Stanford Engineers Team Up With Michelin-Star Chef To Build Modular Restaurants (techcrunch.com) 52
Stanford engineers Alex Kolchinski, Alex Gruebele and Max Perham paired up with Michelin-star chef Eric Minnich to start Mezli, a company building fully autonomous modular restaurants. TechCrunch reports: Mezli's prototype robot restaurant is making a minority of the bowls served to customers and is supplemented by a human-powered kitchen. It is up and running and serving customers from the company's KitchenTown location in San Mateo. The machines take up a 10-foot by 20-foot space and are freestanding. They are loaded with ingredients, initially offering Mediterranean-style grain bowls, side dishes and drinks. The bowls start at $6.99. Diners can order directly from the restaurant or order online and pick up the food or have it delivered. The test location is already showing promise: 44% of customers who have tried the food have become repeat customers, Kolchinski said.
The company is now working on its third version of its prototype that will be ready for a public launch next year, he said. That momentum is backed by a $3 million seed round from investors including Metaplanet, roboticist Pieter Abbeel, restaurateur Zaid Ayoub and Y Combinator. That new funding will enable the company to add more talent, parts, food and operational expenses. Once the company can scale, Mezli will be able to mass produce thousands of the modular restaurants and deploy them in a fraction of the time and money it takes for traditional restaurants to get up and running, Kolchinski added. "We will be scaling up to a few locations and then mass producing them," he said. "We expect to hit 1,000 locations faster than other restaurants due to our mass production method."
The company is now working on its third version of its prototype that will be ready for a public launch next year, he said. That momentum is backed by a $3 million seed round from investors including Metaplanet, roboticist Pieter Abbeel, restaurateur Zaid Ayoub and Y Combinator. That new funding will enable the company to add more talent, parts, food and operational expenses. Once the company can scale, Mezli will be able to mass produce thousands of the modular restaurants and deploy them in a fraction of the time and money it takes for traditional restaurants to get up and running, Kolchinski added. "We will be scaling up to a few locations and then mass producing them," he said. "We expect to hit 1,000 locations faster than other restaurants due to our mass production method."
Not yet (Score:2)
is supplemented by a human-powered kitchen.
I wish them luck, but they haven't solved the autonomous chef problem yet.
Re:Not yet (Score:5, Interesting)
is supplemented by a human-powered kitchen.
I wish them luck, but they haven't solved the autonomous chef problem yet.
I've looked into this before, and the key issue isn't whether we have the tech to solve it now or not, but that the alternative (minimum wage workers) is extremely competitive. Getting an hour of a human worker's labour for ~$10-20 bucks is just a really good deal. They can do the cooking, cleaning, deal with customers, suppliers etc. If times are good you just hire some more. If the economy sours, you just dump them and the cost is gone - there is no big capital investment. And by-and-large, the state pays to educate them, and many times now, provides housing and in-work benefits so they can survive on absurdly low levels of pay.
It is very difficult to compete with this using robots for these low wage jobs. I'm sure that will eventually change, but there are much bigger fish to fry in areas such as transport automation (where the mechanics is much simpler) or things like lawyer/banker bots.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The article also rally doesn't specify what the "robots" are doing. Are they cooking up each part of the dish from scratch? Or are they reheating frozen dinners and dumping them into bowls?
In one sense, we've had robots cooking dinners for restaurants for decades. They just do it in big factories, on assembly lines. Then the plastic pouches of food are shipped to, for example, Olive Garden. There, human cooks reheat the frozen bags of food and plate them.
I'm guessing it's somewhere in the middle. I would be
Re: (Score:2)
It reminds me of Zume pizza using robots to build pizza [youtube.com]. They had the robots (as can be seen from the film), but if you actually ordered a pizza, it would be made by a human.
Who can afford 7$ "bowls" ? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
After first order is free promotion is over, who's going to be left with jobs that still pay actual wages to afford to eat out?
In typical human fashion, we'll drive off that cliff when we come to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying I should invest in modular cliffs?
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying I should invest in modular cliffs?
Robots to clean up all the crap at the bottom of the cliffs. Gonna get messy.
Re: (Score:2)
Cheapest bowl in San Mateo?
