
This robot serves up 340 hamburgers per hour - Jaigus
http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-hamburgers-per-hour/
======
citricsquid
Does anyone here have experience with fast food enterprises? It would be
interesting to hear about how this sort of machine could affect companies like
McDonalds and whether or not it's _the future_ or just a cute idea that won't
scale?

I have the feeling that, if this sort of idea was as value as the article
implies, McDonalds (or Burger King, or any other big chain) would have put
serious money into developing this sort of thing and it would already be
everywhere.

(I wish there was a website or publication that took businesses and profiled
how they work, the challenges they face and the costs associated with parts of
the business consumers might not understand, so these sort of questions were
easy to answer. I would love to read how McDonalds works (as a business))

~~~
meric
At a McDonald's store in my country that I worked in, the labor costs were
only around 15% of the store's costs, whereas the cost of food (excluding
wastage) is around 25%. Since the minimum wage in my country is about twice as
high as that in the US, I wouldn't be surprised the relative labor costs are
even lower there. McDonald's also happen to pay 20% above minimum wage over
here.

Burger assembly is only a small part of the labor cost. You have the cashier,
the fries person, drinks, management, salad/deli assembly, cleaning (during
opening hours as well as final cleanup afterwards), as well as carrying stock
from the truck back to the store.

Whether those machines would be profitable would depend on whether it is worth
saving 5% of the cost of a burger in exchange for the capital and maintenance
cost of the machine.

McDonald's isn't a burger company. It is a real estate company.

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-
es...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/73533-mcdonalds-is-a-real-estate-
company)

~~~
throwmeaway33
You could make the back room potentially a lot smaller if it was all in a
machine.

As for the link - I don't buy his arguments: "First, it buys and sells
properties, as one might suspect."

I've never seen a McDonald's close down. I'm sure they do sometimes, but they
probably realize really quickly if the place will be profitable or if it needs
to be sold asap. So effectively they never cash in on any long term real-
estate investments. If the real-estate values goes up, more than likely you're
gunna be selling more burgers too.

The second point he makes is kinda semantic. At the end of the day McDonalds
needs to extract money from the franchise. They can charge more for using the
brand, more for the ingredients or more for rent or whatever. It doesn't
really have any significance. At the end they are trying to get as much money
as possible out of the franchise without running the owners bankrupt.

His last point about them getting bought and all their real-estate sold.. I
dunno maybe he was trying to just be cute - but net worth of assets is taken
into account into the stock price. It's the kind of stuff that's on quarterly
reports. Kinda scary that this guy is an investor.

~~~
meric
It's a real estate company because for many franchise stores, it owns the land
and collects rent and franchise fee from the franchisees.

“McDonald’s real moneymaking engine was its little-known real estate business,
Franchise Realty Corporation; envisioned and created by Harry Sonneborn. The
obscure McDonald’s alter ego company was based on Sonneborn’s unique even
lesser known financial formula.”
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Sonneborn> (First CEO)

~~~
throwmeaway33
As I explained the "rent" is just a way of extracting money from the
franchise. They are not necessarily charging the local market rate for
commercial real estate (if it's a very busy McDonalds they can charge way
more). They don't realistically sit down and consider maybe replacing the
McDonalds with an American Apparel so they can charge more rent. So it's not
the typical landlord<->renter relationship where the landlord considers
getting new tenants and the renter considers moving to a new place.

------
anandkulkarni
When I met the Momentum Machine guys here in San Francisco, I was shocked that
they were planning to open a restaurant chain instead of licensing the
technology out to existing players. Opening restaurants? Making food? Very un-
startupy, right?

But it turns out that if anyone can do it, these guys can. The brick-and-
mortar restaurant business is massive, bigger than many technology sectors,
and prime for disruption with new food and models: there's a $184 billion
global fast food market, a $2.1 trillion global market, and just about
everybody needs to eat.

This has the potential elements of greatness: serious, hardcore mechanical
engineers as founders, with a background in the restaurant industry. More
power to John and Alex -- can't wait to try my first one.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The first company to produce a Redbox-like burger, fries & shake kiosk will
make a mint. I can envision those in breakrooms of small businesses
everywhere.

