The robots are here… and they’ve got your lunch order

Updated May 8, 2025, 6:39 a.m. | By East Coast Breakfast / Skyye Ndlovu

Your next burger might be built by a robot. No attitude, no breaks, and definitely no hair in your food

Fast food just got a serious upgrade, and no, it’s not extra fries.

Introducing Burgerbots, a shiny, slightly unnerving burger joint in California’s Silicon Valley.

This is where your lunch is prepared by robots that don’t need coffee breaks, never call in sick, and won’t judge you for ordering a double bacon cheeseburger with extra cheese at 10AM.

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The brain behind this futuristic concept is Elizabeth Truong, who says the goal was to bring “consistency, transparency, and efficiency” to the food biz.

Translation: fewer wrong orders, no surprise hairs in your food, and a burger flipped with mechanical perfection.

Here’s how it works:

Inside a high-tech burger-making cell, two robot chefs (FlexPicker and YuMi) assemble your burger in a mere 27 seconds.

One bot slaps a freshly grilled patty onto a bun, reads a QR code that holds your precious burger data, and then adds the toppings faster than your crush can text “wyd?”.

Then it’s passed to the next robot for the finishing touches, and voilà.

Your $18 robot-crafted masterpiece is ready. Yes, $18 (R330).

Turns out efficiency isn’t exactly cheap.

What happens when robots leave the factory and enter the kitchen?

In a food automation industry first, check out our Yumi® cobot and IRB 360 FlexPicker® working together to assemble burgers to order at BurgerBots, Los Gatos California.https://t.co/Y8IAl1slF0 pic.twitter.com/8VZEqf7Ey0
— ABB (@ABBgroupnews) April 29, 2025

This burger-bot takeover arrived hot on the heels of California’s new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers.

Although, if you think these bots are putting people out of work, it’s not entirely dystopian just yet.

Humans are still around to hand over your food and probably listen to your “this wasn’t in The Jetsons” jokes.

In fact, industry surveys suggest most restaurant staff don’t mind their new robot co-workers.

According to ABB Robotics, a solid 73% of hospitality workers are open to automation handling the boring stuff, leaving them free to focus on the human bits.

The fun bits, like delivering bad news about the ice cream machine not working.

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So, should we be worried?

Well, according to the World Economic Forum, automation could swipe 92 million human jobs by 2030, with fast food gigs near the top of the list.

For now though, these burger-bots are just a glimpse of what might be cooking in the future.

Elizabeth Truong believes robot chefs, servers, and maybe even robotic food critics will become as common as avocado toast in the next five years.

Would you eat a burger made by a machine? Or would you prefer your fries served with a little human sass?