Flippy, Sippy and Chippy
Not only are restaurants are being hit with worker shortages, they now face rising labour costs. The thorny problem is there just aren’t enough humans who want to do the work. Stepping in to address this long drawn out labour crunch in food service, particularly in fast food kitchens, is the newest technology. It all started with the question ‘why not develop a robot that can flip burgers with exactness at every-fast food restaurant, particularly in a nation (US) with over 200,000 fast-food restaurants where over 50 billion burgers are consumed annually?’
Meet Robots Flippy, Sippy and Chippy
Jack in the Box is an American fast-food restaurant with over 2200 outlets in the US, and one of the pioneers of the drive-thru concept. It's basically letting people park their cars at a restaurant, waiting for an employee (called a carhop) to bring them the food they ordered.
Back in July 2022, a Jack in the Box in Chula Vista, California, took on Flippy -a new employee. Being around since 2018, his previous work only involved flipping burgers. At his new workplace, he did nothing but observe what cooks were doing at the flattop and fryers. After two weeks and having learned the ropes, he began to work, focusing solely on the fry station, dropping baskets of seasoned curly fries and stuffed jalapeños into vats of oil, until they were perfectly golden.
Not only does Flippy deliver greater consistency in preparing food, he also works any number of hours, doesn’t call in sick and undertakes even dangerous tasks such as working at the fryer station – where workplace accidents occur often, especially at night with people waiting on their loaded fries and chicken rings. Least but no less important is that there are no performance appraisals.
All this however comes at a heavy cost; US$50 million to develop the Robot, $ 5,000 for installation and a monthly rental fee of $3,500+
Chippy, another version of Flippy makes chips at Chipotle. Another robot, Sippy, fills drinks at Jack in the Box restaurants. Sippy, is a robot that pours seals and labels beverage orders.
The robots, with their articulated arms, multiple cameras and machine learning, excel at those mind-numbing tasks restaurant workers have to repeat again and again. And they aren’t fussy about working the graveyard shift.
Flippy was initially a solution in search of a problem and Miso Robotics, the makers of the robots, realised that for a robotic solution to be a real solution for its clients, it had to take a meaningful amount of repetitive labor off the table.
For now though, there won’t be the legions of robots taking over jobs in the fast-food landscape. That’s ‘long in the making’. Time enough for restaurant operators to do the math and for the industry to find answers to the key questions: How long before an initial technology investment pays off? How long will it take to train human employees to work alongside robot co-workers? And, ultimately, how many restaurant jobs will be permanently hijacked by robots?
The food industry is one of the main points through which robotic technology is infiltrating society. They may promise added convenience, and their makers claim they can save humans from menial and long hours of repetitive tasks. But for all the benefits these robots bring, there are hefty downsides, like perceived worker displacement and technical glitches.
Source: External
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