Fast Food Watch: My Face Screams Curry Chicken, According to Beijing KFC's Fancy Order Predictor

One branch of KFC in Beijing is getting a lot of press from lazy bloggers these days (see here and here) for being outfitted with a face recongition-based ordering system that allegedly guesses what you want to eat.

Since my wife and I are partial to both weird tech and finger-lickin' good chicken, we had to try it out.

Entering KFC's financial district branch (outside Line 2's Fuchengmen station) we found a pedestrian-looking touch screen equipped with a camera in the restaurant's back corner. A few staff members stood around helping people use the system (score so far: Humans 1, Robots 0).

Here it was: the future! A magical machine that could guess your age! Your sex! Your mood! Your craving for New Orleans-style chicken nuggets! Imagine a future where you can liberate your mouth from the drudgery of verbalizing anything, freeing it up for more time to stuff food in into it! And of course everything in the robotic future will mean less queuing up, right?

Well, no.

The device did recognize me as male and 30-ish, but failed to guess the chicken burger I was craving, instead determining my face was crying out for a Curry Chicken meal deal (RMB 35).

I have no idea how it arrived at that conclusion. For all I know it was a random selection, or more likely, based on the ordering history of all 30-something males that had previously used the system. Nothing says "personalization" more than being clumped into a Big Data pile along with 30,000 other fast-food consumers.

To give it some credit, the system did successfully recognize me the second time around, which probably means I am going to live the rest of my natural life pegged as a curry fanatic.

My wife's scan session went similarly, though the device did correctly suggest a Spicy Wings and Sandwich deal (also RMB 35) – which is what she typically orders anyhow.

When you're done, you can doll up your face with Colonel beards and other cheesy stickers and, if you have no shame, share it on your moments.

Interesting as those elements are, I can state with confidence that the techie foodie revolution has not arrived. We were the only patrons trying the device during the lunch rush (everyone else was lined up at the old fashioned counter).

It didn't make the KFC experience quicker or easier, and the system is entirely monolingual, which means the whole thing is slightly dumber than a circa 2009 mobile phone. Ordering your bucket of greasy KFC on Meituan, Baidu Waimai or other cutting-edge Chinese online delivery services is much more of an innovative experience.

Of course we can dream: How far away could we be, for instance, from a future where we could use this interface to order up a box of 3D-printed nuggets in the shape of our own heads, extruded from the pink slime used to make them?

More stories by this author here.
Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
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Photos: Kyle Mullin