Hi, can I get to create your own bowl? Please? It's lunchtime on a Tuesday in Washington, DC, and our producer Moe Barrow walks over to Sweet Green. That's a growing chain where the employees make salads and bowls to order right in front of you.
Do you want everything on internet?
Um?
Let me see.
Can we go down the line?
Yeah?
That part of the appeal, of course, is that you can choose exactly what you want.
I think I'll do spring mix, thanks, red onions, cucumbers and cilantro is fine.
But during the lunch rush it may also mean a bit of a weight. Salad makers can only move so fast, especially if there's a contemplative person up ahead in line. I'm looking at you, mo, what else? Oh?
I can get more?
But when the sails. That's one reason Sweet Green and other fast food places are considering automation to perform some jobs like taking orders and making food that are now done by people. Sweet Green's potential answer is called the Infinite Kitchen. It's a prototype salad and bowl making machine.
Sweet Green says that one huge advantage is that the Infinite Kitchen allows them to get orders done for small faster and second of all more accurately in.
An industry that often struggles to find enough people to work those jobs, especially now in a tight labor market where workers have more choices. The rise of artificial intelligence and other automation has big names like McDonald's and Wendy's. Giving it a closer look.
That will be sixteen thirty nine.
I'm Westksova today on the Big Take. This robot is happy to take your order. Bloomberg Business We contributor Elizabeth dun and Sauce Wheet Greens Infinite Kitchen Machine in action.
The Infinite Kitchen is a robotic contraption that Sweet Green has just installed in their first new store. Sweet Green is kind of famous for these elevated salads that are mixed as many as fifty different ingredients in the restaurant.
They're kind of pricey.
They range from tennish to fifteen ish dollars, and they've got about two hundred stores and they're growing. They've always really focused on the idea that their salads are prepped right in the store. You see people chopping ingredients, loading them into the makelines where somebody's standing in front of you and kind of scooping ingredients into the bowl and you get the salad at the end. A lot of their marketing has focused on this connection with farmers and
really the idea of freshness and health and quality. I actually went and visited the first Sweet Green that is equipped with this new technology, which is right outside of Chicago. So normally, when you walk into a Sweet Green, you walk up to a counter, there are people behind the counter assembling these salad bowls. In this location, you walk up to the counter, what you see is this huge, room height contraption that is filled with tubes of salad ingredients.
It reminded me kind of like the bulk bins at a Whole Foods.
Right.
So you've got these like clear tubes of ingredients, and when you place your order, a little bowl kind of whizzes out underneath and pauses underneath all of the different tubes that need to be used.
To assemble your salad.
So like the arugola, the quinoa, the beats and gets to the end and a Sweet Green employee picks it up, gives it a look, maybe adds a couple of delicate ingredients, and then hands it over to you.
And this is the first one. This is like the prototype store that they hope will lead to replication and across other stores.
This is the prototype store. It's a technology that they acquired a couple of years ago through a company called Spice, which had two stores in Boston. So when you think about all of the labor that goes into a Sweet Green store, and Sweet Greens do typically have as many as twenty people per shift to do all of that ingredient prep and all of the salad assembly, so it's
a hugely labor intensive process. When we see automation in fast food restaurants or fast casual restaurants, I mean, first of all, it's very rare that there really is any But when there is, it's usually a device that does one very specific thing, like it'll fry tortilla chips, or it will help dispense drinks. So these are very specific tasks. The interesting thing to me about the Infinite Kitchen is that it is able to replace the effort of as many as half of the people on a Sweet Green shift.
You know, you look at this device and there's nothing about it that is totally space age. I mean, it seems like something that you could imagine in a manufacturing context. There's no component of it that is just like wild and space Age, but as an addition to their store, you could see it being something that really changes the dynamics of how those stores work and how many people are needed to run them.
So you said, there's all these tubes and it's filled with all the different ingredients. How do the ingredients get in the tubes?
