Sweetgreen’s Menu Embraces Wholesome Simplicity

Ruby Tuesday Pick of the Week: sweetgreen
Why It’s a Gem: A back-to-basics menu draws upon new trends in healthful eating.

When money’s tight, eating out may seem like an unnecessary indulgence, especially when all the affordable options seem about as nutritious as a deep-fried Twinkie. That’s where sweetgreen comes in. By serving wholesome yet filling meals for less than $10 per person, the D.C.-based chain is changing the definition of fast food, one salad at a time. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Lynda Resnick: This week on Ruby Tuesday, we’re talking to Nick Jammet, one of the owners and founders of the D.C.-area restaurant sweetgreen. For our readers, can you please describe your business to us?

Nick Jammet: Sweetgreen is an eco-friendly salad and frozen yogurt eatery started by myself and two other recent Georgetown grads. We actually did all the concept while we were seniors at Georgetown a year and a half ago. The business has taken off since, and we are now opening two new locations and a mobile version of the concept.

LR: A mobile version? You mean you would go to places where there are large groups of people like schools and business offices and park outside?

Nick Jammet, Co-Founder of sweetgreen

NJ: More or less, yes. Half of our concept is the frozen yogurt. We’re focusing on this platform of sustainability, with local fruit and biodegradable containers and everything eco-friendly about it. The biggest question we [heard from our customers] in our first year is, “Do you cater the yogurt, and do you deliver it?” And we’ve been forced to say no, because you can’t move the machine or it melts by the time you get anywhere. I’m from New York, and I’m used to the Mister Softee truck. I put two and two together and said, “Why not do a sweetgreen mobile truck?” It’s a modern, healthy interpretation of the Mister Softee truck.

LR: I hope you have a distinctive ring that will have people’s mouths start watering, like when the Good Humor man would come.

NJ: We’ve been working on our own little jingle.

LR: The look of the restaurants is so fresh that I actually sent it to my head of design, because I thought it was absolutely now. It encompassed absolutely everything that is modern and yet wholesome, with roots in the past.

NJ: Thank you. That description is exactly what we’re going for. The design firm is Core Architecture and Design. They’re one of the biggest design and architecture firms in the D.C. area. They do all the biggest restaurants around here, and they took us on as a passion project.

LR: How did you get the funding?

NJ: Well, being four seniors in college, it’s hard to go to any one investor and say, “Give me a couple hundred thousand dollars.” So we have a group of about 15 smaller investors. This includes friends of ours from school who saw us building this brand, our parents, ourselves, and we actually have a pretty big restaurateur from New York as an investor. I did an internship with him a year before we opened sweetgreen, and when we finished our business plan, I brought it to him. He was the first to say, “I’m in.” My parents owned restaurants, so I kind of grew up in that industry.

LR: Your menu is insightful. Tell me, who goes there? What do they tend to eat?

NJ: The demographic is a mix of people. Opening up near the university, we thought it was going to be mostly students. Now that we’ve been open a year and a half, we see that students make up about 30% of the business. It’s just a lot of young professionals, a lot of people that work in all the shops on M Street, and at night it’s a large residential population; Georgetown is a densely populated area. I think, especially in this recession, instead of going out to an expensive restaurant and spending $20-$30 dollars per person, they wanted an option where you could dine for under $10 for dinner.

LR: What percentage of your sales comes from salads as opposed to yogurt?

Interior of a D.C.-area sweetgreen restaurant

NJ: It’s about 65% salads, 35% yogurt. And that varies seasonally, so in the summer it will reach up to about 40%; in the winter down to about 25%.

LR: It is yogurt, right? Because Pinkberry is not yogurt. I don’t know what it is.

NJ: I think now they are putting yogurt in it. Because of that lawsuit, they weren’t allowed to call it yogurt for a while.

LR: Because we need you to be honest. For God’s sake, we’ve been lied to enough. We’re counting on you, Nick.

NJ: We try to be a very honest, straightforward concept. We had our yogurt tested by a lab that does all the nutritional testing for Honest Tea. We found that the probiotic count was more than double what it needed to be. So, the live active cultures are there.

LR: Good. I love the name. It is inspired. You should look at the most successful truck company in Los Angeles, the Kogi Korean taco truck. Their whole marketing plan is on Twitter.

