Inexperience can be a powerful advantage. Just ask Sweetgreen cofounders Jonathan Neman, Nicolas Jammet, and Nathaniel Ru, who credit much of the chain’s success to their lack of restaurant know-how.
Frustrated with limited options for healthy and affordable food, the three friends hatched the idea to provide fresh salads in a quick-service setting in 2006 as business students at Georgetown University. They signed a lease for their first location during senior year and spent the months leading up to graduation working on the plan while juggling classes.
“We were always complaining about the food in the cafeteria and how we didn’t see anything around us that really fit what we were looking for,” Jammet says. “The places that people craved the most, were the most accessible, and had the coolest brands were all the least healthy. For us, the friction was around doing all of those things with food that is actually good for you.”
Along with a passion for food and an interest in nutrition, they bonded over their shared experiences as children of immigrant entrepreneurs. That was a big source of inspiration when they decided to strike it on their own instead of pursuing careers in investment banking or financial planning like most of their peers.
“We knew we wanted to be entrepreneurs,” Neman says. “We also knew nothing about restaurants, which was definitely a good thing, because we probably wouldn’t have done it if we knew then what we know now. But at the time, we were like, ‘How hard can it be?’”
It didn’t take long to find out. Signing their first lease and raising money for the first time as college students was a daunting process. It took a full month of cold-calling landlords every day before they finally secured a meeting. And they were met with plenty of raised eyebrows when they started pitching the idea to potential investors. Many people couldn’t quite picture a quick-service concept that focused on bowls of vegetables back then. Some didn’t even consider it a legitimate meal.
“Just running the gauntlet of raising money and convincing people that this was real—we had to have so much conviction in what we were building,” Jammet says. “We were figuring it all out as we went along, everything from fundraising and signing a lease to designing a restaurant. The whole time, we were so confident that this product and this experience should exist in the world. We never worried about that part, even while we were learning everything else about how to actually bring it to life.”
The cofounders managed to scrape together around $350,000 to fund the venture. Two months after graduating in 2007, they launched Sweetgreen from a 560-square-foot cottage-style site dubbed the Tavern. The limitations of the space—a small makeline and minimal storage—pushed them to create a simple menu centered around seasonal produce, with an emphasis on the quality and source of the ingredients.
The trio didn’t initially set out to build something that could someday scale from coast to coast. But the scope of their ambition grew as they delved deeper into the project.
“It started off with wanting to build something for ourselves, our friends, and our community, but as soon as we started to dig in, we were like, ‘This could be much, much bigger,’” Neman says. “I don’t think we ever realized how big it could get. And every year that goes on, the aperture increases of how big the problem is and how great the opportunity is.”
The Digital Pivot
First-principles thinking is about discarding inherited assumptions and norms. It’s a problem-solving approach that involves distilling things down to their most basic parts and building based on those fundamental truths.
Neman, Jammet, and Ru’s inexperience pushed them to adopt this mindset when creating Sweetgreen. It’s why they view their outsider perspective in those early years as a key asset. With no preconceived notions about how things “should” be done, they were free to rewrite the playbook and challenge the legacy model that most quick-service chains were built on.
Case in point? The cofounders admit they “didn’t really know” how traditional supply chains worked when they were starting out. They just wanted to bring a sense of culinary credibility to a category that had largely become commoditized. That meant working with local farmers to secure the best ingredients when they were in season.
“We knew that doing that at scale would have to start with building these regional, sustainable supply chains across the country, but we had no idea how hard it would be or why it was such a crazy, maybe disruptive idea at the time,” Neman says. “It ended up becoming a huge part of the playbook—understanding that if we want to create accessibility and convenience and also leverage local supply chains, it was more about going deep in each region instead of going broad.”
The trio spent the first six years bootstrapping the business and raising small amounts of funds through debt and equity to grow their footprint in Washington, D.C., before expanding to Philadelphia with a handful of stores. They tested and refined just about every tactic during this period, from building supply chains to scoping out real estate to embedding the brand in the local community.
A pivotal moment came in 2013 when Sweetgreen started plotting expansion into New York and Boston.
