First fully robot-operated restaurant opens in the U.S.

The future in which our food will be served to us by robots is not far off. A restaurant in San Francisco claims to be the first fully automated one, involving no human in the operation. Basically, Mezli is a kind of food truck, with customers able to order and receive their food without “restaurant” employees being on site. The whole process is fully automated, and the founders say the concept can deliver quality, cheap food to customers in the shortest possible time.

The “restaurant” is a kind of automated food truck that can cook 64,800 types of food

The “robot” restaurant is stocked with ingredients already cooked in a kitchen where people cook. However, the operation of the restaurant is then fully automated once the restocking is done. Customers order dishes from touch screens, and robots inside can correctly dose the amount of ingredients for each dish, heat the portions and then deliver them to customers in less than a minute. According to Mezli’s founders, the restaurant can deliver 75 servings per hour.

Inside are several containers of chilled ingredients and an oven that can heat, or finish cooking the ingredients to create these servings. Everything is precisely programmed in advance for each individual dish. Customers have the option of choosing certain pre-set dishes, or even creating their own bowl of food, with over 64,800 variations possible using the ingredients inside.

And to “learn” new recipes, the restaurant only needs a software update, which can add new ingredients, new ways to cook them, or new ways to combine them together. The whole restaurant is completely dependent on electricity and uses no gas for cooking. So it’s easy to move it to where it’s needed. In some of the slideshows, Mezli, shaped like a shipping container, is located next to other food trucks, so it can easily be moved from one location to another as needed.

Mezli’s founders, Stanford grads, say the whole system is proprietary, and the idea behind this robot restaurant was that there aren’t very many affordable healthy food restaurant options in San Francisco. So a meal at Mezli starts at US$6.99, which for this city is an extremely low price. Mezli will open in San Francisco on 28 August.