A employee wears a Sweetgreen Inc. hat whereas getting ready meals inside the corporate’s restaurant in Boston, Massachusetts.
Adam Glanzman | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Salad chain Sweetgreen introduced Tuesday that it has purchased Spyce, a Boston restaurant firm that made a reputation for itself with its automated kitchen.
Since its founding in 2015, Spyce has raised $24.88 million from traders, together with famed chef Daniel Boulud, based on Pitchbook. The firm’s robotic kitchen and conveyor belts are capable of prepare dinner and serve its heat bowls and salads with none human intervention. Spyce has two restaurant places, each in Boston.
The acquisition is predicted to shut within the third quarter this 12 months. Financial phrases weren’t disclosed.
Sweetgreen mentioned it’s figuring out the place and the way it will incorporate Spyce’s know-how into its personal eating places. The firm mentioned the deal is meant to enhance the shopper expertise by filling orders sooner and extra precisely and giving its staff extra time to focus on getting ready meals.
The deal follows Sweetgreen’s transfer in June to file for an initial public offering confidentially. Ownership of Spyce’s know-how may make Sweetgreen extra enticing to traders because it seeks to enter the general public markets. Rising labor prices have been placing stress on earnings throughout the restaurant trade, incentivizing firms to spend money on automation and synthetic intelligence know-how to deal with easier duties. For instance, McDonald’s purchased Apprente in 2019 and has recently begun testing the software to take orders from some Chicago restaurants’ drive-thru lanes.
Sweetgreen’s newest funding spherical earlier this 12 months valued it at practically $1.8 billion after the coronavirus pandemic spurred huge development for its digital gross sales. Because it’s nonetheless a privately held firm, it doesn’t disclose its monetary outcomes.