Sweetgreen's Infinite Kitchen puts salads on a conveyor — better margins, less turnover

Sweetgreen's growth plan ran into a kitchen problem: more digital, pickup and drive-thru orders meant more bowls, but the classic makeline still needed people walking between stations to assemble each one. After acquiring robot-kitchen startup Spyce in 2021 for about $70 million, the chain spent a year and a half adapting the technology into a new restaurant format it called the Infinite Kitchen.

The format inverted the assembly line: bowls ride a conveyor past automated dispensing stations while machines portion ingredients, and team members add final touches such as herbs or avocado. The first location opened in May 2023 in Naperville, Illinois; after a seven-week retrofit of its Penn Plaza store in July 2024, Sweetgreen planned seven new builds and two to three retrofits for the year and said more than half of 2025's new stores would include the technology, with a drive-thru variant on the roadmap.

The economics made the case. Naperville recorded $2.8 million in sales in its first year, restaurant-level margins of 31.1% in Q2 and first-year crew turnover roughly 45% below a standard store, while tickets ran 10% higher. Penn Plaza produced nearly 200 bowls in 30 minutes with 100% on-time reliability, a potential 500 bowls per hour and average order times under 3.5 minutes — throughput that let Sweetgreen pursue formats traditional kitchens could not staff.