THE ORIGIN STORY OF SWEETGREEN
Sweetgreen co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman credits the salad chain’s massive success to his inexperience in the restaurant business.
“The naivete of not knowing what we were getting into allowed us to...take the leap and do it,” Neman says.
Neman started the farm-to-table chain from his Georgetown dorm room in 2007, alongside his two best friends, Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru.
With an inspiring plan to reshape the food system, they got to work bringing sustainable sourcing and clean ingredients to busy customers.
Today, the trio helm a company valued at over $1.6 billion. Sweetgreen is listed in Fast Company's The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2019 and has over 91 locations. Their days of dorm room strategizing are well behind them.
Innovation is still at the core of their mission, however.
As Sweetgreen expands into new markets, the young founders are looking beyond the traditional restaurant model for their next move.
Their goal is to make healthy eating a frictionless experience, and they’re embracing new technology like blockchain to give customers a transparent look at their sourcing, while providing a tailored experience.
“Once you have that direct connection to your customer through technology…there’s a really powerful opportunity to make a positive impact,” says Neman.
Currently, over 50% of Sweetgreen’s orders are generated through their mobile app, and Neman plans to continue digitizing the customer experience and making their products even more accessible.
As Sweetgreen continues to grow and revolutionize the fast-casual dining experience, Neman is staying true to what they do best: serving delicious, healthy bowls, with a side of technology.
In this episode of How Brands Are Born presented by Cardone Ventures, see how Sweetgreen’s humble origins lead to innovation in the restaurant industry.
KRISTEN ALDRIDGE: Your mission and passion are one in the same: inspiring healthier communities by connecting people to real food. Growing from humble beginnings into a fresh, fast, farm-to-table phenomenon, you’ve revolutionized the salad business all while staying connected to your roots. It all started out of your dorm room when you and your co-founders were just 22 years old. As college students, what was the inspiration behind creating such a healthy concept like Sweetgreen?
JONATHAN NEMAN: We started Sweetgreen really to solve a problem in our own lives. I met both of my co-founders while I was at college at Georgetown University. I met Nathaniel in Accounting 101. I sat behind him in class, he was wearing a Lakers hat and we bonded over both being from Los Angeles. Nicolas I met the first day I got to Georgetown. He was in the dorm next door to me. So we bonded over this idea of creating a healthy place to eat that was delicious, affordable, convenient, and really stood for something. And we also really all shared a passion for building something from scratch, and so we started writing a business plan, with a simple mission that we still have today, which was building healthier communities by connecting people to real food. Food is really broken today. In terms of the number of people that eat fast food daily, almost 40 percent are obese. And also, with the terrible effects of food on our environment, it’s an opportunity to rethink the food system. People asked us if we were scared, or if it felt risky when we were launching it, and it really didn’t. It was such a burning problem for us and the people around us, so we set out to go raise about $300,000. We ended up talking to hundreds of people, got hundreds of no’s, but luckily, about 40 people said yes to us. Very, very small investments; really investing in this mission of building a healthier food system.
KRISTEN ALDRIDGE: You of course began the business with no real experience in the food industry, so what were some of your earliest challenges, and how did you persevere?
JONATHAN NEMAN: One of the best things about doing what we did when we did it, was that we knew nothing. Hence, the naivete of not knowing what we were getting into, allowed us to take the leap and do it. I think if we knew what we knew today, we probably wouldn’t take that leap. Our first restaurant was a 500-square-foot old burger shack right off campus, a really iconic looking white and green little tavern. That space was way too small to actually build a restaurant. We had to build an ADA bathroom that was bigger than our kitchen, we had to build storage in the parking garage down the street and cart food up and down every single day. Two days before we were going to launch and have our big opening party, someone had come in and stolen the computer, and it had everything on there. All our operating manuals, all our recipes. Literally everything. We stayed up for two days rebuilding everything from scratch, and while it was really painful, I actually think some of the recipes came out better. Our biggest early challenge was learning how to lead people. We had a really good sense for the brand, the community, the strategy, and the idea, but we had never been a boss. As the company evolves and it scales, it’s still one of the things that we have to continue to adapt to. It taught us from a very early stage about problem solving, and how we could turn these little crises into opportunities, and it’s a mantra that has stuck with us.
