What the business is
Miso Robotics builds kitchen robots: Flippy fries food, Sippy pours and seals drinks, Chippy fries tortilla chips.
The bet
That fast-food chains will rent kitchen robots to close a chronic labor gap — at $5,000 to install and $3,500 a month per station.
Starting capital
About $50 million to develop Flippy, per Fortune; $5,000 per kitchen to deploy and $3,500 per month to rent
How it started
Miso trained Flippy to sink baskets of food into hot oil and remove them at the right moment, using AI to sense when food is ready; a Jack in the Box in Chula Vista, Calif. debuted it at the end of July 2022.
What happened
Jack in the Box planned five to 10 more Flippy locations by the end of 2023; Miso also built Sippy for beverages and Chippy, seen at a select number of Chipotles, for tortilla chips.
What has to be true
The pandemic gutted restaurant staffing — 750,000 fewer jobs as of May 2022 — and chains couldn't lure workers back at the same wages.
Fry stations are hot, high-turnover, precisely timed work: the natural first territory for a robot rented at $3,500 a month.
Customer satisfaction was slipping on service speed and food quality, per the American Customer Satisfaction Index, pressing chains to add capacity.
What can be applied
Automation sells best where labor is scarcest and the task is most repetitive: the fryer before the kitchen.
Aftermath
As of the September 2022 report, Jack in the Box planned to install Flippy at another five to 10 locations by the end of 2023, while Miso positioned Sippy and Chippy as the rest of a kitchen robot lineup.
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