Transcript for:
Sweetgreen's Growth and Innovation

it's kind of crazy that 240 billion dollars of SNAP benefits so government-funded money a year goes towards Ultra processed food food that has Zero nutritional value absolutely zero of the 240 60 billion dollars 60 billion a year towards soda so like think about that's higher than I thought it was I was gonna I thought it was like 10 yeah taxpayer money and give 60 billion dollars to Coca-Cola [Music] welcome to the peel Where We explore the world's greatest startup stories I'm your host Turner Novak founder of banana Capital today Dr Jonathan Neiman the CEO and co-founder of sweet cream a publicly traded fast casual restaurant that serves salads we get a crash course in how the restaurant industry actually works my restaurants are not incentivized to serve food that's actually healthy for you we talk about how the U.S food system leads to over two trillion dollars in indirect Healthcare and environmental costs and how the food we eat is directly tied to our health and how sweet transmission is built the healthy version of McDonald's for the next generation of consumers we talk about the early days of sweet cream including how do you raise money have a second location almost failed and how that led to running a music festival a headline by The Strokes Kendrick Lamar and the weekend we talked through why sweetgreen killed a major product line to double down an online ordering in 2015. and Jonathan's first business making over forty thousand dollars a year in high school we also dive into sweetgreen's newest initiatives a monthly solid subscription called sweetpass and a new automated restaurant the infinite kitchen which is going well despite industry headlines around restaurant Automation and he tells us how it's led to better tasting food and shorter lives thank you Jonathan for coming on the show let's jump in after a short word from our sponsor this episode is brought to you by secureframe the automated compliance platform built by experts secure frame helps thousands of businesses get can stay compliant with security and privacy Frameworks like sock 2 ISO 2701 HIPAA PCI gdpr and more it's an elegant modern solution used by thousands of customers getting them compliant in weeks not months and removing all the headaches of staying compliant with AI and automation I'm at the secure frame team when they started the company in 2020. I loved their Vision to use Ai and automation to make compliance 10 times faster than I invested a recommended careframe to every founder I talk to head to secureframe.com and their in-house team of compliance experts and former Auditors will get you set up thank you secure frame and now let's talk to Jonathan at sweetgreen Jonathan how's it going thanks for joining me today thank you so much for having me it's great to be here I wanted to kind of Jump Right In could you kind of talk a little bit about just the state of the restaurant industry big current topics and Trends and how it all works I think I could talk a little bit about what we saw when we started and then maybe what's changed 15 years later so you know going back to 2007 when we started the company we wanted a healthy option that was delicious affordable and convenient in our own Community we were students at Georgetown and we couldn't find a place to eat and we just looked around we're like this is crazy how come there is nowhere to eat that is healthy but also delicious and you looked around at all the brands and things like McDonald's or Coca-Cola you know Subway you know but the best option for healthy food was considered Subway which is you know fully full of processed foods that you know they promote you know they promote this idea of freshness but really not that healthy similar to you know McDonald's and all the other food out there really focused on most efficiently moving calories largely processed you know getting them to people in the most efficient way as possible and in the effort to standardize things and drive margins as well as the fact that most restaurants are franchised in this country it means that you really have to build a system that dumbs down the operation at the at the edges which means most of the food is actually prepared further Upstream somewhere in a commissary really in a factory and then it's kind of refeed for you which is terrible it's crazy when you think when you think about how it's being done so we saw that in 2007 Chipola had recently just gone public so you saw like a different kind of model being developed around fast casual and they had a fresher model of food still maybe not that healthy but definitely fresher um and we saw an opportunity to create what we thought could be this globe one day a global iconic brand that stood for food that was healthy and delicious and really supported the communities that we were in so that was like the idea from the beginning is how do we create a lot of ways to make Donald's of Our Generation you know the industry um there's all it's it's a huge industry I mean we we serve I think the number I recently saw was a 200 000 fast food restaurants in the United States so that's one for every 200 people when you say fast food how is that defined so call it like you know the McDonald's think fast food we probably would not be in that category we're in this hybrid category of fast casuals like you know find casual a lot of people Define it differently you know still fast but with a higher quality of food I don't mind by the way I don't mind collagos fast food and going head head to head with them because I think it's you're speaking about the experience not about the quality of food but you have about 200 000 fast food restaurants in the US most of them are franchised so if you think about the big restaurant operators in the country all of them are franchises some hybrid version of franchise model so McDonald's is pretty much fully franchise the Yum they own Taco Bell uh restaurant Brands which owns Burger King Popeyes Tim Hortons all these companies are our franchise you have a few operators that are not franchise Chipotle being one you have Chick-fil-A which is a bit of a hybrid model in and out it's another that is not franchise Starbucks is largely not franchise but for the most part think about restaurant companies not as actually running the restaurants they are the brand the marketing engine Behind these restaurants but really are making something like a five percent franchise fee off of these other operators sometimes being more mom and Pub sometimes being larger franchise groups that are running you know hundreds or thousands of restaurants covid changed our industry significantly one obviously digital has shifted significantly so digital you know restaurants were kind of late to the game as it relates to digital I think that's one of the things that sweetgreen did differently we were early to digital and our digital penetration was over 50 before the pandemic obviously like anything else in e-commerce pandemic brought that forward for a lot of people so you have you know all the big chains now are seeing digital penetration somewhere in the 30 to 40 around around their sales another big shift around that we're seeing is around labor you know the restaurant industry employs a lot of people a lot of people left the workforce during the pandemic and you know it's a job you cannot do from home you cannot do remotely you know today there's over two million jobs of open for the restaurant industry so whatever you think is going on with our Economy Restaurant Industries are still hiring we did see that the industry's seen over 20 inflation from wages so the average wage for restaurant employees has gone up pretty significantly do you know why there's that huge gap because I feel like the narrative I hear is Gen Z doesn't want to work that's the narrative that I hear is that true or what's driving it I think it's a job that you can't do behind a computer you know it's a job you largely have to do with your hands and it's a Hospitality job and I think those can come with a lot of stress and pressure but I do think what's amazing about the restaurant industry is it's one of the only places where you can come work really without a lot of uh pre-existing qualifications so like you don't have you know you come work at sweetgreen as a team member and within three years be a head coach what we call our GM making over a hundred thousand dollars a year so you know I think that's one of the amazing things is the development opportunity and the leadership opportunity that you know whether it's sweetgreen or other restaurants really provides I make fun of McDonald's a lot we kind of use them as a foil to a lot of what we do and I think what they the food they serve does make our country sick however if you look at their commercials and what they talk about it's about the jobs they create yeah I guess