A start-up has launched the world’s first fully-automated robot restaurant this month with no employees on the premises, based in San Francisco. The company, called Mezli, was founded by a group of graduate students from Stanford, with the aim of making good, quality meals while still being affordable for people too busy to cook for themselves.
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“To our knowledge, we’re the first-ever fully-autonomous restaurant serving a fresh, fully customisable, hot menu, and that unlocks a number of advantages for us,” the company said. “Eventually, we realised that a restaurant that served takeout and delivery only, with no on-site workers, would be able to serve high-quality meals for a much lower price point.”
It idea came about thinking about the cost of the service industry and how it could be lowered. The team designed a process of having food prepared by professional chefs in a large centralised location and then distributing it to a network of containerised automated restaurants. Therefore, there is a single large kitchen that allows its cooks to serve more daily customers, and enables the company to pay them well, while keeping Mezli’s prices at just about half of what chains with similar quality levels charge, according to the company.
The first Mezli robot restaurant opened its doors in San Francisco on 28 August 2022.
This model means the space inside the restaurant doesn’t need to accommodate any people, making it easier to automate and build in a factory. “This means they’re both cheaper to build and fit in smaller spaces than traditional restaurants, which will let us deploy them to lots of places to spread the availability of our high-quality, affordable meals,” Mezli said.
The robot restaurant menu includes a range of classic bowls made with fresh ingredients, while customers can also build their own meals by choosing their bases, mains, garnishes, and sauces.
