Food Robot

One of the questions that always comes up when talking about food robots is what will happen to the human workers. Coming out of stealth mode today, Hyphen‘s answer is to have its robot work alongside people. Well, technically, to have the robots work underneath them..

Hyphen launched its Makeline assembly robot today, which is meant to help fast casual restaurants quickly and accurately make meals for pick-up and delivery without taking up any additional space. Perhaps the easiest way to think about the Makeline is to picture a Sweetgreen (Hyphen has not announced a deal with Sweetgreen, I’m just using it as an illustrative example). When you’re physically at a Sweetgreen, you order at a counter, and a worker there goes down the line with you, adding the ingredients you want to your meal.

With Hyphen’s Makeline, that counter of ingredients is still there, as is the person. But the magic happens underneath the counter, where a robotic system dispenses ingredients from the same trays used above the counter to assemble electronic orders. In effect, the Makeline is doubling the output of a restaurant’s counter system with humans taking in-person orders and the robot handling off-prem ones.

In addition to saving space, the Makeline is also modular, so restaurants can lengthen and shorten it as needed. Additional modules can be for more ingredients, and there are beverage dispensing modules, re-heating modules, mixing modules, lid and label modules, and staging modules that hold multiple items for pickup.

Hyphen’s Makeline is able to make 350+ meals per hour, and the initial cost is $10,000 for implementation and integration. After that there is an undisclosed per-use fee. In a video chat last week, Hyphen Co-Founder and CEO Stephen Klein told me that his company has signed deals with eight partners, seven of which are fast casual restaurants and one of which is a co-packer for a grocer.

But it’s not just a new robot that Hyphen is debuting today, Hyphen is actually the new name and direction for what was once Ono Foods Co. Ono made a robotic smoothie making system that fit in the back of a van so it could move to different spots throughout the day. Ono Food also had ambitions to be an owned and operated restaurant brand. But Ono launched in October of 2019 which, of course, was just months before the pandemic hit the U.S. in full force. So Ono retrenched, laid off staff and pivoted.

Klein said Hyphen was able to re-purpose its original technology. “We leveraged the same technology to make smoothies to make plates,” he said. Additionally, the company hasn’t lost those mobile roots, as Klein said Hyphen’s Makeline can still fit in a van. “The technology is still mobile [and] can fit in van or ghost kitchen, it doesn’t matter the environment,” he said. “A lot of our partners want to be in spaces that don’t have four walls. It might make sense to have a mobile kitchen.”

As it moves from smoothies to food assembly, however, Hyphen is facing a more competitive market offering a variety of solutions. Picnic‘s assembly robot offers a similar modular design that will eventually be able to accommodate foods like burritos and sandwiches, but it only works with pizza toppings right now. Karakuri and RobotEatz are more autonomous standalone kiosks, but can be customized to create a wide variety of hot and cold dishes.

The biggest selling point for Hyphen, however, will most likely be the space it saves restaurants. By adding a robotic layer to existing dish assembly workstations, Hyphen not only answers the question of what to do with human workers (keep them), but also solves the problem of where a new robotic system would go.