Sweetgreen
Sweetgreen
It was no secret that the salad giant sweetgreen had designs on coming to the Twin Cities, and as of next week, the salad wars are officially on! On Tuesday, Sept. 13 the much anticipated Galleria location will finally open, with locations in North Loop (the former Moose & Sadie's), St. Paul, and U of M hotly on its heels.
Launched in 2007 by three Georgetown buddies, the original salad shop in D.C. has grown to 174 locations and is the first salad chain to go public. The IPO last year raised $364 million dollars, and they have made no secret about hoping to get to 1,000 locations as the McDonald's of their generation. Known not just for their kicky kale Caesar, the company strives to be tech-forward by streamlining the customer experience, while holding true to their mission to get more healthy, sustainably raised food into the quick-serve eating space. It's green fastfoodsmanship.
The concept, a build-your-own salad line, is not new here: Crisp & Green and Green and the Grain are both built in the same format (which is all based on being the next Chipotle of course). Using an app to pre-order, picking your salad up from a locker or shelf, these are things we've seen around town for a few years now, but sweetgreen road-tested the format first and set the tone for the rest who follow.
I talked to co-founder and chief concept officer Nicolas Jammet yesterday, and he told me that one of the first things they do in a new market is to connect with local farmers and makers. "We look for great growers in each region to understand what people are eating, here we're working with Baker's Field Flour, Revol Greens, Stickney Hill Dairy, to name a few. We actually start to explore the food and grower landscape before we get into the real estate, sometimes we'll go visit the farms before we even sign a lease so that we really understand the region." There's a chalkboard in each store that lists every source of every ingredient, which is pretty cool when it drills down to the olive oil in the name of transparency.
For every meal sold on Tuesday, sweetgreen will match it with a meal donated to Second Harvest Heartland. Throughout the opening week they plan to feature more local makers, including Thumb's Cookies, The Plant Penthouse, and The Dripping Root.
When I asked Jammet about how he thought they might measure up against the local competition, he said that he appreciated them, that they were all trying to fight the same battle of getting healthier food into the system, evolving convenient offerings, and giving people better choices than typical fast food which is more plentiful and so much worse for you. He said it was "a big problem to solve." Which made me wonder: so, why Edina?
Why Edina and North Loop? Do we find an overabundance of fast food reliance in those locations? Are you actually battling anything by opening up salad shops in two of the highest income neighborhoods in the metro? Wouldn't it make sense to take your fresh food and your mission on a test drive in neighborhoods that have few other options to fast food? I like the overall mission, so I had to ask.
"When we talk about the long term view of sweetgreen, we start out slowly, but ultimately we believe that everyone deserves access to the kind of food we serve," Jammet said. "We are really focused on doing it in a thoughtful way that is durable and sustainable. I think over the years we've seen some concepts pop up in certain neighborhoods that grab headlines, but then quietly close in a year or two. For us, it's really about doing it in a way that's using conscious capital. The bigger we get, the bigger our mission can be, the more good we can do."
I dunno. Jammet had a lot of good next-gen multi-unit speak, and I want to believe in the good stuff, but I mostly worry about chain guys thinking in quarters and getting bogged down in corporate timelines that have little to do with the actual people in need of a mission. Call me jaded, or call me a former corporate restaurant executive, both work.
Either way, I told Jammet that while he's in town next week, he needed to talk to Catiesha Pierson of The Dripping Root. Because she's a Black single mother who quit her job and put everything on the line to bring fresh pressed juices to a neighborhood changed forever by unrest. Because she knew they needed some healthy glow. Then, talk to me about mission.
