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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Flippy

The Co-Founder and CEO of Miso Robotics, Maker of Flippy, Is No Longer With the Company

Dave Zito, who was Co-Founder and CEO of Miso Robotics, is no longer with the company, The Spoon has learned. This is the second high-profile C-level loss for Miso, following COO Melissa Hampton Burghardt’s departure from the company in September.

Miso Robotics is the startup behind Flippy, the burger flipping, fry cooking robot. Flippy is probably best known for being implemented at CaliBurger in Pasadena, CA (both Miso Robotics and Flippy are companies in the Cali Group holding company). Flippy was also employed by Dodger Stadium to fry chicken tenders and tater tots, and Walmart was experimenting with the robot as well.

At this point, we aren’t sure what spurred Zito’s departure. Zito confirmed with us that he is no longer with Miso and provided the following statement that has been slightly edited for length and clarity:

Yes I can confirm I’ve moved on from Miso. As a co-founder and one of the largest shareholders I am still rooting for the team and the vision we set forth. I’m so proud of all we accomplished together.

I’m a firm believer that breakthroughs in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Real-time Controls for Automation present the next great wave in disruptive technologies that I believe will radically aid humanity in addressing the most pressing problems of our age. I remain resolutely focused in aiding and supporting this burgeoning ecosystem that is leveraging these technologies to produce teams and products built to make a truly positive and lasting impact.

A spokesperson for Miso also confirmed the news saying the two parties split “amicably” and that Buck Jordan, Founding Partner of Miso will be interim CEO, and helping with the search for a full-time replacement.

The news of Zito’s departure comes a week after CaliBurger announced its 2.0 initiative, which involved adding a second Flippy robot station. Miso Robotics has raised $13.1 million in funding.

CaliBurger Adds a Second Flippy Robot to Make French Fries

Fast food chain CaliBurger announced its new “CaliBurger 2.0” restaurant yesterday, which includes new high-tech features like pay-with-your-face kiosks and the addition of a second Flippy cooking robot.

CaliBurger made headlines last year when it first used Flippy to autonomously grill up burgers at its Pasadena, CA location. The burger chain made even more headlines when it took Flippy offline after just one day on the job because it was too fast for its human co-workers. After some re-tooling Flippy went back on the line a couple months later and has been cooking ever since.

CaliBurger and Miso Robotics, which makes Flippy, are both companies in the CaliGroup portfolio.

While Flippy started its robotic life using computer vision and thermal imaging to make burgers, it has also been taught to work the deep fryer. Since last summer Flippy has been frying up chicken tenders and tater tots at Dodger Stadium, and the robot will bring those skills to make french fries at the new CaliBurger 2.0 locations.

As noted, CaliBurger 2.0 locations will also feature the pay-by-face kiosks. This automated payment system records your face (with your permission), and can keep an order history to immediately surface favorites on the touchscreen interface. We used it last year and it worked just fine.

While robots and interactive kiosks were pretty novel last year, they are quickly becoming more commonplace in fast food restaurants. Just this week, Picnic unveiled its pizza making robot, and Creator‘s burger robot is still hard at work. The global kiosk market is expected to hit $30.8 billion thanks to implementations at QSRs like Dunkin, Shake Shack and Wendy’s.

CaliBurger 2.0 will open its first location this month in Fort Meyers, FL, followed by stores in Seattle, WA, Tysons, VA and Pasadena.

Between Faster Checkout and Robot Tater Tots, the Food Tech Game is Strong at Stadiums

If you want to see some of the coolest innovation in food technology, you need to get in the game. Well, at least get a ticket to the game because stadiums and arenas are fast becoming hotbeds for new ways to sell and get you your food quickly.

Speed is the name of the game and the impetus for most of this disruption happening at large sporting and entertainment venues. The faster attendees can order and get their food, the less time they spend away from the game or concert, and, ideally, the more stuff they buy.

