Today CaliBurger announced they’d opened the first restaurant since the onset of the pandemic. The latest addition to the burger chain is in Shoreline, Washington, and to mark the importance of the occasion, the company brought a friend: Flippy the fry robot.
CaliBurger’s use of Flippy at the north Seattle location is the first deployment of Miso Robotics’ fast food robot in the Seattle market. According to the release, Flippy will start at the fry station, but the restaurant expects its new employee to be somewhat versatile:
While the Shoreline store will use Flippy for french-fry cooking initially, Flippy can also cook chicken breasts and tenders, onion rings, sweet potato waffle fries in addition to fries. The system’s image recognition technology allows for real-time quality control to prevent any food quality errors during the cooking process and before any food items reach customers.
The new CaliBurger location is also the first time the chain has deployed PopID’s pay-by-face technology. PopID, which launched its pay-by-face network in southern California last year, allows customers to create an account that ties a debit card to their biometric ID (i.e., their face). The customer can also pull up information such as favorites and loyalty points once ID’d at the point of sale.
As for Flippy, CaliBurger CEO Jeffrey Kalt had the now-standard company line we hear when a new food robot is installed in a new location: the deployment of Flippy will allow the humans to focus on customer-facing jobs and, as a result, will improve the overall guest experience.
“The deployment of Flippy enables CaliBurger to retrain our staff to spend more time tending to customer needs to better improve the guest experience, while supervising the robotic system that’s handling the cooking,” said Kalt. “This results in happier workers, more satisfied customers, and a more profitable business.”
You can watch the video of Flippy in action below:
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