Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, is teaming up with Google to automate its drive-through ordering system with AI-driven chatbots. “The goal is to streamline the ordering process and prevent long lines in the drive-through lanes from turning customers away,” Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor told the Wall Street Journal.
The news has received its fair share of commentary and dunking (see Techmeme). For one, Penegor’s explanation doesn’t make much sense: While 75 percent of fast-food sales are now drive-thru, chains such as Chick-Fil-A and In-and-Out have responded to this surge by hiring more people, who walk around with iPads to take orders from customers waiting in line. Increasingly, “quick-service restaurants,” as they’re known in the industry, are also overhauling their physical footprints with a focus on greater efficiency for drive-thru service. As an architecture firm that works on fast food locations, noted:
“When it comes to new stores, meanwhile, a growing number of QSR chains are pursuing bigger changes—including prototypes that eliminate dining areas entirely. With respect to those advantages, the much-smaller buildings required for drive-thru-intensive prototypes can be built faster and at lower cost. This is no small consideration given today’s steep increases in construction costs and delays. Due to the reduced need for parking, moreover, these restaurants also can operate on smaller sites, which can lower real estate costs.”
Still, fast food will likely be one of the early converts to a no-human future. Where things tend to move slowly is food preparation — a growing area of focus for more automation. Even though fast food is highly reliant on exploitative, low-cost human labor, it is already relatively automated: Raw ingredients come from factory farms, which are transformed into ready-to-assemble food components in euphemistically named industrial kitchens, then shipped to endpoints like retail outlets and drive-throughs. The local kitchen then uses standardized equipment to turn largely frozen or otherwise pre-prepared food into a packaged dish.
With labor remaining one of the largest costs in restaurants — one that has only risen in recent years — we will see robots take over more of these prep tasks. This coming wave of automation is going to impact many, if not most, of the nearly 5.2 million people who work in the fast food industry. While this might seem as far from reality as everyone being chauffered around by sentient Ubers, it doesn’t take much prescience to see how robots will eventually perform most of the standardized processes up and down the supply chain, with little human involvement — especially once raw ingredients are able to be grown at scale in labs, a shift made perhaps inevitable as climate change impacts how we grow food — and how it could be a step up from underpaying people or hiring child labor.
Today, in San Francisco, a customer can talk to their device, and a robot will put together their dish. Investment in food automation has only accelerated over the past few years and resulted in new machines that can, for example, put together a burger or whip up a cocktail. I have seen robot-like gizmos that make pretty decent pour-over coffee.
I don’t see robots replacing the kitchen staff anytime soon at a neighborhood bistro or omakase spot — where people are part of the service experience — but anywhere that food production is standardized, we are going to see robots have a big impact. The implications are going to be profound and long-term: a reduction in service sector jobs could lead to higher unemployment, forcing the governments to look for alternatives to help its citizens.
Similarly, we might see how brands become more valuable. Strong legacy brands such as McDonalds, Chick-Fil-A, or Starbucks will carry some of their brand value into the automated future. For the weaker brands, life might not be as easy. There are over 50 virtual brands that have found success on the digital delivery services, and it won’t be a surprise that some of them make a leap into the real world — Mr. Beast Burger, for example.
So Wendy’s announcement might be the most recent, but it won’t be the last. “If you are not already in robotics,” quipped a White Castle executive, “I suggest you do it sooner than later.”
Also: Will Robots Take My Job?
May 15, 2023. San Francisco