Sweetgreen is working to shift away from its salad-centric brand image, expanding its menu to appeal to a broader audience. Last year, it began introducing more robust options, launching hearty Protein Plates stacked with roasted vegetables, grains, and proteins like Miso Glazed Salmon and Hot Honey Chicken, to attract customers seeking more substantial, dinner-worthy meals.
Building on this approach, it rolled out Caramelized Garlic Steak earlier this year. Available as a protein plate, warm bowl, and salad, each version showcased grass-fed, pasture-raised beef. The item quickly gained traction during the pilot run, appearing in nearly one in five dinner orders, and it led to the chain’s highest single-day sales in history upon going national. Sweetgreen continued the momentum this fall with the addition of Maple Glazed Brussels Sprouts as a limited-time, seasonal item.
DOWNLOAD: Average-Unit Volumes for Top Fast-Food Chains
The chain is now venturing even further from its salad roots with the addition of Ripple Fries, which are currently being tested in Los Angeles. These crispy, air-fried fries—cooked in avocado oil and paired with pickled ketchup and garlic aioli—are expected to debut nationally sometime in 2025 if test results are positive.
Looking ahead, CEO Jonathan Neman sees additional opportunities for menu expansion, including desserts, side dishes, expanded beverage options, and a handheld item that taps into the sandwich or wrap space. He emphasized that any new items will align with Sweetgreen’s high sourcing standards, featuring fresh, seasonal, and organic ingredients free from artificial additives and prepared without seed oils.
“We’ve seen a lot of our customers resonate as we take this philosophy of how we make our food and apply it to other things,” he said during the chain’s Q3 earnings call last week. “We want to disrupt fast food. We want to give you those things that you want, that you’re used to eating—things like fries—and do it in a Sweetgreen way, in a way that we kind of think about as a permissible indulgence.”
The broader menu strategy is paying off for the fast casual. Same-store sales were up 6 percent in Q3. Growth was led by emerging markets with the Midwest, Texas, and the Southeast all comping double-digits. The chain attributed 4 percent of its comp growth to pricing, with 2 percent coming from both traffic and menu mix, including the Carmelized Garlic Steak dishes. Those offerings, along with the Protein Plates, are driving traffic and sales during weekends as well as during the dinner daypart, which accounted for around a third of sales last year but is holding steady at approximately 40 percent in 2024. Both show higher check averages compared to weekday lunch.
READ MORE:
Can Sweetgreen Turn a Profit in 2024?
Sweetgreen Goes All-In with Automated Restaurants
Restaurant-level margin in Q3 was 20.2 percent, versus a 19 percent margin a year ago. That’s more than 100 basis points of improvement from Q3 2023 and marks the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year restaurant level margin expansion. The chain narrowed its net loss to $20.8 million, down from $25.1 million a year ago.
As it expands its menu, Sweetgreen is focused on reducing operational complexity in its restaurants to enable ongoing culinary innovation. In Q3, it simplified its broccoli prep and tested destemmed kale in select markets, which it plans to roll out fleet-wide next year. It is also in the process of updating cooking recipes to optimize oven capacity while improving the consistency of its cooked ingredients.
The goal, according to Neman, is to shift team members’ focus into prioritizing guest interactions and speeding up throughput.
“In a business of seconds and cents, we believe every operational detail matters, not only to drive efficiency, but also to enhance the Sweetgreen experience,” he said.
Neman added that the chain is rolling out an AI-driven labor scheduling system as part of that commitment to continuously improving the employee experience.
“With this tool, team members can take ownership of their schedules through an app, all while aligning staffing needs with guest demand,” he said. “By harnessing machine learning and reducing the administrative load, head coaches can focus on spending more time with guests, coaching our teams, and driving better results in our restaurants.”
Last week, Sweetgreen expanded the pilot to 70 restaurants across six markets, and it anticipates having the tool fully deployed across the fleet in Q2 2025.
The chain also plans to launch a new loyalty program next year. Sweetgreen initially introduced its loyalty program, Sweetpass, in 2023, offering both a free and a paid subscription model. Subscribers received perks like a $3 daily discount for either $10 per month or $100 per year. Neman didn’t offer details on what the fresh program will look like, but said he anticipates it will enable the brand to build stronger connections with guests and boost traffic in the process.
Yet, Sweetgreen’s biggest tech move continues to be its Infinite Kitchen, a model that’s drawing industry-wide attention. The company began Q3 with two Infinite Kitchens. Now, it has 10 of the robotic makelines up and running, three of which were opened in the past few weeks alone.
Neman said the technology is “transforming the guest experience” by enabling a faster and higher-quality food experience. This is reflected in guest surveys from the company’s Penn Plaza location in New York City. It was the first existing store to be retrofitted with the automated food assembly engine and reopened in mid-July. Since then, guests have been citing improvements not only in speed, but product quality and consistency.
“We attribute this to the Infinite Kitchen’s advanced temperature control systems designed to optimize food freshness and quality,” Neman said. “By integrating precise climate management for ingredients and prepared items, the Infinite Kitchen maintains the ideal conditions needed to ensure consistent flavor, texture, and food safety.”
Guests can now receive their order within five minutes, he added, making Penn Plaza the fastest way to get Sweetgreen in the Big Apple. Half of surveyed guests reported visiting more frequently since the renovation.
“Additionally, team members at Penn Plaza have expressed that the efficiency of Infinite Kitchen allows them to focus on their true passions—preparing food, elevating the culinary experience, and providing exceptional hospitality,” Neman said. “This is creating a more engaging work environment.”
In September, turnover for the class of Infinite Kitchens that were open for the full month was “meaningfully lower” than both the class of new restaurants and the fleet average, he added. And one initial learning from Penn Plaza has been a “noticeable increase” in native digital sales with higher ticket and frequency. The store is also achieving all of the financial metrics Sweetgreen is seeing across its class of automated restaurants, including 700 basis points in labor savings.
The company is currently retrofitting a store in Willis Tower in Chicago and on Wall Street in New York with the tool. Those projects should be completed by the end of Q4. Looking ahead to 2025, Sweetgreen expects to open at least 40 new restaurants. Approximately half of those will be powered by the robotic makeline, which means that by the end of next year, Sweetgreen expects to have nearly triple the number of Infinite Kitchens in its fleet.
Sweetgreen opened five restaurants in Q3, three of which came online late in the period to align with the Infinite Kitchen production schedule. Openings in Columbus, Ohio, and Charlotte, North Carolina—two new markets for the company—had some of the best opening weeks in Sweetgreen’s history, following Seattle’s strong opening at the beginning of the year.
“Successful openings like these further our conviction that our brand has significantly greater reach than our current physical footprint and that there is significant white space for our category defining concept,” Neman said.
