Jonathan Neman, sweetgreen Co-Founder and CEO

Jonathan Neman (0:00)

There's pretty much no food brand that as they've gotten bigger, they've gotten better. Like every restaurant at some point, like that is today at scale was really good when it was small. But over time, they lost their way.

But if you look at other types of companies, that's not necessarily true. There's a lot of other companies that as they've gotten bigger, the product and experience actually has improved. So what was it about those companies and what is it about food that makes that so hard to do? And how can we start to redesign the system so we can make our experience and our food better as we get bigger, not get worse and kind of be this decked by a thousand cuts.

Michael Gervais (0:45)

All.

Right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. And I am Michael Gervais by trade and training a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these podcasts, behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery. And we want to understand what they're searching for. We want to dig to get our arms around their psychological framework, which is really how do they explain themselves and events and give context to what's happening in the world, you know, in their world, I should say, in the world in general as well. And we also want to understand the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft.

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Okay, this week's conversation is with Jonathan Neman. He's a co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen. And it's a destination, a restaurant if you will, for simple, seasonal, healthy, real food. Jonathan and his co-founders, Nathaniel Roo and Nicholas Jemmett started Sweetgreen back in 2007, opening their first location in the District of Columbia, Georgetown more specifically. And they were just a couple months out of college, really cool way to get going. They are a mission driven brand and they've got a really strong food ethos and they really are working to create something that embodies the passion that they're coming from and the purpose that they're driven by and they're definitely tech forward in the way that they think about investing in local communities. And that's some of the reasons why sweetgreen, it's been really disruptive in the casual food space. And they've built this into a national brand with over 90 locations already.