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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Robotics

Meet The Dutch Robotic Kitchen That Makes Five Thousand Meals Per Day

Last month, a Dutch startup named Eatch announced they had built a fully automated robotic kitchen that makes up to five thousand meals per day. The company’s new robot, designed to work in a high-production centralized kitchen, has been making meals in the Amsterdam market for food service and catering giant ISS for the past four months.

The Eatch robotic kitchen platform handles the entire meal production flow. It oils the cooking pans, dispenses refrigerated ingredients, adds spices, plates the food, andcleansg the cooking pans when everything is done.

You can watch it in action in the video below:

Eatch - World's First Robotic Kitchen for Large-scale Cooking - Up to 5.000 meals per day

Eatch’s robotic kitchen uses a pot system similar to those we’ve seen in the Spyce kitchen, Kitchen Robotics’ Beastro, and TechMagic’s pasta robot in Tokyo. The Eatch’s tilted pans rotate and toss the food inside, using an internal peg to push the food into a rotation and then drop from the top, creating a toss fry cooking motion common in stir fry kitchens.

What’s most impressive about the Eatch is the throughput, creating five thousand daily meals (and the company says it has the potential to produce up to 15 thousand per day), handling the entire production flow. Most robotic kitchens we’ve seen have production volumes much lower than this and often don’t incorporate plating and pot cleaning in the automation flow.

Company CEO Jelle Sijm told The Spoon that the company has approximately 10 employees and has raised €4.5 million. The company expansion plan includes working with partners who can handle the daily operations, and Eatch will provide the automation technology, software, and recipes. Sijm sees Eatch working with partners to produce food in centralized kitchens for contact caterers. Sijm says they are eyeing an American market entry and says the company is currently in talks with some grocery chains and contract caterers in the US.

As Jobs Disappear, Could Restaurants Become a Battleground For Pushback Against AI & Automation?

Last month, after 29 months straight of job gains, the number of total available restaurant jobs dropped. It wasn’t a huge dip – 800 jobs – but compared to the previous month’s gain of 24 thousand and monthly gains as high as 81 thousand at the beginning of the year, the dip was somewhat surprising, especially as restaurant sales have slowly but surely inched upwards throughout the year.

Could this be a temporary setback? Perhaps, but there’s also a possibility that it’s an early indicator of a long-term, potentially irreversible decline in the restaurant industry’s job market as emerging technologies come into play.

And by new technologies, I primarily mean automation and artificial intelligence. All one has to do is scan the headlines for the past 12 months to find that the restaurant industry has caught automation fever. Big chains ranging from Chipotle to Sweetgreen to McDonald’s are experimenting with ways to automate their restaurants.

And then there’s AI. Last month Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Google in which they are piloting a new generative AI solution called Wendy’s Fresh AI in a drive-thru in Columbus, Ohio. The company said this is the first of what could potentially be many locations that use the technology. Mcdonald’s has also been trialing AI technology, which its execs believe, in some ways, is better at handling customer interactions than humans.

“Humans sometimes forget to greet people, they forget, they make mistakes, they don’t hear as well,” Lucy Brady, McDonald’s chief digital customer engagement officer, told CNN. “A machine can actually have a consistent greeting and remain calm under pressure.”

This wave of new tech goes beyond robotic arms and simulated voices taking orders at the drive-thru. There’s been a recent surge – accelerated during the pandemic – in digital kiosks, mobile ordering apps, and QR code ordering at tables. These have resulted in an increased number of digital touchpoints designed to speed up the process and, to some extent, reduce reliance on human intervention.

It’s hard to fault the operators. A significant number of restaurant employees permanently exited the industry during the pandemic, and since then, operators have struggled to fill vacant positions. Despite offering higher wages and improved benefits, many open positions remain unfilled due to a lack of interest. If employees are hard to find, why not let technology take over?