Remember, not every business is in the middle of a city with plenty of
restaurant choices nearby. If the company I work for didn't have a cafeteria,
I'd be in for at least a 3 mile drive to the closest fast food place if I
forgot to bring lunch.

~~~
kordless
They should call it McSwineys!

------
hooande
The big issue with robot cooks isn't a machine that can cook food...those have
been around for some time now. The real question is can the robots cook safe
and healthful food _with no human assistance_? Any Board of Health will agree
that the real challenge in cooking isn't the mechanical combination of the
ingredients, it's inspecting the food and noticing potential problems that
will stand out to any person.

Robots that can cook on their own have enormous benefits to society. The
preparation of the food is made slightly cheaper and overall quality of the
food improves (if a robot can make the perfect burger once, it can do it again
and again). There's no need to worry about washed hands or cooks with colds,
and for simple or repeat orders it's usually easier to interface with a
machine instead of a person. But the real benefit to the world is freeing up
the processing power of human minds for something other than flipping meat
every X minutes.

These machines take a lot of the human labor out of food preparation, but at
least one person will still need to be around to answer certain questions: Did
this meat go bad before it was cooked? Were there rat droppings on the grill?
Is there any chance that someone could get sick by eating this? Of course
these things will take breakthroughs in machine vision technology and
herculean data collection efforts. But once we get there, we can really cut
costs and fight hunger with food factories.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Given that they're grinding meat on the spot, and that ground meat has a
significantly higher risk of bacterial contamination than its non-ground
equivalent, my guess is that this negates some of the risk. There still has to
be a human involved to be sure, but I'd eat a burger from one of these any day
of the week over the McDonalds equivalent (assuming I ate beef, of course,
which i don't).

------
brianbreslin
8 years ago i remember talking about how i wanted to do a fully automated
pizza shop. with a atm like interface. i know nothing about the pizza
business, and at the time labor was too cheap for pizzas to warrant building
crazy complex machinery. now it could probably work, i think. I do wish there
was a video of this hamburger machine in action.

EDIT: Apparently these machines exist for pizzas:
[http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-nn-
pizz...](http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/nation/la-na-nn-pizza-
vending-machines-20120613)

~~~
shabble
Short segment on How It's Made:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k5WVYu5GXY&t=5m35s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k5WVYu5GXY&t=5m35s)

~~~
hayksaakian
Thanks for the link, that made my day.

------
Kerrick
This may seem like a bit of a brazen comment, but... _what about french
fries_? A burger is boring, a burger and fries is a very American meal.

They point to elimination of tile floors, aprons, hair nets, and the like, but
if the customer cannot get an order of fries from this robot, the restaurant
will still have to have traditional kitchen infrastructure to make french
fries.

~~~
witten
The technology exists: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Znch-RfhRI>

~~~
rsheridan6
Now we have proof of concept of automated burger flippers, fry cooks, and,
elsewhere, ordering from a kiosk instead of a person (I've seen this in the
wild). What does that leave, someone to clean up and to stock the machines?

~~~
tfb
I see no reason clean up and stocking (for the most part) couldn't be
automated as well!

------
zinssmeister
No doubt this is the future of fast food. Been wondering for years why a big
player like McDonalds wouldn't come out with such an automated process and
came to the conclusion it must have something to do with the economic
consequences this would bring along. The amount of minimum wage jobs this
would destroy, would have a very devastating impact on the U.S. economy.

~~~
fragsworth
"Destroying jobs" with technology is not a bad thing. The world benefits from
cheaper products, and we shouldn't keep people working in jobs where they are
no longer needed just for the sake of letting them work. They should learn new
skills, find other jobs, and contribute to society in other ways.

No company would hesitate to fire every one of their employees if they could
get machines to do better work for cheaper. The _only_ reason McDonald's
hasn't done it yet is because they haven't found a cost-effective way to do
it.

~~~
loup-vaillant
There's only so much work to do. Machines seems to be eating more jobs than
innovation can create. Eventually, we will face massive (over 50%)
unemployment, unless of course we change a thing or two in our way of life
(such as 20 hours work weeks or such).

Machines are great, but we do need to mind the way we use them.

~~~
3pt14159
Sorta...

In the short term the less intelligent half will be massively unemployed until
we get something like Gattaca going and then everyone can basically be
researchers (or writers, etc).

The real question is what happens after the singularity.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _The real question is what happens after the singularity._

Probably more true than you realize. The most likely scenario for a
technological singularity is an AI that writes a slightly more efficient AI,
and so on until world domination if it's quick enough (which is likely).

So we better know _exactly_ ¹ what we want the AI to do, or it might for
instance tile the solar system with molecular smileys to maximize a badly
programmed notion of "happiness".

[1] With mathematical precision, no less.

------
damian2000
Here's what they need to do to create an automated restaurant...

Combine:

\- Their invention, the robot burger maker

\- iPads at every table to order (payment via stripe or similar service) :
[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-01/may-the-
tabl...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-01/may-the-tablet-take-
your-order)

\- Robot waiter : [http://www.sfgate.com/business/tech/slideshow/Robots-work-
re...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/tech/slideshow/Robots-work-restaurant-
in-China-55341.php)

But you'd still need people for cleaning, maintenance & troubleshooting.

