Grocery Stores Are Using ‘Salad Robots’ to Replace Salad Bars During COVID

Because if there's one thing we NEED to have, it's salad bars, am I right?

Okay, maybe that's a bit far-fetched, but I'm biased because I love salads. And I love salad bars. And I was sad to see COVID-19 ruin that, but I totally understand - food, left out in open air for people to touch and breathe all over is NOT a good idea during a global pandemic.

Salad bars, however, are a big part of the business for a lot of grocery store chains.  So, what do these chains do when they can no longer offer the option? Turn to the nerds...er, the robots.

Sally the Salad Robot is the latest brainchild to come out of the coronavirus pandemic. One of the first chains to use the robot is called Piggly Wiggly; there aren't any locations in Michigan, but there were a LOT of them when we lived and worked in Wisconsin. Hopefully, Kroger and Meijer catch on to this.

The salad robot was created by a California company called Chowbotics, and it creates salads from inside a hermetically-sealed machine and limits human contact.

According to the Chowbotics website, Sally is a six-foot-tall machine that weighs around 750 pounds can hold around 22 different ingredients to create a salad with eight components in 90 seconds.

As a salad AND a salad bar fan, I really hope that this is something that catches on in national chains. I'd love to be able to use this at Kroger! Maybe they can even create a sushi robot? Or is that wishful thinking?