There’s no barista who grew up watching Star Wars who doesn’t like the idea of having a lovable little droid about the house, helping with the dishes or just hangin’ out for a couple of rounds of Dejarik (holographic space-chess). And any human living in an apartment without steps has either got, or would consider getting themselves a self-guided vacuum cleaner.
There was a lot of discussion about robots in 2017 when Melbourne opened its first robot cafe called Once Alike. Back then, during a period I remember fondly as a kind of peak in the perceived hipsterism of the third wave, some businesses started looking for ways to replace us baristas with mechanical arms, capable of delivering arguably more precision and speed than a barista. In retrospect, the speed of service at Once Alike was on the slow side. But it was a grand experiment that made for very interesting viewing.
Once Alike’s robotic kiosk in Melbourne
The reason robots are back in the conversation this month is because a new fleet of 100 ‘Rookie’ Robots have been rolled out in the Naver building in South Korea, including their in-house Starbucks. Naver is one of South Korea’s biggest tech companies.
While baristas were starting to worry about their job security in 2017, this month it seems like it’s the floor staff that the droids are coming for instead. At Naver, food delivery and bussing empties are being done by so-called ‘busser bots’: Imagine a Darlek from Dr Who, crossed with a filing cabinet, and a pretty mundane-looking tablet for a head, displaying adorable Hello Kitty-esque facials, and you’ve got the picture.
Busser bots working the floor
The thing is, busser bots don’t have arms … yet. Whereas, at Once Alike, the robotic arm was the secret sauce. The rest of the automation they used was much more pedestrian: Puq press, touch screen ordering, and contactless payment. Whilst we never saw Once Alikes popping up on every station platform, they did get the ball rolling and it’s predicted to snowball. We’re now seeing robotic arms creeping into more dangerous parts of the kitchen, such as frying tortilla chips, which seems an undeniably positive step towards reducing accidents in the kitchen.
A robotic arm does have an Achilles heel though. It doesn’t like being bumped out of alignment. And it seems like the hospitality industry has temporarily agreed at this point that if a robotic arm is involved, then it needs to be well out of reach of the customers in case it goes rogue and starts giving out terminator handshakes instead of milkshakes. Once Alike had its arm enclosed in a little cubicle. To understand challenges like these, this week our Dean of Studies, Jem Challender reached out to Liam Wilkie, barista/engineer and former Operations Director of Once Alike, to get his thoughts on the past and future of robots in cafes.
Liam’s thoughts
Jem Challender: Do you think a robot delivering food and drinks would be able to stand in for floor staff in a busy cafe?
Liam Wilkie: I have seen them being used coupled with table ordering via web/QR, allowing a small kitchen team to operate a casual dining restaurant, but I have my reservations about their relevance in a busy cafe.
JC: What limitations do you see with busser bots in 2024?
LW: They have some limitations, they’re quite slow compared to wait staff, and they don’t handle unexpected situations such as an incorrect dish being plated up, or its path being blocked by a chair or some other obstruction. This comes down to a question of dining style and how we value the idea of table service. On one end of the spectrum there’s fast food, e.g. McDonald’s, and on the other end is table service like we’d expect in a restaurant. In my view, using robot waiters to deliver food to seated diners doesn’t really offer an improved service experience when compared to existing fast food service models. Customers can remain seated, but there’s minimal to no interaction with staff.
JC: Can you see busser bots working effectively in a fine-dining setting?
LW: I think it goes without saying that diners would respond poorly to being served by a robot in a fine-dining setting, given the expectation of service and experience in these sorts of venues. In a more casual environment, where customers might be more willing to accept a different service experience, I think a robot waiter could be valuable if some thought is put into how they’re used.
JC: How do you think a busser bot would perform in a busy third wave cafe environment?
LW: In my experience, a busy cafe is very dynamic, where service needs to be responsive and can’t follow a rigid routine. Wait staff will often serve multiple tables at a time, and can stop and change tasks if they see something that is a higher priority, e.g. a diner drops their fork, or there’s an issue with an order. Robots are generally poor in this sort of environment, they perform best doing repeatable tasks in controlled environments. I think the best application would be for them to act as a shuttle between the kitchen and dining sections. This would eliminate trips to and from the kitchen, and allow staff to remain in their sections, attending to diners and doing what they do best — provide service. Additionally, in venues that serve large groups, run events or offer large dishes to share, robot waiters would be useful assisting wait staff with the volume of food being served at any one time.
