively and successfully being reduced to low skill labor. For example, things like ordering inventory, scheduling staff, pricing products are all done at significantly lower pay rates than were done in the past. The only thing that has slowed some of the automation is simply a shorter route to developing nation outsourcing. The reason developing countries still dig ditches by hand is because it is still cheaper. The reason for that is not access to automation but the massive wage differential that makes that labor so cheap. Its the low cost of the labor that actually protects it from automation. So therefore it follows that expensive(high and mid skill labor which is even more scalable due to lower material costs since it can typically be automated without machines) will be the most profitable segment to either automate away or reduce to low skill labor.
LukeB_UK 12y ago
Big burnt bits on the bun isn't a good way to say that it does it well though...
- thret 12y ago
  Presumably once you have the working machine, this can be adjusted to taste. Actually you'd expect a variety of settings.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  Those are poppy-seeds. A weird bun for burgers, to be sure though...
WoodenChair 12y ago
This is super exciting. Would the people who argue against this machine on the basis that it replaces human workers also argue against the use of robots to produce cars and computers to replace secretaries? Yes, some people lose their jobs in the short term, but in the long term the asset reallocation that goes on in the economy actually creates more jobs than it destroys. Plus, who doesn't want a more sanitary, cooked-to-order, more customizable burger rather than the microwaved shit we get at the low-end fast food restaurants today? The company even addresses the issue on its website: "The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy. We take these issues very seriously so please feel free to tell us how we can help with this transition." We don't need to take them at their word because something like this is inevitable anyway. We just need to enjoy the burgers!
- asdfologist 12y ago
  Arguing against technological progress, for the sake of preserving jobs, is really nothing more than the broken window fallacy[0] in disguise. Imagine if Henry Ford decided to stop making cars for the sake of the people working in the horse carriage industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- gress 12y ago
  Arguing that technology always creates more jobs than it replaces is as fallacious as arguing that technological progress should be blocked in order to protect jobs.
  - WoodenChair 12y ago
    On average it does though. With all of the technological progress of the last 200 years, there would be no jobs left if it didn't.
djloche 12y ago
Has there been an update to this project or are they still in the 'hope people give us money to open up a restaurant staffed by robots' phase? Their website doesn't appear to have changed since 2012 (when I first heard about and was excited to see that their restaurant was 'coming soon'. It is a shame that they haven't yet done so.
ojanik 12y ago
Does anyone have a video of this thing? I can't find anything.
27182818284 12y ago
There have been ramen-making robots for years. This isn't a disruption at all. There isn't anything to see here until we read a headline that McDonalds will pilot it in N stores for 6 months.
- qbrass 12y ago
  If McDonald's isn't providing jobs, then there's little incentive for allowing one to be built in your community. McDonald's corporate would rather build more stores, than reduce overhead for franchisees.
  - 27182818284 12y ago
    They are involved, that's why they're franchises and not completely independent "Burger Joint™". With added pressures such as the protests and strikes in NYC over fast food, it seems to me they're probably paying attention now more than they have in the last few years.
icantthinkofone 12y ago
When was the last time you walked into a fast food burger place and heard sizzling in the background? I haven't taken the time to find out but I do know that, in the rare times I visit a Burger King or Jack-in-the-Box, I have not seen anyone 'flipping burgers' but, instead, grab them out of what looks like a steamer. So my suspicion is, no cooking takes place for burgers, at least. Can anyone verify that?
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  I believe Wendys still grills fresh.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  That's why I like Five Guys, Waffle House, and a slew of local diners. You can see the cooking happening. Having been a former line cook myself, I know what a good kitchen looks like.
- afafsd 12y ago
