White Castle @ 100 Still Innovating with Technology

 

First our team just wants to say unanimously that we like White Castle. That said White Castle has been around over 100 years and is still driving top-line growth and bottom-line profits the old fashion way, adapting and driving innovation. 

Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® often reminds regular readers of this blog that if success does leave clues, and it does that White Castle is a great company to follow if your either looking to grow your same store sales or if you want your brand to be around 100 years from now.

With 350+ outlets White Castle is doubling down on Miso Robotics' Flippy machines after more than a year of tests yielded better operations and staff productivity. It could be the largest adoption of such technology by a U.S. restaurant chain because White Castle knows how to adapt to changing times according to Johnson who stated “The family leading White Castle looks a customer, a employee ahead, they do not get stuck doing what they have always done.”

White Castle COO Jeff Carper, stated, “Our partnership with Miso continues to lead the way on what’s next for back-of-house restaurant operations looking to empower team members with technology to better satisfy customers.”

In case you did not know, or read about it on this blog when we had our first ‘flippy story”. So, Flippy is a robotic arm mounted on a rail and powered by AI software. White Castle will be using the second-generation model known as Flippy 2 to work the fry station. The bot will take orders, fill baskets, fry the food and dump it off to be packaged and handed to the customer by human workers.

You have to understand that this system takes some less-desirable work off of employees' plates and allows them to focus on other things, particularly helping customers, White Castle said. It also improves food consistency.

Leader’s lead, White Castle became the first big restaurant chain to embrace Miso's robot when it began testing it in a single restaurant in September 2020. The pilot was not without its bumps, but Miso used feedback from White Castle to develop Flippy 2, which handles more tasks than its predecessor, including filling the fryer baskets itself. White Castle installed Flippy at 10 more restaurants in November.

This announcement comes as restaurants are looking to automate more tasks reducing cost as labor cost are sky rocking. The simple fast is robots can help ease challenges in hiring and retaining human workers as well as keep costs down amid skyrocketing inflation. Who will step up next?

Are you looking for a new partnership to drive sales? Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing tactics look more like yesterday that tomorrow?  Visit GrocerantGuru.com for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may have the clue you need to propel your continued success.