The most recent example is the partnership Postmates announced last week with Yankee Stadium. The partnership, which is similar to one the delivery service has with Dodgers Stadium in LA, and allows attendees to order their food from their seats and pick it up at a designated Postmates Pickup point.

Over at Mile High Stadium in Denver, computer vision-powered checkout scanners have been installed throughout the stadium. Shoppers place their items on a scanner created by Mashgin, which automatically identifies what is being purchased, so individual items don’t need to be rung up one at a time.

But innovation isn’t just happening on the checkout side of the food stand; the way stadium food is being made is undergoing an upheaval as well. Robots in particular will play an increasingly important role in making food at large venues. The Dodgers have used Flippy the robot to fry up chicken tenders and tater tots. And back at Mile High Stadium, the Broncos installed a robo-bartender to pour and serve beer.

The point is that stadiums are perfect venues for a lot of the food technology and automation that we write about. They are large, high-traffic areas that provide a good test case for new, automated workflows and systems. The food being served isn’t highly customized, but rather made in bulk, and meant to be more consistent than artisanal. And really, while it’s fun to eat a hot dog at the ballpark, people are there for the game, so as long as they get their grub in a timely manner, they don’t really care how they get it. Seems like a win for everyone involved.

ArticulATE Q&A: Miso’s CEO on How Flippy the Robot Will Move From Frying to Chopping

Ahh Flippy. It was the first food robot I ever wrote about, way back in…2018. Back then, it could only grill burgers. Now, a year later, it can fry tater tots and chicken tenders, and will reportedly soon get a job in a deli.

They grow up so fast. Soon Flippy will want the keys to not drive the autonomous car.

We’re going to get a full report on what Flippy is — and will be — up to when Dave Zito, CEO of Miso Robotics, sits down for an on-stage chat at our upcoming ArticulATE conference on April 16 in San Francisco. We were so excited to have him be a part of the show that we couldn’t wait and sent him some questions via email, which he was kind enough to answer.

This is but an autonomous amuse bouche — get your ticket today to see Zito and a host of truly amazing speakers at ArticulATE!

THE SPOON: Flippy started off grilling burgers and then moved on to frying up chicken tenders. What particular jobs in the kitchen are Flippy, and robots in general, really good at?

ZITO: We started Miso Robotics with the idea of giving eyes and a brain to a robotic arm so it could work in commercial kitchens with real-time situational awareness and real-time robotic controls. We designed and starting building the system from Day One as a software platform that could automate the cooking of all manner of foods and recipes, with all equipment and restaurant brands, and all kitchen formats.

Our autonomous robotic Kitchen Assistants are focused on helping with the most repetitive, dangerous, and least desirable tasks in the kitchen. Flippy grilling burgers was our proof of concept. Flippy can now fry many different kinds of foods as well. These tasks can be improved and optimized for consistency, ensuring each meal is cooked to the perfect temperature with minimal food waste. Beyond frying, grilling, and other cooking, expect them over time to help with tasks like chopping onions, cutting other vegetables, and even cleaning.

The Kitchen Assistant improves and learns over time based on the data available. Ultimately, this frees up kitchen staff to spend more time with customers. We believe the future of food is on-demand, accessible, personalized, and scalable. We are building the technology platform leveraging automation, machine learning, and robotics advancements to deliver on this future.

What did you learn from Flippy’s time at Dodger Stadium?

Flippy’s deployment at Dodger Stadium emphasized how much one kitchen assistant can impact productivity and efficiency in a high-volume commercial kitchen. Dodger Stadium was the first time we deployed our frying capabilities, and we matched max productivity while producing consistently fried foods to the chef’s expectations. Cooking for extended periods of peak demand during baseball games was a key proof point for the reliability and sustained high throughput of our Kitchen Assistants.

