The Mission to Build the Ultimate Burger Bot

Weeks after he was born, Alex Vardakostas' mother strapped him into a baby carrier and went back to work flipping burgers at A's, the Southern California fast-food restaurant that she and her husband owned. When Vardakostas was a toddler, the town's local newspaper, Dana Point News, ran a photograph of him peering through the restaurant's walk-up window. As he grew older, he often played in the back of the kitchen among pallets of hamburger buns while his parents worked. At 8, he started filling drink orders, standing on top of a milk crate to reach the soda machine. Sometimes he ran food experiments, soaking burger meat in Worcestershire sauce to see if it would taste better.