Americans love eating out. This yr we are forecast spend over $1.1 trillion on this purpose – the most in history National Association of Restaurateurs.
The problem is that restaurants need people to offer drinks, meals and snacks. By the end of the yr, the industry will probably employ nearly 16 million people across the country. But it is not enough: Nearly half of foodservice employers now say they need more employees.
Theoretically, automation could significantly help alleviate labor shortages. To this end, start-ups have stepped in over the last few years, hiring robot waiters, baristas, pizza chefs, and burger and fries chefs.
Their efforts resulted in loud bursts of flame, e.g SoftBank-robot-assisted pizza maker juice. However, we proceed to see maturing startups attract investment for tasks similar to putting food on tables and cooking French fries.
Meanwhile, as labor shortages persist, employers may already be beginning to explore what bots have to supply.
“Restaurants have no choice,” he said Richard HullCEO Miso Robotics, a start-up known for its Flippy food processor. Employers who may have previously been keen on kitchen automation now see it as a long-term survival strategy.
The pressing issue, based on Hull, is that post-pandemic labor shortages, which many believed were temporary, have not disappeared. The recent reality is that it’s hard to draw and retain kitchen employees, “and that’s partly because many jobs aren’t great.”
Dollars for restaurant robots
Even though humans don’t have to spend eight hours a day in front of a fryer, robots don’t mind. The same goes for other tasks similar to seating tables, filling drive-thru drink orders and grilling burgers.
However, the difficult task for startups is to maneuver from a concept to a marketable product. An almost equally difficult challenge is convincing investors to support these efforts.
Hurdles aside, a handful are managing to boost funding whilst overall startup investment has declined. To illustrate, using Crunch Base data, we have collected a list of 16 financed firms in the restaurant automation and robotics industry, most of which last raised capital last yr.
The most recently funded company on the list is based in Redwood City, California Bear Roboticsacquired a $60 million Series C last week, backed by its recent largest shareholder LG electronics. Bear creates autonomous service robots, and its offer includes Servi – a bot that may deliver food and drinks or collect dishes.
This is a large addressable market. In the United States alone, over 4.5 million people are employed in serving food and drinks, with a large proportion providing table service. There are over a million job offers available every yr.
Hamburgers are also big business. This is a motivating factor Ania, maker of a burger-cooking robot that raised $12 million in seed funding in January. The San Jose, California-based company says its bot, called Alpha Grill, can prepare as much as 200 burgers per hour.
Keeping up with the lunch and dinner rush is also a major area of concern, with startups trying to make it easier to hurry up food preparation during periods of high demand. In this spirit, based in San Francisco Chef roboticsmaker of robots that help food firms increase production volumes recently secured $14.75 million in combined debt and equity financing, bringing its total financing to greater than $22 million.
An uneven record of feat
As start-up sectors develop in restaurant robotics, there is no shortage of boosters. Early newcomers to the space, like the robot barista Cafe X or a hyper-automatic restaurant Flairor Flippy Miso, received widespread media attention and commentary.
However, initial enthusiasm does not all the time translate into long-term success. Several robot restaurants in the area are not open, including a burger joint Creator and the quinoa restaurant Bowl Eatsa (whose technology was woven into one other startup, Brightloom).
The biggest flop was Zume, a Silicon Valley startup that had plans to deliver pizza using robots and later began using sustainable packaging. It raised greater than $400 million between 2015 and 2019 before shutting down last yr.
Spyce, a robot-equipped restaurant specializing in healthy meals in a bowl, also closed its original restaurant after being acquired by the salad chain in 2021 Sweet green. However, its technology is helping to power a recent automated restaurant called Infinite Kitchen.
Still on the first course
Miso’s Hull believes the high hopes and expectations surrounding robot-equipped restaurants have helped stall some of its early, high-profile efforts. While seed-stage startups often go out of business, most other sectors see it more quietly.
According to Hull, we are still in the very early stages of the restaurant robotics market. While restaurants have been leveraging technology in back-of-house operations for some time – as evidenced by established firms like Open the table AND Toast — they moved slower in the kitchen.
According to Hull’s estimates, robotics startups have only been developing and implementing food preparation automation in restaurants for about five years. They still have a long approach to go.
Bottom line: it’s probably too early to call kitchen automation with robots a failure or an unexpected success. In the chronology of startup innovations, we are probably barely at the soup course. Before we pass judgment, let’s leave time for the most important course and dessert.