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Its one of the great questions of our modern age: How does Sweetgreen lose money selling $14 (and up!) fast casual salads and bowls? And not just a little money but $442 million in the last three and a half years and more than $908 million since 2014. Sweetgreen is having a disastrous 2025, with same-store sales down 7.6% in the second quarter after a Q1 drop of 3.1%, and a now aborted rollout of fries (how do you mess up fries?). The stock is down more than 70% this year. No one has ever grown a salad chain to Sweetgreens size, 260-plus restaurants and 2025 revenue tracking to more than $700 million. But if the company is to achieve its lofty goals, 1,000 locations mainstreaming its healthy and sustainable ethos, its foundersCEO Jonathan Neman, chief concept officer Nicolas Jammet, and chief brand officer Nathaniel Runeed to step aside. Let me tell you why. What the fries debacle reveals about Sweetgreens problems How the founderss obsession with tech ignores the secret that’s underpinned popular chains both customers and investors have loved Why the Sweetgreen founders can’t be fired Sweetgreen did not respond to a request for comment by press time. We’ll update this piece if the company responds. Fry Guys A salad with a side of fries is such an American cultural cliché that theres even a podcastthat adopted the phrase for its title. So in March 2025 when Sweetgreen added Ripple Fries to its menu nationwide, the move made perfect sense.”This is a way to show that you can come to Sweetgreen, eat a salad, and have a little bit of a permissible indulgence around fries,” CEO Neman told Fast Company in a piece timed to the rollout. Sweetgreens fries, a year in the making, came with the healthy halo of being air fried in avocado oil.”Its the first time we have a truly signature side,” Neman said. The other sides were fine, but now we have this staple. And theyre really addictive. Neman was excited to tell investors in May during its first quarter earnings report that the fries were a hit.Ripple Fries drove same-store sales improvement in March. They have become our most attached side item across channels, helping to lift overall ticket averages and broaden the meal experience. Notably, the strength has been consistent across all markets. But just three months later, in a shocking turn, that indulgence had become problematic, and Sweetgreen was going cold turkey. Neman broke the news he was dropping fries in an odd oh, by the way comment during the companys disastrous second quarter earnings call: If I could just mention one other thing, you know, no one’s asked about Ripple Fries, but I do think it’s important to bring it up. You know, Ripple Fries is something that we’ve learned consumers love. We had a great reaction from. But as we studied what it was doing to the restaurant operation and the distraction for our teams, we realized that it became a complexifier for us delivering on our core. So one of the other big changes we’ve made is starting next week, we will be discontinuing Ripple Fries in order to focus on our core. And in stores where we have tested this, we’ve seen huge improvements in customer satisfaction, because, again, teams can really focus on the core products. What the hell happened between May and August? What likely killed Sweetgreen’s fries Actually, the right questions to ask are what didnt happen before the March debut of fries? And why? That we even have to ask these questions is what leads me to believe Sweetgreen needs new leadership. The company appears not to have done enough testing of how Ripple Fries would affect restaurant operations. Company execs told Fast Company in March that theyd spent months testing the fries at some of its L.A.-area stores. But the best practices for testing a new product are to start with one high-performing store, move to a district-wide test that encompasses stores of varying quality, and then do a strict experiment to assess the economic impact of adding fries in a sufficient number of stores and for a meaningful amount of time so that theres virtually no doubt the new menu item will have the desired impact. Then you develop a rollout plan and train employees to make sure that you see the successful results of your experiment when you go national. In hindsight, a comment Neman made to Fast Company in March raises an eyebrow today. We know that people will attach it to their meal. The question is, will people come in more because of it? Will it drive actual core transactions for us, or will it just drive ticket? If he and the company truly didnt know the answers to these questions, then they didnt do enough testing and werent ready to rollout Ripple Fries. Sources familiar with Sweetgreen’s operations laud management’s innovation and willingness to try something bold, and they laud Neman’s decisiveness in killing Ripple Fries because of the impact it was having on the frontline restaurant staff’s ability to deliver salad and proteins consistently. In sum, they assert that Neman and senior leadership