The ingredients get in the tubes by being carried up a set of stairs. Employees walk behind the Infinite Kitchen. They walk up a series of stairs and you end up on this platform behind the Infinite Kitchen. I think of it as like the bridge of a ship. It looks like a control center. There's screens that have information about how full each tube is, and that's fed by
sensors that are in the tubes. And there's these big what look like sort of the lids of chest freezers that you open up, and then there is a kind of like a just a shoot that you can put ingredients down. So you open up the lid of one of these kind of chest freezery things and there's tubes for chickpeas and cucumber. It's very user friendly. You kind of open it up and it's clear where everything goes. When the tube is full, the little screen will tell
you that you've added enough. A big part of what the Spice engineers were working on in the past year and a half after this sale to Sweet Green was just this kind of thing making it super user friendly for Sweet Green's hourly workforce.
So you hit upon this pretty important point, which is that if it works, it'll let these restaurants potentially operate with fewer employees. And that's a big deal right now, because with a tight labor market, fast food restaurants other retail businesses are having trouble finding workers who are willing to work for relatively low pay, not great benefits, kind of long hours, and not very attractive conditions.
This has really kind of always been a problem for food service. It's always been an industry that has really high turnover where it's difficult to attract and retain people. That's obviously only gotten worse in the current labor situation. The current labor market. The industry experts that I spoke to about this said, robotic solutions like this, automation like this, it's often less about trying to actively fire people and it's more about or reducing your need to rehire people,
to continue to rehire and retrain people. So you're really trying to find something that will work with a smaller workforce because that's what you're realistically kind of able to maintain.
Ultimately, though it does result in a store that just has fewer people having to work there because the robot winds up doing the job of several people.
Yeah, I mean, that is definitely the intention. This is their first pilot of Infinite Kitchen. They're going to do another one in Boston where they take an existing Sweet Green and they swap out the make lines and they put in an infinite kitchen to test it in that context. But the company has been very cautious about what they're willing to promise in terms of labor reduction. But it is definitely their intention to operate the store with fewer people.
Of the ideas here is to cut down on operating costs of a business. What is the machine like this cost itself, and how many people do you need to maintain it and all the other things associated with switching from a human to a robot.
So we know that they paid around fifty million dollars for the technology in twenty twenty one. We know that they've invested something in it between then and now. They've got a staff of about twenty engineers that came over from Spice with the technology, who have been kind of tinkering with it and figuring out how to make it
work perfectly for the Sweet Green environment. What they did tell me in terms of the cost per machine, so what does it actually cost to get one of these things up and running in a store, They described it as a touch more than what it costs to build their conventional salad make lines in the restaurants, those lines that you see filled with ingredients behind the counter. They're
custom built. They have a lot of complex refrigeration and heating elements in them, so they're more expensive than you would think. There's all often two or three of those in a store. There's usually one or two behind the scenes making orders for digital pickup.
So when you put.
Together the whole cost of all of that equipment, I suppose you know, the infinite kitchen is not drastically more expensive.
So have they at the same time automated the ordering system so you don't go up to the counter and order from a person.
The majority of Sweet Greens orders already come in via app online, there are still a big chunk of people who will walk up to the counter and order from the person making the salad.
So in this new.
Pilot store, instead of a person, there is a tablet, so they have a series of touchscreen tablets. It looks very similar to what you'd find on the Sweet Green app that you use on your phone. They do also have one person kind of behind the counter. If you are allergic to the idea of entering the information into the touch Green yourself, you can tell somebody verbally and they will do the same thing for you.
Am I wrong to think that this all sounds kind of needlessly complex? Then you could just have a person making a salad.
So when I've watched prototypes or pilots of kitchen robotics before, they often don't seem like they're working very fast, Like there'll be a robotic arm that's doing something and you're just kind of thinking it feels like it would be faster if a human arm was doing this.
In this case, the thing moves super fast.
So you can imagine at that peak lunchtime when there's a long line of people trying to get their salads. I mean, I can imagine it's speeding up the flow of things. I think that accuracy point is a pretty big one. There's no reason why the machine should make an error, so it should bring their accuracy way up.
