A cooking robot from in a vending machine from Botinkit served fried chicken and fries. | Photos by Jonathan Maze.
FHA-HoReCa, the Singapore event where the FSTEC Asia conference is being held, is a restaurant exposition not unlike the National Restaurant Show.
Which means that there are plenty of robots. We saw fried rice-making robots, noodle-making robots, coffee robots, bowl robots, ice cream robots, pizza robots, fryer robots, and robots we probably didn’t know were robots.
That kind of innovation has generally been slow to fully make its way into restaurants. “Every year we talk about robotics,” Loh Lik Peng, director of Unlisted Corp., a company that operates hotels and high-end restaurants in Singapore, said at FSTEC Asia. “But nobody has come out with a solution except those things that move.”
“The cost is ridiculous at the moment,” he added. “But the holy grail is robotics.”
There is a clear need for it. Despite concerns about the industry losing its “hospitality,” the past few years have taught us just what happens when the restaurant business cannot get enough workers to meet demand: Closed locations, soaring wages, rising prices, frustrated consumers. It’s difficult to be hospitable when you’re short-staffed and there’s a line of angry customers.
While labor shortages have eased, there are long-term concerns about the aging population and a shrinking workforce. Those issues are particularly acute in Asia, and the result is already driving an immense amount of innovation.
In Singapore, for instance, the government has been subsidizing businesses to adopt more technology and save on labor costs, given concerns about the availability of employees. At the opening of FHA-Ho-ReCa, Alvin Tan, Singapore’s minister of state for trade and industry, boasted about the amount of man hours that has saved restaurants over the past three years.
“They’re dramatically cutting back on foreign manpower in Singapore,” Peng said. “We’ve been hearing this for more than a decade. Adoption of technology is second nature here.”
Fried rice robots were particularly popular in all sizes at FHA-HoReCa.
David Henkes, senior principal and head of strategic partnerships with Restaurant Business sister company Technomic, said that labor availability will be a major driver of technology in the coming years. And he pointed out that many Asian nations face a rapidly aging population.
In China, the world’s second biggest economy, 31% of the population is expected to be 65 or older by 2050, up from 15% today. In Japan, 38% of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 30%. In South Korea, 40% of the population will be 65 or older, up from 19%.
Many of these countries are allowing more workers in to fill jobs, he said. “Labor really is going to drive technology innovation, particularly in Asia,” Henkes said.
Asian countries also have heavy demand for restaurants, higher than in the rest of the globe. Henkes noted that 69% of global consumers visit a restaurant at least once a week, and in Asia that percentage is 73%. Many Asian nations, such as Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, are over 80%. In Singapore, 79% of consumers dine out at a restaurant at least once a week.
As such, these concepts must meet heavy consumer demand in an era in which there will be fewer workers.
These companies are developing creative ways to use technology as it is, even if it isn’t strictly about robotics.
The Singapore-based salad concept Salad Stop features a “digital ledge” in front of the counter where salads are put together, to guide customers on the choices of ingredients for their salads, simplifying the ordering process.
Asian concepts are already beginning to have an influence in the U.S. restaurant market. Many of the fastest-growing chains in the country are Asian. And many Asian chains are flush with technology designed both for customer experience and to improve the labor model, such as the revolving sushi chain Kura Sushi.
Some of the world’s fastest-growing chains are based in Asia, such as the Chinese concept Cotti Coffee and its larger rival Luckin. Both could be among the 10 largest global chains by unit count within a few years. And both heavily rely on technology to make their operations more efficient, even if they do not use robots.
The company Codemax featured a number of robots, such as this coffee bot.
But implementation of robotics has been slower than many expected, particularly given how long robotics companies have looked for an entrance into the restaurant market.
For the most part, robots have either been too expensive or not good enough for the tasks inside restaurants, so much of their addition have improved labor on the margins, at best. Mostly they’ve generated more sales, which requires more labor to meet that demand.
Or they’ve taken up residence on college campuses and hospitals and other places where labor availability is particularly difficult for the demand.
One of the most popular displays at FHA HoReCa was a large vending machine that prepared bowls of fried chicken bites and fries. The device is effectively an entire kitchen in a box run by a robotic arm and monitored using centralized software. The device will be targeted initially at nontraditional locations.
But even within traditional restaurants, expect more robots to make their way into kitchens and dining rooms and drive-thrus.
“Absolutely, 110,000 percent,” said Troy Hooper, CEO of Hot Palette America and Pepper Lunch in the U.S.
And he noted that the return on investment is already there for robots such as fry makers. “The math maps out,” he said. “It’s coming. It’s just been a lot slower than I expected.”
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