It turns out robots can make decent chefs.
Just ask salad chain Sweetgreen, which is testing automating some food preparation in order to speed up customer wait times and cut labor costs.
At a Sweetgreen “Infinite Kitchen” restaurant in Naperville, Illinois, a proprietary robot, not human salad makers, is handling the bulk of the work.
“You just walk in, there’s a digital tablet, you place your order and it goes right to this robot, which is front and center in the restaurant and it has these tubes where the ingredients are,” Wall Street Journal reporter Heather Haddon told CBS News.
Sweetgreen began piloting the tech in May, after acquiring robotic kitchen startup Spyce, to speed up operations.
“We believe that automation will enable us to elevate the quality and integrity of our food while also providing a faster and more convenient experience for our customers and a better, more dynamic job for our team members,” Sweetgreen CEO and co-founder Jonathan Neman said in a statement at the time.
Other fast food and fast casual restaurant chains are experimenting with automation, too. Chipotle and White Castle have tested similar systems.
At Sweetgreen, the robot shoots greens such as kale into a salad bowl, which moves on a conveyor belt as other components are added and the salad is dressed and shaken.
“Then a person just puts on the final ingredients and it’s put on a little shelf and you pick it up and that’s it,” Haddon said. “And I have to say it was fast. I think it was probably much faster than the Sweetgreen you might see in Midtown Manhattan.”
The tech is also helping Sweetgreen make salads faster and more cheaply.
“When they’re at peak time, when they’re really slammed, when you’re waiting in that line trying to get that salad at Sweetgreen, this can speed it up. And it will save on labor,” Haddon said. “The Sweetgreen out in Naperville said it was using much less labor to actually assemble the salads.”
Sweetgreen said it plans to integrate the “Infinite Kitchen” technology into new restaurants it opens. “They’re really orienting their company around it,” Haddon said.