KRISTEN ALDRIDGE: So many restaurants fail, especially within the first year. Looking back, what has been your recipe for success?
JONATHAN NEMAN: From the very beginning, Sweetgreen was not about a product. It was about a greater ethos, a mission, and a why behind our brand. Our mission is our guiding light. It’s solving this huge, huge problem of the food system today, and we really think we’re at the very early stages. Whether it’s how we source our food, our commitment to the quality of our food and how we treat our farmers, it’s how we create our food from scratch, how we design our restaurants, how we give back to our community. All of those little things that I think sets us apart. We’re riding two massive waves and secular shifts in the way people consume food. One is that people want to eat healthier food. They’ve woken up to the fact that they want to know where their food comes from, and what’s in it, and they’re making the connection between what they eat and how they feel. We believe that food is healthcare and can be medicine, and so that’s one massive shift. The second is around technology, and how technology impacts people’s lives. Most prominently, it’s helped us get closer to our customers. Today, over 50 percent of our orders are done through our mobile app - far more than a million customers. And what that does, is it just makes it easier to eat healthy food. We’re working to digitize our supply chain and create end-to-end transparency from where our food comes from, the means in which is was grown, and being able to show that to consumers. In our world, it’s a lot about reducing friction. When you talk to a lot of consumers, and you put yourself in their shoes, people always want to eat healthier. What gets in their way is some sort of friction. So we try to think about this desire and friction matrix: how do we make the healthy food more delicious and desirable, but also reduce the friction in which you can access it. Once you have that direct connection to your customer through technology, as well as this emotional connection to the brand, there’s a really powerful opportunity to make a positive impact in the world.
KRISTEN ALDRIDGE: Continuously taking risks is something that keeps any company fast moving and innovative. As a leader, how do you encourage a culture of failure?
JONATHAN NEMAN: We love to create a safe space for failure. In a weird way, it gets harder to do the bigger you get. A lot of it has to do with how you set up goals and structures. For us, it’s our OKR’s around taking some big bets. We have this one thing called the “Learning Forward Document” where when we do fail, we almost celebrate it. And it’s not to celebrate the failure, it’s to celebrate the learnings from those failures. We also believe that gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. Doing it personally and for yourself, and sharing that with others, just brings more awareness and joy to the world. We do have a practice here where once a month we write gratitude cards, both to our internal customers and to our external customers. So we get together and we write hand-written notes to our team members who are giving great experiences to guests, as well as guests who’ve written in notes of gratitude for us. It’s our way of creating this virtual cycle of love.
KRISTEN ALDRIDGE: For all the conscious creators out there, what are three things that every mission-based entrepreneur needs to thrive?
JONATHAN NEMAN: My advice for mission-based entrepreneurs is one: get as close as you can to your customers. Really get to know them, and not just answer their problems that they say they have, but know them enough so that you can anticipate what solutions you may have to make their lives better. Two: have a big mission, but start really small and focused. One thing that we did from the very beginning that was one of the smartest things we did, is we stayed very tight and focused. Both in terms of our product, as well as our geographic reach. Our first 15 restaurants were all in Washington, DC. We had offers to go across the country, go International, to be everywhere and to serve everything. The number of times people asked us to do smoothies, sandwiches, and all kinds of things, as well as to go everywhere, but it was really important for us to be the best in the world at what we were going to do, which was serving delicious, healthy bowls and salads. That gave us the opportunity to do so much more. Three: culture really does eat strategy for breakfast. Strategy will shift and your product will change, but having a culture that can withstand the ups and the downs is so powerful. Staying true to your values will really help you run the marathon. Entrepreneurship and building a business is really not a sprint. Resilience is so important, there are so many ups and downs. From the outside it always looks like this beautiful story of “started here and then here they are now” but on the inside, every entrepreneur knows that every single day you’re on the verge of world domination and bankruptcy at the same time. Know that you just have to make it through to see another day. I’m most proud of the culture that we built at Sweetgreen. This amazing group of people and brilliant minds that are so committed and work so hard every day to bring our mission to life. I’m also really proud of my partnership with my two co-founders. The fact that we still have the relationship we do as friends, partners, and leaders of this company, it’s an amazing thing to be able to live that sweet life together.
