Wonder is putting its new kitchen automation tech to work in a big way. The fast-growing company just debuted the Infinite Makeline, an automated assembly system that can produce up to 500 bowls per hour from 68 ingredients, with average order-to-ready times under three minutes. The first system is already operating at Wonder’s Midtown East location in NYC, where a single line supports six different restaurant concepts. Wonder plans to roll the technology out to tens of additional locations across the Northeast, DMV and Texas in 2027.
If the technology looks familiar, that’s understandable. Infinite Makeline is the latest evolution of Spyce, the robotic restaurant startup acquired by Sweetgreen and turned into its Infinite Kitchen — a technology we’ve followed closely at Ottomate as Sweetgreen began deploying it across its restaurants. Sweetgreen sold the business to Wonder late last year for $186 million, while retaining the right to use the technology in its own stores. As we’ve explored with Hyphen and the broader automated makeline category, the promise here goes well beyond simply replacing someone scooping ingredients into a bowl: these systems could fundamentally change the throughput, labor model and even the kinds of locations that fast-casual restaurants can economically operate. But while the numbers look great on a spreadsheet, getting it to work in-store and at-scale has taken some time.
So what happens when technology developed around a relatively constrained salad menu suddenly has to serve six restaurants at once? I spoke with Kale Rogers, Sr. Director of Robotics at Wonder and one of Spyce’s original co-founders, about what his team had to rebuild for Wonder, what a decade of operating robots in real restaurants has taught them and why he thinks the bigger opportunity for automation is to increase variety while decreasing complexity.
Jonah Bliss What’s changed about the technology since the Infinite Kitchen days at Sweetgreen, and what new capabilities did you need to build for Wonder?
Kale Rogers: The biggest change is going from one concept to six different restaurant concepts off the same Makeline. To do this successfully, you have to be authentic to the offering – meaning you need new ingredients, plating styles, packaging types and team member workflows. What started as a relatively limited menu has become a highly flexible platform capable of supporting multiple restaurant concepts simultaneously, while maintaining consistency, speed and quality standards our customers expect.
The Infinite Makeline can now work with 68 ingredients and serve six different restaurant concepts. How did you go about making a system originally designed for a more focused menu that flexible?
For us, it always starts with working alongside the culinary team to ensure we are handling the ingredients, plating and preparation to make the best meals. Often this can be messy but detailed work, such as dispensing lots of portions of salad greens or dialing the exact plating of our chicken souvlaki. That said, we are fortunate to have designed a flexible system with a dispenser design that can accommodate a vast number of ingredients. This allowed us to move quickly to create new sizes, plating routines, packaging holders, etc., but our core hardware DNA stayed the same. This also gives us the flexibility to add many more restaurant concepts in the future.
What have you learned from years of operating Infinite Kitchens in actual restaurants that has influenced this new generation of the technology?
The biggest lesson is that uptime and consistency matter more than any single spec. It’s easy to build a system that's fast in a lab. It’s much harder to build one that’s fast at the 12:15 lunch peak, day-in-and-day-out. Running Infinite Kitchen in a live restaurant has taught us where the real friction lives – ingredient replenishment, cleaning cadence, how operators troubleshoot in the moment – and a lot of the Infinite Makeline’s design is a direct response to that. We’ve also built to a standard where the system has to work every time, since that’s what our teams and customers expect.
Wonder is a very different environment from Sweetgreen, with multiple restaurant concepts operating out of the same kitchen. What new opportunities does that model create for automation?
The Makeline was built specifically for the level of complexity involved in preparing multiple concepts side by side in one kitchen. It's part of a broader ecosystem of software, automation, kitchen operations, and real-time data working together to execute meals consistently at scale while continuously improving. Because it’s deeply integrated into Wonder's technology platform, the Makeline can seamlessly coordinate with incoming orders and kitchen workflows in real time, helping our teams stay synchronized during peak periods. That integration is what makes the multi-concept model work. For customers, it means faster service, greater consistency, and expanded access to great food without compromising quality. We will continue to expand on this idea of increasing variety while decreasing complexity with each new product we build.
You’re quoting capacity of up to 500 bowls per hour and average order-to-ready times in about three minutes. What does a typical order’s journey through the Infinite Makeline actually look like?
An order comes in and gets routed to the Makeline along with the recipe and restaurant concept it belongs to. The system pulls from up to 68 fresh ingredients, portioning and layering the bowl in the correct sequence before passing it to our chefs for finishing touches and quality review. Depending on the recipe, a bowl may move through the Makeline multiple times during preparation. Order-to-ready time averages around three minutes, and at full capacity the system can produce up to 500 meals per hour. For the customer, all of that complexity should be invisible. They simply receive a fresh, accurate, made-to-order meal in minutes.
How does the Infinite Makeline change the way employees work in a Wonder kitchen? What tasks are being automated, and where do people remain particularly important?
