Chipotle pilots new line of robots in California after $20 per hour wage.
Chipotle pilots new line of robots in California after $20 per hour wage.
(The Center Square) - Chipotle Mexican Grill announced it is piloting an automatic avocado peeler and pit remover at one California location, and an automatic bowl and salad machine at
More propaganda to make people hate increasing minimum wage.
Even if minimum wage never increased, they'd still try and put these robots in. These two things are unrelated!
I can confirm this. I've got family in the restaurant industry and we've been keeping an eye on advances in restaurant related robotry for ages. We knew this was coming looong ago. Like, a decade ago. It just wasn't quite there yet.
Robotry isn't a word, but I think if it were it would be a way to refer to people who hated robots. Kind of like ribbitry is for people who hate frogs.
Edit: oed and mw must have a cage match to decide this one.
McDonald's invested in robotics every year they didn't increase minimum wage. Clearly they must not know shit about maintaining businesses. Automatic soda machines, burger cookers, bun warmers...
Taco Bell tried to do this in the 90s.
This article is light on the details of the failures, but basically the little bits of lettuce, tomato and cheese would slip out of the various holders and get smashed into the moving pieces and jam everything up while starting to rot. It was broken more often than not, and even when it wasn't it was a pain in the ass to keep sanitary. Far more trouble than it was ever worth.
Building these machines and operating them won't be the hard part. Keeping them working will be more expensive than paying people to make food for a halfway decent wage. The necessary logistics system just to supply replacement parts for the machines will probably break the bank, and never mind all the technicians they'll need to make repairs.
Something something McDonalds milkshake machines.
The difference os that yhe milkshake machines are an actual gift because Taylor gets paid to repair the things. Some exec at McDonald's is getting massive kickbacks to force everyone to use shitty machines that need to be professionally maintained.
Automation has evolved a huge amount since the 90s, probably more than the mobile.phone has. This sort of device has been common in food factories for quite a while now and is inevitably moving into first high-volume then after refinement canteen kitchens before slowly making its way into the home.
It's a great thing if it does, the food industry is hugely wasteful especially when trying to lower overheads which also lowers quality and healthiness of diets. Multistage processing allows near to raw ingredients to be sourced locally and used as needed thus avoiding the need for chemical preservatives, pre-proceasing and all the transport logistics, added risk, and etc. Cheap food places could go back to the days of getting fresh produce delivered rather than bags of presliced and shaped meal components from a factory - that'd be huge amounts of plastic and oil use removed from our global consumption.
Of course this installed device is probably just fairly basic pick and place using preshaped meal components but it's a step in the evolution of small-scale industrial kitchens which will eventually benefit us all.
Automation has evolved a huge amount since the 90s
This is true, and we have smaller, lighter and more accurate motors, and fancy tools like machine vision with object identification, and substantially better electronics.
I don't think it matters. Nothing has changed in food ingredients - they're squishy, slippery, soft and irregular. If you put just a little too much pressure on a cooked grain of rice it will turn into a two-inch-long smear of starch that other things will stick to, and then you've got a little pile of gunk inside your machine. The more complex these machines are the more impossible it will be to keep them clean on the inside.
I remember when this burger making robot was getting a lot of attention (apparently they were "the definition of disruption"). Their restaurant location in Daly City (Creator Burger) closed during the pandemic but then reopened with a simpler version:
Gone from this version of Creator’s robot, however, are the automated toppings like lettuce, tomato and cheese, which humans will now apply to the burger themselves.
Give you one guess why.
The company is now dead, their domain is abandoned and the restaurant location is permanently closed, although apparently they managed to sell one to a Sam's Club in Arkansas last year. Wonder how that's going for them now.
It might be a great thing if it wasn't displacing so many workers.
Unless and until some sort of UBI system exists, I cannot applaud businesses increasingly putting people out of work, especially while continually increasing their profits.
Hmm, let's see. In order to fully prepare a burrito, you would need to perform numerous tactile actions. First would be grabbing a tortilla. Given the floppy, inconsistently shaped, and thin properties of the tortilla, you couldn't grab one reliably using a standard 6 axis or suspended picker robot, you would need a tortilla loading mechanism, probably spring loaded with a sensor and servo motor to index the tortilla forward into the work area. Okay, so you have your tortilla loading mechanism. Next is to apply sauces like guac or sour cream. You can achieve this using a suspended robot like an ABB FlexPicker with a sauce application tool or other similarly spec'd robot. Oops! Is the customer allergic to avocado? Looks like the robot needs a tooling change! In fact, it'll need a tooling change anytime a new sauce is requested. Next is toppings and filling. This would need to be performed using dozens of hoppers and sensors to detect the tortilla underneath. Next is an automated rolling device. You might think you could get away with some kind of motorized roll-your-own cigarette type device, but burritos are also tucked, so you would need some kind of machine that can receive a loaded tortilla into a die, with actuators on the sides to tuck, and perpendicular actuators on the bottom to roll. Next, you need to wrap the tortilla in paper. The same type of device can roll the burrito in paper, but it would need to be a discrete device as to cut down on mess. Now, automatically present the burrito to the customer.
