Sweetgreen Inc. appears to be backtracking from a pledge to bring automated equipment to all its heathy, fast-casual restaurants.

The Jefferson Park chain’s chief financial officer, Mitch Reback, said that its Infinite Kitchen model would be used in 50% of its new stores during Goldman Sachs’ Global Retailing Conference earlier this month.

According to a story at Nation’s Restaurant News from Sept. 6, Reback said that while the Infinite Kitchen fully automated store model has higher margins and lower employee turnover rates, the company won’t convert every store to this model.

“I don’t think you’ll see them in every single store for the reason that we have a lot of older smaller stores in the D.C. area and Philadelphia, and we would probably not go back and retrofit,” Reback said during the conference. “We’ve disclosed that 50% of new stores will use the Infinite Kitchen model.”

A 50% automation rate is a far cry from Chief Executive Jonathan Neman’s claims that Sweetgreen will be a fully automated chain by 2028. Even beyond figuring out the logistics of converting old stores to robotic kitchens, a one-size-fits-all approach to operations technology could be limiting as Sweetgreen aims to grow to 1,000 stores by 2030, Nation’s Restaurant News said.

“We previously just had one format, and now we like having more tools in the toolkit,” Reback said at the conference. “It allows us to meet our customers where they are (and) serve them in better ways. We have a digital pickup-only store in a crowded area in D.C. and we’re looking to spread that format to more crowded urban centers. We continue to see the use case for more drive-thrus, and we want to open a drive-thru format with Infinite Kitchen.”

The Infinite Kitchen is the automated service that Sweetgreen began more than a year ago with a store in Naperville, Illinois. It also has an automated kitchen in Huntington Beach.

Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen store models were developed in partnership with robot-powered kitchen Spyce, which Sweetgreen acquired in 2021. The automation technology passes bowls down a conveyer belt rather than having humans stand at each station, according to Nation’s Restaurant News.

As of the end of the second quarter on June 30, Sweetgreen had 231 owned and operated restaurant locations in 20 states and Washington, D.C.