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Sweetgreen changed the sad desk lunch forever. But the 17-year-old salad chain, which has grown its footprint to 25 states and 250 locations, isn’t just for office workers. Since the pandemic, it’s been building out its presence in the suburbs and launching heartier meals to appeal to a broader base. The company added steak to its menu last year and, in March, debuted air-fried, seed-oil-free fries. There have been growing pains along the way. After going public in November 2021, the company has struggled to turn a profit. In 2024, it narrowed its net losses by 20% to $90 million and achieved full-year positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time. In the first quarter of 2025, the company was adjusted EBITDA positive, but same-store sales declined by 3.1%, a first-time decrease since the chain went public. Sweetgreen sees its new automated prep technologywhich it calls the infinite kitchenas a path forward for efficiency. Sweetgreen cofounder and CEO Jonathan Neman came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss salad prices, the rollout of infinite kitchen, and whether the company’s seed-oil turn makes it MAHA. In August 2021 Sweetgreen acquired Spyce, which makes automated kitchen technology, for $50.7 million. How are you incorporating robotics into your restaurants? It really started with this idea of how can we improve the customer experience? [Customers] love the sourcing, they love the scratch cooking, but oftentimes in our fast-paced environment, serving a lot of people in a short period of time, getting orders accurate and on time could be challenging. So we acquired this company called Spyce. The amazing founders are all still with us. They were engineers out of MIT who built this technology for their own restaurant company. We decided to join forces almost four years ago. We’ve seen significantly less turnover in the stores that have infinite kitchens. So far we’ve been able to create a better business model as well. We’re seeing some nice margin leverage, and over time we see it as a way to attack our price value equation even more. Were already starting to test how we can give some of those savings back to the consumer. The holy grail for us is if we can have food that tastes good, makes you feel good, and is at the right price. That’s where this technology can take us over time. We are very early in our development. Weve opened 12 restaurants with infinite kitchen technology. We’re going to open at least 20 more this year. We call it the infinite kitchen. We don’t consider it a robot. It is an automated makeline. Are you saving money because those restaurants require fewer employees? It requires fewer people on production, so sure. You still have a lot of people working there. You still have a management team. You still have a culinary team cooking and prepping the food. The infinite kitchen does most of the assembly, but there are a few elements that do not go into the automation. We have what we call a finishing station. It’s like a chef’s counter at the end where we finish off each bowl. Those are where things like salmon or avocado can be mixed [in]. Then there’s that hospitality component. So you are operating with about a third less labor in each of those restaurants, but when you walk in, you’ll still see a lot of people. Does the automated system also cut food waste? Yeah, because now we have a perfect understanding of what is being used and what’s needed. It’s not just the infinite kitchen, but the systems we built around it. There’s like a mission control where the team sees [things like whether] the chicken is running low. Time to fire more chicken. So we get this perfect ability to make sure we’re keeping the food as fresh as possible and reducing waste. I think the most surprising thing has been the improvement in actual product quality. We thought the product quality would be equal, but because of the way we hold the food in these temperature-controlled tubes where they’re pressurized, we’re seeing the bowls be even more vibrant in terms of taste, flavor, and color. What are the store formats youre investing in? Today we have our classic format, the classic Sweetgreen with a frontline and a digital makeline. We’ve introduced a pickup-only Sweetgreen, where there’s no frontline. It’s only app or kiosk ordering. We run a lot of our delivery business and our pickup business out of those restaurants. Then we have our infinite kitchen format. We [also] have a concept we call the Sweetlane, which is our version of a drive-through. We see a lot of potential in the Sweetlane format especially. We’re very excited about the Sweetlane coupled with the infinite kitchen because of the speed of service that we will be able to offer. The infinite kitchen incorporates AI technology. How else are you using AI? Weve been early adopters in a number of ways. We use it to forecast sales and deploy our labor. Weve begun piloting a number of different customer service tools and have seen huge improvements in our customer service scores. Over time we see an opportunity to leverage AI to truly personalize the ordering experience where based on your order history and your dietary preferences, you would have a different menu presented to you versus someone else. JP Morgan analysts cut Sweetgreen’s target share price from $32 to $25 last month, and explained the reduction by noting that Sweetgreen prices are 7% to 30% higher than those of its competitors. Do you think your pricing is fair? Its something we’re really conscious of and I think there are opportunities for us to have different pricing tiers to bring in more consumers. However, in terms