I didn't do the math, but I bet if a resident kept reverse mortgaging their house or condo they could probably eat there until you're dead. Apartment dwellers will have a different calculus.
Re: (Score:2)
Universal Basic Income. It doesn't make sense to hire people to work for you so they can buy your own products. I mean, you might as well give someone $7 to come eat it. i mean, if you pay someone $10 and they buy one burrito bowl for $7 that cost you $15 to make, where's the sense in that? The only solution is Universal Basic Income .. robots do the hard work, and then you pay a "robot salary" tax which can subsidize people to buy stuff and invest wisely so they don't get bored or hungry. That is until ro
Re: (Score:2)
It's not socialism if the government doesn't own industry, means of production, or monopolies. Here is the definition of socialism:
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
UBI does not entail the government owning any companies.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia:
Talking about "the definition of socialism" (my emphasis) is an example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. UBI experiments have largely been conducted by social democrats: that's the important contrast with Venezuela.
Re: Who can afford 7$ "bowls" ? (Score:2)
UBI does not incorporate social ownership of anything. Unless taxes itself is socialism, which means all forms of government is socialism .. which is a ridiculous dilution.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So they have invented (Score:5, Funny)
a food truck without wheels?
Inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
But we sure as hell aren't planning for it. It is pretty simple math - even if the numbers are enormous
Gotta sell stuff to make money. In the short term, as corporations eliminate their enemy - the employee - they can make more money. But a dual problem crops up at some point. An ever increasing number of unemployable people who only consume, but cannot put money into the system. And a corporate class that demands more profit every three months.
There will probably be a tipping point, at which time, it's going to get pretty ugly.
The Billionaire class will turn on each other. You don't increase your billions by going after people with no money.
The unemployable? Oh, so nasty. When you have zero prospects, you don't fear to die, because your life will be short and brutal anyhow. So we have maybe 50-75 percent of a first world country that is going to be an unemployable powder keg.
We might end up with a depop, where people end up being purposely killed to basically get rid of them. That's a problem for the corporate structure, so they'll have to figure out a way to get more money from less people. Even so, after the tipping point, there will be a massive economic dislocation.
Malthus might be proven right for the wrong reason, as the population controlling resource will shift from basic ones like food to economic resource, the figuring out what to do with humans who are no longer of any use, requiring a massive cull, either by government euthanasia, internecine warfare, or we just gleefully extinct ourselves by pushing that button, as some of the death cults like fundamentalist Christians desire.
In the real world... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the real world... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the real world people become more productive from this type of innovation and everyone ends up wealthier. The US used to have millions of file clerks. ALL their jobs were replaced with computers. Are they all just sitting around waiting for a government check? No, other, higher paying jobs are created as the whole economy moves up. 150 years ago 85 percent of people in the US worked on farms. Farm automation changed all that. Did the economy collapse? Of course not. This sort of neo-luddite nonsense is willfully blind of actual history.
In previous industrious "revolutions", we always had the exact same answer for the human that was not merely made unemployed by an industry change, but temporarily unemployable. The answer was always the same; Go get re-educated. Whether that meant learning a new physical trade, or actually re-training yourself in school.
Now, tell me what THAT answer is when the next revolution that's coming is the AI and automation revolution, with the end goal of not merely displacing humans and temporarily making them unemployable, but permanently making them unemployable. Think destroying ALL of those cash register, driver, and store stocking jobs that actually represent the bottom rungs on the ladder of success, makes climbing that ladder any easier? No, it does not.
We will soon have far more humans than every industry can shit out worthless and pointless jobs for. At that point, you better have an answer for the unemployable masses, and I can promise you that lame-ass one you've used in the past won't work, luddite.
Re: (Score:3)
In previous industrious "revolutions", we always had the exact same answer for the human that was not merely made unemployed by an industry change, but temporarily unemployable. The answer was always the same; Go get re-educated. Whether that meant learning a new physical trade, or actually re-training yourself in school.
Now, tell me what THAT answer is when the next revolution that's coming is the AI and automation revolution, with the end goal of not merely displacing humans and temporarily making them unemployable, but permanently making them unemployable. Think destroying ALL of those cash register, driver, and store stocking jobs that actually represent the bottom rungs on the ladder of success, makes climbing that ladder any easier? No, it does not.
