Innovative companies test the strengths and restrictions of robots in pilot operations. Apart from a few critical voices, the perspectives are largely positive – at least in the medium term. But the more versatile robots are supposed to be used, the more complex the volume of their control data will be. Then AI tools are often required. The same applies to the field of image recognition, which has received little attention to this date. Image recognition could play a significant role in some segments of the out-of-home market in the future. By Dieter Mailänder, mailänder marketing
The reason why the first food robots in the out-of-home market were highly revolutionary was because they offered solutions to problems that this industry didn’t know up until then. Progressive and farsighted market players have dealt with them for some time now, aware that such technological leaps and bounds take some time to find their ways into the different markets. That’s why they can usually only solve problems medium-term and seldom short-term.
But AI and roboting have also arrived in the out-of-home market. One sees this from the fact that the range of applications for food and service vending machines has continually expanded in the industry. food service europe has reported on this several times. On pizza, pasta and coffee specialties produced by robots are followed recently by robot tortilla chips, salads, chicken wings, or double-sided fried burgers.
Since the developers have brought their robotic systems to a certain maturity, more and more innovative users are ready to test them in different areas of application. Perhaps this development reflects a new phase in the currently still low level of market penetration. The motives of the foodservice professionals for these tests are diverse. Most of them want:
• To equalize staff shortages,
• Relieve staff,
• Reduce personnel costs,
• Optimize their workflow,
• Achieve more sales per unit of time, stationary as with drive-thru, and/or
• Implement staff-independent opening hours.
How fast, how permanent, and to what extent the desired effects occur is often very difficult to assess. For this reason, but not only, but there are also voices which currently evaluate roboting critically in multi-unit restaurants. One of the critics is the CEO from McDonald’s, Chris Kempczinski. He doesn’t see a viable solution in roboting for most restaurants in the foreseeable future because he is convinced that the investments don’t pay off.
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