If you’re a Shake Shack customer in Los Angeles, your next burger could come on a little robot with wheels.
The fast casual burger chain and Serve Robotics announced a partnership Wednesday to deliver meals through autonomous delivery robots via the Uber Eats app. The robot, which is shaped like a shopping cart and has four wheels, will travel on sidewalks.
Serve Robotics was founded as the robotics division of Postmates before Uber acquired that company and spun off Serve in 2021. The company went public in April 2024, and today counts Nvidia and 7-Eleven among its investors. Shares of Serve jumped nearly 10% after the partnership was announced.
Serve robots have already been delivering food from restaurants in the Los Angeles area through Uber Eats since 2022. Robots work best for shorter distance deliveries, and the typical delivery takes a robot about a mile to complete, cofounder and CEO Ali Kashani told CNN Business in an interview Wednesday.
The robots are also better equipped for cities than driverless cars, Kashani said.
“It reduces congestion, it reduces emissions, it reduces accidents and fatality, and it lowers the cost to merchants,” Kashani said.
As companies deal with higher labor expenses, consumers are also grappling with the growing price of eating out. Serve Robotics said that another advantage to its robots is that they increase efficiency and lowers costs.
“And there’s no need to tip the robot!,” the press release for Shake Shack deliveries said.
Investors still excited, but challenges remain
Restaurants, delivery chains and stores are investing heavily in automated serving – whether it’s drones, self-driving cars, or in this case, robots.
This is also the second bite of the robo-delivery apple for Uber. Uber Eats and a different company, Cartken, partnered to launch robot delivery services in Miami in 2022 and expanded to Fairfax, Virginia in 2023.
But some avenues like drone delivery have yet to take off despite backing from giants like Amazon and Walmart, suggesting companies can’t fully cut out human workers yet in favor of automation
The same holds true for the concept of robot deliveries. Domino’s, for example, launched a pizza delivery robot in 2021, but still ended up relying on its own delivery drivers and service.
Still, companies and investors have an appetite for taking big swings at the concept, which Serve Robotics is looking to pull off.
Serve Robotics has an agreement with Uber Eats to roll out 2,000 robots on its platform in 2025, the company said in its most recent earnings report released Tuesday, even though it had an average of only 48 robots performing daily deliveries in the three months ending June 30. That’s up from the 23 daily active robots it had on average in the same period in 2023. The company has a total fleet of 100 robots.
And cities like LA present a “challenging environment,” Kashani said, since its tourist-heavy with crowed sidewalks that present more opportunities for items to be stolen out of the delivery bots.
Despite the challenge, however, he said Serve’s robots complete their deliveries more than 99% of the time.
The company is also considering expanding to Dallas, San Diego and Vancouver, Canada, Kashani said.
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