73% of the activities in the Accommodation and Food Services industry can be automated.

We can already see automation solutions being incorporated into some restaurant businesses. These range from ordering, to food prep, to cooking, assembling dishes, and even clean up. These are my Top 10 Automation Applications in the Restaurant Industry.

Reference: A future that works: Automation, Employment, and productivity. January 2017. Executive Summary. McKinsey & Company.

10. Výtopna Railway Restaurant

A franchise of restaurants and coffeehouses that uses model trains to bring beverages to every customer table. The trains save servers some time walking drinks and empty cups to and from tables but I think the main benefit to the restaurant here is the novelty of the trains. It’s hard not to spend time watching the trains!

9. Brightloom / Eatsa

Eatsa began as a vegetarian restaurant with automated ordering systems including kiosks and its app, aggregation of orders from delivery apps for kitchen staff, and food delivery cubicles with highlighted displays. After opening 6 restaurants have now all closed, Eatsa rebranded as Brightloom and pivoted to selling its automated systems instead of running restaurants.

8. Wow Bao

Wow Bao was Brightloom’s first partner. The have built their restaurant on Brightloom’s platform of technology.

7. Roller Coaster Restaurants

Roller Coaster Restaurants is a restaurant chain that uses rails to deliver food to customers. One of these restaurants, ‘S Baggers, has also automated the food ordering via tablets as well as the roller coaster style delivery system. In newer Roller Coaster Restaurants, they are using robots to mix cocktails and to send the food down the correct sets of rails to the tables.

6. Sushi Bullet Trains

Many sushi restaurants around the world are using bullet train technology. It combines automated tablet ordering, with “bullet trains” to deliver customer orders. A separate slower track contains food that you can grab without ordering. The system also incorporates and third track under the bullet train. The slot at each table tally’s the disposed dishes and transports them to an automate dish washer. Some parts of the food preparation are also automated.

Although not all processes are automated, many boring and laborious processes are eliminated such as washing dishes and walking dirty plates back and forth between the kitchen and the tables. This eliminates contamination that can sometimes be caused by servers handling both fresh food and dirty dishes. Most importantly it helps people concentrate on the service in the restaurant.

5. Café X

Not sure about you but I’ve found that brewing an amazing and consistent cup of coffee even with an espresso machine is diffciult. Enter Café X, a robot barista and espresso machine in one! It automates everything from ordering the drink, to grinding the coffee, to serving the drink to the customer. The only thing that isn’t automated is the cleaning and maintenance.

4. Fuamen Ramen

The robots in this restaurant are made to look cute birds and entertain as well as serve a functional purpose. They make made to order ramen in just a few minutes. It seems to need pre-prepped trays of ingredients, however most of the cooking is automated which allows staff to focus on the customer and quality of service.

3. Haidilao – Hot Pot Restaurant

Haidilao is a large hotpot chain in China. They are focused on improving kitchen efficiency and determined not to cut front-line staff. Another example of allowing humans to do what they excel at (social skills and varied tasks) while the robots take care of the repetitive tasks.

Robots are used to pick and prepare the meals which means that no humans are involved in food preparation. Food past its due date is automatically thrown away. Food safety is a big trend in China right now so kitchen cameras are common to increase customer confidence in the way food is being handled.

The system can even customize or suggest soup bases according to your preference.

There are cute little serving robots that kind of remind me of Eve from Wall-E but they’re more of a novelty then functional. Most of the service is carried out by the staff although the robots do assist the staff in carrying more dishes than they normally could by hand. 

2. Spyce

Stir frying has always been a fast way to cook food and Spyce has made it even faster, taking only 3 min or less to cook the food. It has automated the stir fry or sautee process. This includes the addition of each ingredient at the right time, cleaning the wok, and even plating the food. This in combination with the automated ordering system, self-arranged seating, and customer focused service makes it one of the more interesting restaurants I’ve seen.

1.     Creator Burger Bar

Many of the other automated solutions that you’ve seen in this video have made advances in the automation of the cooking process. A lot of these processes use cannisters, hoppers, or stainless-steel tubs filled with pre-prepped ingredients. Creator’s machine uses multiple hoppers but actually slices many of the ingredients fresh. It’s capable of producing many different burger recipes.

Instead of taking an off the shelf robot and adapting it to the task, the machine was uniquely designed to make burgers. And it’s pretty to look at to boot.

With an impressive yield of 130 burgers per hour I think this is a seriously impressive piece of automation and machine engineering.

I hope you enjoyed my Top 10 Automation Applications in the Restaurant Industry.

If you’re involved in the food or accommodation industry and you think you have a process that would be worth automating but you can’t find an existing solution…

And you think that automating this process would greatly benefit your business or give you an edge over the competition…

Get in touch with me. I can help you combine proven technologies (that exist today) into a customized solution that actually works for your business.

I’m Stephen Bruce Wong. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one. Take care.