of what we offer, were proud of our sourcing. Were proud of the way we treat our teams and the scratch cooking we put into our food. There is a cost to all that we do, and our customers value that. Our chicken never has antibiotics in it. Many of our competitors’ do. We make everything in our restaurant from scratch every day, whereas many of our competitors don’t. We have taken less price than the whole industry since COVID, even though theres been a ton of inflation. If you look at the price of a value meal at McDonald’s in California today, it’s about $18. How have you been able to keep prices the same while inflation has forced other companies to raise them? Much of it has been our lesser reliance on beef, which has seen the largest increases from an inflation perspective. I think price is important. We want Sweetgreen to be as accessible as possible, and we are doing all that we can through automation and other efforts. I will say that a custom bowl at Sweetgreen in most markets starts at under $10. In almost every city, we have different pricing tiers where we price largely dependent on the price of labor and real estate. We are charging at what we believe is a fair price for all that we’re doing, while still believing there’s an opportunity to offer different price tiers. But it all goes into what we’re putting into the food, and the fact hat we’re not processing our food. We’re not doing a lot of the things that traditional fast food does to drive down the cost. Take our fries, for example, most companies have frozen fries that they fry. We are hand-cutting our fries and air frying them every 15 to 30 minutes. I think most of our customers really value that. What is it going to take for the company to become consistently profitable? Sweetgreen was profitable on an adjusted EBITDA perspective last year and will increase that this year. The difference between adjusted EBITDA and net income is maybe what you’re referring to. Its our stock-based compensation and depreciation. So the way depreciation works in our company is that as we open a lot of stores, we depreciate them over the life of the lease. So it’s not a cash profitability from an accounting perspective, but from a pure cash perspective, we are profitable. In January, you posted a photo of yourself on X wearing a Make America Healthy Again hat that Sweetgreen sold as merch in 2016, before it became a political slogan. What do you think about the agenda of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? The reason I started this business was always the mission: I saw food as one of the pillars of health and such a big problem to solve. Making healthy food delicious and desirable, convenient, and more affordable is something that I’m very passionate about. If you look at what fast food has done, it solved one problem, but it created a whole other problem. I think bringing more real food to the public is a very good thing. Weve partnered with anyone inside the government or outside the government who was looking to promote this way of living and eating. We partnered with Michelle Obama [as part of her] Let’s Move [initiative]. We started something called Sweetgreen in Schools. In 2016, we had a festival and as a joke we made these Make America Healthy Again hats. I will only speak to the narrow parts that I have the knowledge in and affect my world. I think what [HHS has] done around food dyes and artificial ingredients that are in our food is undeniably amazing. I don’t know, Do you want your children eating that stuff? Let’s just put politics aside. I also think things like the fact that we spend $12 billion a year of SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits on soda that then makes people sick shouldnt happen. So there are parts of the agenda as it relates to food that I think are very on point. I think there’s a huge promotion of regenerative agriculture and more organic farming and the support of local farming. So there’s a lot of it that I definitely agree with. When it comes to things that are not in my lane, I have a rule that I dont talk about them. Kennedy has been a really big proponent of removing seed oil from food preparation. Sweetgreen did that in 2023. Why? We did it years ago, after hearing from our customers. Even though we were very proud of the type of oil we used, it was a high-oleic sunflower oil. Customers told us that they would come more often and they would become more loyal without seed oil. That was about two years ago before it got politicized. Everyone likes to politicize it. We’re not here to talk politics. I’m here to talk food and health. Sweetgreen recently launched a limited-time collaboration with Cote, the Michelin-starred Korean barbecue restaurant. What makes a good collaboration? One of the reasons we love to partner with chefs more than anything is that Sweetgreen is such a culinary-forward brand. While we are a fast-casual restaurant, we have full-service kitchens. We prep all our food from scratch. We are buying from many of the same farmers [that supply] a lot of the high-end restaurants. We heard from customers that they’re looking for bolder flavors and heartier dishes. So we’ve leaned into more protein-forward food. We thought it was a really cool way to tell that story with the best KBBQ chef in the world, David Shim, who happened to be a friend of ours. Years ago, when we started these collaborations [like with Blue Hill chef] Dan Barber, it was telling a story around the waste in the supply chain. Then it was David Chang, and telling a story about sustainability and sourcing kelp. When we came to California for the first time, we partnered with Jon & Vinny’s and then partnered with Nancy Silverton, classic California chefs, highlighting our produce with their culinary credibility. What innovations can we look for from Sweetgreen in the next year? Were focused on menu innovation and bringing more flavor and variety to the menu. One thing we’ve heard from our customers is they missed the seasonal menu. So that’s coming back in a big way, starting in July. We’re innovating a lot of things further up the funnel. Beverages are in tests today. Soft serve is a test that’s going on. We’ve talked publicly about the opportunity to introduce our version of a wrap. A lot of what Im focused on is continuing to elevate the core of what we do. Its about how do we get better as we get bigger, and how do we make our execution in the restaurant as consistent as possible.