Chipotle Tests Robot That Can Prepare Avocados To Make Guacamole Faster (cnbc.com) 59
Chipotle has developed a robot that can cut the 50-minute process of making guacamole in half. "The fast-casual chain developed the collaborative robot, or cobot, in partnership with Vebu Labs, a California-based robotics startup," reports CNBC. "Chipotle also announced Wednesday that its $50 million venture arm, Cultivate Next, is investing in Vebu. Financial terms weren't disclosed." From the report: To prepare avocados using the Autocado, Chipotle employees load up the device with a full case of the ripe fruit. The Autocado can hold up to 25 pounds at one time. Then, the machine vertically orients the avocados, slices them in half and removes their cores and skin. A bowl at the bottom collects the fruit, which employees can then hand mash and mix with the rest of the guacamole ingredients.
Chipotle still wants employees to have a hand in making their guacamole. "There's no plan to test automated guac made in our restaurant," Curt Garner, Chipotle's chief technology officer, told CNBC. Employees don't have to monitor the Autocado while it prepares the avocados and can even use the top of the device as more counter space to prepare other ingredients. The prototype is "very close" to design for manufacture, according to Garner. Chipotle expects to test the Autocado in restaurants later this year.
Eventually, Vebu plans to add machine learning capabilities and sensors to the Autocado that will help it evaluate the quality of avocados. Preparing avocados for guacamole routinely ranks as one of employees' least favorite tasks, Garner said. It's also one of the most dangerous duties in Chipotle kitchens, sometimes resulting in knife injuries. On top of saving time and labor costs, the robot could also cut food waste. If the chain deploys the Autocado across its footprint of more than 3,200 locations, it could help save millions of dollars on avocados annually, the company said. Despite those savings, guacamole will probably still cost customers extra. "It's worth it," Garner said.
Chipotle still wants employees to have a hand in making their guacamole. "There's no plan to test automated guac made in our restaurant," Curt Garner, Chipotle's chief technology officer, told CNBC. Employees don't have to monitor the Autocado while it prepares the avocados and can even use the top of the device as more counter space to prepare other ingredients. The prototype is "very close" to design for manufacture, according to Garner. Chipotle expects to test the Autocado in restaurants later this year.
Eventually, Vebu plans to add machine learning capabilities and sensors to the Autocado that will help it evaluate the quality of avocados. Preparing avocados for guacamole routinely ranks as one of employees' least favorite tasks, Garner said. It's also one of the most dangerous duties in Chipotle kitchens, sometimes resulting in knife injuries. On top of saving time and labor costs, the robot could also cut food waste. If the chain deploys the Autocado across its footprint of more than 3,200 locations, it could help save millions of dollars on avocados annually, the company said. Despite those savings, guacamole will probably still cost customers extra. "It's worth it," Garner said.
They need to prevent food poisoning first (Score:3)
Before going into robotic.
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You can get a Burrito and play Space Invaders at the same time!
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Going to Chipotle for genuine Mexican food is like me going to Panda Express for Chinese food. I'll go there if that's literally the only choice and I starving.
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Panda Express is Chinese food changed to fit non-Asian taste. I'm Chinese, when I want genuine Chinese food, I go to the restaurant that caters to Chinese, with low sanitary score.
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As opposed to buying $20 cut-resistant gloves so the people don't cut themselves?
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Removing humans from the process is the best way to prevent food poisoning.
Re:They need to prevent food poisoning first (Score:4, Funny)
Removing humans from the process is the best way to prevent food poisoning.
Removing Chipotle from your dining choices is another way to avoid food poisoning.
Not sure.. (Score:2)
Removing humans from the process is the best way to prevent food poisoning.
For day one, yes.
For day 2, who cleaned the robot after the first day again? Because without good cleaning you are right back at possible food poisoning concerns.
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If there's no humans in the way, high pressure steam does a truly marvelous job of cleaning basically anything.
The "Cobot" (Score:4, Insightful)
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What do words mean? (Score:3)
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Why stop there? You clean the avocados automatically, you prep them automatically, you cut them automatically, you remove the core automatically, you scoop them automatically, you prep the guacamole automatically, the only thing missing is the automatic throwing into the trash.
Or do they want to leave the only satisfying step to the human?
Make it faster han Sound (Score:2)
Make Guacamole Faster = take Guacamole, put it in a slingshot, aim at somebody, then accelerate it away from you at maximum speed.
If you ant to be even faster, you can use a gun.
Non-denial denial (Score:2)
Chipotle still wants employees to have a hand in making their guacamole. "There's no plan to test automated guac made in our restaurant," Curt Garner, Chipotle's chief technology officer, told CNBC.
The plan is to make a plan to test automated guac made in their restaurant right after Vebu adds machine learning capabilities and sensors to the Autocado that will help it evaluate the quality of avocados.
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Taster Robot: Prefect taste.
Human (spits): *Hurk' Tastes like fucking motor oil!
Taster Robot: I'm a robot, what did you expect?
