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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Two Years After Buying Spyce, Sweetgreen Launches Infinite Kitchen Robotic Restaurant

Last week, Sweetgreen opened the company’s first robotic restaurant in Naperville, Ill, a suburb of Chicago.

The new automated restaurant, which the company calls Infinite Kitchen, comes almost two years after the company acquired Spyce Kitchen, a startup building automated robotic makelines.

The Infinite Kitchen name is not new; Spyce first used the name when it launched its second-generation robotic kitchen platform in November 2020 and, like the new Sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen, the system was visually reminiscent of the Creator burger makeline. The system’s conveyor belt runs under ingredient dispensers that drop customized mixes of fresh ingredients into bowls. You can see the Sweetgreen version of the Infinite Kitchen in action below.

In the video and the press release, Sweetgreen takes pains to make clear that while it sees automation as a way to add efficiency to operations and enhance the customer experience, they are not doing away with humans as part of the Sweetgreen experience.

“Every meal begins with human hands,” says the video’s narrator, “from our local farmers to our team members, all there to guide you through the process.”

With the Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen has also rethought the customer process flow, integrating digital touchpoints (including self-service kiosks similar to those from Spyce).

From the release:

When visiting the Naperville Sweetgreen restaurant, customers are greeted by the new “host” position which provides a more personalized connection between team members and guests. To order, customers can utilize self-service kiosks, place an order through the mobile app, or order directly from the restaurant’s host. The new restaurant format also brings in a new Tasting Counter, brand-storytelling digital screens and a revamped merchandising strategy for an authentic Sweetgreen experience at every touchpoint. Customers visiting the store will be able to shop exclusive merch with designs inspired by the new store joining the Naperville community.

According to the company, Sweetgreen will open its second Infinite Kitchen location later this year at an existing restaurant, where the company hopes to learn how to integrate and retrofit the new technology into an existing kitchen.

Long term, expect the company to expand the use of automation to most of its locations. Company CEO Jonathan Neman has said that about half of Sweetgreen’s labor is food assembly. “And this Infinite Kitchen takes the majority of that,” Neman said in November.

Spyce Closes Location of First Robot Restaurant as It Turns Focus To Sweetgreen

When Sweetgreen acquired robot restaurant startup Spyce in August, one of the outstanding questions was whether the new owners would continue to operate the standalone Spyce restaurants. Finally, it looks like we now have an answer.

According to a post today by Spyce on their Facebook page, the company’s original location at Downtown Crossing in Boston will close at the end of this week.

From the post:

To our DTX Family:

Since our recent Sweetgreen acquisition, we’ve been working hard each day on our mission to scale healthy food and bring the magic of Spyce to more communities. In the next chapter of this long journey, we’ll be closing our DTX location after evening services on 10/22 to focus on developing technology for sweetgreen restaurants.

Downtown Crossing will always be a special place to us! We opened our door back in 2018 as a few fresh-faced college grads with an out-there dream to make healthy food more accessible through automation. We were different! But you gave us a shot and for that, we owe you so much.

With the closure of the downtown Boston restaurant, it’s worth speculating how much time remains for the remaining Spyce location. While I wouldn’t be surprised if Sweetgreen closed it as well, I can also see the company continuing to operate the Harvard located restaurant as a test-lab for potential new technology.

In the announcement about the acquisition, Sweetgreen said it was evaluating where and how it would integrate Spyce’s technology into its restaurants. It looks like that process is starting. The company indicates in the post that the existing team will be offered positions at the Harvard Square location or in a Sweetgreen location.

As for myself, I’m a bit bummed that we’ll be saying goodbye to this standalone Spyce location. I visited there with my son in 2018, and it was one of the highlights of our trip.

Sweetgreen Acquires Robot Restaurant Spyce

Salad chain Sweetgreen announced today it is acquiring the robot restaurant Spyce. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter, and terms were not disclosed.

Spyce was created by MIT alums and launched its first restaurant in the Spring of 2018, which grabbed headlines because of its use of robots to prepare each meal. The company partnered with chef Daniel Boulud to develop its menu and went on to raise nearly $25 million in funding. In November of last year Spyce re-launched itself, and introduced its new “Infinite Kitchen” robot, which allowed for more ingredient customization and could make 350 meals per hour. Spyce currently operates two locations in Massachusetts, one in Cambridge and one in Boston.

In the press announcement, Sweetgreen said Spyce’s automation technology will allow its workers to focus more on customers service, expand its menu into warm foods, and make meal preparation more consistent.

In June of this year, Sweetgreen confidentially filed to go public. CNBC today speculated that the acquisition of an automation company like Spyce could help Sweetgreen attract investors because the technology could help alleviate some of the labor shortage issues facing the restaurant industry at large.

Labor issues and the pandemic have accelerated interest in restaurant automation. In addition to robots being able to work around the clock without a break, robots don’t get sick and provide customers with a contactless food transaction. Sweetgreen’s acquisition comes less than a week after Creator, another robot-centered restaurant that has raised a fair amount of venture capital, re-opened its doors after being shut down by COVID last year. And just today, robot pizza maker, Piestro announced a partnership to deploy 3,600 units co-branded with pizza chain 800 Degrees over the next five years.

