Over the past couple of years, there’s been no shortage of robotic vending machines cooking up everything from salads to bowl food to ramen to pizza. But, what we haven’t seen – until earlier this week – is a machine that makes the cornerstone meal of the American fast food marketplace, the hamburger.
The RoboBurger, a robotic burger vending machine, arrived at its first location in a New Jersey shopping mall. The machine, a fully autonomous machine that makes a complete burger in minutes, showed up at the Newport Centre mall in Jersey City, New Jersey. The box measures 12 square feet, plugs into a 220-volt wall socket, has a built-in refrigerator and an automated griddle and cleaning system. The self-contained machine holds up to 50 frozen burger patties and cooks each burger one at a time.
The machine makes burgers without any human ever touching the food. The frozen meat and buns are prepackaged. The only time a human gets involved with the RoboBurger’s operation is when they come out every couple of days to restock and empty the wastewater. The wastewater comes from the 30-second cleaning cycle the machine conducts between each burger served.
RoboBurger CEO and cofounder Audrey Wilson, a Carnegie Mellon graduate who spent much of his career heading up analytics and business intelligence groups at places like Vimeo and Arkadium, has been burning the midnight oil on the RoboBurger for much of the past two decades. Wilson started to make serious headway on his robot vending machine four years ago, left his full-time job in 2020, and cofounded RoboBurger with CTO Dan Braido and CMO Andy Siegel.
You can watch the RoboBurger make a burger (actually a few burgers) for CNET’s Bridget Carey, who visited with the RoboBurger team at the Newport Centre mall to learn how the machine works, in the video below.
