SPEAKER_00: food is a very very big problem in this country the health outcomes that we have the way we are treating them it's just it's you can't have 60 70 percent of the country be obese and then have

SPEAKER_02: obesity be linked to like the four horsemen of the apocalypse whatever they are like diabetes

SPEAKER_06: disease diabetes all they all come back to metabolic dysfunction and and i want to be clear this isn't people's fault this is not the individual's fault this is the system right now our subsidies 95 of our subsidies go to corn and soy these are things wheat that are then going yeah

SPEAKER_09: that are then going into the processed food system this week in startups is brought to you by wistia is the all-in-one video platform for business with tools that help you create manage and measure the impact of your videos try wistia for free at wistia.com startups cla innovation takes balance our cpas consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up get started now at claconnect.com tech and lemon.io need to speed up your product development without draining your budget hire vetted engineers from europe at lemon.io go to lemon.io twist to get

SPEAKER_15: 15 off for the first four weeks all right if you live and work in any major u.s city suburb you know my next guest sweet green is the fast casual restaurant chain that specializes in salads and they got a little bit more protein on the menu these days as my wife has proven to me and the number of sweet green packages coming to the house jonathan neiman is the co-founder and ceo of that company which has grown like gangbusters uh over the last 15 or so years first location back in 2007 in

SPEAKER_17: georgetown in washington dc since then they've expanded to over 200 locations in the us that went

SPEAKER_15: public and jonathan and his team have been at the forefront of a lot of innovation so i thought i'd have him here on this week in startups because they're doing some really interesting things in robotics pay loyalty you know data-driven menu optimizations jonathan i also think you did a lot

SPEAKER_02: with co-working spaces back in the day and thinking about delivery and ways to get more salads to more people so welcome to the program jonathan neiman thank you for having me been a long time listener huge fan oh thanks pal that means the world to me and i've been trying to have you on the program

SPEAKER_23: for a while now tell me a little bit about the state and the footprint of the business today and we'll get into the backstory of course but there's so much innovation going on so just maybe on a scale

SPEAKER_15: basis how many salads you sell a day how many customers tell me a little bit about the loyalty

SPEAKER_25: program and the footprint of the stores yeah absolutely so today sweet green is 225 restaurants across the country we're in about 20 states today started the company in washington dc and we kind of grew up the east coast but today we have a footprint both coasts middle of the country texas okay we kind of cover call it the top 20 msa's today even mix of urban and suburban um in terms in terms of where we sit the menu is uh you know we started off as mostly salads but today has really evolved into protein plates and warm bowls and a much broader offering you know digital is a huge part of our business about 60 of our business comes through our mobile apps um 60 of orders come in through the mobile app

SPEAKER_29: now which yeah just what's interesting is it was it was it was 50 over 50 percent before covid which is

SPEAKER_30: i think interesting ah the interesting thing about that i think is we've been talking about minimum wage

David Friedberg: a lot and you know the record low unemployment of our lifetimes right isn't it crazy to think that we're living here with this incredibly low unemployment and my understanding is the hardest workers to get sometimes are these frontline entry level or mid-level jobs uh career-run jobs and so the the act of being a cashier and taking an order that's kind of going away in in this uh you

SPEAKER_32: know in for what reason because there aren't enough workers or technology or is it just not enough workers causing people to adopt the technology in your mind i think it's really about improving the

SPEAKER_00: both the customer experience and the team member experience if we think about what the job of a team

SPEAKER_35: member really should be the two things that our team members love to do that that they actually enjoy one is cooking and actually making food the culinary aspect of things and the other is service and hospitality at the end of the day we are in the hospitality business there's a lot that we do in between there that is maybe less valuable and i think can technology those are the places where technology can create a better experience whether that be from how we order the food and making it's more seamless to do so how we assemble the food and other technology sought both software and hardware innovations to just make it easier to provide this type of food at scale the customer experience

SPEAKER_15: i think is underrated here i know when i go to starbucks which isn't too often i like to make my coffee at home if i'm being candid but i do go to starbucks once in a while and we do have an investment in a company called cafe x a robotic coffee bar that's done phenomenally well of late there's something nice about putting the order in yourself and making sure it's correct because when i talked to a large coffee chain at one point um they um explained to me that the turnover at their cashiers was like 50 in the first three months it was something extraordinary i won't

David Friedberg: say which chain it was but it was really high and then there was something to the effect of like over 50 of drinks were wrong or had some aspect that were wrong so you know if it's wrong with a consumer app well then it's on the consumer for putting it in wrong isn't it that reduces the error

SPEAKER_42: rate i would think it does it absolutely does it helps us increase our throughput serve more

SPEAKER_35: customers faster makes it an easier job for our customers and you know it also builds a deeper connection with our guests and it gives us that data where we can email them and and just

SPEAKER_42: find other other other ways to build on that relationship ah because you have their email

SPEAKER_44: and you're on their phone you have that intimacy with them so 60 of your customers you're on their

David Friedberg: phone if you just think about what ray crock would have thought about that concept he would have

SPEAKER_47: lost his mind which i know and i know you're a fan of that movie that's what i make all

SPEAKER_25: my whole team watch that movie it's such an amazing so good i love the scene where they lay it out yeah when they lay out the restaurant with the tennis court and we i mean that is what we do we are so much of our job is experience design actually just right before this that's what exactly

SPEAKER_35: what we were working on in these new formats because we used to be this assembly line format and now everything's changed with the automation it's no longer walk in and walk down a line so how do you now build this new experience in this customer journey and i always kind of refer

David Friedberg: back to that back to that scene yeah for people who don't know there's just an incredible movie called the founder michael keaton about ray crock who although he's not the founder of mcdonald's that's kind of the the duplicity of the title he bought the license for mcdonald's essentially and created what you would experience as the modern day mcdonald's but the original mcdonald's concept was

SPEAKER_15: based upon ford's assembly line and taking that to food and reducing speed so it is interesting even

David Friedberg: today the mighty sweet greens is in some way inspired by mcdonald's brothers and ray crock yeah

SPEAKER_55: absolutely yeah absolutely and you referred on to the turnover just you know what i'll say is the industry is over 150 turnover that's the industry so in the first year no that's every year that

SPEAKER_25: means if you have right if you have 100 employees you are hiring 150 a year doesn't mean all 100 are being replaced but that's the in that's the industry like 50 benchmark and the other secret that most people who've been to restaurants will understand what makes a great restaurant is the people if i look at my store base and i look at the great restaurants versus the mediocre ones or the not so good ones the x factor is usually that manager what we call a head coach you have a great manager and keep that manager in their store for a few years they have a stable team productivity improves hospitality improves everything starts working so as much of a food company as we are in a technology company that we are really it comes down to that people aspect is is the x factor in all

SPEAKER_15: restaurant businesses so that begs the question what makes a great sweet greens manager what do you optimize for and can you make them or do you have to find them in the world and if it is the latter

David Friedberg: how do you identify these super hospitality unusual hospitality uh unreasonable hospitality candidates

SPEAKER_52: i'm curious you know that that book that you mentioned unreasonable hospitality i don't know if

SPEAKER_23: if you've read it oh i've read it i i have made everybody in my organization read it because as

David Friedberg: investors i told them i would like us to take the approach 11 madison park did to our customers which

SPEAKER_63: are lps and founders right so how unreasonable can we be with them but explain to people why it's an