And the sort of chaos.
Of twenty people moving around a store and trying to get these ingredients where they need to go and getting everything into bowls, I mean, it's real. I think it's a very chaotic food production environment, so it doesn't feel completely crazy to me.
After the break, can a fast food plays be run entirely by robots? Lizzie, you said something before the break that I think is interesting that when you look at other attempts at making these automated robots to do fast food, they sometimes look like they're not working very well. And in your story you write there is kind of like a long, sad history of trying to build robots to do the things that people do.
There have been a lot of food service robots that have tried and failed. There are a bunch that are being tried and have not failed yet but don't seem hugely promising. There's a zillion pizza robots. There's Zoom Pizza.
It had like two hundred million dollars worth of funding from SoftBank, and the idea was it was going to be this like robotic pizza assembly line where the robotics were in the back of a pizza truck and it was going to cook the pizza while the truck drove around, and so that you got to a house and.
The pizza was like perfectly cooked.
So you'd order the pizza for delivery, and instead of making the pizza and hopping in the car and trying to get it to you while it's hot, it would actually be made while it was on its way to you.
Yeah, And it turns out there are a bunch of issues with trying to cook a pizza in an eight hundred degree of an on a van that roves around, so that whole operation is defunct. There's one called Stellar Pizza, and that's a group of former SpaceX engineers who are doing something kind of similar, except the truck is stationary, so they're not trying to actually cook as they drive. They seem to be having a little more success, but they still only have one truck that they're piloting the
last time I checked. And then there's like pizza vending machines. There's pizza assembly lines, so pizza is a big one. There are some robotic arm prototypes that can do different things like make smoothies or make salads. Really, the biggest company in the space is a company called Miso Robotics. They had a robot named Flippy, and Flippy flipped hamburgers. Flippy wasn't so good at his job, so now there's
Flippy two, and Flippy two makes French fries. So that's kind of being piloted at a couple dozen white castles in a few other places. But basically all of these efforts are in there very very early stages. There's nothing that's like threatening to take over all of the fast food industry. There's really two different areas of a fast food restaurant operation. There's what you call the front of house, which is the ordering, and then there's the back of house,
which is the kitchen. So the ordering piece of this pie really has had a lot of automation. So we have smartphones now that we are often using to order through apps. You can order online. There's kiosks and restaurants, so the ordering component of the fast food restaurant that really has been dramatically changed through automation, but most of the labor in a fast food restaurant is still the
cooking part of the operation. It's still in the kitchen, and that's an area where there has been very little meaningful automation. But you know, you see these headlines about a fully automated McDonald's or a taco bell that's touchless, and they're really just talking about the ordering.
And the new automated Sweet Green that you've been talking about just recently opened its doors. Do you have any idea how business has been.
So it's in Naperville, Illinois.
I am not local to the area, so I haven't been able to be back to see, but I did see some Instagram reels of lines out the door on opening day. People are intrigued. I think there's probably a lot of interest in the technology and seeing exactly what it is and how it works, and then it will kind of remain to be seen how people feel about it in the long run.
You got a chance when you were there to kind of see it in action. How'd you feel about it?
I arrived with the skeptics mindset, because you know, I'm a food reporter. I care a lot about food and restaurants, and I think that a big part of food is about connection and it's about people. And I still believe that's true, but it in this context. You know, when I walk into a Sweet Green, what I'm really there to do is get a healthy, fast meal where I feel the ingredients are high quality. And the fact that it's being physically assembled by a person. I mean, that's
not something that makes a huge difference to me. When people think about automation, and specifically about robotics, oftentimes the first place their minds go is about job losses and replacing humans, and they're being sort of a mass exodus of jobs. When we actually look at the trend historically from nineteen ninety to today, the number of food service
jobs has almost doubled. Think about everything that's happened in terms of food service automation and kiosks and online ordering, and then innovations like automatic espresso machines and all these little things that kind of help businesses run more efficiently.
It really suggests that.
The overall trend is not going to be towards jobs in the sector being reduced.
