A ROBOT MADE CHICKEN WINGS AT THE MIDDLEBY BOOTH AT THE NAFEM SHOW. | PHOTO BY JONATHAN MAZE
in the future,” Wonder CEO Marc Lore said. He envisions a day in which a robot gets food from cold storage, brings it to the appropriate oven and gets it prepared. “It can pull a lot of labor out and reduce waste,” he said. Then there are brands like White Castle, which installed its first Flippy fry-making robot in 2020 after CEO Lisa Ingram saw the robot flipping burgers a year earlier. “That technology didn’t exist,” White Castle COO Jeff Carper said. “That technology didn’t exist. There was no robot working the fry station. It had to learn how to raise the basket, move the basket over and lower the basket. Today it’s on its third version. And there are other companies doing it.” Nevertheless, broader adoption of robotics inside restaurants is probably a ways off, at least until they have a clear return on investment.
well,” said Aaron Thomas, director of engineering and robotics at Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Habit. “Is there a place for that? Maybe. But how many team members have a role in which they do one thing and it’s pretty limited?” To be sure, there has been some progress on automating some tasks inside restaurants, notably in the drive- thru where AI is taking more orders than ever, and which is likely to expand rapidly in the coming years. “If you can automate individual components, you’re bringing value to the restaurant versus ‘I’m bringing this traditional robotic arm and will look for a problem,’” Thomas said. And there are some companies and people out there intent on developing concepts that can be automated. “The goal is to move toward full automation
and today he said there are 60 of them sitting in a warehouse. Many of the largest chains have likewise been slow to adopt any sort of robotics, even though it’s easy to see how, say, McDonald’s could deploy robot fry makers or dishwashers. The company certainly has the money. But it also has franchisees who need to make a profit, have plenty of expenses as it is, and want any of them to generate a return. Restaurants themselves have different processes, which can make automation of an existing restaurant or chain more difficult. Employees inside a restaurant usually perform more than one task, unlike, say, an automaking plant. That makes it inherently more difficult to deploy robotics with any substance inside restaurants. “Robots do one thing over and over again and do that one thing really
APRIL 2025 RESTAURANT BUSINESS
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