you when you kind of think about how the country's evolve like even going back to like let's say Ford I mean I think Ford was kind of known for employing a ton of people and then his goal is to make the car affordable for all the employees do you know what percentage of people in the country work in restaurants or what percentage of employees I think you have tens of millions of people working in the restaurant industry I believe it's probably the you know top two Employers in the country so you know when we founded the company and you looked around at the food system and how much has changed 15 years ago I think when we're like oh we're starting this you know healthy food concept we're going to sell salads and people like all right you're gonna get to 10 stores and you're gonna you know go bankrupt No One's Gonna Buy one store in every Major Market and that's kind of it you know today we have over 200 restaurants and we believe the tams in the thousands and it's one of those things that as we build the company I think the address of Market continues to expand as we grow so you know I remember Whole Foods early on where their original goal was 50. when they got to 50 like maybe we can have a hundred only got to 100 they're like maybe we can have 200 Whole Foods has like 600 Whole Foods today you think about you know a company like Lululemon is over 500 retail stores in the US so I think the consumer is really beginning to Value Health and Wellness a lot more the system however has not caught up to it largely because I think a lot of it has to do with the economics of the restaurant business it is very hard to make money it is capital intensive to build a restaurant there's then a heavy labor component there's a heavy cost of goods component or rent component Etc so you got to be good at a lot of things to turn a profit in the industry and the incentives in the US are highly High highly misaligned towards healthier outcomes so you know 97 of the subsidies in the U.S goes towards five crops that are not the crops that you want to be eating so most of our subsidies are going to things like corn and when I say corn it's not corn like corn on the cob it's corn that creates high fructose corn syrup which is what's high fructose corn syrup for people who don't know it's highly refined processed sugar it's what goes in Coca-Cola and it's it's just really not good for you you'd be surprised how much high fructose corn syrup is in everything I do believe it's one of the biggest issues facing us as a country is the health of health of the country that's honestly been exacerbated by the pandemic the fact that we are so unhealthy has a lot to do with the food system and it the cost the financial burden on the on the country is huge Rockefeller came out with a report a couple years ago that showed that the cost of the food system the externalities are about two trillion dollars a trillion of it on health outcomes another trillion in terms of environment on consignment and so this just has massive ramifications but it's such a fragmented industry you know another report just came out that showed the top 10 restaurants gained a market share they went from like 23 of the total Market to like 28 the 10 biggest are only controlling less than 30 of the overall system are there any such thing as like local monopolies like certain brands or certain restaurants might have control of certain demographics or Regens and does that impact things at all yeah I think that's the other thing that's really interesting the restaurant business there's a lot of national Brands but it is you know it's a city by City Community by community business so here in California in and out is truly beloved but they only have a few hundred locations you know you go in the South and people love Whataburger you know you go to Canada people love Tim Hortons a lot of different brands that really work in certain regions but really have it transcended to become National and one of the things that we did very early on was we we always intended to be an National and then one day Global brand and so you know we started the company in DC we opened the first almost 20 restaurants in the greater DC area we really thought it was important in order to support the supply chain and to build a brand locally that we stayed in one area but from there we intentionally branched out we went to Boston Philly New York Chicago San Francisco L.A and Austin we went to really kind of the major cities with the intention of building a national brand we want to have a national presence and we want to plant Flags in these different places we don't go to cities and just plant one we'll go and we'll at least open a few stores in a city and look out to look to build a network our goal has always been to build a national brand yeah and I'm assuming each new store in the market up to a point of saturation just probably improves margin across the board for each store right correct yeah they help acquire new customers we buy a lot of food locally so that helps us a lot so the more you know the more stores we have in a single Market the more we're able to see some economies of scale at the local level from a food cost perspective and of course around you know management and overhead you have one person that can see oversee eight to ten stores in the market and so you open one store really you're leveraging that person across one store versus you grow that to eight to ten and you still have that one person overseeing it we also see a lot of efficiencies in marketing once you hit a certain scale you're able to invest into marketing at the local level that can improve the economics overall you could basically have done everything different you're almost thinking first principles what's just the best for maybe for the business maybe for society too can you talk about how you guys started the first store yeah of course so I went to school in Georgetown Washington DC and I met my two co-founders and I think we the three of us all bonded with just this entrepreneurial itch we all somehow like knew we wanted to be entrepreneurs and we're always like the three friends that were talking about starting a business did you do anything before sweet green any ideas or failed Concepts yeah a ton of ideas you know I had a concept in high school I ran actually a club called the young entrepreneurs Club where aware as our business we started selling planners like agenda books to like run your business on or no just with them to students and what was interesting is we had an interesting way of doing I went to a pretty pretty big high school I think there was you know like 5 000 kids in the school and so what we did is we said hey we have a distribution of 5 000 kids we made it we figured out how to make it almost mandatory for everyone to have one of these agenda books it just became like part of the curriculum we convinced the teachers and the administration like make it standard so and we sold them almost at cost so then we went to advertisers locally and we said hey we have 5 000 kids here this is you know before Facebook this before Edition really digital we we have access to 5 000 eyeballs of these kids that you want to get we would sell ads in the book and we figured out we could sell ads on the back cover on the corner of each page like we figured out really clever ways to sell ads on these agenda books each year we would do it would generate over thirty forty thousand dollars in ad Revenue wow and that was pure profit right it was pure profit it was really you know there's nothing so that was one early concept I had a lot of early tutoring and you know teaching kids how to play basketball and always always had just like some sort of side hustle I think it really came from watching my parents my parents came here in 1979 they were immigrants from Iran came over after the Revolution and they really had to start over here you know they had to leave everything in the middle of the night leave all their belongings just moved to the United States and had to start over and I got to watch my dad do that with his two brothers and kind of live the American dream and for me it was always you know this idea of starting something from scratch and building something was always something that from the time I was a kid I remember I used to like read biographies business people and like always looked up to you know these other great Business Leaders and always imagine some creating some sort of company I never thought it would be in food you know my partners were similar both my partners and my co-founders their parents were also immigrants to this country so I think we kind of bonded over that as well fast forward senior year you know we'd all gone abroad I had gone abroad in Australia this is 2000 5 2006. I'm in Sydney and what was so interesting is the cool places to eat the places you kind of like would want to go