Meet Chippy, Chipotle Mexican Grill’s robot tortilla chip maker

Remember Flippy, the burger-flipping robot that caused a media sensation a few years ago?

Flippy has a new sibling, Chippy, that makes tortilla chips.

Chippy is in development at Chipotle Mexican Grill, which reached out to Flippy’s maker, Miso Robotics, to find a way to automate tasks that go into food preparation.

“This whole idea was really borne out of the urge to make the job easier for our team members,” chief restaurant officer Scott Boatwright said in a phone interview.

“We didn’t find someone currently making chips today, but we knew it was just a routine, repetitive process that a robot should be able to handle, and Miso really brought that vision to life.”

Chipotle began testing Chippy in March at its innovation center in Irvine, but will try it out at a Southern California restaurant later this year, according to a news release from the Newport Beach-based company.

In the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, businesses are looking for tasks that can be automated. Restaurant robots are being pitched as a way to avoid staffing shortages and the impacts of inflation.

“Necessity is the mother of invention, right?” said Boatwright.

Chippy can make a serving of tortilla chips in 50 seconds, a task that might take a human two minutes, according to Boatwright.

A team member loads a hopper with chips and a robotic arm dispenses 8 or 9 ounces of them into a fryer basket. After they are cooked, Chippy moves them into a bowl where they are mixed with salt and fresh-squeezed lime juice and then dispensed into a pan for bagging.

Chippy is a large, boxy machine that takes up more kitchen space than a person. Chipotle is evaluating its size and how many of its nearly 3,000 existing restaurants can accommodate it. The chain has a goal to open 4,000 new restaurants, according to Boatwright, and those kitchens could be built to fit Chippy.

Based in Pasadena, Miso Robotics has a similar product called Flippy Lite that can fry, drain and dispense seasoning or sauces for such foods as chicken wings and fries as well as chips.

Miso boasts that its next-generation Flippy 2 can fry “nearly anything.”

It also sells Sippy, an automated beverage dispenser, and CookRight, a coffee monitoring system that Panera Bread is testing.

Other restaurant robotics include the Picnic Pizza Station, intended to top pizza dough with sauce, meats, cheeses and vegetables in precise amounts.

Mobile units from Bear Robotics deliver food and bus tables. BellaBot, a similar product from Pudu Technology, has cat ears and a face with whiskers on an electronic screen. It can react when customers pet it, according to a news release from the company.

Chipotle is not interested in changing the way it interacts with its customers, according to Boatwright.

“The idea was never to remove the team member experience, because that’s really at the heart of what we do. The idea was to remove the mundane, repetitive tasks that people don’t enjoy doing anyway and allow our team members to focus on the culinary and the guest experience.”

Chipotle built its reputation on made-to-order burritos, tacos and bowls assembled by staff before the customers’ eyes. Since Brian Niccol became chief executive officer and moved the company to Newport Beach in 2018, the company’s focus has been on digital service and speeding up orders, but it still wants that intimacy.

In 2019, it made a series of commercials by Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris in which Chipotle team members showed off culinary skills such as making guacamole.

“We’ll continue to hand-mash guacamole. That’s not going to change,” said Boatwright. “It would be very easy for us to take items like guac or salsa out to a commissary. We know at the end of the day it would never be as good as handmade salsa, handmad guac, in-restaurant daily by our purpose-driven people in our restaurants.

“That is not a sacrifice that we’re willing to make.”