Business
Robots can make your fries, salads and guacamole. Is this the future of fast food?
Miso Robotics’ lab in downtown Pasadena is filled with robots of the past and present.
There’s Sippy, Chippy and Drippy. The star of the lab: an updated robot named Flippy that can fry French fries and chicken nuggets much faster than humans.
Miso Robotics has a lot riding on its ability to convince fast-food chains to incorporate Flippy — a robotic arm that drops fryer baskets into sizzling oil — into their kitchens. With the restaurant industry buffeted by higher costs driven in part by rising minimum wages in California and other states, Miso is one of several tech startups betting more businesses will be searching for new ways to save money, reduce employee turnover and fill more orders.
“You’re never going to get rid of humans in restaurants, nor would you want to,” Miso Robotics Chief Executive Rich Hull said. “What you’re trying to do is automate the tasks that the humans don’t enjoy doing.” Flippy can process more than 100 fry baskets an hour, notably faster than the 70 or so baskets the company estimates employees can handle during the same time period. The robot also spares workers from the risk of burns from hot oil or slips on grease.
Flippy the French fry making robot at Miso Robotics
Restaurant chains have been experimenting with robots in the kitchen for years. But, while several companies including White Castle, Sweetgreen and Chipotle are currently testing out ways to automate food prep, circuits and software haven’t yet taken over.
“We are at the very, very early stage. The return on investment has not been proven,” said John Gordon, a restaurant industry analyst who founded Pacific Management Consulting Group. “There’s no doubt an opportunity in some restaurants because of the … repetitive work that is done” out of view of diners.
For some businesses, early results are promising. Los Angeles-based fast-casual restaurant Sweetgreen has been testing what the company calls its “Infinite Kitchen” that uses machines to dispense and mix salad ingredients that humans then put the finishing touches on. Two locations that piloted the technology, including one in Huntington Beach, saw improvements in order accuracy and staff turnover, while average sales were 10% higher, executives said during a recent earnings call.
Miso Robotics, founded in 2016, has tested earlier versions of Flippy in roughly 20 restaurants including White Castle, CaliBurger and Jack in the Box. White Castle, a burger chain with locations primarily in the Midwest and the region around New York City, said it expects to follow through on plans announced last year to roll out Flippy in nearly one-third of its approximately 350 restaurants.
Rich Hull, chief executive of Miso Robotics, demonstrates the latest version of Flippy at the company’s Pasadena lab.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
The field of fast-food robotics is littered with companies that failed in their attempts to disrupt the restaurant industry. Last year, Silicon Valley pizza-making startup Zume shuttered after raising $450 million from SoftBank’s Vision Fund and other investors. Among other problems, the company, which was founded in 2015, reportedly had trouble getting its robots to keep melted cheese from falling off pizzas that were being baked in a moving truck en route to customers. And in 2022, food delivery company DoorDash shut down Chowbotics — the company behind a robotic salad-making vending machine — roughly 18 months after it purchased the startup because it didn’t live up to expectations.
Miso Robotics appears to be at a make or break point, analysts said. As of June 2024, the startup had an accumulated deficit of $122.8 million and meager cash reserves of just under $4 million. The company’s negative operating cash flows have raised concerns about its ability to survive, a report filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says.
Hull and other executives started just last year, and former CEO Michael Bell was terminated in May 2023, another filing shows.
As of March, the company has raised $126.5 million from investors and was in the process of raising additional funds, according to data from Pitchbook. Gordon and other analysts said they believe the company’s immediate future rests largely on its ability to raise more cash as it tries to ramp up sales.
Hull, an early investor in Miso Robotics, is a Hollywood film producer and executive who also founded a Spanish-language streaming company Pongalo, which was later renamed Vix.TelevisaUnivision acquired Vix Inc. in 2021. He said Miso’s board and Ecolab, which invested $15 million in the company, brought him in to grow the startup much like he’s done for the streaming business.
“Innovation is not easy. It’s really hard. Now we have a seven-year head start on everybody else, but it’s messy,” Hull said. “I love messy. That’s always been my thing.”
He said the company recently closed a $20 million round of financing.
The company plans to significantly ratchet up its production capabilities next year, making it able to fill whatever orders it receives, Hull said, adding that Miso is aiming to be profitable by the end of 2026.
