LEGO Mini Chef
Order your food with LEGO bricks
LEGO House is the latest addition to the Billund skyline in Denmark, a gigantic LEGO building filled with 25 million bricks and creative, educational games for LEGO fans of all ages. But before you unleash your greatest talents for building and playing, you need to eat!
Not all restaurants make you play to get your food. But at LEGO Mini Chef restaurant, mini-figures cook your meal – and they only speak brick. Order your food with LEGO bricks – and have it delivered by dancing robots.
“We want magic”
Billund town square was a hole in the ground. Soon, it would be the site of Denmark’s largest steel structure – what was to become the LEGO House. Keld Kirk Kristiansen, third-generation LEGO Group owner, was building his legacy: a building filled with 25 million bricks and creative, educational fun and games for fans of all ages. Part of that dream was world-class family dining with healthy local food – and a twist. The brief: a never-before-seen, impossible-to-imitate experience that embodies the LEGO spirit: Learning Through Play and Inspiring and Developing The Builders Of Tomorrow.
Playing well together
World-renowned hospitality design agency Stylt were tasked to come up with the restaurant strategy and turned to us to find out what was possible with the latest tech. Together, we developed a concept that combined novel and proven tech into a build-your-meal experience, wrapped in a story to delight the kids and with robots to serve the meals. From there on, Stylt took charge of restaurant identity and interior, and we took on the role as turnkey contractor for the tech and digital content – developing the experience in close collaboration with the LEGO House team, testing iteratively with families and trimming it in with the operations team.
Guest experience
Upon arrival, every visitor receives LEGO “Build you meal” brick set and a menu which also serves as a manual. Each component of the meal is represented by a specific brick. Visitors get to customize their own meal by picking up to four individual pieces and assembling them onto a smart machine-readable tray (also made from LEGO). For those who have trouble deciding, the menu manual has a few preset suggestions. When the full meal order has been composed, diners slide their tray into a hatch on the Foodifyer box on the table, which sends the builds into the kitchen.
Visitors can follow every step of their order on the screen. LEGO mini figures interpret the build, prepare the food and place it in a meal box. Meal boxes are then transported on a conveyor belt to cute robots Robert and Roberta, who hand out the orders to the excited kids. Families recognize their set of boxes by the unique lid color, and each guest can see their build specifications on the slip on the box. And it wouldn’t be a LEGO experience if there wasn’t also a special surprise inside…
A comprehensive physical-digital experience
We designed the guest journey, supporting processes and systems, and co-developed all design elements and animations – on-screen and physical. An automation hub syncs all experience elements: robot sounds and motion, mechatronics, guest app, conveyor belt, and the web based staff interface, which is used to manage orders and fire off the robot birthday dance – often several times a day.
The solution also spans a restaurant management system, printing of order slips, payment, content management system and analytics. Two core software components had to be developed: brick recognition, to go from iPad camera input to 3D model and meal order, and a custom pipeline for translating animations to movement instructions, then stream those to the ABB YuMi robots and custom head mechatronics.
One-of-a-kind family dining
The restaurant is widely praised in the media, fans, and industry awards. Additionally, the “Build Your Meal” core experience is patented by LEGO House.
One million plus house visitors. Hundreds of thousands of restaurant guests. Consistent top guest ratings and new record guest counts. Mini Chef has proven itself a must-visit for fans of one of the world’s most beloved brands.
