Robot server delivers meals at east Edmonton restaurant

At Tambayan Ni Kabayan restaurant in east Edmonton, one server stands out from the rest. That’s because she stands on two wheels. Peanut is a robot, who rolls to the beat of her own tunes, and greets customers with a smile and a wink.

“They bring their kids and they want the robot, 'I want the robot to serve our food,' so they're really, really happy,” owner Joe Baddas told CTV News Edmonton.

“It's easy because the customer, after they grab their food, we just press OK and it will say, ‘Thank you, have a good meal,’ and it will go back to the kitchen.”

Baddas says the family-owned restaurant invested in Peanut to bring in new business.

“During pandemic time it's really slow, so we for a small business like us, we cannot afford to hire servers and everything like that,” he said.

“We wanted just to innovate and get more customer, especially for the teenagers, they are more on the social media.”

It was a big investment for the small business, but one that’s paying off.

“It’s really nice. It’s amazing,” one customer said. “My son, four years old really like it.”

Baddas says Peanut can be customized to deliver personal service.

“If they have birthdays or something like that we can customize.”

“We just press happy birthday and the robot will go, ‘Happy birthday, happy birthday,’ and keep on singing.”

Peanut the robot server.

Peanut doesn’t just sing and deliver food to the table, she can also take empty plates away.

“It’s like everything. The serving and bringing back all the plates and everything. So it really helps,” Baddas said.

KEENON Robotics, the company that makes Peanut, says it sold more than 100 robots in Canada in the past two years.

The company, which is Chinese but has distributors in Canada, expects to see sales climb with a labour shortage here.

In addition to server robots they sell cleaning robots, hospitality robots, and advertising robots.

Prices range from $25,000 to $40,000.

While Baddas is happy with Peanut and everything she brings to the business, he says he won’t be getting rid of his human servers any time soon.

“Some people, especially for the teenagers, they love the robot and the kids, but for the older people they want some interaction.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Nicole Weisberg.