did everything right. Okey-doke! They also are quick to cite broader economic conditions that have inspired many Americans to eat out less or trade down for more value. Online, the disappointing earnings of Cava, Chipotle, and Sweetgreen inspired a “slopcession” discourse in the last week, lampooning the cooling societal ardor for eating all our meals out of a bowl piled with stuff. If fries were an isolated incident, or if all of Sweetgreen’s woes could be explained by fragile consumer confidence, perhaps I, too, could buy these narratives. But there are signs everywhere that Sweetgreen is struggling with its operations. Sweetgreen is not a good operator The most successful restaurant chains in history, fromWhite Castle to In-N-Out Burger to McDonalds to Chipotle, introduced innovative systems. High-performing chains need a good product, sure, but they rely on processes to get peole their food as quickly as possible and able to handle rush times. Sweetgreen’s leadership understands this and yet achieving it remains elusive. Look at what Neman had to say in May and then what he said in August. Heres the CEO in May: True operational excellence requires relentless attention to detail, especially now. That’s why our team is committed to optimizing every process, no matter how small, to drive continuous improvement. Now heres Neman in August: Today, about one-third of our restaurants are consistently operating at or above standard, while the remaining two-thirds represent a meaningful opportunity for improvement. Ouch! How are two-thirds of Sweetgreens restaurants below standard? One answer may be that the companys chief operating officer role has been a great source of instability. Since 2018, six people have rotated through the position. Sources familiar with Sweetgreen operations have high hopes for the latest COO, Jason Cochran, who is a former Chipotle VP of operations services, who was hired this spring. They also reaffirm the company’s high standards. But at present, Neman and company seem to do things that run counter to his statement about relentless attention to detail. Sweetgreen is on its third loyalty program in four years. After introducing its current one, SG Rewards, in April to replace its SweetPass subscription loyalty membership, Neman had to acknowledge that Sweetgreen faced a falloff in revenue from a small but highly important cohort of former SweetPass members following the discontinuation of the subscription program. Translation: It didnt anticipate that it should do whatever it could to take care of its best customers before revamping its loyalty program. Almost as bad, Neman revealed to investors that later this year the company would be adding the ability for customers ordering in the restaurants to scan their loyalty card and pay in a single transaction. Right now its a two-step process, and thats slowing down the restaurants lines, the very thing it desperately needs to fix. Sweetgreen failed to have its streamlined in-store system in place and hadnt thought about its most devoted customers before changing its loyalty program. This is another example of the lack of attention to detail thats bedeviling the company right now. Theres more! Its increasing portion sizes for chicken and tofu in an effort to deliver more value for customers but has given no indication how itll pay for these changes. Its reducing hold times for items, meaning that customers should get fresher food in their orders, but without addressing the potential that has on waste and what those costs could do for its restaurant-level profit margins (currently at 18.9%, below the 20% that investors would like to see). Its in the midst of another major test for a new product: house-made beverages. Theyre about to roll out to three markets, and Sweetgreen is testing four beverages. Leadership gave no indication to investors how the presumably time-consuming process of making drinks in house will impact operations at the two-thirds of its restaurants that are already underperforming. But a source with knowledge of Sweetgreen’s operations tells me that it has adopted a “stage-gate process” for product testing and it is being used on these beverages. Sweetgreens general and administrative costs, meaning corporate overhead, are well above that of their primary competitors. In the most recent quarter, its G&A was 18.6% of sales, compared with just 11.4% at Cava. Sweetgreens labor and occupancy costs of its locations are also a higher percentage of sales. In other words, its overhead is bloated. Chasing shiny baubles Fries! Drinks! More protein! Merch! And just this week, baby goats! Theyre all manifestations of Sweetgreens proclivity to chase shiny baubles rather than obsess over its restaurants’s execution. Sources with knowledge of Sweetgreen praise Neman for acting with urgency in rolling out generous protein servings and seasonal burrata bowls, for example. But from the outside, I find that the company’s most recent moves read as more frenetic than considered. This grasping for something magic that’ll make Sweetgreen