Inside Sweetgreen’s first automated location, plans to take tech

In early May, Sweetgreen opened its first automated location, in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. After only a few weeks operating the restaurant, the salad chain is preparing to go all in on the technology to cut labor costs and improve the customer experience.

But in the early days of the automation trial, only time will tell if customers, employees and investors prefer the new way of making salads and warm bowls.

The restaurant industry has historically been slow to adapt to new technology. Eateries’ razor-thin profit margins mean most don’t want to invest in expensive technology that might not work out for their kitchens or dining rooms.

But with its so-called Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen joins the legion of restaurant companies incorporating automation into their businesses. Starbucks and Chipotle Mexican Grill are among the big names exploring artificial intelligence or robots. Some experiments, such as McDonald’s test of AI voice ordering for drive-thru lanes, haven’t resulted in nationwide launches.

But it looks like Sweetgreen has more faith.

“In five years, we do expect eventually all Sweetgreen stores to be automated,” CEO Jonathan Neman told investors at the William Blair Growth Stock Conference this month.

Sweetgreen plans to open a second Infinite Kitchen location later this year. The company hasn’t disclosed the location but said it will retrofit an existing location with the technology.

Sweetgreen jumped into automation in August 2021. Just months before it went public, the salad chain purchased Spyce for roughly $50 million, although the final valuation depends on the performance of the startup’s technology, according to regulatory filings.

Spyce was the brainchild of four MIT graduates, who founded the company in 2015. They created the robotic technology to make and serve healthy meals for an affordable price. The startup opened two restaurants in the Boston area before Sweetgreen bought it.

A month after Sweetgreen acquired Spyce, and before it closed Spyce’s restaurants, the salad chain brought a few menu items to try out in one of Spyce’s locations.

Sweetgreen then worked on how to make the robotic kitchen function for its restaurants.

“The core foundations of the IK were the same. What we focused on is making it operationally easy to interact with as a team member — to stock, to clean, to maintain. There were also some tweaks to protect food quality,” Timothy Noonan, Sweetgreen’s vice president of operations strategy and concept design, told CNBC.

The chain had to work out how to dispense goat cheese, which clumps easily, and cherry tomatoes, which could be easily squished. It also tweaked the technology to ensure consistent portions, whether for airy arugula or heavier toppings such as sunflower seeds. Sweetgreen also added the ability to rotate bowls as they move along the conveyor belt that fills dishes, ensuring even distribution of components, and the capacity to mix the ingredients…