the cool cafes on the beach were all really healthy and it was cool to be healthy cool to have this active lifestyle and like the cool kids were eating salads and bowls and riding bikes and skateboarding and surfing and I was like wow this is like this is a very cool lifestyle this idea of like being healthy taking care of yourself so you can be active and have fun which is like not what it was like here in the U.S it was thought that oh like wow this is some there's something really here and then it took my you know my love of food and love of business and luckily I met these two co-founders that we all complimented each other really well still work together and we decided to start a restaurant and so right in the fall of senior year we said hey wouldn't it be cool if this just existed here like isn't it crazy that there's not a decent place to eat and our options are Subway McDonald's chipotle like there's not like a clean good healthy place to eat were there any big kind of salad chains at the time no there's no real salad chains yet you had the ones in New York that were kind of like the cafe europas things 30 dollar salads or something yeah but it really hadn't become much you know much much of a thing yet and for us you know it was funny people I was like why salad part of it was because it was like naturally healthy part of it is none of us had any culinary background and we could like figure out how to make salads in the bowl you know it was all about this I mean it's true to till today which is a good salad is all about the sourcing of the ingredients I actually believe great food in general she talked to any great chef they give all the credit to The Growers you know our Chef famous it would always be like listen I all I did is not mess this thing up right I bought the best food and my job was to let the ingredients shine and the salad is kind of this four Mass salad bowl that really does let the quality of the ingredients shine and that's kind of been the thing from the beginning it Source the best food we just kind of don't mess it up create cool combinations for it make healthy food more comfort meet customers where they are make it easier for them so it's delicious you know it has a brand that people believe in it's in a great convenient experience and kind of meet customers where they are and so we decided to open the first restaurant we raised money from friends and family this is before like the VC had totally taken off and it was easy to raise money probably more like what it is today and restaurants at the time were especially hard to raise money so we raised three hundred thousand dollars from about 50 investors so if you do the math it's like almost five thousand dollars per person it was classmates it was old bosses that we had interned for it was really anyone you know we met someone on a plane that we convinced like anyone that would take a meeting you know we had to talk to hundreds and hundreds of people the amount of times we heard why restaurant business is so bad why 90 fail in the first year all of these things we heard over and over so my wife has wanted to start a restaurant she actually has a similar story where we ate at a really nice cafe in the UK and she was like I want to build this in the US and for the last 10 years I've been like restaurants are very very very bad businesses let's let's wait a little bit if you really want to start something so how did you convince people I think at the at the time it was people just believing in us it was friends that it kind of we knew or old bosses and they're like all right five grand I'll take a bet I believe in you guys it seems like a different approach in what you're doing and either this goes to nothing or this can be something that is potentially really really big yeah and I guess there's probably a cash flow component too like did you give out dividends or anything like that or so when we started you weren't investing in sweet green Inc you're investing in sweet green Georgetown and so there was like a management company that held the IP and then you're investing in the individual entity and we were giving quarterly distribution we actually paid back our investors in our first restaurant you know with cash before we eventually after we had three restaurants and we decided we were going to continue opening we kind of rolled up all of the entities into a singular entity we traded everyone being like hey you own X percent of restaurant one and extra restaurant to an expert Center restaurant three we're going to give you a different percentage in the overall holding how many meetings did you say it took hundreds I mean it was hundreds and I always say with raising money it's the value is it's kind of like going through this Gauntlet of really sharpening your thinking and your will like it takes a level of relentlessness of having to do that and tell your story so many times and try to convince so many people and in the process you kind of convince yourself too like you have to believe it so much to go through that pain of how many meetings and how many rejections that you really have to believe in and it really forces you to sharpen your thinking so you got you got the round done the first 300 000 you own the restaurant how did it go so we thought we'd open in the spring of 2007 while we were still students and we thought it was just going to be maybe like a one and done we're like we'll open one and we'll hire someone to run it and we'll all go on with our lives and maybe they'll grow it and like great it'll be a fun experiment we'll learn ton and it'll be a great value to the community turns out what we thought opening a restaurant was and what it ended up being was very different from the outside it looked super simple it looked like you go buy a bunch of kitchen equipment and put it in you know an empty box and you buy these ingredients and you just kind of make them and serve people you know people just show up and buy them and yeah starting a business is really hard everything from like setting up you know for us building restaurants really hard it's not just buying kitchen equipment yeah because you guys kind of have you at least at the time sort of unique setup for things I think you talked about first principles a lot of the credit I give was this naivete we actually didn't just didn't know so we didn't know how the restaurant industry worked and so we kind of thought how should it work oh we go to the farmer's market why don't we go to the farmers and talk to them about buying food directly we didn't know that people didn't make their food in the restaurant themselves what else do you do but make it all from scratch and so there's all these like simple Concepts that seem obvious and I think are part of our model but is not how the restaurant industry was set up and I think as we started writing the business plan we realized we start to have early inklings like well this is actually this is a big problem this is not a problem just Georgetown in our little Community this is a big opportunity a fast casual was a really fast growing Market at the time it seemed like there was a real a niche to be served around people that wanted healthy and delicious food together and so we ended up opening August 1st 2007 first restaurant was only 500 square feet so it was Tiny our restaurant just give you an idea our restaurants today are between 2500 and 3 000 square feet so five or six times the size in that store we still did all the scratch cooking yeah we did everything that we do today so it had to be done in a tiny tiny store and I think some of the advantages is it forced us the constraint for was really helpful I always believe that constraint drives creativity and so it forced us to keep things really simple and distill the concept down to the basics I think if we had a bigger space day one we would have probably done sandwiches and smoothies and you know God knows what else we would have had on the menu but it was you only have 500 feet you had to really really keep it simple I think we were you know very lucky from the very beginning even from the very first day we opened the doors and it was very clear that we'd fill the need in the community people really were looking for an option and by the time students were back in September you know the restaurant was doing really well we couldn't keep up with the business until winter hit and the students went away for school and people didn't we have no seating inside and people didn't really want to eat salads in the winter and all of a sudden our sales are down like 70 from what they were what what were your investors doing how did they handle it I mean it was it was very scary for all of us because it's not like we like ran with working capital in the business at the end of the first restaurant we raised enough money to build the restaurant and we still owed the contractor like 