In San Francisco, it’ll cost you $5.79 to get a Big Mac. But Creator, a new startup fast-food restaurant, is making gourmet burgers using the best ingredients for about the same price—a whopping $6. And they’re paying their employees above the minimum wage to boot. According to Fast Company, Creator is changing the fast-food game through a cost-effective, mechanized fry cook that can churn out 240 burgers in an hour with minimal human assistance.
Alex Vardakostas, co-founder and CEO of Creator, was inspired to developed the robot because of his experience working minimum wage jobs flipping burgers while growing up. After spending so much of his adolescence flipping burger after burger, Vardakostas said that he “saw so many opportunities where I wanted to do it a bit better, slower, or more personalized, but it’s impossible when you have to manually make that many burgers with rudimentary tools.”
While studying physics in college Vardakostas wondered if the advanced technological concepts he was learning could be applied to food service. “We don’t see it as a robot,” he said. “I see it as the ultimate kitchen instrument. It’s just a utensil. The whole thing started–if a better griddle makes a better burger, let’s go all the way. It just happens that it basically has to be as sophisticated as what some people call a robot.”
The biggest critique of machines like this is that they replace human jobs, but Creator has no intention of phasing humans out of the restaurant industry just because their chef is made of metal. The employees, instead of flipping burgers, greet customers and help customers with their orders. They’re paid $16 dollars an hour and are encouraged to use 5% of their time to study anything of interest for their future careers. “Overall, what we’re doing is reducing the cost of food,” says Vardakostas. “That’s something that’s positive for everybody. When it comes to a discussion of, hey, let’s try to keep people in a position of flipping burgers, I’m kind of incredulous–why the hell are we asking that question? Why aren’t we trying to figure out how to get those people to do something that’s more fulfilling, more human-centered, more creative, and more social?”
So humans are doing the work that robots likely will never be able to replace, and this machine is completely the more mundane tasks with precision and efficacy that is just not possible of a human. It toasts the hamburger over 90 seconds, which humans usually don’t have the patience or time to do, and grates cheese to order, which helps it melt to perfection. It’s even revolutionized patty flipping—“When the patty’s put into the griddle, it’s so loosely packed it will literally fall apart in your hands, but the robot has the dexterity to keep it all together,” says Vardakostas.
The technology has a sleek and open feel that engages the customer. “You see everything, and that’s an important feature of the machine from a physical design perspective,” says Per Selvaag, principle at Montaag, the firm that handled the experience design. “The openness is baked into its physical DNA as much as anything, and your sense leaving the machines is that you trust the process.” It’s even designed to reduce the amount of smoke and grease that stinks up your typical burger joint, allowing customers to breathe cleaner air while eating fresher ingredients.
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