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Meet Two Startups Bringing Robots to Restaurants

Monday December 12, 2022. 09:34 AM , from Slashdot
It's a coffee shop and and robotics startup. Founded in 2020, Seattle-based Artly has seven locations in Washington, Oregon and California, reports the Seattle Times, noting that each location has a mechanically dexterous robotic arm that they're calling a 'barista bot' that 'makes the espresso, pours the milk, steams the foam and puts it all together, topping it off with a carefully drawn foam leaf.'

[P]ressing market needs were behind the innovation. Cost concerns and high employee turnover in food services have led Artly and others to provide automated solutions to restaurants and businesses, even before the pandemic hit and brought additional challenges. Just a couple of years into operation, Artly CEO Meng Wang said the company has maintained healthy operating margins — the profit a company makes after paying for costs of production — by eliminating the biggest expense in food business: labor. For a coffee shop that would need two or three baristas, Artly needs one staffer, in addition to a barista bot like Jarvis. Artly reinvests the money it saves from labor into sourcing more quality coffee, Wang said.

Artly isn't alone in introducing robot help in food preparation. Another Seattle-based startup, Picnic, offers automation solutions for a staple of the American diet: pizza. Its food prep station can produce up to 100 pizzas in one hour using metered toppings. Since Picnic was founded in 2016, its robots have assembled pizzas in many places, including Seattle's T-Mobile Park and the Las Vegas Convention Center. The company has seen a growing interest in its robots. This summer, Picnic announced partnerships with pizzeria Moto's West Seattle location and a Domino's store in Berlin.... With a robotics-as-a-service business model, the standard full offering for operators is $4,500 a month on a 36-month contract.

But the founder also told the newspaper how their customers reacted to their barista bots:
[C]ustomers were initially intrigued and excited about the robot barista, but the service was slower than with a human barista. He said customers craved the connection with the person making their coffee. 'When [customers] go to the coffee shop, their expectation is to be served by a human,' Yang said.

With that, Artly has focused on opening locations in shopping malls and business office buildings rather than standard coffee shops.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/12/12/0435228/meet-two-startups-bringing-robots-to-restaurant...
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