Once you place an order their grill robot starts grinding the beef for it and then immediately grills it. Flippy, their robotic fry station, cooks the French fries to exact times. An employee does the finishing touches: salting the fries, grilling onions, assembling the burger, and serving the order.
Robot-Made Burgers & Fries
Limited Time Pop-Up!CaliexpressEat the Future
CaliExpress by Flippy serves freshly made wagyu blend burgers at prices competitive with other premium burgers using standard meat. Uniquely, the grill robot (made by Cucina) grinds the high quality beef in real-time after the order is placed, resulting in a burger patty that melts in the mouth. Flippy, the famous robotic fry station, cooks up crispy, hot fries made from top grade potatoes - always to exact times. Our simple menu has burgers, cheeseburgers, and french fries.Restaurant AI & Robotics Innovation Showroom
CaliExpress by Flippy is the world's first fully autonomous restaurant. Utilizing the most advanced systems in food technology, both the grill and fry stations are fully automated, powered by leading-edge artificial intelligence and robotics.Guests watch their food being cooked robotically after using self-ordering kiosks to get personalized order recommendations and make easy and fast payments. The new CaliExpress by Flippy restaurant is located in beautiful downtown Pasadena, California on the northwest corner of Green Street and Madison Avenue at 561 E. Green St.
Meet Flippy
Powered by Miso's proprietary and patent-protected AI, Flippy is a ground-breaking, smart commercial kitchen robot that fries items from french fries to chicken nuggets, and works alongside humans to enhance quality and consistency, while creating substantial, measurable cost savings for restaurants.
We tried a restaurant where robots cook the food
CaliExpress by Flippy is both a functioning restaurant and a test kitchen for kitchen robots.the HustleCaliExpress by Flippy
Their menu is simple - burgers and fries - but it's a little different from your standard fast-casual affair in that its staff includes two robots. CaliExpress by Flippy serves as a test kitchen for Miso Robotics, which builds robots for use in restaurants, currently including White Castle and Jack in the Box.How it works
Customers order at a kiosk powered by PopID - a biometric payment startup that lets users upload a selfie, then pay, access loyalty rewards, and more using their face.Those orders are received by the kitchen, where two robots get to work:
- Miso Robotics' Flippy is essentially a fry cook. At CaliExpress, it makes up to 150 pounds of fries per hour, but it's capable of other recipes - chicken tenders, onion rings, mozzarella sticks, etc.
- Another robot, made by Cucina, grinds wagyu beef, then grills up to six patties at a time.
A human employee salts the fries, grills onions, assembles the burger, and serves the orders. They're also responsible for “managing” the robots.
Elsewhere in the restaurant, other Miso Robotics bots are on display, including a pair of earlier Flippy bots and Chippy, a robot created to fry and season Chipotle's tortilla chips.
It's a fun novelty to watch the bots at work, and the food comes out just like you'd expect - a standard burger and fries, on par with similar fast-casual restaurants.
Where else are robots in use?
You'll find them at various fast-food and fast-casual chains, including:
- Chipotle, where a bot from robotics startup Hyphen makes up to 180 bowls an hour, about 6x faster than human employees.
- Sweetgreen's Infinite Kitchen restaurants, where bots make 400-500 dishes per hour, 50% more compared to staff.
Fully Robotic Kitchen Slings Burgers And Fries At New SoCal Restaurant
Robot burger-flippers and fry cooks run the kitchen at a new SoCal restaurant that claims to be the world's first fully autonomous eatery.PatchPasadena, CA
Burgers, fries and drinks. While the menu at CaliExpress by Flippy is basic, the new Pasadena eatery is anything but simple - its owners say CaliExpress is the world's first fully autonomous restaurant.The result is a restaurant that serves precision-cooked food (thank you, robots) at lower prices with fewer employees and less waste, its owners say.
Here's how it works:
The fully-automated grill and fry stations offer several benefits. Flippy helps prevent the threat of slips and burns for the kitchen crew and reduces the amount of food and oil waste, its owners say.
- Guests order food on self-ordering kiosks
- They then watch their meal being prepared - the grill robot grinds wagyu-blend beef for each burger before putting it on the grill
- Flippy - the AI fry-cook robot already in use at other restaurants - cooks up crispy fries for exactly the right amount of time
Naturally, the kitchen crew is smaller, and the owners say the automated nature of CaliExpress makes for a less stressful work experience with "above average wages," according to a release.
The cost savings for the restaurant allows the wagyu-blend burgers to be priced similarly to other burgers using standard meat, the owners say.
