WellSpan Health has a robot making hospital food

Beep, bop, boop? More like beep, bop, food!

Clinical staffing shortages have long been a well-publicized challenge for hospitals, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Less discussed, though, are the staffing shortages for other hospital workers, like janitorial or kitchen staff. In industry publication FoodService Director’s survey of 56 respondents in 2022, nearly 82% reported a staffing shortage.

That’s why on March 9 the nine-hospital, Pennsylvania-based system WellSpan Health opened Fresh Take Eatery, a new robotic dining system that uses AI to make hot food for patients and staff 24/7 at the system’s 593-bed WellSpan York Hospital.

Alyssa Moyer, president of WellSpan York, told us this new technology can fight employment challenges and provide the hospital with the food services it needs.

“Coming out of Covid [it was] very difficult to find folks that want to work the night shift, particularly preparing food and some other similar positions, and we are very much a 24/7 hospital,” Moyer said.

Mechanical enginEATing. The bot was created in conjunction with tech companies RoboEatz and ABB Robotics, with Fresh Take Eatery being the first to put RoboEatz’s autonomous robotic kitchen to use in a commercial setting, according to both the hospital and robotics companies.

The robot works in a 400-square-foot area and can store, retrieve, cook, plate, serve, and clean up after 80 different food options . This is “a postage-stamp footprint for what would otherwise be a really large kitchen renovation,” Moyer said.

The bot uses both physical AI—which allows autonomous robots to observe, reason, and perform complex actions in the physical world—and generative AI, RoboEatz spokesperson Greg Moller, told us.

“The physical AI specifically is working on robotic efficiencies, food safety issues, food waste, food quality,” he said. “We’re using generative AI to develop menus, optimize those menus…That allows for venue menu variety, such as seasonal menus.”

The team customized the technology a bit to fit some of the hospital’s goals to provide ​​healthy, local foods, Moyer said. For example, with its local chicken supplier, WellSpan had to find the exact right size piece of meat that the robot could make into a meal.

The company can make sure the robot operates “specifically [to] the end user” depending on their food service provider, Moller added.

Since it works all day, the robot also operates alongside human staff (we know, that sounds weird). Nurses, for example, can even order their lunch ahead on the website (each hospital has its own ordering platform) and schedule pick-up times for food, Moyer said.

The health system claims Fresh Take Eatery can produce about 1,000 meals a day, which it says increases its retail meal volume by over 50%.

Moyer declined to share any financial information or return on investment, though she said she “would anticipate, given the success of the robot here, expanding that to other hospitals within our system.”