  At Macca's at least they no longer get flipped, but they are cooked from raw-and-frozen by a top-and-bottom grill thing, apparently in forty seconds. http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4616233_mcdonalds-make-burgers.html http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4616233_mcdonalds-make-burgers....
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    That's how it was in 1994ish in the US when I was a youngin workin the griddle. It was already pretty automated back then: slap down some frozen hockey-puck burgers, lower the top griddle down which trips an automated timer. When the timer tripped, the upper griddle released, an alarm sounds letting the griddle operator know that the burgers are ready for retrieval. Then generally they were placed in warming bins unless it was rush when they were immediately needed for burgers. It was a horrible job, mostly because I am a diligent employee even at a McDonald's, my fellow employees were not, and the assistant manager was dealing meth to many of them. He was the franchise owner's son.
  - MereInterest 12y ago
lotsofmangos 12y ago
They'll get infested with stainless steel rats in no time.
mschuster91 12y ago
Well, you will still need employees on the premise to refill the machine, serve drinks and collect the cash. In a local BurgerKing, there are three employees: one shift lead, a cashier and a cook. So the labor costs will not lower significantly, but the quality will increase.
- im3w1l 12y ago
  The cashier is going (burger king demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zNUu9r1S4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zNUu9r1S4E) The cook is going, according to this article. Serving drinks is trivial for a machine. I guess refilling and cleaning will remain for some time.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
RogerL 12y ago
Okay, this makes a burger, and let's assume it can handle all the variations a normal place would want. I don't just order burgers. Fries, drinks, ice cream, chicken, salads, wraps, and many more, are the typical items on a fast food menu. Perhaps in really busy stores there is a person dedicated to burgers and nothing else, but would this really reduce the amount of labor you would need? I suspect not (I have no data to back that up). Sooner or later all of this will be automated - this machine, by itself, isn't going to make much of a dent in my opinion.
fred_durst 12y ago
The reality of labor replacement is that low skill workers are likely to be the very last group to be replaced. The reason for that is how low they are paid and how expensive physical manufacturing and upkeep of machines are. Middle management and entry to mid level white collar work are by far the most susceptible. Also, lower end knowledge jobs. Current trends show low skilled workers getting cheaper and raw materials getting more expensive so at least for the near term, low skill worker replacement appears highly unlikely. Much like the late 90's mid and low level computer programers etc will likely be eliminated, or reduced to a low skill job, long before low skill workers are replaced by machines.
samstave 12y ago
I want one of these in my home kitchen in ten years. Further, I'd love to see the same effort applied to many many common dishes: a pasta-bot, ramen-bot, sandwhich-bot etc.. This company hopefully does the work to ID each bot-module needed for dishes that are just a combination of separate ingredients that require little preparation at the time you're assembling the dish. Also, this thing is IDEAL for stadiums and high-density events. Every stadium should have one. This will also be awesome for food trucks. Every military will probably invade for this. THis device will succeed assuming it is real, but that doesnt mean it would replace fast food restaurants.
annatong 12y ago
Momentum is hiring! - Embedded systems and computer vision experts Company: Momentum Machines makes the most advanced culinary robots in the world. Our first device is capable of making gourmet quality hamburgers from start to finish with no human interaction. The efficiency savings of our technology alone can cut the price of high quality food in half, making it affordable for the first time to the vast majority of Americans. This fundamental shift in the cost equation is augmented by improved quality, precision, customizability, sanitation, and consistency to the restaurant industry, ultimately reinventing the customer experience. Team and position: We are a team of Stanford and Berkeley educated engineers with roots in machine design, robotics, and restaurant operations. Currently, we are searching for an experts in embedded systems and computer vision as our team grows. Please feel free to email us at callings@momentummachines.com if you would like more information.