You would need roughly 5 automated stations that include robots, sensors, actuators, and bespoke engineered parts. To control it all, you would need a PLC with enough IO slots to manage all of the signals that are required (ie: signal to indicate tortilla is loaded, signal to indicate that sour cream is empty, signal to indicate that tortilla has failed wrapping, etc there are dozens of signals to process even in simple operations), a massive electrical panel to house all of the control circutry, and you would need at least 1 college educated technician (earning roughly $60-80k per year) to maintain the equipment at all times, but more likely, you'll need at least 2 technicians per shift.
Then comes the commissioning phase, which given the menu and all of the options Chipotle offers, would take months to fine tune the process. It has moving parts and exists in a location with lots of civilian consumers not wearing PPE, so you'll have to perform a pre-start health and safety report and get that certified by the right governing body (usually state/province level government agency).
Then comes the paperwork required to terminate thousands of staff legally and the added HR cost of taking managers away from managing in order to terminate their entire staff. Not to mention, the added risk of all of your managers losing faith in the company due to severe morale degradation.
All of this assumes 100% uptime, which is an impossibility. Even Toyota's lines go down for PMs or faults.
Is that easier than just paying your minimum wage earners a little more?
Fully-automated outdoor vending machines for pizza from scratch already exist and aren't new. It doesn't seem like a huge stretch to adapt that to roll something into a burrito instead of baking it.
Yeah, this whole list is kind of nuts. Burritos already get mass produced in factories. Those prepackaged ones at the grocery store? Some brands have people hand making them but quite a few are machine made and rolled. It's not a very big stretch to put that kind of machinery into a restaurant, and 2 techs is about the same price as 4 $20/hr works by their estimate
How many decades before the purchase, installation and testing costs of these robots are recouped vs. that $20/hour wage?
Because I'm thinking it may not be all that cost-effective to just say "fuck you" to a minimum wage.
I honestly think it's more the principle of the matter... they'd rather invest in robots to do this than consider paying those they view beneath them anything remotely resembling a living wage.
Chipotle has fallen off a cliff. It was decent 10 years ago, now it's trash. They treat their workers like shit.
Mmm mmm... Don't you love the taste of supply chain optimization?
I quit going after their CFO was bitching about quiet quitting keeping him up at night.
QDoba is better anyways, they're just not in nearly as many locations (around me anyways).
Pancheros is my favorite. They press tortillas fresh when you order and I love it.
Nice! I'll keep an eye out for one!
I wish I liked QDoba, Chipotle is still better to me even after all their changes which I am not crazy about either. Luckily we have a local chain that beats the pants off them both called Illegal Pete’s
QDoba is better anyways, they're just not in nearly as many locations
Only seen them in shopping mall food courts.
interesting! I've never seen one in a mall in my area, just stand alone (same with Chipotle actually)
Push it more and more towards universal basic income, with Chipotle's help.
Is there any chipotle that exists where a better-tasting taco truck isn’t within walking distance?
I was promised taco trucks on every street corner if Biden won. Of all the Trump lies, this one is by far the most disappointing.
All of Ohio
We have bodegas and trucks, for a very reasonable price, although the trucks cost less, I suppose because of less overhead. If anyone's never had homemade tortillas, I recommend them. In the bodegas, they usually have a machine, similar to the wringer on the antique wringer washers so they're thin and more uniform, but hand made masa tortillas are divine, especially topped with avocado and queso fresco.
Near me there is a chipotle, a taco bell, and a nice taco truck that is open late, all within just a couple blocks of each other.
Chipotle is dead to me. Suprema Market in Atascadero is easily the best burrito I can get my hands on.
Have you tried an al pastor burrito from Los Robles Cafe in Paso? Thanks for the rec of Suprema Market
No, but I will today
Companies should be outright banned from dodging ways to pay wages like this
No, they should be required to pay taxes equivelant to what they subtracted when they removed a tax-paying worker. All of those taxes should go towards UBI.
I think we really need some kind of automation tax, whether or not it’s specifically this take. But between robotics and AI, the only sustainable solution is taxing these kinds of things to fund UBI or some similar payments scheme for the displaced workers. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a few wealthy capitalists and mass unemployment. So it sure sounds to me like they need to choose between the tax option, and a significantly more dangerous option.
Chill. You can't force businesses to hire people any more than you can force someone to work.
Don’t worry, the robots will be subscription by year’s end.
That's okay, I already don't eat there.