Gadgetory

if I walk just a few blocks from this office I can find a robot that will make me a latte serve a quinoa bowl and now there's one that will make me a custom me to order hamburger and it kind of makes sense when you think about it San Francisco is a hub of food enough technology so having new businesses that want to tech fi their restaurant concept makes a lot of sense but when I talk to my co-workers about it they had two distinct opinions about robots making their food one I think it sounds cool I would definitely go and the other so how does that affect people working in this city both of these opinions are completely justified but that jobs one is where things get complicated typically robotic restaurants employ plenty of people they're just doing different jobs than before so instead of flipping burgers or making pizzas they're stocking machine greeting customers and just keeping everything in working order but I wanted to see this for myself so we are going to head over to creator that robotic burger place that I was telling you about and I am going to see how robots might impact the future of how we order food so crater is a new type of restaurant one that has one of the most advanced culinary instruments so this baby back there it makes literally the freshest burger ever we sliced tomatoes pickles onions the bun to order but my favorite part actually grinds the meat to order which means to make an amazing burger and a six bucks this robot isn't what I had imagined instead of one mechanical arm flipping burgers as we've seen in the past creator has built a 14 foot all-in-one burger machine that uses 350 sensors and 20 computers it takes five minutes to make a burger start to finish and with two machines the creator team can make a hundred and thirty burgers per hour here at their first location so in designing the system we have a principle where we wanted to design a device that would be nature where it is and not kind of make food conform to a robot but that causes all kinds of engineering challenges because food is so different so for instance with the hamburger buns each one is slightly different size and so on the bun system alone there are seven different laser distance sensors that are watching every little aspect of it seeing where the buns are and how they're moving and so forth a burger is a composed dish which means you need to be able to accurately control where everything is where it's going and how it kind of comes together and for that we had to build advice with a pretty impressive amount of dexterity so we didn't want something that would make just one kind of burger we look at this sort of like a platform for different recipes we wanted as much culinary creativity as possible there is also a proper kitchen where employees prep burgers and make sauces insides but since the robots cook and assemble the burgers creator needed less space meaning less rent which leaves more room to invest in their ingredients it's one of the great things about our operation is because it's so efficient we spent so much more on the cost ingredients which definitely comes through in the flavor so it's an example the beef is whole chunks of chuck and brisket its steak it's pasture age there's no antibiotics no hormones so how did it taste well I can confidently say that it was the best six dollar burger that I've ever had but I am NOT a food expert so I asked Ellen from eater who was one of my co-workers what she thought about the burger I think it's a good burger it's meaty it has fresh toppings the bun is nice it's the freshest possible burger and there's way fewer times that people are touching your burger so think about another restaurant where every single thing that you're eating on the burger has been touched by multiple people in this case the bun goes in the tube but it gets shot through the machine it flies the saws it cuts vegetables to go on the top really freshly and makes it and at the end they hand it to you in a box and at that point no one has touched it except for you so yeah robotic restaurants are cool and interesting but there's still that whole job thing it turns out that the average cook makes thirty thousand dollars a year salary and that also happens to be the mean average rent of a single bedroom in San Francisco not a one-bedroom apartment just a single bedroom San Francisco is notoriously an expensive place to live and that is now creeping into every part of our daily lives so that includes restaurants of course but specifically it's making it hard for restaurant workers to even have a place to live here so people are edging out into the surrounding areas that makes commuting long and expensive it makes it hard to even want to work in the city a lot of restaurants are experiencing a big struggle to find people who are even willing to do it so in some cases robots can kind of pick up that slack and do those repetitive tasks that Cubans don't really need to do as it stands today there are very few restaurants testing this technology so there's little threat of robots taking over anytime soon but I can see a world where robotic restaurants becomes a thing with robots on the line owners can afford to pay their staff and make ends meet and the matches might make more sense even if you can find staff we've got like very expensive permitting processes that go on forever hugely expensive rents which are not going down anytime soon and then minimum wage is also rising so people who are operating restaurants have to pay their staff more they have a whole lot more overhead and that's really reflected in the menu prices which is part of the reason people are finding it so expensive to dine out in San Francisco and to date the robot restaurants we've looked at here in San Francisco are charging around 20 percent less than their human powered competition and in there lies the hope that maybe just maybe these robots are a solution it is an exciting future when you think of all the stuff you can do with better technology and the restaurant space which frankly hasn't seen a lot of improvement over the past several decades my expectation is that we're gonna some pretty exciting new dishes coming out maybe even new cuisines using the dexterity that you get from some pretty advanced instrumentation in your kitchen a future with more robotic restaurants might not be all that bad we'll have to wait and see what do you think about robot restaurants be sure to leave us a comment below and also check out our friends over at eater Ellen and some of the reporters are doing some amazing coverage behind the scenes of some really cool restaurants