100 Grand so you were selling salads and it was just going to the contractor yeah we were literally I mean we're at the end of life you know we're still paying the contractor we had no working capital we were the employees in the restaurant for the most part we had a couple other people but like we were just doing you know running the place for for the first you know few months and it was very very scary you kind of had committed to go work somewhere before this all happened and you actually went and worked somewhere else for a while how did that go yeah it was that was also a really interesting part of my life story so we we started writing the business plan called it September October of that year of 2006 right around the same time at least at our school they'd start recruiting for jobs and Georgetown was like everybody would go into Consulting and banking didn't knew I didn't want to be a banker but Consulting sound interesting you got to work on business strategy applied for a job it was the time I thought it was my dream job to go work at Bain and I got the job they gave me a signing bonus which is awesome when you're in college yeah I put all that money in apple in 2006 I still haven't sold it which was the best record made but I said I'd be in Bain in Boston like the following October I almost forgot about it when all my life started the business figured I'd figure it out later we opened the restaurant they're like all right are you ready to come I'm like I'm actually not ready can we delay it a little bit and so we pushed it out till around the end of the year by the end of the year that winter I was like starting work at Bain I worked at Bain I had a great experience there I learned a ton you know I met a ton of really high quality people I learned a lot about a lot of the basics and fundamentals around business strategy but at the end of the day I also learned that I wanted to be driving the business not advising the business and the frustration of just making decks and not actually solving the problem was just maddening to me I remember like one of my first days I got a case some Telecom company and our job was to reduce churn at the Telecom company I'm like well why don't we go think about how what's wrong with the product why are people churning so fast and they're like no our job is to figure out what's the right win back offer when they call to cancel and how hard to make the telephone decision tree like should I give them when they when they call they cancel do I give them one free month to stay or six free months and what's the LTV of like doing that I'm like yo you guys are just trying to stop the bleeding here this is not you know very sustainable end which is terrible for the yeah terrible for the brand I don't know who you're talking about but my internet provider trying to communicate with them like you know that's part of their strategy is to make it hard to even modify your subscription or your account yeah and I you know you get why people do this from business sense but as an entrepreneur I always wanted to go to the core issue what's wrong with the product what's wrong with the experience what's up with the brand what's up with the team and the org structure like where do we go to the heart of the problem and I think having already started the business that I was emotionally connected to and starting to be successful I was always one foot in one foot out and so after you know six or eight months we decided we were going to open a second and third restaurant and so I decided to move back how did that second restaurant go you know so we decided to open a second and third restaurant pretty much at the same time so now we're looking at early 2009 the economy is a disaster you know we're fully in the great financial crisis we had watched the Lehman Brothers happen and AIG and just these like crazy moments which in retrospect are even crazier at the time you didn't even understand that it was crazy because it felt like you just kind of were born into that world didn't know how bad the economy was just because that's all we knew and we opened so we raised a lot more money for restaurant two and three restaurant three was really successful they opened in the same month restaurant three was super successful it was in Bethesda Maryland and right out the gates was great but restaurant two we opened in Dupont Circle in DC and it was not successful we opened in April you know we spent over two times what we spent on the first restaurants we spent like seven hundred thousand dollars building it supposed to be this big Flagship for us and we opened the doors and pretty much have no customers we're doing way less than we were doing at our first restaurant and this restaurant was bigger I'm supposed to do way more you know we just realized people didn't know who we were and the first Georgetown Restaurant people knew who we were because it was the story of the students opening this restaurant and we had a very captive audience in Dupont we didn't have that but what we did have is we had the farmers market behind in our parking lot of that restaurant and so we knew the customers were there and this is not just any Farmers Market this is the farmer's market of DC it's kind of like the Union Square Farmers Market in New York it's like the major farmers market and so we realized there was an opportunity to try to capture some attention and again not knowing what we didn't know our idea as 23 year old kids was why don't we go buy a big speaker from Guitar Center get a big folding table and just start playing music and the funny story was we at the very early uh days our menu was made out of this like Wildflower seeded paper it was printed on this like seated paper as like a sustainability thing and the whole idea was like come get the menus and like plant plant the menu and it would actually grow into something it would actually grow this is kind of this gimmicky thing while we were playing music and just like meeting the community D and giving out samples it's interesting we still have this same challenge people think of squeaker and they're like oh it's a salad place like I'm not a salad guy that doesn't sound delicious that's a side that's an appetizer that's not a meal that's not gonna fill me up and we knew we just had to get people to try it because our how we build salads and bowls is different than I think how most people think about it and so we started DJing this little dj set turned into a block party the block party grew and grew and all of a sudden a few months later we have over a thousand people there with a bunch of local artists and bands having this block party for sweet green it was right and it was like right after the farmer's market and we realized there was an opportunity to really Elevate the brand Beyond just a restaurant but really build in more lifestyle components that back to like the founding vision of it eating healthy is just part of a greater healthy lifestyle that can still be fun and cool and music was a passion of ours and we thought a great universal language to share with people and connect on and so we turned that block party into a music festival and it went from like a thousand people in a park parking lot until the next year 25 000 people at Meriwether Post Pavilion headlined by The Strokes like here was a poster in 2015. that you can see it was you know oh wow yeah it's you've got like off for people who are just listening don't have video there's like avocados it looks like you have like peas different uh like there's a fish and then there's also musical instruments guitar and then the artists are Kendrick Lamar Calvin Harris the weekend you know Pixies Billy Idol Tove Lo marine and the Diamonds is uh so I think it was this like cool way of bringing these huge artists and creating this like amazing experience telling the story of our brand that hey you can listen to music and go to this big music festival and still be healthy okay so I have to ask how did you convince those people to come perform a music festival for a a salad chain like I'm sure that anyone even heard of sweet cream before no no one had heard of it for a long time the festival had bigger brand recognition because we ran the best possible for like six or seven years it was kind of the big Festival in the DC area we had a great partner that we worked with there that owns 9 30 club and a bunch of other venues so he would help us with a lot of the booking and we had two of our early investors where the guys that started Tater magazine John Cohen and Rob Stone and they were very helpful in the early days of helping us think about how to build the Lifestyle brand and then they had a lot of connections in music and so I always remember the first one we decided we're gonna do a festival we wrote a list of bands and it was like Daft Punk Jay-Z like we named like oh you know all these like big