🍳 Restaurant Automation
Restaurants break down into a handful of core tasks: ordering, cooking, serving, prep, and dishwashing. Each is at a different stage of automation. Here's where things stand — with sourced data.
Ordering is the most automated task in restaurants. QR-code menus, self-service kiosks, and app-based ordering have replaced human cashiers in a large share of fast-food and fast-casual restaurants worldwide. McDonald's alone has deployed kiosks in nearly all of its 40,000+ locations. In China, QR-code ordering is the default in most urban restaurants.
Indoor delivery robots carry dishes from kitchen to table, navigating autonomously around obstacles and customers. This is the most visible robot deployment in restaurants. Two Chinese manufacturers — Pudu Robotics and Keenon Robotics — have shipped over 220,000 units combined by end of 2025. Adoption is strongest in Asia but growing rapidly in Europe and North America.
Cooking remains overwhelmingly manual. The complexity of culinary tasks — heat control, ingredient timing, plating, taste adjustment — makes full automation extremely difficult. Robotic cooking systems exist but are confined to narrow use cases: wok-flipping robots in Chinese cafeterias, pizza-making machines, and automated ramen stations. No general-purpose cooking robot has achieved significant commercial scale.
Food preparation — chopping, slicing, marinating, portioning — is almost entirely done by human hands. This is one of the least automated tasks in the entire restaurant workflow. The variation in ingredient shapes, sizes, and textures makes automation extremely challenging. Some industrial-scale food processing plants use automated cutting lines, but in individual restaurants, prep work is manual.
Why it's hard: Ingredients are wet, slippery, irregularly shaped, and vary batch to batch. A tomato slice, a fish fillet, and a carrot require completely different techniques. This level of dexterity is beyond current affordable robotics.
Commercial dishwashers are standard in virtually all restaurants — this is a mature mechanized process. The machines themselves are fast and efficient (cleaning hundreds of dishes per hour), but the workflow still requires humans to scrape plates, load racks, unload, and sort clean dishes. The dishwashing role hasn't disappeared — it's changed from "washing" to "loading and unloading."
The gap: Washing dishes is solved. But scraping food scraps, sorting cutlery from plates, stacking different shapes — these require the kind of dexterous manipulation that robots still struggle with at restaurant speeds and costs.