If you love salads and Chipotle, you might want to check out the franchise’s new salad making robot. This innovative machine can whip up a fresh and customized salad in minutes, using ingredients that you choose from a touchscreen. It is currently being tested at select locations by the Tex-Mex franchise, but once it hits all of them, it won’t be the first on its production lineup.
Chipotle was the first to have a robot make tortilla chips. Then, another robot began helping whip up guacamole. Now it has added salads to its automated helpers. You can select from a variety of greens, toppings, dressings, and proteins, and watch as the robot chops, tosses, and plates your salad. The fast casual chain is testing a new automated “digital makeline” at its Chipotle Cultivate Center innovation hub in Irvine, California, where the previous robots were also put to the test.
When an order comes in – via the Chipotle app, for instance – any bowls or salads are sent to the robotic system, which automatically dispenses the required ingredients. Once the bowl or salad is complete, it pops up from the enclosed automated work process line through an opening in the countertop level where the human Chipotle employees work. A crew member then puts a lid on the dish and adds any additional items to the order.
The robot is designed to not only speed the process, but also to reduce waste, and ensure consistency and quality. Even more impressive is that it also has a built-in sanitizing system that cleans the utensils after each use.
For now it’s only available at select locations, but the company plans to expand it to more stores in the future.
Salads make up as much as 65% of orders at Chipotle, so there is no underestimating how helpful and productive such an innovation could be.
“Chipotle’s new digital makeline built by Hyphen embodies our commitment to leveraging robotics to unlock the human potential of our workforce, ensuring an elevated dining experience for our guests,” Curt Garner, Chipotle’s chief customer and technology officer, said in a statement.
Chipotle is not alone in seeking to introduce such innovations. Sweetgreen, another fast casual food chain, has deployed an automated system in Naperville, Illinois, which can make up to 100 salads in 15 minutes with better accuracy than its human co-workers, Restaurant Business reported. A second system is expected to be operational later this year in Huntington Beach, Calif. the site said.
Chipotle announced its first robotic crew member, an AI kitchen assistant named Chippy from Pasadena, Calif. tech company Miso Robotics to make and season its tortilla chips, back in March 2022. Then, in July 2023, the Mexican restaurant chain said it had enlisted Autocado, a robot prototype to prep avocados before they are hand-mashed for guacamole.
“Our goal is to have the automated digital makeline be the centerpiece of all our restaurants’ digital kitchens,” Garner said.