Which brings us back to how we humans will be impacted by all this new technology. Workers are increasingly tasked with working alongside all this new tech, transforming job descriptions into something that can sound like working an IT help desk. Others find that technology is increasingly eating away at opportunities at the human connection aspect of the job they enjoy.

“Those points of connection get lost in mobile ordering,” said one former Starbucks barista. “So, it’s just like, ‘Here’s your order, bye.”

Then there’s the threat of job extinction as automation and AI take hold. While no big chains have deployed robotics or AI so widely that they’ve eliminated key positions in the front or back of house, it’s only a matter of time before early pilots become the primary engine of production. Sweetgreen has essentially proclaimed its new bowl-making robot is the future, and both Wendy’s and McDonald’s have hinted at broader applications of automation and AI.

As we teeter on the precipice of an automated and AI-powered restaurant industry, are we beginning to see signals of pushback stemming from job loss fears? There are subtle signs. When Chili’s showed off their trial of the Bear Robotics server in a video on Facebook last year, some commentators pushed back. “Quit trying to erase people!” wrote one. Another commented, “Another reason why I will never set foot inside of a Chili’s. You cannot replace a human in the hospitality industry.” Others are penning editorials saying that while operators may benefit from automation, workers and customers lose.

In certain instances, workers displaced by new technology have begun to retaliate. As detailed in our interview with restaurant operator Andrew Simmons, he struggled when a former employee who resisted the deployment of automation at his San Diego area pizza restaurant started making negative comments on social media and called in complaints to the local health department.

Are these initial pushbacks a sign of a larger anti-technology movement? That remains to be seen, but ignoring these early indications of a neo-luddite movement would be ill-advised, according to one professor.

“The various signals currently circulating in public discourse are not immediately obvious, nor are they specifically anti-technology or anti-progress,” wrote Sunil Manghani, a Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique at the University of Southampton and Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for AI. “Yet, arguably, the signals are of a nascent sense of ‘protest’. Just as Hobsbawm reminds us, the Luddites were not opposed to machines in principle, but rather to those machines that were threatening their livelihoods and communities, we will likely start to see opposition not to software in principle, but various instances of software; opposition, then, to how and who deploy new technologies in the particular.”

Today resistance may manifest in an employee fighting back here or there or the occasional social media pushback against new automation. However, these intermittent signals could become the norm, especially if job numbers continue to decrease while more restaurants deploy robots and AI. Some studies say that over 80% of restaurant jobs could be handled by robotics, and some experts see millions of jobs being replaced through AI or automation within a decade.

And, of course, it’s not just restaurant jobs. Other lines of work, from creative to industrial, are threatened by new technology. And as more and more workers see unionization as the front line to a fight for more equitable pay, it’s also apparent – as evidenced by the Writers and Actors guild strike – the biggest fear about making a living in the future is whether or not employees will be replaced by technology.

Still, the restaurant industry, perhaps more than any other, is ripe for an automation and AI takeover, which is why I think that it could become the central battleground for the pushback in the form of an automation neo-luddite movement. Restaurant chains are the second biggest employer in the US, and two – Mcdonald’s and Yum Brands – are two of the top three employers in the country. Although Andrew Yang’s campaign warning of societal destabilization due to robotics and AI didn’t gain much traction in 2020, there’s a good chance he was ahead of his time, and we may see future politicians campaigning on an anti-automation platform with restaurants as one of the primary areas of focus.

Readers of The Spoon know we’re not anti-technology around here. In fact, we’ve covered just about every food robot out there and will continue to do so. But as we see more signals about potential pushback against the rise of automation and AI, I think it would be wise for the restaurant industry to begin to get ahead of this growing issue and think about how to balance new (and often necessary) technology with taking care of their employees.

Otherwise, they risk losing control of the narrative as more people organize to resist the impending AI and robot invasion.

Come hear experts talk about the impact of automation and AI on food jobs at The Food AI Summit on October 25th.

