Automation & food industry

McD has always been a leader when it came to incorporating new technology into their stores. I see no reason why they couldn't pretty much fully automate at least the kitchen operations of their restaurants. They usually have a limited menu depending on the time of day and a lot of the process is somewhat automated already. I don't think they could eliminate all workers besides your burger flipper repair tech. Customers would still expect some human contact at least to deliver their order but order taking could be computerized using touch screen kiosk. That would probably eliminate most of the order mistakes that seem to have plagued McD in recent years.

Ever notice how many people it takes to actually operate a McNopes? The McD by my place is not a really large one but I've counted as many as 15 people working there at any one time. If McNopes could just eliminate half of them, that would be a huge decrease in employment costs. And with the push to increase the minimum wage, it could even be bigger.

So, no, I don't think they could completely automate the entire restaurant, but I think that automation can and will play a lot bigger part of their operation in the future.

The touch screens just print the order out in the kitchen, as well as updating the stores computer system so they know what items they have left in storage.

'Full automated' fast food doesn't strike me as viable - what you'd save in reduced wages you'd loose in electricity, equipment, set up and lost trade when the system decides to stop working. Currently the only thing that is likely to shut your local fast food place down is if the oven stops working - and even then that wouldn't stop them from offering some foods such as fries. If your automated system went down you'd end up being unable to fill any order. You'd also run into problems connecting all the various equipment, which is made by different companies and of different ages. If you wanted or needed to upgrade the current soda machine with something newer you'd have to bring in a team to reprogram the base system or the newer system either isn't going to work or isn't going to work correctly.

The other problem is loading the machine - you can't just dump frozen burgers into a hopper and have it dispense them as needed. half the burgers will be struck to each other and have to be seperated. Other foods need to be prepared before cooking, pizzas especially, which even if you get pre-made bases have to be placed into prepared trays (other places make the base on site). Packaging is another problem, ranging from opening packets of sauces to removing the paper lids from foil trays. For such things nothing beats human hands, or human problem solving even on such a small scale. Sure, you could design a system that could remove the plastic wrapping from frozen burgers...IF the wrapping is oriented the right way.

Basically given the number of things you'd need a human to do to keep such a machine working and supplied, and the relatively small number of orders per day (Compared to a factory that makes something like ready meals), it is cheaper, faster and far less hassle to use people.

I question who would be your targeted market...
If you take away all the jobs, who can afford the product.

Fast food has always been the job market for young people.
If you take away that hope, what have they got left.

Exactly.
When we get to the stage where the machines take over, where will the economy go, because they machines will make stuff for people who cant afford it because they have no jobs to earn enough.

The 3D Pizza Printer is a prototype machine being developed for NASA (as of January 2014). In that case such technology makes sense, as it allows for more options as to what crews have available while reducing weight and space required for transporting consumables - something that is second only to fuel in regards current endurance limitations of manned space flight.
Although saying that I wonder how well that technology would work in zero gravity.
The technology will probably end up being used by the Navy as well, if not first. As they too have limitations in regards the amount of food they can carry. Subs would probably be the first the use it, as they are basically space craft and have many of the same limitations in regards supplies.
In both cases the technology is for variety in conditions where you A; Have limited storage space and B; Also happen to have a large number of well trained individuals who would be capable of taking the equipment apart to repair it if needed. Taste is secondary, and in context slightly less important - the basis for the MRE. C; Keeping the equipment clean is also not an issue in these situations, as you will usually have at least one person who can be assigned that duty between meals (compared to a restaurant, which would be running the machine for several hours and require you employ at least one person to clean the machine several times a day).

Delivering pre-cooked foods is not just about costs, but also about standardization of the final product. Companies (at least the large chains) want customers to know exactly what to expect when they order a meal - so the meal you order in, say, Saint Louis will be the same as the same meal if ordered in New York, San Francisco or Butte Montana. Costs do enter into the equation, as precooked foods take less time to make and require smaller preparation and storage areas*. It does also help reduce wastage, or at least make it more predictable, compared to hand-making.

(*As I mentioned pizza bases tend in most places to be pre-made and shipped as frozen disks. Making the bases on site would require that you shipped the flour in large bags, which you couldn't keep in the freezer - unlike just about everything else on the menu - plus a work station large enough to make the bases on. The place I worked at was simply to small for such a work station, and keeping up with the needs of even a quiet shift would have required at least two people working in the kitchen - one making the bases and the other filling orders. As it was we could get away with one person working days, two on the night shift and three at weekends - this including washing (something the delivery drivers and waitresses helped out with), filling orders (usually two on the prep-station at nights when it got really busy) and preparing the bases for the next shift as well as almost always having to defrost additional bases for the current shift.)

