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Sweetgreen doesn\u2019t use iceberg lettuce, and it doesn\u2019t buy lettuce from Mexico, according to cofounder Nic Jammet, but the salad chain still paid for this summer\u2019s cyclospora outbreak anyway.<\/p>\n
Federal investigators tied the outbreak to iceberg lettuce from central Mexico, but fears about produce hit Sweetgreen regardless. The company cut its full-year outlook in August, projecting same-store sales would fall 7% to 8%, down from its earlier forecast of a 2% to 4% decline. The CDC declared the outbreak over on September 11.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a painful summer because that was like the headline for all summer,\u201d Jammet, who is currently Sweetgreen\u2019s chief concept officer, told Fortune<\/em>.<\/p>\n He said he worries the headlines and messaging around this summer\u2019s recalls may have nudged people to believe \u201cthe safer thing is actually highly processed food.\u201d He\u2019s even watched farmers till fields of greens back into the ground, he added.<\/p>\n The outbreak landed on a chain that was already in a turnaround, as the pre-pandemic desk-salad days have never quite returned. Same-store sales dropped 11.5% year-over-in 2025, but the stock has gained nearly 28% year-to-date as CEO Jonathan Neman has been running a turnaround plan built on tighter operations, marketing, menu changes and pricing. <\/p>\n There\u2019s also evidence that the customers are returning: on Sept. 28, Wells Fargo analyst Anthony Trainor upgraded Sweetgreen\u2019s stock, citing a faster-than-expected recovery, and shares hit their highest intraday level since the outbreak began in mid-July. Foot traffic data from Placer.ai also showed that Sweetgreen\u2019s average visits per location rose 5.6% year over year from July 6 through Sept. 11, while rival Chopt\u2019s fell 7.7%.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like we\u2019re on the other side of cyclospora, and the world has kind of moved on,\u201d Jammet said. \u201cAt the end of the day, we moved past it, and so we\u2019re excited to be on the other side of it.\u201d<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Sweetgreen named cookbook author Molly Baz its first chef-in-residence, the latest in a run of menu launches and collaborations this year. The Molly Baz collab is one of the biggest of the year, he said capping many fun collaborations and an \u201camazing summer menu.\u201dJammet said the collabs are \u201cbringing back a bit of that drumbeat that, you know, really built the brand.\u201d<\/p>\n Sweetgreen\u2019s founders have been here before, on a smaller scale. A week before the chain opened its first store in 2007, a break-in cost Jammet and his cofounders, Neman and Nathaniel Ru, the laptop that held their recipes and training materials. There was no cloud backup in those days. The three stayed up all week rebuilding the files from old emails.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though that was a crisis, it really forced us to just think about this idea that, like, never waste a crisis,\u201d Jammet said. \u201cShit\u2019s always going to happen to you, so you\u2019ve got to be ready to find solutions.\u201d <\/p>\n His advice for other restaurateurs dealing with this summer\u2019s fallout is similar. \u201cTry to stay long-term focused, and honestly, we try to stay as close to the customer as possible,\u201d he said. Customers are changing faster than ever, he added, which makes understanding them more important.<\/p>\n For Sweetgreen, that meant emphasizing its supply chain and staying focused on execution in the stores rather than letting the company \u201cget too distracted by the narrative,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n That narrative also means fighting against a trope. Jammet is the first to say Sweetgreen is more than just a salad chain, and points to Baz\u2019s menu, which includes three limited-edition items: a Caesar wrap, a pickle Caesar salad and a scoop of chicken salad with a pickle spear, now through November 9. <\/p>\n The menu builds on the chain\u2019s push into wraps this year, as bowl chains try to shake the \u201cslop bowl\u201d label, and on summer collaborations with Alice Waters and the tinned-fish brand Fishwife. Jammet said the response to wraps \u201chas been really great.