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ive been feeling grossly inadequate, career-wise. Some of this has been driven by my perception that the economy is failing and Im going down with it, and my addiction to reading industry trends on LinkedIn.Dont get me wrong, I love LinkedIn. The anticipation of logging on and, fingers crossed, earning my long-awaited prize of a new client, job invite or contract is what drives me. But lately, Ive been opening up to anxiety-inducing posts like, Last night, an AI destroyed my career opportunities, but now I have a million-dollar business, or My startup sold for $20 million, and Im an investor now, and I built an app that was so dumb, and then a community of millions downloaded it; heres how I did it! or I just earned a massive sponsorship and partnership with [name your favorite celebrity], and I just lost it. The upside of envy It seems like everyone but me is thriving in their new super-fab job, reaping the benefits of AI, or sharing highly informed commentary on a topic I know nothing about; then I see 15,000 engaging comments on their posts! Some people take selfies, use skin filters, and celeb-obsess on Instagram. But for me, Im all about LinkedIn and its been killing my creator spirit. But the real truth is very painful and inconvenient: I am coldly and blisteringly envious. Warren Buffet quipped: As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sinsexcept for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they didall it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside to it.But what if you could prevent this awful feeling, and turn it into a business opportunity? Even when you arent religious, this quote from the bible makes sense: “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice,” James 3:16. Right now, jealousy seems to be at an all-time high in the United States. Some people are having such extreme career and financial success these days. If you are like me, you scratch your head daily and ask yourself, “How they are doing this amid layoffs and a souring political and economic environment?” And then, “What am I doing wrong that I cant succeed too? Dont I deserve success? I work so hard.” I imagine that many of you who are reading this are, like me, not feeling successful or satisfied. I know this to be true because after I read yet another Im winning post, I go right to the comments. Im not seeing the glass half full when comments I read are lined with the bitterness of regret and the sour taste of envy. You know those posts, the ones where the first comment makes a resentful or snarky complaint about the privileged, the well-connected, or the trust fund baby, or how they slept their way to the top. The morally upright you tries to dismiss such comments, but the envy in us feels some satisfaction knowing that we are not alone. Feeling envious or jealous is no way to work or grow a brand or a business. At some point, it will consume your entrepreneurial spirit, your happiness, and your time, just like it did mine. But I decided to repackage how to approach my feelings of envy, and it placed me on a path of professional and creative recovery. Give these five ideas a try to see if they help you like they are helping me. 1. Define success Have we forgotten how to do this since we are so focused on other people? Do you define success as financial stability and comfort, or do you define it as having optimal health? Maybe you define success as finding hope, happiness, and abundance even in moments of despair? What does the outcome look like and what does it feel like for you? Defining your own version of success can arm you against self-pity, anger, and most certainly envy. Your version of success will be unique to you. After you define what success is for you, put the vision of success at the beginning of a journey map or flowchart and backtrack to get to where you are now. I find that seeing success first can prevent stagnation. As you build toward your vision of success, know that you will find envy potholes filled with people who appear to have already reached the goals you’ve been trying to reach for yourself. You may feel that the grass is greener on the other side, and that might be true. But this part of the story is about you finding a place in your own heart firstwhere you can see your own success on paper and begin to act. 2. Embrace social comparison Social media, with repeated use and exposure, makes us feel that we know successful people like they are friends, and that they see us. Social media is not real, and the people we see on it are not our friends. This actually reminds me of the woman on the plane who screamed That MF is not real! Remember her crash out the next time you see a person social posting their perfection. But scrolling with the intention to conduct research can help you learn, copy, admire, then repackage what youve learned to align with your own brand. Study competitive products, watch how your perceived competitor creates content, read their posts, add them to a social media monitoring platform and run analytics. Study, study, and study more. Become a student of your jealousy. Identifying insights instead of flaws is empoweringnot spiritually depleting and extractive. Copy what you are jealous of and apply your own creativity to it. Replacing your competitiveness with curiosity will be a mental and career game changer. Of course, you could put blinders on and never consume anyone else’s success content to keep your sanity. But if you are in business and are an entrepreneur like me, youll need to use all your social media tools for business outreach and to broadcast what problems you’re solving for others. 