The home-sized ones often take a cartridge of little plastic bins preloaded with the ingredients and coded with the instructions. Just slip one of those in the slot, push start, and get a good hot meal.
You want to compete with China, you need to know what's already been done there. Remember those "Bodega" clowns? They apparently didn't know that much more advanced automatic convenience stores already exist in China.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HkGRzzsKH4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCTv-4sFt_s [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NTIciISVPA [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S--wwu4S-w [5] https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/automatic-wok-machine.html
Just to pick one: the supply chain is a real issue. Getting fresh ingredients into the machines, keeping them running, performing maintenance... all of that requires a well-tuned supply chain, knowledge of food sources, etc., especially since Spyce is targeting an upscale "fast-casual" (~healthy) demographic.
As a disclaimer I was pitched by this team in 2015-2016, and was pretty convinced that they weren't facing much local competition.
The innovation is now trying to make robots that are more flexible, smaller and low volume food production while not being super expensive.
Fast food could also be run by robots fairly easily. I am imagining in 15 years most places will have robots doing the majority of cooking in restaurants. They won't spread disease, make food consistently, won't call out sick nor require an hourly wage.
"All their food" at Applebee's is not "microwaved frozen food"; I know plenty of people who got their start as cooks and chefs there. Something like three-quarters is made in-house and you'd have to be blind and unable to feel your tongue to not be able to tell a microwaved steak.
You may want to consider asking dang to delete your comment.
As a side note, if you walk into an Applebee's you can actually be seated at a table with a view of the kitchen, where you can watch the cooks at work. Applebee's may not be the best cooked food, but it is actually cooked by real live people, and has been for decades.
And it really works. At a startup I worked at we had a guy from MIT and whenever the VCs talked to to the low ranks they inevitable ended up talking to him. And no, he was not the best engineer. Not even close.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/mit-students-invented-a-robot...
I'd envisioned a somewhat different robot. I thought the ingredients could be tube-delivered like caulking guns, on a rotating 'tool carousel' so you could cook different recipes by selecting and timing. And process vertically so you avoid most 'conveyor belt' issues. Finally do it as drive-thru with automated ordering (touch screen/phone app) to eliminate the rest of the human factor.
The result should be good quality, fast food at a radically cheaper price.
That is a non sequitur. The most dangerous illness associated with fast food (poor nutrition aside) such as E. coli[1] and Hep A[2] are most readily attributed to ingredient suppliers, not improper food handling.
Most of the largest chains have pretty much automated nearly everything by now that's possible given reliability and safety standards. If you look in the kitchen of any McDonald's nobody is cooking or preparing the components. They're either pre-cut, loaded into dispensers, being cooked in a self-timing temperature-controlled fryer, or being cooked on a self-timing temperature-controlled clamshell grill. If you check out a Taco Bell, they've even eliminated the cooking part. It's all made off-site in large batches and rewarmed on the assembly line. Even the beloved Chipotle has moved to retherming their components where possible.
The human labor is merely in assembly and delivery. And automating that with robots is a generation away, if at all.
Here's a compilation video of various food robots from July 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRngacYpi7E
With regard to health and safety, the robots will provide only small benefit. Humans are better equipped (i.e., we have noses) to detect bad food; and in any case humans will still be involved in the handling, storage, and transportation of ingredients. Although disgusting, cases where the cook doesn't clean the grill properly and people get sick are much rarer than cases where the ingredients are already bad.
I suspect the main benefit of these robots to a fast food chain would be consistency in product and preparation times.
The automated food industry is very, very good at producing quality safe food. And I reject that humans will still be storing nor handling food - a truck backs up, exchanges pallets with a food container carousel, the truck drives away with the empties. Robots all the way!
With that said, from the robotics progress I've seen/studied, more fundamental robotics progress needs to be made first. The approaches used right now are just not durable/reliable enough for mass market adoption. Best of luck to that team though.
Putting junk in a bowl is a much simpler feat. Also hard for robotics to win much on I should think because the labor for putting food into a bowl is not terribly expensive as is (and imo not a particularly exciting market) - see Eatsa. Though it's still cool that they end-to-end the process with dishwashing (according to video).
An photo of the updated device in background that appears it should have run in the New Yorker article: https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5ac80c69ae933e116601abbf/...
Pretty broad definition of "good" if Soylent fits in there.