Some labor analysts question whether automation will help workers. Brian Justie, a senior research analyst at the UCLA Labor Center, visited a restaurant that used Flippy during the summer.
“Whether or not it’s faster or cheaper than a … traditional restaurant, I think what it very clearly was, it was fewer people doing pretty much the same amount of work or more work with a limited menu,” he said.
During a demonstration at Miso Robotics’ lab, Hull highlighted improvements the company has made to Flippy, including making it smaller so it can fit under the exhaust hood and above the fryers in a compact kitchen. And he said the integration of artificial intelligence technology has cut down on food waste and improved durability with the machine able to fix problems with its operating system or alert a customer service representative if it’s about to break down.
Miso Robotics has tested out other robots, which were meant to pour drinks at the drive-through (Sippy) or cook and season tortilla chips (Chippy), but Hull said its engineers are focused for now on the frying robot. Miso initially designed Flippy to flip burgers when the startup unveiled the robot in 2017, but the company changed course when it saw a bigger revenue opportunity with fried foods, he said.
Miso executives believe the frying technology could be a huge boon for the company, claiming in a government filing that “Flippy’s automation of the fry station represents a potentially massive $3.5 billion revenue opportunity for Miso alone in a market that, importantly, still remains fragmented, underdeveloped, undercapitalized, and ripe with growth opportunities for a company with Miso’s first-mover advantage.”
Restaurants can buy or lease the robot, and the company makes money as well from maintenance, software upgrades and tech support. Most customers lease Flippy for $5,000 to $6,000 per month, but various factors can influence pricing, including the number of fryers in a restaurant.
Several chains, including Panera, Jack in the Box, Chipotle and Buffalo Wild Wings, have been testing Miso’s technology since 2021, SEC filings show. Many of the companies declined to detail whether the robots led to cost savings, but they pointed to other benefits.
At White Castle, for example, Flippy robots have allowed employees to better focus on other aspects that improve a customer’s experiences such as order accuracy and hospitality, said Jamie Richardson, the chain’s vice president of marketing and public relations.
A touch screen enables a worker to operate Flippy’s robotic arm.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
The burger chain turned to Miso after realizing workers assigned to the drive-through and fry station had to juggle multiple responsibilities and orders. White Castle also partnered with SoundHound to test an AI voice assistant named Julia (named after a beloved White Castle host named Julia Joyce from the 1930s) to help take drive-through orders. In June, McDonald’s announced it was ending a similar pilot program with IBM amid reports the technology had struggled with people’s accents.
With many variables at play, White Castle hasn’t measured whether Flippy has improved employee retention, Richardson said. So far, it has gotten positive feedback about the robot from employees.
“People who come to us want hot and tasty, affordable food,” he said. “If you can take the pain points out of that, if you can reduce the friction, everybody wins.”
Curt Garner, chief customer and technology officer at Chipotle, said the restaurant chain tested out Miso’s tortilla chip-making robot in one Orange County location from 2021 to 2023. Even though the pilot ended last year, Garner said the restaurant incorporated what it learned into other products.
For the record:
6:28 p.m. Oct. 30, 2024An earlier version of this story incorrectly said James Jordan is president and board chair of Miso Robotics. He no longer holds those roles.
Chipotle, which has a $100-million venture fund, has invested in other startups including Vebu Labs, which was founded by former Miso Robotics’ president and board chair, James Jordan. The partnership produced Autocado, which cuts, cores and peels avocados before workers hand-mash them to create guacamole. It has also invested in San José-based Hyphen to create what the company calls an “augmented makeline” that uses automated technology to build bowls and salads while Chipotle employees make burritos, tacos, quesadillas and kids’ meals.
Jot Condie, president and chief executive of the California Restaurant Assn., said the COVID-19 pandemic fueled more interest in the use of automation and technology in restaurants.
A lot of the adoption, he anticipates, will happen in fast-casual restaurants where convenience and efficiency are key, rather than in full-service restaurants where the interaction with friendly servers is a more important part of the experience.
“Quick service restaurants like Chipotle that have the ability and the resources to invest and adopt technologies will sort of lead the way,” he said.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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