We will soon have far more humans than every industry can shit out worthless and pointless jobs for. At that point, you better have an answer for the unemployable masses, and I can promise you that lame-ass one you've used in the past won't work, luddite.
Exactly. The Pollyannas are making the mistake of assuming that the past dictates the future, and that this automation revolution is the exact same thing as the previous ones.
All of the other ones were based on growing more food, making better and more parts and machines, and increasing productivity.
This one is based on removing as many humans as possible from the employment rolls. This instantly shows us it is nothing the same as previous automation. Using a restaurant with no human employees as an ex
Re: (Score:2)
We will soon have far more humans than every industry can shit out worthless and pointless jobs for. At that point, you better have an answer for the unemployable masses, and I can promise you that lame-ass one you've used in the past won't work, luddite.
We are still several generations from that and we already have at least two distinct possibilities:
#1: We are nowhere close to the technology needed to replace even a minimum wage housekeeper. The rich have always employed domestic servants for this and this need is not going away and is only increasing as more and more upper middle class workers reach the level where they can hire this done as well. In times and places where income disparity is great enough, it's not uncommon for the rich to employ mult
Re: (Score:3)
In the real world people become more productive from this type of innovation and everyone ends up wealthier. The US used to have millions of file clerks. ALL their jobs were replaced with computers. Are they all just sitting around waiting for a government check? No, other, higher paying jobs are created as the whole economy moves up. 150 years ago 85 percent of people in the US worked on farms. Farm automation changed all that. Did the economy collapse? Of course not. This sort of neo-luddite nonsense is willfully blind of actual history.
It's sort of funny, my Pollyanna. How about giving us a dissertation on just what these unemployable people are going to do. What are the new and higher paying jobs that the people at the bottom of the food chain are going to perform?
The fallacy you are banking on is called the hot hand fallacy. Automation has resulted in more jobs created, soit will always result in more automation, so more jobs. There is a really big problem with that argument. And it is this:
The present automation is specifically aim
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't want to admit this, but these are the same thing once you recognize that "eliminate" in this case means "some" not all.
But before we address that: there is no "automation" that has ever been created that didn't create jobs. There will be people designing and maintaining these kitchens. There will be people delivering food to them. Just as when clerks were replaced by computers, there were computer programmers, system administrators, computer designers, and so on, who got jobs. And the people who lost their's found that they had new jobs in similar fields. This is true of this project. There are jobs created by this project. It was not designed by Elon Musk, who build a robot to turn carbon into mobile kitchens, that'll never need maintenance and don't need raw materials to turn into dinners.
This is wonderful - I now agree. If we automate all jobs, it will create an infinite number of new jobs - a true positive feedback loop of work. Oh brave new world But back to the increasing productivity: you have to assume that these kitchens will be good enough to replace traditional restaurants. There's little or no reason to think this is true. People who go to restaurants merely to eat usually have alternatives, from microwaved meals (if they're lazy) to pre-prepared food made when they have the time. Only a handful actually need to go to a restaurant, which means its fair to say that most restaurant goers go to restaurants for more than just the food. They want to be waited on, they want someone to clean up the mess, they want a building they can sit in that's clean and ordered. There's no evidence these mobile kitchens will address them unless they have a full service restaurant attached. And if the mobile kitchen attached to a real restaurant means it's suddenly economic to open a restaurant that would otherwise be uneconomic, then guess what, jobs have been created, and those jobs were created as a result of higher productivity.
Drop the luddism. The idea will succeed or fail on its merits, but it's not part of a plot to eliminate employment opportunities. It's merely an additional dining option for some, and a way to run restaurants more cheaply for others, that'll create directly and indirectly a whole bunch of jobs that didn't exist before. If it works it's progress. If it doesn't, it'll disappear.
Sorry, but you don't get to issue orders to me, my friend. And I'm not a luddite - I'm doing analysis. It just doesn't agree with your narrative.
You are serving up platitudes, declaring that something that has worked in the past will always work. That really is not the best way to advance your argument, because the "hot hand" argument just tends to be shown wrong eventually.
It's a little silly anyhow. In Physics, concepts that end up at infinity are really suspect. Your concept that automation always
Re: (Score:2)
Shouldn't it be people who actually reinvent themselves and make themselves marketable, as opposed to hoping the government hands them more freebies?
