3 Robot Restaurant Automation Trends to Look Out for in 2024

Humans have always been looking for ways to make their lives easier in the kitchen since the early days when “the kitchen” was only a pit in the ground and a fire inside it. We started off slow, learning the laws of mechanics before steadily graduating to the laws of computing, without which robotics would not be possible.

Gradually, early models of automatic slicers and fryers transitioned into disembodied robotic arms putting toppings on pizza and AI taking orders at drive-thrus. But if you’re seeing more robots at your dinner table recently, you’re not losing it.

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic left the food industry financially devastated after months of unending lockdown, social distancing and a mass exodus of restaurant workers who never came back. To combat the critical labor shortage and the rising minimum wages, many big food chains have turned to robots for a solution. With that said, let’s look at 3 robot restaurant automation trends to look out for in 2024.

Restaurant Automation Trends

Keeping up with consumer’s insatiable appetites in an ever-growing fast food and restaurant industry means keeping up with the times. And if anything is becoming clear about 2024’s restaurant automation trends, it’s that businesses are starting to get creative in how they approach foodservice. Let’s take a look at how robots are changing the restaurant industry for the better in the sections below.

Restaurant Kitchen Automation

Robots aren’t just customer-facing employees, they’re in the kitchens, too. Check out our list of restaurant kitchen automation that are gaining popularity this year:

• Food flippers – Companies like Miso Robotics invented an automatic basket flipper for fried food items called “Flippy.” This intelligent automated foodservice robot improves kitchen efficiency while reducing employee injuries, cross-contamination and other costs associated with human error.


• Pizza makers – Pizza shops got a whole lot more modernized with automated pizza-making machines. Small kitchens can now keep up with popular demand with the mechanical help making over 100 pizzas per hour.


• Bread bakers – Fast food and pizzerias aren’t the only establishments getting a makeover. There’s now a machine coined “BreadBot” that can make a loaf of bread from scratch all on its own.

Robotic Servers

Another restaurant automation trend on the horizon of 2024 is robotic servers that can escort customers to their seats, wait on them and bring food to the table.

But this has many people asking, “What about human interaction?” Companies like BellaBot have anticipated customer hesitation to welcome robots into the workforce to do jobs traditionally performed by humans. So they put a face on it. Okay, it may not be human, but does a cat or other animal work? In fact, their line of cat server bots project facial expressions and respond and react to touch.

Now, let’s talk money. The price of a BellaBot delivery robot is a hefty $15,900. But let’s break this down. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, restaurants are legally obligated to pay their tipped workers $2.13 per hour (not including maximum tip credit against minimum wage).

That makes the salary $4,430.40 without mentioning the cost of employee onboarding and healthcare for full-time workers. So, if this server robot were to replace one employee, it would take around 3 and half years for the robot to pay for itself, less when you factor in the fact that labor laws don’t apply to robots. Mind you, this is an extremely rough estimate, but it gets you in the ballpark enough to know that it’s an achievable and worthwhile investment.

Automated Delivery

With the influx of hungry customers choosing take-out instead of sit-down, it should come as no surprise that robotic delivery has become a new restaurant automation trend. To keep up with the increase in demand, many restaurants are now adopting robots to fulfill take-out deliveries and curbside pickup orders.

What Is the Future of Robots in Restaurants?

As of right now, the use of robots in restaurants and the food industry is limited by the costs of implementation, the public’s resistance to robots, and, of course, the technological limitations of the day. In this section, we’ll break down some of the obstacles the robotics industry is currently facing in foodservice and how it’s projected to evolve around these roadblocks.

Costs

The current challenge is the considerable upfront costs of implementing a technical solution. This makes it only financially feasible for big brand names, such as Chili’s, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Chipotle and Pizza Hut, which have already embraced robotic automation to innovate restaurant operations. But chain restaurants and fast food companies don’t hold a monopoly on the food service robotics industry.

These tech solution companies offer leasing and payment plans to make their robots more affordable upfront for mom-and-pop shops. And as technology advances, it will become cheaper and more widely available to the masses.

Public Resistance

Unfortunately, cost isn’t the only adversity robots in the food industry are encountering. Bad experiences and impersonal interactions just add insult to injury to the fact that many people perceive robots to be stealing their jobs.

However, as time goes on and the prevalence of robots in restaurants continues to rise, the public perception towards robots prepping, cooking and serving their food will evolve with the industry and the changing technological world. After all, foodservice robots are already here, and they’re here to stay, with bigger and better innovations to come.

Technological Limitations

As of now, robots have taken over many tedious cooking tasks, like chopping vegetables, frying foods and brewing coffee, allowing workers to specialize and focus their work on customer service and other administrative and operational loose ends. However, there’s still a lot robots can’t yet do. For instance, they need a high level of supervision and maintenance. Not to mention, they’re a one-trick pony, unable to learn new recipes without a significant amount of software development and programming involved.

But that’s the here and now. Already, robots have gone from simple kitchen aids to preparing 100 pizzas in an hour and delivering food for curbside pickup. As robotic technology advances, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that we’ll one day see total automation in the commercial kitchen and restaurant sphere.