SPEAKER_42: important book so you know will gadara who wrote the book were you know started 11 madison park before

SPEAKER_35: that worked for danny meyer and kind of built on what danny had created this idea of hospitality being the 51 in a restaurant will's a friend and we actually similarly had will speak at our conferences this past year our hospitality conferences for our teams gave everyone the book and just recently i actually had everybody watch that episode in the bear oh episode five forks forks yes episode five

SPEAKER_00: season two explain to people the episode it's so the the episode it take it's it's based luke relatively lucy off 11 madison park and richie the you know the one of the guys who's a bit of a punk

SPEAKER_35: kind of goes and he's staging um so kind of call it like uh interning at this restaurant and he goes

SPEAKER_00: in and his job is just to clean forks and he's pissed off after the first day but then he speaks to the other guy working there and there's this moment where he talks about how much he cares about what they do every day and he goes he goes you don't get it every day is the super bowl for us and the way we have to make people feel and he talks about this idea of you know the fact that the

SPEAKER_35: word hospital and hospitality kind of come from the same place and i don't know that i watched that that

SPEAKER_29: episode and like you know i just got like goosebumps the whole time because that was like that is that

SPEAKER_72: is what we do at our best okay so your boss tells you you got to make a product tutorial and a customer

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SPEAKER_75: they're great for big companies too wistia.com startups what was great about that moment is

SPEAKER_32: you had somebody who was purely cynical you know uh richie right that's the character's name who by the

David Friedberg: way he's now going to play the thing in the fantastic four which is exceptional casting i feel like my

SPEAKER_39: childhood and like my adult fantasies of running a michelin star restaurant are coming together here

SPEAKER_15: but he's got this really bad attitude his cousin sends him to you know what is a michelin star place and he says listen we got this waiting list and he's so cynical why am i wasting my time with the forks and he said you know like you said this is the super bowl every day was people wait for months to come to this evening they look forward to it they spend their whole week's salary on it like we need to make this count and it really does matter and this is like a concept that you see in japan and how everybody you know looks at their work you i'm sure you have to spend time in japan

SPEAKER_29: yeah and what do they call it the with the three circles uh yes it's a theory of like what you're

SPEAKER_15: good at what the world needs and putting that together yeah and there's something for everybody

David Friedberg: to be excellent at in the world and yeah it was just so such a powerful episode to see the arc of him going from being so cynical about polishing the forks and then connects his world with the deep dish pizza in chicago and then the micro basil gets put on and it's fine dining and just everything's right in the world right and you just feel so good for this character yeah so so a few things one you

SPEAKER_25: know this idea that i forget the name of the japanese concept but from when we started sweet green we defined this idea of the sweet life and the sweet life all the t-shirts everything what the way we defined it was a key g there it is the idea of the sweet life for us always and for me has always been this idea of passion x purpose where you can align your passion and your purpose which is a very similar way of saying it but you know you talked about the head coach and what makes them great and what you

SPEAKER_35: can teach them it was the next episode i think in that series where they're interviewing that woman and he's sitting the richie's sitting there i don't know if you remember the scene he's sitting there with with the manager and they interview the woman she comes in with a great resume seven years experience but he had intentionally put the the napkin and the forks perpendicular yes and at the

SPEAKER_25: end of the interview you know she walks away and the manager's like we should hire her she was amazing seven years experience and richie's like did you see that she sat there for an hour and did not flip the napkin back the people we want would notice that yes the people we want would notice that this was out of line because those are those that that little thing that above and beyond that it's just innate and so to your question we can teach you how to run a restaurant we can teach you how to run you know read a pnl and train you and all those things but there's certain things about how you connect with your team because what we find is what drives that what drives that stability is actually having relationship knowing each person on your team and really getting joy from taking care of customers if you can if you like have those things and we like to say happy humble and curious if you have if you if you're happy humble curious and you know i like to say coachable we can teach you the rest so

SPEAKER_52: it's that innate it's that innateness in hospitality that you need to have first and foremost you call

SPEAKER_06: them head coaches the general managers we call them head coaches because they're they're they're leading a team and their their main job is developing talent again the other secret in the business is

SPEAKER_25: you know if you look at the best restaurants like we got like chick-fil-a is incredible incredibly run restaurant what is the secret you don't get your own restaurant at chick-fil-a until you work

SPEAKER_35: you work at a restaurant for almost 20 years wow and it's that promotion from within that really drives the business so we're very focused and we open new stores the limiter to growth is not so much you know today for us it's not capital it's not real estate it's not our supply chain people ask like why don't you go faster so much of it you know generally is is your ability to execute and that has to do with your ability to develop talent to run those next restaurants

SPEAKER_02: and you can't speed that up you have to have the moment where they polish the forks you have to have the enlightening moments the coaching moments where people learn you know over time so you're developing your own talent i guess that's the dream right i get somebody in there polishing forks and then eventually they're managing their own restaurant yeah that's that's exactly right and we we

SPEAKER_25: can do it you can start as like a dishwasher and be a manager within two and a half three years

SPEAKER_35: pretty amazing last week you know i promote you know we i called a couple individuals who made it you know they've been with us almost 10 years each started off as team members worked their way to manager and now they were just got area leader positions and there is no better like no call that makes me happier than calling someone that like that's that's worked their butt off and is now making great money managing like eight restaurants and restaurants on average to 2.9 million dollars so you

SPEAKER_00: have this individual that was making you know 15 bucks an hour working the line is now managing a

SPEAKER_32: 25 million dollar business incredible so let's pause for a second here and talk about the franchise

SPEAKER_02: model versus owned and operated my understanding is you are doing the owned and operated model which

David Friedberg: means you're not hiring an owner like ray crock did to franchise it and in that movie the founder and in grinded out ray crock's biography which is also exceptional history is written by the victors uh so take that for what it's worth i'm not sure how much is correct exactly but their theory was and there's a great scene in that movie where he is at the country club with his first wife and he's got rich people who play golf to open up franchisees and then when he goes and visits them they've turned into places where hooligans are playing loud music smoking there's garbage everywhere and they've added weird stuff to the menu and destroyed the quality and then he has to fire them take those franchises away which is exactly what the mcdonald's brothers told them would happen and why they didn't like franchising and then he goes and finds the blue collar people he goes to a synagogue he goes to you know like a vets association and he starts looking for hungry people and it starts with somebody selling bibles and he finds them and he realizes i need those you know more blue collar people who really care okay that worked for them and because it creates ownership so you must have considered the franchise model you must have been lobbied heavily by investors and i know you've had a lot of

SPEAKER_02: investors over the years in this business what were the arguments for franchising versus owned and operated and how did you navigate making that decision you know this is one of those discussions we had

SPEAKER_00: very early on i remember you know we're dorm room level writing the business plan and one of those things we said from the beginning is we do not want to franchise what we're doing we wanted to build a

SPEAKER_35: company that we controlled more of the stack the experience and for us it was even deeper than most restaurants we wanted to control our supply chain we wanted to control our technology and we wanted to control the restaurant of course because that's your that's your interface with the customers and so let's call it more of that apple approach of owning more more of the more of the stack and specifically that piece of owning your customers we also looked at restaurants and you know just generally if you look at businesses there's businesses that over time as they scale they get better and then there's businesses as they scale they get worse and what i mean by better or worse not financially better or worse but the product gets better or worse in technology typically you get

