Technology

Miso Robotics launches Flippy 2 for QSRs

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November 2, 2021

Miso Robotics, a provider of intelligent automation, has introduced its newest model of Flippy, its flagship product, aptly named Flippy 2, according to a press release.

Based on key learnings and feedback from innovation partner White Castle, which deployed the original Flippy to a location in the Chicagoland area in Sept. 2020, Flippy 2 takes over the work for an entire fry station and performs more than twice as many food preparation tasks compared to the previous version including basket filling, emptying and returning.

Flippy 2 — which makes the fry station, even at peak times, less than a full-time task and allows team members to focus on other important duties — features the brand new AutoBin system for lower volume and specialty foods like onion rings or chicken tenders, providing restaurants an even more capable and complete frying solution. Each bin can hold as much as a full fry basket, be customized for a kitchen's specific needs and be delineated for individual products like vegetables and fish to prevent cross-contamination.

Once the product is placed in the bin, AI vision automatically identifies the food, picks it up, cooks it in the correct fry basket and places it into a hot-holding area. Eliminating the transfer task lessens overall human-to-food contact, decreases potential oil dripping and burns caused by lifting and moving baskets, and ensures an entirely closed-loop system where Flippy 2 can operate on its own without human intervention in the middle of the process. This makes the system faster, increasing throughput by 30% — or around 60 baskets per hour — which is more than what is needed in high-volume QSRs.

"Like all technologies, Flippy 2 has evolved significantly from its predecessor, and we are extremely grateful for the insights collected from White Castle to truly push its development forward in a real restaurant environment," Mike Bell, CEO of Miso Robotics, said in the release. In addition to White Castle, Miso Robotics has several other pilot agreements with leading national brands in place, including its recently announced partnership with Inspire Brands.

"Flippy 2 consolidates key tasks in the back-of-house to make QSRs more efficient and addresses a $278.6 billion market where it can be customized to cook whatever a brand needs, including anything that can be fried. Flippy 2 takes up less space in the kitchen and increases production exponentially with its new basket filling, emptying and returning capabilities. Since Flippy's inception, our goal has always been to provide a customizable solution that can function harmoniously with any kitchen and without disruption. Flippy 2 has more than 120 configurations built into its technology and is the only robotic fry station currently being produced at scale," said Bell in the release.