Robot arm? Cute but hasn't food automation gone past that?<p>Dump cooked ingredients down a chute into a cup - that seems simpler.<p>I always imagined the totally-automated fast-food joint would simply limit the menu to what you could deliver with simple ordinary factory automation. E.g. grind meat, mix, deliver measured amounts into a steam-heated cooking mold, decant onto a bun. Squirt condiments as ordered. Drop into a bag and deliver to a pickup window.<p>Live steam cleans the cooking surfaces for the next customer. Nobody in the place, maybe just a low drive-thru experience with a touchpanel or phone-operated ordering, electronic payment, drive up and flash your credential (card/id/whatever) and the right bag drops into the chute. Like automated banking!<p>Why do this? Well, why does anybody do this - cheap fast food. Tasty if you get it right.
"No animal was required to diminish its dignity for preparation of this meal"<p>Level 4 Veganism?<p>Where Level 7 is "Eat nothing that casts a shadow."<p>It seems to be a sideshow effort in marketing; if you want to feed people <i>more efficiently</i> (time, resources, whichever measure) than industrial TV dinners delivered by the modern commercial grocery store logistics system, you've got a hard fight.<p>The proposed effort only seems to serve the end of marketing to assumed moral superiority and technophilla.