Simply over a yr in the past, Steve Ells, the founding father of Chipotle, opened Kernel in New York Metropolis—a vegan restaurant idea that includes a big robotic arm within the kitchen to help in meals preparation.
Given Ells’s pedigree, Kernel acquired vital consideration from information retailers, with many speculating whether or not it represented the start of widespread robotics adoption in eating places.
Nevertheless, this hypothesis was short-lived. A yr later, Kernel closed, changed by a sandwich store serving roast beef and different conventional sandwich staples—primarily, extra meat and fewer robots.
This pivot marks a notable shift for Ells, who simply final fall described his automation-heavy restaurant as “the long run for the restaurant business.” But by December, Ells had expressed frustration and was already planning a reboot. The revamped idea, now referred to as Counter Service, utterly modifications the unique premise.
Why did Ells shift from viewing robotics as central to eating places to abandoning the thought completely inside a yr? Firm COO Tom Cortese, who spoke at The Spoon’s CES Meals Tech convention in January, outlined some challenges in an interview with Expedite:
The logistics of putting in and sustaining a extremely delicate robotic are appreciable, Cortese says. Workers have to be correctly educated to work together with it, and it introduces an entire new set of security guidelines past these of a typical restaurant kitchen. Then there’s the problem of New York actual property:
“The subsurface of a few of these flooring had been in-built 1910… now I’m bolting a delicate piece of robotics to it, and the ground shifts over time. That basically messes up plenty of issues,” he says.
Whereas Cortese didn’t explicitly point out it, one other potential challenge was probably the restaurant’s overtly robotic look. Ells himself admitted as a lot in a Gizmodo interview, noting he might need gone “a bit chilly” with the preliminary idea and prompt a have to “heat issues up” in future iterations. Evidently, that meant eradicating the enormous Kuka robotic arm.
In the end, exterior novelty ideas similar to Cafe X’s robotic espresso store, shoppers seem uncomfortable with outstanding industrial robotic arms dominating open kitchens in informal eating settings. Such robots appear jarring in comparison with purpose-built food-making robots like Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen or Picnic’s pizza robotic.
Ells’s choice to introduce meat to the menu additionally displays broader market realities. Regardless of a decade-long concentrate on vegan and various proteins in meals innovation, nearly all of People stay meat-eaters. Whereas eating places profit from providing vegan choices, completely vegan institutions at the moment face challenges in attracting broader audiences.
By eradicating robots and incorporating meat into the menu, Ells is pivoting in the direction of a extra conventional idea and betting that the success of his new enterprise is set by one thing the pioneering founder is aware of one thing about: the standard of the meals itself.
