Sweetgreen Tests Robots to Make Faster, More Efficient Sad Desk Salads

“We’ve been trying to be very quiet about it, because it’s not proven out, and we don’t want to promise anything.” Nathaniel Ru, Sweetgreen’s co-founder and chief brand officer, is standing inside a soon-to-open location of the bougie salad chain. He’s talking about a steel-and-glass contraption the size of a 1960s computer mainframe that’s looming behind the front counter. The device is called the Infinite Kitchen, and its job will be to assemble the hundreds of harvest bowls, kale Caesars and many other permutations of kinda-fancy salads this restaurant will churn out daily.

A small team of engineers is on-site here in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, working out any last-minute kinks in the automated assembly line. Michael Farid, one of the Infinite Kitchen’s inventors, is excited to show off what it can do. He keys in an order for a spring asparagus salad on one of the restaurant’s touchscreen tablets. In front of us, a compostable bowl whizzes forward along a track, pausing beneath a series of clear plastic tubes that call to mind bulk candy dispensers, except they’re filled with arugula and lentils and beets. The bowl rotates as ingredients drop inside—in engineering-speak, this is a “two degrees of freedom plating system,” but imagine a salad bowl doing pirouettes—ensuring that they’re all arranged neatly, just like in the photos.