Robot now serving customers at Smitty's in Kelowna

The future is here.

Kelowna’s first-ever robot server, Bella the Robot, was brought in by Smitty’s Family Restaurant to help with overall service.

Maxine DeHart, city councillor and sales director for the Ramada Hotel where Smitty’s is located, believes the new service will help the restaurant industry in more ways than one.

“I think it’s important to know that Bella the robot is not taking jobs away. All it is doing during heavy times is helping ... The restaurant industry, we are having trouble getting staff ... it’s an enhancement just to help the service,” she said.

Greenco Robots’ BellaBot can deliver up to eight trays of food at one time and can serve roughly 400 tables in a 12-hour shift, a huge helping hand for servers in the industry and a fun and different way for people to enjoy dining out.

“What it does is it brings the food to the table and then the server takes the food off, the customer doesn’t touch the food from Bella,” added DeHart. “It’s fantastic, today we have four tables coming in and saying hey we want to see the robot! They just love it. The kids really go crazy over it, but even the adults, they’re going crazy over it too.”

The BellaBot may be new to Kelowna, but Ionut Bordieanu of Greenco Robots says it's been around for a few years now, finding success in all markets.

“Bella is a very good piece of equipment that we brought into Canada a few years ago. It works very well and has huge success in Alberta. Vancouver is doing pretty good and now we’ve brought it in to the Okanagan,” said Bordieanu.

For now Bella the Robot is limited to just serving food. But it makes one wonder, how long is it going to be until robots are flipping pancakes?