BEIJING, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- A new trend has emerged in South Korea's restaurant industry in recent years: more and more catering companies are using robots to "help" to cope with labor shortages and rising labor costs.
According to the Korea Herald, as early as 2019, a small number of catering companies in South Korea began to experiment with the use of robots; Now, more companies are following suit, and robots are becoming more common to cook noodles, peel potatoes, and grind coffee.
Robros, a South Korean robotics start-up, opened a 24-hour coffee shop in the capital, Seoul, in 2023 with two employees who are robots. After the customer places an order, the two robots work together and quickly serve the customer cups of coffee, tea and other drinks.
On April 23, 2024, at the Hannover Messe in Germany, visitors played a game of "rock-paper-scissors" with an intelligent robot. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ren Pengfei
According to Robros, only two hours of maintenance are required to be performed on the coffee shop every day, and the rest of the work is done by robots. This results in significant cost savings and makes the drink more competitively priced. For example, a cup of iced coffee at the shop costs 2,463 won (about 12.6 yuan), while other nearby coffee shops often cost 4,500 won (23 yuan).
Since 2021, the Korean fried chicken chain Kyochon F&B has partnered with Neuromeka to work as a chef using a robot developed by the latter. So far, 12 of the chain's stores have used robot chefs, which do tasks such as frying chicken, getting rid of excess oil, and plating.
Kim Jong-bok, the 43-year-old owner of a Kyochon F&B store in Gyeonggi Province, said: "I can't say that robots produce more fried chicken per hour, but they do make human jobs a lot easier." Before, we had to keep an eye on the frying process, but now we have the time to focus on other tasks such as spreading sauces, cleaning up, and serving customers. "
"In the past, we sometimes forgot to look at the time, so that the frying time was too long," he said, but robots don't make this mistake, and the quality of fried chicken is more guaranteed. He hopes to apply robots to more work links in the future.
It is understood that the monthly rental cost of the robot is between 900,000 won (4,617 yuan) and 1.2 million won (6,156 yuan). Kyochon F&B thinks it's a good deal and plans to expand the use of robots in more stores in South Korea next year, as well as to some stores in the United States.
BHC Chicken, another fried chicken chain in South Korea, has partnered with LG Electronics since 2022 and plans to have its robot chef available in 30 stores by the end of this year.
Since 2022, most of the stores of the Korean foodservice company "Xijiefu Taste Garden" have used robots to cook noodles. This month, Vips, a restaurant chain owned by South Korea's Lotte Lee fast food company, also started using robot chefs at a store in Seoul.
In addition, many of South Korea's highway service areas are increasingly reliant on robots for food and beverage services because they are far from the city center, making it difficult to hire employees. For example, seven of the Pulmuone Group's motorway service areas have been using robots since this year.
"As the labor market becomes tighter and labor costs continue to rise, more and more companies are turning to automated solutions to optimize production and service processes," predicted a South Korean food industry official. (Yang Shuyi)