3. Express gratitude Speaking your gratitude out loud instantly changes your energy. Have you noticed that when you doomscroll you forget where you are and your surroundings go dark? I combat this when I do my morning runs. The first 10 minutes I express thanks for my health, my children, whatever is left over in my bank account, my current clients, current contractsno matter how small, the sun, moon, air, trees, and light. I also use a mantra. One of my mantras is I will bring health and wealth to Birk Creative this quarter.Gratitude and mantras pull me from barbed wire thoughts and back to the present moment, which is always the best place to be. Force yourself to speak positivity into existence. What also works for me is to put away my screens, take a deep breath, relax my shoulders, roll my neck, and stretch. This helps me to remember I am a human and connected to the earth. 4. Beat the algorithm Nope. There’s no way to beat the algorithm, but you can try to trick it. Force yourself to not look at, linger on, or tap at content that triggers your envy. Find and like content that is the opposite of what you typically consume. Click like on things that bring you joy, a smile, or a laugh. Just make sure something about it brings you to a place of learning that lines up with your vision of success. Focus on your bodys response to this feeling. Does your body relax or tense up? Do you keep scrolling or do you hang on and rewatch? Rewatching content to understand it is better for this exercise than empty scroling to the next post. There’s no way to stop unwanted content on social media channels from showing up, but you can program new content. Delete an app and dont visit it for a few days, maybe a week, and then reinstall it. Visit the profile of a person you are jealous ofmake a screen shot and repost something of theirs you like or recreate it to add your own spin. Experiment with this strategy every day for at least a week. As another idea, look for business inspiration quotes and like them or repost them. Prompt an LLM to give you five quotes on positivity, then plug them into Canva to make your own positivity quotes. Write an essay based on the quotes; relate it to your experience and share it. Whats your favorite color? Prompt and create a beautiful image online that includes your favorite color and use that image to accompany the post. Heres a prompt: A [fill in your color] flower floats above the ocean, under a [fill in your favorite color] sky with white fluffy clouds [water color painting style]. Use this image to accompany your essay; post it to your favorite social media channel. Stumbling across someone elses path of success can distract you with jealousy. Instead, try to find just one thing to authentically celebrate about the person or product you are jealous of. You know the saying: If you cant say something nice, dont say anything at all. Make a habit of finding something nice to say to combat your envy. 5. Create or refine your own brand If there was ever a time to get to know AI it would be right now. Even if you are tired of hearing about professional branding, creating your own is the one thing that will keep you from looking outward and being jealous and force you to look within and reinvent yourself. A professional and personal brand also helps to keep focused on creating your own platform for business growth and personal development. For those with a reservoir of content, go back to your saved articles, essays, YouTube videos, and social media posts, and repurpose them all using an AI tool like Whisper, Opus if its video, or Perplexity. Copy the words or YouTube link, paste it in the AI tool, and prompt it to create fresh buckets of bite-sized content that you can share. Or feed it to the AI and ask it to analyze your content and write your new professional brand statement. (To accompany this article, I created a playlist on YouTube called Songs to Help You Not Be Jealous.) Use these tools to help you hone in on what you are good at by reviewing your content or by helping you write new content. Be honest, talk about your interests and your skills with these AI tools; use them to help you create a fresh personal brand even if youve never had one. The exercise here is to get you to navel gaze a little bit and focus on your own ideas in order to avoid becoming lost in greener pastures. Transform your thoughts The bottom line is there’s no real way to avoid business envy and jealousy. Unless you are the rare person able to feel altruistic joy for someone else’s success, it’s unrealistic to not wish that what somebody has could be yours. But each time you see something that you’re jealous of or envious of, transform your thoughts and actions, learn from them, express gratitude, and create away. Eventually, if you stay consistent with learning, your professional jealousy will turn into greater self-awareness, which most often leads to your vision of success.
