
Fast-food worker replacement machine - luu
http://momentummachines.com/#product
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ottoflux
How does this fix the fast food problem? 1) Who will clean the machines _well_
every night? 2) Really? Try to answer 1 honestly. 3) How will keep the tables
clean, as well as the messes from terrible idiot customers who no longer
believe they should clean up a mess they make (at least partially until
getting help from employee)? 4) When I mean clean, I don't mean rubbing the
table with microquat (or equivalent) and knocking the food and crumbs all over
the seating surface. I mean cleaning it so that you would comfortably (and by
you I mean more than 50 % of the people) lick the surface of the table. It
takes hot soapy water, effort, and technique - all things that seem to be
missing from restaurants (fast and many not-so-fast). 5) Terrible mopping,
etc.

The big problem isn't keeping cheap sh*tty food cheap, it's keeping the
restaurants clean enough you don't feel dirty when you leave. That is a social
and managerial problem, and you don't fix it with magical meat grinder
machine.

~~~
malandrew
Easy, take all the parts that need to be cleaned and convert it into
disposable laminated paper product or plastic. The employee at the end of the
night just removes the dirty ones and replaces it with clean ones. The tubes
for example could be disposable.

The conveyer belt would have to have a wax paper or laminated sheet wrapped
around the belt and affixed in place.

The only thing that would have to be cleaned is the cooking surface and
grinding mechanism, which should be trivial.

You basically would need one employee to fill the device hoppers with fresh
ingredients in the morning, babysit the device for the day adding more
ingredients as necessary and then break the machine down at night and set it
up again for the following day. I estimate 20 minutes labor in the morning and
40-60 at night. A huge savings for the ability to pump out 3600 decent burgers
over a 10 hour work day.

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AndrewKemendo
I have been following this for a little while and their site hasn't changed
much since 2012 - if at all. I am really curious to see what they are doing
now.

Many of the founders' angel.co profiles don't show any other employment but
beyond that I haven't seen much else from these folks, on twitter or
otherwise.

Anyone know?

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csbrooks
> ...frees up all of the hamburger line cooks...

Frees them up for what? Unemployment?

~~~
Einstalbert
One special McDonalds ticket to machine-repair college, let's replace the
workers with technicians and then make THOSE jobs minimum wage.

That'll be the future. People groaning at minimum wage jobs for repairing
current-day minimum wage jobs.

~~~
joezydeco
Having actually worked on McD's kitchen tech, the corporation is extremely
specific about their technology design including the amount of repair calls
allowed per machine per year.

I can guarantee this machine would never make that metric. And I'd really like
to see what this machine looks like after making 40 burgers, much less 400 or
4000. 40,000? Forget it.

Cooking and handling animal protein is a _very_ messy job. Letting semi-
skilled workers load raw beef into a hopper? That's a non-starter right there
for a company like McDonald's.

~~~
malandrew
Disposable meat hoppers changed daily. Specialized cleaning machine with high
pressure water and autoclave temperatures for blasting the disassembled
grinding mechanism and sterilizing it. All that is left is cleaning the
cooking surface, which is already normal in every diner.

~~~
joezydeco
So let's simplify the process by adding more equipment and expense? It doesn't
make sense at all.

A group like McDs has had half a century to figure out the most effective way
to make this stuff, make it cheaply, and make it safely (for both crew and
customer). This is not a direction anyone like them would take.

~~~
malandrew
Disposable paper hoppers are hardly an expense worth worrying about
considering the costs it helps replace (salaries, health insurance, other
benefits, other liabilities).

Once the machine proves effective, they are likely to identify impeding
factors like labor cost of cleaning and figure out how to minimize those
costs.

A simply food-safe inner-laminated (possibly PTFE) non-woven material would be
perfect for these machines. Easy to package and ship in collapsed form to
McD's around the country and extremely cheap to manufacture, especially at
McD's scale.

The main factor preventing McD's from adopting this is the cost of
ingredients. This machine most likely requires all beef chuck, without fillers
to achieve the desired quality level.

~~~
joezydeco
No, the main factor in this is asking McDs to change their distribution from
frozen patties (safer to handle and easier to work with at the kitchen level)
to refrigerated raw product, which increases the risk of contamination, cross-
contamination, and spoilage to extremely hazardous levels. The HAACP
requirements alone would be staggering. It doesn't matter _what 's_ in the
beef.

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adam-f
I'm not sure if they can deliver on the custom grind promise. I know that
supermarkets have to grind in a specific order: roughly cow, pig, chicken:
lower required cooking temperature to higher.

Is every burger going to be well-done?

~~~
dzlobin
Presumably a self-clean in between grinder changes is not entirely difficult
though.

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taybin
Great, let's eliminate the last remaining service sector jobs! What could go
wrong?

~~~
deelowe
Better to plug our ears, cover our eyes, and pretend that the technology
doesn't exist, right? Automation is going to displace workers (and it should).
This is certain and it's something we need to prepare for. The transition may
be painful, but the end game is that humans are no longer _required_ to work
to survive. This is a "Good Thing."

~~~
w0utert
People are not just required to work because there's so much work to do, but
because they need income, so they can consume, take on debt, service it, etc.
No work means no income means no consumption means no economic growth means we
won't be able to service our national debt or take on new loans.

I'd go as far as saying a non-trivial proportion of service sector jobs is
only necessary to keep deprecated business models going, not because they are
indispensable or add actual value to the economy.

The cynical conclusion to draw is that the common man will always be a working
debt slave. A history of over 200 years of automation seems to support this
conclusion, as people only have to work more and more to make ends meet.

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nikoftime
This is a very interesting pitch to the consumer: gourmet food/higher quality
ingredients at fast food prices.

This is entirely different from the imagined pitch to investors: same food,
cheaper production, higher profits.

It will be fascinating to see what they come up with and how they productize -
it sounds like they think equipment sales is just an ancillary revenue source
or something they "might do later" at present, but perhaps they'll change
their minds if and when they have functioning burger bots.

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taybin
I'm skeptical that "gourmet" food can be made by a machine. Perhaps it is
"artisanal" as well?

