Inside Seattle’s new Sweetgreen restaurant, where a large robot helps the humans make your salad

A worker at the new Sweetgreen restaurant location in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood bangs out orders in no time and has portion consistency down to a science.

The worker — a large stainless steel and glass device called “Infinite Kitchen” — is Sweetgreen’s answer to food automation. And it’s got plenty of human helpers in the restaurant at the corner of 11th Avenue and East Pine Street that opened on Tuesday.

The 2,500-square-foot space is the third in Seattle for Sweetgreen, which operates more than 230 locations across the U.S. But it’s just the eighth to feature the technology, which was developed in-house by the 18-year-old chain.

“We love it,” said Timothy Noonan, Sweetgreen’s SVP of operations innovation and services. “We’re still learning a lot about how to fit it into our designs and our build-outs to make it the best experience. But we really believe in it, so we’re planning to put it in more and more of our new restaurant openings, as well as looking at retrofit strategies.”

More restaurants are experimenting with robotic devices and automation to do everything from flip burgers to pile ingredients on pizza. The Wall Street Journal reported in July on how increasing labor costs have prompted chains, including Sweetgreen, to give the technology a closer look.

Noonan said the Infinite Kitchen can churn out 500 orders in an hour.

But Cody Fessel, an area leader for Sweetgreen, said that beyond speed, consistency and cost control, the robot is improving the quality of the work experience for employees.

“It removes the repetitive nature of putting ingredients in bowls,” Fessel said. “It’s hard to get passionate about that part of the job. People are passionate about hospitality. People are passionate about the food, the culinary side of it, and that’s exactly what we’re embracing here.”

How it works

Customers can order salads, grain bowls or protein plates through Sweetgreen’s app or via an array of touchscreen tablets at the front counter. The menu allows for customization of orders, such as holding or doubling certain ingredients or requesting dressing on the side.

When an order is submitted, it’s sent directly to the Infinite Kitchen. A human worker places the proper container for the order in the proper slot on a “smart track” that moves the bowl through the system. Along the way, more than 40 tubes dispense ingredients into the container, depending on the specifics of the order.

Bowls also rotate and/or quickly spin at certain spots on the track, to avoid having ingredients end up in a mound, and to help mix any dressing. Watch the Infinite Kitchen in action in this YouTube video from it’s first location, in Illinois:

The machine on Capitol Hill is configured in a square, revealing only a few ingredient compartments on the side facing customers. Machines in other locations are in a linear layout.

Employees in the center of the machine are responsible for keeping the ingredient bays stocked with fresh chicken, kale, carrots, cucumbers, rice and so on. Employees at a finishing station will add dressing cups if the customer requested an unmixed salad. Or they’ll add an ingredient such as cilantro that can’t be handled by the machine because of the delicacy of the herb.

A large screen near the Infinite Kitchen tracks the ingredients in every bay, alerting employees to how many bowls can be processed from the available ingredients and when to refill.

Elsewhere in the restaurant, which employs about 22 people, ingredients are prepped in house — kale is shredded, chicken is baked, tomatoes are cut, etc.

Orders are generally supposed to come up in about three to five minutes, but my Crispy Rice Bowl arrived on the counter in barely two minutes. I watched another customer enter the restaurant, tap his order into a screen and leave with his bowl in about three minutes total.

Nothing about the way my bowl tasted suggested the flavor was compromised by its automated preparation. The ingredients were fresh, the flavors were good, and the dressing had a nice kick to it.

“When you are perfectly portioning every bowl, it makes for a far more consistent product,” Fessel said. “You get less missed ingredients, which increases customer satisfaction.”

The Capitol Hill Sweetgreen is located at 1530 11th Ave., and open daily for pickup, dine-in or delivery options from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Other Seattle-area locations are in South Lake Union and Totem Lake / Kirkland, Wash.

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