San Francisco recently welcomed a new type a restaurant to its host of eateries through the city: the world's first fully-autonomous restaurant called Mezili.
Mezil serves a wide range of Mediterranean grain bowls that have been created Michelin star Eric Minnich, with a menu of over 60,000 options for patrons to pick from. These options come in the form of a variety of sides, add-ons, or substitutions.
Designed by a team of Stanford engineers Alex Kolchinski, Alex Cruebele, and Max Perham, Mezli most prominently features robotic and culinary modernization, which enables individuals to experience restaurants in entirely new ways. Mezli's self-service robots allow customers to gain a sense of independence that they had not previously done. Whether it is through partial automation via hot menus or entire automation via simple menus (like rehydrated noodle bowls or ready-made cold salads), Mezli will be the very first restaurant to have such robotic features that do not require any human interaction at all.
"It resonates with me," said Mezli investor Pieter Abbeel. "Anything physical is always harder than you think, so if you don't come up with a first principles way to solve it, it will be difficult. In addition, from day one, the food was being served and that is compelling."
In the near future, Mezli plans to move to a variety of other locations while simultaneously broadening the array of food options that are accessible through Mezli. By nature, Mezli restaurants are much smaller and more inexpensive to establish than typical restaurants.
"We realized that if we could do food service in an autonomous way, then we could actually bring the price point way down and start serving better food for lower prices without people having to cook it themselves," Kolchinski, Mezli's CEO and co-founder, told CNBC's "Make It".
The future of Mezli, and autonomous food services in general, is anticipated to grow in popularity due to convenience and lower costs for owners who no long need to hire staff to run. It is a new commodity that most have yet to be exposed to, but more like it are expected to crop up in cities around the world.