Machines can pour beer, make cocktails, pick up and bring ordered dishes, and make an invoice without any problems, which speeds up the payment process. Will modern technologies fully automate gastronomy soon?
Autonomous cars, smart watches that study our health, or virtual reality devices are technologies that we have become accustomed to in recent years. However, somewhere out of the media's reach, a completely different technological revolution is taking place that could completely change the future of bars, cafes, and restaurants. So, let's take a look at how soon the future of gastronomy might look.
2028: you pour the beer yourself
The Beer Wall beer wallthis is a decision that can hardly be considered particularly new, although for many reasons it has not yet managed to win over Polish restaurants and pubs. However, the near future may change this.
– I think that after a while these walls will be twice as large. Unless we're stopped by an epidemic, a war, or something like that. This is a solution that successfully conquers the market - says Waldemar Timinsky, owner of the Beer Wall company, which created most of the beer walls operating in Poland.
The principle of operation of the device is simple. The customer buys a special prepaid card and decides how much they want to top up. To pour yourself a beer, simply insert the card in the appropriate place and select the beer we are interested in, which we can try in any capacity. It's up to the guest to decide whether they want to pour themselves a full pint or try just a few milliliters. Finally, the device deducts the corresponding amount from the funds on the card.
A beer wall in every mulitap?
The wall works particularly well in places with a large selection of beer. This is a technology created primarily for multitaps and large pubs, and not necessarily for small pubs or restaurants with a choice
two cast beers.
– It's fun for the customer to have as much beer as possible. Although in Gdansk we made beer walla with only six taps, and it works perfectly. However, it is better when there are more taps. People like to pour their own beer. I think that after some time, multitaps that don't have such a solution will lose clients. At the moment, this system is too little popular for this to happen - predicts Valdemar Timinsky.
An obstacle to the development of this kind of technology is, at least for now, its high price. We will have to pay up to ten thousand zlotys to prepare one tap. And while the investment can pay off in no time, setting up a wall with a selection of a dozen beers will be a significant expense for many entrepreneurs.
However, the advantages of this solution cannot be overemphasized. Draughts can be used by several people at once, which significantly speeds up service time and eliminates the problem of spilled or wasted beer. The restaurateur makes money from every drop that flows through the unscrewed tap, and in addition, having a beer wall in the restaurant or bar means that bartenders can focus on other activities, such as serving coffee and spirits or mixing cocktails. Of course, we can go even further in automation and eliminate bartenders entirely.
2032: a robot will make you a coffee and cocktail
Alcoholic cocktails are basically not the first association that most of us have when thinking about the Olympic Games. Meanwhile, the Beijing Winter Olympics, which ended in February this year, will also go down in history as the first time that a robot bartender served invited guests. However, the term” mechanical arm" would be more appropriate, since it was the main part of the cocktail making machine available to visitors of the Olympic media center.
Another robot works very similarly, this time a native robot that serves coffee in one of the four locations in Warsaw. After choosing a drink and paying for it, we can watch as a white mechanical hand gracefully and accurately selects a cup, which is then placed under the automatic machine. Well, it may not be the skill level of a Beijing robot, but it's another important step towards automating public catering. This, of course, will not be the last step.
2037: android will serve you in the restaurant
Let's run even further into the future and ask a question that borders on futurology and economics: will specialized robots cook and serve food in restaurants in 15 years? It's worth taking a look at the hard data.In Poland alone, the HoReCa market shrank by more than 30% in one year from 2019 to 2020. Moreover, when restaurateurs started looking for employees again in 2021, there were five newly created jobs for every one eliminated by the pandemic. Unfortunately, there were clearly not enough people willing to fill these vacancies, " the Main Statistical Office said in a statement.
Maybe the answer to the market's problems is to automate some of its areas? The pandemic has made electric waiters increasingly common, not only in Japan, China, or Singapore, but also in the United States or Western European countries.
