2 min read- White Castle is partnering with Automated Retail Technologies to roll out Crave & Go hot-food kiosks.
- The company says the vending-style machines will start with 1,000 locations in places like campuses, hospitals, and workplaces.
- White Castle expects the kiosk expansion to continue throughout 2026.
Can you imagine walking up to a vending machine, pressing a few buttons, and having a hot White Castle Slider come shooting out at you? That is the kind of thing dreams are made of, as Hilary Duff once taught us. Only now, in 2026, is that dream apparently becoming a real thing.
White Castle is expanding beyond its restaurants and freezer-aisle sliders with a new vending-style setup called Crave & Go. The fast-food chain has teamed up with Automated Retail Technologies, LLC to roll out hot-food kiosks that will dispense White Castle favorites on demand in places where a full restaurant may not exist.
The plan starts with 1,000 locations, with kiosks expected to pop up in places like college campuses, hospitals, workplaces, and transportation hubs, giving people a shot at hot sliders in the kind of places where you usually have to settle for a sad granola bar or a vending-machine bag of pretzels.
According to White Castle chief marketing officer Jamie Richardson, the whole point is to give people another way to get the chain’s food right when the “cravings strike,” and it’s hard to argue with the logic. If your options are “mystery sandwich sitting under a heat lamp” or “freshly dispensed White Castle slider,” the winner feels pretty obvious.
The kiosks are being powered through ART’s Just Baked platform, which is already used in busy public spaces, and White Castle says the machines will make the food to order. The two companies also plan to use the partnership to test future menu items built specifically for these automated setups, which means this may be only the beginning of the robot-slider era.
Deployment has already started, and the companies say the early response has been strong with more locations expected to come online throughout 2026.
The future may be confusing and terrifying in a lot of ways, but if it also includes hot White Castle sliders coming out of a machine when you need them most, I’m willing to hear it out.