As the pandemic maintains a looming presence in our lives and automation technology matures, expect more announcements like this over the coming year.

Spyce Kitchen Relaunches with All New Robot Kitchen, Dynamic Menu and Delivery

Spyce, the Boston-based robot-centric restaurant, officially announced its revamped concept today. The new Spyce features an all new automated cooking system, a dynamic, customizable menu, and in-house delivery.

The first Spyce Kitchen restaurant burst on to the scene back in the Spring of 2018. The robot used in that incarnation featured a row of bowls that spun to mix and heat ingredients that were dropped into them. This new version, dubbed the “Infinite Kitchen” aesthetically seems more akin to Creator’s burger creating robot.

Spyce’s new food robot makes both salads and warm bowl food, and holds 49 separate recipes. Serving dishes are placed on a conveyor belt that runs underneath the dispensers, which automatically portion out the proper ingredients for each dish. There is also a plancha searing station to cook and dispense proteins and vegetables as well as a superheated steamer to cook pastas. The Infinite Kitchen can make up to 350 bowls in an hour, with the average bowl costing $11.

Food is ordered either through the Spyce mobile app or via in-store kiosk. The new menus feature real-time customization to meet dietary preferences such as keto or vegan, as well as eight different allergen requirements like gluten-free. The menu also lets you adjust to taste preferences like levels of sauce and spiciness. The new Spyce menu does not, however, offer red meat, which has been left off for environmental impact purposes.

Like just about every other restaurant looking to survive this pandemic, Spyce is also placing an emphasis on delivery. There is no dining room to eat in, though people can walk in to order and take out food. The robot and new ordering system work in conjunction with each other to ensure that food is prepared and ready just in time for delivery.

Spyce is extending its precise operational control to delivery as well. The company is using its own in-house delivery fleet, which will help Spyce retain more of the customer experience (and data) and help ensure a good delivery experience. Drivers are W2 employees and will use electric scooters outfitted with special hot side/cold side insulated containers to carry the food.

The new Spyce is located at 241 Washington St. and is open for lunch and dinner every day between 11 a.m. and 9 p.m.. Delivery is currently to the Back Bay, Battery Wharf, Financial District, North End and West End neighborhoods, with the delivery radius increasing to more neighborhoods in the coming weeks. Spyce also plans to open up a second location in Cambridge’s Harvard Square neighborhood later this fall.

Here’s The Spoon’s 2019 Food Robotics Market Map

Today we head to San Francisco for The Spoon’s first-ever food-robotics event. ArticulAte kicks off at 9:05 a.m. sharp at the General Assembly venue in SF, and throughout the daylong event talk will be about all things robots, from the technology itself to business and regulatory issues surrounding it.

When you stop and look around the food industry, whether it’s new restaurants embracing automation or companies changing the way we get our groceries, it’s easy to see why the food robotics market is projected to be a $3.1 billion market by 2025.

But there’s no one way to make a robot, and so to give you a sense of who’s who in this space, and to celebrate the start of ArticulAte, The Spoon’s editors put together this market map of the food robotics landscape.

This is the first edition of this map, which we’ll improve and build upon as the market changes and grows. If you have any suggestions for other companies or see ones we missed you think should be in there, let us know by leaving a comment below or emailing us at tips@thespoon.tech.

Click on the map below to enlarge it.

The Food Robotics Market 2019:

Spyce Gets a Patent for its Robot Restaurant

Spyce received a patent this week for its robot-run restaurant. Patent number US 10,154,762 B was awarded to Spyce on December 18 for “Automated Meal Production System and Apparatus.”

The patent is filled with the requisite mechanical drawings and legalese, but there were a couple of things that stood out. From the patent filing:

The invention provides a fast food restaurant/kitchen concept or kiosk with drastically reduced overhead costs. This is possible by automating the entire meal production system, therefore eliminating the need for onsite employees and reducing the space required for the restaurant.

As my colleague, Mike Wolf, found out earlier this year, the Spyce restaurant in Boston still relied on humans to help explain the newfangled automated concept to customers as well as finish up the food once it was cooked by the robot. Since this is the first such Spyce restaurant, it’s understandable that they would have a few people on hand as they worked out any kinks. But if the patent is any indication, future locations won’t have such people power:

The inventive apparatus can be configured to autonomously cook and serve up to 300 meals or more per day with no human involvement. The automated restaurant will preferably be restocked and serviced by employees once every 24 hours.

According to their patent filing, Spyce believes that by reducing/eliminating the human costs associated with running a fast food type restaurant can free up resources to create better food. It’s a solid argument, now we’ll just have to see how it plays out in real life.

There are plenty of robot-powered restaurants coming online. From Creator and Flippy here in the U.S. to the thousands of locations JD.com and Haidilao plan to in China, and you can expect more throughout next year.

