Hot Dog Robot: ABB Arms From Carts to Kiosks

A hot dog robot is a smaller idea than a robot chef. The job is simple: take a sausage, put it in a bun, add the toppings and hand it over. That simplicity is why people keep trying to automate it. This post follows the hot dog from Coney Island carts to roller grills, then to the robot kiosks that now sell hot food in Poland and the United States. It also asks where ABB arms such as the IRB 390 FlexPacker and YuMi fit, and where they would only be a possibility.

A Nathan's food cart on a New York street, 2024. Photo: Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From Coney Island carts to roller grills

The story usually starts at Coney Island. Charles Feltman is credited with selling sausages in a bun from a heated pie wagon in 1867, though accounts of the date and the details differ, and some put his first sales around 1870. His business grew into a large seaside hotel and restaurant, shown here in a stereoview from the period. Whatever the exact year, the method was the same for decades: a person cooks the sausage, splits the bun and builds each order by hand.

A stereoview of Feltman's Hotel at West Brighton Beach, Coney Island, between 1865 and 1919. Photo: New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1916 a Feltman employee, Nathan Handwerker, left to open his own stand a few blocks away on Surf Avenue. He sold franks for five cents, while Feltman's charged ten. This photo of Surf Avenue was taken in 1913, a few years before Nathan's opened. The business he started is still on that avenue, and its name now sits on carts in New York, like the one in the opening photo.

Surf Avenue at Coney Island, 1913. Photo: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Carts spread through American cities. Berenice Abbott photographed a vendor with his cart at West Street and North Moore Street in Manhattan in 1936, selling frankfurters and lemonade from a wheeled box with an umbrella. Machines tried to take over the cook's part as well. Everett Ford of San Francisco filed a patent for a coin-operated wiener vending machine in 1941 and was granted it in 1944. It held about 50 wrapped hot dog sandwiches and heated each one in a high-voltage coil for roughly 25 seconds.

A frankfurter vendor with his cart at West Street and North Moore Street, Manhattan, 1936. Photo: Berenice Abbott / New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Roller grills, robots and the 2026 shake-up

The roller grill came next. Atlas Obscura says the first patent for a roller machine was filed in August 1939, and that engineer Calvin Dodd MacCracken made a working commercial model in the 1950s, called the Roll-A-Grill. It kept sausages warm and turning for hours, which suited snack bars and stadiums. Convenience stores later made the roller grill a regular fixture. In September 2026 Kwik Trip said it would remove roller grills from all of its stores on 21 September, and sell hot dogs wrapped from hot grab-and-go cases instead because a test showed those cases sold more. Murphy USA had already left roller grills out of its newer, larger store design.

A hot dog cart near Grand Central Station in New York, 2022. Photo: Larry D. Moore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Robots arrived at the same moment. In June 2022 Polish grocer Żabka and VeloxAlpha put a robot named Robbie in a Żabka Nano store in Warsaw. Shoppers enter with an app, a smartwatch or a payment card, pick a size, a sausage and a sauce on a touchscreen, and get a hot dog in about 40 seconds. The store has no staff, so speed and hygiene drove the design. Kiosks like this pizza machine in Romania show the same idea in another food.

A pizza vending machine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 2026. Photo: Sciking / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

More kiosks are coming. On 14 October 2026 Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported that Primepick is adding a hospital and a nursing home in the Tri-State area as its fourth and fifth installations. Its kiosk serves hot dishes in five to seven minutes, using two robot arms to move meals between frozen storage, three microwave ovens and a warming cabinet. That is a reheating model, not a sausage on a grill. Murphy USA also announced robotic White Castle burger kiosks for its convenience stores in August. In New Zealand, WM Robotics, which began with a pie vending machine, was reported in September to be piloting ready meals in its machines.

A robotic coffee kiosk from Mt. Comfort Coffee, with the arm working behind glass, 2026. Photo: Oleg Yunakov / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not sell a hot dog kiosk, and I found no ABB customer making hot dogs. The nearby facts are real, though. An ABB IRB 390 FlexPacker, as in this photo from a Brazilian meat line, picks packs of sausages and trays at speed. On the food service side, an ABB YuMi finishes burgers at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. A hot dog kiosk could use the same ideas: a hygienic arm to place sausages and a gentle gripper for buns, which is a possibility, not a product.

An ABB IRB 390 FlexPacker packing meat trays at Torfresma in Brazil. Photo: ABB

What a hot dog robot still has to solve

The BurgerBots example is the closest model. A YuMi has two arms and works in a small space beside people, and our fast food kitchen post shows how that works. Hot dogs add problems of their own: sausages vary in length, buns tear, sauces drip and every surface must be washed. A fixed arm can do the repeating motion well, but it needs a gripper that handles soft, greasy food without crushing it. Programs for such a cell can be tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB YuMi cobot finishing a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

The street vendor still has advantages. A human cooks to taste, talks to the queue and moves the cart when the crowd changes. A robot kiosk needs a site, power, a refill schedule and someone to fix it, and customers must decide whether 40 seconds beats a person with tongs. Convenience stores will test that first, and our robot convenience store post tracks the wider trend. For homes the case looks weaker, since a machine that makes one kind of sandwich takes counter space for a small job.

A hot dog cart with umbrellas serving customers on 47th Street, New York, 2025. Photo: Kritzolina / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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