In early May, Sweetgreen opened its first automated location, within the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. After only a number of weeks operating the restaurant, the salad chain is preparing to go all in on the technology to chop labor costs and improve the client experience.
But within the early days of the automation trial, only time will tell if customers, employees and investors prefer the brand new way of constructing salads and warm bowls.
The restaurant industry has historically been slow to adapt to recent technology. Eateries’ razor-thin profit margins mean most don’t need to speculate in expensive technology which may not work out for his or her kitchens or dining rooms.
But with its so-called Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen joins the legion of restaurant corporations incorporating automation into their businesses. Starbucks and Chipotle Mexican Grill are amongst the massive names exploring artificial intelligence or robots. Some experiments, comparable to McDonald’s test of AI voice ordering for drive-thru lanes, have not resulted in nationwide launches.
Nevertheless 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 on the William Blair Growth Stock Conference this month.
Sweetgreen plans to open a second Infinite Kitchen location later this 12 months. The corporate hasn’t disclosed the situation but said it should retrofit an existing location with the technology.
Why Sweetgreen selected automation
Sweetgreen jumped into automation in August 2021. Just months before it went public, the salad chain purchased Spyce for roughly $50 million, although the ultimate valuation relies on the performance of the startup’s technology, in keeping with regulatory filings.
Spyce was the brainchild of 4 MIT graduates, who founded the corporate in 2015. They created the robotic technology to make and serve healthy meals for a reasonable price. The startup opened two restaurants within 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 number of menu items to check out in certainly one of Spyce’s locations.
Sweetgreen then worked on tips on how to make the robotic kitchen function for its restaurants.
“The core foundations of the IK were the identical. What we focused on is making it operationally easy to interact with as a team member — to stock, to scrub, to keep up. There have been also some tweaks to guard food quality,” Timothy Noonan, Sweetgreen’s vice chairman of operations strategy and concept design, told CNBC.
The chain needed to work out tips on how to dispense goat cheese, which clumps easily, and cherry tomatoes, which may very well be easily squished. It also tweaked the technology to make sure consistent portions, whether for airy arugula or heavier toppings comparable to sunflower seeds. Sweetgreen also added the flexibility to rotate bowls as they move along the conveyor belt that fills dishes, ensuring even distribution of components, and the capability to combine the ingredients together at the top.
“We’ve an incredible team, but it surely’s really hard to maintain it perfectly accurate and consistent,” Neman told CNBC. “And the opposite amazing thing is that the peaks do not feel crazy. It is not like a few of our stores in Recent York. This permits us to be there, to serve more people, and this could have it feel quite a bit smoother.”
After months testing the technology within the lab, Sweetgreen decided to try it out in Naperville, adding it to a recent restaurant that was originally slated to be a conventional location.
“We would like to know how suburban customers interact with this,” Noonan said.
Contained in the Infinite Kitchen
The outside of Sweetgreen’s Naperville location
Source: Sweetgreen
While Sweetgreen may tout labor savings to investors, the Naperville location was designed to place a face on the finished orders.
The restaurant’s exterior features a big window that shows Sweetgreen employees preparing the ingredients that may make their way into the Infinite Kitchen’s dispensers and eventually into finished orders.
“It starts with human hands, and we’ve got people ending off the bowls after they’re produced by the machine, so it ends with human hands,” Noonan said.
The Naperville location displays Sweetgreen merch and drinks before customers place their orders at tablets.
Source: Sweetgreen
Upon entering the restaurant, customers pass by a display refrigerator of drinks and a rack of Sweetgreen-branded sweatshirts and t-shirts to order their food. A big digital menu board hangs above the display, flashing recommendations for brand new customers.
“We all know that our menu for some customers might be just a little overwhelming,” Noonan said.
Customers can order from certainly one of five tablets arrange in the course of the shop. If none can be found, diners can order on the app as an alternative of waiting in line. Unlike the normal Sweetgreen restaurant, customers won’t must wait 10 to quarter-hour to select up mobile orders.
For now, an worker hangs across the tablets to assist customers place their orders. Sweetgreen remains to be deciding how much of a human presence it needs during that step, Noonan said.
Behind the ordering counter is the Infinite Kitchen, which assembles customers’ salads and warm bowls.
Source: Sweetgreen
Behind the counter is the “Infinite Kitchen,” which resembles the majority food dispensers present in some grocery stores. The dispensers hold nearly the entire ingredients to assemble customers’ warm bowls and salads.
After an order is placed, the Infinite Kitchen begins assembling the bowl, starting with dressing on the underside. Then come the greens and the grains, followed by the remaining of the chosen toppings. At each stop, the bowls rotate barely, allowing the brand new ingredients to go in an empty spot. The bowls glide past dispensers for ingredients they do not need, unless a dish in front blocks their path.
The ultimate automated step is mixing the salads or bowls. A employee waits at the top of the assembly line so as to add herbs, avocado and fish — all of which the Infinite Kitchen cannot add yet.