So you cover this industry, do you think that automation eventually starts taking over more and more functions, and that we're going to be seeing a lot more robots at the fast food places we go to.
Probably eventually robotics and automation will play a bigger role in food service. I think this is probably going to happen relatively slowly. Sweet Green and businesses like it. Any place that makes a bowl or a salad, they have some aspects of their menus that make them particularly suited for this kind of automation, Like you can have an infinite kitchen robot that makes every item on the menu. Most fast casual and fast food restaurants, their menus aren't
like that. There are dozens of different discrete tasks that need to be done to create order, from flipping a hamburger to assembling the hamburger and pouring's fountain drinks and frying off fries. I don't see a future where five years from now we're walking into a McDonald's or a Wendy's or Taco Bell and it's just a whole bunch of machines in the back. But I do think in the fullness of time, I guess anything is possible.
Liz, thanks so much for coming on the.
Show, Thanks so much for having me when.
We come back. Where workers and the shortage of them fit into this puzzle? As we all know, companies are having trouble finding people willing to take fast food and some other service industry jobs. The pay and benefits and the hours are often not great. At the same time, though, some people who do work in the service industry fear that robots are coming for their jobs. But are they really? Danielliser Tory Cortina knows a thing or two about this.
She covers the restaurant industry for Bloomberg. Danielle will we hear a lot about how the fast food industry is struggling to recruit enough employees to fill all these restaurants. Can you just kind of paint us a picture of this nine hundred billion dollar food service industry. What's it like right now in terms of recruiting and trying to keep the employees they have?
Several chains have said recently that their employee turnover, so the number of people who leave has actually declined a little bit from last year, and they've achieved that by improving, you know, their training, and they've also race wages. The economy has also softened like a little bit, and so now the share of Americans that are in the workforce
has been edging up a little bit. Now, with the not so positive part, we have US government data that showed that as of March, there were about one point three million job openings in the restaurant on accommodations sector. So that's like a broader industry, but that's higher than the roughly eight hundred and seventy five thousand positions that were open in.
Twenty nineteen on average.
So even though the situation has been improving, there's still that gap when it comes to restaurant employment.
So why is it that restaurants and fast foods have been so hard hit? Why are they struggling to recruit and keep.
Pable so there's more choice, for one, and second, I mean, restaurant work has always been tough. You know, pay can be lower than in other industries. The jobs are difficult. You know, people spend a lot of time on their feet, working in hot kitchens, dealing with the public directly, and you know customers sometimes have specific demands that are hard to meet. Those are some of the factors that also contribute to making it harder to get people to join
restaurants and stick. And also the schedules can be very unpredictable. Unlike other industries, restaurants have increased pay over the past couple of years because they know that they're competing for a bunch of different workers. And so just to give you a little bit of data, in the US, on average for workers in limited service restaurants, so you know, places like McDonald's, the hourly wages were in March around
fifteen thirty four. That's actually up almost five percent from a year ago and twenty two percent from two years ago. So restaurants have increased wages, and even then, it's still hard to find people.
And so here we are talking about restaurants starting to try to use more automation. How much of that is about trying to make up for this gap between the number of people they need to work at the restaurants and the number of people they're able to find to work at their restaurants.
It's part of it, you know. I had conversations with people across the restaurant industry, from restaurants to consultants to economists, just to give you a little bit of context. White Castle, which makes burgers, which they call Slighters, has a robot called Flippy that can make fried items, so things like chicken rings, like potato fries, and they've put these robots in about twelve of their three hundred and fifty restaurants.
White Castle is open twenty for seven. So what they told us is that having the robot in some of these restaurants means that they're never understaffed, especially in the late night shift, which is hard to staff. So that's one point that restaurants are making. That being said, labor's not the whole story. We talked to a restaurant consultant called Kriz Berley who's at PAIN and he said that it's not even the main reason, at least in his view.
