Thursday, March 09, 2017

Inevitably, a burger flipping robot.

This one is a show-piece, but it does replace one kid in a kitchen.

A burger-flipping robot has just completed its first day on the job at a restaurant in California, replacing humans at the grill.

Flippy has mastered the art of cooking the perfect burger and has just started work at CaliBurger, a fast-food chain.

Notably, it is a self-contained robot that you can roll up beside any grill, and set it to work flipping away.

For the McDonalds of the world of course, this machine is much too slow. They use a conveyor oven and pre-cook everything. But there's no reason they can't design a machine-deliverable sandwich. I'm sure they're doing it right now. Eliminating one human saves a franchise $30-50K a year, I would guess. In a 24 hour operation, that's three people. There's your profit margin back to looking a little more healthy in one shot.

The Mechanical Phantom

3 comments:

Orvan Taurus said...

And if you have thing robot-ized then even in places where it does not makes sense to be open 24-hours a day now, it might be no big deal to go that route. Maybe a few people will be needed (one per shift, with cover so it needs to be probably 5 minimum) and then sales go up and costs go down.

qt said...

Yah, Orlando. Restaurant as vending machine...

The Phantom said...

Greetings gents. Here's a new one: http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.ca/2017/03/walmart-as-vending-machine-it-might.html