According to an analysis by McKinsey & Company, nearly three quarters of food service and accommodations tasks could be automated.
These span a broad number of tasks; industrial robots work in concert with AI, thermal scanners, and lasers to chop vegetables, grill hamburgers or other foods, or perform similar tasks. AI is now being used to improve cooking processes including optimizing recipes and ingredient selection.
Similarly, at the front–end of restaurants, we could see substantial technology-driven change. In particular, we could see movement towards more automated service where voice- or facial recognition- activated cashiers could take orders and payments or assign tables.
There are also other innovations such as the Winnow system, for example, which uses a smart scale and camera to measure the amount and type of food thrown away by restaurants. Staff can then indicate the reasons why the food has been thrown away (mistake in the kitchen, unfinished plate, etc.). Careful analysis of this data allows decisive action to be taken to reduce food waste.
There will likely be substantial heterogeneity across restaurants in this adoption as, unlike back–end operations, it is unclear how amenable potential diners will be to these technologies. As noted in a recent report issued by Oracle, four in ten consumers said they’d visit a restaurant less often if it used greeting robots. It is not just diners. 76 percent of restaurant operators say that its appealing to use robots for food quality checking or robotic preparation.
Sushi Robot makers in several Japanese restaurants, like the “Sushi Sun Magliana” in Rome, aren’t even a surprise anymore. Mr Kisaku Suzuki, creator of the world’s first sushi robot, once ran a company that made candy- wrapping machines. Suzumo Machinery Co’s robots are used by about 70,000 customers around the world, ranging from sushi chains to factories, and account for about 70 per cent of the market for the equipment at restaurants, according to Suzumo’s estimates.
Furthermore, we might see sorting across restaurants depending on tastes and preferences for a technologically–driven experience, where there might be a premium associated with human customer service.
A case study published by Journal of Tourism Futures in November 2020 states that even when customers accept the use of robots in the restaurant industry, the findings indicate robots were not capable and qualified enough to replace human employees in restaurants.
That is why some hospitality firms, especially hotels, preferred not to use service robots anymore (Qiu et al., 2019). The most notable example is the Henn na hotel that turned off half of its robots because they reportedly malfunctioned and created more work for the human employees (Shead, 2019). As the inimitable feature of human employees is needed for the hospitability and service (Golubovskaya et al., 2017), the robotic service may negatively affect the customers’ experience (Gursoy et al., 2019). Therefore, high-quality service with robots may not be possible for hospitality firms, but simple requirements of consumers can be meet.
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