The Chinese really have efficiency down to an art form. The last time I was in HK, I had breakfast at Dai Ga Lok. I put in my order and by the time I ambled over to the next counter, my noodle soup and toast was already ready. It blew my mind just how fast they managed to put it out... and this was with an all-human staff!
It was like that scene in The Founder where Ray Kroc eats at McDonalds the first time and he doesn't understand how he could possibly get his burger ready so quickly.
Did a trip through a bunch of East Asian countries once, the level of attentiveness and speed from service workers there is light and day compared to the US. Waiting for a cashier to finish chit chatting before spinning up their brain cells over a few minutes trying to work the cash register buttons just doesn't happen. The implications are disturbing though. Either East Asian service workers just have so much pride and drive in their minimum wage jobs that they're willing to work at 100% focus when they're on the clock, or there are so many warm bodies ready to take their jobs that only people who can work at 100% stay hired. I bet that's a big driving factor in why so many people in Asia want to emigrate to the US. When you grow up in a sea of competition like that, a place where you can work at 70% instead of 120% and still be considered a top worker probably looks like paradise.
This is easy, just a matter of plating. They probably have a very limited menu (serves 95% just fine) and the rest if just perfecting the system little by little
The GP mentioned Cafe de Coral, which has a menu size similar to any other fast food restaurant [1]. The thing is, this is a trend of a geographical region, not just a specific fast food restaurant. McDonald's in HK are always able to serve you your order way, way faster than any American or European McDonald's I've been to. Quite literally, most of the time once you've finished paying, the food is ready. In America, it's common to wait on average of 5 minutes for your order, standing around the order pick-up area.
The little chengdu xiaochis I went to in Beijing often had my food up before I was done paying, I would hear the propane stove hose on just shortly after I said my order....
at the risk of sounding like an idiot: are Chinese /HK workers more attentive to their job? We've seen the McDonalds and other fast food workers here...not that they get paid to work faster, let's be honest.
Burgers and sandwiches should always be hot and ready to pack especially during peak times. Fries too. Others would replenish them as needed. Soda is what it is, so it should a matter of seconds if everyone worked like their livelihood depended on it. But they system is what it is: teenagers making believe they are working and employers making believe they are paying them. In the end, waiting just a few minutes is fast enough for the customer anyway, so no incentive to change the system.
At least in mainland China, labor costs are lower, so they have more workers. The chengdu xiaochi wouldn’t be so responsive if there wasn’t so much extra capacity (both in terms of workers and a lack of customers because of lots of competition).
I worked at McDonald’s as a teenager and we really did work. It was easy to get ahead of the game when things weren’t that busy, but often resources were simply over subscribed (not enough workers, too many customers, often both).
Its not just Chinese. Same applies for restaurants / local fast food places in India. They're lightning fast. If you're used to the pace of service in US, your mind will be blown when you travel to Asia.
Am I the only one to find this level of competition scary for western countries?
I always thought that robots and automation would be our hope to compete with the ultra-cheap labor in China. Like Apple moving production back to the US and making it profitable with a lot of automation. But if China now becomes a leader at robotics in addition to remaining competitive at manufacturing, then how are we going to compete?
How was this ever not going to be the case? Robotics will go wherever the manufacturing is. Where else would roboticists get practical real world experience, other than in factories? Obviously there's plenty of robotic manufacturing in America still, but there's clearly no shortage of opportunity in it for China either.
The assumption that America would have the best robotics which would force manufacturing to come back to America seems rooted in little more than wishful thinking.
I don’t think people would have expected Boston Dynamics to emerge out of the U.S. as opposed to Japan, but they did, and it’s telling that they emerged out of a subregion with top rate American educational institutions. Ignore that they were bought out by SoftBank because I think America will consistently churn out top robotics and automation companies in the coming years. All it takes is for there to be a profit signal. Until a field has that profit signal, Americans outside of academia pretty much ignore it.
Boston Dynamics doesn't seem like the sort of robotics that's particularly relevant to manufacturing. They've got impressive showy robots but don't know who to sell them to; the military seems ambivalent and now Boston Dynamics is trying to sell them as toys to rich people instead. It remains to be seen if they'll find a viable market like that.
