 If I walk just a few blocks from this office, I can find a robot that will make me a latte, serve me quinoa bowl, and now there's one that will make me a custom made to order hamburger. And it kind of makes sense when you think about it. San Francisco is a hub of food and of technology, so having new businesses that want to techify their restaurant concept makes a lot of sense. But when I talked to my coworkers about it, they had two distinct opinions about robots making their food. One, I think it sounds cool, I would definitely go. And the other, so how does that affect people working in the city? Both of these opinions are completely justified, but that jobs one is where things get complicated. Typically, robotic restaurants employ plenty of people, they're just doing different jobs than before. So instead of flipping burgers or making pizzas, they're stocking the machine, greeting customers, and just keeping everything in working order. But I wanted to see this for myself. So we are going to head over to Creator, that robotic burger place that I was telling you about, and I'm going to see how robots might impact the future of how we order food. So Creator is a new type of restaurant, one that has one of the most advanced culinary instruments. So this baby back there, it makes literally the freshest burger ever. We slice tomatoes, pickles, onions, the bun to order, but my favorite part actually grinds the meat to order, which means we make an amazing burger and it's six bucks. This robot isn't what I had imagined. Instead of a mechanical arm flipping burgers as we've seen in the past, Creator has built a 14-foot all-in-one burger machine that uses 350 sensors and 20 computers. It takes five minutes to make a burger start to finish. And with two machines, the Creator team can make 130 burgers per hour here at their first location. So in designing the system, we have a principle where we wanted to design a device that would meet nature where it is and not kind of make food conform to a robot. But that caused all kinds of engineering challenges because food is so different. So for instance with the hamburger buns, each one is slightly different sized. And so on the bun system alone, there's seven different laser distance sensors that are watching every little aspect of it, seeing where the buns are, how they're moving and so forth. A burger is a composed dish, which means you need to be able to accurately control where everything is and where it's going and how it kind of comes together. And for that, we had to build advice with a pretty impressive amount of dexterity. So we didn't want something that would make just one kind of burger. We looked at this sort of like a platform for different recipes. We wanted as much culinary creativity as possible. There is also a proper kitchen where employees prep burgers and make sauces and sides. But since the robots cook and assemble the burgers, Creator needed less space, meaning less rents, which leaves more room to invest in their ingredients. One of the great things about our operation is because it's so efficient, we spend so much more on the cost of ingredients, which definitely comes through in the flavor. So as an example, the beef is whole chunks of chuck and brisket. It's steak. It's passerelle. There's no antibiotics, no hormones. So how did it taste? Well, I can confidently say that it was the best $6 burger that I've ever had, but I am not a food expert. So I asked Ellen from Eater, who is one of my co-workers, what she thought about the burger. I think it's a good burger. It's meaty. It has fresh toppings. The bun is nice. It's the freshest possible burger, and there's way fewer times that people are touching your burger. So think about another restaurant where every single thing that you're eating on the burger has been touched by multiple people. In this case, the bun goes in the tube. It gets shot through the machine. It applies the sauce. It cuts the vegetables to go on the top really freshly and makes it. And at the end, they hand it to you in a box. And at that point, no one has touched it except for you. So, yeah, robotic restaurants are cool and interesting, but there's still that whole jobs thing. It turns out that the average cook makes $30,000 a year salary, and that also happens to be the mean average rent of a single bedroom in San Francisco. Not a one-bedroom apartment, just a single bedroom. San Francisco is notoriously an expensive place to live, and that is now creeping into every part of our daily lives. So that includes restaurants, of course, but specifically it's making it hard for restaurant workers to even have a place to live here. So people are edging out into the surrounding areas. That makes commuting long and expensive. It makes it hard to even want to work in the city. A lot of restaurants are experiencing a big struggle to find people who are even willing to do it. So in some cases, robots can kind of pick up that slack and do those repetitive tasks that humans don't really need to do. As it stands today, there are very few restaurants testing this technology, so there's little threat of robots taking over anytime soon. But I can see a world where robotic restaurants becomes a thing. With robots on the line, owners can afford to pay their staff and make ends meet, and the math just might make more sense. Even if you can find staff, we've got very expensive permitting processes that go on forever, hugely expensive rents, which are not going down anytime soon, and then minimum wage is also rising. So people who are operating restaurants have to pay their staff more. They have a whole lot more overhead, and that's really reflected in the menu prices, which is part of the reason people are finding it so expensive to dine out in San Francisco. And to date, the robot restaurants we've looked at here in San Francisco are charging around 20% less than their human-powered competition. And in there lies the hope that maybe, just maybe, these robots are a solution. It is an exciting future. When you think of all the stuff you can do with better technology and the restaurant space, which frankly hasn't seen a lot of improvement over the past several decades, my expectation is that we're going to see some pretty exciting new dishes coming out, maybe even new cuisines using the dexterity that you get from some pretty advanced instrumentation in your kitchen. A future with more robotic restaurants might not be all that bad. We'll have to wait and see. What do you think about robot restaurants? Be sure to leave us a comment below, and also check out our friends over at Eater. Ellen and some of the reporters are doing some amazing coverage behind the scenes of some really cool restaurants.