bands and The Strokes were always one of my favorite bands we had The Strokes on the list and someone knew The Strokes manager they were coming doing come back to her and like we sent him an offer and they said yes and it was just like whoa this thing's real were you able to fund the music festival like did people pay to get in or were you kind of running it as a loss and hoping that if people came to the restaurant or the festival could not run out of loss because again at the time we were not funded we were raising enough money to to open a restaurant and that was really it and yet years where the Fest festival for the most part broke even in years where you made a little bit of money your years where you lost a little bit of money but for the most part was the goal was to kind of break even and have just this amazing moment of telling our brand story so we got a lot of content out of it we got a lot of earned media out of it and I think it just kind of positioned the brand in a different way and then also leveraging the cap table like were you thinking about that when you raised money from those guys that they'd help us down the road or kind of I think for us we were very always you know we knew relationships were just we really valued relationships and looked for people that we admired and wanted advice from and would somehow convince them to give us a little bit of money and leverage their their expertise one of the secrets to success very early on is we did a lot of networking Outreach and kind of met a lot of people who we could learn from whether it be you know a guy named Walter Robb who was the co-ceo of Whole Foods for a long time joined early a guy named Gary hershberg who is this founder of Stonyfield yogurt kind of of the OG pioneers of the natural food movement joined Seth Goldman who did honesty she had some people like the natural food world that were involved and then we had other people and more lifestyle type things and our job was just to synthesize all those relationships and see how they could help us and you mentioned frozen yogurt that was a big category initially right yeah when we first opened it was a huge part of the business I think you mentioned it was something like 30 of Revenue 50 transactions then you you killed it like what that seems like an insane idea take your mind back to 2007. it was when that frozen yogurt craze was taking over the country Pinkberry Red Mango they were starting to grow but it had it wasn't a huge thing yet so when we opened in DC and we had that type of like tart frozen yogurts we were the first to Market so when we opened Georgetown the only place you could get that type of product by the time we got rid of it in 2013 it was a product that had really been commoditized you had thousands of these yogurt shops everywhere and it went from being you know 30 of our sales to probably mid single digits of sales which at the time were like okay this is great but we have this idea around online ordering and we have these huge lines we just opened in New York City we have this line around the corner and we can only go as fast as this one make line can produce so was it like a 50 50 split half the restaurant with salad half was Froyo or not half but it took up a pretty good chunk of space right especially in those restaurants where like you have the yogurt machine you had like all the toppings for it we have this idea around online ordering instead of having a yogurt machine there we can put another make line we can put these shelves up to have people do online ordering so by like 2010 we'd like been playing with online ordering which I remember the time people thought we were crazy people aren't going to order on their phone yeah that's ridiculous why would you do that why would you do that you know but as like you know the iPhone it's interesting the iPhone came out in 2007 same years three years founded and they were just very lucky being of that Aid being digitally native in that way both on social media and on mobile seeing that that was clearly Gonna Change the World and it was going to change Commerce in a significant way and so at the time the yogurt was probably you know mid single digits of our business but we saw about the opportunity with online ordering and mobile ordering you know we've considered bringing yogurt back because I do think today now that the market is not saturated it could be something really great to bring back to capture that like afternoon Day part and our yogurt was just really really good because we were able to do it with just great ingredients and not processed so it had that like tart flavor but creamy and not processed tasting but at the end of the day it was great you know we introduced mobile ordering and that ended up being a huge accelerant to the business we were able to take that line of people the hundreds of people waiting in line and convert them to mobile customers and essentially double the throughput of each restaurant and then it seems like you've done a lot more around apps mobile ordering and also increasing throughput automation things like that so recently I think you guys had two really big announcements and this is what I reached out I was like holy cow I want to talk about these so the salad subscription the sweet Green Plus and then the infinity Kitchen Chicago can you just talk about those and how they work what the process was like for launching those and what direction you're going with them yeah of course I'll talk about sweet pass first and then and then I'll talk a little bit about the infinite kitchen so in terms of sweet pass you know sweetgreen for a long time had a loyalty program we had a loyalty program that was more traditional buy 10 get one free what we learned is while customers really loved it it wasn't really driving behavior I wasn't really driving loyalty and we thought there was a different way to gamify loyalty and create a membership or subscription model and I think what was what positioned us against the competition around this specifically has to do with the food the fact that you know I think one of the things about you know what makes sweet green special from an economic standpoint is the frequency of our guests our guests are high frequent users it's a normal thing for someone to eat sweetgrain three times a week whereas you look at a lot of our competitors I don't know if you can say that about a lot of them or at least a lot of them where you think that's a good thing the idea was how do you play into these existing behaviors how do you improve existing behaviors and incentivize things that people are already doing and just create slight improvements into those things and so we saw a lot of inbound requests around hey like can I just like subscribe like I don't want to think about it because if you just feeding me every single day like how do we make it easier and reduce the friction of just being able to fuel myself with this good nutrition code as often as possible and so about a year ago we tested into this program we called it sweet past for ten dollars a month you get some sort of discount and so we tested into it it did really well and we just about a month ago we launched it nationwide where for ten dollars a month you get three dollars off every order it also comes with a bunch of other benefits around things like free delivery you know access to a larger menu some merge swags and drops that we do that people love that are very high demands kind of build some lifestyle components around that and really the idea is just making it easier to live your suite life and so good response so far and I think over time you'll see more and more customers opt for that so thinking through some of the numbers ten dollars a month free delivery I think it said once per week maybe something like that and like is it after 4 P.M too yeah it's it's evening delivery so it's again it's like it allows us to like incentivize some of the behaviors we're trying to create because like get people to come more at dinner get people to come more on weekends and then the sweep pass the non-paid version is totally gaming unified rewards and challenges so we use personalization to offer different customers different challenges very similar to like the Starbucks apple do so hey come three times in a week and get this or try two things on the seasonal menu and unlock this or just buy one get one free it uses personalization to give us a lot of control over which users we want to offer which things the idea is just how do you increase margins while still giving customers something they love and some benefits for for being loyal guests it's not like you're doing anything bad you're giving them salad you're giving them healthy food so and then you ask about the infinite kitchen so for anyone that that's not been to Sweet green the way you know the way it works we Source food from great Farmers it's