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Watch: Future Is Here – Robot Waiters And Guides Arrive At New Mrieħel Restaurant And Supermarket

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Mrieħel’s newest restaurant and supermarket are promising people a pretty futuristic dining and shopping experience, becoming the first Maltese establishments to roll out robot waiters and guides.

Mondo Restaurant and Greens Supermarket, both owned by the Greens Group, are located a stone’s throw from each other at the Quad Central business complex.

Lovin Malta spoke to Anthony Grech, chief technology officer of the Greens Group, to understand how these robots work and why they have been rolled out in the first place.

“We still employ human waiters and we still need human interaction with clients but the robots are now helping out,” he said of Mondo’s two robot waiters.

 

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Human waiters take diners’ orders and are on hand to discuss the menu but food is delivered from the kitchen by robot waiters, which are equipped with cameras that can capture table numbers and can determine their movements accordingly.

With the catering industry facing major staff shortage problems, Grech said these robot waiters allow the human waiters to have more quality time and focus on human aspects of the job – such as speaking to clients, upselling specialities and receiving feedback from them.

Clients still have a choice on how to be served, as the restaurant wants everyone to feel comfortable, but many are opting for the robot option.

The Greens Supermarket robot currently acts as a guide to shoppers, who can instruct it to lead them to their desired products and follow it through the aisles.

However, the plan is to expand the robot’s functions to product merchandising, with the robot cruising around the supermarket stacked with products whose promotion offer will be flashed on a screen. Similar robots will eventually also be launched at Greens’ flagship Swieqi supermarket.

And Grech stressed that the goal isn’t to make human staff redundant – indeed the Greens Group increased their HR by around 150 people in Mrieħel.

The Greens Group has also become the local agent for these ‘iServe’-branded robots, meaning more businesses could well go down this route in the near future.

“There are many types of robots,” Grech explained. “An upcoming version is an industrial cleaning robot, which we will use in our establishments to clean it at night and a bit in the day. There are also host waiters, which can for example be located at hotels and lead guests through the lift and to their rooms.”

“There’s a mixture of emotions from the public – some are against the idea of robot waiters and others are in favour but if you work in the industry, you will realise that it’s part of the solution because it’s become ridiculously hard to find staff,” Grech said.

He added that Greens was the first Maltese supermarket to introduce self-service of fruit and vegetable packaging and self-checkout machines and that both of these technologies were initially met with public scepticism before they were eventually accepted and spread to other establishments.

Robot waiters, he predicted, will follow the same route.

Chamber of Commerce President Marisa Xuereb last year urged restaurants to launch robot waiters in response to the catering staff shortage crisis. 

“We’re talking about driverless cars; is it so hard to imagine an automatic trolley delivering food to a table?” Xuereb questioned, adding that the key to recovery is improving productivity by doing more with fewer people. 

Association of Catering Establishments secretary Matthew Pace said robot waiters were a “very sensible” option but stressed that they could never substitute the human interaction between server and customer.

Would you like to be served by a robot waiter?

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Tim is interested in the rapid evolution of human society and is passionate about justice, human rights and cutting-edge political debates. You can follow him on Instagram or Twitter/X at @timdiacono or reach out to him at [email protected]

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