This Kebab Bot Will Precision Cut Your Döner Dinner

Hakan Gorenli, the owner of Super Kebab Takeaway in North London, wants to accelerate the takeout experience. The Guardian reported that he's invested in a £5,000 ($7,800) precision kebab robot that offers up hygienically sliced doner for hungry customers within seconds.

"I decided to get this machine because it cuts faster [than a human] is more hygienic, and is better than cutting by hand," Gorenli told me, saying the machine produced thinner slices. Human kebab cutters can get pretty sweaty when they slice meat close to the grill due to high temperatures, but the robot cutter eliminates that hygiene risk from the equation.

Originally from Izmir, a western seaside city in Turkey, Gorenli first heard of the machine through friends. Thinking it would be a good investment, he decided to have the machine shipped over from Turkish manufacturer Atalay.

Though Gorenli agreed that the super-slicing kebab bot was killing off the traditional practice of carving up slices of sizzling doner in real-time, he seemed pretty convinced—preferring efficiency over old-school technologies.

He has also been conducting his own in-house survey to gauge customer happiness levels.

"I've asked every customer, 'Which one is better? Hand-cut or machine-cut?' Ninety-nine percent tell me that the robot is better," he said. When he asked his customers why they preferred the robot kebab maker over their human counterpart, they responded that they liked the robot's ability to produce thinner slices and it's quicker performance.

"My customers used to wait half an hour or so in a queue, but now the maximum waiting time has shrunk to ten minutes," said Gorenli.

For the moment, the culinary robot seems like it could be a boon for time-pressed takeouts. But with a growing family of cookery robots such as a Japanese sushi robot, Chinese robo-cooks, and a British "robo-chef," it might not be long before there's a Great British Bake Off for robots.