locally as as much as you can right locally as much as we can really focus on just regenerative agriculture just the best produce we can find is it's really about the quality more so than where it is but a lot of it does happen to be local just because we love the regionality of some of those local suppliers so we work with small you know small medium large Farms we get deliveries to our stores every day so we do not have a commissary we make we make food directly in all of our kitchens and pretty much everything you have at Sweet green is made from scratch every day in the restaurant so from our dressings that are made for the most part most of them are made in the restaurants to you know our chicken and our and our proteins are marinated and cooked throughout the day um and we have a number of tools in the back of house that help guide the team in terms of exactly what to make you know restaurants have a lot of complexity and I talked about at the beginning what most restaurants have gone to limit the complexity in order to scale has been to remove the complexity from the restaurant so either totally simplify the menu reduce the skus or have everything made in some Factory somewhere where at the edge all you got to do is put the thing together our thinking was that's kind of what ruins restaurants the quality of the food can we think differently about how to preserve the best thing about what we are which is this like freshly produced the large number of ingredients that can be customized in so many ways can we figure out a way to preserve that as we scale and still have great economics and so the idea was we're going to invest in technology that allows us to do that so there's a few things that we do that enables this one is in the preparation of the food we have a couple tools that guide our teams think about them as GPS for the kitchen so we have one that runs cold prep we run that one that runs hot crap so if you are working in the kitchen you have an app next to the oven that tells you it has the recipe on and everything based off of the sales forecast and how what the velocity is of of what's selling it's time to cook chicken here's how you should do it here's exactly how much you should cook now it's time to cook mushrooms and here's exactly how you should do it and it measures all of this similarly on the cold food again it's a dynamic beautiful iPad app that again tells you don't just like randomly start cooking like chopping and washing things here's exactly what you should make when and it's fully Dynamic based off what's going on in the restaurant so we really have lowered the cognitive low mode of how many you know complex it can be to work in the kitchen and prep all of those things and I'm assuming the app you kind of have this touch point with the consumer that just gives you even more holistic picture or ability to you know influence all the different external factors to do that even better I'm assuming correct we have a really good idea based off of the digital connection we have what the sales will be for the day what the product mix will be and what the what the ingredient mix will be for the day in my time period so we're able to use that data to then just guide our teams to make the food in a much more seamless way you then move to what most people see in the restaurant which is assembly so in assembly in our restaurants I'm actually making the bowls down the line most of our restaurants have a front line that is the one you typically see where you come and order in person with one of our team members working down the line all of our restaurants also have a digital make Line This is the line I was referring to that took the place of the yogurt our restaurants have a separate digital make line and this is the line where if you order online or for delivery it's almost like a separate kitchen those orders are taken into and some of our restaurants have multiple lines of second make lines or software stores like high volume locations in cities like New York have two or three or even four of those lines so we can capture really high throughputs in like a very short period of time yeah and didn't you say I feel like you've mentioned somewhere before you guys have 80 digital penetration in some stores yeah in some stores we do overall it's in the 60s is there a skew like rural areas or more in person cities are more digital or vice versa generally although what was interesting with the pandemic is it really pulled forwards suburbs so you've seen the subject to catch up in a really Major Way delivery is really big and a lot of the suburbs why delivery radius but uh yes you're seeing Urban there's a huge more pickup in urban as you know there's huge huge lines and so people want to use mobile or you know pick up do you see anything on um demographics like younger people are more like to do digital income threshold how does that change their behavior we don't see much on income we definitely see a little bit on on again on younger people but again on that again like changing rapidly like we were really nervous for example like having kiosks how are older people are going to view the technology and over just changed all of that where everyone's just much more comfortable with screens and tablets whatever for everything my wife's Grandma she's like 82 I think and she gets instacart on the time now and that was unheard of that would never have happened try it once and then and then you're like why not do this yeah I mean it's so convenient well especially if you're time constrained I feel like it's a little bit more expensive which I'm excited for people to figure out ways to bring the cost down to make it even more accessible for me a lot of things I think about is just like time so for me when I'm ordering sweet green or whatever if I can order on my phone and go pick it up and not wait in line I'll I'll pay a little bit more yeah for us the pin mode pickup is this is the same price as ordering store so there's no it's not it's delivery there's service charges which really we don't make coaches are careers but on uh digital pickup it's it's the same price talking about the restaurant operation this assembly part is a huge part of the business and it's today done by our wonderful team members but one you have a few issues with this one is you're capped in terms of how fast you can go we've reported that our digital make lines can do about 200 orders an hour right our front lines are slower than that 100 and something an hour when we're running at Peak capacity and so one you have your throughput constraints two you have a restaurant or food is highly customized so almost 80 percent of bowls are customized in some way so 80 of people are doing something different and on averageable for us has 10 to 12 ingredients so you think about how many individual actions have to be done perfectly to have perfect accuracy it's really hard to do just leave it like some interesting math you have 10 orders and they each have 10 things in them you get one order wrong a one percent error rate is not a one percent error rate it's a ten percent error rate because one out of ten Bowls has an error in it if you ever order online you've had something missing and it's just because when you're going that fast trying to build customized items you know humans naturally miss things is that almost why we have menus like it's just hey there's the 10 things you need to know how to make and it probably makes it simple on both sides well totally it's a huge I mean we've had to design a system one we have great training program and we have great change members that you know learn or learn our menu items but for the most part most restaurants really want to again make it so that hey you learn five things and that's all you got to learn or we're gonna print something on a ticket and you're just gonna follow and I'm assuming probably as you shift the employees and the Frontline workers away from doing the more manual repetitive things they're maybe being a little bit more creative they're interacting with customers more maybe they're moving around the store or they're outside marketing like there's probably a lot more things they can do that's probably better overall so that was the thesis it was hey like the value of sweet green is the fresh prep the fact that we're buying the best food preparing it from scratch and we're cooking it right there the value is not necessarily the fact that a human is putting it in the bowl for you if any case that's where a lot of the error rates are in us doing this this should be possible this doesn't seem like an unsolvable problem we should be able to figure out how to automate this and so we started thinking about it I remember talking to people being like you're crazy that's a crazy idea and nobody wants that I don't even know how that that would work at the time so today A lot of people are