Industrial robotics on the other hand is a mature field, and much (most?) of it has been outside the US from the beginning. Yaskawa and FANUC in Japan. ABB in Switzerland. Siemens in Germany. How many factories have been automated by these companies? How many have been automated by Boston Dynamics?
I think the more important AI becomes in guiding robotic hardware, the more America will gain a competitive advantage in manufacturing. At the very least America would be able to eat Germany’s lunch. I also believe that America will ultimately “win” the AI race against Asian countries, but many here may disagree with that.
It's not clear to me that "AI guided robotics" have much industrial utility. Where those sort of systems might excel is in finding solutions to novel problems. But mass production is all about avoiding the introduction of novel problems in the first place; that's been the premise of mass manufacturing since the 19th century. Parts are made to a spec and interchange with each other, allowing machines without intelligence to make and assemble them.
Which is not to say advanced tech like computer vision or whatnot don't have industrial applications; it definitely does. Industrial robots using computer vision are already common today, used for things like quality control (e.g. inspecting each individual potato chip on a conveyor belt.) I suspect that to the extent other AI systems might plausibly be relevant to industrial-scale production, industrial robotics companies have been investing. I sincerely doubt Boston Dynamics is going to leapfrog Siemens in any foreseeable future.
You remember that whole story about the cannon launcher competition where one team tries to take the meticulous approach of calculating the trajectory arc needed to hit the target, while the other team starts shooting and readjusts as they go?
Or the one about the art class where one team meticulously plans things out and produces some unfinished shoddy work, while the other team keeps churning out bad pieces but eventually starts churning out good pieces in volume?
Well, at 1.4 billion people, China can most certainly keep churning out bad pieces and readjusting, and they will get much better, much faster than a lot of other countries would.
That it's 2020 and they still aren't seen as the leader of the world in everything has historic roots that have bred a lot of resentment in China towards the West. In particular, the meddling of US in China's affairs.
But the pendulum is swinging. Let's see what happens next.
I had never thought about it like that before :) Yes, China definitely has the volume of people necessary to just try out everything and see what sticks.
In that case, the solution might be for governments to massively invest into making the tools available for free to pretty much every citizen, so that in the west, one person can run the same number of experiments as 100 people in China.
It is interesting though I am not sure if it makes sense at all. Is a restaurant sector a significant vector for covid 19? I have not heard about people getting infected from food deliveries.
Health agencies showing that food preparation ain't a vector:
Have you been in a working kitchen? I've only been in one (a couple of times) and it was the smallest, hottest, least ventilated place I've ever been. While it might not be a transmission vector for customers, it's _definiely_ a high risk enviroent for the staff. Particularly if they interact with wait staff who interact with customers.
If the staff is at risk, the customers risk depends on how closely they interact with the staff. So while replacing the cook with a robot may not reduce the risk, replacing the server with one will.
There are cheaper ways to replace a server than with a robot. For instance, with a counter. You could make an air-locked counter built like a fume hood for a small fraction of what a single serving robot would cost.
To me, it looks like food preparation is a huge vector.
"Just hours after reimposing the lockdown in Gütersloh, a district with some 360,000 people in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), the state officials now reintroduced restrictions in the nearby area of Warendorf and its 278,000 residents.
[...]
after over 1,500 workers at a meat processing plant tested positive"
I am a foreigner running a rival food automation venture in Guangdong. I had resigned from HN participation but thought to rejoin and post thoughts as this is quite close to our area.
The venture under discussion Qianxi Robot Catering Group (千玺机器人餐饮集团系) who are owned by real estate group Country Garden (碧桂园 / 02007.HK) who invested 2.4B RMB (USD$33.5M) in the company. It has four subsidiaries including Zhiyuan Technology (智源科技), Bijiashun Kitchen (碧家顺厨), Youbisheng (优碧胜) and Biyouwei (碧有味).
Background is that the parent group sees the combination of robotics, agriculture and real estate as a growth area.
It reportedly spent USD$87M on robotics research in the first half of 2019 and will spent "at least" 80B RMB or USD$11.2B on robotics research in the next 5 years. This includes another company in the group '博智林机器人' (Bright Dream Robotics).
For the current robotics restaurant group, in January 2020 it reports that it will "refine its mass production plan and expand its stores nationwide in 2020."
Includes welcome robots, frying robots, dessert robots, burger robots, bartending robots, claypot rice robots, wok robots, cloud track systems and ground delivery robots, etc.