Why only half? (Score:4, Interesting)
Drop them onto a rack. They will roll forward to a wall where a clamp will stab the sides of the avocado and lift it to a blade while rotating it. The blade will be spring loaded and mounted on a load sensor that will identify when the pit is being pressed against.
The rails which were flat plates will tilt towards each other forming a wedge which the clamps will press the fruit against while attempting to rotate in opposite directions. When the motors (closed loop steppers) no longer miss steps, the clamps will retract while continuing to rotate.
Two lateral clamps with serrated edges will attempt to grasp the pit (one for each half as the pit). The first clamps will rotated back and forth to break the pit loose.
The clamps will retract further and pry the fruit halves loose allowing them to drop onto square mesh grill (not sharp, about 1cm square holes). The mesh will also act as a hopper and bounce the fruit until a simple AI detects the fruit is laying flat side down.
A presser will mash the fruit through the grill leaving a flattened skin.
The grill then flaps outward where it may be necessary to have a simple spatula mechanism to release the skin.
The rest is easy. This design could be cleaned in a few minutes.
I could prototype this in a month.
This kind of stuff is easy. But using a few 6dof robotic arms would easily manage many of these tasks without the need for a different machine for each type of food.
Sounds a bit much (Score:1)
I'm having a rough time picturing this but it sounds a bit violent for avocado prep. Especially blades stabbing the pit then some kind of rotation?
Part of the goal is to start the guac process with fairly whole avocados, so that mashing them you can wind up with fairly large pieces which I think your mesh phase might destroy.
Chipotle is, to me, has one the best guacamoles in any restaurant, defiantly any chain restaurant. So I'd hate to mess that up, and it appears so would they.
Re:Why only half? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why only half? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure a special tool would speed up the peeling and pitting the fruit. The difficult to automate part is selecting the ripe ones and rejecting the bad ones, and you often can't tell which is which until you've cut them open. Avocados are notorious for their inconsistency.
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On a side note, if you're so clever, can't you design and implement a gizmo to find back that beaver of yours?
/jk
Despite those savings, guacamole will probably (Score:2)
Despite those savings, guacamole will probably still cost customers extra. "It's worth it," Garner said.
Ha ha ha! No.
Boot to the head.
Zume 2.0, didn't they forget the AI ingredient? (Score:2)
Where can I sign up for the round-C funding ?
Food processor vs robot vs AI... (Score:3)
So now every form of automation is being marketed as a robot?
Despite those savings, guacamole will probably still cost customers extra.
This was the only interesting part of the article, but of course, this wasn't explained, because it doesn't need to be.
Anyone else notice how ridiculously expensive fast food has gotten as of late?
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So now every form of automation is being marketed as a robot?
If it has sensors and mechanical actuators, it's a robot.
Obligatory PA (Score:2)
https://www.penny-arcade.com/c... [penny-arcade.com]
"one of employees' least favorite tasks" (Score:2)
People would prefer to ladle food into containers as people point to what they want? I think I would stick with the avocados. Meanwhile all this thing appears to do is shuck them.
A very modest achievement, the machine doesn't make the guacamole. Now if the prep people could dump the ingredients into some bins on top and fresh guacamole came out the bottom that would be impressive.
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I mean. I'm no robotics expert, but I would think 'mashing' the avocados and mixing ingredients would be the easiest part of automation.
It's possible they just want to not scare people into machines will take all the jobs, but it seems a bit silly they didn't just complete this process. I'm sure it's coming though.
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Screw Chipotle... (Score:2)
I want one of those things for my house!
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This is gonna be Mcdonalds (Score:2)
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Re: This is gonna be Mcdonalds (Score:2)
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Beguiled by tech - first turn brain off. (Score:3)
A trend, for good but sadly also for bad is the effect that tech has to make people feel compelled to keep making better mouse traps that really are not better, just shiny and new, or that nobody asked for.
I see the merit of the idea here:
- Guacamole is time intensive for the company.
- Employees don't like that task.
- It is dangerous and risks injury.
- Injury has downstream risks in sick time and insurance costs.
If you have never made guacamole or peeled an avocado, these are real concerns. I can see how 50 minutes might be needed, even by a skilled worker, to dress 25 pounds of avocados. Getting the pit out is easy enough in concept, but it requires force applied to a slippery object with a sharp object, and it is risky for cuts and hand injury. It is akin to shucking oysters albeit somewhat safer and easier.
So, this is a legitimate problem to try and solve. If avocados could be dressed at a pound a minute, one fruit every 15-30 seconds, with certain safety, that would be a benefit. And, notice that they are not automating the whole guacamole process, just the avocado prep.
So, the problem reduces to : how do you flip the fruit out of the skin without the pit in just a few seconds, safely?
Okay, food gizmo engineering to the rescue.
But, it doesn't have to be a "robot" with multi-angle video, complex manipulator arms, AI software, and a complex video control station that might look like a nuclear control room.
