It cooks 700 meals a day and makes a mean chicken teriyaki. Meet your new robot chef

No matter what happens, the robot chef at Florida International University never gets frazzled.

Not when the line for lunch grows long with students impatient to get to their next class. Not when they’re slow to choose between the chicken teriyaki or the penne with broccoli. Not even when they request individual modifications that aren’t on the main menu, an action usually guaranteed to send cooks spiraling into fits of frustration.

But the robot chef — who goes by the name of Beastro — just keeps cooking.

A commercial, self-contained robotic kitchen, Beastro is the creation of the U.S.-Israeli company Kitchen Robotics, and it made its debut at the busy 8th Street Campus Kitchen at the Graham Center on FIU’s Modesto A Maidique campus in Miami earlier this year.

Beastro can cook four dishes at a time and anywhere from 500 to 700 dishes a day, with up to 70 customized dishes an hour, depending what you put into it and how you program it. At FIU, it’s programmed by lead chef Denisse Castillo with 37 different ingredients, including liquids (oil, butter, sauces); protein (beef, chicken, tofu, even shrimp); vegetables (broccoli, onion, peppers); and pasta.

Users order on a screen, choosing items off the menu or creating their own dish from the ingredients available. They put in their phone numbers, and when their meal is plated by a staff member and ready, they’re sent a text notification to come pick it up.

The robot excels at teriyakis and stir fries and powers through almost any style of pasta from sausage-and-peppers in spicy marinara sauce to macaroni and cheese. It can even make an omelet. And then, unlike your children, it cleans up after itself, cleaning and sterilizing every pot after it’s used.

As the new school year begins, students and staff are loving it, says Roger Clegg, assistant vice president of business services at FIU. The “wow” factor is high — watching Beastro in action is undeniably fun — but there are other pluses for diners.

“The advantage is the food is made fresh, and you can customize everything,” Clegg said. “But the real advantage is you don’t have to stand in line and wait for the person in front of you and the person in front of them. You put in your order and can sit and study.”

Chris Valdes, resident district manager at FIU for Chartwell, an international food service organization that manages food service on campus, said the robot kitchen is a thrill for staff and students alike.

“It’s not the traditional style cafeteria food that just sits there in a hot pan,” he said. “Everyone’s always in a hurry here — students have maybe a 45 minute break, then have to get back to class. The technology plays a huge role in them planning their meals. It’s been a great new learning experience for us.”

FIU, Clegg said, has long been keen on improving technological innovation on campus, so when Kitchen Robotics offered Beastro to the school to test its practical application in a cafeteria setting, FIU gladly accepted. The university, named no. 1 in college food service by niche.com for six straight years, is the only college in the country using Beastro at the moment (it was previously tested, strangely enough, at a Bank of America in Tampa).

Ofer Zinger, co-founder and chairman of Kitchen Robotics, said the company is “agnostic” in terms of how Beastro is used. There are items it can’t make — notably pizza or burgers or anything fried — but its applications are wide-ranging.

“Think of it as a washing machine, a commercial washing machine,” he said. “We can do a very wide variety of cuisine: Italian, Asian, Indian. It could make chicken salad. It could make breakfast. All those types of cuisines are are suitable and compatible with Beastro.”

This means that in addition to revolutionizing university food courts, the robot could be easily adapted into use at food halls, hospitals, ghost kitchens, catering and, most notably, hotels, especially for room service orders.

The question, of course, is the same as with any sort of modern technological advance: Whose job does it eliminate? Does this mean the end for cooks at college food halls or Panda Express?

At FIU, the answer is no, Clegg said. Someone still needs to create the menu (in this case Chef Castillo). Someone needs to plate the meals when they’re ready. FIU chooses to cook its rice separately, so the rice has to be added to the plate (though you could program precooked rice into the robot). The pasta and sauces must all be made beforehand and put into the robot.

“In our case, we’ve added staff,” Clegg said. “This is an extra amenity we offer the students. Who knows what happens in the future? But we’re trying to expand our services rather than replacing people or cutting back.”

Ofer of Kitchen Robotics argues that Beastro helps fill the jobs the food and restaurant industry are finding hard to fill in these days of constant staff shortages.

“People do not want to work at this type of job, so the restaurants, especially at hotel chains, have a major problem,” he said. “We always imagine the chef with a fancy hat, but most of the kitchen work is about chopping, cutting and cleaning the dishes in the back of house. And people do not want to work on those jobs, and we are trying to find a solution for that. There aren’t enough working hands, and because of that, places get shut down. Places are not profitable enough to be kept open. Working hours are getting limited because they cannot find enough employees to keep restaurants open.”

The robot chef, he said, also offers consistency in every dish as well as data about what’s being ordered and what isn’t (which can then be taken off the menu to eliminate food waste).

“When you go to certain restaurants, you expect to get the same dish or the same quality again and again,” he said. “It’s much easier to create consistency. Once you program a certain dish, you can create consistency through your entire chain.”

Whatever the future may hold, Clegg said the team at FIU is eager to work with Beastro. They’ll experiment with temperature control, the spin rate of the cooking pots and the menu to see what dishes are most popular.

“With this platform you have all the data behind what the students are ordering,” he said, adding that so far alfredo pasta has been the student favorite. “You find out what they’re not ordering and take it off the menu. Frequent rotation is the goal. We’re excited about the innovation.“

This story was originally published September 4, 2024 at 4:30 AM.