But it looks like Spyce may have ambitions beyond its own restaurant and may expand into other applications:

Alternatively, the inventive apparatus and system can be used in industrial applications for the automated production of ready-to-eat food products or entrees in bulk.

Perhaps Spyce is thinking about going all Wolfgang Puck and creating its own line of pre-packaged Spyce meals that could be sold in grocery aisles. Or maybe it will offer its robot as a white-label food maker for grocery stores or other CPG companies to create their own customized and branded prepared meals.

Spyce, which raised $21 million in funding this year, seems to be setting itself up to scale beyond the restaurant biz.

Spyce Cooks Up $21M as Investors Continue Rush to Robots

Spyce, the Boston-based company behind the eponymous robot-powered restaurant, today announced it has closed a $21 million Series A round of funding led by Collaborative Fund and Maveron (h/t The Boston Globe). This brings the company’s total amount raised to $24.8 million and further indicates that the restaurant robot space is getting frothy.

For the uninitiated, Spyce is a restaurant that serves food bowls prepared by robots (with a little human help for garnishing). Spoon founder Mike Wolf recently ate there and thought the food was “excellent.”

Robots making meals might be a novelty now, but those days are numbered as more and more automated eating experiences get funded. So far this year we’ve seen:

  • Miso Robotics raised $10 million and put Flippy, it’s burger-flipping robot, to work at Caliburger.
  • Bear Robotics raised $2 million for Penny, it’s front-of-house food shuttling and bussing robot, which got a job at Pizza Hut in Korea.
  • Ekim raised €2.2 million (~$2.6M USD) for PAZZI, it’s three-armed pizza-making robot.
  • Chowbotics got $11 million to expand its salad-making robot/vending machine capabilities into food bowls.
  • Details are scarce, by Ono Foods, which was co-founded by the VP of Operations for Cafe X, got backing from Lemnos, Compound and Pathbreaker Venture for its forthcoming robot restaurant.
  • Cafe X raised a $12 million Seed-1 round for its robot baristas-in-a-box.
  • While not confirmed, Zume, the pizza delivery company that has two pizza-making robots, reportedly was in talks to raise up to $750 million from Softbank.

That list doesn’t even include Creator, the new burger restaurant in San Francisco that opened its doors this summer (and raised $18.3 million last year). Or Alibaba’s Robot.he restaurant in Shanghai which has robots scurrying along tracks to deliver food. Or MontyCafe, the Russian robot barista that serves coffee in Moscow. Or the Blendid smoothie making robot kiosk in Sunnyvale, CA.

Robots are taking over and we won’t care because we’ll all be stuffed.

Robots, of course, are great at repetitive, manual tasks, especially in high-traffic, high-volume establishments. They don’t call in sick, don’t get tired and don’t ask for a raise. And with new breakthroughs, robots are getting better at doing more delicate tasks, which is necessary when handling food.

The other thing robots are really good at is being consistent, which is important when you look at creating a national footprint. Spyce says it will use its new money to expand the number of locations on the East Coast and further develop its robotic systems. As more people experience Spyce’s food and (ideally) like it, they know that no matter what Spyce location they visit, they will always get the exact same thing. It’s the comfort that comes from ordering a latte at Starbucks or buying a Big Mac, only with even more precision.

All of this funding in food robots will have a human toll, as traditional restaurant jobs (baristas, cooks and bussers are all impacted by the companies listed above) get automated away.

Startups in the space that I’ve spoken with are often quick to point out that robots can take over more dangerous work, especially around hot appliances like ovens and fryers. They also say automating some of the repetitive cooking tasks allows the humans to spend their time doing more complex tasks like customer service. Caliburger has said that they haven’t laid any person off since employing Flippy, Zume says its new robot allows people to care for its precious mother dough, and Cafe X said that their robot baristas will have an accompanying human to help people pick the best coffee.

Humans may pick the coffee, but as Spyce and others raising money are showing, it’ll be food robots that provide the froth.

Spyce Kitchen Robot Restaurant Opening This Spring

Spyce, the meal making robot from minds of MIT alums, will open its first restaurant location this Spring in Boston, and is holding a press event on May 1 to explain its automated, futuristic, vision of fast food.

The Spyce Kitchen is a fully contained, self-cleaning robot kiosk that refrigerates, mixes, cooks and serves up a selection of “bowl” meals. You can see an earlier version of Spyce in action at the MIT dining hall in this video Futurism posted two years ago.

An Autonomous Kitchen That Will Cook, Serve, And Clean For You

The team from Spyce has partnered with Chef Daniel Boulud to come up with recipes fit for a space age restaurant robot. According to The New Yorker, the latest incarnation of the Spyce Kitchen has been approved by the National Sanitation Foundation for commercial use, and later this month, a Spyce restaurant location will open to customers and create seven different types of bowls at $7.50 a piece.

Spyce is part of a new cohort of self-contained food robot kiosks popping up all around us. In addition to Spyce, there is the Cafe X robot coffee shop, Chowbotics’s salad making robot, Sally, and 6d bytes’ new Blendid smoothie maker bot.

We love food robots here at The Spoon and can’t wait to check out the Spyce in action.