Bloomberg News reports that squeezing hundreds of millions of lemons per year to make lemonade was so labor-intensive for Chick-fil-A that it “enlisted an army of robots to do it”:
In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility….then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain’s trademark lemonade. The automated plant frees up in-store staff to serve customers faster…Squeezing lemons was a tedious task that added up to 10,000 hours of work a day across all locations and resulted in many injured fingers. Removing the chore aims to make working at Chick-fil-A more appealing – key for a company looking to add hundreds of new locations while contending with a fast-food labor crunch….
The lemonade factory shows how restaurants are using automation to improve efficiency and wring more sales out of their stores as competition intensifies for diners and labor. Nearly half of quick-service chains say they’re understaffed…The shortage is expected to persist for years.
Chick-fil-A restaurants are busier than most fast-food chains. The average Chick-fil-A restaurant has about twice the annual sales of the average McDonald’s. A busy Chick-fil-A restaurant can use up to 2,000 lemons per day worth of lemon juice, and there are over 3,000 Chick-fil-A restaurants in the United States.
“Other restaurants are also turning to automation in all its forms. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. is testing in-restaurant machines that cut, core and peel avocados while Wendy’s Co., Taco Bell and others are doing trials of AI to take drive-thru orders. Cava Group Inc., a fast-casual Mediterranean chain, is piloting the use of cameras and generative AI to monitor how fast ingredients get used up.”
Robot taxis are transporting thousands of passengers every day in the United States.
Japan is turning to robots to care for its elderly as its birth rate shrinks. Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms and robots are being used as waiters in restaurants in Korea.
Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells, and nanorobots to fight cancer.
