Inside White Castle’s digital transformation efforts

White Castle may be known for its miniature sliders, but its digital transformation plans are anything but tiny.

For the past six years, the fast food burger chain has cooked up automation initiatives across its stores to help employees better serve customers.

Meet Julia. Part of White Castle’s digital transformation efforts have revolved around Julia, a drive-thru AI voice assistant. White Castle CIO Susan Carroll-Boser told IT Brew that Julia helps drive-thru employees “be a little bit less of an octopus.”

“They’re trying to do five or six different things. They’re trying to talk to and be pleasant in the drive-thru. They’re trying to take money from the car that came up. They are trying to hand food out. They’re trying to have a memorable moment at the window where they actually talk to people and are friendly,” Carroll-Boser said. “And that’s a lot to ask.”

White Castle began piloting Julia at select locations in October 2020, tapping voice AI company SoundHound AI as its partner. In its early days, Carroll-Boser said it was important to make sure the technology was responsive to different voices, accents, and volumes.

“Getting the sound correct and having the right partners on the sound systems [and] the sound engineering of the actual sound…has been important,” Carroll-Boser said, adding it was also important for Julia to learn the full scope of the menu and the different combinations customers may want (like extra pickles, no onions).

“If you’re a brand that is in the space and you’re approaching [drive-thru AI], your menu itself is going to tell you how hard this project is going to be, but also the decisions on the flexibility that you need the system to make,” Carroll-Boser said.

Oliver Ostertag, president of growth and AI at restaurant tech company PAR Technology, told IT Brew that the concept of an AI-enabled drive-thru generated a lot of hype in its early days, but not a lot of traction.

“You didn’t see mass adoption to start because there were still issues both in terms of the technology, whether or not they actually got the orders right, and then separately for the companies themselves that were running [it],” Ostertag said, adding that the technology subsequently evolved, leading to more restaurant chains incorporating it.

“You’re seeing a greater level of success there. It is inevitable that almost every company that uses drive-thru will end up using voice AI,” Ostertag said. “It’s just a question of when does the technology fully work for that use case?”

And Flippy. As Julia takes orders, Flippy, an autonomous kitchen robot, handles repetitive cooking tasks at select locations. In 2020, White Castle announced a partnership with Miso Robotics to pilot the burger-flipping fry cook, which includes a robot arm moving along an upside-down rail. Ostertag told IT Brew robot adoption within the restaurant industry is still low, but that he expects more restaurants to embrace the technology.

Since then, the partnership has expanded to include Flippy 2, a next-generation iteration of Flippy that can take on the work of an entire fry station. In 2022, White Castle announced a commitment to place Flippy 2 in 100 stores, or slightly less than one-third of its 336 locations across the country.

“It still requires a person. They’re still making the sandwiches. They’re still helping with the stuff that Flippy can’t get out of the freezer,” Carroll-Boser said. “But we are trying to get more stuff coming out of the freezer automatically. We’re trying to get it more tuned to real-time predictive sales.”

The not-so-flashy automation efforts. While Flippy and Julia may catch people’s attention, Carroll-Boser said automation efforts at White Castle expand well beyond the drive-thru AI and robotic assistants, including a five-year automation plan to revamp its kitchens.

“We’re looking for more tools, more partners, or just doing some of the stuff that we’ve done for a long time better,” Carroll-Boser said. “And it may not be as fancy as a robot. It’ll be better tools [for] things that we’re slow on, things that bottleneck us, [and] helping our team do more.”

Takeaways. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned from White Castle’s automation projects, according to Carroll-Boser. One is that it is crucial for companies to keep innovating, even after rolling out initial automation efforts.

“You can’t sit still,” Carroll-Boser said. “And the company that you’re dealing with, or your voice AI, or your own teams have to accept that this is going to be constant because it’s customer-facing. Think of it as like a website or an app. You can’t just stay with the same thing you’ve had all these years. You have to keep moving.”

She added that smaller chains should avoid overscoping their AI projects.

“[Small chains are] seeing a lot of big failures and it’s because instead of dealing with the problem that they would like to work on, they get excited and expand it to being bigger,” Carroll-Boser said. “I think staying small and staying very clear about why you’re doing something is the way the mid-size and the smaller people like us have to stay.”

It is likewise critical for companies to reassess whether AI projects are continuing to meet their intended goals. “These are changing technologies; the competition is changing. You’re going to have to go back and revisit it to make sure it’s still making its goals, and possibly innovate,” Carroll-Boser said. “When you think you’re done, you’re not done. Innovate again to keep up.”