appear to be more than a restaurant chain is most evident in the founderss longstanding interest in being perceived as a tech company. The companys early adoption of digital ordering and payments was laudable.Since then, though, theyve talked about but havent really delivered on everything from blockchain-based transparency of every ingredient to machine-learning algorithms to give each diner personalized recipes tailored to their tastes. Sweetgreens biggest bet has been on a robotic make line, an automated version of the row of ingredients that could be part of your order. Known as Infinite Kitchen, Sweetgreen acquired the tech in a $50.7 million deal in 2021. The company has been rolling these out in some of its new restaurants as well as retrofitting older ones. This past quarter, it opened nine restaurants, and four of them had the Infinite Kitchen tech. In theory, Infinite Kitchen solves a lot of problems for Sweetgreen at once. The machines can provide perfect portion control to keep food costs in line. It can operate more efficiently than a team of people. But theres a lot we dont know about Infinite Kitchen just yet: Theyre expensive to install$450,000 to $550,000and tariffs could impact the price. The oldest ones havent been in operation long enough for us to know how durable they are. As Sweetgreen continues to diversify from salads and bowls to heartier meals and sides such as house-made beverages, are the labor advantages that the robotic system offers nullified? Infinite Kitchens at least represent the first effort by the company to use technology to solve its biggest problemoperationsrather than mere magic dust sprinkles to make the company look like something its not. Great restaurant chains make for the best stocks The Sweetgreen founders obsession with tech always seemed like an expression of their envy as they watched tech valuations explode in the 2010s for products created by and/or for their generational peers, from Uber to DoorDash to the overvalued tech unicorn of your choosing circa 2019. Yet it belies the reality that the best-run restaurant chains can outperform even tech darlings. Chipotle: 3,340% growth from IPO to 2015, then another almost 800% under CEO Brian Niccol from 2018 to 2024 following the companys food safety problems in the mid-2010s Dominos: 5,438% from 2004 to 2020, surpassing that of fellow 2004 IPO Google, whose stock rose 2,939% during that time Panera: From 1999 until it went private in 2017, it was whats known as a 100-bagger, meaning that a $1,000 investment grew to be worth $100,000. If you take the companys stock from its 1991 IPO to 2017, it grew approximately 4,000%. Sweetgreen stock is down almost 83% in its less than four years as a public company. Time for a change Neman, Ru, and Jammet have led their company for 18 years now. They have achieved what seemed impossible once upon a time: creating a national chain based on healthy eating and sustainability principles. The trio deserves all the credit for doing so. But its time for them to step aside and hand the reins to an experienced operator whos a proven winner to Wall Street. Right now, the founders have the luxury of making this decision on their own. Much like a tech company, the trio has voting control at Sweetgreen, even though they own a small percentage of the companys shares. That means itd be nigh impossible for an activist investor to agitate for changes. But with cash dwindlingSweetgreen had $472M at the end of 2021 and$168M as of Q2 2025at some point its going to need more capital, especially if it cant tighten up its operations to generate more cash. At that point, one could imagine whomever provides that funding might require their departure as a condition of the money. Someone new needs to come in and look at Sweetgreen and see where its model needs to change to be a sustainable, profitable business. Where does the concept need to be rethought? Should it move more food preparation to central kitchens to improve consistency and lower costs? What precisely is the vision for a Sweetgreen of the future thatll get this concept to its stated goal of 1,000 locations? (Keep your eye on Monty Moran, who just joined Sweetgreens board of directors in June. Moran was president and then co-CEO of Chipotle during its run from 2005-2015, and now hes sitting right there.) In 2019, Inc. profiled Sweetgreen and its fixation on being a tech company. This bit hits different when you read it today: One gets the sense that Sweetgreens founders, who have been at this for over a decade and are still only in their early 30s, considered the idea of building a typical restaurant chain and cashing out simply unglamorous, boring. Its a little bit of a hamster wheel, admits Ru, describing the conventional strategy. Your growth is defined by opening new restaurants and driving more customers into busy restaurants. Yeah, thats the job! Theyve had 18 years to get this right. Theyve racked up more than $900 million in losses and never turned a real profit. Theyve had a sweet ride. Lets see if someone else can do better.