Regarding burger being stuck to each other, that is more a question of supplier quality control than automation. The normal method is to pack patties together while still raw and then freeze them. This commonly results the product being stuck to each other. The work around is to freeze them separately and then pack them together in this case, it much easier to separate them, and is something that could easily be done by machine. It is a matter of choosing the proper supplier to provide a product that can be easily processed by machine.

For sauces, here you can take advantage of scale. Why bother with small packets? A 2 gallon hopper of mustard feeding a nozzle to apply it to the burger is easy to do. Just see the guns that McD's uses now to put sauces on. You still need someone to fill the hopper. You can do automated materiel loading systems, but they are rarely cost effective. More practical to have a person do it.

After talking to a couple automation engineers, I am not seeing any technical problems. Issues come more from economics and practicality. As you said, to be cost effective, you need it to replace as many people as possible, but in doing so, the more subsystems are tied to one another, the greater the risk of one system going down and shutting the whole system down. In normal manufacturing, you need to design such a system so that you have a ready work around for every step of the operation so that one part breaking doesn't shut down production.

It's one thing to have a breakdown in a factory where the customer may not even know it happened as long as the shipment is on time. It is totally different if the customer is impatiently waiting right outside wondering why their food is taking so long.

Say such a system costs $1 million. If it replaces 10 workers, doing 8 hours a day for $10/hour, you get an ROI of just under 4 years, ignoring benefits, taxes, and other costs of having employees. Really, not bad.

Another issue I could see is the dynamics of someone working in such a place. If you get rid of the minimum wage workers, you then need people who can maintain the equipment. Someone here needs to be well versed in mechanical and electrical automation systems as well as machine programing. Such a person is skilled labor and demands much higher wages. But when things are running smoothly, they will be stocking food hoppers and cooking the items that the system can't handle. That is going to be a very high paid cook. Most people who have that level of skills probably would not enjoy a job like this that has them doing work well under their pay grade. Not to mention the stress of having to fix problem as fast as possible while simultaneously dealing with angry customers.

The machine itself may cost a million bucks, but have you factored in R&D and trial period? There's bound to be some lost revenue due to technical problems and "double rent" (having to run the machine and still needing your employess while you work out all the kinks) during that trial period. Then there's the engineer who has to be there for the entire trial period to both monitor that the machine is doing what it's supposed to do and possibly to train the staff for using it. Add to that the fact that the staff aren't so stupid they can't figure out the machine is there to take their place and they'll do pretty much anything and everything they can to either convince management that this is a bad idea, sabotage the machine or both and I think you'll find that figure is only going to get bigger.

This is the problem with engineers who have their noses buried too deep in numbers (I'm not saying you do, just that some do). The numbers tell them, "this will cost so and so and will take this amount of time". The the real world has a weird way of not conforming perfectly to numbers, though. In my experience, what the engineers have "promised" differs greatly from the actual result, mostly because there are human beings involved in the process.

Case in point:

I used to work for the Danish Postal Service at a large mail sorting center. Back in the day, all sorting was done by hand, but then someone had this great idea that you could save money by automating the process. So they did the whole cost/benefit analysis thing and went ahead and contacted some companies that could make machines to do the job. One company (NEC) was to make OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanner sorting machines that sorted the mail into zip codes and individual mail routes, put the letters into trays and stuck a label on the tray. Another company (Giben Scandinavia) was to make a robotic system that could sort the trays by city and place them on pallet sized flatbed wagons that were easy to roll into the back of a truck. The only obstacle initially seemed to be getting these two different systems to work together. Initially...

The old process (all manual) went like this:

- Mail came in during the evening and a rough sorting was conducted for each sorting center (5 major centers in the country). The mail for the other 4 centers would then be sent away and we would keep what was left for our own district.
- The night shift would then come in at around 10 p.m. and further sort the mail for each individual post office in our own district, starting with the mail for the office that was farthest away. During the night, we'd receive what the other 4 centers had rough sorted for us and go through that as well.
- When the mail came to the post office in the morning, the employees there would then further sort the mail into individual routes in the city.

The mail sorting machines had one set of problems. The OCR scanners had a hard time recognizing some carachters, especially when people's handwriting on the envelopes wasn't all that good. They "fixed" that by having some of our employees redesignated as "video coders", which essentially meant that all the images of envelopes that the scanners hadn't been able to read were sent to a room with 20 computers where employees looked at them, tried to determine what they said and punched in the zip codes manually. From the time that picture was taken inside the machine, the "video coders" had 40 seconds to process the photo, or the letter would be discarded into the "overflow" tray, which would then be sorted manually (the old way). With 8 letter feeding stations and each station feeding the machine with 250 letters per minute, there could be a lot of overflow at times. And let's not even mention that the idea of having the machines sort the letters into not only cities, but also individual routes was an effort to also cut employees at the local post offices, since they would no longer have to go through that process. Problem was that the video coders only punched in the zip code and not the street name, so the ones they caught would be put into their own trays that still needed to be sorted manually at the post office and it was the same for the manually sorted overflow trays. At its highest, the machine could process 70% of the mail fed into it. The rest was either video coded or thrown into the overflow tray.