SPEAKER_25: better right as as a business gets bigger they invest more in the technology and the product continues

SPEAKER_35: to improve and improve and improve your iphone today is much better than your iphone 15 years ago

SPEAKER_02: yeah your tesla model y is going to be so much better than the roadster yeah they have compounding innovations and the team is just starts to hit their shrine of course the world of tech startups

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SPEAKER_25: start today so in restaurants when you think about it it's kind of the opposite it's diminishing returns of scale from a quality perspective typically in the industry as you get bigger in order to maintain consistency the fact that you're dealing with fresh food or some people fresh with some less fresh there's things you do to make ensure the consistency typically some of it's done to increase profitability but a lot of it's just done so you can execute consistently think the commissary model for restaurants so most restaurants don't actually prep their food in in the restaurants themselves they buy it they have a commissary called like a giant factory where they make everything oftentimes actually cook the food there ship it out into bags and the what they're doing at the node is just putting the food together right keep reheating it and handing and putting it back to

SPEAKER_00: you and i remember this really hit me when i was at a conference very early in my career when it started sweetgreen and i sat next to someone that was working at outback steakhouse nothing wrong with

SPEAKER_25: outback steakhouse but she was telling me when it first started it was the most popular restaurant like people would come from across the state to go to outpacks it was known as the best steakhouse and you look at it today and it's outback steakhouse and so how do you know from the very beginning we're like how do we ensure we don't do this how do we get bigger as we get better and part of that's a mindset the other is we believe technology can enable us to do that so in you know as we think about automation for example what most restaurants at our scale start to do is they get to the scale again where they they move all the prep off off site but that's what people love about sweet green and really most food it's the qual like what makes great food is where you buy it good quality food and the fact that it's made fresh and so what we said is instead of getting rid of that in order to scale and find the consistency let's preserve that let's preserve that in the restaurant because that's what people love let's even highlight that and let's automate the part that nobody really cares about and actually is prone to a ton of errors which is the assembly so that was our way of you know trying to ensure that we maintain that quality of vision as we continue to scale so you know for us we you know we had a lot of franchise requests in the in the early days it was i got to say it was tempting because you have one or two restaurants and you have people saying hey

SPEAKER_06: we can we'll sign up for a thousand like imagine that they're like we'll send it like we'll take a

SPEAKER_123: thousand in china we'll take 500 in australia or there'd be 500 in australia you know with some

SPEAKER_25: partner yeah and they'll pay you you know some fee up front and then they'll pay you like five six percent a year in terms of royalties but for us money yeah it can be really it can be a really good business and and i think there's a world for franc licensing internationally um i think it can make sense with the right partner but for us it was you know it was always about thinking sustainably which was one of our core values it was how do we build a business that we're proud of and stands the test of time this has never been like a pump and dump this is our baby we're very proud of the quality and we want we want it to be around for a very very long time so we took the slower approach the more capital intensive approach though it's it's a honestly a much harder approach we have to do so many we you know sweet green we think about all the mini businesses inside of a sweet green we have to be great at real estate design construction we have an engineering team we have a product team you know we have huge operations and training you have an automation team there's so many components if you're operating the full sec that you have to be great at but that's why it's there's also such rarefied air when you look at the world in the the the market there's only two companies that i've hit that i believe have hit terminal velocity in a company-owned model starbucks

SPEAKER_32: and chipotle and starbucks had a lot of licensees and i've seen they've unwound them because you know

David Friedberg: when you're at a franchise because it sucks and like you go into a franchise at like a supermarket you

SPEAKER_32: ever like pull up the starbucks app or something and you're like or even i think some of the airports were franchisees and you're like this is just not consistent and the tell was you couldn't

SPEAKER_06: use the app there and that's right of them and they still are they still are licenses and that's you know and that's something that we're gonna have to face one day because you want to get into

SPEAKER_25: airports the licensees have a monopoly hms hosts and these companies have a monopoly on the airport so it's like if you want in you gotta partner with them ah right so there there's places where you have to do it really an alternative real estate but you know if you look at chipotle what they've done you know 3500 restaurants about a 75 billion dollar market cap company all company-owned restaurants

SPEAKER_32: going slow and thoughtful and the the scale will emerge the opportunities for scaling will emerge

David Friedberg: like ordering on the app or just getting better at hiring and building talent all that becomes a fly will eventually you hire great people they bring great people let's talk about robotics because this is something i and on this very podcast i don't know about 10 years ago i just told my

SPEAKER_17: producers get me every robotic anything restaurant because i grew up in the restaurant business i had the dishwasher company i had the salad company i had the fro-yo company i had the ramen company i

David Friedberg: had the pizza company zoom pizza that softbank i think drowned in capital and they went out of business and there was of course i think it was was it momentum burger or something there was some burger place that was like in san francisco i think you became obsessed with this a bit too yeah

SPEAKER_35: yeah i've been i've been obsessed for a long time almost a decade of obsessed with robotics very clearly saw it as the next wave of technology innovation after mobile that was going to transform the business i remember years ago when i told people they're like are you they thought it was

SPEAKER_25: crazy they're like robotics in a restaurant no one's going to want that first of all it's probably impossible to build you're going to take away the humanity and like why would you do that if you that's so doesn't make sense for the brand but i was very adamant that that's where the world was

SPEAKER_15: going and i and i believe so even more so today and yeah when i tested all of them there were two that

David Friedberg: worked really well the dishwashing robot worked incredibly well but you had to use their cafeteria style plates and everything which is a bit limiting but they have like magnets in them so you know it just lets you do a better job with them but then cafe x the robotic coffee machine that

SPEAKER_02: we invested in which has a couple locations at sfo and and they've got a couple more going into other airports and they're doing amazing like a million dollars across two machines at sfo it was the first one that i saw that could actually do it from soup to nuts and then it had the ability

David Friedberg: to keep adding stuff so when you watch a founder go from you know making espresso based beverages

SPEAKER_15: to adding a tap and then you've got kombucha but then you've also got teas and then you figure out the cold foam machine and you put cold foam on you know a chai and then you put an espresso in it and it's a dirty chai and then you do the matcha and it and then all of a sudden you put cookies in it and the arm can do all those things and then there was a chocolate machine and you're just like whoa okay you're starting to see it come together and i can't believe that company made it through

SPEAKER_17: covet and everything but you've delved into robotics where is it working now and can it do a hundred

David Friedberg: percent of a salad slash plate sixty percent what's your vision for this um because i know you do have it at least in beta in a couple of stores correct so we're actually fully live we have two stores

SPEAKER_35: operating as if they were normal restaurants today with what we call the infinite kitchen technology so the first one opened last may in naperville and outside of chicago and then we opened one in december uh in huntington beach the way we saw this little robotics opportunity you know it's probably seven or eight years ago started thinking about it actually tried to build it ourselves we went and hired a team started putting it together realized it was really really hard at the same time we were watching the industry like you were and we saw this group of uh this group of entrepreneurs in out of boston um these four guys and interesting had a very similar story to us they actually they i mean they'll tell you they they loved sweet green and they're like they went to mit they're mechanical

SPEAKER_39: engineers and like we're that's where it's all out of people don't realize this but the robotics lab at mit is where we had a company called root ai yeah that was picking uh strawberries um and got bought

SPEAKER_150: by another company and um all the robotic arm technology and the hands and everything came out of mit

