Ghost restaurants, essentially. Incidentally, I wonder what Travis Kalanick and his company CloudKitchens is up to now that he doesn't run Uber anymore.
Basically it seems after expanding to >30 countries then realizing COVID growth would not continue, rationalizing operations, and figuring out the model of ghost kitchens is limited in growth potential with significant customer and platform backlash TK's been trying to automate the production side using the "former self driving team" of Uber at a Cloud Kitchen subsidiary called Lab37. https://www.lab37.us/ However, the (2023) pictures of their system show they are not very advanced, and news appears to have halted.
Why am I monitoring this? I personally spent 9 years actually doing mechatronic R&D in the food prep, packaging and logistics automation space in China with more aggressive footprint and automation goals and am currently raising for US based go to market on a far higher density platform that sidesteps the last mile delivery providers entirely. Email in profile.
How'd that go in China? Robot-burger flipping always seemed cool. With the level of automation they otherwise employ, why isn't McDonald's doing it yet?
My understanding is that it's basically a cost benefit calculation where it would cost nearly as much or even more than a worker because of the mechanical repair cost over time and a restaurant still wouldn't be able to automate the entire production flow from take burger out of freezer -> package it up, so there isn't much benefit. Also, having all the burger variants McDonalds sells also doesn't make this easy.
Value wise, China for mechatronic R&D is awesome. There's nowhere better on earth. It's the other stuff - legals, regulatory, HR, schools, etc. that's a PITA.
Re. McD's (actually ~15 years ago I used to work with the husband of the head of Europe but never discussed the business) - don't think their risk model has 'operational efficiency' high on the agenda. Mostly risk is outsourced to franchisees. They are so big they can just move really slowly and nobody gets fired. When competitors do something, they copy it and see if it works, recent eg. CosMc'shttps://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/mcdonalds-unveils-cosmcs-i...
Fundamentally - are we all going to be eating from robots real soon now? Absolutely, yes. But they won't look like 'Flippy' or Creator. They'll just be infrastructure - familiar features of the public environment as common as an electrical socket, garden tap, or street sign. You'll press a button on your own device, and either the results will come to you or you'll take a short walk. Yes, that means they have to be small, highly reliable, and self-managing. Nobody (else) has this yet. We're there.
But the stock tip of this post is - current era last mile players are dead men walking. They have no means to transition to a significant position given pending commercial drone deregulation. The players set to clean up must be vertically integrated and provide both production and delivery (that's us) or have exceptional cycle time confidence and perfect autonomous drone integration with agreed standards to unknown airframes (sketchy proposition).
