Can Robots Reinvent Fast Food?

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The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2024

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Restaurants are a tough business with tight margins, from the cost of food to paying for staff. Kernel, the new venture by Steve Ells, the founder and former CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, is trying to fix that by introducing food-making robots and a "digital-first" approach to restaurants. In this conversation from the WSJ Global Food Forum in June, reporter Heather Haddon talks with Ells about his new bet on consumers’ desire to eat less meat, and on a business model that could solve some of the industry’s thorny challenges. What do you think about the show? Let us know on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or email us: [email protected] Further reading: Rise of the Restaurant Robots: Chipotle, Sweetgreen and Others Bet on Automation How Chipotle’s Founder Is Moving Beyond Burritos Chipotle’s Labor Costs Are Rising. Customers Will See It in Pricing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:24.5	elastic.co.elastic for search AI company. Running a restaurant is hard work with tight margins. You have to design a great menu,
0:37.6	make sure you've got fresh ingredients no matter the season, train and pay a full team of kitchen workers, servers, and counterstaff,
0:46.5	and keep customers coming back for more day after day.
0:50.1	I think back 31 years and we all knew what the fast food format looked like.
0:54.8	We knew how they operated and then Chipotle came along and we did everything differently
1:00.8	and it turned out to be a platform that's quite popular.
1:04.0	That's Steve Elles. He's the founder and former CEO of Chipotle Mexican Kitchen,
1:10.0	the restaurant chain that helped shift the fast food landscape.
1:14.0	One of the biggest innovations at the time was the assembly line style of ordering your food.
1:19.0	Now, with his new restaurant, Colonel, Els wants to reinvent fast casual dining again by taking another
1:26.0	page from modern factories.
1:28.6	Normally when you see maybe a dozen people at peak period at a typical restaurant, we would have three.
1:34.8	And they're working alongside this automated robotic production system.
1:40.5	That's right, robots. And the precision and the consistency and the reduction of the
1:47.4	monotony for producing large borders throughout the day is extraordinary.
1:51.8	Journal reporter Heather Haddon spoke with Els last month at the W.S.J Global Food Forum
	...

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