Chef vs. Robot

March 13, 2026·26 min·2 clips

Kenny Poon's new chef Robbie never complains, works overtime, and can make 5,000 dishes—but Robbie is a robot wok.

Planet Money reporters Erica Barris and Justin Cramon visit Philadelphia's Chinatown to investigate the rise of robot chefs in the restaurant industry. At InstaFoods, they meet Kenny Poon, a restaurateur who bought Robbie, an automated wok machine made by Next Robot that costs $36,000 to purchase or $5 an hour to rent. Robbie can make over 5,000 dishes, never calls in sick, and can be operated by someone with 30 minutes of training — compared to months or years for a trained wok chef. Across the street at Ting Wong, Chef Feng Huangqiang, a 13-year veteran who won a cooking competition in Guangdong province, earns $35 an hour and can make 20 to 30 dishes per hour over an open flame. The episode sets up a three-dish smackdown — beef chow fun, vegetable fried rice, and wok stir-fried beef — judged by chef and restaurant consultant Shola Olinloyo. To provide economic context, the hosts speak with MIT economist and Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, who quantified automation's effects on employment across industries from 1990 to 2007. His research found that one new robot per thousand workers reduced employment by about three workers and cut wages by 0.4 percent. He explains the competing forces of displacement — robots replacing human tasks — and reinstatement — robots creating new job types — and notes displacement has dominated so far. He warns that automation tends to complement higher-wage workers while pushing middle-wage workers into lower-skill, lower-wage roles. Shola notes that restaurant profit margins average just 3 to 4 percent, comparable to US Treasury yields, making labor-saving technology highly attractive. He is openly pro-automation for lower-end food, arguing most people cannot tell the difference in high-glutamate dishes like burgers and fried foods. During the smackdown, Shola correctly identifies the human and robot dishes in all three rounds. The key differentiator is wok hei — the high-heat char achievable only on an open gas flame — which Robbie's electric wok cannot replicate. Chef Feng wins beef chow fun and stir-fried beef on this basis. Robbie unexpectedly wins the fried rice round, however: despite the dish looking worse — mashed rice, beat-up vegetables — its stronger soy sauce application produced better flavor. The episode closes with Acemoglu noting consumers will vote with their feet, and the observation that as robot technology improves and restaurant margins remain thin, robot-made food will likely become more common.

As heard by us

A robot chef becomes a clear, readable lesson in who automation helps and who it hurts.

Planet Money uses a robot cook in Philadelphia's Chinatown to make its point about automation and work. The setup is unusual, but the episode does not stay with the gimmick for long. It moves into a plainspoken look at displacement and reinstatement, and it does that well.

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Why you'd press play

You want robot-chef novelty with a real labor-market payoff.

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