Our Salad Robot Future

Way back in 2022, we predicted that our “sh*tty robot future” wouldn’t be the panacea it was cracked up to be. As we said in last year’s Visions Report: 

Our semi-autonomous future will be filled with side-glancing frustration at a world that almost works, but not quite the way we had hoped. The more robots can do, the more opportunity there is for them to fail our expectations.

This week when Sweetgreen — yes, that overly-capitalized counter-serve salad restaurant-pretending-to-be-a-tech-company — opened its “Infinite Kitchen” employing a robot to make your salads, the internet went berserk.

“I want my salads made by a stoned teenager,” wrote business journalist Emily Sundberg on her Twitter. “Not a robot.” 

What is rarely considered is how the robot feels. Imagine going to robot school to be a knee surgeon but instead you make salads. Now even robots can fail to live up to the expectations of their parents and live with crushing student loan debt.

We joke. But this generation will probably complain that the millennials had that human experience taken away from them, too.

In reality, the saladbot is overdue. Sweetgreen acquired robotics startup Spyce in 2021 shortly after its IPO, and has been broadcasting a move to automated stores during earnings calls through 2022.

What will get lost in the discourse is the positive impact this will have on prices for the consumer. While premium brands experiment on the fringes with their white-collar $20 takeout salads, this kind of technology has the potential to transform our services economy into a knowledge economy.

In his book Post-Capitalist Society (1993), Peter Drucker developed the idea of the knowledge economy, arguing that knowledge, not capital or labor, would be the key economic resource in the future. He wrote:

This society in which knowledge workers dominate is in danger of a new 'class conflict' between the large minority of knowledge workers and the majority of workers who will make their living through traditional manual work or the service industries.

If you thought kale was bitter, you should see basic white girls reacting to saladbot. If our robot future is more salad than sh*t, we should be thankful that it begins with menial ephemera (like salad). For Sweetgreen, labor costs are anything but sweet — labor was the largest expense on the PNL for Q1 earnings for the chain. Automation could result in higher margins, a turnaround in performance, licensing of the tech, and those sweet, sweet tech valuations that they’ve been chasing all along.

As we slowly socialize to the idea of automation everywhere, we’ll realize that the productivity gains result in lower prices, and have a deflationary effect overall on a booming economy. Or, at least, that’s what we’d hope (and the Congress would ensure).

Displacing a waste of human labor so that we can realize the totality of human potential, while lowering the cost of living? That’s the future of commerce.

Let’s hope it doesn’t disappoint.

— Phillip

P.S. This week’s featured essay unveils an emergent subcultural behavior — something we’re calling Mockup Culture. In it we examine how the culture of “mocking up” popular social media apps, and similar behaviors, are a new form of individual participation that will lead to heightened customer expectations. Read Insiders #148: The Rise of Mockup Culture.