Robots invading the kitchen: your next restaurant meal may be made by a machine, not a person

A new generation of robots is set to transform the fast-casual restaurant market

Today's expression: Brace yourself
Explore more: Lesson #70
July 23, 2018:

Several companies are developing robots to automatically prepare restaurant meals. One California restaurant has a machine that makes a burger start-to-finish without any human interaction; a startup in London says its robot can mimic a master chef at work and prepare any one of 2,000 recipes. Automation may drive down costs and increase speed at so-called "fast casual" restaurants. Learn the English phrase, "brace yourself."

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Robots in the kitchen: they’re coming to a fast-casual restaurant near you

A new generation of robots is set to transform the fast-casual restaurant market by bringing down costs and speeding up the process of ordering lunch.

Welcome to Plain English, episode number 70 for Monday, July 23, 2018. I’m Jeff, the producer of the program is JR, and you are listening to the podcast that goes at the right speed for English learners. The transcript of today’s program can be found at PlainEnglish.com/70. As always, the transcript includes instant translations of the hardest words and phrases from English to now six languages! They are Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese and Japanese.

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Hey I have some news for those of you who have Android are listening on Spotify. It’s great that you are listening on Spotify and if you like listening there because you are already using that app—that’s fantastic. If, however, you want to try a new way of listening, Google just launched something called Google Podcasts and it’s a way you can download and organize all the podcasts that you might listen to. Now this podcast, Plain English, is obviously your favorite, but there are other good ones out there—in every language—and Google Podcasts is a good app to use to discover new things to listen to and organize your podcast library. If you’re an iPhone user, you already have an app called Apple Podcasts, whether you know it or not. If you’re listening on an iPhone, you can just search your phone for the word “podcasts” and you’ll probably see the purple icon come up. That’s just a new option for those of you who first discovered the program on Spotify.


Robots in the kitchen

They say robots and computers are out to take all our jobs someday. First in manufacturing, then in customer service with chat bots and touch screens, teaching has been affected by online courses, maybe soon delivery and transportation jobs will be at risk. My day job is in business consulting and a lot of what we do is susceptible to automation in the future. There’s even a web site called willrobotstakemyjob.com which estimates that 47 percent of American jobs could be automated someday.

But if you thought the act of creating a gourmet, delicious meal is something a robot could never do—then think again. Robots in the kitchen were mostly a joke until recently, but now several companies have prototypes that can create gourmet meals with minimal—or in some cases no human interaction.

Take burgers—that classic American food, right? It’s one of those things that seems simple to cook until you try to program a robot to do it. The technology has come a long way since “Flippy,” a robotic arm at a California restaurant that would automatically flip a burger. Flipping the meat on the grill, of course, is not the hardest or most labor-intensive part of the act of cooking a good burger, so this was more a publicity stunt than any true innovation in robotics.

But now—and why does this always happen in California?—now, there’s a restaurant in San Francisco called Creator. And Creator claims to make a gourmet burger from scratch with absolutely no human intervention whatsoever. Here’s what it does: it grinds the meat—okay, that’s pretty cool, you almost never see a restaurant grind its meat when the order is placed. It grinds the meat; forms the burgers; grills them to perfection; chops tomatoes; slices the cheese to go on top; cuts and toasts the bun; puts on all manner of seasonings, sauces and other toppings; and finally it wraps the whole creation up in a bag without crushing it and spilling the toppings all over the place.

It took the creators eight years to get the process right. It’s a beast—about two square meters—but it can make 120 burgers per hour.

So now you might be thinking—okay, burgers, come on. That’s just one menu item out of the thousands of things that can be cooked in a kitchen. And making a burger is still a pretty simple thing. So let me introduce you to a restaurant called Spyce in the Downtown Crossing neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Spyce opened at the end of April and is the brainchild of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a prestigious engineering school near Boston. The students wanted to get good, casual food but couldn’t pay the $10 to $12 that a decent meal costs—and we’re not talking a nice restaurant, but just something with a higher quality than fast food.

So the students teamed up with French chef Daniel Boulud to develop a menu of interesting, nutritious, and high-quality foods that could be mostly prepared by robots, thereby keeping costs low. Customers order on touch-screens and the robots then select and drop the ingredients of your Moroccan bowl, for example, into the frying pan and serve it up. There are some humans there to help guide you through the process and add some customization to your meals if necessary. But speed is king in the downtown area full of office workers: they say they can create these dishes in three minutes total, at a cost of just $7.50, well below what a meal with equal quality would cost at another restaurant.

So are some of you still skeptical? First we had burgers—not too hard to make, not a lot of real skill involved. Now Spyce—all they really do is drop the ingredients in the frying pan and stir it up, big deal. If you’re still skeptical of robots in the kitchen, then brace yourself for a company called Moley. Now, it’s not here yet. But this startup company flips the thinking of robotics around 180 degrees. The other innovations started by thinking about a robot or a machine and asking what a typical robotic machine can do. Moley decided to start with what a chef does. So they had real-life chefs work under the supervision of detailed 3D cameras and motion-sensory gloves and then designed a machine that has robotic arms that can mimic all the actions of a master chef at work. According to the company, the Moley Robotic Kitchen will be able to cook 2,000 recipes—as long as the ingredients are all loaded into pre-determined locations.

As JR would say, that sounds like it’s del futuro … from the future—indeed it is.


I don’t need a robot in my kitchen that can cook 2,000 recipes—but do you think they could make a cheap one that cooks, say, ten recipes? Oh, and does the food shopping too? That could change everything.

I’d like to say hi to a couple of listeners today. Simone from Cologne, Germany, wrote to say she’s practicing English as preparation for a visit to Los Angeles soon. And Andrea from Italy is thrilled with the new Italian translations on our web site. She is an engineering student and lives near Rome. I wonder what the Italians think about automated cooking, since big family meals are such an important part of the culture there. I’m trying to picture what would happen if you told an Italian grandmother that you could prepare stuffed shells or ricotta pie with a robot. I think you’d get smacked with a wooden spoon; that’s what I think. Maybe Andrea can try that out with her relatives and let us know how it goes. Simone, Andrea—thanks for listening and being part of Plain English.

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Expression: Brace yourself