SPEAKER_00: yeah so we met we met these guys we they were just graduating college they shared their idea like this is really cool let's stay in touch they decided originally they probably wanted to build

SPEAKER_35: robotics for the industry they realized that was very hard to do and that the only way to really create value at least at that point was to build a restaurant themselves so they actually opened two restaurants it was called spice kitchen that were fully automated with their technology because they had based a lot of their menu and like vision of of the experience off of sweet green we were very lucky their menu was like almost identical to where we were doing they were doing bowls you know we kept in touch we really liked these guys they're just so smart so it was just so bright so hungry and we felt like years ahead of the rest of the industry and so about two and a half years ago we acquired the team and the company as well as all their technology and we began working on a version for up for all for us and they actually had the technology pretty much fully figured out what we had to figure out was how to scale it how to bring the cost down how to make it easily cleanable how to make it so you don't need an engineer or a technical person to run it

SPEAKER_06: you need an an average worker civilian a civilian that knows nothing not a rocket scientist yeah

SPEAKER_25: be able super easy to use and so uh we had a few pilots and now we're off to the races we opened our

SPEAKER_35: first two this year we're on pace to open about 11 more of them this year which will be a couple of retrofits and older older restaurants and then a few new ones so for us it's intentionally there are

SPEAKER_25: still humans there there's less people but the idea is let's take away the things that they may not love doing let's let them focus on the things they do so back to the culinary aspect and the hospitality and let's take away that part in the middle which is the assembling of bowls and when

SPEAKER_06: we look at our nps our biggest attractors were always accuracy and time like you got my order wrong

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SPEAKER_45: so this machine that we've developed can do over 500 bowls per hour um perfectly accurate on that for a second yeah it's eight bowls a minute i mean it's deranged it's

SPEAKER_06: it's just it's it's an amazing thing to see and it does it perfectly accurate and the food is better

SPEAKER_25: because it's all held perfectly temperature control and so the hot food comes out piping hot the cold food cold portion perfectly your dressing you know we ask you light medium or heavy light medium or heavy can mean different things to people now you get it down to down to the gram of exactly what you ordered and so it does almost everything there's a few items that it does not do and we actually don't mind it because it allows for a moment of hospitality in theater so it does almost the whole

SPEAKER_35: bowl there's the items that it doesn't do our avocado it does not do the salmon and it doesn't

SPEAKER_25: we you know intentionally we want like the lemon lime and the herbs to be on the side so the bowl comes off and they'll put your hot salmon on it or they'll take the salmon is way too fragile to have

SPEAKER_55: a robot start messing with it correct yeah correct but it does it does every it does everything else

SPEAKER_32: amazing and and is this the kind of uh cylinder based approach where you kind of queue up in the cylinders and then each portion can come out and what this also does you got portion control you got

SPEAKER_164: safety you got consistency and you got speed i mean yeah this is like the holy grail and you

SPEAKER_165: this very weird thing where people i remember when we were working on cafe x we're like oh what about

David Friedberg: baristas and it's like you know when you're in an airport and the line for you know starbucks or coffee bean tea leaf is longer than the wait for your flight it's kind of a non-starter you no longer care about the barista experience and then let's call it keep it a buck right like keep it 100. you ever peek behind what's going on at starbucks now they're just pressing a button it's a super automatic machine it's not the old days where they were you know tapping stuff so here it is folks you see it here if you're watching live and and the bowl comes around and uh yeah open up the port the bay door opens

SPEAKER_00: and you get your salad you're done easy breezy what's interesting about it is probably like most technology solutions the first 90 is quite easy it was all about dispensing almonds this would be the easiest thing ever yeah it's how do you dispense you can count them yeah how do you dispense goat cheese how do you dispense dressing with the right viscosity how do you get it so it plates so for us it actually plates the bowl you don't want it all dropping on top of each other you want your bowl to come out and

SPEAKER_25: be photo worthy so it actually knows where on the bowl it is putting it and it rotates around so you

David Friedberg: got to hit it like three o'clock by the double score on the dartboard you got to hit it you know a triple 20 with your avocado i don't know if use a dartboard or what you use as your metaphor but

SPEAKER_28: you got a little ted lasso to you yeah and maybe you get curious about the dartboard and uh but you

SPEAKER_15: know that everybody was like this people are going to hate this you know people said the same thing about ordering from an app and i go to a restaurant right now and we have a very weird thing happening in norcal and i think it's happening in socal where you just can't get people to be waiters and so

David Friedberg: i've watched and i was shocked when i came from new york city to live in la that a quality restaurant with a 20 entree you know or or more would have you pick up food at the counter like earth cafe or you know some places you know and or like order at the counter and then they give you a table stand

SPEAKER_135: they handed that to me the first time a kid from brooklyn or living in manhattan i was like what are you giving me this i'm not the waiter you know let's send the waiter over and like we don't have waiters i'm like what can somebody be my waiter said no you have to go to the counter order now with toast and some of these other things i i prefer much prefer the experience when i'm with my daughters of like oh we need to get another thing of dumplings bang i order it a runner brings it much better experience and in a high-end restaurant lower-end restaurant i i really don't

SPEAKER_183: care i'm people are about speed and convenience and this will also help with price i would think at some point maybe not immediately or what what does this do to margins for sweet sweet green i mean i had read some numbers some like 20 or 30 percent even but i don't know if that was a whisper number or

SPEAKER_35: true so it's pretty pretty significant what it can do you know first uh you know obviously experience improvement so the speed is a huge one you know there's a huge walkaway rate in the business

SPEAKER_00: so all of a sudden that goes away you can capture all of the demand that is there walk away as i see

SPEAKER_66: the line i'm out yeah i see the line i'm out or even on our app we have like what we call throttle

SPEAKER_35: capacity on our lines so you go to order in new york new york at lunch and that store even online might push you out an hour hour or so so now with the speed you're able to capture a lot more serve a lot more people you have the accuracy there what we're seeing is much less turnover in those

SPEAKER_25: restaurants so the team members prefer working here it's more fun it's easier to work in it can be a really pretty hard job to be honest yeah it's an easier job our customer service scores are much

SPEAKER_35: better and we are seeing pretty significant margin lift off of it you know if you look at our business if you're at a we haven't we haven't disclosed publicly but what i will say is uh our business is split our labor is about 50 percent between prep and 50 production and this takes most of the production oh you know it does it kind of takes most of the production so so it can be

SPEAKER_25: pretty uh pretty significant in terms of what it can do for margin of course there's capital involved in terms of doing it well you know again what we've stated publicly is we are seeing incremental return on capital and so in our business that one of the critical metrics is return on invested capital at the unit level so if a store costs you a million dollars can it deliver four or five

SPEAKER_35: hundred thousand dollars a year that would be a forty percent return on capital these stores within

SPEAKER_25: infinite kitchen are more revenue or a bottom line so so let's say if it costs you a million and it the

SPEAKER_35: profit is four hundred thousand got it yeah the metric is 40 would be 40 in that case so what we've said publicly is the incremental cost of them with the incremental cost of the machine at the unit level

SPEAKER_23: the returns are better oh so okay so i could start to do some math here being a poker player hey if you were 25 better and it cost a quarter million dollars i put this out a quarter million dollars maybe a half million uh and then as you scale it you everyone you do you're going to knock

SPEAKER_15: 10 off for every 20 you do you knock 50 off it's yeah and that's the other thing to your business as

