According to a study conducted by global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, nearly a third of all U.S. jobs could be fully automated by 2030. The latest industry on the chopping block is bartending, thanks to a new machine called Monsieur that can produce specialty cocktails in record time.
Founded in 2013, Monsieur is the brainchild of Barry Givens, who came up with the idea after waiting nearly two hours for a drink. Givens, who earned his BS in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, began thinking of ways to make the bartending industry faster and more efficient.
“As I got older and started going out to dinner and trying to find a decent cocktail, I’d go to a restaurant or a wedding and I’d realize that it’s difficult to find someone who can make a decent cocktail, and the engineer in me started thinking that I can create something that does this and that I could put a business behind it,” Givens said in an interview with New Atlas.
Weighing in at 50 lbs., Monsieur is a black box that measures 22 x 18 x 21 in. It comes with a preset selection of 12 themes that consist of 25 cocktails each. Examples of themes include tiki bar, sports bar, Irish pub, or non-alcoholic.
To order a drink, users simply make a selection from Monsieur’s touchscreen display. The machine is also equipped with artificial intelligence that can recommend future drinks based on the user’s current selection.
“When people taste [Monsieur’s drinks] they’re particularly surprised that it makes a good cocktail,” said Givens. “People expect, because it’s a machine, for it to spit out the liquids, and people are surprised that, ‘this is a real cocktail, this is really good.’”
And even though the machine currently only produces cocktails, the writing is on the wall: in the future, robots will make all alcoholic beverages.
