Spyce Kitchen or just Spyce was a

robotic Robotics is an interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist human ...

-powered

restaurant A restaurant is a business that prepares and serves food and drinks to customers. Meals are generally served and eaten on the premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services. Restaurants vary greatly in appearan ...

which prepares food in "three minutes or less".

History

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, and ...

graduates Michael Farid, Brady Knight, Luke Schlueter and Kale Rogers developed the kitchen using seven autonomous work stations to prepare bowl-based meals using healthy ingredients such as

kale Kale (), or leaf cabbage, belongs to a group of cabbage (''Brassica oleracea'') cultivars grown for their edible leaves, although some are used as ornamentals. Kale plants have green or purple leaves, and the central leaves do not form a head ...

bean A bean is the seed of several plants in the family Fabaceae, which are used as vegetables for human or animal food. They can be cooked in many different ways, including boiling, frying, and baking, and are used in many traditional dishes th ...

s and

grain A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and legum ...

s. The four graduates wanted to make healthy meals more affordable, so they built the robotic technology and initially served the food to students at an MIT

dining hall A cafeteria, sometimes called a canteen outside the U.S., is a type of food service location in which there is little or no waiting staff table service, whether a restaurant or within an institution such as a large office building or school ...

. The group received the $10,000 “Eat It” Lemelson-MIT undergraduate prize in 2016 as one of America's top two collegiate inventors in

food technology Food technology is a branch of food science that deals with the production, preservation, quality control and research and development of the food products. Early scientific research into food technology concentrated on food preservation. Nic ...

. The four then teamed up with chef

Daniel Boulud Daniel Boulud (born 25 March 1955 in Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu) is a French chef and restaurateur with restaurants in New York City, Palm Beach, Miami, Toronto, Montréal, Singapore, the Bahamas, the Berkshires and Dubai. He is best known f ...

to create the new

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to customers and the prices. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-established seque ...

for their restaurant. Prices start at $7.50 for an entire meal in a bowl at their first real branch, which opened on May 3, 2018, in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, Massachusetts. Referred to as the "Spyce Boys", the four founders were inspired by their experiences as hungry

student athlete A student is a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution. In the United Kingdom and most commonwealth countries, a "student" attends a secondary school or higher (e.g., college or university); those in primary or elementar ...

s on tight budgets. Spyce Kitchen automated cooking units also clean up after cooking and dirtying the cooking apparatus.

Funding

Spyce raised $21 million in

series A funding A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

in September 2018, led by venture capital firms

Maveron Maveron is an American venture capital firm that invests in consumer-only and early-stage companies, with offices in Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California. The firm was co-founded by Dan Levitan and former Starbucks chief executive Ho ...

Collaborative Fund Collaborative Fund is a venture capital firm focused on providing seed and early stage funding to technology companies. __TOC__ Firm Founded in 2010 by Craig Shapiro, the firm is based in New York City, New York, and manages approximately $2 ...

, and

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successfu ...

Acquisition by Sweetgreen

In 2021, the company was acquired by

Sweetgreen Sweetgreen (legally Sweetgreen, Inc., stylized as sweetgreen, previously swɘetgreen) is an American fast casual restaurant chain that serves salads. It was founded in November 2006 by Nicolas Jammet, Nathaniel Ru, and Jonathan Neman. In August ...

, a chain of salad restaurants.

Restaurants

Spyce operated and then shuttered two restaurants in the Greater Boston Area. Their first restaurant was located at 241 Washington St, MA in downtown Boston. Their second restaurant, which opened in February 2021, was located at 1 Brattle Sq, MA, at Harvard Square.

Closure

Both Spyce restaurants would be closed following the Sweetgreen acquisition. The downtown Boston location would be closed October 22, 2021 "to focus on developing technology for Sweetgreen restaurants." The Harvard Square location would be closed February 18, 2022 for similar reasons.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://www.spyce.com/ Robotics Robotic restaurants