thinking about these automated hands so a lot of people have taken this not a first principles approach they have their restaurants they're larger franchises and they're like hey how can we make the franchise or the restaurant a little bit more productive by adding technology that you bolts on on top of an existing system and one of the things we learned with digital ordering and how to integrate technology into our experience was you have to take a first principles approach so if you take your existing system and just try to add online ordering the experience is not going to be great you have to think holistically day one hey if you have multiple channels you have to serve what's the best experience to design and so we thought that same way around automation how would it work in a new store where you had the whole system automated from a first principles approach and so we started working on this idea we actually originally started hiring our own team to do it thinking we could you know we can build it ourselves and then we met for college kids going to MIT they were still there three of them were still there one I just graduated they were sweet green Fanatics they loved sweet green they were on the Water Polo team their idea was they were mechanical engineers at MIT they're like we're going to build sweet green but we're going to build it with robots so we can make it more affordable and easier and it's gonna be better and I remember like seeing a tiny little news clip about this like automated system they built in their dorm we went up to Boston we met these guys it must have been like six years ago and we're like let's stay in touch this is super cool they continued on they decided instead of building automation for the industry they were going to build their own restaurant so they were going to build like a sweet green competitor they ended up raising money from mavron and cosla they raised like 30 million dollars they opened two restaurants with a beautiful automated system it was called spice kitchen they had two restaurants open in Boston and we stayed close and we really admired what they had done the system they had built was amazing but I think with being a restaurant brand you have to figure out the technology and the operation we also have to figure out the brand and the food and I think what we're really our superpower around brand marketing and kind of culinary was a perfect match for their superpower which was around engineering and so about a year and a half ago we acquired Spice in a lot of ways it was like this perfect marriage because our mission statements were practically like written the same I was like we had the same exact idea what we were trying to solve culturally around the food system and so we required them a year and a half ago we began working on the sweet green system which we've called the infinite kitchen and just a couple weeks ago we opened our first one out in Chicago it's been really successful so far we're learning a ton about it but we do believe the future of the industry will be much more automated as I mentioned earlier on the show two million open positions very high quit rates very high turnover rates and to your point earlier we think we can make the job more fulfilling we think we can focus the job on more on the culinary aspects and the hospitality aspects versus just the repetitive aspects of the job and so very early for us but that first first infinite kitchen has been very successful so far we're excited to see what we do from here any surprises just from the first couple weeks yeah yeah I think what's been interesting for us we're trying to learn a few things we did it it was less does the technology work because we knew the technology work they had two restaurants opening and the day we acquired them we put the sweet green menu into one of their existing restaurants and just call it a sweet green pop-up and like prove that the technology works so the questions were more a few things one was do customers like it you know the big fear is hey you're going to put like this big piece of technology in a sweet green which is very human and vibrant bustling kind of place is it going to feel cold and sterile and not get the brand ethos across the way we want it to are people going to not like the way we the ordering system are they gonna be scared of it like are they gonna be turned off by it and so that was one and so far happy report that people love it I think the way you can order from a human but you can order from kiosk or you can order from your phone and people love that the other thing we're trying to learn is you know what are the unit economics these machines are going to cost you know a store with one of these machines will be more than our existing stores so we'd expect some labor savings and other benefits from those machines to offset the additional cost so that we're you know we're still learning but it seems good I think the third is like how do employees like it can we lower our turnover is you know for the industry is way Way north of 100 can we get the turnover down significantly by making it an easier place to work early reads our employees like it a lot a lot more it's a lot more enjoyable Play Store but I think for me the biggest learning that we weren't expecting to learn so much has been a few things one has been the factual food quality the food quality has been improved one of the things that we didn't realize is you know you keep these Foods in these perfectly temperature controlled tubes both hot and cold the temperature is perfect like you can't get it wrong although we're like you know we're pretty good in our normal stores like it's perfectly controlled and because there's no you're you're covered the food doesn't get oxidized even the color in the the food coming out here it feels brighter can it change how you operate your supply chain and how you procure stuff a little bit if they're in these controlled environments or it was worth starting to think about like does it change how we procure but I think the other thing has been around portioning you know no matter what getting portioning by hand correct is really hard I mean think about dressings we ask you light medium or heavy we can train people how to do light medium or heavy or you can have a machine that measures perfectly exactly what the different portions should be and so there's something to like the actual for me I was I spent like the first few days you know four days there and I was just like Amazed by I actually wanted to eat the food more and I know good quality was better and the just experience was better and then the last thing which we knew was something but it was very hard to quantify is what are the benefits of no longer having a lie when you order the infinite kitchen your food comes out in approximately three minutes you were saying earlier like hey I have to make a decision around food and I have to like order on my phone before or I have to go and potentially wait what happens to the consumer Behavior when that is gone where you can walk into a restaurant and whether if you've ordered an advance or not have your food in three minutes and what these machines have higher throughput than our existing lines what happens when you can capture all of that demand that you're maybe missing so learn again learning a lot but very excited for what this can do for sweetgreen eventually you know our goal would be is leveraging technology to make healthy food much more accessible there's a huge system that we're kind of fighting against here and today that we're in the stage of make healthy food desirable first job is just like make people want it because you can't I can't go tackle food deserts and food access issues if people don't want to eat this food and they're not it's not cravable and cool and something that people just like really desire once you've captured that I think using technology and Innovation to lower the cost curve to figure out how to then make it accessible to more places that's the Holy Grail take this and then eventually be able to kind of be ubiquitous by lowering the eventually being able to have food that can serve people in any community and still do so profitably yeah and you kind of think about just the food system you open up your fridge and take out whatever you're eating or your pantry or you go to a fast food restaurant and the Burger's already prepared and you're just ordering it and they hand it to you it's good some piece of land some parts that are not very good are there any like interesting stories or kind of stats you've heard on just ways that food impacts you that we might not even realize or think about down the road I think about it a lot I think you know the key to health is food sleep and exercise and food it's like the three major pillars that as a society we figured out how to build a system that actually promoted these