Salad Robot History: ABB Robots and Bowl Assembly

On paper, a salad robot has an easier job than a cooking robot. Nothing gets fried or flipped. The machine drops greens, grains and toppings into a bowl in the right amounts, fast, and has to stay clean while it does. For most of the last century salad was hand work from the packing shed to the plate, and salad chains only got bowl machines working in the 2020s. This post follows bowl assembly from the first salad bars to the robot makelines that Sweetgreen, Chipotle and Wonder run now. Then it looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker and the IRB 1200 Hygienic could fit in restaurants, food plants and homes.

Workers grade and pack lettuce into crates by hand at C. H. Frye's lettuce farm in Monroe, Washington, around 1929. Photo: Lee Pickett / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From salad bars to the first salad robots

Before anyone built a machine for it, salad was put together by the person eating it. Nobody is sure where the salad bar started. One story ties it to the Swedish smörgåsbord shown at the New York World's Fair, and by the early 1940s American newspaper columns were telling families to set out the ingredients and let everyone build their own plate. In 1956 Chris' Corral in Oakdale, California, advertised a salad board where diners made their own salad. Norman Brinker, later behind Chili's and Bennigan's, put salad bars into his Steak and Ale restaurants in the late 1960s to keep guests busy while their steaks cooked.

The salad bar at the Club 60 Supper Club in Columbus, Wisconsin, 2018. Photo: Downspec / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fast casual chains moved the work back behind the glass. Sweetgreen was started by three Georgetown University students and opened its first store in Washington, D.C., in August 2007. There, as at Chipotle, the customer walks along a counter while staff build each bowl by hand from rows of pans. The industry calls that counter the makeline. Customers can point at exactly what they want, but every portion depends on a worker's scoop, and at lunchtime the line backs up. Online ordering made it harder. An app order has nobody standing at the glass to point at toppings, so it waits behind the people in the queue.

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez and Rep. George Miller hold salads at the Dupont Circle Sweetgreen in Washington in 2014, with staff at the makeline behind them. Photo: US Department of Labor via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first salad robots came in the 2010s. Chowbotics, founded in 2014, built Sally, a cabinet about three feet square that made salads and bowls from up to 22 ingredients and was placed in hospitals, college campuses and grocery stores. DoorDash bought the company in February 2021 and shut it down in August 2022 after Sally missed internal targets. Spyce went after restaurants instead. Four MIT students built its first prototype in a fraternity basement in 2015, and on 3 May 2018 it opened in Boston's Downtown Crossing, where robotic woks cooked bowls in about two minutes and cleaned themselves. Bowls cost $7.50, and staff added the garnishes at the end. Sweetgreen bought Spyce in August 2021.

The former Spyce restaurant at 241 Washington Street in Boston's Downtown Crossing, closed since 2021. Photo: 4300streetcar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Robot makelines at Sweetgreen, Chipotle and Wonder

Sweetgreen turned the Spyce technology into the Infinite Kitchen, which opened in Naperville, Illinois, on 10 May 2023. Bowls ride a conveyor under dispensers that add greens, grains and toppings, and a person at the end adds the last touches, such as herbs or avocado. In a deal announced in November 2025, Sweetgreen sold Spyce to Wonder, Marc Lore's multi-brand restaurant company. On 14 September 2026 Wonder showed its first Infinite Makeline in Midtown East, Manhattan. It holds 68 ingredients, can make up to 500 bowls an hour and serves six of Wonder's restaurant brands from one kitchen. Bowls can loop through the line more than once for complicated orders, and Wonder plans tens of locations in 2027.

A Sweetgreen restaurant on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, 2018. Photo: Tdorante10 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Chipotle went with Hyphen. Since October 2023 it has tested a digital makeline at its Cultivate Center in Irvine, California. Online orders for bowls and salads go straight to the machine, which moves each bowl along a lower line and stops it under the ingredients the order calls for. The finished bowl rises through an opening in the counter, where a worker puts the lid on. Chipotle said about 65 percent of its digital orders are bowls or salads. Its Autocado prototype, built with Vebu, cuts, cores and peels avocados before staff mash the guacamole by hand. In August 2026 Hyphen and SUMMITS began testing meals built to each diner's nutrition targets, with every ingredient weighed as it is dispensed.

A bowl made by the Hyphen digital makeline sits in the counter opening while a Chipotle worker wraps an order by hand. Photo: Chipotle Mexican Grill

We found no ABB salad makeline, and none of these three lines uses a robot arm. They are built from dispensers and conveyors. ABB's food robots do the neighbouring jobs. The IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot that uses vision to pick small items off a moving belt, and its stainless version is rated IP69K, so it can be washed down with hot water and detergent. At BurgerBots in Los Gatos a FlexPicker stacks burger toppings, as covered in our post on fast food kitchen automation. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is a small six-axis arm with an IP67 body, an IP69K stainless flange and food-grade H1 oil, made for handling meat, fish, fruit and vegetables.

An ABB IRB 1200 Hygienic robot picking bananas in a food handling demo. Photo: ABB

Where salad robots go next, in restaurants, plants and homes

For restaurants, the next question is whether these lines scale. Wonder's rollout and Chipotle's trial will show whether a makeline pays for itself outside a flagship store. Most of the trouble comes from the food. Leafy greens tangle and clump, wet toppings stick to dispensers, and every part that touches food has to come apart for cleaning each day. An arm could help where dispensers struggle. A FlexPicker could lay sliced avocado, egg or salmon on each bowl as it passes, while dispensers handle the grains and greens. Nobody sells that combination today, so it is only a possibility, and cost will decide whether it happens.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robots working above a moving food line. Photo: ABB

Food plants are the other big opening. Supermarket salad bowls and ready meals are assembled on conveyors, and much of the topping work is still done by hand. Chef Robotics, a US startup that builds robots for this job, says its machines have placed more than 80 million servings in production. ABB robots already handle the steps around assembly: FlexPickers pick and pack food into trays, and the IRB 1200 Hygienic handles fresh produce, with soft grippers for delicate pieces that would crush. A topping cell like this would follow the belt with conveyor tracking, and it is usually laid out and tested first in RobotStudio.

A soft gripper on an ABB FlexPicker, made for picking delicate pastries. Photo: ABB

At home, nobody sells a salad robot yet. Salad spinners, food processors and bagged greens do most of the work, and a bowl for one or two people is quick to make by hand. If home salad robots come, they will probably arrive sideways. Countertop cooking robots that already dispense ingredients could add a cold bowl mode, and nutrition services like the one SUMMITS is testing could send recipes with exact portions. ABB's GoFa cobot slows and stops when it senses contact, which answers part of the safety question for an arm in a kitchen. Price is still open, and so are the counter space and daily cleaning such a machine would need.

Washed lettuce in a home salad spinner. Photo: Robert Couse-Baker / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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