But don’t just take our word for it; here is what our partner Levy had to say about the experience:

“The robotic kitchen assistant helps us more quickly and safely cook perfectly crispy chicken tenders and tater tots,” said Robin Rosenberg, Vice President and Chef de Cuisine for Levy. “It’s amazing to see the kitchen assistant and team members working together, and the consistency of product is incredible.”

“New technologies at large scale venues and events like this need to add value for both guests and team members,” said Jaime Faulkner, CEO of E15, Levy’s analytics subsidiary. “Working with Miso, we were able to create a process that both delivers high quality food more quickly, and gives kitchen team members a chance to hone sought-after skills working with robotics and automation.”

We are looking forward to resuming frying with Levy this baseball season.

What is the biggest misconception about food robots in the kitchens?

The biggest misconception about the use of technology in the kitchen is that it’s about job replacement. There is a growing labor crisis in the restaurant industry. Local workforces are shrinking, and wages are increasing, making commercial cooking uneconomical. Meanwhile, consumers have an increased desire for meals cooked for them, whether via delivery, take-out, dining out, or grocery deli meals, adding pressure on kitchen workers.

Restaurants already see 150% turnover today from a dissatisfied workforce. Pair this with an aging workforce that can’t handle some of the physical demands that come with the job and commercial kitchens are struggling to recruit and retain talent. Intelligent automation not only creates an avenue for meaningful work for the next generation through the creation of new jobs like a Chef Tech (employees trained to manage the robot), but also takes the physical burden off of more mature employees who want to continue to contribute later in life.

The tasks that Miso’s technology can perform are some of the most dangerous tasks in the kitchen, not to mention messy and menial, ultimately improving the employee experience by freeing up time for them to focus on more meaningful work, like warm customer service that a robot simply can’t match.

What should restaurant owners know about food robots before implementing them?

Expect improvements across several aspects of their business — better food, better customer service, better inventory and cost management. While a signature recipe for a restaurant can make it a success, it can be hard to reliably reproduce at scale to every customer, but robots like Flippy can deliver consistency in flavor to help keep customers loyal. Furthermore, the value proposition of implementing robotics in the kitchen spans productivity and cost-savings to one of the most pressing issues in our world today – sustainability. Food waste is a huge contributor to the climate crisis we are in, wasting $160 billion of food a year. This technology has the potential to significantly reduce that number – restaurants can contribute to a positive step in the right direction of food waste and ensure they are maximizing inventory as they begin to grow.

What is your favorite fictional robot?

As a kid I loved Johnny 5 from the film Short Circuit. I loved the idea that technology built for one purpose, in this case the military, once embedded with artificial intelligence shifted to more compassionate pursuits. In that way we are inspired at Miso to take industrial robotic arms, add our intelligence, and in so doing improve them for a broader and more impactful service — helping liberate commercial kitchens from repetitive tasks and mediocre menus, while empowering chefs to make delicious and nutritious meals accessible for all.

Walmart Gives Flippy the Frying Robot a Shot

Flippy, the burger flipping, fry cooking robot, is auditioning for a new gig in Walmart’s deli department, according to Yahoo Finance. The retail giant has been testing Flippy out at its Culinary Institute and Innovation Center, where the robot fries up items like potato wedges, mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders.

This wouldn’t be the first time Miso Robotics‘ Flippy worked a fryer. The robot got a gig this past summer at Dodger Stadium, where it helped cook up more than ten thousand pounds of chicken tenders and tater tots, churning out up to 80 baskets per hour.

As we wrote earlier, there are three core technologies powering Flippy’s fry capabilities:

At the fryer, Flippy uses the Miso See, Miso Serve and Miso Move technologies to fry up the aforementioned tenders and tots. Miso See allows Flippy to identify food, cookware and utensils. Miso Serve helps the robot make real-time cooking decisions. Miso Move controls Flippy’s movements to make sure it is working safely and efficiently. All together, Flippy can put full baskets in the fry oil, monitor the cooking time (and gently shake the baskets while cooking), remove the baskets to drain the oil, and set the food at a designated location for serving.