SPEAKER_35: you know you got two cost curves going the opposite opposite directions you have one of technology which is as we all know kind of goes down it's not going to go to zero like software but it will

SPEAKER_25: continue to come down as we scale this on the other hand you have we have labor costs and labor call it complexity availability that's going completely the other way you know california on april yeah april 1st it's 20 in california and three you know three and a half percent a year on top of that that's going to be thirty dollars and not you know not too far away it is shocking to go out to eat or to

SPEAKER_02: you know see what's happening at supermarkets restaurants just the the sticker shock is very real what have you seen in terms of customers and inflation and the sticker shock of you know i

SPEAKER_15: don't know when you started was it eight to twelve bucks a bowl and you know now you're at your 14 to

SPEAKER_02: twenty dollars a bowl with you know whatever accoutrement how are customers reacting to that and then as a business how do you react to their sticker shock so inflation has been one of the hardest

SPEAKER_00: things for us to deal with i think the the the big last you know kovid impacted us in a lot of ways a

SPEAKER_35: lot of it was immediate for us we had a heavy heavily urban business eighty percent of it was urban at the time of kovid you can imagine what happened to that business when we were depending

SPEAKER_25: on people going to the office so you know i would track that castle return to office the metric very

SPEAKER_35: very closely and who would have thought it only was only going to get back to 50 is where we're at today wow 50 of 2019 levels is where we're at today which is just a crazy crazy thing even did you

SPEAKER_32: have to close places during kovid were there some that just didn't make it because city

SPEAKER_29: centers didn't come back or you know yeah we just fought the good fight built out our delivery business and just it was hard i mean i gotta say it was the past four years they've been the most

SPEAKER_23: challenging of my career is that why you have so many suburban places now because you're following

SPEAKER_35: where people are yes but also if you look at the country that's what most of the country looks like and it was the next the next step in our trajectory anyway so got it our strategy was always go to the urban centers build the brand so go to these major cities and then kind of follow the customers home in the in the suburbs you know we had already gone to the major urban places and so the next step was always always to move towards suburban but on your question question on inflation so we've seen a ton of it we've seen it in in labor obviously we've seen it in commodities and food costs we've also seen it in construction and build out we feel that in a very major way i think what's helped is a few things one we've uh given the lack of reliance on beef we've been a little bit more immune to the

SPEAKER_25: commodities inflation that's impacted a lot of people you know i think chipotle's raised prices over 30 35 i want to say from 2019 levels relative to our peers we have taken up we have taken less price so

SPEAKER_35: while we are we still sit at a premium to most of our fast food and fast casual competitors i think we had a lot of pricing power and as they continue to take a price the relative difference actually decreased so if you look at us versus the rest there used to be a bigger gap it's actually a bit closer today

SPEAKER_02: tell me about delivery obviously you know everybody can take a shot now i was a third or fourth investor

SPEAKER_39: in uber as is tradition here on the show everybody has to do a shot so if you're driving a car right now you could get some dispensation you have to do the shot when you get home jacob said uber

SPEAKER_32: um but watching what they've done with delivery and then obviously my friend travis doing cloud kitchens this has revolutionized how people eat and of course you got to give stanley and the team

SPEAKER_02: over at doordash a lot of credit as well this has changed how millennials look at consumption and food and just how they architect their lives this is just like nobody ever thought people would pay five or

SPEAKER_17: six bucks for for a starbucks the idea that people would pay 15 bucks to deliver their dinner eight bucks extra to deliver their lunch like they're they seem fine with it i mean they might

SPEAKER_32: complain but it's not hitting the numbers yet so how do you approach delivery and how do you think

SPEAKER_15: about cloud kitchen specifically as a competitor doordash uber and then how do you do that fulfillment

SPEAKER_02: um and then how do you control the experience you expect people to come to the app to order it do you think i don't know if you're available in uber eats and in the doordash and everything yeah so it's

SPEAKER_35: something we think a lot about and i think a lot changed pre and post pandemic so pre pandemic we were very focused on only our own channels it was we actually had just launched our own native delivery actually in partnership with uber at the time um where we you could only order delivery on

SPEAKER_25: the sweetgreen app only on sweetgreen channels and we really wanted to control that we wanted to

SPEAKER_153: maintain that direct connection with our guests pandemic happens and you're in a fight for fight

SPEAKER_25: for survival if there's one if there was one winner of the of the pandemic it was definitely the delivery companies the food delivery company that is a behavior that shifted and has stuck and interestingly continues to grow um so really impressive to see to see and i do think uh both uber and doordash have executed really well you know there it's kind of like a frenemy uh type of thing there there are great partners you know i'm very close to both of them we love we we love are you in both the apps can you yeah we are yeah we're we're in all the different apps so most companies today are non-exclusive because they find that there is incremental revenue it's a different

SPEAKER_35: occasion in each one there's two like consumer use cases one is i know what i want i'm a loyal

SPEAKER_00: customer you may have then the sweetgreen app you want loyalty and those things yeah people have

SPEAKER_124: the dominoes app for example the dominoes app is pretty great right but yeah dominoes i think made

SPEAKER_00: a deal with uber recently dominoes just did because it's a different experience where you're like actually i have no idea what i want i'm hungry quick i'm going to open something up and i'm going

SPEAKER_35: to browse the options on on that app and they also did a really good job with their passes um they have these these membership uber one dash pass most of their revenue is coming through those and that and that that really has a lock-in nature of of those marketplaces but today we're on all the marketplaces or at least the major ones we do have our own native delivery service which is a very robust channel it's actually our own native is bigger than any of the individual marketplaces but as a whole the marketplaces are bigger but delivery continues to grow it i mean almost like shocking to me like you said with the prices people love convenience and they've almost accepted that it's a luxury that

SPEAKER_00: they're willing to pay for and so it so it does continue to grow the thing that i think we did

SPEAKER_25: really well early on we were actually one of the you know my brother actually worked uh for travis at cloud and so i know i know them i know travis and the team very well we were one of the first customers there ended up actually not working for us largely because we we realized that we had a ghost kitchen in every restaurant and this goes back over 10 years when we saw the the opportunity for mobile we realized that mobile was only going to work if you took a first principles approach to mobile

SPEAKER_35: and designing the physical experience to match the digital experience and so of course yes you see

SPEAKER_25: those restaurants i mean you've been to them where like they have like 10 tablets up and they have like one make line and they're trying to take care of you but then like trying to make take care of the delivery orders and it's just a shit show for those people a ghost kitchen can be great but for us we very intentionally over 10 years ago realized that digital was going to be a big part of the business we

SPEAKER_35: were one of the first mobile ordering apps out there in 2010 and immediately realized we need to build a second kitchen like a second make line in our restaurants and pretty soon after realized we need to think about the flow in the restaurant in terms of where do the delivery drivers pick up

SPEAKER_231: and getting them out of the way door right yeah yeah if you see some of our like heavy volume

SPEAKER_25: restaurants we have one uh on Folsom in san francisco as an example we have a separate entrance for delivery drivers we actually have an area where they can get water and like have a little like pickup area and it's completely out of the customer area so this idea of like ghost kitchens you know we've kind of built ghost kitchens inside inside of our restaurants taking that first principles

SPEAKER_232: one thing i could see is if you wanted to conquer a country with which travis and diego and the ck

