Chowbotics Works to Develop New Food-Preparation Robots

We’ve heard quite a bit about mobile ordering and mobile payment restaurants of late, with even Starbucks going so far as to make a location just for mobile devices.

Yet we’ve also seen how these restaurants can falter in the face of too large a number of orders from mobile and in-store options. One way to address this problem is substantial hiring, but some, like Chowbotics, want to further automate stores down to food preparation.

With the Chowbotics systems, more particularly one of the prototype models known as Sally the Salad Robot, users get access to a kind of vending machine setup where users touch panels on a touchscreen display, and the robot then concocts the salad desired accordingly.

Right now, Chowbotics is set to make its appearance in businesses first. Right now, reports note plans to put Sally models in almost 62,000 restaurants, along with 37,000 supermarkets and 10,000 hotels.

Once Sally is on hand, Chowbotics wants to expand the prospect outward into Mexican, breakfast food, and more from there. Basically, Sally could make it that much easier to get a salad made from fresh vegetables, which is actually a challenge for regular home chefs.

Figure in all the time it takes to wash vegetables, chop lettuce, dice onions and peppers, slice cucumbers, and do all that sort of thing and even something as simple as a salad can take 15 or 20 minutes.

With Sally, these steps become automated, so that might drop it down to five minutes or less of chopping, slicing, and dicing, and ultimately make salad more accessible. Imagine a vending machine that spat out completed salads the way it spits out a candy bar today. That’s tailor-made for mobile payments, though it also poses a down side for those who work in food service who are no longer needed to wash, chop and so on.

If used as a supplement, though, this could be the kind of thing that makes healthy options more convenient, and convenience counts for a lot. Just where Chowbotics goes with this could be interesting, and deliver some great new options in mobile payment and mobile ordering systems.