41 points by sirteno 12y ago

I find it hard to believe that installation + maintenance + unexpected maintenance + still some people to prepare ingredients would be cheaper than cooks. 24 square feet sounds impressive though.

kristopolous 12y ago
but if the aggregate long term (think 24 month) price projection is lower, then price sensitive establishments will take the bait. Have you looked inside a mcdonalds kitchen lately? They've automated quite a bit of it already.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Everything they can, at least. Still, someone has to load the fryers/grills, assemble the sandwiches (of which there are at least three different basic kinds, and many, many more variations, even some more then in some places), and wrap/package the result. I don't forsee a machine handling the entire process anytime soon. There are too many edge cases. (And I remember quite a bit of expletive-laden rage at the automation we did have when I worked there.. when it breaks, it's annoying. Fry dispenser not loading baskets, things getting stuck in the bun toaster and holding up the whole line, timer buttons on the holding cabinets failing so you can't tell what's been there for how long..)
  - fred_durst 12y ago
    Exactly. McDonald's has never been afraid of automation. If this were really that viable, they would already be doing it.
Karunamon 12y ago
Thinking about the numbers.. the average McDonald's kitchen, at a midsize store when I worked there many moons ago, all by itself, had between 2 and 6 people in it. At full staff, there were two assembly lines with two people each, one guy on the grill, and one guy starting orders by preparing the buns (the initiator). At low times, one guy on the line, one guy on the grill. Assuming a reasonably busy location where there is no such thing as a "slow time" (airport, central metro area, etc), that means you have to pay six people around $8 an hour for 8 hours. Works out to $384/day on kitchen labor, give or take. $2688/week, $139,776/yr. (And that's before taxes, local wage variances and so on - this is a very rough, very conservative estimate) There's no way this thing will cost less than $150k - a shake/ice cream machine costs aroud 50-75k for a much, much more simple set of parts (liquid pumps, an auger, and a compressor). And that's before you get into maintenance costs and the cost of having a single point of failure. Example: One of your kitchen guys gets sick, you can usually call in a replacement, shift someone from elsewhere in the store, or just run one person down and deal with it. The Burgermaker 9000, on the other hand, say the tomato slicer breaks? You're down. Completely and totally. Combine that with the insane time to break even and see even a penny of ROI.. it ain't happening. Not anytime soon.
- shiny 12y ago
  In that case, Seattle's $15/hr minimum wage may help spur innovation in this space.
  - fred_durst 12y ago
    You're still only at $247,715 The reality is that the more the income gap grows between the servers and those served, the less profitable automation becomes. There is a reason low wages jobs are growing, not shrinking in the US.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

smacktoward 12y ago

> Of course, businesses are free to spend their savings however they like. For some, that may mean more quality ingredients or services. For others, it might be competing with other restaurants by maintaining the same level of service and ingredients but offering even lower food prices. Or it could mean management just stuffing the money into their pockets. Somehow I think this is the most likely outcome.

ams6110 12y ago
You've not worked in fast food I take it? It's highly competitive. There is no margin for "stuffing pockets"

afafsd 12y ago

So instead of paying some bozo minimum wage to flip burgers, you have to pay someone to fix the burger robot every time it screws up. Which it probably will, frequently, because it's got a zillion moving parts and a bunch of loose messy ingredients which can get stuck in them. Replacing people with robots works great if you're replacing large numbers at the same factory, because firing workers and hiring robot repairmen still saves you a lot of money. If you're only going to replace one or two workers per site, though, it sounds pointless.

ams6110 12y ago
Restaurant kitchens are also rather hostile to precision mechanisms. They are greasy, hot, and stuff gets thrown around without a lot of care.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Wouldn't robots fix the "without a lot of care" aspect?
asdfologist 12y ago
That's exactly what people said about self-checkout lanes.
- wmeredith 12y ago
  You know what's empty every time I go to Home Depot and Costco? Self checkout lanes. The Costco by my house just took out half of them and added more staffed stations.
  - harmegido 12y ago
    I don't think one data point is enough to say that self-checkout lanes are a failure and waste of money.
  - MrFoof 12y ago
    There are varying implementations. Stop and Shop supermarkets have Symbol guns running Windows CE, and an iOS/Android app. You scan as you shop. When you get to a register you scan the "End Order" barcode on the register, then scan your Stop & Shop card. That's it. Pay. They even recently revved their software to speed up the process and reduce processing delays. I can check out an entire cart in about 40 seconds, and everything is already bagged the way I want it.

beejiu 12y ago

It's a cool machine, and I'd buy a burger from it for the novelty factor, but I'm not sure the economics of it stack up. For each burger sold, the staffing cost is probably no more than 10 cents. This machine would have to be sold rather cheaply to be able to replace those staff. I've never had a problem with service time in most fast food restaurants, so I'm not sure this will improve experience for the customer. It'd be cool to see something like this applied to busy bars, where it could make any drink you wanted.