~~~
ghshephard
My long bet says that we'll see the "Totally Automated" restaurant (exception
being original construction, and periodic "high level" engineering) - I.E. A
restaurant that can do basic maintenance, self repair, cleaning, food cooking
(the trivial portion), receiving) - in about 25 years.

The cleaning/cooking/receiving part will be up and operating in about 15
years.

~~~
JackpotDen
Welcome to the kitchen of the future. By the year 2000, all of mom's cooking
and cleaning duties will be performed by Rosie the maid.

------
powatom
One question I have is this: if we let robots produce our fast food, what
guarantees of food hygiene do we have? I imagine it can be pretty difficult to
get a robot to self-clean all of the relevant parts, and it's not hard to
imagine critters getting inside and making a nice home for themselves.

The picture in the article does nothing to convince me that a burger produced
by this machine will not give me food poisoning.

~~~
kalleboo
I think removing the teenager sneezing in the food and coming to work the day
after having mono and not washing his hands will more than make up for it.

------
jakejake
I worked in fast food growing up and it seems hard to imagine a machine would
be a huge cost saver because the actual burger production was rarely a
problem.

Most of the work is in the pre-prep, cleaning, stocking in preparation for the
lunch rush. The machine would be nice during a rush but I have a hard time
seeing it actually replacing an employee unless the robot also knows how to
use a mop.

------
roc
This thing sounds almost purpose-built to enable a gourmet burger food truck
business -- a restaurant niche where revenue is largely tied to how quickly a
_fixed_ number of staff can churn out food.

There's also plenty of inherent down time for that same small staff, technical
entrepreneur or centralized maintenance crew, to clean/maintain the machines.

One could set up a 'fleet' of such trucks and a centralized 'headquarters'
with cleaning, stocking, and technical staff to handle any necessary
maintenance and repair, as well as centralized and scalable data-driven
inventory management and routing.

------
kposehn
So long as the first restaurant is called Cafe Alpha and is staffed by an
overenthusiastic female android, I'm happy.

(Go read Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou to get the joke ;)

------
Uhhrrr
I saw this machine in action at an event at the hardware accelerator they're
part of. The guys behind it are cool and they have solved a number of problems
so far.

But I do not think they have solved all of them. When I saw it the rate of
production was far below 340/hr, and the machine wasn't doing all of the
assembly. So I think the headline's use of the present tense is very
misleading.

------
chebucto
The machine may automate the slicing, cooking, and stacking, but cleaning
seems like a major concern. The chutes with vegetables, cooking surfaces, and
especially the meat grinders would all need close attention on an daily (or
even hourly) basis.

------
sbarlster
What Americans really need right now is the ability to eat burgers faster and
cheaper...

[http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/19/fat-america-keeps-
getti...](http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/19/fat-america-keeps-getting-
fatter/)

Duh.

------
rdl
I have always wanted one of these sushi robots:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPPwXRZCqew)

------
aaron695
The technology here could easily have been done 50-70 years ago (And it
probably was)

I think it's not about robots but the spread of ideas and commerce is now much
easier with the internet.

------
whyme
Am I the only one looking at the image and imagining chain grease flicking
onto the burgers... Yuck.

Afterthought: I suppose that might be better than humans handling my food.

~~~
likeclockwork
They could lubricate the chain with lard.

~~~
DigitalTurk
Yum!

------
rorrr
I almost feel bad for all the people without education. Robots are killing
their jobs, one niche at a time.

~~~
AndrewKoszela
I can't wait till robot can do every job so that we can all just kick back and
let the robots serve us beers on the beach. Your framing it all wrong by
saying "robots are killing their jobs" in reality their jobs are still getting
done, just more efficiently. This lowers the cost of the product and frees up
individual to do more rewarding jobs.