The new process then went like this:

- Mail came in during the evening and was loaded into the machine for rough sorting.
- 30% (at best) of that was either video coded or spit back out as overflow and sorted manually.
- Mail for the other centers was sent away and the night shift came in to sort the mail for our own district into cities and individual routes.
- 30% (at best) of that was either video coded or spit back out as overflow and sorted manually.
- The mail was then sent to the individual post office in the morning, where they had to go through all the trays and find out which ones they had to sort manually and which ones were ready to go right away.

We've now gone from a 3-stage process to a 5-stage process. Oh the wonders of technology!

But wait! There's more!

As machines have a tendency to do, the sorting machines would sometimes crap out. Now we had to employ 2 technicians (at more than double the salary of any other employee) who were on call to fix it when they did. And they did. A LOT!!!

The most common problems were the feeders not being able to draw the letters in, letters getting stuck inside the machines and the labelling systems for the trays going wonky. Fixing just one of these problems could take anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours and a typical night would see at least 2 feeders not being able to draw letters in and the labelling system going wonky at least 3-4 times. Previously unencountered problems could bring the entire system down for more than 24 hours, as it once did when someone had put coins in an envelope. The envelope was torn open inside the machine and, well... I probably don't have to explain what happens when small metal things are introduced into a machine with many moving parts...

At least twice a week, a letter would get stuck inside the machine and this was the biggest "regular" problem. Depending on where inside the machine it got stuck, just getting everything pulled apart to get in there could take up to half an hour (and that's not counting the time it took to determine where it was stuck in the first place). And guess what we had to do when this happened... That's right. We had to sort manually, just like in the old days. Except now we had around 2,000 sq. ft. less to do it on, since that's the room the machines took up. Oh, and some of the oldtimers who were really good at the manual sorting process had been fired to make room for more "technologically minded" young people who could run the machines, but had no idea how to sort manually.

All these problems were only related to the two sorting machines. The robotic sorting system hasn't even been brought into the equation yet.

The robotic system (on which I was an operator) had three jobs: Send trays of unsorted mail to the feeders, send empty sorting trays to the machines and put the trays of sorted mail coming out of the machines on flatbed wagons for transportation.

Remember how I said that an early concern was making these two systems work together? That was "fixed" by the two companies working together to develop the labelling system, so the robotic system could read the labels produced by the sorting machines. But wait... Didn't I just say the labelling system went wonky 3-4 times every night? Yes. Yes, I did. So that was one problem. This system had a lot of other problems that I won't get into, but let's just say that if you think it sounds bad with the sorting machines, those were actually the most stable component of this entire debacle. The robotic system was WAY worse! (Seriously... Who's brilliant idea was it to use around 250 photocell light barriers to track the trays as they move around the system and place half of them where people can easily brush up against them when they walk past?!)

In the end, they ended up spending a whole lot of money on trying to save a little pocket change and managed to fire some good employees in the process. It took a lot longer to get the system up to a state that was just "acceptable" than first estimated by the engineers behind the project (years, not months) and as far as I'm told, it's still not even close to what they were promised.

What does all this amount to? Well, this was 10 years ago and the idea at the time was that introducing this system would save money, in turn reducing costs (or at least keeping them in line) for the customers, so the Postal Service wouldn't lose them. The price of a stamp back then was around 80 cents and mailboxes were emptied at 9 p.m. Any letters you dropped in before that time could be expected to be delivered the next day between 7 and 9 a.m. These days, though, the price of a stamp is almost $2, mailboxes are now emptied at 5 p.m., you can't be certain they'll even get delivered the next day and even if they are, they're now delivered between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Unless the person you're sending it to pays extra, of course. In that case they can have their mail delivered some time before 10 a.m.

Sometimes technology does more damage than good and the more advanced it is and the more moving parts it has, the higher the likelihood of something breaking. Ask any military aircraft mechanic and they'll tell you that the more technologically advanced a plane or helicopter is, the more time it spends on the ground.

This comes from somewhere that "Reports" to be strange but true.....
Conl Sander hated his own food?....
(Ok, so not his food but the (del) that was sold in his name...)

while he controlled the business, he would randomly visit restaurants and any that did not pass muster either shaped up or lost the franchise.