“We realized that we had to step up our game, because the world had already changed a ton from a competition perspective,” Neman says. “It forced us to double down on seasonality and localness with the supply chain, and to improve the food by really thinking about the culinary aspect.”
The world had also changed from a technology perspective. Sweetgreen launched two months after the first iPhone debuted, and by the time expansion entered the picture, smartphones had become a ubiquitous part of daily life.
“Technology wasn’t part of our original vision,” Neman says. “It didn’t really exist in restaurants yet. But we were there right at the very beginning of the world’s mobile transformation, and I think we were lucky that we were still so small when that happened.”
Sweetgreen got in on the ground floor during the early stages of the industry’s digital revolution. In 2013, it became one of the first in its category to create its own app and allow customers to order ahead on its website. The company started building its stores to accommodate higher digital order volume, adding extra salad prep lines in the back and allocating more space in the dining area for dedicated pickup shelving.
“Again, we took a very first-principles approach, saying, “If we want to create an app, that’s fine. But anyone can do that. How do we also build a restaurant that is digitally native in a way to support that omnichannel experience?’” Neman says. “It was almost like a refounding moment. We reimagined the experience with a digital mindset, and we brought this new idea when we went to New York and Boston with stores 20 and 21. That was really where the brand got to a much larger stage, and when we began to expand pretty rapidly across the Northeast.”
By 2018, orders through the app made up over 25 percent of total revenue. That continued growing as the platform went through a couple of iterations over the next few years to improve the user experience. All the while, the company was building an internal tech team to create a custom, native app that better reflected the in-store experience. That launched in 2016 and set a foundation on which the brand could further innovate.
The digital milestones piled on from there. The company introduced its B2B “outposts” in 2018, which serve as offsite drop-off points in offices and hospitals. In 2020, it became an early mover in developing its own native delivery experience alongside marketplace options.
Maintaining direct relationships with customers through owned digital channels has long been a key priority for the company. Along with the profitability gain, greater order frequency, larger average order value, and access to data are the core aims. It also helps Sweetgreen convey what makes it different through digital channels and why it stands apart from traditional fast food—all vital as expansion accelerated and the brand grew into new markets.
Scaling Smartly
By 2021, Sweetgreen had expanded to 13 states and Washington, D.C., built up regional supply chains with over 200 food partners, and was earning more than $300 million in annual revenue in 2021. Coming out of the pandemic, more than 70 percent of the business was flowing through digital channels.
That’s where things stood when Sweetgreen filed for an IPO in June 2021. It debuted on the stock market with a valuation of roughly $5.5 billion in November 2021.
One of the cases for going public was the idea that the fast casual’s awareness outsized its unit count. It had expanded fivefold in 15 years, but there were still just 150 units at the end of 2021 and a vision of 1,000 that had one prominent roadblock: profitability.
The topic has weaved through the strategy since then. In Q3 2022, Sweetgreen cut its workforce by 5 percent at the support center. It’s taken a more conservative approach to planting flags in new territories, prioritizing quantity over quality and securing the best available real estate. There’s also been plenty of learnings around in-store operations, staffing, general managers, training, and the internal promotion focus of bringing along leaders who understand the business and culture, and empowering them to open new stores.
Things have continued evolving on the digital front, too. Sweetgreen ventured into the drive-thru space with its Sweetlane—a pull-thru lane for digital customers who order ahead. The fresh format includes a large observation window, allowing customers to watch food being prepared in the open kitchen, much like in traditional locations. It introduced its first digital-only restaurant, removing dine-in seating and in-store ordering to focus solely on online and app orders. And last spring saw the launch of Sweetpass, the company’s first loyalty program in years. It features a free component and a paid component where guests receive $3 off daily orders and other exclusive perks for $10 a month.
The cofounders have spent a lot of time reflecting on why quality often declines as brands grow, and how they can avoid the same fate. It’s a central focus that’s unfolding in a few ways as the company learns and navigates from scale.
Jammet notes that preserving the integrity of regional supply chains has been a major part of the conversation since going public.
