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restaurants

March 13, 2018

Scoop: Little Caesars Has a Patent for a Pizza-Making Robot

It’s hard to fear the robot revolution when they come bearing pizza.

Little Caesars is the latest fast food chain to get in on the robot action. The pizza chain was issued a patent today for what is described as an automated “apparatus provided for assembling pizza,” which includes “a pizza sauce spreading station, a cheese spreading station and a pepperoni applying station.” The robot will have an articulating arm with a gripper attached to grab onto pizzas, as well as a rotary dial system to ensure proper cheese and pepperoni distribution.

The Little Caesar pizza robot in action.

The background and summary section of the patent frames the pizza robot as a tool to help retail workers. By partially automating the “labor-intensive endeavor” of pizza-making, the robot can free workers up to perform “other value added tasks.” It will also help improve efficiency, ensuring a more consistent quality pizza at a faster speed.

If Little Caesars put its new patent to use by employing an army of pizza robots in its restaurants, it will mark yet another step forward for automation in casual dining. We’ve already seen food running and bussing robots in the front of house and burger-flipping robots in the kitchen. Judging from the patent photos, Little Caesar’s proposed robot can handle the entire pizza assembly process, handing off a finished product to a human who could either place it on a buffet or slide it into a box for delivery.

Little Caesar isn’t the first company to create an automated pizza assembly system. Zume Pizza in Silicon Valley uses robots to stretch their pizza dough, add sauce, and shuttle their pies into the oven. However, last we heard, they still needed humans to add the toppings—something that Little Caesar’s robot is able to do on its own.

This patent shows that fast food chains are trying to optimize what customers like—speed and low price point—and reduce what they care less about: who (or what) is cooking their food.

October 24, 2017

Can Daily Paychecks Make a Positive Impact for Food Workers?

Getting paid twice a month is pretty well ingrained into the minds of American workers. But startup Instant Financial thinks that paying lower-wage workers, like those in restaurants, daily paychecks may be a better way to increase financial flexibility and avoid monetary pitfalls.

Business Insider reports that Instant currently works with franchisees (not corporate) of companies such as McDonald’s and Outback steakhouse to reach roughly 150,000 people across the US. Once connected to the Instant mobile app, employees can ask for up to half of that day’s pay within an hour after their shift, and that money is accessible via an Instant debit card.

According to Instant Financial website, there is no fee for users to access their money via Instant Pay. There is an inactivity fee if no money is loaded or spent for 90 continuous days, and repeats monthly for the length of inactivity.

As the article points out, this shift to daily pay fits more with the millennial mindset. This is a generation raised on instant access to everything, so adding pay stubs to that makes sense. According to the people at Instant, getting a daily paycheck not only helps people avoid predatory lenders should a sudden money issue arise, but it also aids in employee satisfaction and retention.

And for Instant, there is a sizeable market in the food industry for its services. In April of this year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported

The industry with the highest percentage of workers earning hourly wages at or below the federal minimum wage was leisure and hospitality (about 13 percent). Three-fifths of all workers paid at or below the federal minimum wage were employed in this industry, almost entirely in restaurants and other food services. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received.

It might be easy and cliche that this is another example of millennials ruining everything, but this actually makes sense. Minimum wage is not a lot of money, especially in expensive cities such as New York, San Francisco or Seattle. For restaurant workers who don’t get cash tips to bring home at the end of the evening, getting paid within hours could literally mean getting home that night.

At the very least, Instant’s approach is an interesting one, and I’m curious to see how many restaurants sign on — or if this idea of daily pay spreads out to other industries.

October 17, 2017

Allset raises $5M to take waiting off the menu

You would be forgiven for rolling your eyes when you first hear of Allset. The reservations app, which today announced it had raised $5M in Series A funding (hat tip: TechCrunch), wants to make the dining experience more “efficient” by letting you reserve a table, order and pay all before you even take your seat.

At first, this seems like yet another case of Silicon Valley trying to disrupt something that was actually just fine, thank you very much. After all, a restaurant is more than just food. It’s the ambiance, the slowing down for a minute to enjoy a meal.