32 wok based cooking robots and a claypot robot that can make 24 claypot meals at the same time.
My own investors have visited this venture and reported that there were technical problems prohibiting its automatic operation. It seems condiments are supplied by the numerous staff, rather than automatically, and many specific robot interfaces are also handled by staff. For the wok robots, it is reported there are 32 dishes made by robots, and it appears that each wok only makes one (fixed program). Note that the packaging for drinks appears to be the largest and most expensive type of take-away cups available which are presumably selected in order to minimize precision, rigidity and consistency related issues with cheaper plastic lid pressure application processes. There is no evidence of self cleaning. The burger frying robot appears to have the following structure based on two Kuka standard light weight industrial robot arms. The left side focuses on parallel burger frying in sets of three. The right side combines the deep fried (fries, possibly 'fish cakes'). The process is as follows.
A uniform shaped, pre-cut half-bun is grilled and then placed on a new sheet of packaging. Pre-chopped lettuce is added by extracting an apparently weight-measured portion from an apparently hidden rotary dispenser. A chicken burger is fried and then lifted by pneumatic suction. Apparently either the burger or the top of the bun can have sauce applied, or the algorithm has changed. The top is placed on the burger then it is packaged by a complicated folding mechanism. Finally the result is stuck together with a sticker then lifted and placed in the output queue.
Esimate cost of burger system: 2 linear motion systems + 2 robot arms + custom aluminium + grippers + pneumatics + stock framing + heating systems + industrial control systems + air extraction system + frying system + deep frying system + sauce dispensers. Conclusion: expensive, likely over USD$40,000 in parts before labour and design.
Our venture - Infinite Food - retain what we believe to be a global technology lead in the sector and look forward to launching our world first service supplying personalized food retail from a network of kiosk form factor automated restaurants. invest at 8-food dot com if interested.
Right you are, $339M at current exchange rate. Anyway its silly money.
The problem with open source platforms are that they generally provide tooling to target only generic motion systems, and generic motion systems are poorly matched to most specific tasks when it comes to real world metrics. Even if they can perform a task, they tend to be cost, time, space or programming inefficient, require additional complexity (eg. vision system pairing or very high complexity actuators/effectors), come with reliability challenges, etc. Efficient execution relies upon whole domain conception, which includes software, process engineering, mechanical engineering, food safety, cost, reliability, serviceability, manufacturability, IP protection and other considerations.
The domain is simple in conception, but very complex in execution.
The robots by this competitor are not reconfigurable at all, they have one for burgers, one for stirfries, one for basically boiled rice stew, one for ice cream, one for drinks, etc.
Although those robots sure do look expensive. For now. But once you build out the software, the replication costs are minimal. And the robotic machinery will eventually get cheaper, when mass produced.
This video was released just before the virus hit. So it’s perfect for our solitary and isolated post-pandemic world.
I am not sure sure how much these robots learned as the article claims based on the gifs they are specialised production like robots doing a single repetitive task each. Still impressive but not much different than a modern car factory.
Is this the way to turn services like Uber Eats profitable?
Instead of small restaurants, you could have ala carte factories cranking dishes under different brands. At scale investment in automation makes more sense.
If you mean online-only ghost kitchens, they sure do work (even without automation). They already exist today (I believe former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has a ghost kitchen venture).
Right now, most ghost kitchens have one major shortcoming: they lack a compelling narrative. Restaurants don't just sell food -- they sell a story, a distinction. They sell a distinct style of ramen or pizza or pasta because the chef brings their culture and training to the product. Standard markup gets you margins, but a compelling story coupled with good execution adds a premium.
In this regard, pure-play ghost kitchen food feels empty and generic. There's no story or flair behind it, just a factory production line. For the "food as fuel" demographic -- this doesn't matter. Food is food, pizza or pasta is the same anywhere. For people who believe "food is culture" -- this matters a lot. I'm not going to order pizza from a generic Grubhub place named "Sam's Pizza".
One way around this is perhaps to have restaurants with pre-existing narratives to lend their name/brand and process to a ghost kitchen operation. The Filipino chicken chain Jollibees -- which has name recognition -- is trying this out, so we'll see.
