The technical complexities, coupled with the cost of building a kitchen bot, mean that it will take time before robotics transforms the fast-food industry. Still, chains continue to pursue automation because they think it will boost their profits; labor costs typically make up around 30 percent of restaurant expenses. “The fact of the matter is businesses will automate when it’s cost-effective,” says Teofilo Reyes, a policy expert at Restaurant Opportunities United, a nonprofit that advocates better conditions for fast-food workers. Replacing multiple salaries with the one-time cost of a robot is an enticing business strategy, especially in an industry with a high turnover rate. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, predicts that within the next five to 10 years, major fast-food chains will be able to reduce staff by 30 to 40 percent due to automation.

The impact of such cuts on overall employment rates is unknown, says Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at UC Berkeley. “The big mistake everyone makes is they can’t foresee the new jobs that will come online because of the technology,” she argues. The car may have put blacksmiths out of business, but it also created assembly-line jobs. Of course, automation in manufacturing has now put assembly-line workers at risk. They’re being replaced by robots, overseen by a small group of humans with the expertise to manage them.

How to Work a Burger Bot 1. Ordering

Diners customize their meals through Creator’s app, which sends the information to the bot.

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2. Toasted bun

Air pressure pushes the brioche bun through a blade that slices it in half. It travels down a vertical toaster before dropping into a compostable container.

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3. Produce

The bun moves on a conveyor belt below chutes of tomatoes, onions, pickles, and shredded lettuce. The robot cleaves a fresh portion from each of the vegetables.

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4. Beef

Hunks of brisket and chuck are tumbled with seasonings in a vacuum chamber. The bot grinds and shapes 5 ounces of meat into a puck, then a mechanized arm deposits the patty between two griddles.

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5. Grill

The patty is cooked at 350 degrees until medium rare. When it’s done, a mechanized spatula places the patty onto the open bun.

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6. Condiments

Convection heat melts shredded cheese. Requested sauces and seasonings—including coffee-flavored salt, chipotle powder, and curry ketchup—are deposited from various dispensers.

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7. Quality control

The burger emerges from the robot, where it’s checked by a human worker. —L.S.

Vardakostas won’t share his financial projections, but his business model makes some ambitious assumptions in its path to success. He says that the robot will eventually make burgers more efficiently than a typical fast-food restaurant, though at its current rate—about 100 burgers per machine, per hour—a McDonald’s-­style restaurant could keep up. App-based ordering means that Creator will be able to serve more customers, faster. The restaurant may also shore up its bottom line by serving beer, wine, and fries, items with a high profit margin. Vardakostas says he plans to spend around 45 percent of his revenue on burger ingredients, which include pasture-raised beef and organic vegetables. Most restaurants spend roughly half that on total food costs.

To Erik Brynjolfsson, coauthor of The Second Machine Age, it makes sense that Momentum Machines is opening its own restaurant rather than shopping its bot around to existing chains. “You can’t just pop the robot into a restaurant and leave the whole rest of the business the same,” he says. “You have to reinvent the roles of the people, the types of ingredients, your price points. Replacing a human burger-flipper with a machine isn’t the big payoff—the payoff is inventing a totally new kind of restaurant.”

While robots will serve as Creator’s chefs and cashless cashiers, they won’t be without human support. This spring, Momentum Machines hired its first restaurant employees, including a general manager, a host to explain how the smartphone ordering process works, and “burger buffs” trained to maintain the machine and deliver meals to tables. Up to nine employees will work during Creator’s peak hours—on par with a standard fast-food restaurant—and Vardakostas says he’ll pay them $16 an hour, $1 above San Francisco’s minimum wage.

All this raises the question: Can Creator actually make money, or will it become another over­hyped gimmick propped up by VC funding? “It’s to be determined,” says Aaron Noveshen, founder of the restaurant consultancy the Culinary Edge and an early Momentum Machines adviser. “If it doesn’t take five people to stand next to the robot to make it work, then they can reach profitability.” Helen Boniske believes Alex could charge more than his proposed price of $6 to $7 per burger, with an eye to Creator’s eventual expansion.

While Creator is a contained testing ground, for now, the idea of robotic kitchens catching on throughout the restaurant industry is unsettling to many. “For some reason, with our burger bot, people have a visceral reaction: This machine is doing exactly what you see a human doing,” acknowledges McDonald, one of Momentum’s original engineers. There is something especially troubling about fast-food workers being tossed aside—perhaps because those jobs are viewed as a place for people who have limited options. The median income for a fast-food worker is around $21,000, and more than half receive some public assistance. “The reality is that many people who work in fast food may be well suited for routine jobs,” Ford says.

Alex balks at such sentiments. He sees burger flippers as trapped by their jobs, not clinging to them. “You don’t grow up next to fast-food workers without realizing these people are capable of so much more—it becomes this sort of haunting thing,” he says. “People say, oh, flipping burgers is the only thing they can do. That’s fucking bigoted. Dude, no, we can do a lot more than flip burgers. We just haven’t had a chance.”

For a line cook who just lost his job, though, Vardakostas’ vision may offer little consolation.

Momentum Machines engineers receive real-time obstruction alerts from the burger bot during testing. BRIAN FINKE Vardakostas loads stacks of pickles, tomatoes, and onions into his machine. Each topping is sliced to order. BRIAN FINKE

At Creator in San Francisco, Vardakostas walks over to inspect his machine’s latest burger. For the past year, the restaurant’s unfinished dining area has been his second office, his 50 employees gliding between the two buildings on scooters and skateboards. At the moment, the restaurant windows are frosted over to thwart oglers, and the rare visitor is required to sign a nondisclosure agreement and cover their phone’s camera lens with a sticker. It’s mid-April, and the team is customizing burger orders from Creator’s smartphone app for the first time, requesting extra cheese or chipotle powder instead of jalapeño salt. Half a dozen developers and software engineers are seated at the dining tables with their laptops, obsessively tracking the real-time progress of the two identical robots across the room.

Amid the bustle of machinery, finishing touches are being put in place to make the space feel more like a homey café than, say, a dystopian factory. One wall is painted with yellow Fibonacci spirals. Burger ingredients chill in glass-front refrigerators alongside meticulously written explanations of their provenance. Customers will be invited to browse books while they wait for their orders, from design tomes to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.