I could also see them being used with popups or food halls. These sites often operate with a number of different food trucks or vans serving a large communal dining section. QR/table ordering could be coupled with robot waiters allowing the vendors to operate with kitchen staff only, and speeding up the ordering process by removing the need to queue at a POS.
Given diners’ expectations around service, and the limitations of the current technology, I think that robot waiters can only be relevant in a hybrid service environment, alongside wait staff.
There are some coffee shops that mirror or even exceed the kind of service experience you might receive in a fine dining restaurant. So we decided to take this conversation to some legends of the hospitality world. Before Ewelina Kania became the Operations Manager of Barista Hustle Tools, she was the GM of Prufrock Coffee in London for six years.
Jem Challender: If you had a busser bot installed at Prufrock, could you imagine being in a position to employ fewer floor staff?
Ewelina Kania: I reckon we would need less floor staff. I think you could potentially save one to two floor staff 🤔. But I would never do it. I feel one of the few things that can differentiate a coffee shop from its competition is the customer experience. Delivering food and drinks is one of the best opportunities to create those feel-good moments for customers that I wouldn’t want to take away. That said, I would get a robot that packs the dishwasher — anytime!
One of the biggest challenges a GM faces is managing sick days and lunch breaks for cafe staff. Large places like Prufrock who do a lot of volume tend to cope a little better when someone’s away because they have a lot of baristas on the roster on any given day, but smaller venues with just two or three staff can really sweat it out when they drop down to two staff. A busser bot weighs in at around $15,000 USD each. That’s roughly a third of a London barista’s salary who’s taking home the London Living Wage. So to justify their existence, these little bots would need to do at least one third of the work of a human, whilst not getting under everyone’s feet. Actually, as I type, a cute little mopper-bot just glided past me busying itself cleaning the halls of Bangkok Airport (I’m on my way home from back from the World of Coffee expo). It didn’t exactly trip anyone over, but it didn’t get much mopping done either. In the two minutes I spent watching it, it was heavily engaged in collision avoidance mode with three separate travellers. If you let him loose in the early hours of the morning when the place was empty, I’m guessing he would be an absolute mopper-boss.
Mopper-bot in action at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Thailand
So, what’s the perspective of a cafe manager who has put armless busser bots into service already?
Boparan Restaurant chain, one of the biggest in the UK, claimed in a recent statement that they have added busser bots to their team without making any other changes.
“The trial will put no jobs at risk … with the robots implemented to give the restaurant team more time to focus on engaging with and serving customers”, according to a company press release.
Smith added, “The robots, along with our kiosks, app and table ordering, are the next stage in our digital journey. We don’t plan to replace our team with robots, they are here to support them and make their jobs easier.”
I get that. As a barista, if you slide into a cafe work flow with zero automation — no volumetric controls on the espresso machine; no timed or gravimetric grinder; no Puq press; no AutoComb — and it’s all down to old-skool finesse and barista skill, you really do feel your heart rate go up when a big queue starts to form. That kind of challenge is part of the thrill of doing this job in many ways, but any barista who has tasted the sweetness of a few workflow upgrades will tell you how much they appreciate the help.
What about the fine dining perspective? I asked Billy Brooks, General Manager of Elliot’s in London’s Borough Market, if he would ever consider introducing a robot into the workflow at Elliot’s.
The thing is, self-checkouts in supermarkets have become popular because many of us prefer not to disclose to a cashier what we’re having for dinner, or what, and how many sanitary items we may be purchasing for the household. But when it comes to your choice of coffee at a specialty coffee shop on the other hand, customers are generally proud to be there; over the moon to be guided in a choice of coffee; and very pleased to encounter some warmth and kindness at the start of their day whilst being surrounded by motivated, well educated coffee professionals.
So my view on this for now, at least while the first generation of bussers is rolled out, is that they are great at mopping, terrible at crowd control. And in a dynamic cafe setting, you’d have better luck asking a bollard to work front of house. I like Ewelina’s point — where the one place where advanced robotics could be immediately introduced to a specialty coffee shop without a single complaint being raised by any coffee professionals is behind those dishwasher racks.
That is an absolute great insight! Bots cannot handle operations without making errors that are rookies. Besides, humans need emotional support even when it comes to customer service and that is something that bots cannot show!