Category:
E-Commerce
Take a quick look around the office or scan the names of your colleagues on Slack. Two-thirds of your coworkers are feeling burned out. Maybe you are, too. In a survey conducted for Moodle, an e-learning tool, 66% of workers are struggling, citing too much work, not enough resources, and a poor economy. While all these circumstances have a role in burnout, there may be an internal problem also in play, according to Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore, coauthors of The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact. Your ego could be too noisy! A noisy ego describes a person who is constantly thinking about themselves, Moore says. Theyre asking Am I OK? Are they insulting me? Am I being positioned correctly? Its a self-referencing, self-oriented noise. A quiet ego is a term coined by Jack Bauer, a professor of psychology at the University of Dayton, and Heidi Wayment, a professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University. It describes a personality type characterized by being mindful, emotionally intelligent, compassionate, and growth-oriented. The quiet ego is an evolved person who’s integrated all the noise, Moore explains. Theyve been through life. Its where stress turns into growth; the next stage beyond emotional intelligence of self-awareness and self-regulation. Why We Shift into the Noisy Ego The noisy ego often gets triggered during a loss of vitality. Perhaps youre not getting enough sleep or youre not eating well. This is a really important transitional moment when the ego could get really noisy and make things difficult, Hull says. Your battery is basically drained, and there’s no energy left, Moore adds. [Your prefrontal cortex goes offline], and you’ve lost your ability to control things. You can’t blame the individual for all of it. It’s an equal balance of external factors and internal factors, and you can’t get out by yourself. Being in a crisis can trigger the noisy ego since it pushes you out of the familiar and into reaction mode. It can also stir up emotions that are uncomfortable to handle. You can easily slip into feeling out of controlanxious, afraid, and hopeless. Its also common to not ask for enough support, believing you can power through. But this can quickly become a place with a lot of negativity and too little positivity, Moore says. Shifting Back into the Quiet Ego Getting yourself out of your noisy ego involves positive psychology. How do you find gratitude and inspiration? Moore asks. How do you get a little bit of upward liftby socializing or taking a break? You build those positive resources, but you also have to resolve the negative with a friend, a coach, or by journaling. A good place to start is investigating the noise. When youre coming from a place of fear, the main negatives are worry, anxiety, sadness, disappointment, and anger. Look at each of those, Moore says. If you’re angry, what are the emotions telling you that you need more? Do you need more safety or stability? Then, how do you meet the needs of those parts of you? Curiosity is a superpower, but it isn’t accessible with a noisy ego. You need to quiet that energy to be more open and receptive. When you notice symptoms of burnout, Hull recommends reflecting on a time when things were working. What did it look like? he asks. Very successful people wouldn’t be in positions of success if they had always been burned out. They had to come from a place of having done well. But that noisy ego gets in the way, and they forget the gifts and talents and strengths that got them to that place of success. Hull recommends reflecting on a resource called the resourceful past. What got you through college? What got you your first job? Or try to remember a time that was really difficult. What did you do to get through that? he asks. Those capacities are still there. The Quiet Ego Is Your Natural State Its easy to forget what it feels like to have a quiet ego because we live in an overstimulated world. We become so caught up in the noise that we no longer recognize it, seeing it as normal. But the quiet ego is our natural and normal state, Moore says. Start noticing your heartbeat and your breathing, she suggests. It is a place of quiet. Think about a time when you exhaled and felt calm and in control. This place is a state of stillness, and it can become a refuge you visit when you want to regain control of your mind, Hull says. The challenge we have in our culture is that we’ve made [stillness] wrong. We think we don’t have time for that, that its wasteful. But when you get calmer, you start to explore because your ego is not in the way. “Its not about having no ego,” he adds. “Its setting aside the noise. Its the process of becoming awake to yourselfphysically, emotionally, and mentally. Your energy shifts to a calmer place. And from that calmer place, you can access creativity, ideas, and curiosity.
Category:
E-Commerce
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