Think of the slop bowl robots, won't you?
Sweetgreen, Chipotle, and Cava have each invested in bots to build the bowls the internet loves to hate.
It’s a good thing robots don’t have feelings.
This summer, pop culture turned on fast casual restaurants and the once-highly Instagrammable bowls of food they sell. Abruptly, bowls full of mixed ingredients — frequently a mix of grain, protein, vegetable, and sauce, marketed as healthy — were deemed “slop.” Restaurants that sell them, like Sweetgreen, have faced mounting consumer criticism about their pricing. Taken together, it seems like the bowls could be falling out of favor. (Or.. flavor?)
At the same time, fast casual restaurants, long sensitive to price pressure, have been investing in and experimenting with bowl-filling automation to grow, scale, and serve customers quickly and affordably. They’ve thrown time, money, and energy behind robots that make these signature bowls, but no chain has yet deployed them at scale.
If the allure of the bowl is gone, what happens to the bots that build them?
The term “slop bowls” didn’t always refer to these composed and customizable concoctions.
In GQ in January, a defense of the “slop bowl” referred to more literal slop, optimized for macro-chasing, not pretty photos:
“These mushy, brown meals are the antithesis of carefully carefully crafted, Instagram-ready foods, but plenty of people are professing their love for them on social media as an easy way to meet macronutrient goals.”
But by May, bowls from fast casual restaurants got lumped into a growing category of online “slop” and “hauls” and general gross excess that’s become pervasive in online social circles.
In the New York Times in May, Emma Goldberg wrote:
“‘Slop bowl’ is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants — Cava, Naya, Sweetgreen, Chopt — where the selling point of the assembly line is efficiency, not craft”
Last week, I caught yet another journalist’s call for “slop bowl” sources on LinkedIn, which is what inspired this newsletter. (That piece ran early Tuesday, calling the aforementioned restaurants “indistinguishable” from one another, ouch)
Chains including Chipotle, Sweetgreen, and Cava have invested in robotics that make bowl-building faster and more efficient.
Leaders of these chains have said they want the bots to help with order efficiency, portion sizing, accuracy, and speed. And, in tests and early deployments, they do.