“I’m being summoned.”Īs Stebner dug into the Spicy Thai, the salad with tofu instead of shrimp, he recalled a focus group in Virginia, where he met a forlorn fan of the shrimp version. “I think salad’s just, like, a great platform for it.” He forked a bite of the Chicken Pesto Parm.
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Has he always been a salad person? “I just like healthy food,” he said. Stebner fetched new salads for a final sampling Gleason left for a conference call. “We’re testing all kinds of things,” Neman said. A whiteboard listed ideas for a kids’ communal dining menu (broccoli tater tots). The men went to the Sweetgreen lab, maneuvering past the lunchtime crowd-the lab is in the back of a restaurant that’s open to the public-to an area behind the main kitchen. “We don’t want to be that company that has a hundred things and then there’s, like, this paralysis of choice.” (Stebner had mentioned how the Tex-Mex chain Chili’s once offered three items.) “Only the people who ordered the OMG Omega see it,” Neman said. “We tell people, ‘You can basically still make it.’ ” “We could just put the version of the OMG Omega on the app,” Gleason said. He and Neman debated revealing this to the salad’s fans. Gleason noted that Sweetgreen’s smartphone app makes it possible to custom-order an approximation of the OMG Omega. Focus groups preferred steelhead with lime, cilantro, and tortilla chips, hence the new Fish Taco salad. One salad forced into retirement was OMG Omega: greens, steelhead (a type of trout), and miso dressing. “I’m sure we’ll give away a lot of salads doing that.” Corporate staffers would parachute in with recommendations akin to the Amazon algorithm: “If you liked the Rad Thai, you might like the Spicy Thai.” “We will rally, as a company, around helping customers that are not happy,” Gleason said. “ Kaizen,” Neman corrected him, so that the the first syllable rhymed with “sky.”Ĭasey Gleason, forty-one, Sweetgreen’s food and beverage director, planned to deal with ornery customers at the point of purchase. “I love the Japanese term for continuous improvement: kaizen.” He pronounced the first syllable like the letter “K.” “We came up with the idea of capturing the flavor of chicken Parmesan in a bowl, and then we iterated,” Stebner said. To formulate five new permanent salads (seasonal ones come and go depending on ingredient availability Sweetgreen sources its food from local farms), Stebner tested thirty with focus groups in Sweetgreen’s lab, below the treehouse, and four other restaurants. “Not that we have something against sugar-it’s just the hidden sugar,” Neman said. “We didn’t want to come out and say, ‘Hey, Sriracha is really bad for you, it’s twenty per cent sugar.’ ” He wore a short-sleeved version of chef’s whites. Neman refers to the episode as “our Srirachagate.” “I answered a lot of those e-mails personally, and as soon as I explained why I did it, they got it,” Michael Stebner, Sweetgreen’s forty-five-year-old culinary director, said. What are the friction points for eating healthier, and how do we increase desire and reduce friction?”įriction flared when Sweetgreen removed the Sriracha brand of hot sauce from its menu, in 2016, prompting an outpouring of angry tweets and e-mails. “But then you get AirPods and you’re, like, ‘I can’t imagine my life without them.’ ” Neman, slim and with wavy brown hair, wore a collarless Aztec-print shirt. “At the time, you’re, like, ‘Are you crazy?’ ” he said. “The extreme example we use is Apple, when they take things away,” such as the headphone jack. (In 2016, one Twitter user estimated that the company had lost a thousand dollars of his business, and counting, by doing away with bacon.) Neman, thirty-three, who started Sweetgreen with two Georgetown University classmates, in 2007, wanted to forestall the potential fallout from the new menu, which was introduced in the restaurant’s eighty-seven locations, in March, by reviewing a contingency plan that he began working on last year. Fans of its fare, which includes exotic fixings like za’atar bread crumbs and spicy sunflower seeds, grow attached to their favorite salad formulations and can lash out on social media when the offerings change. A modern, minimalist slinger of chopped salads, Sweetgreen strives to get everyday Americans excited about greens. of the fast-casual chain Sweetgreen, called a meeting at the company’s Los Angeles “treehouse” (headquarters, in the parlance of Ray Kroc) to finalize the rollout of a new menu. What if McDonald’s had come up in the Facebook age? The other day, Jonathan Neman, the C.E.O.
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The Chicken Pesto Parm, one of the salads on Sweetgreen’s new menu.