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E-Commerce
Ever wonder how much energy it takes when you ask an AI to draft an email, plan a vacation, or role-play as a friend? Google just shed some light: The company calculated the energy, water, and carbon emissions tied to text prompts on its Gemini apps. The energy use for the median text prompt is far less than some previous estimates: Google found that it uses just 0.24 watt-hours, or the equivalent of watching TV for less than nine seconds. Other models might be wildly different: One estimate of OpenAIs GPT-5 model suggested that it might use as much as 40 watt-hours per prompt. (That estimate, unlike Googles calculations, wasnt based on internal data.) Google laid out a detailed methodology for measuring the environmental impact of getting answers from its AI. For energy, that includes the electricity burned as the system converts your text prompt into a form it can process, calculates all the probabilities for which word could come next, and decodes the result into readable text. It also includes the energy for cooling and other infrastructure needed at a data center, and for keeping idle machines running in case demand spikes. The carbon footprint of the median prompt was 0.03 grams of CO2, based on the energy mix for each grid and Google’s own investments in renewable energy. Each prompt also uses 0.26 milliliters, or about five drops, of water. Efficiency is improving rapidly. Over a 12-month period, the company reports that the median energy use per Gemini prompt has fallen 97%, while the carbon footprint has dropped 98%. Google attributes these gains to advances in its language model architecture, more efficient algorithms, custom-designed hardware, and broader system-wide optimizations. Still, even if the footprint per prompt is relatively small, the cumulative impact could be enormous as AI use scales. The research Google shared focuses only on text prompts, not on more energy-intensive tasks like video generation. Other companies footprints may also differ significantly. But as firms race to build more data centersand utilities respond by constructing new power plants, often powered by fossil fuelsthis is at least an initial step toward understanding how much additional energy AI will truly require.
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E-Commerce
Daniel P. Johnson, a geographer at Indiana University at Indianapolis, works with a team of researchers who spend a lot of time catching blowflies, dissecting their iridescent blue-green abdomens, and analyzing the contents of their guts. Johnson and his colleagues are tracking the spread of Lyme disease on a warming planet. But they need a lot of additional data. They get it from NASA. The worlds foremost driver of space science is not a public health agency. But NASAs vast data collection has quietly become important for health research, helping scientists track disease outbreaks and monitor air pollution amid climate change. Now, as President Donald Trumps administration proposes sweeping cuts to the agencys budget, including its Earth Sciences Division, experts are worried that many of these data sources could be lost, and research collaborations halted, with serious consequences for public health. NASA really enabled a whole new world of health research that the public health community hadnt been doing yet, said Susan Anenberg, who directs the George Washington University Climate and Health Institute, and whose own work has been funded by NASA for nearly a decade. NASA, of course, is best known for launching expeditions into space and capturing images of distant galaxies. But NASA also has a mission to Earth. Its satellites surveil what the agency calls vital signs of the planet and supply information to scientists whose work is decidedly Earthbound. A good deal focuses on tracking the effects of climate change on groundwater levels, wildfires, global temperature trends, and more. Those changes come with health hazards, and research funded by NASA or supported by NASA data has helped scientists study the effect of environmental changes on malaria, avian flu, asthma, and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as cognitive decline in the elderly and preterm birth, both of which can be affected by heat. The space agency also tracks air pollution and particulate matter, which isnt all caused by global warming, though a warmer planet may make some health hazards of pollution more severe and complex. That interaction is part of what scientists are using NASA data to better understand. In the case of the blowflies, Johnson and his team are using NASA data to track the spread of Lyme. Blowflies feed on fecal matter and decomposing meat, including that of white-footed mice, which are a reservoir for the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. If theres a lot of white-footed mouse DNA in the flies guts, it suggests there are a lot of those mice around, which in turns offers some signal about the prevalence of Lyme. (At one point, his team found tiger and elephant DNA in fly guts, which was puzzlinguntil the researchers remembered that the Indianapolis Zoo was nearby.) Lyme disease is tick-borne, and the ticks bite mice and then bite humans. By tracking the mice via the blowfly guts, Johnson and his team aim to create a rough map of where Lyme is present and how its moving across the landscape. To