MIT & NVIDIA Researchers Are Building Tech That Could Enable Better Kitchen-Robot Precision

This week, a group of researchers from MIT and NVIDIA are showing off a system that one day may be pivotal in helping our robot chef make dinner without making a mistake.

While robotic planning systems are good at developing high-level plans, they often fail when confronted with highly-complex environments. Because of this, the group wanted to create a task-planning system that performed well in complicated scenarios with many obstacles.

The project focused on developing a task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithm to help robotic systems solve mobile manipulation problems in difficult environments. The core of the algorithm is PIGINet, which the group describes as a transformer-based learning system that, for each proposed task plan, helps the system more quickly understand the success probability of a given motion trajectory.

Today’s robotic system task planners often fail when faced with the reality of highly complex and infinitely variable real-world scenarios, getting bogged down in processing how to navigate through the unique physical geometries of their environments. The seemingly infinite variety of small things in a kitchen – random items on a counter, the different locations of a pot on a cooktop, open doors and drawers – may be easy for a human to handle but can give a robot fits. With the PIGINet transformer, the system will be able to more quickly process through and understand the success probabilities of each course of action due to the specific start state and the given obstacles within.

According to the group, the PIGINet transformer-enabled task planner gives the robot a better chance of success by better understanding the various scenarios and each’s feasibility before they are executed. Their initial experiments showed that using PIGINet substantially improves planning efficiency, cutting down runtime by 80% on problems in relatively simple scenarios and up to 50% in more complex ones.

While the group’s initial effort focused on kitchen and food-planning tasks, it believes its system can be applied to other tasks within and outside the home.

While there have been a lot of venture capital dollars and product development hours spent on developing kitchen robotics, you can see by this project and those similar to it just how early we are in developing truly advanced kitchen automation. The kitchen is one of the most complex and variable work environments, and creating a robot that doesn’t simply automate a single repeatable process is extremely difficult. With projects like this one and EPIC Kitchens, we are laying the foundation for our robot chef future.

You can watch a video on their project and how it works below:

PIGINet: Sequence-Based Plan Feasibility Prediction for Efficient Task and Motion Planning

Do You Have Thoughts on the Impact of Robotics & AI on The Food Biz? Fill Out Our Survey!

Last week, The Spoon hosted an insight-filled day talking with founders and operators about how new technology like generative AI will change the food business.

And next week, we’ll bring together investors, restaurant operators, and technology builders to get a pulse on the state of the food robotics market.

One thing we know from running these events is our community is one of the sharpest around when it comes to predicting how these technologies will impact the food business, so we figured why not ask them their thoughts in a Food Robotics and AI industry survey?

If you run a food company or provide technology that uses robotics or AI, or just have a good perspective on where you think these technologies are going, we want to hear from you! If you take a few minutes to fill out our survey and we’ll send you a summary of the results and enter you in a giveaway for a $100 Amazon gift card!

And oh yeah – make sure to sign up for next week’s event to get an early glimpse at the results and hear from some food robotic builders and investors.

Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurants in Japan Will Soon Use a Fry-Cooking Robot

TechMagic, a Tokyo-based restaurant robotics startup, has signed a development deal with Kentucky Fried Chicken in Japan to build a robot to automate the entire process of cooking french fries.

According to company CEO Yuji Shiraki, preliminary testing of the TechMagic fry robots is complete and is the company is moving into the development phase, where they will focus on productization and in-store installation. The fry-bot will manage fry-feeding, frying, bagging, storing, and arranging the french fries. The company is also working to reduce the size of the frybot so as to enable deployment into space-contrained spaces of existing Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

Shiraki says they are aiming to introduce the robot in some Japanese locations by this fall.

Spoon readers may recall that TechMagic has already been working with restaurant operators to deploy its back-of-house food robots in restaurants in Japan. I had a chance to visit one, the P-Robo, last September when I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. The robot is a multi-function robot that automates nearly the entire process of creating pasta. It preps the sauces and toppings, heats the noodles (which are pre-cooked and frozen, standard for noodle and pasta restaurants), combines it all in a spinner, and then delivers the meal down along a conveyor belt to the plating station. From there, the meal is plated and a human does the final prep for delivery to the customer. Afterward, the robot washes and cleansthe prep bowls. The entire process takes less than two minutes.