SPEAKER_02: team are really good at you know you wanted to go to mina you wanted to hit uae qatar riyadh and you wanted to just sweep the whole deck at once they could probably you know accelerate your process by you know a year or two but again you have to be thoughtful about that and what's the long game etc so you have this massive um robotics going on the question i always have with the robotics is can this eventually lead to 24 hour a day kind of approach and have you thought about like those kind of concepts

SPEAKER_15: because it does seem to me like and i don't know if you do breakfast or not um do you do breakfast not yet one day we will yeah i mean that seems to be a great one you know the the thing i love about the bowl and i i wonder if this is where you got it from were you inspired by australia and the bowls

SPEAKER_102: in sydney because that bowl culture has been going on for a while there did you how did you did you know

SPEAKER_17: that i did not know that but i've been going to australia for 20 years and when i did my first speaking gig there they took me to a couple of different places downtown that's amazing and they had these

SPEAKER_135: bowls and grains plus eggs plus bacon and now i go there because you know i'm trying not to eat bread because i'm irish i get fat i eat a loaf of bread and that's it it's like plus seven pounds i'm trying

SPEAKER_42: to say skinny that's uh i mean you're a hundred percent like i'm almost that's why i like reacted like

SPEAKER_25: that really is that what you saw balls the way sweetgreen started is my junior year i lived in australia in college and we're in sydney or melbourne i lived in sydney i lived in bondi district and i loved it and i think i was taken by these that aussie aussie cafe culture where they had these awesome bowls and also the fact that those cafes were like the cool places to go yes healthy food was cool and in america healthy food was not cool in 2006. healthy food was you know it was like granola eat your vegetables whatever and so you were even the name sweet green originally uh was based off of a restaurant in bondi beach called greens cafe so the whole really like so much of the vision actually derived from from my experience there that's why i was so used you ever go crazy that

SPEAKER_255: you brought that up we get those ever go to pancakes at bills bills oh yeah yeah i've been there too

SPEAKER_15: amazing bills was like uh it's still there and every time i go i bring people and they lose their mind because you they had a great bowl there with which had chunks of corned beef back to my irish roots you get this nice corned beef with some nice poached eggs and they put it on some frise or i don't know some micro greens whatever it is and i'm like you know what this is an easy compromise for make i'll eat my greens if you give me some brisket you know or you know some corned beef that's an easy one for me to make that um and there's one in tokyo so when i was in tokyo i was like oh my god

SPEAKER_135: in tokyo on the third or fourth floor there's a bills it's the same you know same bills uh with the same menu and they have this incredible rigoda that is so funny it really is interesting how food travels on the boat so have you gone back full circle did you have locations in australia and

SPEAKER_00: no not yet i would love to i've been back a year it's been almost a decade but i went back a couple

SPEAKER_15: times after and i just i love the culture there you know you look at japan and you go to tokyo as an entrepreneur and i always tell every entrepreneur if you're thinking about going to japan don't don't overthink it just go and i'll give you a list of places but you will get to see you know as we talked about your life's purpose what people are willing to pay for what the world needs yada yada but you'll also just see like a commitment to excellence and then if you go to australia it's it's very similar i think they've also been influenced by japanese culture where people put a little bit of pride a little extra pride into what they do and when you're an entrepreneur it

SPEAKER_35: just makes it's always that extra one percent we have this one of our core values is called add the sweet touch and the idea is we want to empower our front lines and everyone in the company to just

SPEAKER_25: try to do that one thing that one unreasonable hospitality thing or whether you're thinking

SPEAKER_35: about design to experience what's that one little thing that makes someone remember what you did and that's the best way to build a brand you don't build brands with billboards i mean social media can help but at the end of the day it's it's all about that experience and the best brands are built even today we have you know we market we do all that you know all these kinds of things

SPEAKER_25: we used to throw a music festival like we have all that stuff but what eighty percent of our business

SPEAKER_02: is word of mouth i know this because my wife's addicted to it and you know like i would say

SPEAKER_15: minimum once a week not unheard of two three times a week the text from my wife at sweet greens what do you want or thank you thank you knock on the door and the sweet greens just shows up you know and she just gets me stuff and and i just chow down on whatever it is but you did add a lot more protein you you obviously listen to the tim ferris or the hooberman or all these lunatics with their protein-based diet and that seemed to be i don't know when you did that but you were must have been listening to customers and i think correct me if i'm wrong you know the keto people probably want to have you know whatever six eight ten ounces of protein and you were you know you're sprinkling on a little bacon but you know that's not the same thing so so that must have changed the

SPEAKER_109: demographic a bit you shift yeah you know from the very beginning the vision of sweet green was not

SPEAKER_35: to just be a salad place it was salads was the way in maybe just because then we didn't know how to cook and salads were the easiest thing to start with but always it was more around creating nutritious delicious food at scale right it was how do you create the mcdonald's of the generation but one that is actually good for you and so that you know always expected us to kind of go expand beyond the salad and protein plates is our biggest our biggest menu innovation and change uh really in the company's history so in october we launched it and it's a total it's not a salad you know it's it's it's uh i think the marketing campaign said uh you don't have to be a

SPEAKER_25: salad person to be a sweet green person and the fact that you can eat you know for me healthy food doesn't mean a salad it just means real nutrient dense food and so we launched in october it's done

SPEAKER_35: incredibly well it is starting to shift our demographics the bowls have between 30 and 50 grams of protein just with a single serving the way i eat it to 50 grams of protein really 30 to 50

SPEAKER_25: grams yeah on all of them and i eat it with double protein so on some of them i'm just getting 80 grams of protein in a bowl um at the same time to get to the next level i was told i need to eat my weight in

SPEAKER_15: protein and when i i'm starting to lift now i did the ozempic that lost 20 pounds i did fasting lost 20 pounds and now i want to add 10 pounds of muscle and just all about it's all about protein

SPEAKER_35: so like i'll do like a plate with the double chicken or double salmon it is starting we're seeing a demographic shift it's broadening our consumer we're seeing i'm assuming it's bringing in more men yeah it's bringing in more men it's also you know we have restaurants in texas and atlanta

SPEAKER_25: kind of different parts of the country it's starting to really expand like people in la san francisco already like they love salads but people in other parts of the country they're starting to love what we do because it's just tasty and it's not about the health it's just

SPEAKER_35: delicious and so right now we're actually very excited we are in test we're piloting steak it's a grass-fed grass-finished try tip that we're in pilot on um as long as things go well we'll be

SPEAKER_21: launching that um pretty soon um and right you know now you have a full offering let me just save you

SPEAKER_01: this is what i want you to do let's listen to jay cow because i know barbecue i make my own brisket

SPEAKER_32: just let's cut to the chase here just go right for a brisket you make a 12-hour brisket you can do it in four or five hours with the texas crotch anyway if you can do chunks of brisket with a salad with some greens man that is such a great combination when the fat you know more because it holds really

David Friedberg: nicely holds nice you can cut it into cubes a lot of different preps for it um you can do slices of of course but when you mix it with salad and you get a little of that combination of the the fat from

SPEAKER_135: the meat and the salad the salad goes down a lot easier and so this is what i explained to my my wife

SPEAKER_281: you know you give me a slice of brisket i'll i'll eat you know a bowl full of salad just for my one

SPEAKER_25: slice of brisket now the other thing we did with the with the plates that was interesting is i mean