fill in that map, Johnson relies on NASA data about the physical environmentthe landscape, meteorological conditions, air temperatures, and incoming solar radiation values. The result, he hopes, will inform Indianas public health officials efforts to reduce the spread of Lymeand with time, contribute to a broader understanding about this tick-borne disease on a warming planet. In addition to tracking the disease locally, Johnson and other scientists are looking at how climate change could make Lyme more prevalent, and possibly, as some data suggests, more infectious. Johnson received NASA funding in 2008 to study early strategies to protect urban areas during heat waves. Now, hes hoping to get a NASA grant to continue his Lyme research, still in its early stages. Without it, continuing this work, now backed by his university and local health departments, would be more difficult over the long haul. The geographer is one of many researchers and policymakers who have benefitted from a focus within NASA on examining conditions on Earth. We have a constellation of over 20 satellites and sensors in Earths orbit, including several on board the International Space Station, that are continuously monitoring Earths weather, climate, and environment for research and applications purposes, John Haynes, a meteorologist and program manager in NASAs Earth Science Division, said on a NASA broadcast last year. We get a ton of data on the Earths system, and how it is changing, downloaded every day from that constellation. And that data gives us information on things like land surface temperature, ocean surface temperature, vegetation density, air pollution, wildfires, you name it, Haynes added. That ton of data, he said, is almost 25 terabytes every day. NASA makes data available at no charge to researchers and to federal, state, and local public health agencies in the United States, and around the globe. A lot of Anenbergs work at George Washington University involves making some of that data more accessible, she said. NASA has wanted it to reach people in local government, people in school boards, people in any walks of life. Her group, she said, has created several websites, one of which allows users to look up local levels of fine particulate matter or carbon dioxide, or example, and compare it to cities elsewhere. The future of some of that public health work is now unclear. The Trump administrations proposed budget for the coming fiscal year would, if enacted, bring NASAs spending back to 1961 levels, with cuts to science divisions including Earth science tantamount to an extinction-level event, according to a piece by Asa Stahl, science editor for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for space science and exploration. The overall budget would be cut by nearly 25%, and Earth science more than halved. The White House has described these cuts as an attempt to refocus NASA on space exploration by prioritizing missions to the Moon and Mars. In May, NASA closed a New York office that housed the Goddard Institute for Space Studies lab, part of the agency dedicated to studying climate change and other Earth sciences. The researchers who worked at that site werent fired, but a brain drain of NASA scientists has begun and may well accelerate. As of late July, nearly 4,000 NASA staff had opted for early retirements and similar arrangements, according to a statement from the agency. The number of departures may still rise. [T]he last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASAs wokforce, a group of current and former agency employees wrote in a recent open letter. NASAs chief scientis and senior climate adviser, Katherine Calvin, was let go earlier this year. The cutting-edge science taking place at NASA has far-reaching societal benefits, more than many people are aware. The climate crisis is a public health crisis, and fighting these crises will not happen in a vacuum, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, wrote to Undark in an emailed statement. Unleashing chaos on the agency by gutting science programs, firing employees without cause, and proposing draconian budget cuts for NASA, she added, will hurt Americans and jeopardize the future of our rising generations. Several NASA spokespeople, as well as Haynes and other scientists at the agency, as well as House and Senate Republicans involved with space policy, did not respond to requests for interviews, or referred Undark to public budget documents. In a brief emailed statement, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said the agency remains committed to our mission as we work with a more prioritized budget. She did not address how proposed cuts could affect environmental data and public health work. