Robotics company Miso Robotics, the developer of Flippy 2, which handles fries, wings, onion rings and other fast food items, has announced that it is making a new machine called Chippy, designed specifically to fry tortillas.
The Chippy robot is set to debut at a California location next month after reported months of testing by restaurant chain Chipotle, which sells Mexican food.
Like many restaurants across the US, Chipotle has been experiencing labour shortages as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. In November last year, a Chipotle location in Kentucky had to shut its doors after half of its staff walked out.
Flippy flipped burgers, whereas the Flippy 2 was geared more towards frying due to the backlog created by frying stations in restaurant kitchens.
“When an order comes in through the restaurant system, it automatically spits out the instructions to Flippy,” said Mike Bell, CEO of Miso Robotics, to Reuters.
Earlier this year, burger restaurant chain White Castle ordered 100 Flippy 2s to replace fry stations and support the distribution of workers to other roles.
“White Castle was the first large brand to embrace our technology and we are thrilled that our Flippy pilot made such a positive impact on their operations that they want to integrate 100 more,” said Mr. Bell.
“The task that the humans are most happy to offload are tasks like the fry station…they’re delighted to have the help so they can do other things.”
In April, fast food chain Jack in the Box began trialling Flippy 2 and Sippy, followed by a May announcement from chicken restaurant Wing Zone that Flippy 2 would be installed as standard in all new sites.
Engineers from Miso are able to monitor Flippy 2 robots as they work in real time on a big screen, which is intended to help them quickly troubleshoot any performance issues.
