Today Chipotle announced they have launched Chippy, a tortilla-making robot.
The company is working with Miso Robotics, the company behind the Flippy fast-food robotic arm robot. As you can see below, Chippy is a slightly modified variation of Miso’s Flippy bot, only instead of flipping burgers or frying potatoes, the bot is optimized to make Chipotle’s tortilla chips.
Apparently, the customization for Chippy included producing tortilla chips with varying degrees of seasoning to mimic the imperfect work product of more carbon-based life forms. “Everyone loves finding a chip with a little more salt or an extra hint of lime,” said Nevielle Panthaky, Chipotle’s Vice President of Culinary, in the release. “To ensure we didn’t lose the humanity behind our culinary experience, we trained Chippy extensively to ensure the output mirrored our current product, delivering some subtle variations in flavor that our guests expect.”
According to the release, Chipotle is currently testing Chippy at their innovation hub in Irvine, Calif., with plans to integrate Chippy into a Chipotle restaurant in Southern California later this year.
“The company is leveraging its stage-gate process to listen, test and learn from crew and guest feedback before deciding on a national implementation strategy,” the release said.
In other words, Chipotle is trialing Chippy to evaluate (and possibly prepare for) a potentially wider rollout of the robot to essentially automate the chip-making process.
If we were to predict end-of-year headlines for 2022, one of them could well be “The Year Restaurants Went All In on Robots.” Already we’ve seen news of White Castle and Pizza Hut making significant moves, and yesterday Bear confirmed numerous chains are doubling down on robotic servers. And now, we can add one of the country’s biggest fast-casual chains to the list of restaurants that are experimenting with transitioning one of the core employee functions to automation.
For Miso, the company has continued to gain momentum ever since the commercial launch of their second-generation kitchen robot last year. One reason for the embrace of their new generation robot is its flexibility. The Flippy 2, which the company first trialed at White Castle starting in September of 2020, can make all sorts of hot food, enabling the robot to be plugged into the various kitchens of different chains.
Leave a Reply