It should come as no surprise that Walmart is mulling over adding Flippy to its cooking team. Walmart likes to use robots for manual, repetitive tasks and already has them scanning store shelves, cleaning floors and potentially even driving shopping carts.

But that’s three jobs at Walmart that will potentially be performed by robots and not humans. Miso Robotics CEO, David Zito told Yahoo Finance, “Our whole thing is not about job replacement, right….What we want to do is assist the hardworking linemen cooks and chefs in America with tools to give them the ability to faithfully reproduce while taking the burden off some of these more repetitive and mundane tasks.” For its part, Walmart says having robots handle these repetitive tasks frees up humans to prep other food and do more customer service.

While there are mountains of ethical issues coming down the pike as robots take more of our jobs, the fry cook is one where it might actually make sense. In addition to being manual and repetitive, there’s also a certain level of danger associated with standing over a vat of hot oil. Robots,however, don’t get burned, and because they use software to precisely repeat its tasks all day, they won’t burn your tenders.

No Ticket Required, Robot-Powered Creator Restaurant Fully Open in SF

Creator, the restaurant that uses robots to cook up hamburgers, opened to walk-in customers San Francisco this week, as automated restaurants continue to pop up across the country.

Creator features a 14-foot long kiosk-like machine that grinds, cooks, buns and tops burgers. The restaurant actually had a bit of a soft opening back in June, during which it required a ticket to eat there. Since that time, according to Eater, the company has been learning customer preferences and adapting its burger design.

At Creator’s full opening this week tickets aren’t required, but service is first-come first-served, and the restaurant is only open from 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Wednesday through Friday.

Creator’s burger-making robot is different from Flippy, the burger-making robot that works at Caliburger further south in Pasadena, CA. Flippy uses an array of cameras and thermal sensors to cook the burgers, but still requires humans to dress them.

But the two are part of a larger trend in using robots in quick service restaurant settings. In addition to Caliburger, Flippy also learned how to fry up chicken tenders for its pilot at Dodger Stadium this summer. Another Flippy will also be deployed at an upcoming Seattle Caliburger location later this year. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, Zume Pizza uses robots to pull pizza crusts out of the oven, and over in Boston, Spyce uses robots to make delicious (according to our own Mike Wolf) bowls of food.

As we’ve noted, food robots are great for high-volume restaurants where customers want to get in and get out. Robots work quickly and precisely, they don’t take breaks and they never get injured. The results, however, may need a little fine-tuning. We aren’t in SF, so we haven’t tried it ourselves, but friends of The Spoon have told us that the burger was fine to above average (especially for a burger in downtown SF that only costs $6). Commenters on Yelp echoed those sentiments. People like the robot and the experience, but the burgers are “pretty good,” and “slightly underwhelming.”

Robots are becoming commonplace in restaurants, so their novelty and ability to attract customers in and of themselves will start to diminish. Once that happens, the food will need to be good to keep people coming back. That’s why even though I’m anxious for Flippy to make its Seattle debut, I’m more excited about the Crowd Cow burger coming to our first Shake Shack.

Flippy’s Frying Pilot is a Hit at Dodger Stadium

Miso Robotics announced last week that in addition to cooking hamburgers, Flippy the robot is now a full-fledged frying machine after going through a pilot program at Dodger Stadium this summer.

According to the press announcement, Flippy has been working as a frying assistant since the end of July, and in that time has helped cook and serve more than ten thousand pounds of chicken tenders and tater tots, producing as much as 80 baskets per hour.

The Flippy platform started its culinary career at Caliburger, where it uses an array of computer vision, thermal sensors and AI to autonomously cook hamburgers. This summer, Miso began the pilot at Dodger Stadium to expand Flippy’s capabilities.

