RoboBurger Promises Robot-Made Burgers in 7 Minutes or Less
While vending machines can dispense warm food items, RoboBurger is taking the concept one step further. This all-in-one fridge, griddle and cleaning device will take your order, cook your burger from scratch and deliver it in about 7 minutes -- all without a human to take your order, man the grill or serve it to you.
"We're not we're not here to really replace the service industry," CEO Audley Wilson said. "We're really here to supplement its needs, and we provide a hot, high protein burger in places where no one else can. So it's not really here to replace the lunch rush. It's here to just get you a burger at convenient locations when you need it."
RoboBurger has been in development for 17 years. Its latest prototype has found a home in Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City, N.J. The current burger uses a Pat LaFrieda beef patty and Martin's potato roll. It can dispense melted cheese, ketchup or mustard on request. The device is certified by the National Sanitary Foundation (NSF) according to U.S. food safety regulations.
WIlson sees it as an opportunity to help the service industry which has been struggling with staffing issues since the pandemic began, as well as provide other higher-paying jobs in the area, including robotics-based jobs. In addition, it needs maintenance staff to run the machines.
"We have our manufacturing arm which is based in New York. and what we do is we build our units," he said. "We source locally, and we hire great employees here in the New York area and teach them how to build robots and be on our operations team."
In the future, it hopes to add more condiments as well as other kinds of proteins, including plant-based meat and chicken burgers. It is aiming for 100 units in use by the end of the year, expanding to thousands starting in 2023.
"We really hope to be one of the largest burger chains in the country," he said.
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
Image-sharing app Pinterest reported big beats on its Q4 earnings for the top and bottom lines. The social platform surprised investors after seeing a decline in users while earnings and revenue were much higher than expected.
