Another unmanned bubble tea shop? There are two masters hidden

Robot chefs are no longer in science fiction, but are getting closer and closer to our daily lives. At the end of 2018, SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume, a pizza delivery company whose selling point is to make pizza with robots. Also at the end of 2018, Haidilao spent 150 million yuan to build a smart hot pot restaurant, and a large number of robots are responsible for serving dishes, serving dishes, cleaning dishes, and matching pot bottoms. In March this year, Happy Lemon applied a robotic arm to make milk tea in its first smart store.

01 Background

It is already an obvious trend to let robots enter the kitchen and realize catering automation. In 2019, the customer "Little Monster in Tea" began to plan an unmanned milk tea workstation, hoping that through a robot, it could support 18 SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit, single product item management), and place the whole system in a fully enclosed transparent glass room to show the entire operation process: ordering, production, and picking, and the whole process is unmanned. Consumers can see the process of making milk tea directly in front of the machine.

Customers are optimistic about the upgrading opportunities of traditional chain stall bubble tea shops. "New Tea Drink" has been favored by capital in recent years as an independent track. The market for ready-made tea is large and growing rapidly. However, the threshold is not high, the product homogeneity is serious, the competition is very fierce, and the head brands are often caught in product plagiarism disputes, and the stores rely heavily on manpower. The tea production process includes tea extraction, boiling pearls, beating milk caps, adding ice cubes and many other links, and "standardization" is a big problem. Sample blending and streamlining operations have become the key to ensuring a consistent taste and product stability – which also means that brands need to invest a lot of effort in staff training, product supervision, etc., in order to achieve a thousand stores.

Another unmanned bubble tea shop? There are two masters hidden

02 pain points

The premise of replacing manpower with machines is to ensure consistent product quality. For operators, the driving force of "robot substitution" lies in: standardized quality of machine products, stable efficiency, all-day work, no worries about not being able to recruit people, and more trouble-free management and operation. However, whether the robot can be truly accepted depends on whether the deployment and operation and maintenance costs reach the replacement node.

According to a third-party survey, the cost structure of the bubble tea shop in the follow-up operation is generally 5% of the ground rent and 3% of the manpower (different store types will be different). Therefore, the idea of increasing the efficiency of a single store comes from two aspects: one is to reduce the size of the store, and the other is to reduce labor costs.

03Ideal store type

Therefore, for customers, the ideal store type is: a small store of about 6 square meters (the operation space required by the equipment is less than that of human operation), and the introduction of robots replaces manual labor. This means that if the operation and maintenance costs can be ensured to be not too high, with the extension of the operation cycle, with the advantages of low rent, fewer employees and low manpower of a small store, the cost advantage of the robot milk tea shop will be more obvious.

With the solution in mind, after comparing the traditional industrial small six-axis robots, the customer turned to a collaborative robot with a compact structure, flexible deployment, and relatively simple programming.

The Little Monster in Shanghai experience store in Shanghai still chose a larger operating area, and the store was equipped with two ELITE EC66 (6kg payload) collaborative robots.

Two milk tea robots started work left and right, and the tasks in the fresh milk area on the left were completed by one of the robots, including tea canister loading and unloading, negative pressure tea extraction, tea brewing, ultrasonic knife (cutting milk), and pouring milk into the milk storage tank, and the whole set of actions were taken care of by this robot. The one on the right is responsible for the fancy feeding process - this site has 18 kinds of milk tea flavors to choose from, the system will send instructions to this robot according to the information of the customer's order, and prepare the flavored milk tea according to the taste, after the feeding is completed, the robot will place the cup on the conveyor line, and a cup of "freshly made tea" made by the robot will be quickly delivered to the customer.

A cup of milk tea can be conjured every 60 seconds, and the whole process of ordering-making-cup taking can be truly realized, and the whole process is unmanned on-site production.

In addition to the advantages of compact structure and small footprint, the ELITE cobot supports ± 360° rotation of the single joint, and the robot basically has no dead angle in the spherical working area, so it can easily reach all points. The interactive programming of the teach pendant makes it easier to debug the robot, especially for projects with various and complex actions such as milk tea concoction, where engineers plan the robot's path by dragging and dropping the teaching and point fine-tuning, thus ensuring that the project launch time is greatly reduced.

With the launch of more experience stores and mini robot milk tea shops in the future, it is believed that collaborative robots will give a new look to the business of "freshly made tea".

Another unmanned bubble tea shop? There are two masters hidden

Sections viewed

Contact

working hours