At the fryer, Flippy uses the Miso See, Miso Serve and Miso Move technologies to fry up the aforementioned tenders and tots. Miso See allows Flippy to identify food, cookware and utensils. Miso Serve helps the robot make real-time cooking decisions. Miso Move controls Flippy’s movements to make sure it is working safely and efficiently. All together, Flippy can put full baskets in the fry oil, monitor the cooking time (and gently shake the baskets while cooking), remove the baskets to drain the oil, and set the food at a designated location for serving.

With the pilot wrapping up successfully, it’s a safe bet that Flippy will be making its way to more stadiums over the next year. Levy, a Chicago hospitality firm that runs a number of sports and entertainment venues as well as convention centers, is an investor in Miso.

Flippy is among the first wave of robots that will be assisting/taking over food production in high-traffic areas. Robots like Flippy are perfect for sporting venues because they can work non-stop without needing a break, and can take on the more dangerous work such as frying food without getting hurt. Zume pizza is another company using robots for more dangerous work, employing automated assistants for pulling dough out of hot ovens.

Companies like Caliburger and Zume both say that robots help free up humans to do higher level tasks, which is true. But in settings like stadiums, the object is more about speed and volume, so it’s not hard to envision a future where ‘bots like Flippy take more jobs and reduce the number of people needed to run food establishments there.

It’s a sticky issue and one that we’ll be tackling at our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle next month. I’ll be moderating a panel with people from Cafe X, Zimplistic and Chowbotics to discuss the evolution of robots, and we’re sure to touch on what that means for humans. Get your ticket to come and join the conversation!

Video: A Trip to Caliburger to See Flippy the Robot and Pay with my Face

If you read our newsletter (and you should!), you know that I’m in Los Angeles this week. One of the reasons I was so excited to come down here was to finally meet Flippy, the burger flipping robot.

Flippy is currently online at Caliburger in Pasadena, where it cooks up anywhere between 500 and 1,000 burgers a day, according to a Cali Group representative. Behind a glass wall, the robotic arms swings and swivels to turn meat over, change spatulas for raw and cooked meat, and remove burgers from the heat to set them aside for dressing.

Its movements are faster than I expected, especially when dropping off finished burgers. It’s a quick, precise motion, but almost jerky in its precision.

What was especially interesting was watching it interact with the human co-workers, who placed raw patties to the grill, added cheese and dressed each burger. Humans also do a temperature check on each of Flippy’s cooked burgers to ensure food safety. People seem to have figured out the dance they need to do with Flippy and have a rhythm. Flippy even fails sometimes, pushing a burger instead of flipping it, but its human coworkers quickly correct any problems.

For the humans’ safety, there is a taped off area around Flippy. If a someone enters that space, Flippy immediately shuts down until the person walk back outside its designated area.

On a screen above the work area, visitors can see what Flippy “sees” on the grill. It’s a not-quite-Terminator-like view of various burgers, each with a countdown as they near readiness.

Since I was there, I decided to order up some lunch and try out Caliburger’s automated kiosk, which lets you pay with your face. The kiosk and payment system is actually part of PopIQ, which is also owned by Cali Group. PopIQ is aiming to become a universal loyalty program used by different restaurants or gyms or any place else with frequent repeat customers. The idea is that your face becomes your payment system and loyalty card when you shop at participating locations.

The Caliburger rep told me that about 65 percent of Caliburger customers use the automated kiosk to order pay, but most are still wary of storing their face data and credit card information with the company. I too, was a little wary, as Caliburger has locations around the world and I wasn’t given a sufficient explanation as to where my data is stored and what governments of different countries can access. Given recent news about data breaches, this is definitely an issue the company should explicitly address.

Having said that, I was here for a story, so I went through the sign up process and scanned my face into the Caliburger system. The kiosk was straightforward with a clean UI and I found it easy to use. In less than a minute I was up and running. Once in the system I went through the touchscreen menu to order my burger and customize it. When it came time to pay it let me know it was scanning my face and that was it, my order went off to Flippy for preparation.