You can see the P-Robo in action below:

TechMagic Pasta Robot: Noodle cook, saucing, plating all in one minute.

The Tokyo restaurant where P-Robo slings pasta is owned by the Pronto Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan food and beverage conglomerate Suntory. When I interviewed Shiraki last summer, he indicated that they were also working with a large well-known Japanese food brand (presumably KFC Japan) and noodle giant Nissin.

For those wondering if this move means we’ll see KFC deploy robots stateside, I wouldn’t hold your breath, mainly because KFC Japan is operated by Mitsubishi, whereas the U.S. fried chicken chain is operated by the holding company Yum Brands.

Food Tech Weekend Podcast: Talking Food Robots With Clayton Wood

Our guest this week on our weekly food tech news wrapup is Clayton Wood, the CEO of pizza robot startup Picnic. We talk about the latest food tech news and hear Clayton’s view on where things are going in the world of food robots.

Here are the stories we discuss on this week’s show:

We also put Clayton on the food robot hot seat, asking him:

  • How would you assess the food robot marketplace in 2022?
  • Will we see some consolidation in certain areas of food robotics in 2023?
  • Predictions for the 2023 food robot market.

You can listen to this week’s pod by clicking the player below, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy!

Who Are The Leaders of the Food Tech Revolution?

We may be a little biased here at The Spoon, but we think food tech is the most exciting industry going.

Think about it: Food is what many of us – heck, most of us – spend a huge chunk of our day thinking about, craving, searching for, and consuming. Food is something everyone is passionate about.

It’s also an industry where some of the biggest advances in AI, biology, agriculture, design, chemistry, and many more fields are now manifesting themselves to create some of the most interesting and exciting changes we’ve ever seen in what, where, how, and why we feed ourselves.

And perhaps most importantly, food systems and their future will undeniably play an outsized role in determining what life on earth looks like here in 10, 20, or 100 years.

All of which is why we love covering this industry, and the biggest joy in all of it is talking to the people leading the food tech revolution. The innovation, the collective progress we make, the futuristic advances we see nearly every week, all of it is a direct result of the many inspiring voices pioneering in this space and trying to create a better world.

It’s an industry made up of thoughtful and brilliant people worthy of celebrating, which is why we’re launching the Food Tech Visionary Awards. To be presented at The Food Tech Leaders Forum in November, The Food Tech Visionary Awards will recognize those making the biggest impact and inspiring others to help lead the charge.

And because we know we’re not the only ones who are energized and inspired by the many leaders building the future of food, we want to ask our readers to tell us who they think deserves consideration. If you know someone who you think is creating something amazing and helping to catalyze the world of food tech, please let us know by filling out this nomination form.

The Food Tech Visionary awards will consider seven categories: Sustainability/Food Waste Reduction, Future Food, Future Kitchen, Restaurant Tech, Food Robotics & AI, Agriculture & Farm Tech, and Food Web3. You can find out more about what is considered under each category on the nomination page here.

We will be taking nominations until August 15th. Final selections will be chosen by the Spoon editorial team and an assembled panel of experts. Finalists will be notified and announced in the fall and the winners in each category will be named live at the Food Tech Leaders Forum on November 3rd (get tickets here).

Nominate someone who you think is a visionary helping to build the food tech revolution!

Sweetgreen’s New Takeout-Only Location Is a Logical Landing Spot For Spyce’s Kitchen Robots

This morning, Sweetgreen announced they are opening their first pickup-only location in Washington DC’s Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood. Opening on August 1st, the new location will not have any dine-in seating, will feature shelves for pickup and delivery, and all food production will be hidden from sight behind the shelving system.

