Major fast food chain White Castle has hired numerous new chefs to operate their kitchens. While this might not sound as shocking news, you might want to look further into their new employees. The new kitchen operators for White Castle are in fact fully autonomous robot arms, programmed to flip burgers and operate fryers. This AI driven kitchen assistant called Flippy, made by Miso Robotics (n.d.) reduces the need for human kitchen employees and with improved efficiency and speed in food preparation, profit margins for quick service restaurants can increase up to 300%. Because of the removal of human error in the food preparation process, customers will receive a more consistent product. Due to cloud connectivity, data can be collected from the machine to monitor and tweak performance, which creates the possibility for efficiency to increase even more.
For employees of White Castle, this development creates the opportunity for them to focus more on customer interaction and quality control. This will ultimately lead to a better customer experience, less waste and less stressful moments in the kitchen. Common injuries from operating hot kitchen appliances will also reduce greatly.
However, with the current high unemployment rate in America, a decrease in jobs is the last thing that needs to happen at this moment in time. Approximately 13.2 million work in the restaurant business in the USA and 3.7 million of those work in the fast food restaurant business, so if these machines would be implemented throughout all restaurants, hundreds of thousands could be losing their jobs in the kitchen (Huddleston, 2018). But due to the improved efficiency, cost reducing opportunity and a safer work environment, more restaurants will eventually follow the trend of implementing autonomous kitchen assistants.
While the increase of automatisation has been happening for a long time, the world seems to be unprepared for an exponential increase in automated work. Data scientists, mechanics, industry experts and programmers are going to be in high demand to develop, maintain and train the machines. In my opinion, before the major rise of machine happens, some important measures need to be taken. One of the most important developments that need to be set in action, is a reform in the education system. It is clear that a lot of jobs are going to disappear in the near future. The next generation should be better prepared to work on and alongside automated machines. Also, as most jobs that disappear are not high academic positions, retraining should be stimulated to offer kitchen employees new jobs within their business in order to prevent a further surge in unemployment. What do u think should be taken action on before machines take over a substantial amount of jobs in the restaurant industry?
Sources:
Huddleston, J. (2018, June 1). Things you don’t know about fast food employees. Mashed. https://www.mashed.com/124676/things-dont-know-fast-food-employees/#:%7E:text=You%20may%20think%20that%20fast,work%20for%20fast%20food%20restaurants.
Miso Robotics. (2020). Miso Robotics. https://invest.misorobotics.com/
