Talking robots, seed oil, and fast food with Sweetgreen's execs

More from my time at the chain's Los Angeles HQ ahead of its ripple fries launch this week

photo courtesy of Sweetgreen

I am not a food critic, but I rarely turn down the opportunity to hang in a test kitchen. So when my Fast Company editor asked me to cover Sweetgreen’s launch of ripple fries, which happened this week, I got on a plane to Los Angeles to try them.

Taste aside, Sweetgreen wants the new side to drive business. Over months of testing in LA, they’ve honed in on both recipe (five ingredients, no seed oil) and price ($4.95 per order). It’s a bold move from a chain known for salads and other healthy food, though Jonathan Neman, the chain’s CEO, told me he welcomes the tension.

“Part of what we always like to do is spark conversations about food. We've never tried to be holier-than -thou around food, we're not trying to be like you have to diet or have self-control around everything,” Neman said during my visit. “For us, it’s about real food, because real food tastes better.”

The fries, which are not actually fried, landed in Sweetgreen’s 250 restaurants on Tuesday. You can read my coverage of the announcement in Fast Company here. (I also just saw that Sweegreen is “popping up” with its fries at the Hollywood farmer’s market in LA this weekend to give away its fries alongside all the fresh produce.)

What does this have to do with restaurant tech and the future of hospitality, Kristen?

Great question! Sweetgreen has always been an object of Expedite’s fascination. It’s a relatively young, upstart restaurant brand, launched by three millennial co-founders and scaled as one might expect a technology company to grow. That’s had its ups and downs. For a time, Sweetgreen described itself as a tech company that sells salad. That sounds great when announcing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding (and probably while seeking that funding) — à la a hot, 2010s technology startup. It’s less appropriate when confronting the realities of restaurant operations. Sweetgreen had a few early communications gaffes — in once case, its CEO alluded to pre-IPO profitability when that wasn’t the case (the company is still in the red, though losses are narrowing); in another a revenue exaggeration slipped into media coverage.

Shortly after its 2021 initial public offering, I used an edition of this newsletter (with what is still my favorite title to date, “Salad doesn’t scale like software”) to argue that Sweetgreen missed its opportunity to explain — and, frankly, to own — the differences between building a restaurant business and building a technology business. The restaurant-as-tech-company never really worked for any chain that used it — Sweetgreen was not the only offender — and investor expectations seemed out of line with what a restaurant chain could realistically achieve.

But Sweetgreen has evolved; its leaders use words like “craveable” and “throughput”, common terms in the enterprise restaurant business. Its introduction of salad-making robots perhaps scratches that techy itch and supports better margins as the tech is deployed. They also talk about how the new restaurant tech enhances hospitality, a claim they’ve so far been able to back up with stories of employee interest and satisfaction.

Here’s more from my time at Sweetgreen HQ and what it signals for the future of hospitality in America

Sweetgreen’s leaders call it “fast food.”

Here’s a business reporting secret: The number of times a company exec slides a particular term into a conversation is directly related to how loudly they want the listener to hear it.