SPEAKER_124: you probably heard this huge conversation around seed oils well i was about to say um i decided to have

SPEAKER_15: you on the show here i was always like watching you and then i saw this back and forth you had on x formerly known as twitter where people are like hey bruh sunflower oil it's a great name everybody loves sunflowers this is getting very highly correlated within you know inflammation obesity heart disease cancer and like you know listen we get research and you make changes and you engaged

SPEAKER_281: immediately and i don't know who it was who who who got up in your grill about the sunflower oil it was just

SPEAKER_25: a ramper i don't even know who was it was just a random random customer i always i always like to talk to my customers and get feedback and listen it's something we've been talking a lot about we are we're kind of nerds about this we study it we're actually pretty very proud of this the oil we'd used before because it was a high olealic sunflower oil and if you look at all the data around seed oils it's relatively unconclusive it's more the issue is what the seed oils are in so it's the fact that if the seed oils are in all of the processed foods they look at people that eat seed oils and they happen to also eat processed foods and the outcomes are worse but if you actually do the controlled studies for seed oils they're not as conclusive but what we do know is olive oil is always better it just it just even if this is you know and there's different levels of seed oils but

SPEAKER_289: yeah but it was important to customers expensive right it's expensive and it's especially it was very

SPEAKER_25: expensive um honestly it was it was a big decision but it was one of those ones back to how do we get bigger better as we get bigger and we heard our customers and like this is important to us and and we made the change and the reaction's been incredible immediately and in this in the reaction it is a it's the huberman crowd it's like yeah it's like it's the one five cell yeah the one to five percent of our most loyal customers you know 95 of customers never heard what seed oils are

SPEAKER_35: but for those people that care they really really care and here's the thing you and i both know this

SPEAKER_32: being part of the generation where science and customer science came to startups and companies you have mps score and if you make a move like this and you delight that one to five percent

David Friedberg: they could have turned into detractors they could be telling everybody hey don't go there sunflower oils and people were coming at you with hey yeah don't go to sweet greens sunflower is terrible for you what are you doing to yourself and now you turn a detractor somebody who rates your you know

SPEAKER_15: how likely are you to tell a friend to go to sweet greens if somebody gives you one to six or zero

SPEAKER_32: to six they're gonna that means they're outwardly detracting they're telling people not to go they're costing customers you get them in seven eight those are kind of neutral people then you get the nine and tens and when you get those nine and tens they tell people to go to sweet that's right and they then become your promoters that's the net promoter score and so you you just turned the lunatic the huberman lunatics and i can say that because i know them the huberman lunatics you get them on your side fantastic and now they're getting 80 grams with a double protein pack man they're feeling

SPEAKER_47: pretty good about the yeah absolutely great we're excited about that and uh you know i'm actually

SPEAKER_66: very excited about oh this is the thread here we go please fix this yeah wow amazing yeah when was

SPEAKER_25: that that was january of last year so in january of this year we we made the change with protein plates so when we did the change to protein plates we shifted it you know something i'm actually we're

SPEAKER_35: actually very curious about is is more around this personalized health i think there's such an opportunity you know you think about you and your goals and it's so complicated like what do i eat

SPEAKER_25: to hit my we hit my goals sweet green is perfectly positioned to be able to take what your goals are understand more about you what you're willing to share with us and be like you don't have to order off the menu here jcal here is your menu here is what you should be eating i know you don't like spicy food i know you like meat i hit you know cilantro tastes like soap to you we can take your taste profile and

SPEAKER_35: your nutritional profile there's so much cool ai that's already doing this and they're getting i mean there's crazy ways of doing it of like you know kind of checking your stool sample and you can go down to your genome in ways but then there's other just you know what your your goals are and

SPEAKER_25: your likes and dislikes are but if you think about the sweet green menu it's 55 unique ingredients that can make millions of combinations yeah and so by understanding and we're testing this

SPEAKER_35: internally right now with our with our team when i open up my app i have a feature where it says

SPEAKER_29: your personalized bowl today and it takes it takes that's like spotify your mix that's it by the way the what we call it is uh spotify for food that's our internally the vision the original like

SPEAKER_25: brief like memo on it is we want to build what spotify did for the playlist for the menu i love it

SPEAKER_02: yeah i mean and then you start thinking about you know whenever anybody wants to lose weight or they're trying to go on a health kick what do they do they spend a thousand dollars a week on prepaid meals

SPEAKER_32: and i think they overpriced these they charge twice as much for this food and they're not good

SPEAKER_17: in order to make you commit it's like part of the commitment it's like oh well i spent them

David Friedberg: thousand dollars a week on these 21 meals and 10 snacks and they're like packaged meals

SPEAKER_04: they're terrible it's like i want you we want to be able to offer that solution the convenience of that solution but with the food made fresh every single day well i mean i would take it for two days if

SPEAKER_23: i'm being honest because it's a salad so if you gave me two if you gave me like a two day cleanse kind of situation where you're like hey here's breakfast here's your lunch a little cheating here on the edges here's a snack here's dinner and then maybe you throw in some juice maybe do some

SPEAKER_32: with like press juicery or something or you guys don't do juice but you got the vegetables there

SPEAKER_00: yeah we used to actually we used to do it we used to have some called sweet press it was yeah it's a it's a tough business tough business and there's a reason they charge so much for it it takes a lot

SPEAKER_25: of vegetables to make a little bit of juice and and there was also given the pricing that you had to

SPEAKER_35: charge it's like do you really want to buy juice for 11 bucks after you bought a you know salad for for 14. it's kind of it was a challenging thing we are excited about expanding drinks and kind of

SPEAKER_25: functional beverage is probably the next innovation for us yeah or something kombucha but think more uh protein yeah interesting yeah infusing protein with matcha and some cool flavors i like it yeah so

SPEAKER_123: you get it you can get a six seven eight dollar beverage on the menu as opposed to a two three four

SPEAKER_33: dollar beverage and you're drinking some that's right bone you got bone broth going yet i love

SPEAKER_25: bone broth we run a few bone broth tests um and during covid we actually ran a ran a pilot where we

SPEAKER_35: did both broth and broth bowls so instead of having like a lettuce or lettuce base you could do a broth

SPEAKER_00: base and then add everything into it oh sweet um i love it it's i think it's something that we'll we'll

SPEAKER_150: explore again yeah yeah it is the i know like where the trends are gone because i'll be at poker games

SPEAKER_02: you know home games and then you know that gets everybody's on help you know one or two people are on health cake and then somebody brings their bone broth with them and they're drinking bone broth and i'm like why are you doing that it's like oh it's got 40 grams of 40 grams of protein in it it's so

SPEAKER_35: good for you the collagen everything and it's it's it's just amazing you know some of the best like the emails i get that are that are just the most you know rewarding is when you get these emails from a customer that are like we get a lot of these ones unfortunately people who are like cancer and they're like i got i started eating squeaker and every day to like cure help me beat cancer yeah or you know totally turn around their lives through the power of food and food is a very

SPEAKER_00: very big problem in this country the health outcomes that we have the way we are treating them it's just

SPEAKER_02: it's you can't have 60 70 of the country be obese and then have obesity be linked to like the four

SPEAKER_05: horsemen of the apocalypse whatever they are like diabetes diabetes diabetes all they all come back