The industrial age, when power was steam or water, and advanced techno systems were mechanical, we made extraordinary machines and factories to simplify or automate all kinds of activities. That spilled over into all kinds of widgets to make life easier at home, including tools for Dad and kitchen conveniences for Mom. Carrot peelers, apple corers, potato choppers, meat grinders, food mills, can openers. These all seem so low tech by today's standards, but they are tried and true designs that just work, and they are mostly very safe. And, let's not forget the mechanized food production that goes on in factories around the world on mechanical production lines that trace their technology back 150 years.
Many of these kitchen tools, like any tool, were born of necessity and opportunity. The devices just mentioned were made in the 19th and early 20th centuries in industrialized places that had generally Euro-American farms and diets (with apologies to other places that might also have made some metal tools, and lets not forget the many pre-industrial wood-wicker-bamboo kitchen widgets from around the world that we still make and use). Hence, an apple peeler for Mom's apple pie made sense. But those same industrialized societies in those eras were not much exposed to avocados and guacamole, so no clever inventor had an idea to improve the process.
I bet that if some of those clever mechanical inventors who made so many machines, tools, and mechanical patents in that era were to tackle this job, we would see several good designs for avocado scoopers. I am talking about the simple handheld tools that would sell for maybe 5 bucks in the kitchen utensil isle of your grocery store.
So, Chipotle could hire an industrial design or toolmaker person to design such a thing, which they could patent, then license, and make money selling the gizmos at the kitchen store - versus - spend millions or more for a robot that will break, have down time, and be mostly for just in-house proprietary use at a net expense.
Granted, nobody has yet made a simple way to shuck oysters, but avocados would be easier. But to me, this is yet another of many and increasing examples of a modern disease. Instead of defining the problem clearly and then finding a best solution from among all potential tools or technologies, some executive just wants to throw the latest technology at it. Because? Because "gee whiz, that would be cool!"
The question is, who had this idea? Was it some "suit" who just wanted to solve the issue by throwing tech money
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Force applied to a slippery object with a sharp object??? Make one cut around the core. Twist the two halves to remove one of them. Make a second cut around the core perpendicular to the first one. Put away the knife. Twist the two halves to remove one of them. At this point you have 3/4th of the core sticking out of the flesh. Just break the core loose. Works as well for peaches.
50 minutes? (Score:2)
How does it take 50 mins to make Guacamole? it's like 5min for mashing and mixing. So how many Avocados can you halve in 45 min if you are slightly practiced?
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I dunno, how much time does it take to make a 5 gallon bucket of the stuff
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Well, exactly. How much time does it take to make an olympic poolful of the stuff? The 50 mins is a meaningless number. Journalists.
Getting rid of the bad bits (Score:2)
In my experience, the most difficult part of preparing avocado is getting rid of the bad blackish bits that are rotten.
I don't really trust a robot to do that.
Re:Getting rid of the bad bits (Score:4, Funny)
Wholeley guacamole! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not from the USA so don't know the next thing about Chipotle (the fast mex food joint), but when I last visited, my Texan host took me to a number of Mexican eateries (he loved Mexican and like most americans, also loved eating out, although TBH he is also a good cook).
At this one place (owned by a Mexican emigrant, I was told) they had this little ritual where the server would bring the avo + other ingredients to the table, clean the avo and make the guac right there in front of the customer's eyes. Took maybe a minute or 2. (I understand Chipotle is all about fast food and not so much a trademark "experience", and makes the guac in a large batch.)
I actually live in an avo-producing country myself, I literally grew up on a farm where avos were grown. I've seen a lot of different fruit varieties and the different methods of detecting whether one is ripe to eat. I've seen the brown areas and hard spots and brown strings in the flesh that are only detectable once the skin is off/the fruit is cut open. I've seen how some don't ripen, or ripen unevenly, if picked too soon (often because they are stolen - luckily the Cartels have not gotten that involved yet unlike Central/South America). I've seen the exorbitant prices asked for acceptable to good quality. So the commoditization that both the above restaurant and Chipotle is achieving with avocadoes, is impressive to me.
From my small sample of US restaurants, as well as a stint in Canada, I don't envy North Americans their eating-out culture. There's a lot of bland, chemical-tasting ingredients going into your food. I can understand that recent immigrants in both countries can do quite well in the food business, as long as they try to keep it authentic and avoid the processed shortcuts.
What planet are they on? (Score:2)
On my planet, avocados don't have a core; they have a large pit in the middle.
Lawsuit incoming in 3, 2, 1... (Score:2)
To prepare avocados using the Autocado
I sense a lawsuit incoming from Autodesk...
Guac (Score:2)
Faster Guacamole? (Score:1)
> Chipotle Tests Robot That Can Prepare Avocados To Make Guacamole Faster
Do we need faster Guacamole? Most Guacamole (under it's own volition) doesn't tend to exceed 0mph.
I wasn't particularly worried that Guacamole could escape from me in most situations, but this raises a worrying though...
Give me a break (Score:2)
Despite those savings, guacamole will probably still cost customers extra.
Chipotle: We Pass the Savings Onto Our Executive Bonusesâ
Minimum wage is a subsidy for robotics. (Score:1)
So it's an avocado peeler (Score:1)
Nothing more...