Cali Group ExecutiveTo our knowledge, this is the world's first operating restaurant where both ordering and every single cooking process are fully automated. The marriage of these various technologies to create the most autonomous restaurant in the world is the culmination of years of research, development, and investment in a family of revolutionary companies.- John Miller
CaliExpress is a effort by Cali Group, a holding company that seeks to use tech to transform restaurants and retail; Miso Robotics, which created Flippy; and PopID, a tech company that aims to simplify ordering and payments using biometrics, according to a release.
Nationally, White Castle has already begun installing Flippy units and plans to use the robots at over 100 of its restaurants, according to reports.
- Lettuce Wrap
- Grilled Onion
2016
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
These GPUs, essentially the brains of Flippy, were part of the experimental "Flippy Cart" that was tested during the World Series at Dodger Stadium! Flippy Cart earned its name by being uniquely designed on wheels to be mobile, a rarity in commercial kitchens.
Did you know?! These four GPUs used to be needed add-ons to run Flippy and all its Al vision tech. We've optimized so much that Flippy units today run using just a single system-on-a-chip (SoC).
2016-23
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
Portioning order sizes is unexpectedly difficult. The Miso team created many different 3D-printed dispenser "drum" designs, including these, to get portions right for small, medium, and large sized orders for a wide variety of food sizes, shapes and textures - this was the reason to research drum designs.
The drum is located at the bottom of the freezer that holds Flippy's frozen items. When an order is placed, the drum spins, pushing the correct amount of items into a waiting basket.
Each design was tested to gauge which was most gentle on the food, prone to sticking, and generally efficient.
2016-23
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
Flippy's robotic arm slides back-and-forth on a rail. Before Flippy, this had never been done before in restaurant automation, and Flippy actually holds the patent for this innovation. Miso engineers innovated in extremely novel ways to make Flippy as versatile as it is - now being able to fry nearly any type of food.
2017
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
This original Flippy robotic arm operated at both the grill and fry stations, and utilized several different types of "grippers" to grab burger patties and fried items. Flippy originally earned his name by flipping burgers on a grill, but soon proved to be a rock star at making French fries, onion rings, and anything else fried! While other, more frying-centric names were considered as Flippy migrated solely to the fry station, crowds loved the Flippy name so much that it has remained unchanged.
2017
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
In the early days of Miso, Flippy flipped burgers! This "soft gripper" was one of the original features tested to place raw patties on the grill. Eventually, a more spatula-like design became part of Flippy's system to both place patties and flip burgers mid-cook.
2018
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
Once moving solely to the fry station, Flippy required a custom-designed gripper to grab and move baskets. This design used compress air to open and close Flippy's gripper.
We now use electric actuated grippers, and have removed the air compressor, which required heavy maintenance frequently.
2018
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
Flippy earned its name by originally launching as a burger-flipping robot in 2018, essentially ushering in the start of the "food tech" era. Through its early trials, we learned that the fry station presented a far larger opportunity, and quickly evolved the product to instead tackle that task - a $3.5 billion revenue opportunity for Miso alone. Despite many later attempts to change the name to "Frybo" and other fry-related monikers, Flippy had become beloved, and customers and fans alike insisted that this new iteration retain the original Flippy name.
2019
Fort Myers, Florida
Here one of the original Flippy prototype units fries onion rinas on its first day of operation.
2019
Fort Myers, Florida
One of the first Flippy units, this prototype was one of two at the location. Here is the unit during its initial installation and setup.
2021
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
This experimental incarnation of "Chippy" condensed many of Flippy's innovations into a smaller, mobile unit designed to cook tortilla chips. After frying the chips, Chippy would add salt and fresh lime juice, and then deposit the chips into a large bin below.
Newer versions of Chippy, which operate today in several secret locations throughout the U.S., feature an improved design that was architected using large amounts of proprietary data gathered in commercial kitchen testing with this unit. With Chippy cooking its chips perfectly every time, this Chippy unit participated in countless taste tests — and won them all!
December 2021
Westlake Center, WA
Flippy 2 launched in 2021 from the learnings of the first Flippy. The CaliBurger Westlake Center location served up over 36,000 baskets during its test mission.
2022
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
As Flippy evolved, gripper designs were updated rapidly, becoming smaller, stronger, and faster as Miso engineers refined the design. This original IP 54 design led to the gripper that Flippy uses today.
2022
Miso Innovation Lab/Pasadena, CA
Virtually everything Flippy does has never been done before. As recently as only a few years ago, when Flippy's designers wanted to create a new feature, it could take weeks to design, manufacture, and test prototype parts.
It involved a lot of back-and-forth, overnight shipping, and third party partners. Today, it can take mere minutes to design, 3D-print, and start testing new parts right in the Miso Innovation Lab that now houses a dozen such 3D printers.
Robot-Made Burgers & Fries. Once you place an order their grill robot starts grinding the beef for it and then immediately grills it.
