Attendees at the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers (NAFEM) show crowded around a demonstration of a chicken wing-making robot. They listened to an employee talk about the benefits of the device as he quickly put sauced, bone-in wings into boxes.
“What’s the ROI?” one person asked.
The presenter didn’t have an answer, and the attendee turned around and walked away. But the story highlights the single, biggest question any operator is asking these days as technology ideas are thrown at them daily: How is this going to help me make more money?
There’s nothing new about that, of course. Operators have always been focused on the returns new equipment can generate.
Yet, over the past five years, restaurant operators have dealt with a pandemic, a false recovery and then a three-year period of soaring inflation, rising interest rates and now a consumer that is cutting back to adjust to those higher prices. And that means they’re less interested than ever in fancy equipment that doesn’t solve their everyday problems, such as food and labor costs, speed of service or hospitality.
Operators “have real problems they have to solve today,” David Wilkinson, who recently stepped down as CEO of NCR Voyix, said at NAFEM. “We need to solve real challenges and avoid distractions.”
In many respects, the NAFEM Show demonstrated that shift. Robots were tougher to find at NAFEM this year. Oh they were there, for sure. The Middleby booth alone featured several of them. Robots made the aforementioned chicken wings and fries. Another one, in a large box, put sauce, cheese and pepperoni atop a pizza crust.
Other robots were less out front than they’d been in the past, such as one that rinsed dishes that was tucked in a back corner.
Yet, generally speaking, the robotics weren’t as prolific as they’d been in the recent past, when robots took center stage at many events. Robots made and served drinks. They prepared salads or made fries or scooped toppings onto soft-serve frozen yogurt. They often drew crowds of curious onlookers taking videos.
And the restaurant business was seemingly eager to see them in action, particularly as operators struggled to find enough workers to service the demand inside their restaurants.
But, while plenty of chains are testing robot ideas, there appears to be more skepticism about the ability for these devices to generate a return.
Chili’s, the casual-dining chain, started adding robot servers into its restaurants to help address its labor challenges in 2021. But the company ditched those servers shortly after Kevin Hochman took over as CEO of parent company Brinker International, and today he said there are 60 of them sitting in a warehouse.
Many of the largest chains have likewise been slow to adopt any sort of robotics, even though it’s easy to see how, say, McDonald’s could deploy robot fry makers or dishwashers. The company certainly has the money. But it also has franchisees who need to make a profit, have plenty of expenses as it is, and want any of them to generate a return.
Restaurants themselves have different processes, which can make automation of an existing restaurant or chain more difficult. Employees inside a restaurant usually perform more than one task, unlike, say, an automaking plant. That makes it inherently more difficult to deploy robotics with any substance inside restaurants.
“Robots do one thing over and over again and do that one thing really well,” said Aaron Thomas, director of engineering and robotics at Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Habit. “Is there a place for that? Maybe. But how many team members have a role in which they do one thing and it’s pretty limited?”
To be sure, there has been some progress on automating some tasks inside restaurants, notably in the drive-thru where AI is taking more orders than ever, and which is likely to expand rapidly in the coming years.
“If you can automate individual components, you’re bringing value to the restaurant versus ‘I’m bringing this traditional robotic arm and will look for a problem,’” Thomas said.
And there are some companies and people out there intent on developing concepts that can be automated. “The goal is to move toward full automation in the future,” Wonder CEO Marc Lore said. He envisions a day in which a robot gets food from cold storage, brings it to the appropriate oven and gets it prepared. “It can pull a lot of labor out and reduce waste,” he said.
Then there are brands like White Castle, which installed its first Flippy fry-making robot in 2020 after CEO Lisa Ingram saw the robot flipping burgers a year earlier. “That technology didn’t exist,” White Castle COO Jeff Carper said. “That technology didn’t exist. There was no robot working the fry station. It had to learn how to raise the basket, move the basket over and lower the basket. Today it’s on its third version. And there are other companies doing it.”
Nevertheless, broader adoption of robotics inside restaurants is probably a ways off, at least until they have a clear return on investment.
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