Robots to become commonplace

First appearances at the Common Room restaurant in the Brunswick Centre in London’s bookish area of Bloomsbury can be rather deceiving as it looks like any other cafe and healthier QSR venue with its pale wood interior and airy vibe created by young diners tucking into bowl food.

But a glance behind the counter reveals it is not your ordinary set-up as there is a bank of automated dispensing technology that quietly and efficiently fills up the bowls for waiting customers. Venturing through into the back room highlights further unique characteristics as there is not only a central kitchen but also a row of coders constantly iterating the restaurant’s operating procedures. Ducking below stairs reveals a bank of 3D printers that churn out frequent updates to the parts used in the automated dispensers.

The Common Room’s founders and team of Imperial College graduates are at the vanguard of building a hospitality operation that adheres to the growing requirement for business models to be less reliant on employing people and thereby having a reduced proportion of their revenues committed to labour costs.

Such is the difficulty of sourcing employees and the rising costs of employment that there is a consensus among the big global advisors such as Blackrock and Accenture that organisations should be adapting their business models to decrease wage budgets and divert this into increased IT budgets.

The Common Room clearly got the message and its technology – built by sister firm Kaikaku – involves an alignment of dispensers and a conveyor belt moving the bowls underneath them that enables the handling of thousands of orders per hour. The cost-effective tech solution has delivered a very efficient model with margins of 40% versus more like 10% for regular restaurants, according to co-founder Josef Chen, who says:  “We can operate at the cost of a café selling coffee and pastries but we sell £12 bowls so our revenues are double the cafes.”

The company has stated it is looking to open up to 10 more sites this year and is also considering the possibility of selling the technology to other operators, with talks involving the likes of healthy food chain Tossed. In these early stages of automation in the hospitality industry there is no doubt that healthy bowl food concepts and salad-focused brands are sitting pretty. They appear to be in the sweet spot for the adoption of technology to improve efficiencies that includes automated bowl filling and plating solutions based on the dispensing of multiple ingredients.

The trend to reduce employee costs through tech is evident in the US where various healthy/salad brands are investing heavily in automating their operations. Sweetgreen has developed what it calls Infinite Kitchen, involving a bowl moving through an automated make-line with minimal human intervention. This format of restaurant is faster, more accurate, and has lower labour costs than its regular outlets and delivers margins 10 points higher. Rival salad chain Chopt is also testing automated make-line technology with specialist firm Hyphen.

Both companies are also developing labour-lite formats that are not necessarily heavily automated but where technology is leveraged. We’re talking drive-thru units and digital-only locations with kiosk ordering. The latter is a route taken by The Salad Project and its Spaces format in the UK – initial trials are taking place in the City of London – which it describes as an ultra-convenient, digital ordering outlet that has seriously reduced its employee overheads. The plan is to promote order-ahead and click & collect, which will further strip-out costs and human intervention by removing entirely the order in-store element.

With the opportunity to both tap into the appetite of a growing number of diners for healthy foods and the ability to more easily leverage technology to reduce labour costs and boost efficiency it is hardly surprising that we are seeing a plethora of salad-focused and bowl-food concepts hitting the market. Expect to see this part of the hospitality industry remain particularly fertile and to set the pace in the adoption of new operating practices for some time to come.

Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider