Bunnings snags’ new upgrade with ‘Saucebot’ goes viral on TikTok

TikTok users have been blown away after a video of a futuristic twist on the humble Bunnings sausage sizzle went viral.

As all Australians know, it’s not a proper trip to Bunnings until you’ve stopped by one of their famous sausage sizzles.

And TikTok users have been blown away after a video of a futuristic twist on the humble snag went viral on the platform overnight.

Shared by user Shades McCarthy on Sunday, the clip of the Bunnings Saucebot – a machine that dispenses sauce onto the sausage – has clocked up more than 617.5k views, along with hundreds of stunned comments.

“Bunnings snags living in 2050,” McCarthy captioned the post.

The machine, introduced last year at the hardware store’s Hawthorn location in Melbourne, allows sauce to be evenly dispensed along the sausage in bread in a zigzag pattern via a pulley system that holds the bread and sandwich.

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The Saucebot is located at the hardware store’s Hawthorn location. Picture: TikTok

It’s used to evenly dispense sauce along the sausage in bread. Picture: TikTok

There are hoses positioned above that squirt out either tomato sauce or mustard, with a red button for tomato sauce and a yellow button for mustard, enabling customers to pick what they want their sausage doused in.

The Saucebot was conceived by Melbourne’s Connected Community Hackerspace (CCHS), using a repurposed 3D printer, a couple of pumps designed from scratch and made on a laser cutter, some oversized switches, and code written by one of the members.

“It took about a month of casual pottering to get the project from joke to condiment spewing machine of doom,” CCHS President Shane Rogers told Ruth Barber.

He added that “there have been a few mutters about robot overlords taking over the world and rather more inquiries about an onion dispenser”.

“For our part, we are learning from how it is used and refining such elements as we can, and we are thinking about the onion problem,” he said.

For the most part, though, “everybody seems to love it, even if they don’t always get how it’s supposed to be used”.

It’s not a trip to Bunnings until you’ve stopped by one of their sausage sizzles. Picture: David Geraghty/NCA NewsWire

TikTok users said they were ‘obsessed’ with the Saucebot. Picture: Jenny Evans/NCA NewsWire

People took to the comments of McCarthy’s video to declare they were “obsessed” with the concept.

“WHERE IS THIS BUNNINGS? I must experience this,” wrote one.

While another commented that it was “genius”, a third person adding, “The future is now.”

“Exactly how I do it. Tomato sauce in zigzag and mustard in a straight line. Genius,” said another.

Not everyone was impressed, though, particularly with the selection of sauces loaded into the machine.

“Minus 10 points no BBQ sauce," commented one.

“They chose mustard instead of BBQ to load into the machine? What?!” said another.

“We need one for BBQ sauce and onions,” wrote a third.