NJ: We actually are on Twitter also for the trucks. We’re on Twitter and Loopt, which is basically a tracking system so you can see where everyone is. The truck will be signed up for Loopt, so everyone can friend the truck and say, “The truck’s two blocks away. I’m going to it!”

LR: I love it. It’s so great. So, your sales are good?

NJ: Sales are great, knock on wood. In a year where people are experiencing declines, our sales are up about 35%.

LR: Tell me what’s next. Are you going to offer franchise opportunities?

NJ: We’re going to hold off on the franchising for a while. I think it’s important for us to grow this ourselves, [keep it] privately owned for at least the first 10-15 stores. Quality control is the biggest issue, and brand control.

LR: Yes. Let them come begging you for franchises. Now, where are you going to open next?

NJ: We want to reach six locations in the D.C. area, then we’ll try one in L.A., then either New York or Miami. The biggest thing we notice is our sales are seasonal. It does much better in the warmer months, so L.A. and Miami would be kind of obvious choices for us. And I think New York, because our brand is strong enough that we can survive there.

LR: Listen, don’t come to L.A. yet. The problem is your span of management: It will kill you to be across the country. If I were you, I’d open in places that are strategically near where you are so you can manage it. If you come to L.A., it will just drain you. You have no resources, you know? That’s just my opinion. I’ve seen people do this before and it’s a disaster. If you do come to Los Angeles, you should open three or four stores here so you can have separate management [separate from the East Coast stores].

Are you designing t-shirts and other things?

Sweetgreen's exterior is just as enticing and wholesome as its interior.

NJ: Oh yeah, we have some great t-shirts. Most of them are for the employees, but we also sell some in the restaurants. But we do have other sweetgreen items. We have salad blasters that we have branded. We just had Klean Kanteens made with our logo.

LR: Is there anything I can tell you? Any way I can help?

NJ: One question I have is, for a young brand like us, there’s the difference between developing your brand and letting the brand come into its own, or having a standard, cohesive brand where every item of packaging has the same logo with the same font and same color. How would you say is the better way to go? Our PR firm has been saying, “You need to make sure your branding is cohesive and is the same everywhere across the board so you have a stronger brand identity.” But for us in our first year, it’s hard for us to do that, because we’re still developing our brand. For us or other small business owners, what would you say is the best to focus on?

LR: It’s always better to have everything look like it came from the same family and to create a design manual. But I also hear what you’re saying, and you can go too far with that and you can start to look very corporate. It’s a very good idea to keep exploring, because you may come up with something better.

I think you have very good instincts, and I don’t know where you got them being so young, but go with your gut. Don’t listen to old PR firms that have been doing everything the same way. Now, I’m sure they’ve helped you a lot, but I’m not even sure that you need a PR firm.

NJ: Right. They have helped us a lot. A lot of doors open up because of our success, but we need somebody to coordinate that and get us through those doors, to help pitch stories and coordinate all that. And they have taught us a lot. Our PR firm has a lot of experience. For us being such a young brand, it adds that other side that we were slightly missing.

LR: Right. Eventually I hope that you handle it yourself, because it’s all in-house for all of my brands. Because nobody’s going to have as much passion as your own employees. I don’t know how much these people are charging you a month, but traditional PR is expensive. And that’s a big amount of money for a small company to pay.

NJ: We actually didn’t have PR until about two months ago. For the first year, year and a half, it was an expense we didn’t want. We preferred word-of-mouth and just letting the brand grow on its own. And we got some great press reviews by ourselves. My mom was in the restaurant industry, so she helped us a lot with connecting us to certain media. For the first year and a half that was fine, but now we’re growing. We need a middle ground until we get big enough to have in-house.

LR: Right. Or freelance.

NJ: Another general questions is, for any small-business owner, someone like me who’s trying to focus on the brand, do you have any advice, or warning that you would give a young entrepreneur?

LR: Grow slowly, like a healthy animal. Don’t get pressure from the outside to expand too quickly. Don’t stretch your span of management too far. You want to make sure that you can handle it.

I wish you the best of luck. And I promise you the next time I come to D.C., that’s the first place I’m going to eat.

NJ: Thanks so much, Lynda.