Season 7, Post 15: Learning with Lego

Your author’s children were delighted with a trip to Billund as part of their Spring break. This town of 7,000 people in Denmark’s Jutland region is the home of Lego, comprising both Legoland and Lego House. They were somewhat less delighted when the trip evolved into an opportunity to learn about multiple overlapping future trends.

The Lego Group, now almost 100 years old, has consistently been an innovator, evolving from wooden toys to interlocking bricks. It continues to push boundaries, especially when it comes to circular economy, shrinking box sizes and recycling materials, a future trend we have discussed since 2018. A visit to the ‘Mini Chef’ experience in the Lego House demonstrated Lego’s circular economy credentials as well as its thinking on the future of food and the role robots will increasingly play in our lives (covered most recently in our materials here and here).

The concept is simple. Book a table on the ground floor, build your meal, send it into the machine and, some minutes later, it will appear on a conveyer belt handled by robots. Robert and Roberta, pictured below and named by Lego, are the front end of the experience. Prior to this, guests – both adults and children – are required to devise their own meal. Like any good restaurant, diners choose from a menu, but there is no waiter. Rather, assemble what you want from bricks: red relates to protein, blue energy, green fresh products and so on. Then insert the finished model into a digital device on your table. This goes to the kitchen where – presumably humans – prepare it. The device alerts guests when the meal is ready. Cross the room to where Robert and Roberta are stationed, and the food is delivered.

Beyond the inherent playfulness of the concept, there are some important learnings. In the country where Novo Nordisk is also headquartered, healthy eating matters. Obesity and diabetes are major problems that can be countered through appropriate dietary choices. The menu is designed to comprise healthy, local and often organic ingredients (your author chose Scandinavian salmon). Further, each product is weighed methodically, minimising waste. Packaging (such as the bento box in which each meal comes) is made from Lego bricks or is fully biodegradable. In the future expect more robots involved in both serving and preparing meals. Automatons can free human labour up for other, more purposeful tasks. And what about the food? The family consensus was very tasty, even if the portion sizes were rather small.    

24 April 2025

The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.

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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager

Photos by the author