“There’s still a few things we’ve got to do by hand, but we consider that the main target will allow us higher accuracy,” Noonan said. “We still wanted someone to envision the orders.”
The conveyor belt can hold as much as 20 bowls, with room so as to add more if needed, and may make as much as 600 bowls an hour if none have to be mixed, in keeping with Noonan.
Even behind the scenes, the setup is deceptively easy. Stairs behind the top of the assembly line result in a mezzanine level where the dispensers might be reloaded. Screens show if any ingredients are running low or signal any possible malfunctions, comparable to an overfilled dispenser.
If any dispensers stop working, the ingredients might be moved right down to a special spot or added by hand at the top of the method. But overall, employees are relatively hands off within the Infinite Kitchen.
Fruits of automation’s labor
Wall Street primarily cares about automation’s ability to chop labor costs, though Sweetgreen and other restaurant chains deny it’s their only motivation to explore the technology.
T.D. Cowen estimated last 12 months that about 30% of Sweetgreen’s costs are labor, with half of its staff preparing food and the opposite half assembling orders. Cutting down on labor means increasing profit margins. Sweetgreen is already profitable on the restaurant level, although the corporate overall has yet to show a profit.
It’s clear already that the Infinite Kitchen means fewer Sweetgreen employees in restaurants. Noonan said locations with the Infinite Kitchen can depend on roughly half the employees of a conventional location. They need not beef up what number of employees are scheduled for five-hour shifts to cope with the overwhelming peak periods — which only last about 90 minutes.
“A part of the fantastic thing about that is having the ability to keep the identical size team and let the machine absorb the height,” Noonan said.
Employees must arrange the Infinite Kitchen within the morning, ensuring it’s well-stocked and calibrated for accurate and consistent portions. Throughout the day, employees will watch digital screens that may tell them if any dispensers are running low on ingredients or experiencing any issues. At the top of the day, employees could have to scrub the system.
Sweetgreen anticipates some secondary labor advantages, as well. Staff on the Naperville location didn’t need extra training, and down the road, training for Infinite Kitchen locations ought to be faster.
“An enormous part of coaching in a typical restaurant involves not only training the prep processes, but determining tips on how to memorize our core menu items,” Noonan said.
Neman also said that the calmer restaurant environment might mean employees stick around longer, reducing turnover, a typical problem within the restaurant industry.
Customer reactions
To date, customers have barely noticed the automation, in keeping with Noonan. He said they often think that the ordering tablets are the automated tools and mistake the Infinite Kitchen for a fridge displaying ingredients.
Nevertheless it doesn’t appear to be the situation’s use of automation will alienate many purchasers. Broadly, consumers are growing more comfortable with technology in restaurants. A Deloitte survey conducted in March found that 60% of respondents reported being somewhat prone to order from a kitchen that prepares food not less than partially using robotic technologies. That is up from 54% within the consulting firm’s survey two years ago.
Buzz in regards to the Naperville restaurant’s use of automation appears to be generating interest, even though it’s too soon to inform if the crowds will still be there in a number of months. Wealthy Shank, vice chairman of research and insights for Chicago-based Technomic, told CNBC that his coworkers have reported long lines during busy lunch and dinner hours. Shank is waiting for consumers’ curiosity to die down before he visits.
The changes to in-person ordering may contribute to the long lines. A standard Sweetgreen location allows customers to make up their minds about their customized meals as they move along the assembly line, telling employees what ingredients they need. This approach normally results in lines during busy times — but they have an inclination to maneuver relatively quickly.
But at Naperville, customers do not have the identical likelihood to have a look at a display of ingredients. The tablets’ format will probably be familiar to anyone used to Sweetgreen’s website and mobile app, but it might probably create a bottleneck for patrons who aren’t as certain about their orders.
One Yelp reviewer said the road to order went out the door, simply because it took customers several minutes to order.
“That stands out as the downfall of this establishment because had we walked in 5 minutes later and seen that line we’d have walked past and eaten someplace else,” the client wrote within the review.
It’s a typical issue for fast-casual restaurants which have built their menus around customization, in keeping with Shank.
“The decision is out on whether the user interface of any form of kiosk can solve that problem,” Shank said.
On a more basic level, customers could also realize that they need a human to assemble their orders.
“It is quicker for a human to listen to the customization that the client requires and to make adjustments on the fly. The machine, not less than in its present form, doesn’t sound prefer it’s in a position to handle the improvisation that usually happens on the road, like ‘I don’t need that much sauce’ or ‘Are you able to make it extra light on the dressing?'” Shank said.
And, after all, there’s all the time the potential for the Infinite Kitchen’s technology to fail, despite Sweetgreen’s best efforts to eliminate errors that may take down the system. The layout of the Naperville location wasn’t created with back-up make lines that may allow employees to assemble orders by hand quickly.