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from the Could-I-Please-Have-My-Robot-Medium-Rare? dept.
Technology Review reports on a startup restaurant https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611788/engineering-lunch/ that features specialized robots to assemble ingredients and wok-fry them for healthy fast food.
As customers placed their orders, Spyce's automated food storage bins (known as hoppers) reliably fed refrigerated ingredients through a portioning system that measures precise quantities into a red box that zips along a horizontal track. That box, called the runner, collects ingredients and delivers them to one of seven induction-heated woks that spin to tumble the food so it cooks evenly at 450 °F. ...
The development process had some low points,
Even so, their cooking robot was still a work in progress. That fall, it dumped half-cooked food straight onto the counter in front of a potential investor. One outcome of that fiasco: each of the restaurant's automated woks now has a sensor telling it whether there's a bowl underneath.
These MechEs recognized that they might not know much about the restaurant business,
Even as they were perfecting their automated kitchen technology, the founders knew they needed more than technical expertise to develop a successful robotic restaurant. So Farid got in touch with restaurateur Daniel Boulud, the chef-owner of multiple award-winning restaurants and author of nine cookbooks, by guessing his e-mail address in five tries—and the team ultimately convinced him to serve as Spyce's culinary director and invest in the concept.
Check out the link to see how they managed to make kale (reasonably) palatable...
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday September 03 2018, @09:23AM
Realised that people might misunderstand a thing here so I should clarify.
It is a thing of scale really. In the range between a few dozen and a couple of thousand (tens) units per day is where assembly style workers are best, they also are needed for things where robotics just isn't there yet.
However once you get past a couple of thousand units a day a fully automated conveyer belt assembly is prefered, for some things (like lasagna) the robots are quite simple but is space-consuming.
(Overall however, the complexity for making lasagna in a fully automated manner is roughly the same as the one for making bread in a fully automated manner, you only need a few more passes (one for each layer))
So while the biggest brands are fully automated most are assembly-line-workers (and quite frankly, a market as small as sweden (pop: 10 mil) doesn't warrant a fully automated plant)