Automated Foodservice
12 HN mentions · mentioned in 11 months, 2015–2024
10:40 · 102K views · Jan 16, 2014
A circa-1964 film showing AMF's AMFare system, which ordered, cooked and packaged hamburgers, fries, shakes and more automatically for a pilot fast-food operation.
HN cites it as historical precedent in threads about restaurant robots and automation, noting it worked but was not cost-effective.
12 comments from Hacker News
Eatsa has done a great job marketing itself as the automatic restaurant, so much so that many people believe robots prepare their food (their kitchen is just as labor intensive as any other restaurant). I actually spoke to their engineering director a while ago and I think they are going to have a hard time building any real robots (they are working on this and hired several engineers to do so). For starters, they had to outsource building their automatic cubbies - they couldn't build a moving door by themselves. But they are hoping to build an autonomous food preparation system more sophisticated and an order of magnitude cheaper than anything that exists today. Something I see a lot is for someone with a lot of experience in pure software engineering to delve into hardware or robotics, and think he'll be able to just breeze through it (if it were so easy, there would be a lot more awesome consumer robots everywhere). What I found particularly amusing was the way he viewed it though. When I said robots are limited by the laws of physics, his counterpoint was that software was limited by the speed of light. He was dead serious, and to him that made the challenges comparable. I look forward to seeing all the crazy food robots people concoct in the coming years. I suspect most people will realize it's a lot harder than they thought, and by the time the robot is useful it's too expensive to be profitable. Most people are unaware of the many companies in past decades that have tr
Robotic fast food restaurants have been built. Check out AMFare, from American Machine and Foundry, deployed in 1964.[1][2] Automatically produced a range of meals (burgers, hot dogs, chicken, fries, shakes) comparable to most of McDonalds' business. This worked, and served real customers for a year, but was never deployed beyond one test location. Apparently it wasn't cost-effective. AMF returned to their more successful product, automated bowling alleys, which they still make and operate. There's a startup trying to do a burger machine now.[3] Typical pretty web site, no installations. Last updated in 2014. McDonalds deployed a robotic kitchen in Phoenix AZ last year, and it hasn't been heard from since.[4] Looking at the trade magazine of fast food, QSR ( [LINK] ), there's not much talk about kitchen automation. Even when they discuss a higher minimum wage, they barely mention automation[5] Most of the newer systems look less effective than the AMF system from 1964. What's happened instead is movement of more processing upstream. The AMF system took in potatoes and bulk ground beef to make french fries and hamburger patties. Today, french fries are cut in a big plant elsewhere, and patties are pre-formed and shipped refrigerated. A fast food operation today is a final assembly plant. One idea that did not catch on was automating fast food managers out of a job. Hyperactive Bob [6] is a system from a decade ago which watched images of customers lined up and lines at the dri
So far, nobody has done a successful automated restaurant. There have been many attempts. The first was AMFare, built in 1964 by American Machine and Foundry, and it was better than most of its successors.[1] McDonalds tried and failed about a decade ago. Eatsa, the SF chain, is just an automat where you can't see the kitchen. Momentum Machines in SF has a prototype hamburger-customization machine, but hasn't shipped. There's a functioning pizza-making robot from Zume. So far, though, the hardware has a narrow functional range. There's lots of automated food preparation in the plants that make frozen dinners and airline meals. But those,too, have a narrow product range. A good place to start would be at the back end. Build a robotic system which can take a tub of random dishes, tableware, and trash, separate them, apply blasts of hot soapy water to anything that needs pre-cleaning for the dishwasher, load the dishwasher trays, and start them down the conveyor to the dishwasher. Everybody hates that job. [1] this video
Absolutely not, for IP protection reasons. 4 years of R&D. Our strategy for commercialization is wholly owned network operation. Quite unlike the apparent de-facto strategy within the segment of "wow-factor novelty" we have designed for operation as an always-available urban utility. Examples of "wow-factor novelty robots": Foodom in Guangzhou, Ekim/Pazzi in France, Creator in SF, Spyce in Boston, etc. It seems the done thing, when that fails to commercialize, is that you spend marketing budget on expensive chefs to convince people the food is good, then you go back to your investors for more money, then you become a zombie startup... (Edit: Oh there are many more projects... it is quite an active area globally, despite a lack of significant successes. Most making the same mistakes. See this video and [LINK] for an early example.)
Circle Medical is "Uber for doctors". That's going to be interesting. The tea-making robot seems to come with overoptimistic numbers. The sandwich-making robot is a good idea, but it will need a complete redesign to make it cleanable. All stainless and Teflon, no food trap points, machine-washable, steam-cleanable. Whether it's cost effective is another issue. That idea has been tried many times. Here's AMFare, from American Machine and Foundry, in 1964.[1] That system worked quite well, but needed a constantly busy fast food outlet to justify the expense. Then there's the version for the 1%[2]. [1] this video [2] [LINK]