SPEAKER_06: the metabolic dysfunction and and i want to be clear this isn't people's fault this is not the individual's fault this is the system right now our subsidies 95 of our subsidies go to corn and soy these are things weak that are then going yeah that are then going into the processed food system and so

SPEAKER_25: there's a lot to i think unwind of this food system something we're very interested in we're just trying to be a good solution towards it i do believe capitalism can solve a lot of the world's

SPEAKER_35: problems it is a messed up um is a really messed up food connected to health system that we have here

SPEAKER_02: in america yeah i mean the convenience of bread and the what happened with wheat there's incredible book wheat belly and then if you just do some research on dwarf wheat you can see how wheat was turned into

SPEAKER_32: like a super processed wheat just immediately has this glycemic index in people and makes you super fat very quickly when they came up with this like really advanced wheat it was like oh wait a second if you're on the go which americans are right we're a fast-paced society you can wrap anything in bread you can wrap cheese in bread pizza grilled cheese you can put a hot dog in it a hamburger everything

SPEAKER_15: is bread and meat bread and cheese and you know i think what the bowl concept does is even if you're on the go you got a bowl you can put a lot of stuff in there and some of it can be green and could be healthy for you or it could be even the the base of it and people are a function of their options

SPEAKER_02: and their incentives and sweet greens is just such a great incentive for people and such a great option how do you think about communities that are less served and you know trying to get access to them this has always been you know one of the harder topics for people to discuss but you got plenty of bad options if you live in the ghetto if you live in you know a low-income area and you know

SPEAKER_15: i can't imagine it's easy to to make a sweet greens work there do you think about how do you get this long tail and you know maybe people who need it even more who have less options yeah we actually think

SPEAKER_00: a lot about it and and i've been thinking about it since we started because the you know what i remember doing early vision boards like what is success for us it's it's sweet greens in those

SPEAKER_35: neighborhoods and providing access access to real food everywhere not just not you know not just where people you know can afford it today the the problem is is multi-layered because there's an education issue yep there's an access issue and then there's a price issue yep and i think you kind of got to solve in that order the you know you got to solve the education which education is both understanding why it's important and creating desire and that's why we've always been in like let's let's not solve

SPEAKER_25: this the original vision for speaking is let's not solve this by telling people like eat your vegetables because it's good for you let's solve this by making it sexy and cool coca-cola sells happiness and we're going to tell you to eat your vegetables like no we got to make this fun and sexy and cool why into that you know in 2010 we started a massive music festival to just make it like fun we ran a music festival for seven years to be like eating healthy is cool like you can go watch the strokes and eat a bowl of quinoa and that's like a cool thing it's what the cool kids are doing so how do you like create that cultural relevancy so let's start by making it cool let's start by making it delicious where they actually want to eat it we almost have like meet their their meet people's

SPEAKER_35: taste buds where there are then you you know you got to understand why it's important for you then you got to have access and then i think there's a price component but if you look at like other examples of a major brands take starbucks as an example they're everywhere and they don't really

SPEAKER_06: adjust their price in a crazy way and it's seven dollar seven dollar cup of coffee in a lot of you know in a lot of these places and they didn't have to adjust their price they just made it cool yeah

SPEAKER_25: you'll get there i mean and so we'll get there and i think you know one of the visions for

SPEAKER_35: automation is is being able to lower our cost structure in order to be able to eventually

SPEAKER_112: bring down the cost of food to be able to be more accessible in other places eventually you'll

SPEAKER_02: impact the supply chain you know i think you know mcdonald's eventually was selling so many nuggets i think they started buying the chicken farms and yeah you know you start courting the market on certain things i know the folks at uh in and out they like a certain type of potato i don't know if

SPEAKER_33: they bought the potato farms i think they have exclusives with a lot of them to get those specific

SPEAKER_340: potatoes to fry them up to to get a certain texture or size of french fry that's another

SPEAKER_25: part of the the part of the mission is is being a positive impact on the food system and so we take a lot of acres of of land with farmers and we convert them to organic every year because we guarantee them contracts we say hey you convert this land over we will buy from you and so the impact to the local communities in terms of our supply chain can be mad i mean we have 225 stores it's cool it's changing local supply chains in some ways but you imagine that at thousands of restaurants and when you get

SPEAKER_343: to 20 000 yeah now you're telling people what kind of tomatoes you want what's acceptable you start

SPEAKER_109: dictating yeah it really starts to change the food supply in the in the country yeah and robotics

SPEAKER_344: is going to hit that too you know like this the the greenhouses and robotics and that's gonna oh

SPEAKER_242: that's happening i mean that that stuff is happening yeah i mean you i think i think i saw on one of

SPEAKER_00: you one of your one of your podcasts the the harvesting yeah and the picking with the vision i mean a lot of that stuff is starting to happen because they're having the same labor they're

SPEAKER_02: having the same labor issues and what's really interesting about it is the opportunity you when people were picking and just take strawberries as an example you know you send somebody out to pick strawberries okay yeah pick this row so you figure out when the row is ready you pick it now you got a

SPEAKER_32: robot the robot scans or computer vision or camera scan they're watching a wall of shrubbers and they're like okay these strawberries are two days out let's pick those put them into baskets yeah those

SPEAKER_02: are going to stores or to markets where they're going to be consumed in 24 hours and the consumer has 24 hours with them and you know then they start degrading after that oh these strawberries are

SPEAKER_183: gonna go you know two states away they need three days so the 70 we'll pick this the 72 hours from

David Friedberg: ripe ones and put them on a different thing so you know now you're getting to what japanese farmers in hokkaido have done for a long time which is when they're picking their strawberries they're making

SPEAKER_340: like hey these are the 80 strawberry boxes for people who really care about strawberries they have like an 80 strawberry box it's ten dollars for eight strawberries or whatever it is eighty dollars for

SPEAKER_32: twelve it's it's legit delicious they're worth it those have been hand selected so now you just start thinking about you know how quality could improve for the average person it's truly but no mock meets yet

SPEAKER_358: for you you got the mock meets going you don't believe no i'm i don't believe in them i'm uh yeah

SPEAKER_25: it's processed food it's processed like i just think you know my definition of healthy food is kind of simple just eat real food you want to eat whipped cream have whipped cream don't have ice cream eat ice cream just eat the real stuff look at the label make sure you understand everything on the label and eat that if you eat that way of just eating whole unprocessed foods whether you eat meat or vegetarian or whatever you're going to be fine yeah it's everything that's processed that

SPEAKER_26: is the problem in this country stay away from all this garbage in your hotel room or whatever yeah

SPEAKER_361: yeah anything that's in a bag that's like tastes too good to be just look look at the ingredients i

SPEAKER_06: mean even with ice cream like look go to a haagen dazs and look at the ingredients there's like four

SPEAKER_25: ingredients in about anything of haagen dazs but go look at baskin robbins and you'll see like 200 ingredients so you don't if you can't if you can't pronounce the word you're trying to stay away

SPEAKER_362: don't put it in your body all right listen jonathan i'll have you on again you're a great

SPEAKER_15: guest uh oh thank you we got a couple of recommendations here you got a unreasonable hospitality you got the founder you got the bear and uh yeah just go to sweetgreen sign up for the

SPEAKER_02: membership download the app and get healthy and hey maybe they'll have breakfast with some brisket at some point i'm gonna share one of those bowls what a great guest and we'll see you all next time thank

SPEAKER_367: you man it's great to be here thanks brother