Jonathan Neman - Building the Modern Restaurant - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 24]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:47)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:12)
My guest this week is Jonathan Neman, the co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen. Sweetgreen is a fast casual restaurant chain that Jonathan co-founded in 2007 during his senior year at Georgetown when he realized he couldn't find a healthy, affordable, and convenient place to eat. Today, Sweetgreen operates in 11 markets and will have about 160 restaurants across the US by the end of 2021
In our conversation, we cover the origins of Sweetgreen and how it builds a direct relationship with its customers, how Jonathan thinks restaurants should work with marketplaces like DoorDash, and the economics of operating restaurants. While Sweetgreen is primarily a restaurant concept, Jonathan brings a tech-first mindset to the food industry, focusing less on single store economics and thinking more about customer lifetime value and the importance of owning the relationship with the customer. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jonathan Neman.
So Jonathan, with these discussions with Founder CEOs, I always like to begin with the origin story of the business, the path that you were on that immediately prior to founding Sweetgreen and sort of how this business came to be. Could you start there by just giving us your origin story?

**Jonathan Neman** (3:19)
Sweetgreen started while I was a student in the University of Georgetown. It was really our senior year where myself and my two co-founders, Nicholas and Nathaniel, just identified a problem in our own life that was just nagging us beyond belief. And it was a very simple problem, yet a very complex solution. And that was we couldn't find a decent, healthy, affordable, convenient, accessible place to eat. This was the same time as senior year. You're trying to figure out what to do with your life.
People are interviewing for jobs. You're thinking about what you want to do next. Myself and my two co-founders always knew we wanted to do entrepreneurs. I don't think we knew that we were going to start a business in college and go right into it.
But it was this problem that we just became obsessed about. And it started off with what solves this problem for ourselves. It would be amazing if this just existed here in DC. And as soon as we started putting pen to paper on the business model, we realized that this problem was massive. It was not a problem in our lives, in a small community. This was a national and global issue around the food that was best marketed, most widely accessible, was quite honestly terrible for you and terrible for the environment. The whole value chain was engineered the wrong way.