Yes, you heard that right. Robots are here to flip burgers. You can no longer scare your kids to study hard to get into a good college and get a good job by saying that if they don’t, they will end up working at the local burger joint, flipping burgers in the scorching heat. Yep, automation is taking that away from us as well.
To me, this doesn’t sound surprising. The meat already arrives at the fast-food restaurant ready to be put on the grill. Its’ not like the fast food industry is feeding us fresh meat that is minced, herbed, and whatever it is that they do in the actual restaurant. It’s prepared somewhere else and comes to the store. Yes, you have to unpack it and get it ready for the day. But, the whole concept of flipping a burger and maybe adding some basic ingredients such as a thin slice of cheese should not be too difficult to automate and that is what exactly the newish startup Miso Robotics is doing.
The name of their first robot is Flippy. Very innovative (yes, I’m sarcastic). They call it an AI-enabled kitchen assistant. But, I’m not sure it really assists too much outside of just flipping the burger. In addition, I think this task is too simple to require AI. I think that part is just the usual “let’s add some buzz words to make it sound cool”.
Does it have the ability to disrupt a multi-billion dollar industry? Can it be a billion-dollar unicorn?
I think it certainly can. Any job that can be automated will be automated. Fast food fits the bill nicely. From what I gather, the business plan for the startup Miso Robotics is to charge $15K a year for this kitchen robot. Assuming that the robot (I mean kitchen assistant) works as advertised then Miso definitely has a winner on their hands. $15K is cheaper than hiring someone, dealing with time off, trying to find backups workers, dealing with human mistakes, illness, arguments over pay, insurance (do fast-food workers get insurance?).
Of course, the business plan of Miso Robotics is based on Flippy the AI robot working continuously, without breaking down or needing service too frequently. What happens if a worker hits the robot by accident? After all fast food kitchens don’t have much space. Or what if it just breaks down naturally – all mechanical devices have a much higher failure rate compared to pure electronics. What happens then? How quickly can it get serviced? What is the service cost? It is baked into the $15K annual cost. I personally don’t know the answers, so if you do, please comment below.
Assuming that business plan is realistic (because 80% of the startups out there have crappy, unrealistic business plans) and the company can whether the Covid slowdown, since many business are going to be reluctant to spend cash let alone experiment with robots that have not been wildly proven, I think we will see automation become more widespread in the fast food industry.
In the future Miso robotics will either be acquired by an industrial kitchen appliance vendor or they will diversify into many more industries. I believe the chances are higher that it will be acquired under a $1B valuation and therefore will not make it into the unicorn club. What do you think?
How is the current sales/market traction?
I’m sure that the company has probably done some low profile test trials or even some low key customers, but the first high profile customer is White Castle burger. If you have exhausted your Netflix queue during the lockdown, you might want to check out the Harold and Kumar movie. It’s not great, but, hey you’ve probably seen all the good movies by now 🙂
Clearly, Miso Robotics doesn’t have much traction. And as I said before, Covid is not helping the situation. But, I think they will try to take advantage of the robots that can’t spread viruses argument (they can spread software viruses) and push for an aggressive expansion agenda. Good luck to them!
Have you heard of competing companies in this space? If so, please drop me a note.
How is the ordinary employee compensation?
They don’t have too many employees; therefore, I don’t have insider information. Looks like many of the employees have a machine learning background, which is still a rare skill, therefore, the base salary might be reasonable to compete with the rest of the Bay Area tech startups. After all, it’s a hot space, so they would need to pay reasonably well. Would love to hear from you if you have any info.
Startup Surfer’s Scorecard for Miso:
What do you think about Miso Robotics? Would love to hear your thoughts.