At the Sweetgreen in FiDi, the salads are made by a robot.
The salad robot is not a new thing. Sweetgreen began rolling them out in New York City in 2024. But this was absolutely shocking to me to realize when I first encountered it back in April. I had one of those moments—watching the automated claw quietly whisk a compostable bowl below tubes dispensing precise portions of kale, spinach, mozzarella, tomatoes, walnuts—when a technology intrudes into your life before you've had the chance to consider whether it was possible, let alone "good."
In a way that's hard to record, this kind of intrusion is happening more and more. It might have been shocking at first, but now I don't remember exactly when I got accustomed to ordering from a screen, or when I last bought a ticket without first downloading an app, or when I could navigate my home city without consulting Google Maps, or when I first began giving my computer access to my biometric data. Soon maybe I'll forget my first time in a driverless car or my first encounter with a non-human medical provider—or my first salad robot.
I'm worried about worker displacement, of course, but it's also that going to Sweetgreen, with its pricey, healthy, assembly line vibe and its AirPod-wearing customers already makes me feel like a robot. So the salad robot is also a scary mirror. I returned on a recent afternoon to see if my sense of emptiness and dystopia about it lingered or if it was shared by fellow salad-eaters.