A big factor is also that the way that people acts as restaurants really changed a lot during the pandemic, and so there are things like ordering ahead, going to a drive through, and broadly just getting more food on the go that became so much more popular. And so Beerley said that a lot of the automation that's happening in the restaurants is around like apps and other systems that allow restaurants to deliver on those new consumer expectations. A little bit more smoothly, you know, just to put
it in the words of Wendy's. We spoke to on executive there and they told us that basically, quick service restaurants when based on three factors accuracy, convenience, and speed. So they're looking to automate functions that help them improve on any of those points, and so enter things like AI in the drive through with a chatbot that communicates with people so they can order that way.
How does that actually work? What are they investing in?
Wendy's is doing a pilot, and that pilot actually has not started, so it's starting in June of this year. And so what they've told us is that basically, you know, you pull up to the drive through and there's a robotic voice, which is going to be female, that's going to take your order. And supposedly that robot will understand the orders even if they're not placed exactly like they're
listed on the menu. So, for example, Wendy's has milkshakes that they called Frosty's, So even if you order a milkshake, it will understand that it's a Frosty, right, That's how it's supposed to work. And so after that you know, there is a menu board in which you can see
whether what you ordered is reflected on the text. One important point is that at least for this pilot, which will be in one store in Ohio, there will be a person monitoring the AI just in case there are any issues or if someone just wants to talk to a person.
What do we know about how customers feel about this. Do they want to interact with AI and robots or do they like having that person standing behind the counter taking their roder at the cash register.
It can be a little bit early to know, but we have a couple of data points. So White Castle, in addition to Flippy, the actual robot that makes right items, does have an AI chap book called Julia, which can take orders. And so what they told us is that ninety percent of the customers that have used the AI actually complete the order without going and asking for a person. So that's a good data point, I mean, and they see it as sort of like customer acceptance for that
type of product. At the same time, there was a survey by a research firm called in Touch Insight that found that around half of the people that they pulled took issue with the technology for one reason or the other, one of them being the lack of human interaction. At this same time, not everyone who had an opinion had actually tested the AI, so that just muddies the picture
a little bit. Other technologies that are public facing in the restaurant space, like you know, the big touch screens that you might see when you walk into McDonald's so you can place an order on your own and pay without having to necessarily interact with a person. Intoch Insight, the same research firm found that seventy percent of the people that they polled have interacted with one such service,
you know, those like self checkout chios. Though many people did prefer talking to a person if given the choice, and older customers had a much more stronger preference for interacting with a human than younger customers did.
If we do start to see more technology doing the jobs that people are currently doing, now, do you think ultimately that means we're going to start seeing fewer people in restaurants and more automation.
One important point to keep in mind is that it's still early days. A lot of restaurants are trying AI and to drive through, but it's not like it's wide spread across the entire industry. Yet in that regard, I think we still have to wait and.
See a little bit.
The broader question of whether there will be fewer jobs in the restaurant industry depends on who you ask, and so what I have found this time around is that restaurants, you know, told me again and again that they're not looking to reduce the size of their labor force. They make the point that currently they don't have enough people to work at their restaurants, and what they're looking to
do is hopefully free up people to do other tasks. So, for example, Wendy's told us that instead of having someone scrambling to take orders, what they want is to reallocate people to do other tests, like, for example, checking the accuracy of your order to make sure that what you get handed is actually what you ordered. At the same time, I also spoke with Simon Johnson, who's an economist at MIT. He did say that there's uncertainty about what automation will
mean for employment. In his view, it will eventually result in a reduced need for labor. What happens next really depends on what shape automation takes, and so from his perspective.
What he said is that the type of automation that's happening now kind of across the economy is primarily designed at replicating tasks that humans can do without necessarily adding new tasks, and so he said that it's possible the new tasks will emerge, which is kind of what restaurants are saying that the annual to reallocate staff to do
other tasks. But in Johnson's view, the technology is just advancing so fast that more jobs could be lost faster without there being in enough time for new tasks to emerge.
Daniella, thanks for speaking with me today anytime. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Galina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Frederica Romanello is our producer.
Our associate producer is Zeneb Sidiki, with additional production support from Moberrow. Filde Garcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take.