An ambitious pilot project to sell fresh, locally-sourced salad using a automated assembly line opened in downtown Naperville, Il in May.  Sweetgreen is the first salad franchise to introduce its computer-controled ‘Infinite Kitchen’ in fast food casual setting.   A diner enters a quiet corridor-like space that runs parallel to an illuminated assembly line and selects a salad from a menu on an electronic pad. Within 5 minutes a salad arrives on a pick-up counter sealed in a recyclable paper bowl. Service is a fast, seamless process without any human interaction. 

This innovative venture appears both timely and foolhardy in view of current economic conditions.  Hospitality has always been a people-driven business, but food service help is currently hard to find and the turnover rate for hourly workers is over 100%.  Automation requires a huge investment, the retrofitting of an existing kitchen and staff that can handle equipment failures should they occur.  The restaurant business itself is highly competitive and profit margins remain stubbornly low, a situation that has kept it historically risk averse.  It's no surprise that 1% of restaurants now use automation in their kitchens. 

The Sweetgreen concept grew out of frustration shared by three Georgetown business school friends with the poor quality of fast food and the time-consuming nature and expense of preparing fresh, healthy food.  In 2007, with funding from family, and friends, the partners began to open restaurants on the east coast. 

In 2015 Sweetgreen introduced an app, the first of its kind, to supplement online ordering capability already available on its website.  Soon the demand overwhelmed their restaurants, forcing the company to create off-site kitchens called Outposts and a courier service to deliver the salads. Online sales now account for more than 60% of the chain’s orders. 

In 2021 the company bought  Spyce, an automated assembly system, designed by four MIT graduate students who originally cobbled it together from parts of abandoned appliances in the basement of their fraternity.  The Naperville Sweetgreen is the second outlet to open in 2023 using an updated ‘Infinite Kitchen’ to assemble salads. 

Human employees are on display washing and chopping vegetables in the storefront window at Naperville’s Sweetgreen.  Behind the scenes, they maintain the restaurant’s 60 ingredients, most of them stored in tall, glass silos that resemble a bulk food display in a grocery store.  These cylinders form the assembly line over which laser sensors monitor the portioning of an ingredient into each recyclable paper bowl that passes beneath it.  First the dressing goes in, followed by the greens and, with a slight rotation after every addition, the other ingredients are dropped in to form an even layer.  An employee at the end of the line checks the bowl to make sure it's filled correctly, adds an herb, nuts or cheese from a table of recessed containers, covers the bowl, seals it and places it at the pickup point.   

On a recent weekday visit to Naperville, I ordered a ‘Shroomami’ salad of kale, a portobello mix, tofu, wild rice, cucumbers, raw beets, sunflower seeds and basil with a miso sesame ginger dressing on the side.  My daughter’s ‘Modern Green Goddess’ salad contained kale, spinach, black lentils, cabbage, chickpeas, cold sweet potatoes, raw beets, raw carrots, spicy broccoli, roasted almonds with green goddess dressing.  The tab for the two salads was $30 and came with a label requesting they be consumed within exactly three-and-a-half hours to the minute.  The salads were tasty and generous but too pricey to become a weekly habit. 

For 17 years, Sweetgreen has been growing and evolving without having ever shown a profit. One can only say it has become less unprofitable with time.  The brand’s three owners identify their customer as a “conscious achiever” whose “maximized life” requires a dining experience as efficient and accessible as everything else in his or her digital-driven world.  It appears that the large millennial market the chain has attracted continues to draw investors and venture capitalists. The company has enjoyed numerous partnerships with celebrity chefs, fed hospital workers during Covid, and underwritten several music concerts to rally its customer base.  There are plans to broaden the protein choices on Sweetgreen's menu beyond trout, chicken and tofu and to add a dessert line. How this will roll out with fewer employees and sticking to fast food pricing is this innovative chain's next challenge.

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