Yes, of course. I've reinvented myself a few times in my career. But let's face it - I'm so driven that I'm considered a real asshole. Not everyone can reinvent themselves, unless it is going from one menial job to another.
disclaimer - I've worked at what would be considered menial jobs. Worked as a flower delivery, a pizza baker, car parts salesman as a lifeguard (not certain that is actually menial) but I've been around enough to know that a lot of the folks in menial work are doing the best they can w
Re: (Score:2)
An ever increasing number of unemployable people who only consume, but cannot put money into the system
There's no inevitable reason why this must happen, we've long past the point where most people are doing essential work.
That isn't to say they aren't working, you can hire someone to clip your toenails for you. And they charge a lot to clip your fingernails.
So a more likely scenario is that work will change from drudge labor to more relaxing endeavors. In fact, that's already happened.
Re: (Score:3)
There will probably be a tipping point, at which time, it's going to get pretty ugly.
There have been plenty of "tipping" points throughout history. And no, it's not going to get "pretty" ugly. It's war. It's going to get really fucking ugly. We humans have even engaged in War on the World stage, and were even dumb enough to do it twice, proving we're not even smart enough to learn from it.
Malthus might be proven right for the wrong reason, as the population controlling resource will shift from basic ones like food to economic resource, the figuring out what to do with humans who are no longer of any use, requiring a massive cull, either by government euthanasia, internecine warfare, or we just gleefully extinct ourselves by pushing that button, as some of the death cults like fundamentalist Christians desire.
The unemployable masses will represent Welfare 2.0, just on a slightly larger scale, and only slightly more annoying to the Billionaire Class that created all of it, and is still ultimately funding all
Hygiene (Score:4, Interesting)
How can they keep it clean? I feel like the dispenser part can easily accumulate food, I mean all the parts in general .. I assume the containers of the food and maybe other parts are disposable -- but then it gets costly. And does it have cameras to see what's happening inside it? Is there some self cleaning thing that happens? I guess someone must have to come by once a day or a few times a week to load and clean it. They would probably have to pay whoever's doing that like $40 an hour and she'll have to take care of multiple machines to make it worth the time. I hope there aren't parts that food or sauces can be uncleaned for a while.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Hm, that's a good idea actually.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's cool, it seems like most mainstream sci-fi has gotten dystopic and wary of technology. That's feeding back viciously into all the anti-science, anti-GMO, and anti-vax sentiments today. Due to the success of antibiotics and previous vaccines, it's easy to deny the things that we were protected from even existed. If someone finds a cure for cancer or dementia and those go away .. no doubt those treatments will be maligned as well. It might be human nature to think that a previous problem or someone els
Re: (Score:2)
Solving the wrong problem ... maybe(?) (Score:3)
This looks to me like a potentially sub-par cross-breed between a military mass hall and a vending machine, combining the worst of those two worlds. The optimisation through robot-cooking might be eaten up by mainanance and the limiting of options. With a human preparing my meal I get to talk to a human and he can make the special arrangements I'd like ... more of this, less of that, etc.
I'd first focus on reusable portable containers funded by deposit and robots that can clean them. And perhaps some upgraded automation of pre-cooking the basics.
Really? (Score:2)
You need a Michelin-starred chef for a machine that puts Quinoa and Chia seeds in a bowl?
Re: (Score:2)
If you want people to click on your shill's articles, you do.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh boy! (Score:2)
Not since the first Matrix movie have I pined for gruel /s.
Vague on technology (Score:1)
Not sure why I need to get excited on this. It doesn't give anything out about technology used, and where it's used.
For all we know it could just be spoons on motors that just plops prepared food from the box underneath onto a bowl that rotates each time a spoon plops food onto it so the food doesn't fall on top of each other (ok.. this is over simplified, but you get the idea).
This might just be automating the low hanging fruit of front counter work of places like Chipotle, Subway etc.
What does it actually do? (Score:2)
I can't find a video of it actually working, just stuff in a bowl. Is anything actually cooked by this 'robot' or is it just a glorified vending machine?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it is just a glorified vending machine. /. accepts for puff-piece advertising.
Amazing what