The process of preparing fried chicken is hardly a laborious one, but nowadays we’ll do whatever it takes to make our lives easier, and this just in: chicken-frying robots have entered the chat.
Robert Fried Chicken, which is making its way to NYC, employs cooking robots…well, cooking robot arms, to be more specific.
Founder and CEO Kang Ji-young came up with the idea for building a chicken franchise that utilizes chicken-frying robots back in 2018.
“I thought the day would come where a robot fries chicken and a drone delivers it. But there was no such startup in South Korea, so I started the business,” she told The Korea Economic Daily.
Thus Robo Arete was established in September 2018, in which kitchen robots were developed to replace human cooks. The robots can fry up to 50 chickens in an hour, essentially replacing the workload of three part-time (human) employees.
The robot arm can carry out the entire process of frying chicken, including dipping the chicken in flour and frying powder, dropping the chicken into the fry basket, and shaking the basket throughout the cooking process to prevent sticking and overcooking. It even shakes the chicken before mixing it with its accompanying sauce in order to remove residual oil.
And while Robert Fried Chicken primarily operated in Seoul, it’s now making its way to NYC!
According to The Real Deal, the franchise has reportedly signed on to an open location on Fifth Avenue in Koreatown.
Though we don’t know for sure when we’ll have the chance to bite into a piece of fried-chicken that was prepared sans humans, we’re undeniably curious to see where our skills lie in the battle between human vs. robot chicken frying.