Why Robots Will Staff the Restaurant of the Future

What if someone told you that within a decade, a large number — perhaps even a majority — of national quick-service restaurants (QSRs), fast-food chains and even upscale dine-in establishments will be fully automated, with a single staffer on site just in case?

Adding to the excitement, what if that same person said automated voice ordering would be ubiquitous at drive-thrus within the next two years? That’s disruption — not in the pandemic paradigm of messed-up supply chains, but rather the “future of industry” variety.

That’s what Rajat ‘Raj’ Suri, Founder and CEO of Presto recently told Karen Webster.

“It’s a dramatic transition,” he said. “This industry has been old-school for many, many years. It’s been very analog, very much ‘we do service the old-fashioned way.’ That’s kind of always been seen as a perk in the industry, and technology as kind of the enemy. Now it’s going through this rapid transition where it’s like technology is the only way to operate.”

Saying that, traditional restaurant labor math which had been running at 20% of sales has doubled to 40% — “and that’s a dramatic transition for an industry that barely makes 5% in margins.” That’s for restaurants lucky enough to even find workers now. Between higher wage demands, immigration issues and low American birth rates, restaurants are running out of workers.

Underscoring these points, PYMNTS new Main Street Merchant Index (MSI) notes that “Employment was the key catalyst of Index growth across all industries in Q3, with the notable exceptions of food places and professional services. For these two categories, wage growth exceeded establishment growth and workforce growth.”

Combined with new digital contactless modes of ordering and payment, plus advances in robotics, Suri is confident the U.S. will begin to do what some other nations have done already and automate restaurant operations to the point where almost the only humans present are customers.

Presto kicked this off on Tuesday (Dec. 7), announcing its pact with autonomous delivery robotics startup Ottonomy, utilizing “autonomous delivery vehicles for contactless curbside and parking lot deliveries. Guests can order and pay using Presto’s touch or voice products and receive food delivered via Ottonomy’s vehicles,” per a statement.

This convergence of social, scientific and cultural forces has Suri seeing robots ahead.

“We actually believe in the next 10 years in this country [that] entire restaurants are going to be run with just one person,” he told Webster. “This is happening in other countries where labor is very expensive and very hard to find, like Japan.”

Get the study: The Main Street Merchant Index

Flipping Out for Automation

As Suri sees it, robotics and automation are the way out of the current labor predicament, while offering better customer experiences and operator economics in the process.

“A lot of things can be automated, like drink pouring. Do you need a person to watch over a drink being poured, or can you do that with sensors and technology?” he asked. “Do you need [staff] to put fries into like little carton? No, you don’t. Condiments, all that stuff can be automated. It gets a bit more tricky when you’re assembling a burger, but assembling a pizza is not that hard. Some things are low hanging fruit, and they’re already being worked on.”

Putting together a customized burger might require humans for the foreseeable future, but the upgraded Flippy 2 robot by Miso Robotics is ready for the field — and it also fries wings.

As robotic capabilities rapidly advance, Suri told Webster, “In the next 10 years, a restaurant chain will take the country by storm operating fully automated. The food is going to be really cheap. It’s going to be good food. It’s going to be like the next Chick-fil-A. Chick-Fil-A just makes, like, three or four items, and they do it really well. The food is delicious. You don’t care when you buy Chick-fil-A if it’s made by robots or by humans. You don’t care.”

“This restaurant chain will just nail three or four items and they’ll do it at scale, it’ll be super cheap, people will love it, and then every other brand out there will change.”

Suri doesn’t think that mega-disruptor even exists yet. More likely, he believes, it will be a startup with automation and robotics as its north star, with no legacy brand issues.

In fact, he thinks an ideal place to start is pizza. “I think pizza is ripe for automation. That one is easy to build robots around. If you think of the assembly line of a pizza, you get the dough, you sprinkle the cheese, topping, topping, topping, the oven, slice, box, done.”

See also: Robots Help Restaurants Improve Curbside Delivery

Voice Tech — and Big News — Are Imminent

In the QSRs and dine-in restaurants envisioned by Suri and Presto, voice will play an integral role as the primary interface between human customers and automated eateries.

“I talked about 10 years [into] the future restaurants going to one person. I think in two years you’ll see the majority of all drive-thrus support voice technology and voice assistants.”

According to Suri, “The voice assistant ends up actually doing a better job than the person.” He mentioned more consistent audio quality and standardized accents as improving the experience.

He added that a voice assistant “is never going to say, ‘can you wait a minute while I go take care of something else.’ That happens in drive-thrus. The voice system will never have to take a break. The voice system will also upsell consistently, which will make more money for the restaurant. In our trials, we already can upsell three to four times more than humans.”

Voice systems also free staff members to do more, like prepping the food as it’s being ordered.

“Everyone gets their food faster, the drive-thru moves faster, the restaurant makes more money, and the people are happier,” he said.

“Our system actually takes over 95% of all orders without human intervention. We’re about to announce the largest national rollout of this technology ever. It’s going to be announced in early January. It’s going to be with a big chain and they’re going all-in on it.”

More deals are in the pipeline for 2022. That pairs well with Presto’s initial public offering (IPO), being done via special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Ventoux CCM Acquisition Corp. “The $170 million Ventoux CCM SPAC is led by former hospitality execs and backed by investment bank Chardan Capital Markets LLC, has about $170 million and is led by several former hospitality executives,” as PYMNTS reported.

See also: Presto Completes $1B SPAC Merger to Go Public