When Audley Wilson was a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, he took an entrepreneurship class in which each student was tasked with starting a business.
Wilson decided to open a restaurant, and ended up running the Hkan Hookah Bar near the Pittsburgh school for 12 years. The place was a big success, Wilson said. But it also taught him how hard it is to run a restaurant.
“I realized that this was a lot of work,” he said, “and I wish I could automate this.”
So he and his best friend from college, Dan Braido, started building a burger-making machine in Wilson’s dad’s single-car garage. Braido was a mechanical engineer, and Wilson supplied the business acumen and restaurant experience.
Over the years, they built five prototypes. The first one was 7 feet long and 2 feet wide and could make hundreds of burgers in an hour. But its bulky size made it unwieldy, and its massive capacity wasn’t really necessary.
“It was something where, we’re not trying to replace the back end of a McDonald’s,” Braido said. Instead, they shifted their focus to building something that could stand on its own and fill unmet demand.
“If we could make a machine that could support itself on selling only 20 burgers a day, we could bring this to places that couldn’t even support a hot dog cart,” he said.
About four years ago, the pair began working on the machine in earnest again with their new strategy in mind. They built almost the whole thing by themselves, using a 3-D printer to make parts. In 2019, RoboBurger was born.
RoboBurger is designed to fit almost anywhere. "All we need is a plug," Wilson said. / Photogaph courtesy of RoboBurger
The machine measures 12 square feet and can hold ingredients for 50 burgers. It contains a freezer, a toaster and a griddle, as well as a dispenser for condiments. When a customer orders a burger using the touchscreen interface, a patty is dispensed onto the griddle and cooked fresh, then placed on a toasted bun and topped with cheese, ketchup and mustard. The whole process takes about six minutes.
“The great part is that short time between coming off the grill and getting to the consumer,” said Braido.
RoboBurger joins a growing crop of fully automated food kiosks that are racing to offer fresh meals with zero human labor in places like airports and malls. Other companies in the space, like Farmer's Fridge and Basil Street, have tended to focus on pizza or bowls, so an automated burger concept is somewhat unique.
Read more: Why robotic kiosks are the next hot restaurant format.
A burger from RoboBurger is $6.99 plus tax, a price that the creators said reflects its high-quality ingredients like Pat LaFrieda beef. In time, they plan to offer a wider selection of sauces. But vegetable toppings like lettuce or tomato won’t be included for food safety reasons.
“There’s no real way to monitor that remotely to ensure the safety of the consumer to the level that we require,” Braido said.
The first-generation machine was installed in a restaurant in 2020. But the partners' goal now is to market the bot as a vending machine in places like airports and hospitals, where hot food is not always available around the clock.
To operate as a vending machine, RoboBurger needed approval from NSF, which scrutinized every element of the machine, down to the origins of its various plastic parts. One of the final steps was putting the machine in a 100-degree room for 24 hours to make sure it could function in those conditions, Wilson said.
RoboBurger’s first certified unit opened last week at Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, N.J. As it looks to grow, the company is targeting airports, malls, hospitals and even employee break rooms, and already has agreements with several companies, Wilson said.
“Really anywhere where there are people and there’s a challenge for other people to really address their desires for food,” he said.
That challenge was illustrated during RoboBurger’s grand opening at Newport Centre, when a security guard ran up to greet them.
“He was just so excited that someone would be able to handle his needs” during overnight shifts when nothing else is open, Wilson said.
Venues that add a RoboBurger will share in the revenue, though Wilson would not reveal details on the split. RoboBurger staff are responsible for servicing the machines, which will typically happen once every three days.
For the immediate future, the company is focused on production and growth. RoboBurger’s factory in Newark, N.J., will produce more than 100 machines in 2022, and the company will be operating in at least three different regions by year’s end, Wilson said.
“Right now our focus is on our owned and operated model and starting to work with some of the largest managed foodservice in America,” Wilson said. “We’re really trying to build a brand.”