Do we want robots to make our $15 salads?
The saladbots are coming, warns Alan Sytsma in Grub Street. Last month, salad chain restaurant Sweetgreen announced it purchased Spyce, a Boston company founded by two MIT grads that uses a fully automated kitchen designed to cook and assemble veggie bowls. In an interview with Insider, Sweetgreen said it planned to use Spyce’s technology to “power” its restaurants. It’s reasonable to assume that the company’s CEO Jonathan Neman, more recently known for his controversial LinkedIn posts, is serious about salad-making robots. But do we even want food made by robots? If so, chain salad—already impersonal and anodyne—might be “the perfect food to answer that question,” Sytsma writes. But the labor implications and cold efficiency of a robot-made salad doesn’t make restaurant “robo-creep” any less gloomy, and Sytsma concludes the sad desk salad is about to get even sadder.
