You may have seen them in restaurants before: waist-high machines that can greet guests, guide them to their tables, deliver food and drinks, and carry dirty dishes to the kitchen. Some are cat-faced and even purr when you scratch their head.
But are robot waiters the future? It’s a question that the restaurant industry is increasingly trying to answer.
Robot waiters are thought by many to be the solution to the industry’s labor shortage. Sales of them have been growing rapidly in recent years, with tens of thousands now slipping through diners around the world.
“I have no doubt that this is the direction of the world,” said Dennis Reynolds, dean of the University of Houston Hilton College of Global Hospitality Leadership. The school restaurant began using a robot in December, and Reynolds says it has eased the workload on human staff and made service more efficient.
But others say robot waiters aren’t much more than a gimmick that has a long way to go before they can replace humans. They can’t take orders and many restaurants have steps, outdoor patios and other physical challenges they can’t adjust to.
“Restaurants are pretty chaotic places, so it’s very difficult to embed automation in a way that’s really productive,” said Craig Le Clair, a vice president at consultancy Forrester that studies automation.
Still, robots are proliferating. Redwood City, California-based Bear Robotics introduced its Servi robot in 2021 and expects to have 10,000 deployed by the end of this year in 44 US states and abroad. Shenzen, China-based Pudu Robotics, which was founded in 2016, has deployed more than 56,000 robots around the world.
“Every restaurant chain is looking for as much automation as possible,” said Phil Zheng of Richtech Robotics, an Austin-based maker of robot servers. “People will see them everywhere in the next year or two.”
Li Zhai was having trouble finding staff for Noodle Topia, his restaurant in Madison Heights, Michigan, in the summer of 2021, so he bought a BellaBot from Pudu Robotics. The robot was so successful that she added two more; now, one robot takes diners to their seats while another delivers bowls of steaming noodles to tables. Employees stack dirty dishes in a third robot to take them back to the kitchen.
Now, Zhai only needs three people to do the same volume of business that five or six people used to handle. And they save you money. A robot costs about $15,000, he said, but a person costs between $5,000 and $6,000 per month.
Zhai said the robots give human servers more time to mingle with customers, which increases tips. And customers often post videos of the robots on social media that entice others to visit.
“In addition to saving manpower, robots generate business,” he said.
Interactions with human servers may vary. Betzy Giron Reynosa, who works with a BellaBot at The Sushi Factory in West Melbourne, Florida, said the robot can be a nuisance.
“You can’t really tell it to move or anything,” he said. He has also had clients who don’t want to interact with him.
But overall, the robot is a plus, he said. It saves you trips to and from the kitchen and gives you more time with customers.
The labor shortage has accelerated robot adoption globally, Le Clair said. In the US, the restaurant industry employed 15 million people at the end of last year, but that was still 400,000 fewer than before the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association. In a recent survey, 62% of restaurant operators told the association that they don’t have enough employees to meet customer demand.
Pandemic-era concerns about hygiene and the adoption of new technologies like QR code menus also laid the groundwork for robots, said Karthik Namasivayam, director of the School of Hospitality Business at Broad College of Business at Michigan State University.
“Once an operator starts to understand and work with one technology, other technologies become less overwhelming and will be much more accepted as we go along,” he said.
Namasivayam notes that public acceptance of bot servers is already high in Asia. Pizza Hut has robotic servers in 1,000 restaurants in China, for example.
The United States was slower to adopt robots, but some chains are now testing them. Chick-fil-A is testing them at several US locations and says it has found that the robots give human employees more time to cool drinks, clear tables and greet guests.
Marcus Merritt was surprised to recently see a robot server at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta. The robot did not appear to be replacing staff, he said; he counted 13 employees in the store, and the workers told him the robot helps service move a little faster. He was delighted that the robot told him to have a great day and he hopes to see more robots when he goes out to eat.
“I think technology is part of our normal day to day now. Everyone has a cell phone, everyone uses some type of computer,” said Merritt, who owns a marketing business. “It’s a natural progression.”
Chili’s introduced a robot server called Rita in 2020 and expanded the trial to 61 US restaurants before abruptly stopping it last August. The chain discovered that Rita was moving too slowly and getting in the way of the human servers. And 58% of guests surveyed said that Rita did not improve their overall experience.
Haidilao, a hot pot chain in China, began using robots a year ago to deliver food to diners’ tables. But managers at various outlets said the robots have not proven to be as reliable or profitable as human servers.
Wang Long, manager of a Beijing store, said both of his robots have broken down.
“We only use them from time to time,” Wang said. “It’s kind of a concept and the machine can never replace humans.”
Eventually, Namasivayam hopes that a certain percentage of restaurants, perhaps 30%, will continue to have human servers and be considered more upscale, while the rest will rely more on robots in the kitchen and dining rooms. The economy is on the side of the robots, he said; the cost of human labor will continue to rise, but technology costs will fall.
But that’s not a future everyone wants to see. Saru Jayaraman, who advocates for higher wages for restaurant workers as president of One Fair Wage, said restaurants could easily solve their labor shortage if they paid workers more.
“Humans don’t go to a full-service restaurant to be served by technology,” he said. “They seek the experience of themselves and the people they care about to be cared for by a human being.”
