Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. HOMEPAGE

This trendy salad bar's design secrets keep customers coming back for more

sweetgreen salads
Sweetgreen

There is a Sweetgreen — the fast casual salad chain that people stand in lines for like it's a new iPhone — about 10 blocks north of the Tech Insider office. It always seemed like a land of mythical salads; too far for a quick lunch, but all my friends said it was delicious. 

Advertisement

Then in December, one opened up two blocks away. There's a line out the door all the time, which we obviously skip through use of the Sweetgreen app. And lo, it is good: vibrant lettuce, tangy dressing, surprisingly robust cheese crumbles.

The magic of Sweetgreen is that it's healthy food that is both tasty and reasonably priced. And unlike many lunch salads, you're not hungry 45 minutes after eating one. For about the same price as a burger and fries, you can eat nourishing food.

After starting out in Washington, DC in 2007, the chain has expanded to 40 sites in New York and California, with shops on the way in Boston and Chicago

Fortune recently declared that "if legacy restaurant companies could start from scratch, most of them would want to look like Sweetgreen."  Tech Insider spoke with Sweetgreen cofounder Nathaniel Ru about how Sweetgreen finds its food, how it crafts "service design," and why we  should be eating more than kale.

Advertisement
Sweetgreen   Bingham 31
Sweetgreen

Sweetgreen's clever way of picking locations

Along with the usual demographic analysis, Ru says that sequencing — as in, the timing of store openings — is a huge part of Sweetgreen's real estate strategy. 

"How we enter a market is just as important as how many stores we do." 

In New York, for example, Sweetgreen's first store was at 28th and Broadway in the increasingly chic NoMad neighborhood. Ru points out that this was far from the standard strip of fast casual chains along 23rd street (where lots of tech and new media companies are clustered. 

That literally set Sweetgreen  apart from the Chipotles of the world (or at least the Chipotles of New York). The chain also opened stores in the affluent and hip neighborhoods of Tribeca, Nolita, and Williamsburg.  The idea is to get beyond "pure convenience," Ru says; they don't want just lunch traffic, but dinners and weekends as well. 

sweetgreen app
Drake Baer / Tech Insider
How Sweetgreen does design 

Walking into a Sweetgreen is kind of like visiting an Apple store — with all those clean lines and smiling faces, there's a sense of relief at patronizing a retailer that feels good to visit.  

Advertisement

"We call it service design," Ru says. It's "the culmination of storytelling, technology, and design itself — elevating simply selling a product to a personalized, consistent service to each customer."

Sweetgreen feels like a restaurant you can rely on, whether you're ordering in-store or with the app (as about 30% of customers do).

"Hopefully the first thing you see is the open kitchen," Ru says. "Seeing the ingredients, seeing the kitchen and the process behind it is really important to us. We make all of our dressings, all of our products, from scratch every day, with produce delivered each morning, so it’s important to show our guests rather than tell them what we do."

You get in line, which Ru says should be about a 15 minute wait. When it's time to order, you stand in front of a row of ingredients, similar to Chipotle. A team member walks you through the entire process. It's one-one-one rather than an assembly line process — a change Sweetgreen made a year and a half ago. It takes a little more time, but improves accuracy. From start to finish, the ordering process should take two to three minutes. 

Advertisement

Sweetgreen wanted the app to mimic the store experience, Ru says, so it spent a lot of time on food photography. Big images of the ingredients you can get in-store make it a more visual experience than just checking boxes. And once you order, you skip the line and go to a designated pickup area.

sweetgreen sgfarmtrip nocal 3
Sweetgreen at Field Fresh Farms in Salinas, California.
Sweetgreen

Where Sweetgreen gets its food

Ru says that Sweetgreen will meet the farmers in a new region before meeting its landlords, since the company needs to figure out if it can create a supply chain before opening a cluster of stores.

Unlike many other restaurants, Sweetgreen asks what farmers are growing instead of requesting a certain crop. This cuts down on food waste and exposes customers to veggies that they might not normally try.

"About a year and a half ago, we went to the Salinas Valley in Northern California. We met a farmer who was showing us his plot of broccoli," Ru says. "Most people associate broccoli with the florets or crowns, but it actually grows in a similar fashion to like a kale or a winter green. There’s all these leaves that surround this broccoli crown."

Advertisement

So the team asked the farmer, "What do you do with leaves once the crown is gone? Do you sell them?"

And he replied, "No, nobody wants to eat it. We till them back into the ground." 

"Well, can you eat them?," they asked.

"Yeah," the farmer replied. "It's just as healthy if not healthier, than most of the lettuces you see out there."

Advertisement

So Sweetgreen made a deal for the broccoli greens. 

"We can show that there’s more to eat besides kale," Ru says. "There are more vegetables in the ground than most people think."

And as Sweetgreen's long lines and continued growth show, there's more to lunch than burgers and burritos.

Design
Advertisement
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification.

Jump to

  1. Main content
  2. Search
  3. Account