ams6110 12y ago
Labor is typically about 25% of sales, a very high volume restaurant might do a little better.
DanBlake 12y ago
It is pretty well understood that 25-30% percent of costs of operating a restaurant was the labor. Dont forget that things like payroll tax, health insurance, overtime, etc.. goes into that. Food is 25-40% and the rest is rent/profit.
- fred_durst 12y ago
  The machine still has an equivalent annual cost to compare to the workers salaries. Some things that you now have to pay for with machine labor compared to human labor below: 1. Up front payments: Parents and schools subsidized the manufacturing cost of human workers. With machine labor that cost is passed on to the buyer. 2. Energy: Employees feed themselves via their salary, or is often the case with subsidized food stamps. With machine labor the cost of energy falls entirely with the owner. 3. Replacement: If employees die or are otherwise unable to work do to catastrophic events, they can be replaced immediately with little on-boarding cost. If machines fail catastrophically the investment is lost(or needs to be backed up with insurance). Also, on-boarding the new machine requires specialized higher wage human labor. 4. Repair and modernization: As machines age they incure greater upkeep costs. They also become obsolete by newer machines. As employees age and become less capable of performing their duties, they can be let go, free of charge, for poor performance and replaced with a younger worker. Much like was discovered with slavery and indentured servitude, ownership of labor and free labor can be fairly close in cost if you know how to really exploit workers effectively. Harvesting in agriculture is an interesting place to look at how competitive exploited human labor can be compared to machine automation.

slurry 12y ago

Automation tends to hit at the middle, not the bottom. For example, blacksmiths got replaced by automation. Highly skilled labor, replaced by machines + lower/unskilled labor. Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile. But I would put my money on new waves of automation that disrupt skilled labor. There may come a day when we reach the bottom of the pile and utopia/dystopia is realized, but I don't think that day is today.

erichocean 12y ago
> Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile. Automatic dishwashers, laundry machines, vacuums, automatic car washes are all widely known examples of replacing low-skill labor with machines. There's also the enormous amount of low-skill labor that's been removed in agriculture and the building trade (think: digging ditches by hand, which they still do in 3rd world countries). Even food preparation labor has been dramatically reduced already at home thanks to the microwave and the logistic possibility of shipping and storing frozen foods (not to mention the proliferation of restaurants). Low-skill activities are almost always the easiest things to automate (that's why we call them "low skill"). Things that require fuzzy human judgement, like managing people, are hard—if not impossible—to automate.
- LukeB_UK 12y ago
  I'd say cooking requires human judgement. Mainly in the "nope, that's going to kill someone" category.
- fred_durst 12y ago
  Managing people is absolutely, 100% for at least the last 10 years, being aggressively and successfully being reduced to low skill labor. For example, things like ordering inventory, scheduling staff, pricing products are all done at significantly lower pay rates than were done in the past. The only thing that has slowed some of the automation is simply a shorter route to developing nation outsourcing. The reason developing countries still dig ditches by hand is because it is still cheaper. The reason for that is not access to automation but the massive wage differential that makes that labor so cheap. Its the low cost of the labor that actually protects it from automation. So therefore it follows that expensive(high and mid skill labor which is even more scalable due to lower material costs since it can typically be automated without machines) will be the most profitable segment to either automate away or reduce to low skill labor.

LukeB_UK 12y ago

Big burnt bits on the bun isn't a good way to say that it does it well though...

thret 12y ago
Presumably once you have the working machine, this can be adjusted to taste. Actually you'd expect a variety of settings.
wavefunction 12y ago
Those are poppy-seeds. A weird bun for burgers, to be sure though...

WoodenChair 12y ago

This is super exciting. Would the people who argue against this machine on the basis that it replaces human workers also argue against the use of robots to produce cars and computers to replace secretaries? Yes, some people lose their jobs in the short term, but in the long term the asset reallocation that goes on in the economy actually creates more jobs than it destroys. Plus, who doesn't want a more sanitary, cooked-to-order, more customizable burger rather than the microwaved shit we get at the low-end fast food restaurants today? The company even addresses the issue on its website: "The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy. We take these issues very seriously so please feel free to tell us how we can help with this transition." We don't need to take them at their word because something like this is inevitable anyway. We just need to enjoy the burgers!

asdfologist 12y ago
Arguing against technological progress, for the sake of preserving jobs, is really nothing more than the broken window fallacy[0] in disguise. Imagine if Henry Ford decided to stop making cars for the sake of the people working in the horse carriage industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
gress 12y ago
Arguing that technology always creates more jobs than it replaces is as fallacious as arguing that technological progress should be blocked in order to protect jobs.
- WoodenChair 12y ago
  On average it does though. With all of the technological progress of the last 200 years, there would be no jobs left if it didn't.

djloche 12y ago

Has there been an update to this project or are they still in the 'hope people give us money to open up a restaurant staffed by robots' phase? Their website doesn't appear to have changed since 2012 (when I first heard about and was excited to see that their restaurant was 'coming soon'. It is a shame that they haven't yet done so.

ojanik 12y ago

Does anyone have a video of this thing? I can't find anything.

