With a beep, a buzz and a whir — and maybe even a little sizzle — the world’s first fully-automatic hamburger machine can prepare, cook and serve a perfect custom-made burger without a single human hand being involved.

A San Francisco startup is taking the Silicon Valley attitude into the fast food market and hoping to revolutionize what they call “the most labour intensive industry in the country.”

Featuring glass tubes filled with lettuce and tomatoes, a meat-grinder, bun slicer, oven and bagger, the alpha machine is part Rube Goldberg, part Jetsons and promises to be the first step in burger evolution since McDonald’s proliferated around the world.

It can produce a custom-made, freshly ground burger, baked to order at a rate of 400 per hour. The machine will add the requested toppings, slicing tomatoes directly onto the burger, and pop out a neatly-wrapped sandwich ready for human consumption.

The makers, Momentum Machines, claim that their invention “does everything employees can do except better.”

The oven employs “gourmet cooking techniques never before used in a fast-food restaurant, giving the patty the perfect char but keeping in all the juices,” according their website.

“It’s more consistent, more sanitary,” and the company claims, “the labour savings allow a restaurant to spend approximately twice as much on high quality ingredients.”

Momentum is planning on demonstrating their invention in a soon to be opened restaurant in San Francisco before franchising it out to any restaurant, convenience store, food truck — or potentially even vending machine — that wants it.

As for all those grill tenders and line cooks made obsolete by the contraption, Momentum offers discounted technical training and says that the money saved on labour will be recycled into restaurant expansion and new job creation.

Plus, according to the website, “the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy.”

It’s a delicious win-win.