This is the future Chipotle customers want: one with equitable burrito bowl assembly and no need to see who got more guac or cheese. Chipotle is debuting new automated machines in some restaurant chains that will make portion sizes more consistent and prepare avocados for guacamole faster. The robots will be introduced in two California locations, and rollout will be expanded based on feedback.
The Mexican-style fast food chain will introduce “cobots,” or collaborative robots, to work alongside employees for the first time. The Augmented Makeline robot, created with food service platform Hyphen, can assemble burrito bowls and salads—which make up 65% of Chipotle digital orders—by dispersing the right amount of each ingredient, while employees prepare quesadillas and burritos. Chipotle will also pilot Autocado, a guacamole-prepping bot that can cut, core, peel, and scoop an avocado in 26 seconds.
Restaurant robots have begun cropping up in fast-casual chains like Sweetgreen and Starbucks, aiming to increase order accuracy and kitchen efficiency by prepping ingredients and dishes, cutting out menial, repetitive tasks for workers whose efforts are better spent interacting with customers. Chipotle’s investment in automation will be no exception.
Chipotle customers have been looking for the consistency that the Augmented Makeline robot could provide, making clear their grievances about skimpy and inconsistent portion sizes. A Wells Fargo analyst who bought and weighed 75 burrito bowls gave credence to those complaints. He found the weight bowls could vary up to 87% and were particularly light for online orders.
Since then, former Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol has assured customers the restaurant is prioritizing sizable scoops of rice and carnitas for its patrons.
“Generous portion is a core brand equity of Chipotle. It always has been, and it always will be,” Niccol said in July.
Other restaurants implementing automation have had success not only with promising uniform dishes, but also in boosting its bottom line. Sweetgreen implemented Infinite Kitchen last spring to help assemble salads and grain bowls and attributed the company's revenue boost in part to its automated help.
Where will the workers go?
While restaurant automation may ease customers’ anxieties around portion sizes and consistent taste, it also stokes fears of automation replacing workers on the line. Almost half of Americans are concerned about automation in the workplace, with 55% worried about the robots affecting jobs in retail, according to a February 2023 survey from Retail Brew and Harris Poll.
Retailers’ responses to increased labor costs, including a California law boosting the minimum wage to $20, also have some sounding the alarm. Chains like Pizza Hut in California shaved hours, cut jobs and increased prices to account for the wage increase, despite fast-food profit margins continuing to increase at accelerated rates.
Even with the fast-food landscape rapidly changing, experts aren’t convinced retail robots will disrupt fast-food labor. Automation has helped drive down employee turnover, which can cost companies thousands of dollars in retraining replacements and put pressure on already shorted staff. The machines can often eliminate repetitive tasks that employees find boring. A Chipotle spokesperson told Fortune the introduction of its new bots won’t eliminate any jobs.
“It’s not that they are necessarily reducing the number of people,” Bank of America analyst Sara Senatore told Fortune in March. “It’s more that they’re making those people more productive and happier.”
Kernel, a vegan takeout restaurant in New York launched by Chipotle founder Steve Ells, would agree. Though Kernel, which uses a large robot arm to help out employees, has only three workers in the restaurant at a time, as of March, it had a starting wage of $25 and a 100% employee retention rate.
“Team members are enjoying the experience and automation is creating a better working environment for them and not a worse one,” Kernel president Stephen Goldstein told Fortune.
