Sweetgreen Tests Robots to Make Sad Desk Salads More Efficiently (1)

“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 ...