As we approach the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference, it’s a good time to ask what the heck is actually working in restaurant technology.
Many highly automated or full-on robotic solutions came and went in years past, and the same is true in 2026. Some seem promising, while some previously hyped things are losing their shine—and some attempts have imploded completely.
Sweetgreen remains a leader, but it does not want to build the automation stuff itself anymore. Its Infinite Kitchen, the automated line that assembles bowls with about half the usual staff, has been the clearest margin proof point of kitchen automation out there today. The flagship in Naperville, Illinois, posted a 31.3 percent restaurant-level margin in its first year, well above a conventional store, and the company has told investors those units run with lower turnover and faster throughput. By the middle of 2026, there were 35 of them across 287 restaurants. Despite the success, Sweetgreen opted not to keep building the actual robots.
In November 2025 Sweetgreen sold Spyce, the division that actually built the Infinite Kitchen, to the pivot-happy Wonder for $186 million, choosing to shed the engineering and refocus on running restaurants.
California Pizza Kitchen in August promised a new fleet of automated kiosks, up to 1,000 of them over three years. Retail automation firm T-ROC Global will operate the pizza bots, which are reportedly able to cook a 7-inch pizza in about 90 seconds, with target sites in hospitals, hotels, airports, offices and stadiums. That many locations promised is a typical moonshot robot plan, but lots of tech firms with similar aspirations have fallen far, far short. Time will tell.
At the other end is Flippy. The former darling of restaurant automation that hit the cover of Franchise Times back in February 2020 is grinding some gears. The revenue and footprint of parent company Miso Robotics has been in decline, and the number of installed robots actually shrank, to around 14 robots by the end of 2025 from 17 two years earlier across White Castle, Jack in the Box and others.
That’s a long way from the 100-restaurant rollout White Castle announced back in 2022.
Most telling, Miso ended its relationships with Panera Bread and with CaliBurger, the burger chain that shares common ownership through Cali Group and gave Flippy its very first home. When the sibling company that helped invent you quietly pulls the robot, that’s not a great sign. But here’s hoping Flippy flips again because it is cool technology, but maybe not cool enough for the estimated $5,000 per month in operating costs.
But the “move-fast-and-break-things” award goes to Steve Ells, who launched the automated plant-based Kernel back in 2024 with a goal of 15 locations over the next two years. The promise was for three employees to support a robot dropping plant pucks on a grill for customers delighted to pay $9 for a not-chicken robo burger. In early 2025 it rebranded to Counter Service as Ells seemingly said, “screw it, we’re doing a deli.” It was a noble test of extreme labor and kitchen efficiency, but whether it was the bot or the food that failed, the world may never know.
Garbled voice ordering
For all the brand’s other troubles, the FreshAI system at Wendy’s, built with Google Cloud, has run since 2023 and brought artificial intelligence voice ordering to hundreds of the chain’s drive-thrus. The company reported about an 8 percent bump in margin and 22 fewer seconds of service time. Those are numbers an operator can actually get excited about.
Taco Bell is the cautionary tale. The chain put voice AI in more than 500 drive-thrus and has processed millions of AI orders, but it spent much of 2026 walking back the hype. Now, the company is coaching employees to jump in earlier when the bot is having trouble.
Both Wendy’s and Taco Bell are using a pretty similar concept, but it shows that AI is not one-size-fits-all. Or maybe the tech broligarchs never trained the robots to understand someone slurring their way through a Cheesy Gordita Crunch order with techno blasting in the background.
AI still vibing as promises fall short
There is a genuinely exciting or terrifying prospect in the tech world right now: The idea that AI could be a sledgehammer aimed at the software monopolies that chip away at every restaurant.
The clearest example is the bold middle finger to the restaurant tech software industry from juice chain Keva, which in an interview with Restaurant Business shared how it’s using AI to replace various software subscriptions. Keva went to its software vendors and told them to cut their rates or be replaced. About half agreed. Keva cut ties with roughly five apps and rebuilt them with Anthropic’s Claude. The company expects to save about $30,000 a year in subscription fees.
Keva is an eight-unit brand, but Starbucks is running the same play at a very different scale. Bloomberg reported the company is bringing software development in-house, using AI and replacing systems from Microsoft and IBM.
Starbucks spends around $400 million a year on software, and chief technology officer Anand Varadarajan told staff there were “clear opportunities to reduce the spend,” with the company targeting roughly $40 million in technology savings this year. IBM and Microsoft shares both dipped on the news.
But to anyone cheering the “SaaSpocalypse” (SaaS stands for software-as-a-service) be wary; a system built over a weekend by a vibe-coding novice puts you at some serious operational risk.
Survey data from the tech supplier Qu found that about 51 percent of limited-service brands are investing in AI, yet very few report that any of it has moved the needle in a way they can measure.
Whatever tech you’re excited about this conference season, take your hype with a grain of salt. Of course there are loads of great speakers and smart people at the Restaurant Finance & Development Conference to help you sort through the wheat and the chaff.
Nicholas Upton has reported on retail and restaurant technology for more than a decade. His Tech Stack column aims to distill complex ideas into actionable insights. Send interesting tech topics to [email protected].
