Paul Carlin
Google
I visited on April 1st, 2024, which was the day it opened, according to the web page. However, I believe they have been at this location for months now, but just not open to the public? What they have been doing all those months is not evident as the whole experience is disappointing, from both a robotic experience, and a fast-food burger experience.
My cheeseburger was so cold that the cheese just sat on top completely unmelted. The bun was dry and too large, putting the bun to meat ratio too high. The fries were okay, but they had an unusual orange color to them.
The robots are responsible for cooking the beef patties and cooking the French fries. Humans (actually, just one human when I was there) are responsible for placing the fries into packaging, building and dressing the burgers and bagging the order (and yelling your name out as loud as possible). I would have liked to see more robots involved in the process, especially considering that is the main draw to this place (it most certainly won’t be the food).
Ironically, parts of the process that have long been automated and still manually done here. For example, the human has a line of paper printed order tickets that he is looking at to know how to build the burgers. They yell out your name when your order is completed. Surely, these are the low hanging fruits of automation in fast-food that have already been worked out by many others in the industry.
It was not busy at all, with only a handful of customers milling about the lobby area, which is more of a museum of robot tech than it is a place to sit down and eat. The smell of grilled beef permeated the air and was not appealing. There needs to be better air circulation so that the greasy smell doesn’t linger in the lobby. The order took an inordinate amount of time to complete, and given that the burger was cold, this needs to be rectified in the future.
One robot machine apparently grinds the meat, makes a burger patty and cooks it. The cooked meat is then deposited into a stainless-steel pan. There is nothing keeping it warm at this point. The human, at some undefined point, collects the meat and makes a burger out of it. I would have preferred the hot cooked meat placed onto a toasted bun directly so that the bun can absorb all those flavorful fats and yumminess. All of that is lost here as the burger patty is allowed to cool and re-congeal into a cold solid mass.
What I WOULD HAVE liked to see is a line of robots doing various different things, viewable to the public like the donut conveyer belt at Krispy Kreme. One robot chops the onions and drops them onto the burger as it goes by, for example. Each robot's action dictated by the customer's order. As the customer, I can follow the process as SEE my burger being made in front of my eyes. Given that the main draw here is robotics, and the fact that they have been working on this for months, I am very disappointed in what I saw.