But that’s not always the case, especially when you are busy and need to maximize your lunch hour. Being seated and served in rapid, automatic succession is actually a great time saver. Or if you are having a lunch meeting, the ability to pre-order and pre-pay makes can take some of the social awkwardness out of the process and allow you to be more productive.

And Allset believes it isn’t just good for diners, the company says it can be a boon to restaurants, helping them become more efficient and deliver a VIP experience. In this regard the startup is just one of a slew of services looking to optimize restaurant processes and the business of eating out.

Speaking of business, Allset also provides a service that allows companies to offer faster restaurant lunch experiences for employees. Having worked a startup that had catered lunches every day, the ability to actually leave the office in a timely manner (and experience actual sunlight) would have been a great perk.

And just as Facebook has expanded its foray into food delivery, and AirBnB lets guests book reservations via Resy, perhaps it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a more business-focused social platform such as Linkedin expanding into the business of business lunches through some kind of partnership with Allset.

Allset is available in San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York City, Chicago, Boston, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Jose. Greycroft led the funding round announced today. Founded in 2015, Allset has raised more than $8.35 million in total funding so far.

January 15, 2017

Can Tech Completely Automate The Restaurant Front Of House?

While we’ve seen a bunch of news lately about how food robots and automation are gaining momentum in the restaurant world, much of the action has been around ‘back of house’ operations and delivery, where robots and automation can specialize in completing repetitive tasks like making burgers at a lower cost than humans.

But the reality is, front of house is just as susceptible to automation. One of the most obvious places for tech is at the dining table itself, where companies like Ziosk are working to make servers more efficient and, in many cases, help restaurants reduce overall server headcount. Ziosk’s touch screens, which allow consumers to order, ask for refills and pay, are on tables everywhere from Red Robin to Chili’s to Olive Garden. In fact, the company indicated that their kiosks touch 50 million consumers in 3,000 restaurants in the US.

Fast food is even more susceptible to automation. Companies like Panera, Wendy’s and McDonalds are rolling out self-order kiosks nationwide, making fast food one of the fastest growing categories in what some predict will be a $73 billion self-serve kiosk market in 2020.

And then there are those restaurants creating entirely new restaurant concepts which take the front-of-house beyond just the kiosk and make them entirely human-less.

One of these is Eatsa, a San Fransisco based chain that has created a restaurant concept where the entire order and serve flow are done with automation. And if you think Eatsa’s quinoa meals are prepackaged boxes made somewhere off-site, you’re wrong: humans work to fulfill orders, only consumers never get to see them behind the wall of futuristic cubbies where the custom-ordered meals magically appear.

You can see how it all works in the video from Techcrunch below:

Eatsa's High Tech Quinoa To-Go

But do consumers want humans eliminated entirely in the front of house? Are restaurants going to eventually all become Eatsa-like order and pickup joints with nary a worker in sight?

My guess is human-less front of house operations will eat up a small but growing percentage of the overall restaurant mix, particularly in fast-food and casual dining markets where consumers often want to eat fast and affordably. But the biggest impact will be on specific functions. Much like Amazon has re-thought the grocery store in a modern context to use technology to automate a task (checkout), we’ll see restaurant chains starting to focus on those front of house tasks that can be reduced or eliminated with tech (like ordering).

I expect automation to have a much smaller impact in fine dining’s front of house operations. That’s because consumers are willing – and often times expect – to pay more for the experience, and that experience is usually highly dependent on the service of humans.

The ultimate question is how far will automation go and what does it mean for both restaurants and consumers? On the restaurant side, it’s clear a balance must be struck between increased efficiency and creating a compelling user experience.  If consumers see added benefit through expedited ordering and payment through tech like Ziosk, then why not?

But if going to restaurants becomes the equivalent of going to food ATMs, there’s a chance eating out will lose some of its appeal. Unless of course you frequent one of these many robot-restaurants popping up in China.

Then you may want your meal served by a robot waiter.

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