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Most College seniors think about end exams, admission of studies or landing their first work. Nicolas Jammet was to open a restaurant.
Not only any restaurant-seaetgreen, a highly regarded, fast network with over 250 locations, a public list of actions and a short, but unforgettable episode-Własny Music Festival with Kendrick Lamar and Weeknd.
Jammet was a co -founder of Sweetgreen in 2007 with friends Jonathan Neman and Nathaniel Ru. Today, Jammet is the concept director of the company, Neman is the general director, and RU is the director of the brand.
Two days before the opening of their first location in Washington, DC Georgetown Neighborhood, Jammet The apartment was broken. The only laptop they’d disappeared. Inside, every recipe, training document and operational details built by the team.
“There was no backup,” says Jammet. “We stayed for 48 hours in a row, trying to put it all back.”
And so they opened and made it work. Then a winter hit. Georgetown was emptied, pedestrian traffic disappeared, and their 560 square foot salad shop attacked on the edge. “We hardly managed to live,” he recalls.
But they adapted. They corrected the menu, leaned into warm dishes and began to wonder what actually worked. It wasn’t nice, but it was enough to proceed.
The second location was a step forward, but it brought its own challenges. This supported one of the best Markets of DC farmers – perfect for ingredients, but not so great for business. The location was on the incorrect side of the street – Starbucks on the other side of the street was full, but Sweetgreen sat empty.
They improvised: they got a Guitar Center speaker, and Ru made a DJ set DJ DJ during the samples. It worked – people took their sight, poured the movement, and then steadily clicked.
They organized a block event. Then greater. This block event turned into a Sweetlife festival. The first was small – only a few hundred people in the parking zone, a Lulummon tent and local energy. A few years later there have been hundreds in MerriWeather Post Pavilion, watching Lana del Rey, Strokes and Yes, Kendrick Lamar and The Weeknd. Avicii brought Taylor Swift. Sza also performed.
What began as a approach to move salads turned into something greater: a brand with cultural gravity, a viewpoint and the habit of doing things on your individual skin, intentionally.
The same impulse to think about the company’s approach to something much less effective than the musical composition: operations.
Breakthrough
From the early days, Jammet and his team understood that convenience could be just as necessary as quality. Sweetgreen was one of the first to build a native ordering application, offers mobile pickup and completely eliminate the countertop. The self -service pickup shelf, currently standard in countless fast chains, was originally an amendment in a short Boston store.
“It was a happy accident,” says Jammet. “Customers did not want to wait. They wanted to get in, take food and go.”
This instinct to cut back friction without sacrificing experience now defines the next phase of the brand: automation.
Sweetgreen infinite cuisine uses robotics for mounting as much as 500 bowls per hour with a precise portion and temperature control. Proteins, grains, vegetables and dressings are added by the machine. But the company has not passed full science fiction: guests are still greeted by the host, and the ingredients are still prepared and finished by hand. The idea consists in performance without cold.
It’s not only about speed. Technology also gives a brand room for scaling without prejudice to consistency, which is extremely difficult to keep up in over 250 locations.
The latest Flex Sweetgreen? Fries. They are called fries, which are freshly cut, fried in the air in avocado oil and served with garlic or marine ketchup. The introduction was not quiet – they distributed hundreds of samples in Hollywood Farmers MarketThe comparisons of ingredients next to Fast Food giants have been published and let the web do the rest.
Jammet calls them willing. They are also strategic. French fries are not only a pleasure from the crowd; They are a signal: Sweetgreen is not only a salad optimization. Holy fast-food staples and rewriting their component in accordance with the ingredient are coming.
What suits, considering that the original recipes needed to be rewritten from zero on zero soda after a stolen laptop. Now the files are backups, and Sweetgreen does what is at all times done best: see where the food is going, and quietly comes there first.
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Most College seniors think about end exams, admission of studies or landing their first work. Nicolas Jammet was to open a restaurant.
Not only any restaurant-seaetgreen, a highly regarded, fast network with over 250 locations, a public list of actions and a short, but unforgettable episode-Własny Music Festival with Kendrick Lamar and Weeknd.
Jammet was a co -founder of Sweetgreen in 2007 with friends Jonathan Neman and Nathaniel Ru. Today, Jammet is the concept director of the company, Neman is the general director, and RU is the director of the brand.
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