How Salad Chain Sweetgreen Figures Out Its Next Product to Sell

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:17)

Tracy, do you know my favorite thing about working in midtown Manhattan?

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

Is it the daily commute?

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Actually, I have a fine commute. I'm like a few stops away on the subway. That's fine. Yeah, I guess so.

No, I love the plethora of bowl lunch options that we have around us. We are in the bowl lunch capital of the world. Maybe DC also, but I imagine the per capita number of places that let you get something that's sort of like you're feeding from a trough and you can get it right in front of your computer and eat while checking Twitter or your emails. It's very nice.

Tracy Alloway (0:53)

I feel very old because I remember when none of these existed, and if you wanted to get lunch in midtown Manhattan, you went to a sandwich shop and you had a selection of sandwiches and you weren't allowed to make any individual customer choices. And I guess the upside of that was it took everyone literally 10 seconds to order and now it seems to take everyone about six minutes.

But of course the downside is you weren't able to customize, you weren't able to get the specific things that you want, maybe pay as much attention as you can now to ingredients. So it's definitely changed.

Joe Weisenthal (1:28)

It's definitely changed. By the way, speaking of change, I've been rewatching, I think it's on Hulu or something, the old LA Law episodes that are streaming again. And it's so funny watching what professional lunches looked like in the 80s with like white tablecloths.

Tracy Alloway (1:41)

Was it steak?

Joe Weisenthal (1:42)

It was like fancier, like plates of, I don't know, vegetables over a piece of fish.

Tracy Alloway (1:47)

And people actually going out to restaurants.

Joe Weisenthal (1:49)

Anyway, so that's a side diversion, but I actually do like be able to just eat in a bowl at my computer and staring at the screen. Anyway, but it does raise the question. There are all these chains and one-offs doing salads and Mediterranean bowls and cava and knockoff cava and knockoff of the knockoff cava and salad bowls and stuff like that and knockoff Chipotle's. How do you stand out? How do you win in this game where there are clearly many competitors?

Tracy Alloway (2:13)

No, I completely agree. It seems like a crowded market at the moment and everyone, even the non-bowl places have their version of a bowl nowadays. But also I'm really interested in how you come up with the specific offerings for customers.

And like how much of it is what people are asking for, so demand versus supply? Like what is available to you in terms of ingredients at a cost effective price?

Joe Weisenthal (2:40)

Totally. Well, we really do have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. How the lunches that we eat get in front of us, how the ingredients are selected. Why am I eating this salad that I'm eating right now?

Figuratively, I'm not eating a salad right now. We're gonna be speaking with Nicolas Jammet. He is the co-founder of Sweetgreen, one of the success stories in the salad bowl game. So Nick, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Nicolas Jammet (3:06)

Thanks for having me.

Joe Weisenthal (3:07)

There's plenty of things to talk about in the bowl game, but let's start with something. You recently announced that Sweetgreen is going to be not cooking anything in seed oils and is only gonna be using, I think, olive oil and other higher quality oils.

There is an internet community of people who are like really anti-seed oils. Can I just say, this is Joe's dream, is to finally do the anti-seed oil episode. We're gonna do an hour long conversation about seed oils and seed oil bros.

But actually, for real though, I am curious, why did you make this switch? How much is it actual customer demand? How much is it science? How much is it quality? Where did this come from and how much is it gonna cost you?

Nicolas Jammet (3:49)

Great question. So I'm glad we have an hour because there's lots to talk about here. We can go deep, but zooming out and backing up a bit, the reason we started Sweetgreen was because we did see this shift in the consumer and between their relationship with food. And we saw this conversation starting to change. We were seniors at Georgetown, myself and my co-founders, Jonathan and Nate, and we were missing the options that we wish we had to eat. And this idea of wanting food that was good for you, that made you feel good, but that was also delicious and craveable and cool.