“If we wanted to, there were some really quick, easy things we could’ve done to change the profitability model just by divesting a bunch of stuff in the supply chain,” he says. “To still be talking about sourcing and seasonality and regionality at our scale is something people told us we shouldn’t and couldn’t do. But for us, the whole value prop of Sweetgreen—of this aspirational and elevated brand—is the quality of our food. There’s nothing more important than maintaining that.”
That constructive pressure is behind many of Sweetgreen’s decisions, including the integration of automation, which has quickly become one of its most talked-about initiatives.
All-In on Automation
Last year, Sweetgreen took a significant step toward the future when it unveiled the Infinite Kitchen, a fully automated assembly line capable of producing up to 500 bowls, plates, and sides per hour. That’s 50 percent more output than a typical restaurant’s front and digital makeline combined.
Employees still handle prep work and finishing touches. Where Sweetgreen sees real value in automation is improving order accuracy, portion control, food safety, and throughput, in addition to the obvious labor savings.
This type of technology has been on Sweetgreen’s radar for a while. Years ago, the cofounders started seeing parallels between the early days of digital ordering and the future potential of automation. And just like before, the company was the right size at the right time to become an early adopter—big enough to make a significant investment in transformative tech, but small enough to envision the future without worrying about a massive current footprint.
“We knew we needed to protect the supply chain and the quality of the food, but then we had this other huge piece of the business with the assembly of the bowls,” Neman says. “As people with not a lot of experience, we were like, ‘Why can’t we just automate this?’ We actually built a team internally and began trying to do it ourselves. Then we realized it is really, really, hard to do that sort of thing.”
The breakthrough came in 2016 when Sweetgreen encountered Spyce, a kitchen robotics startup serving salads and grain bowls in two Boston-based fast-casual restaurants—the first of which opened in 2018—powered by the Infinite Kitchen. Neman, Jammet, and Ru met Spyce’s founders early on, struck up a friendship, and kept in touch over the years.
“I think what really brought us together is that they’re mechanical and electrical engineers at MIT, but it wasn’t just about the automation for them,” Neman says. “We were both trying to do the same thing and provide healthy food at scale. They were just using automation to do it. We thought that if we can take their superpower and bring it together with our superpower around the quality of the food, it could be something really special.”
Sweetgreen acquired Spyce in 2021 and began fine-tuning its system for the menu and operations. True to form, the cofounders took a first-principles approach when figuring out how exactly they should go about bringing automation into their kitchens.
Instead of simply layering automation onto the existing model, they reimagined how their restaurants would operate from the ground up. This included introducing kiosks, concierge order ing, and moving food prep to the front of the kitchen.
One thing they wrestled with is the fact that for many people, there’s an ingrained notion that fast casual is synonymous with the customer-facing assembly line. It’s the visual cue that the ingredients are fresh and the food is customizable. What happens when you remove that element?
“What we’re interested in as we think about evolving our classic format is how we’re taking advantage of essentially not having a frontline and using that real estate as an experience, either for conversation, ordering, hospitality, or education,” Ru says. “It’s about giving ourselves the opportunity to create a customer experience that is more consistent and more accurate, but also more educational in nature, and really making it feel like a community space.”
Ultimately, the Infinite Kitchen is designed to optimize human connection, he adds. Sweetgreen even created a new restaurant host position to ensure automated locations are delivering on that heightened hospitality.
The focus on face-to-face customer interactions has given the cofounders a chance to revisit their hospitality roots by putting themselves back in that first restaurant, when they were working in the Tavern and introducing people to Sweetgreen for the first time.
“We’ve been thinking about what those interactions were like and how to get people excited about it,” Ru says. “We expect everybody to be fast, friendly, and accurate. We also know that it’s really hard to be all of those things at peak lunch rush when there’s a line out the door. What the Infinite Kitchen allows us to do is be friendly all the time because the machine is being fast and accurate. So much of this brand is about how you tell its story and then giving our team members the opportunity to have those moments of connection. That’s where we’re headed, because that’s really what builds loyalty.”
