Yesterday at the FOODIT event in Mountain View, I had salad for lunch.
Why I am telling you this? Because unlike any salad I’ve had before, this one was custom built for me by a robot named Sally.
We’ve written about Sally before at the Spoon, but this is the first time I got to taste a Sally-crafted salad. On hand to give me a tour and tell us about Sally was Chowbotics CEO Deepak Sekar.
You can watch the video of Sally making a salad above, but here are a few takeaways from my conversation with Sekar and Chef Kelly Olazar:
- Sally allows the user to choose “chef salad” mixes or build their own using the twenty types of ingredients. Users can also use an app to do greater customization of the salad.
- The list price on a Sally is $30 thousand, but the company does offer discounts
- Sally herself weighs in at 400 pounds
- The product is targeted towards office cafeterias, universities and restaurants
- Sally can make about 40-50 salads before she has to be refilled. Yesterday at the FOODIT event, they had to once and served 90 salads. Chef Kelly Olazar told me people were coming back for second salads later in the day (cheapsters).
Overall, I like the salad and was impressed with how quick Sally worked. While the robot’s price seems high, I figured that if could replace a worker and generate $500-$1000 a day in a busy cafeteria, the product makes sense financially in a high-volume food service location.
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