Dairy Queen’s First Robot Blizzard Counter Opens on Wujiang Road

Crowds on Shanghai’s Wujiang Road have a new reason to stall outside the Dairy Queen at No. 169, across from Louis Vuitton’s ship-shaped flagship. On August 29, Sharpa’s wheeled humanoid, North, started a daily shift behind a dedicated counter in that store, making Oreo Blizzards for paying customers on the same machines, cups, toppings, and blender a human crew already used. CFB Group runs the franchise. Sharpa and DQ call the setup the first live commercial kitchen where a humanoid works a full branded workflow without new fixtures, custom conveyors, or a rebuilt room.

North follows a 55-step process that begins with taking a paper cup from a stack and ends with handing up the order. It places a metal blending ring between its thumb and index finger, draws soft serve, adds three scoops of Oreo crumbs, runs the blender, flips the cup upside down without spilling the mix, and performs the age-old Dairy Queen test to ensure your Blizzard is thick enough to manage. According to official sources, each sequence comprises of 50 to 60 consecutive moves. Right now, you can only get your Blizzard in Oreo flavor. The robots are only available from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., but the rest of the shop has a human counter running alongside.

Sharpa’s still a very young company, as it was founded just 2 years ago by Hesai Technology’s three co-founders, David Li, Xiang Shaoqing and Sun Kai, who used to work on self-driving car LiDAR before this. Its headquarters are in Singapore, with a California office and a Shanghai facility for research and manufacture. Just before the shop opened, the company had received over 4.5 billion yuan ($670 million) in funding from a number of major investors, including Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com, and Qiming Venture Partners.

North is a 67-degree robot with Sharpa Wave hands that feature 22 moving bits and over 1000 touch sensors on each fingertip. This data is transmitted into CraftNet, Sharpa’s vision touch language action model, which determines the next step and adjusts the grip 100 times per second to keep the cup from slipping or falling over. The business claims to use tactile feedback 98% of the time in the 55 phases, which means it will feel resistance when taking a cup from the stack or vibration when mixing the Blizzard. The components are very standard: a cabinet handle designed for human hands, a deformable cup, and a metal ring that must remain stationary while the motor is rotating.

Getting an order still requires some planning. People can make a request on Friday mornings for a DQ prepared by the robot the following week, however only one can be booked at a time per phone number. They charge 31 yuan for a normal Blizzard, which is identical to what the human line charges. If you arrive late, you will lose your position, as they sold out quickly in the early weeks, which is certainly not surprising considering the traffic in the evenings, and also because some people are simply intrigued to see a robot flip the cup without spilling anything. The employees on the other side of the counter are still completely human. This is an additional service within an existing store, not a separate robot-only section.