Sweetgreen tries to speed up menu with de-stemmed kale as CEO admits to hating the veggie

· New York Post

Sweetgreen is trying to speed up its menu and offer cheaper prices with ingredients like de-stemmed kale — even though its CEO fessed to despising the veggie.

The chain is offering lower-priced items and attempting to speed up service amid a slump in same-store sales, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

“People don’t want to always come into Sweetgreen, because they feel like it’s slow.” CFO Jaimie McConnell was quoted as saying.

Jonathan Neman, chief executive officer and co-founder of Sweetgreen Inc., speaks during the company’s initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021 Bloomberg via Getty Images

The chain is starting to use “de-stemmed” kale to hopefully shave seconds off of time-crunched customers’ salad wait time.

However, Sweetgreen’s CEO Jonathan Neman says he personally “hates” the veggie, preferring arugula, instead.

“I really don’t like kale. I’m not a huge fan. People don’t realize how labor intensive it is for the store. It has to be washed, chopped and messaged,” he said on an episode of the “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt” podcast published Tuesday.

Neman said if it wasn’t in their most popular item — the harvest bowl — he would probably banish the dark leafy green from his stores.

As for the revamped menu, workers previously had to de-stem kale by hand and the average store spends two to three hours de-stemming the product, Neman explained.

Pedestrians pass by a Sweetgreen restaurant on in San Francisco, California in August. Getty Images

Sweetgreen, which has about 880 stores across the country, added slightly cheaper salad wraps to its menu in an effort to appeal to more customers and bring in more people after a summer of cyclospora fears caused sales to go down. The parasite, found on lettuce contaminated with feces caused one of the worst food-borne illness outbreaks in US history. Sweetgreen said the company was never impacted.

The cheapest Sweetgreen wrap in New York City is around $13 and the lowest salad is $13.50. One of Sweetgreen’s competitors, Cava, also has a $13 wrap.

Initially, the salad wrap challenged the company’s time-saving efforts.

McConnell told the Journal workers struggled to roll them fast enough and now, one skilled person is on wrapping duty during peak hours. Sweetgreen said this past spring that “more than half of the people who tried wraps returned within the same month.” 

Sweetgreen workers add the final ingredients as salads come off the new Infinite Kitchen robotic system during a test run, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024, at Willis Tower in Chicago. TNS

 “If you can go into a restaurant, be in and out with your salad in under five minutes, that would be the goal,” said McConnell, a former Chipotle big.

In 2023, according to CNBC,  it took employees 50 minutes to make a batch of guacamole. 

The salad brand has been slowly trying to claw back from declining sales. The company anticipates same-store sales to fall between 7% and 8% for the year.