Miso Robotics is ready to automate a fast food kitchen and save the industry from staffing challenges.
If you didn’t have sympathy before for the difficult challenges faced by your average fast-food restaurant owner or manager, you’ve probably developed some over the past two years. In an already volatile industry marked with high employee turnover and tough staffing issues, the fallout of Covid-19 and its impact on the entire U.S. workforce has taken what used to be a difficult task and made it borderline impossible.
Job openings in the restaurant industry are up almost 70 percent over just two years ago. Meanwhile, warehouse and logistics jobs are up almost 300 percent, taking many former food service employees into new positions.
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That’s left many fast-food restaurants, known in the business as Quick Service Restaurants, almost comically understaffed and ridiculously outgunned. But amidst all that gloom and doom for the future of your favorite fast stop burger joint, there may be a white knight on the horizon. And oddly enough, it turns out that the white knight isn’t even human.
Miso could be cooking your next fast food meal.
Miso Robotics has built a thriving young business around an unusual, yet intriguing concept: Could you staff a fast-food kitchen almost entirely with robots? With so many jobs to fill that most humans don’t want anymore, Miso has unveiled a complete line of tech-driven robotics that are cooking, frying, grilling, flipping, and all-around engineering a fast food meal like it was conducting a symphony.
Now, Miso is ready to step up to the big time, recently offering a Series D investment opportunity to bring on new investors and widen the footprint of their quickly growing brand.
The centerpiece of the Miso line remains the direct descendant of the company’s first product developed back in 2015, a burger-flipping robotic arm known as Flippy. Since those early days, Flippy has grown up.
Now equipped with a flotilla of AI-powered super-smarts, Flippy can not only grill a burger to perfection, but its fryer skills allow it to also automate all the fry station cooking as well. Those skills helped land Flippy a tryout with the country’s first fast-food burger chain White Castle. And Flippy didn’t disappoint. After scoring big during a beta test at a single White Castle location, the slider-centric restaurant decided to roll out the pilot program by installing the robot in 10 of their restaurants this year.
Meanwhile, just like the rest of the AI world, Flippy is only getting smarter. Miso is getting ready to release the new and improved latest version of the robo-cook that’s already sizzled up more than 175,000 lbs. of fried foods, while successfully grilling over 10,000 burgers. The new Flippy 2 will take over the entire fry station and perform more than twice as many food preparation tasks compared to the previous version including basket filling, emptying and returning. That innovation was also too entertaining to keep a low profile, with outlets like the Wall Street Journal and TechSpot reporting in recent months on Miso Robotics and its new creations. Miso recently launched an innovation partnership with Inspire Brands, including Buffalo Wild Wings, to test a new product line called Flippy Wings. Flippy Wings is the only robotic chicken wing frying solution designed for high-volume restaurants and will translate to higher volume with less waste, the company says.
And Miso isn’t just holding the line on grilling and frying. The company has also launched pilot programs in two major QSR chains for their Automatic Beverage Dispenser, a crafty little bot that fills drink cups, seals and labels them, then bundles everything up so all the drinks are ready to be handed over to a waiting customer.
Then there’s also the CookRight, a next-level package of cooking software that uses video recognition technology and built-in sensors to up kitchen efficiency, using AI to control beyond the grill and drink stations to ovens and beyond, all holistically and based in one digital platform.
Miso seeks investors today.
With programs in place already with 10 of the nation’s top 25 QSR brands, it’s no surprise that Miso Robotics is looking to grow. Right now, the company is looking for new blood to join more than 11,000 current investors with stock in the California-based company. Miso is seeking savvy investors for this Series D crowdfunding effort, which has already raised more than $16 million.
Learn all about their investment opportunity, and act fast before the round closes on November 18th.
MISO ROBOTICS IS OFFERING SECURITIES THROUGH THE USE OF AN OFFERING STATEMENT THAT HAS BEEN QUALIFIED BY THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION UNDER TIER II OF REGULATION A. A COPY OF THE FINAL OFFERING CIRCULAR THAT FORMS A PART OF THE OFFERING STATEMENT MAY BE FOUND HERE.
This content was provided by Miso Robotics. Kiplinger is not affiliated with and does not endorse the company or products mentioned above.