The payment process, while fast and convenient, could use a little more guidance. Once you pay, there is no clear direction on where to go or what to do next. The order just goes into the ether and you aren’t sure where your food will arrive or where to get your drink. You can sense why some people prefer to stick with people when paying.

Foodservice robots like Flippy are quickly moving from novelty to mainstream. Flippy is expanding its skillset and becoming a fry cook, Penny shuttles food and empty dishes around a restaurant, Ekim’s PAZZI will make you a pizza, and Cafe X’s robot will wave to you after it makes your latté.

And lucky for me, pretty soon I won’t have to travel for my next Flippy-made burger. Caliburger is adding Flippy to its new Seattle (where I’m based) location later this year. Until Flippy comes to your town, you can enjoy these videos of it in action.

Flippy Fires up a new Job at Dodger Stadium, Will it be a Home Run?

Flippy, Miso Robotics‘ fast food robot assistant, has a new job and some new skills: frying up tater tots and chicken tenders at LA’s Dodger Stadium.

The pilot is a collaboration between Miso, data analytics company E15 Group, and hospitality company Levy, who participated in Miso’s Series B funding round earlier this year. Miso and Levy had announced a plan to put Flippy in sports venues back in March.

The first Flippy works at the Pasadena Caliburger location, flipping burgers. When the ‘bot first came online in March, it ran into a few technical snafus as well as some issues with human counterparts keeping up. After a brief hiatus, Flippy returned to CaliBurger in May; it now cooks up thousands of burgers a day.

This stadium gig will be an intriguing test for Flippy. First, Miso is adding a new skill to the robot, moving it from the grill to the fryer, pushing Flippy’s artificial intelligence, HD cameras, thermal sensors and grippers all into a new food type and cooking technique. Second, it’s working at Dodger Stadium, which seats 56,000 people, so there will be high volume of work over a shorter period of time.

Having said that, baseball seems like the perfect sport for Flippy to start with. The slow and leisurely place means customers coming throughout the game, rather than high bursts of activity between quarters or halves.

As Mike Wolf pointed out earlier this week, robot restaurants are all the rage, and Flippy’s move to the majors is a perfect example of why. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive work more precisely, and leave us humans to do higher level work. By one 2017 estimate, foodservice accounted for 12,000 burns to employees per year. If Flippy can run the fryer properly, fewer employees could get hurt (saving people from pain and restaurants money).

If you’re in the LA area, take yourself out to the ball game, buy yourself some peanuts and robot-cooked chicken tenders and tell us how they are.

Use Postmates to Skip Food Lines at the Panorama Music Festival

As a verified “old,” just the thought of going to a multi-day summer music festival is enough to make me scrunch up my face, put on my cargo shorts and stand out on my lawn, waiting to yell at kids to get off of it.

But for you “youngs” brave enough to withstand such things, the Panorama music fest in New York this month just made a big part of the concert-going experience a whole lot easier: Postmates will enable mobile ordering and pickup from food vendors at the show. That means you don’t have to wait in line for your hipster hot dogs or huevos rancheros (like I said, I’m old, I don’t know what you kids eat at concerts anymore).

Fast Company first reported the news, writing that the Postmates app will have a special geo-fence around the island where the concert is being held. When you log in to the app, you’ll see participating vendors at the show and be able to order and pay for your meal, who will then send you a pickup time. Instead of spending precious minutes in line, you can walk over, grab your food and get back to the show without missing a, errr, beat.

This move towards speeding up and automating the food buying process in high-traffic situations, like concerts, is inevitable. Goldenvoice, which puts on the Panorama festival, is the same company behind Coachella, so expect this type of line-destroying tech in more places fairly soon.

In fact, we aren’t that far off from mobile apps and robots automating even more of our live event eating. Entertainment and hospitality company Levy has already announced plans to add robotic assistants like Miso Robotics’ Flippy to its sports and entertainment venues. And a high-profile multi-day festival like Panorama would be a great spot for Cafe X’s robot barista-in-a-box.

