Robots are coming to a burger joint near you
Robots are coming to a burger joint near you
A burger-flipping robot called Flippy will be at work in
Caliburger restaurants by early 2018.
Miso Robotics, the inventor of Flippy, has raised $3.1
million in Series A venture funding.
Patent services firm Acacia Research, Caliburger and
Match Robotics VC are investors.
Lora Kolodny July 4, 2017 3 Hours Ago
Grilling burgers may be fun on the Fourth of July, but
less so if hot grease is your daily grind.
Enter Miso Robotics. The southern California start-up has
built a robotic "kitchen assistant" called Flippy to do the hot,
greasy and repetitive work of a fry cook. Flippy employs machine learning and
computer vision to identify patties on a grill, track them as they cook, flip
and then place them on a bun when they're done.
Miso is part of a budding kitchen automation industry.
Its peers include Zume Pizza, Cafe X, Makr Shakr, Frobot and Sally, which are
developing robots to help commercial kitchens churn out pizzas, lattes,
cocktails, frozen yogurt, and salads.
In a recent CNBC interview, Yum Brands CEO Greg Creed
predicted robots would replace fast food workers by the mid-2020s. It's not as
if workers love those jobs.
Employee turnover in the restaurants and accommodations
sector was 73 percent in 2016, according to data from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. Fry cooks, the people who flip burgers (or fillets) all day at a
hot grill, move on from the job faster than others in the field.
Rather than build a robot from the ground up, Miso
integrates the best of available components on the market, including robotic
arms, sensors and cameras. It develops proprietary control software to enable
the robots to work as cooking assistants in complex environments right
alongside humans, said CEO David Zito.
"We take into account all of our customers' needs
for everything from food safety to maximum uptime," he said. "Today
our software allows robots to work at a grill, doing some of the nasty and
dangerous work that people don't want to do all day. But these systems can be
adapted so that robots can work, say, standing in front of a fryer or chopping
onions. These are all areas of high turnover, especially for quick service
restaurants."
Miso Robotics recently raised $3.1 million in a funding
round led by patent services firm Acacia Research, a relatively new fund called
Match Robotics VC, and earlier investors including the restaurant chain
CaliBurger.
The company will use the capital to produce its first
commercial Flippy units. It expects to roll Flippy out, starting at the Los
Angeles CaliBurger, in the first quarter of 2018, Zito said. Along with its
investment, Acacia will provide the start-up with patent and intellectual
property-related services, helping Miso Robotics prepare for global expansion.
"I see robotics in the kitchen as kind of an
extension of going from the open flame to the oven," said Rob Stewart,
Acacia's president, in an interview. "It's next-level efficiency,"
What does this mean for the industry's 2.3 million cooks?
"Like the electronic spreadsheet did for
accountants, this will cause the jobs to go elsewhere," Stewart said.
"But there will be new hospitality and culinary jobs we have yet to
imagine. And those will be jobs where people will get paid a higher wage, and
where they'll want to stay long-term."
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