Why Did Din Tai Fung Put Robots in Many Restaurants?

Jason Ma says Din Tai Fung put Dyna robots in many United States restaurants because the chain decided the robots create enough value to roll out across sites, not only to run one pilot. Plenty of robotics companies announce a deployment or a pilot. The hard part is not placing one robot in one restaurant. The hard part is the customer wanting robots across many sites. To his knowledge, a multi-site rollout has not happened for other companies building similar general purpose robots. Din Tai Fung is the biggest scaled customer. The robots fold thousands of napkins a day at many locations.

Din Tai Fung's quality standard is extremely high. The second fold must leave the seam of the napkin only a couple of centimeters below the pocket so chopsticks fit. Humans are less consistent on small details. A robot can do the fold nearly perfectly.

Napkins and towels are deformable and can take infinitely many configurations, so the job is hard for a specialized robot. He allows a specialized robot might still manage the fold. A general purpose model on a robot, adapted to the restaurant, reaches production quality faster. After Din Tai Fung scaled and signed a much bigger contract, the restaurants want the robots for more than napkin folding.