It may not happen tomorrow, or next year. But eventually fast-food joints are going to be phasing out human cooks and substituting them with robots. Many restaurants have experimented with these machines to flip burgers, chop vegetables, and plate dishes to modest success.
One of the more successful fast-food robots is Flippy, a kitchen assistant that allows those in the kitchen with an extra set of hands. Developed by Miso Robotics, a lot of organizations have adopted the technology, from Dodger Stadium to a burger place in Pasadena, California (this one failed because the human workers were not fast enough).
You can add Walmart to the list of businesses experimenting with Flippy.
According to Yahoo! Finance, Walmart is thinking about installing a Flippy in its Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. The company will determine if it will fit in its culinary center to automate the frying process, including potato wedges, chicken tenders, and mozzarella sticks.
“Walmart saw what we were doing and said, ‘Could you bring Flippy from Dodgers Stadium to our Culinary Institute?” said Miso Robotics CEO David Zito.
“If you think about commercial kitchens, they really are micro-manufacturing facilities. And yet, they are some of the hardest conditions for people to work in. Our whole thing is not about job replacement, right. You hear this over and over again. Automating food is very difficult. Ask any chef. Their goal is to try to faithfully reproduce that delicious recipe that they unlocked once. And in software we do that all day long, we make an app, it’s great, and everyone gets the same experience over and over again. With food, you crack that code once, and you get that flavor that’s so great and then it’s so hard to faithfully reproduce it. What we want to do is assist the hardworking linemen cooks and chefs in America with tools to give them the ability to faithfully reproduce while taking the burden off some of these more repetitive and mundane tasks.”
The benefit to installing Flippy is slashing labor costs that typically involves wages, taxes, and insurance. It’s a one-time cost with little maintenance.
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