Actually, all this automation is making me re-think my aversion to concerts. I mean, there’s nothing cooler than a dad in cargo shorts ordering food on his iPhone, right?

Flippy Gets Back to Work at Caliburger

After a brief hiatus, Flippy, Miso Robotics’ burger-grilling robot is back online and back at work at the Pasadena Caliburger location.

Flippy famously debuted at Caliburger back in March — only to be “fired” after just one day. Earlier reporting suggested that the problem was the human staffers who couldn’t keep up with the high-tech cook. While human interaction was an issue, a story in USA Today states that there were technical problems as well, with Flippy having trouble keeping up with demand and not putting burgers in the proper trays for co-workers.

Evidently, those glitches have been addressed and Flippy has been quietly back in action since the start of this month, doing a one-hour lunch shift every day, flipping roughly 300 burgers.

Flippy is a tip of the spear of sorts, leading the way for the restaurant robot revolution. In addition to Flippy, Zume has a pizza-making robot, Cafe X has a robot barista, and Bear Robotics has Penny to shuttle food and dirty dishes back and forth. Looking ahead, Sony recently teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to work on food robots for the future as well.

Despite its rocky start, Miso Robotics said that fifty more Flippys will be launched by 2019. Additionally, earlier this year Miso Robotics raised a $10 million Series B round, which included participation from hospitality company Levy. The two companies are working on using Flippy in commercial kitchens at large venues such as sports arenas.

If you love robots, be sure to subscribe to our podcast Automat on The Spoon Feed, which features discussions with those people building our food robot future, today.

Restaurant Robots Starting to Fill in for Fatigued Staff

Often, when we talk about robots in the food industry, there is a measure of doom and gloom associated with it. I’m guilty of this as well, trying to balance excitement around innovation with the gravitas of millions of human jobs being wiped out.

But it’s also important to remember that robots are really frickin’ cool, and as a CNBC story points out, robots are needed in a country like Japan, which is facing a labor shortages due to a shrinking population.

Tetsuya Sawanobobori started up a restaurant upon completion of grad school. Long story short: long hours made it exhausting and he quit after a year. For sure, owning a restaurant is challenging, but Sawanobori talked to CNBC about the food service industry in Japan more generally, saying “Right now, especially in the food service industry, they have a serious lack of labor because people tend to avoid these kinds of jobs, doing daily, repetitive tasks.”

After exiting the restaurant business, Sawanobori got into robotics and is now the president of Connected Robotics. The company will start selling a robot this summer that can prepare Takoyaki, a Japanese street food consisting of batter balls and minced octopus. Sawanobori said that his robot will take the pressure off of cooking staff who won’t have to stand in front of a hot grill all day.

Takoyaki Robot Demo @Maker Faire Tokyo 2017

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story coming out of Japan. At our own Smart Kitchen Summit startup showcase last year, Hirofumi Mori told our audience that his time performing repetitive, manual tasks at a crêpe shop inspired him to invent his own crêpe making robot.

Here in the U.S., the long hours of restaurant work are spurring our own robot adoption. Bear Robotics created “Penny,” a robot that looks like a bowling pin and shuttles food and dirty dishes around the restaurant. Bear CEO John Ha told us that he built Penny because “[Servers] are tired, they get a low salary, usually no health insurance, but they’re working really hard.”

Sometimes, however, it seems like our new restaurant robots are working too hard. The most famous example of this is Miso Robotics’ Flippy, the burger flipping robot. Flippy was temporarily “retired” after its first official day on the job, but evidently that’s because it was too fast and the human co-workers couldn’t keep up.

Perhaps the possible Little Caeser’s pizza making robot will fare better.

With the restaurant robot genie out of the bottle, now it’s incumbent upon us a society to keep up, and avoid the doom and gloom.