Kitchen automation has risen during the pandemic, with robots from Miso Robotics, Chowbotics, and other startups now replacing some jobs in fast food chains
it's practically Food As A Service 🧵 https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : Honestly if your first reaction on seeing this is “ugh robots gonna take all the jobs” you gotta update your priors. It's just not how automation plays out, ever. https://twitter.com/... @wsj : Engineers are building a bestiary of new robots to tackle every part of the cooking process—and maybe solve the fast-food labor crunch in the process https://www.wsj.com/... Miles Kimball / @mileskimball : “'The 17-year-old fry cook isn't expensive labor, but the 17-year-old be-comes expensive labor if he or she doesn't show up for work,' says Ruth Cowan, a historian who has researched kitchen automation.” https://www.wsj.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : Began this piece on kitchen automation thinking “ok this is silly, let's find out just how silly” But it turns out we're at an unexpected convergence of both cheaper and more capable robotics + intense demand from usually-conservative fast food giants. https://www.wsj.com/... Matt Beane / @mattbeane : Another way of looking at advanced automation is that it's increasingly being used to handle the work that turns people into robots. Shifting to industrialized production took creating massively parallel, highly routinized work - performed by humans. That's not what we're for. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in a pandemic-era automation wave the WSJ had been tracking since early 2020, when manufacturers and e-commerce firms were weighing robot investment to handle social distancing and worker shortages. By August 2021, that wave has reached the fry station: engineers are building 'a bestiary' of cooking robots at Miso Robotics, Chowbotics, and other startups, pitched explicitly as an answer to the fast-food labor crunch — with Miles Kimball's point being that cheap teenage labor becomes expensive once turnover makes every hire costly.
Christopher Mims frames the shift as 'Food As A Service,' arguing the job-loss reflex misreads how automation actually plays out. But the corpus already contains counterweights: delivery bots like Kiwibots' remotely piloted fleet show the labor often just moves to cheaper geographies rather than vanishing, and by late 2022 chains including BurgerFi and Chili's would be ending or rethinking their restaurant robot trials over the cost-versus-usefulness math.
First-order effects
- Fast-food chains gain a partial substitute for scarce kitchen labor right now, with Miso Robotics and Chowbotics converting pandemic hiring pain into their first commercial deployments.
- Kitchen workers in affected chains see specific prep and frying tasks automated away, even as the full 'bestiary' of cooking robots remains confined to narrow tasks.
Second-order effects
- Chains that hold out face a competitive fork — automate to match rivals' cost structure or differentiate on human-made positioning — while robot startups race to price units against a wage floor that keeps moving.
- 'Food As A Service' shifts some pricing power from restaurants to whoever owns the robot platform, echoing how FedEx's adoption of AI-equipped picking arms moved warehouse economics toward equipment vendors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, kitchen work bifurcates into machine-tending roles and residual tasks — but the corpus's own later evidence, from the 2022 trial pullbacks to service robots like hospital courier Moxi still finding demand in 2023, suggests adoption will be selective, surviving where tasks are repetitive and volumes high.
- The durable lesson echoes the century-old debate the field itself marks back to R.U.R. (a retrospective on robotics a hundred years after 'R.U.R.'): automation reallocates labor more often than it eliminates it, pushing wages and liability questions onto regulators and operators.
The trend: Food-service automation advances in fits rather than waves, with each startup generation testing which kitchen tasks clear the cost bar faster than the labor market tightens again.