Sally, the salad-making robot, may soon be coming to a lazy salad-making place near you if startup Chowbotics has its way. The machine, which can be leased for $500 to $700 a month or purchased for $30,000, has just made its first retail appearance at a Palo Alto cafe that happens to be owned by the guy who works as executive chef for Chowbotics, former in-house Google chef Charlie Ayers and that's Calafia Cafe & Market A Go-Go, as the Chronicle reports.
Via Instagram and the photo above, we see that Sally has previously popped up temporarily in San Francisco at WeWork Embarcadero.
The salad still requires a prep cook to stock it with 21 ingredients, including dressings, lettuces, vegetables, and avocado stored, of course, in lemon juice to keep from turning brown.
Ingredients are totally customizable, and the robot salad-tosser can be programmed to make a variety of pre-determined recipes. But, as some critics on YouTube have pointed out, it "doesn't even chop the vegetables."
CEO and founder Deepak Sekar raised $5 million in Series A funding back in March to start manufacturing his salad robots, and as TechCrunch reported at the time, Sekar had plans in place to put Sallys in the Campbell restaurant Mamma Mia's, and at the SF coworking space Galvanize.
Below, a demo video from an early, 2016 prototype.
