Meals on wheels: are robot waiters going to take over from humans? Many restaurant owners see them as the answer to labour shortages
- In the US, a robot server costs US$15,000 to buy, while a human server costs between US$5,000 and US$6,000 a month, and takes days off
- There are now tens of thousands of robot waiters in service worldwide, and that number will only grow, observers of the food and beverage industry say
You may already have seen them in restaurants: waist-high machines that can greet guests, lead them to their tables, deliver food and drinks and ferry dirty dishes to the kitchen. Some have catlike faces and even purr when you scratch their heads.
But are robot waiters the future?
Many think robot waiters are the solution to the industry’s labour shortages. Sales have been growing rapidly in recent years, with tens of thousands now gliding through dining rooms worldwide.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is where the world is going,” says Dennis Reynolds, dean of the Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership at the University of Houston in the US state of Texas.
The school’s restaurant began using a robot in December, and Reynolds says it has eased the workload for human staff and made service more efficient.
But others say robot waiters aren’t much more than a gimmick with a long way to go before they can replace humans. They can’t take orders, and many restaurants have steps, outdoor patios and other physical challenges they can’t adapt to.
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“Restaurants are pretty chaotic places, so it’s very hard to insert automation in a way that is really productive,” says Craig Le Clair, a vice-president at the consulting company Forrester who studies automation.
Still, robots are proliferating. California-based Bear Robotics introduced its Servi robot in 2021 and expects to have 10,000 deployed by the end of this year in 44 US states and overseas. Shenzhen, China-based Pudu Robotics, founded in 2016, has deployed more than 56,000 robots worldwide.
“Every restaurant chain is looking toward as much automation as possible,” says Phil Zheng of Richtech Robotics, an Austin, Texas-based maker of robot servers. “People are going to see these everywhere in the next year or two.”
Besides saving labour, the robots generate business
Li Zhai was having trouble finding staff for Noodle Topia, his Madison Heights, Michigan, restaurant, in the summer of 2021, so he bought a BellaBot from Pudu Robotics.
The robot was so successful he added two more; now, one robot leads diners to their seats while another delivers bowls of steaming noodles to tables. Employees pile dirty dishes onto a third robot to shuttle back to the kitchen.
Now, Zhai only needs three people to do the same volume of business that five or six people used to handle. And they save him money. A robot costs around US$15,000, he says, but a person costs US$5,000 to US$6,000 per month.
Zhai says the robots give human servers more time to mingle with customers, which increases tips. And customers often post videos of the robots on social media that entice others to visit.
“Besides saving labour, the robots generate business,” he says.
Interactions with human servers can vary. Betzy Giron Reynosa, who works with a BellaBot at Sushi Factory in West Melbourne, Florida, says the robot can be a pain. “You can’t really tell it to move or anything,” she says. She has also had customers who don’t want to interact with it.
But overall the robot is a plus, she says. It saves her trips back and forth to the kitchen and gives her more time with customers.
Labour shortages accelerated the adoption of robots globally, Le Clair says.
Pandemic-era concerns about hygiene and adoption of new technology like QR code menus also laid the ground for robots, says Karthik Namasivayam, director of The School of Hospitality Business at Michigan State University Broad College of Business.
“Once an operator begins to understand and work with one technology, other technologies become less daunting and will be much more readily accepted as we go forward,” he says.
Namasivayam notes that public acceptance of robot servers is already high in Asia. Pizza Hut has robot servers in 1,000 restaurants in China, for example.
The US was slower to adopt robots, but some chains are now testing them. Chick-fil-A is trying them at various US locations, and has found that the robots give human employees more time to refresh drinks, clear tables and greet guests.
But not all chains have had success with robots.
Haidilao, a hotpot chain in China, began using robots a year ago to deliver food to diners’ tables. But managers at several outlets said the robots haven’t proved as reliable or cost-effective as human servers.
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Wang Long, the manager of a Beijing outlet, says his two robots have both broken down.
“We only used them now and then,” Wang says. “It is a sort of concept thing and the machine can never replace humans.”
Eventually, Namasivayam expects that a certain percentage of restaurants – maybe 30 per cent – will continue to have human servers and be considered more luxurious, while the rest will lean more heavily on robots in the kitchen and in dining rooms.
Economics are on the side of robots, he says; the cost of human labour will continue to rise, but technology costs will fall.
But that’s not a future everyone wants to see. Saru Jayaraman, who advocates for higher pay for restaurant workers in the United States as president of One Fair Wage, said restaurants could easily solve their labour shortages if they just paid workers more.
“Humans don’t go to a full-service restaurant to be served by technology,” she said. “They go for the experience of themselves and the people they care about being served by a human.”
