Chipotle Is Testing a Robot That Will Help Make Guacamole
Meet Autocado.
Photo courtesy of Chipotle
Guacamole is famously extra at Chipotle. Meaning you pay a bit more for it. Now, though, it’s about to be extra in a whole new way.
The chain has just unveiled a new prototype for an avocado-processing collaborative robot (a.k.a. “cobotic”) that cuts, cores and peels avocados to prepare them to be hand-mashed for its guacamole. The name of this marvelous pre-mashing prep machine? Autocado.
The prototype, which Chipotle developed in collaboration with food-industry technology company Vebu, is now being tested at the Chipotle Cultivate Center in Irvine, California. The incorporation of the new technology, which marks the beginning of a long-term partnership between Chipotle and Vebu, aims not only to save time and increase efficiency, but also relieve an employee “pain point.”
On average, it takes approximately 50 minutes for Chipotle workers to make a batch of guacamole by hand, laboriously cutting, coring and scooping avocados. Ultimately, Autocado is projected to cut guacamole prep time in half, which, the company says, will allow the employees to spend more time serving customers and doing other tasks.
Chipotle says it expects to use about 4.5 million cases of avocados (more than 100 million pounds of fruit) to meet customer demand for guacamole in restaurants across the U.S., Canada and Europe in 2023 alone. Autocado is projected to help the chain get the most from each avocado “through precision processing,” which, if the robot rolls out more widely, could save the company millions of dollars every year and help it meet its sustainability and waste reduction goals.
So how does Autocado work? First, an employee loads the robot, which can hold as many as 25 pounds of avocados at once, with a full case of ripe avocados and selects the size setting. The avocados are vertically oriented, one by one, and then moved over to the processing device. The machine then slices the avocados in half, removes their cores and skin, and discards the waste. It then deposits them in a stainless-steel bowl at the bottom of the machine, where an employee collects the bowl of skinned, cored and sliced avocados, moves it to the countertop, adds ingredients and hand mashes it to create guacamole.
“We are committed to exploring collaborative robotics to drive efficiencies and ease pain points for our employees,” Curt Garner, Chipotle’s chief customer and technology officer, says in a statement. “The intensive labor of cutting, coring and scooping avocados could be relieved with Autocado, but we still maintain the essential culinary experience of hand mashing and hand preparing the guacamole to our exacting standards.”
“Our purpose as a robotic company is to leverage automation technology to give workers more flexibility in their day-to-day work,” adds Vebu CEO Buck Jordan. “Autocado has the potential to work alongside Chipotle crew members to create the same, delicious guacamole that Chipotle fans love but more efficiently than ever before.”
Autocado is not the only robot Chipotle is currently testing: Chippy, an “autonomous kitchen assistant that integrates culinary traditions with artificial intelligence to make tortilla chips,” is currently in use in a Chipotle restaurant in Fountain Valley, California.
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