27182818284 12y ago

There have been ramen-making robots for years. This isn't a disruption at all. There isn't anything to see here until we read a headline that McDonalds will pilot it in N stores for 6 months.

qbrass 12y ago
If McDonald's isn't providing jobs, then there's little incentive for allowing one to be built in your community. McDonald's corporate would rather build more stores, than reduce overhead for franchisees.
- 27182818284 12y ago
  They are involved, that's why they're franchises and not completely independent "Burger Joint™". With added pressures such as the protests and strikes in NYC over fast food, it seems to me they're probably paying attention now more than they have in the last few years.

icantthinkofone 12y ago

When was the last time you walked into a fast food burger place and heard sizzling in the background? I haven't taken the time to find out but I do know that, in the rare times I visit a Burger King or Jack-in-the-Box, I have not seen anyone 'flipping burgers' but, instead, grab them out of what looks like a steamer. So my suspicion is, no cooking takes place for burgers, at least. Can anyone verify that?

ceejayoz 12y ago
I believe Wendys still grills fresh.
moron4hire 12y ago
That's why I like Five Guys, Waffle House, and a slew of local diners. You can see the cooking happening. Having been a former line cook myself, I know what a good kitchen looks like.
afafsd 12y ago
At Macca's at least they no longer get flipped, but they are cooked from raw-and-frozen by a top-and-bottom grill thing, apparently in forty seconds. http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4616233_mcdonalds-make-burgers.html http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4616233_mcdonalds-make-burgers....
- wavefunction 12y ago
  That's how it was in 1994ish in the US when I was a youngin workin the griddle. It was already pretty automated back then: slap down some frozen hockey-puck burgers, lower the top griddle down which trips an automated timer. When the timer tripped, the upper griddle released, an alarm sounds letting the griddle operator know that the burgers are ready for retrieval. Then generally they were placed in warming bins unless it was rush when they were immediately needed for burgers. It was a horrible job, mostly because I am a diligent employee even at a McDonald's, my fellow employees were not, and the assistant manager was dealing meth to many of them. He was the franchise owner's son.
- MereInterest 12y ago

lotsofmangos 12y ago

They'll get infested with stainless steel rats in no time.

mschuster91 12y ago

Well, you will still need employees on the premise to refill the machine, serve drinks and collect the cash. In a local BurgerKing, there are three employees: one shift lead, a cashier and a cook. So the labor costs will not lower significantly, but the quality will increase.

im3w1l 12y ago
The cashier is going (burger king demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zNUu9r1S4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zNUu9r1S4E) The cook is going, according to this article. Serving drinks is trivial for a machine. I guess refilling and cleaning will remain for some time.
deleted 12y ago
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RogerL 12y ago

Okay, this makes a burger, and let's assume it can handle all the variations a normal place would want. I don't just order burgers. Fries, drinks, ice cream, chicken, salads, wraps, and many more, are the typical items on a fast food menu. Perhaps in really busy stores there is a person dedicated to burgers and nothing else, but would this really reduce the amount of labor you would need? I suspect not (I have no data to back that up). Sooner or later all of this will be automated - this machine, by itself, isn't going to make much of a dent in my opinion.

fred_durst 12y ago

The reality of labor replacement is that low skill workers are likely to be the very last group to be replaced. The reason for that is how low they are paid and how expensive physical manufacturing and upkeep of machines are. Middle management and entry to mid level white collar work are by far the most susceptible. Also, lower end knowledge jobs. Current trends show low skilled workers getting cheaper and raw materials getting more expensive so at least for the near term, low skill worker replacement appears highly unlikely. Much like the late 90's mid and low level computer programers etc will likely be eliminated, or reduced to a low skill job, long before low skill workers are replaced by machines.

samstave 12y ago

I want one of these in my home kitchen in ten years. Further, I'd love to see the same effort applied to many many common dishes: a pasta-bot, ramen-bot, sandwhich-bot etc.. This company hopefully does the work to ID each bot-module needed for dishes that are just a combination of separate ingredients that require little preparation at the time you're assembling the dish. Also, this thing is IDEAL for stadiums and high-density events. Every stadium should have one. This will also be awesome for food trucks. Every military will probably invade for this. THis device will succeed assuming it is real, but that doesnt mean it would replace fast food restaurants.

annatong 12y ago

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