\u201d<\/p>\n He thinks the office-lunch-bowl terminology misses what his brand is. \u201cSweetgreen is not a slop bowl,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is high-quality ingredients composed and cooked from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt really becomes food that you could eat every day,\u201d Jammet said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like one specific flavor, one specific cuisine.\u201d<\/p>\n Jammet learned hospitality from his parents, Andr\u00e9 and Rita Jammet, who ran La Caravelle, one of Manhattan\u2019s great French dining rooms and a Kennedy family favorite. Its head chef recommended the cook Jacqueline Kennedy hired to run the White House kitchen, and it was nominated for the James Beard Foundation\u2019s Outstanding Restaurant award shortly before it closed in 2004. <\/p>\n The restaurant closed during his freshman year of college, but he grew up in it, because that was where his parents were. \u201cMy parents ran it together, like mom and pop, there every day. If my dad wasn\u2019t there, they weren\u2019t open. And they worked dinner, so if we wanted to see our parents, we would go there.\u201d His father went to the fish market at 5 a.m. on Tuesdays and the meat market at 5 a.m. on Wednesdays.<\/p>\n \u201cI have two brothers. Three little five-year-old boys sitting in one of the booths at a fine dining restaurant in our little suits and ties,\u201d Jammet recalled, of his twin brother Patrick and his older brother Christophe. \u201cCustomers would walk behind me like, \u2018Why are these three, like, toddlers sitting here eating canel\u00e9s and souffl\u00e9s by themselves?’\u201d <\/p>\n Fine dining and fast casual run on the same principles, he said: high-quality product and \u201cpeople leaving better than when they came in.\u201d<\/p>\n Jammet\u2019s case for fresh food goes back to the chain\u2019s founding. When Sweetgreen opened in Washington, D.C., in 2007, Michael Pollan\u2019s books and nutrition scholar Marion Nestle were at their peak, and Morgan Spurlock\u2019s Super Size Me<\/em> was still fresh, and then two years later, Michelle Obama brought a focus on healthy food to the White House.<\/p>\n \u201cSo much of what inspired birthing and growing Sweetgreen was this shift in how people thought about and talked about their food,\u201d Jammet said.<\/p>\n Years later, Super Size Me<\/em> inspired Tim Donohue, a 27-year-old ad agency copywriter from Hoboken, N.J., and former office fast-food junkie whose coworkers were urging to eat healthier. He ate only from Sweetgreen\u2019s menu, twice a day, for 25 days. He lost nine pounds, though he also stopped drinking, and spent just under $1,000.<\/p>\n Sweetgreen turned Donohue\u2019s video of his personal challenge into the Sweetgreen Challenge, a 30-day version. It gave 30 Sweetgreen fans a credit of $700 a week toward meals, plus $500 to compete. <\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t expect people to eat Sweetgreen twice a day, but it just is kind of like the extreme challenge of it all to show you the power of the decisions you make around what you\u2019re eating and how it makes you feel,\u201d Jammet said.<\/p>\n He ate Sweetgreen about once a day and then went to twice a day after turning 40, when he set out to get in the best shape of his life. \u201cI\u2019ve been doing some version of the challenge for 20 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n For Donohue, the hardest part wasn\u2019t the food but the logistics. He skipped a concert in Brooklyn and once borrowed a car to drive about an hour after ordering to the wrong store. By day 20, he said, it felt like living on a different planet. The challenge, he said, was a way to \u201ctravel without going anywhere, because you can live an entirely different life just by changing what you eat every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Donohue said Sweetgreen never paid him for the video, though it gave him a \u201cgenerous amount\u201d of reward points after the challenge launched. After the challenge? He still eats there three times a week.<\/p>\n \u201cI actually thought that when this project was done, that I would swear off Sweetgreen and never eat it ever again in my life. And to my surprise, one week after I finished this challenge, I was just genuinely craving it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nNever waste a crisis<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Growing up at La Caravelle<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The Sweetgreen Challenge<\/strong><\/h2>\n