My first thought upon seeing the digital renderings of the new restaurant was it reminded a lot me of Eatsa’s spare tech-forward front-of-house. My second thought was maybe Sweetgreen has robot aspirations for the back of house like Eatsa once did.

A quick refresher to understand my line of thinking. Spoon readers may remember that Eatsa’s original vision included not only an automat-like front of house with rows of cubbies and ordering kiosks, but also included a long-term plan to roboticize the back of house. They even received a patent for a fully-automated food assembly system last year.

And then last year, Sweetgreen made a fairly surprising acquisition when they scooped up robotic restaurant startup Spyce. Surprising because just the year before, the company layed off its technology team, including the company’s head of automation.

Since that acquisition, Sweetgreen has closed the remaining Spyce branded restaurants and redeployed the Spyce team to work on solutions for Sweetgreen’s own restaurants. At the time of the deal, Sweetgreen said Spyce’s automation technology will allow its workers to focus more on customer service, expand its menu into warm foods, and make meal preparation more consistent.

With all that in mind, it makes one wonder if the new restaurant format is a logical landing place for Spyce’s automation technology. With a completely digital order flow, small kitchen footprint, and the design flexibility a completely new store format gives them, it makes sense that Sweetgreen might see its new pickup-only location as the perfect place to deploy Spyce’s kitchen robot technology.

Of course, this is all pure speculation, and there’s a good chance Sweetgreen might just stick with their traditional kitchens with humans doing the bulk of the cooking. But with the company’s founders’ original vision of creating a tech company that serves food, this new restaurant format might provide them just the opportunity they are looking for to put the robot business they acquired last year to good use.

Chili’s is Trialing a Sidewalk Delivery Robot From Serve Robotics

Hankering for some Chili’s but don’t want to jump in your car? It might not be long before that grilled chicken and bowl of chili arrive at your front door via sidewalk robot.

That’s because Chili’s parent company Brinker has been secretly piloting a trial with sidewalk delivery startup Serve Robotics and is evaluating the possibility of a wider rollout.

The first hint of the Brinker-Serve pilot came via a small mention last week in an article in a Dallas publication about the company’s drone delivery trials with Flytrex. Both Brinker and Serve have since confirmed to The Spoon that they are running an early stage sidewalk delivery pilot but were not ready to discuss further details of a wider rollout.

“We can confirm Serve is working with Brinker International to roll out robotic delivery for Chili’s customers,” a Serve spokesperson told the Spoon. “We will have more to share once service is launched.”

Chili’s Serve pilot is just the latest move into robotics by the casual dining chain. Last October, robot servers named Rita from Bear Robotics started showing up across the country. And as mentioned previously, the company started testing out a Flytrex drone in North Texas.

As more restaurant revenue share comes via off-premise delivery, chains like Chili’s are exploring drone and sidewalk delivery to counter the high cost of traditional delivery from the likes of Uber and DoorDash. Wade Allen, Brinker’s SVP of innovation, told Dallas Innovates that drone delivery is “a lot cheaper” than solutions that involve a human and a car. Likewise, the cost economics of sidewalk delivery robots are also likely to be much lower than that of traditional delivery.

For Serve, which began life as a division of Postmates and spun out of Uber last year, Brinker represents a massive opportunity with over 1,600 Chili’s locations worldwide. The trial comes on the heels of last year’s seed round with strategic investors Uber, 7-Eleven, and Delivery Hero, all of which represent potentially interesting opportunities for the company.

Foodservice Distributor Gordon Trials Dexai’s Bowl-Food Making Robot

Gordon, one of the largest regional foodservice distributors in the US, is trialing a bowl-food robot from Dexai Robotics.

Dexai (a Smart Kitchen Summit finalist in 2018), makes an articulating-arm robot named Alfred. According to the post, the company installed an Alfred bowl-making salad station at Gordon’s test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

You can see the Alfred in action below:

“We help operators with efficiency,” said Dexai CEO Dave Johnson. “They can load up a table with ingredients and let the robot assemble 100 grab-and-go chicken Caesar salads. You no longer need to have a body to do that, the machine doesn’t take breaks or call in sick. … It really goes to labor savings.”

