Hyphen
Food-service automation company whose Automated Makeline assembles bowls and salads under the counter for restaurant chains.
- Ricoh USA signs on to install and service Hyphen's bowl-making robots as restaurant chains look to scale
Ricoh USA said in a PR Newswire release on Oct 15 that it has partnered with Hyphen, the maker of an automated makeline for restaurants, to deploy and support the system across the US through RICOH Service Advantage, its lifecycle service for fast-growing technology companies. Hyphen's makeline, backed by Chipotle and Cava, takes drive-thru, online and kiosk orders and assembles rice and salad bowls under the counter while staff serve walk-in guests on top; Hyphen says it turns out more than 200 meals an hour. Hyphen go-to-market chief Shawn Lange said the ability to scale had held back restaurant robotics and that the partnership lets the company train and install for chains that want to roll out chain-wide; the release gave no number of sites, contract value or timeline. Ricoh, a Tokyo-based group with sales of 2,608 billion yen (about $16.4 billion) in the year to March 2026, is betting its office-equipment field force can service robots too. Service capacity is becoming the bottleneck MEKAWIRE keeps seeing in deployments: Capital Machine bought Ohio integrator KC Robotics on Oct 14 for the same reason, to sell the machine, the robot and the support as one package.
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