The technology has been known for decades
However, robots that serve food are not an invention of the last two years or even two decades. The first restaurant with robots serving guests was Two Panda Deli in Pasadena, California, back in the 1980s. This fact was recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. Cylindrical, about 130 cm high cars with the appearance of a trash can with a dome at the top weighed more than 80 kilograms and cost almost 200 thousand. zl in recalculation.Unfortunately, the high purchase price wasn't their only drawback. – They are known for dropping food and spinning around in circles as soon as the police radio starts working nearby "we could read it in the Miami News article about robots.
Waiter 2.0
Heavy, clumsy and difficult to repair robots eventually gave way to much more complex structures. BellaBot, a cat-like robot waiter serving guests at Warsaw Pizza Hut, can smile, meow and "lift" 40 kilograms at once. In addition, if you believe the manufacturer, they can also recommend specific dishes to us, as well as respond to scratching behind the ear.
– The robot waiter is a good solution in the field of catering and hospitality, ensuring uninterrupted delivery of food and collection of dirty dishes. The robot itself also attracts the attention of customers and makes them like it. At the same time, it really reduces customer service time. - says Krzysztof Nester, regional manager of the Pizza Hut Zodiac restaurant in Warsaw, the first place in Poland where you can meet a cat robot.
Cats, drones, or robots?
Of course, as in the case of cars, there is no single model of robots for public catering. Electronic waiters are now produced by companies all over the world, from the USA to China, India and Estonia. Each producer also has a slightly different vision of how humanoid waiters should look and behave. Some robots resemble an automated tray cart, while others are equipped with advanced speech recognition functions, can read commands from the other person, and even have a screen in place of the face that displays facial expressions. The robot can also display the face of a cat or other pet. Most of them move on the ground, although there are solutions on the market such as the Infinium Serve drone flying over the heads of guests. Prices for automatic waiters vary from several to several hundred thousand zlotys, depending on the level of complexity and purpose of the machine. However, it should be assumed that in the near future such solutions will become more common and, therefore, also cheaper.
Cashless automation
Thus, the immediate future can be summed up in one word – automation. This trend is likely to be accompanied by the rapid development of cashless payments in various forms. Even today, you can pay for beer from the beer wall through the app downloaded on your smartphone.
More and more people are using Blik or Apple and Google's payment system for daily transactions. The development of new bill payment methods is likely to accelerate the commitment to connect the terminal to an online sales register, which came into force in 2025. There is nothing stopping robot waiters from accepting non-cash payments and issuing fiscal receipts to customers.
Will waiters lose their jobs?
Does this far-fetched automation mean that bartenders and waiters will soon lose their jobs? Unlikely. The robot waiter won't offer regular guests their favorite table by the window, ask what's bothering a sad customer at the bar, or help order a taxi for lost foreigners returning home from a restaurant. And this, contrary to popular opinion, is often more important than the ability to quickly distribute dishes.
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Tekst autorstwa dziennikarza magazynu “Food Service” i portalu Foodservice24.pl Przemysława Ziemichóda.
Źródło artykułu: Magazyn Food Service.
Junior specialist in Marketing Communications and PR.
He is a graduate of the University of Warsaw and the Main School of Agriculture. We have been in the HoReCa industry for more than 10 years. For many years, he has been associated with the Trip group, Sobienie Royal Golf and Country Club, and the Florentin Restaurant in Warsaw.
She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw Technical University with a degree in Architecture for the Knowledge Society and Visual Communications at the Polytechnic University of Milan. A specialist in creating a mood. She has gained experience at home and abroad at numerous international seminars (Seville, Lisbon, Florence), fellowships at La Sapienza (Rome), etc. m.in. in Carmi e Ubertis and ADM Milano.
A manager with many years of experience in the cosmetics, food, and children's industries. During his career, he was associated with such companies as: L'Oreal, Samsung, Danone-Nutricia, Unilever. During his professional life, he was responsible, among other things, for the development of e-commerce sales and content in Poland and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. 