While the partnership involves a single test location today, it’s easy to see how it could blossom into a bigger collaboration for Dexai. Gordon could deploy the bowl-food robot in a managed cafeteria or in one of its nearly 200 stores it operates in the US and Canada.

For Dexai, the news comes on the heels of the Massachusetts-based startup’s deployment of Alfred to 10 military bases across the US. According to Johnson, the company plans to continue developing new robots to handle tasks such as plating food and serving drinks, which could expand the locations the robot finds itself in the future.

The Food Robot Roundup: Alfred Joins the Military, Wings Hits Milestone

While much has been made about White Castle rolling out the Flippy 2 fry station robot to 100 more of its 350 locations, we thought we’d take this chance to showcase some smaller news stories from the food robot universe in this week’s food robot roundup.

Robot Chefs Enlist in The Military

We’ve seen food robots in restaurants, hospitals, universities, and malls, but placing them on military bases is new. The U.S. Department of Defense is deploying Dexai Robotics’ automated sous chefs to ten military U.S. military bases. The robotic arms use AI and computer vision to interact with their surroundings and use standard kitchen utensils to prepare various meals. The ten robots will cost the department $1.6 million to reduce food waste, improve sanitation, and keep facilities adequately staffed. The first one was deployed at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield California at the end of last year in a dining facility that serves around 950 people a day. 

For Dexai, the news is just another sign of the company’s momentum. The Boston-based startup also recently made news through a new trial of its robotic system with Gordon, one of the biggest foodservice companies in the country. The two companies are trialing Alfred, the salad-assembly robot at Gordon’s developmental test kitchen in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Wing’s Flock Grows

Drone service Wing announced this week that it had completed 200,000 commercial deliveries, with a significant amount of them in its primary market of Australia. It makes more than 1,000 deliveries a day and has Australia’sring with Coles, one of Australia’s leading supermarket chains. 

The partnership will involve Wing making deliveries in Canberra, Australia’s capital, and sparks debate of the efficacy and viability of drone deliveries in rural vs. urban areas. In some cases, such as when Australian-based drone company Swoop Aero has delivered Pfizer vaccines to Malawi, drones have been used to deliver critical supplies (like medicine) to hard-to-reach areas. Vaccines require ultra-cold chain conditions, and the Swoop Aero drones can bypass global supply chain bottlenecks to distribute vaccines in remote communities. In the case of a city-based delivery like with Wing, drone delivery can reduce traffic congestion, accidents, and greenhouse gas emissions. 

In general, last-mile delivery has been rapidly growing and this week multicultural grocery delivery service Weee! announced $425 million in funding. We also covered Kiwibot’s $7.5M pre-series A funding a few weeks ago and the global last mile delivery market size is projected to be $128.54 billion USD this year. 

The Turnkey Robotic Restaurant

You’ve heard of software-as-a-service and even robots-as-a-service, but have you heard of restaurants-as-a-service? This week Nala Robotics debuted Nala Marketplace, a network of customizable robotic chefs that can prepare recipes from various cuisines and enable restaurateurs to launch a new digital restaurant in a day. The marketplace goes hand-in-hand with the robot kitchens Nala produces, which involve a system of multiple robots using articulating arms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to prepare, cook, and serve food. 

Restaurant chefs and owners will be able to upload recipes and menu items to the secure database and create a virtual storefront. From there, customers will be able to access these menu items and place orders sent directly to the chefs in the robot kitchen. It all sounds very futuristic, but the first Nala Marketplace location opened last month in Naperville, Illinois, where several other restaurants by Nala Robotics are operating. 