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has partnered with NASA on climate research, also did not comment. While Republican lawmakers have mostly endorsed the Trump administrations overall vision for the agency, Congressional appropriators have approved spending bills that would largely leave NASAs funding intact. But the Trump administration has withheld money appropriated by Congress in other agencies, and presidential appointees have made clear they plan to keep doing so. Some conservative policy thinkers champion a dramatic realignment of NASA spending. My view is that NASA should not be chasing climate, period, said Anthony Watts, a senior fellow of the Heartland Institute, a think-tank known for arguing that climate change is not a crisis. Its fine if NASA launches satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the U.S. Geological Survey, he said, but NASA should concentrate on space and space missions. NASA used to widely promote its climate and public health work. The agency had a presence at last years American Public Health Association conference, complete with a big high-definition video screen the agency calls its hyperwall, which illustrates how researchers can draw on NASA data to map, for instance, where water-borne diseases are likely to emerge. In recent years, the public health work has become more varied and more urgent, touching both global and domestic health. Theres a lot of possibility for conducting public health research with NASA data and tools, said Anenberg, the George Washington University researcher. And the reason the field exists the way it does now, with a lot of people doing that research, is because of support from NASA. [Photo: Dominic Hart/NASA] But it requires money. And if those funds get cut as deeply as the White House has proposed, the impact could be vast. Its not yet clear, though, precisely which specific programs within Earth sciences could be axedthough firing the top climate scientist may be a signal. So, too, might recent news that the Trump administration is moving to have NASA decommission two satellites that gather information on greenhouse gases. Many scientists and public health experts want earth science and health research to remain squarely within NASAs mission. NASA satellite imagery, for example, has been used to develop tools that can predict cholera outbreak risks in countries like Bangladesh. Health teams can mobilize to avert or minimize illness. NASA data has also been used to study malaria, which is widespread, often seasonal, and endemic in many parts of the world. As the climate changes and rainy spells and dry spells shift, the timing and contours of the malaria season are changing, said Richard Steketee, who spent 25 years at the CDC, mostly working on malaria. That adds an unwelcome amount of guesswork for health teams that need to know where and when to preposition the bed nets, insecticide, and prophylactic drugs. Mapping those changes is complex, but NASA satellites and computer modeling can help, said Steketee, who served as deputy coordinator for the U.S. Presidents Malaria Initiative in his final five years at the CDC before retirement. The focal point for much of the work in the last few years is NASAs Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team, or HAQAST. The research cohort, consisting of scientists from within and outside NASA, is led by Tracey Holloway, a professor of energy analysis and policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Recently, Holloway has been studying how to best utilize satellite data to fill in environmental health knowledge gaps in rural areas, given that many counties dont even have a single ground-based monitor to track ozone, fine particulate matter, and other pollutants. In public health, more information can lead to better risk characterization, better forecasts, better outreach, she said in an interview. That includes better tracking of wildfire smoke with satellite data to support emergency public health response. Funding for the current round of HAQAST work was approved by the Trump administration this year, with the goal of connecting NASA with private- and public-sector information needs, Holloway wrote in a follow-up email. But there are no guarantees, she wrote, and no alternative source of financial support. Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth science at Dukes Nicholas School of the Environment, has both worked at NASA and been funded by NASA as a grantee. Over 30-plus years, his own professional trajectory has aligned with the growing urgency of the climate crisis. Originally a researcher of the stratosphere, he has shifted his work to focus on modeling climate change, including its impacts on health. When connections between public health and this kind of research came up, he recalled, there were people both within NASA and on the Hill who didnt think that was NASAs job, that it was mission creep. While Shindell agreed that NASAs work in this area should be coordinated with other agencies to avoid duplication, he disagreed withany arguments that NASA shouldnt be involved in such research at all. In part, the desire to study health, as well as his increasing interest in looking at the economic impact of climate change, propelled him to move to an academic setting at Duke. He still uses NASA data, NASA computers, and NASA supercomputers to model the effects of a warming world. He and his colleagues develop scenarios and do physical science in order to model those scenarios impact on climate, health, and economies. In the academic world, he can work on that whole continuum in a way he could not had he remained at NASA. And now, whether even that work can continue may be uncertain. Joanne Kenen is the Journalist in Residence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where the Kresge Foundation supports her work on climate and health. Earlier, she spent a decade overseeing health coverage at Politico. This story originally appeared at Undark.
Category:
E-Commerce
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