The first two restaurants equipped with the salad-making robot came online last year, one in Naperville, Illinois, and the other in Huntington Beach, California. Sweetgreen has since ramped up deployment, with the next wave of automated restaurants coming online in the second half of this year. Over a quarter of the company’s 24 to 26 new builds in 2024 incorporated the Infinite Kitchen, and one restaurant has been retrofitted as of October.
Sweetgreen is testing the assembly line engine in a variety of settings, from suburban to urban locations, to see how it performs across different types of real estate. The results have been promising so far. As expected, the automated system is delivering faster throughput, better order accuracy and consistent portions, and minimizing food waste.
Additionally, these locations are experiencing substantially lower employee turnover, with team members noting that the technology has created a more enjoyable and manageable work environment.
“We’ve been very focused on the team member experience,” Jammet says. “What really gets me excited here is that based on the early signs we’re seeing—the turnover, the team member energy, the ability to connect with customers—it just feels like that’s right where things need to be evolving.”
The assembly line engine could be applied to new formats, like digital-only and drive-thru stores, and even to something like an airport location in the future, if the opportunity arises. The idea is to have a standardized back-of-house kitchen that can fit in different geographies and real estate whenever and wherever it’s needed. That could prove especially useful for future Sweetlane sites.
“We only have one today, but we’re going to be experimenting with a few more,” Neman says. “It’s clearly the preferred channel, and it’s rapidly growing. If we want to compete with fast food from a convenience perspective, we know it’s a place we’re going to have to play in, and the Infinite Kitchen could be a huge unlock for that.”
Looking ahead, the pace of deployment is expected to continue accelerating, with the Infinite Kitchen model being used in 50 percent of new stores in the 2025 pipeline. The company expects a majority of new locations will incorporate automation within the next five to seven years. A significant portion of older stores will be remodeled to include the technology, too.
Beyond Salads
Even before the Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen had become widely recognized for its extensive use of technology. But it’s all in the name of supporting the brand’s larger mission to make healthy eating convenient and accessible. That can sometimes be overshadowed by the buzz surrounding its tech-forward, digitally-driven restaurants. So while the focus on sourcing isn’t new, it’s become more central in the company’s marketing lately.
“If you zoom out and look at our growth, we were really focused on broadening our channels and adding that digital connection for so many years,” Jammet says. “As we went public and started to look at how we can open up in more communities and reach more types of consumers, broadening the menu became a huge focus and opportunity.”
This shift has started to take shape over the past year with some notable menu additions. Last fall, the chain introduced a new category of protein plates, which the cofounders describe as “one step beyond the bowl.” Think heaping portions of roasted vegetables and grains topped with proteins like Miso Glazed Salmon and Hot Honey Chicken.
In February, Sweetgreen tested Caramelized Garlic Steak. That marked the first time the chain offered beef. The item was introduced in three forms: a protein plate, a warm bowl, and a salad, each featuring grass-fed, pasture-raised steak seasoned with a garlic spice blend and roasted for a deep caramelized char. Nearly one in five dinner orders during the pilot included the item, and when it launched nationwide a few months later, it resulted in the highest-grossing sales day in Sweetgreen’s history.
The expansion of protein offerings has been highly successful, achieving exactly what the company had hoped: eliminating the “veto vote” and drawing in new guests who don’t want salad for every meal. It’s also been a key driver of same-store sales during the dinner daypart, which grew from approximately a third of sales in Q4 2023 and approached 40 percent by Q2 2024.
There’s plenty of whitespace on the menu to continue moving beyond salads. Sweetgreen plans to accelerate its R&D and do more testing to see how it can broaden its offerings and serve more people while reinforcing the message around its food ethos.
“People are now expecting and excited about seasonal ingredients in a fast-food setting,” Jammet says. “That wasn’t the world we lived in 17 years ago. People told us that this wouldn’t be something you could scale in the beginning. Continuing to create that access and change how people view their relationship with food, and ultimately how it affects their health, is always going to be really, really big for us.”
The impact will only grow as the brand continues evolving and broadening its reach, he adds.
“What we’re doing is creating a brand that can do a lot of good for the individual, but also for the broader food system,” Jammet says. “As our platform gets bigger, we’re going to use not just our weight and our buying power, but also our voices, to continue to shift the conversation.”