According to Ajay Sunkara, cofounder and CEO of Nala Robotics, Nala Marketplace reduces labor expenses by 60 percent, and restaurants can be set up in less than 24 hours. This has significant benefits for restaurant owners since upfront costs and labor costs can make it difficult to start a restaurant. Additionally, the flexibility of the robots to make food from many cuisines expands the options beyond the capabilities of human chefs and could also enable restaurateurs to start ghost kitchens.

Meet Dashbotics

After acquiring robotic bowl food vending machine startup Chowbotics last year, it seems that they’re expanding their food robot plans internally as well. Doordash filed trademark applications in December and early February for the names Dashbotics, Tex-Mess, and Queso Your Way. The first could indicate a plan to integrate Chowbotics into Doordash and position the platform as a white-label offering for other restaurants to launch their own consumer-facing kiosks, or it could be a sign of Doordash looking to leverage their own brand for the robotic kiosks.

Are We Ready for Humanoid Robots Like Ameca to Take Our Food Order?

If you watched the news coming out of CES, you probably saw a robot named Ameca talking to attendees on the trade show floor.

The robot, whose human(ish) eyes and facial expressions had Elon Musk freaked out when it showed up on Twitter last December, went viral during CES in January as press and attendees tweeted out videos of the humanoid interacting with attendees.

Ever since CES, I haven’t been able to shake the image of Ameca and wonder when we might see a robot like her at my corner restaurant. And, once humanoid robots start to show up in our restaurants, I can’t help but wonder how exactly consumers will feel about it? After all, it’s one thing to show off futuristic technology at a geek-filled conference like CES. It’s another to see it in your local restaurant.

Why wonder, you ask? After all, aren’t today’s front-of-house robots more R2D2 than C3PO, and didn’t a spokesperson for the company behind Ameca say it’s probably a decade before a robot like her is walking on the streets amongst us.

Because it’s only a matter of time. My guess is we’ll start to see humanoids like Ameca in customer service roles within five years, first in scenarios where interactions are limited to a focused topic (like ordering food) and the robot is either immobile (standing behind a register) or where mobility is limited to a small spacial terrain.

So if I am right and that’s the case, it’s worth asking: will consumers embrace or run away from humanoid robots working at their local restaurant?

Industry research would suggest it depends. In a research paper published in 2018 entitled “Human Or Robot? the Uncanny Valley in Consumer Robots”, researchers describe a test in which they showed participants images of three different customer service workers – a highly but imperfectly human-like robot, a human, and a human posing as a perfectly human-like robot – and told them a chain of stores is considering employing them.

The results showed people felt most comfortable with humans and least comfortable with almost-human robots. Interestingly, while respondents weren’t as comfortable with the perfectly human-like robot as they were humans, they did feel slightly more comfortable with perfectly human-like robots than ones that were slightly off. This suggested to the researchers that once consumers can no longer discern small differences that make a humanoid seem slightly uncanny, they become more comfortable.

The receptivity of humanoids might also depend on where people live. The same researchers conducted a test in the US and Japan where they showed survey respondents pictures of robots with moderate or high human likeness and also photos of humans. Japanese respondents tended to see the robots as significantly less uncanny than Americans and were more likely to see the robots as having more “human nature.”

Researchers theorized these differences in reactions between Japanese and US respondents might be cultural. They suggest that in countries like Japan where religions like Confucianism and Shinto teach that spirits live in both animate and inanimate objects, consumers may be more likely to grant human nature onto robots. They contrast this with the US, where Christianity, a religion that believes only humans have souls, is dominant.

While consumer perceptions tied to religious or local value systems are important, it’s also worth recognizing that collective perceptions in society do change over time. As robotics become more commonplace, everyday consumers may just become less freaked out about them. Today’s novelty could become tomorrow’s everyday reality, if you will.

And while only time will tell, my guess is operators might opt to be more conservative, at least in the near term, when deploying humanoid robots. After all, if almost-human robots freak out consumers, restaurant owners might be safer installing something closer to Chuck E. Cheese than some real-world version of the kid from Polar Express.