Chipotle and White Castle are spending over $500,000 a month on ROBOTS to ... trends now
The rise of restaurant robots is upon us.
Major fast-food chains are employing robots to flip burgers, brew espressos and greet customers - and it is a fraction of the cost compared to paying human workers.
White Castle is testing the Flippy robot at 100 locations and Chipotle uses a one-armed robot to make tortilla chips at 73 sites - both cost $3,000 a month - and Starbucks has $18,000 AI-powered espresso machines in at least 1,200 locations.
As food costs rise and an intense labor shortage grips the US, paying monthly rentals for machines has become a cost-effective option.
The National Restaurant Association recently reported that four in five operators are understaffed and have been since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
White Castle is testing the Flippy robot at 100 locations. This robotic arm flips hundreds of burgers daily and fries several items on the menu. It costs $3,000 a month for one robot
However, experts are not yet sold and believe it will be a few years before robots take the place of human workers.
David Henkes, a principal at Technomic, a restaurant research firm, told CNBC: 'I think there’s a lot of experimentation that is going to lead us somewhere at some point, but we’re still a very labor-intensive, labor-driven industry.'
The labor shortages have forced restaurant owners to offer higher wages to attract more staff, which, combined with increasing food costs, is leading establishments to run their banks dry to stay afloat.
But this is where automation comes to the rescue.
Starbucks has rolled out more than $21 million worth of AI-powered espresso makers that runs on the company's Deep Brew software.
And while it does not make cups of coffee, it can mix brews precisely and does so faster than a human barista.
The same software has also been added to the coffee maker's drive-thru lanes, which greet customers and take their orders - reducing the number of staff needed in a location.
Miso Robotics, a California-based company, is a major supplier in the industry. Its kitchen robot Flippy is capable of cooking 300 burgers and dropping hundreds of baskets of fries into the fry daily.
The company claims its technology performs food preparation tasks twice as fast as human workers and 30 percent more efficiently.
Flippy 2, the company's most advanced model, is used in leading American fast-food restaurant chains such as White Castle, Jack in the Box, Inspire Brands (the parent company of Buffalo Wild Wings, Arby's and Sonic), Wings and
