There are six hundred thousand restaurants in the USA and tens of millions of restaurants around the globe. In the US Fifteen million people work in these environments, often on minimum wages and supporting families. There we 98,000 non-fatal accidents or associated illnesses from restaurants in the US in 2019. Restaurants play a vital part of our lives with billions of meals served every year and with American families eating out between two to four times a week on average. Forty four percent of our personal food budgets going to eating at or through restaurants (including fast food) each week.
Sinking Spring, PA - April 8: The sign at the McDonald's restaurant on Penn Ave in Sinking Spring, ... [+]
The precarious economics of restaurants were severely exposed with Covid-19 and the supply chain issues of materials and the ley human labor that fuels them. How many times have you experienced staff shortages when you have gone out to eat or to pick up food?
Six Elements from the podcast
· Labor will continue to be a huge talent and especially for the restaurant business and in Europe. The combination of minimum pay requirements, health and benefit needs and an increasing pressure for unionization (see Starbucks) mean a key part of the restaurant industries economic formula (30% of all OPEX) needs to be solved now and into the next ten years.
· There are more value-added human endeavors in restaurants, especially in the front of the house. Restaurants are already automating a range of tasks ( pick up/delivery/ ordering systems/vending machines), but the tricky areas are in the back of the operation in cooking (grills, deep fry, etc.).
· The idea of a robot colleague may appear strange at first but installations show an immediate concern is quickly removed after a few hours with the Flippy in action.
Flippy 2 robotic fryer cook
· The economics of a Flippy will increasingly replace these back of kitchen roles. One Fliddy for deep frying might cost $3,500 a month and it replaces the labor of two people (loaded at $6,000) who can now do higher value add jobs in the front of the restaurant.
· The combination of AI, ML, sensors and intelligent systems technologies are vital as the interactions with the robots and their environments and humans in close and often dangerous environments can be difficult. Smoke, variations in light, equipment moving around and often un-predictable actions means these robots need to be mission critical capable and highly intelligent.
AI, Machine learning, merging humans and robotics
· Sensors are key for this as the difference between a hash brown or a chicken nugget might be easy for humans but are difficult for machines to assess at speed and accurately.
In 2033 restaurants will have highly intelligent robotic co workers, sensing and learning about unique differences in food, cooking techniques timing and delivery.
Mike Bell is a veteran software CEO and entrepreneur. For the past 25 years and has served as the chief operating executive in early-stage tech startups and as a division head in public company roles. In 2016, Buck Jordan, a seasoned tech investor and Caltech alum, decided to embark on solving the straightforward yet complex issue of improving restaurant operations. Leaning on co-founders Rob Anderson and Ryan Sinnet with operational guidance from Restaurateur, John Miller, to build Flippy for producing multiple products across robotics and AI to solve some of the largest gaps in back of house restaurant operations such as robotic frying stations, vision-enabled grill systems and automatic beverage dispensers.
