Can robot waiters plug labor shortfall in China?

Two years ago, Bao Xiangyi quit school and worked as a waiter in a restaurant for half a year to support himself, and the 19-year-old remembers the time vividly.

“It was crazy working in some Chinese restaurants. My WeChat steps number sometimes hit 20,000 in a day [just by delivering meals in the restaurant],” said Bao.

The WeChat fitness tracking function gauges how many steps you literally take, and 20,000 steps per day can be compared with a whole day of outdoor activity, typically ranking you very high among your friends.

Bao, now a university student in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, quit the waiter job and went back to school.

“I couldn’t accept that for 365 days a year, every day would be the same,” said Bao. “Those days were filled with complete darkness and I felt like my whole life would be spent as an inferior and insignificant waiter.”

Photo credit: Kate Townsend

Olivia Niu, a 23-year-old Hong Kong resident, quit her waiter job on the first day. “It was too busy during peak meal times. I was so hungry myself but I needed to pack meals for customers,” said Niu.

Being a waiter has never been a top career choice but it remains a big source of employment in China. Yang Chunyan, a waitress at the Lanlifang Hotel in Wenzhou in southeastern China, has two children and says she chose the job because she needs to make a living.

Today’s young generation have their sights on other areas, though. Of those born after 2000, 24.5% want careers related to literature and art. This is followed by education and the IT industry in second and third place, respectively, according to a recent report by Tencent QQ and China Youth Daily.

Help may now be at hand though for restaurants struggling to find qualified table staff who are able to withstand the daily stress of juggling hundreds of food orders. The answer comes in the form of robots.

Shenzhen Pudu Technology, a three-year-old Shenzhen startup, is among the tech companies offering catering robots to thousands of restaurant owners who are scrambling to try to plug a labor shortfall with new tech such as machines, AI, and online ordering systems. It has deployed robots in China, Singapore, Korea, and Germany.

With a Pudu robot, kitchen staff can put meals on the robot, enter the table number, and the robot will deliver it to the consumer. While an average human waiter can deliver 200 meals per day, the robots can manage 300 to 400 orders.

“Nearly every restaurant owner [in China] says it’s hard to recruit people to [work as a waiter],” Zhang Tao, the founder and CEO of Pudu, said in an interview this week. “China’s food market is huge and delivering meals is a process with high demand and frequency.”

Pudu’s robots can be used for 10 years and cost between 40,000 yuan (US$5,650) and 50,000 yuan (US$7,054). That’s less than the average yearly salary of restaurant and hotel workers in China’s southern Guangdong province, which is roughly 60,000 yuan (US$8,465), according to a report co-authored by the South China Market of Human Resources and other organizations.