Honestly I think if the "robot" food is truly incredible and delicious, I don't buy that the story will matter much at all. That paired with high value relative to cost, likely leads to a world where only the edges survive, "fine dining" like experiences and cheap but good options. Agreed with the power of ghost kitchens leveraging brand, this is what sweetgreen does to help with their distribution
There's little if any evidence to support fear of Corona transmission through food. You get corona by breathing it, not eating it. Restaurants have taken a hit because their dining areas are dangerous, not their kitchens (not to the consumer anyway, the employees are a hazard to each other.) I've been eating 7-11 hotdogs this entire time in a city that's been locked down for months; they never stopped food prep because there's really little reason to stop it.
For that matter, our world has been "post-pandemic" for longer than recorded history. It's not even the first pandemic in the modern era.
> There's little if any evidence to support fear of Corona transmission through food.
You're probably right, but there's perception. And that's very important for marketing. Pizza delivery companies are advertising their pizza as "untouched by human hand" from the time they emerge from the oven to the time they get to your door.
> It's not even the first pandemic in the modern era.
We have short attention spans. Not everyone is a history expert/pedant like you.
If my intent was to be pedantic, I would have pointed out that we're not post-corona because it's still ongoing. My actual point, which I had hoped you would infer, was that people have short attentions spans. I see little reason to believe corona will have lasting profound social impact when previous pandemics in the modern era did not. Judging by road traffic, people are already beginning to return to their normal lives even though this pandemic still hasn't run it's course. I think in a few years it will be nearly forgotten, just like the other pandemics.
And they’re opened for 14 hours a day, 10 am to 12 am midnight. And say they’re always operating at full capacity. And each table has a 45 minute window between turnovers, so you eat your meal in 45 minutes. So you’ve got about 18 rotations throughout your day. And assume the 600 seats are always optimally filled.
Then, 18 x $600 = $10,800/day
Then, in a year, this could theoretically become: $3.94 million/year.
You could always adjust your numbers, like if they target $2 in profit per meal, then this could theoretically be $7.9 million/year.
Then, at these rates, the initial capital outlay for these robots, might just be worthwhile. Say, you spend $1 million for the robots and machinery, then, it would take 3 months to recover that cost.
Of course, you also have to factor in other costs like the front workers, cleaners, security, and dish washers (unless they have a robot for that too).
But at least you don’t have to pay for a cook anymore. But you will have to pay for a Quality Assurance guy to watch the robots.
And most people prefer to eat during the lunch and dinner rush, so you won’t get to hit the full theoretical operating capacity, thus limiting your profits. But you can try to make more in profit per visitor instead.
Average meal delivery prices in second tier cities approximate or exceed 20RMB per meal. After ingredients at least 15RMB or 75% of that is potential margin. Roughly, this demographic covers at least the higher earning ~60% of the Chinese population or 840M people if you can scale it. Now, according to various sources food delivery networks currently deliver USD$35B/year to 400M unique users in China. Replace that with robots and you are talking faster itch scratching, better personalization, higher reliability, more choice, higher cleanliness, 24H availability, smoother experience (no "where are you I am outside" phone calls). So, forget your $10,800/day figure. Think USD$35B/year = ~USD$100M/day, discounting any growth. Now grow that, value the market position and lock-in in addition to the cashflow, and you have an idea of the real opportunity... that's how we see it, anyway.
Yes. We made the strategic decision control production, already have our own 1000m2 factory with heavy equipment enabling nearly full internal production and absolutely intend to build tens of thousands of units ourselves. Incidentally this means we can produce far more cheaply than if we had outsourced through contract manufacturers (default approach of foreign foodtech firms), and also in conjunction with modular design means we can pivot rapidly should we generate upgrades or revisions to hardware. You would be surprised how much convenience matters in the food retail market: the consumers tend to see only the immediate itch-scratching option, and mentally discard the competition. Just look at the recent explosion of 'food' in convenience retail chains globally since around Y2K, reportedly their largest growth area for decades.
> But you will have to pay for a Quality Assurance guy to watch the robots
I assume with modern sensors, IoT and analytics, it can be done at scale remotely. Instead of maintenance folks regularly inspect on-site, they will only visit when the analytic indicates it is time to fix/clean the machines.
It was like that scene in The Founder where Ray Kroc eats at McDonalds the first time and he doesn't understand how he could possibly get his burger ready so quickly.