~~~
jhuni
It should free up individuals to do more rewarding jobs, but unfortunately we
still live in a capitalist society. The only individuals that benefit from
increased automation are the capitalists that own the robots, not the members
of the working class that are losing their jobs.

~~~
AndrewKoszela
Good point

looking at it from the perspective of the working class automation is scary in
the short term, just like the invention of automated farming equipment was
scary in 1870, 70-80 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture

Now approximately 2-3 percent of the population is directly employed in
agriculture, is flipping burgers really that different?

I know the perfect way to gain 100% employment outlaw all farming machines,
but you can see the flaws in that solution. Everyone is hurt by higher cost
food and the opportunity cost of all the work that is more complex

True the people that put up the money and took the risk of engineering
innovative ways of doing things better see the largest benefits, but the
person that gets the innovation wrong many times goes broke.

The "working class" needs to realize that the nature of work is changing and
the assembly line education we were all feed is not going to cut it in a fast
pace economy we are living in today.

~~~
jhuni
> _I know the perfect way to gain 100% employment outlaw all farming machines,
> but you can see the flaws in that solution._

The capitalist system requires a reserve army of labor so 100% employment
cannot coexist with the capitalist mode of production. The only reason
outlawing farming machines could allow for 100% unemployment is that it would
replace the capitalist mode of production with the foraging mode of
production.

> _True the people that put up the money and took the risk of engineering
> innovative ways of doing things better see the largest benefits._

The people that receive the most benefits are the capitalists who control the
means of production. Our most talented engineers are being exploited by the
capitalists, so they aren't the ones receiving the benefits of production.
Some capitalists might just so happen to be engineers but that is not the
basis of their social relationship to the means of production.

> _The "working class" needs to realize that the nature of work is changing
> and the assembly line education we were all feed is not going to cut it in a
> fast pace economy we are living in today._

With this statement you are taking the elitist position that us workers need
to be told what we need to "realize" and that we deserve to suffer because
what we are doing "is not going to cut it." Workers are in this precarious
position entirely because the capitalist class has undeserved control over the
means of production. The workers should take control of the means of
production and use it to satisfy human needs rather then profit. With communal
ownership of the means of production, automation technology will benefit the
entire race rather then a minority of greedy capitalists.

~~~
AndrewKoszela
It seems like you listen to a lot of the propaganda used to separate people
into classes that keep them believing that they shouldn't even try. We're
living in an age where anyone with an Idea and a little bit of savings can
bring a project to fruition.

Stop watching Americana Idol, learn from all the free resources online and
lift yourself up from the bootstraps. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and do
something about it!

Stop listening to the self-defeating prophecy feed to you by people trying to
separate society for political gain. It's easy to write yourself off, give up,
and take the drone job.

Solution: Open Source Everything - Pure Free Market Competition - Less
Government Interference.

Cheers

~~~
jhuni
> _It seems like you listen to a lot of the propaganda used to separate people
> into classes that keep them believing that they shouldn't even try._

In the earliest human societies nobody was more entitled to the worlds natural
resources then anybody else. According to Heckewelder in Iroquios society
"whatever liveth on the land, whatever groweth out of the earth, and all that
is in the rivers and waters, was given jointly to all".

Classes emerged when one group of people decided that they were more entitled
to the Earth's natural resources then everyone else. These people made these
natural resources into their private property and in order to get wealth out
of those natural resources they made human workers into their private property
as well. These owners became the ruling class and their subjects became the
slave class.

Slavery existed in human society for several millennia until it was partially
replaced by feudalism. In feudal societies, there was still a ruling class
that controlled the natural resources and violently suppressed anyone who
opposed them, except that their serfs had a little bit more autonomy and they
were tied to the land rather then their masters.

The industrial revolution changed everything. In industrial societies people
were able to work in other sectors of the economy besides the primary sector,
which allowed some people to live free of the tyranny of the landlords.
However, new forms of private property emerged corresponding to the new
sectors of the economy. In the manufacturing sector, there was private
property in the means of production and the instruments of labor, and in the
knowledge sector there was intellectual private property.

The private ownership of our natural resources also still exists. As an
example, Gina Rinehart, the world's richest woman, is a mining tycoon who
inherited her control of Australia's natural mining resources. Classes have
existed throughout written history and with people like Gina Rinehart they
apply today as much as ever before.

> _Open Source Everything_

You want to eliminate the form of private property that exists in your sector
of the economy: intellectual property. This is good, but what are you going to
do for people working in the primary and secondary sectors of the economy? Do
you want farmers to continue to subjected to the tyranny of the landlords and
do you want for manufacturing workers to continue to be completely alienated
from their workplace?

> _Stop watching Americana Idol, learn from all the free resources online and
> lift yourself up from the bootstraps._

What is with this ad hominem attack? I don't even know what "Americana Idol"
is. I spend most of my time studying mathematics and writing computer
programs.