more versus the opposite which is a lot of lobbying and special interest driving the cost of foods that are really bad for you also a lot of Regulation that like you know for me processed food and cigarettes are not that different and the fact that we can't Market cigarettes to children but we can Market it's all this unprocessed food to children I think it's crazy you know there was recently a bill introduced in Congress or that was around SNAP benefits and what they can go toward it's kind of crazy that 240 billion dollars of SNAP benefits so government-funded money a year goes towards Ultra processed food food that has Zero nutritional value absolutely zero I I think sap benefits are really important but we should make the stat benefits useful for things that are actually nutritious and nourishing not things that not only have nutritional value are going to kill you and then on the other side we're going to pay for the health care for these people that were you know that were making sick of the 240 60 billion dollars 60 billion a year towards soda so like think about that's higher than I thought it was I was gonna I thought it was like ten percent yeah taxpayer money and give 60 billion dollars to Coca-Cola okay on maybe the the 240 you could say hey like there's no other option they need people people need to eat okay they're hungry okay fine there's no excuse for the Coca-Cola I just I don't it just doesn't make sense to me right you can drink water there's other ways to do it you know another stat that's always been interesting to me I related is about 50 years ago you look at per capita spend on food versus health care it's really interesting to see how those lines cross so it used to be we spent twice as much on food as we did on Health Care today it's exactly inverse so we we spend twice as much on health care as we do on food wow I think it's just like very related it's very hard to solve these problems further Upstream because you're making Investments for decades maybe there's not as much money to be made around the Pharma that then goes and solves these things whether that be the new weight loss drugs like ozampic Etc that is going to be the most profitable drug of all time unfortunately eating healthy is not as profitable as some of these other drugs may be I do believe incentives in a system are really important and it's not that people are bad and I do not believe consumers want to make the wrong choice the Obesity problem we have in this country where 40 of people are obese it's not because consumers have lack of like willpower it is a system that is driving that it is a society that is making that food cheap marketing that food that's all there is to eat it's a culture that is infiltrated by that our goal at Sweet green has been how do you make it first again like I said desirable you want to build the Nike you know like I look at a company like Nike or Disney it makes something that like people just meet the customer where they are it happens to be healthy but I want to eat this just because it's the best tasting thing and the brand that I love most with the best experience oh and it happens to be healthy and that's the only way we do we can kind of change culture not by telling people to eat their vegetables yeah and I think it's it's kind of like capitalism's great and there's there's downside there's a lot of upside but it's whatever is the most profitable people will do the interesting part is when you think of like the new consumer kind of how we've been changing like people are willing to pay a premium sometimes for something that's health related or better for them so maybe it is more profitable I don't know take a broader view on the total system and the health of people overall and how would a system be designed not for sick care but for health care it's a good way to think about it you had a really interesting word that you you've used before conscious Capital it's kind of the intersection a lot of this stuff can you just explain what that is it's the core value at sweetgreen that we have called win-win-win which is about making decisions that benefit our customers our team members and our community and really it's that triple bottom line I think if done right they're not at odds with each other doing the right thing sometimes costs more but done creatively and with the right time Horizon can create a really durable business case in point Patagonia young great business does a lot of the right things just been named the most beloved brand they have a very strong position a lot of things they do but that reinforces their brand and makes them more successful so I think it's very hard to do I think in order to do it aligning your stakeholders is important and playing an infinite game around time Horizon because a lot of the things that we do doing the right thing may not help us in the quarter but will help us if we're playing for decades and generations will help us and so I think you can only do it if you if you increase your time Horizon and the game you're playing for because otherwise it's all you can always take that short term okay that's the idea for me is finding those those Creative Solutions where we can balance the interests of all of our stakeholders yeah and there's probably some something to be said about getting a bigger base of restaurants or fixed costs leveraging the base you have lowering prices increasing access more Revenue which of course lets you open up more restaurants continue to leverage the fixed costs that's exactly that's the flywheel and that's why people say restaurants are really bad businesses and Mom and Pop aren't we in one-off restaurants can be very hard businesses but it's also a very durable business and at scale can be really fantastic so you look at a company like Chipotle is almost a 60 billion dollar market cap company I think people are surprised by that that you know they have over 3 000 restaurants in the United States and if you look at you know companies like Chipotle or Domino's I mean some of the best investments over the past 20 years and so they can be fantastic Investments at scale because of the barriers to entry on single restaurants are very low but the Bears entries to creating a large restaurant chain similar to like retailers anyone can go open One retail shop but create a platform like a Walmart or Amazon huge Bears to entries and I think that that over time there is a huge moat around these around these sorts of companies because of the flywheel that you described I did have one final question that I was kind of intrigued by reading something article from a long time ago you said that you and all your co-founders used to play a lot of board games do you have a favorite right now or historical I think you mentioned Sellers of Catan was one this is like 10 years ago still settlers I still think it's one of the best games so fun like human dynamics just everything about it first time I did the expansion packs one like seafarers Cities and Knights which one yeah cities and nights oh nice you settle I do play yeah not as much as I'd like to we try a lot of new games too honestly we play a lot of sequence have you ever played sequence no no is it good it's it's pretty simple but with my six-year-old can play it and she's so good I don't know why I mean her win rate is like I don't know 70 which doesn't make any sense for a game that you think is random and she's like six years old that's amazing awesome this is great I guess anything you want to end with yeah I think for me advice for less just for starting a restaurant but for an entrepreneur would be I think our society over time really glamorizes overnight success you can look at sweetgreen and be like overnight success I mean people don't know we've been at it for 17 years and I tell people all the time I feel every day I within multiple times a day I feel like I'm on the verge of where domination and bankruptcy constantly and I'm like paranoid I'm like is this all gonna end even today we're a public company with children restaurants I'm like are we doing anything right are we gonna make it or like oh my God this is gonna work and we are gonna be the next McDonald's and I think that you know being an entrepreneur is as much in intellectual challenge of coming up with the right idea in the business but it's also an emotional challenge around the ups and downs of the Heartbreak the relationships and I think so much of the success is is just not giving up with sweet green I don't think we're like that much smarter than anyone else I just think that like we just kept going and we'll just like outwork people and just keep going and keep going and learn and I think being very like reflective around learning when we you know quickly learning and iterating from the mistakes we've made but just that relentlessness I think is so important for an entrepreneur and so what I tell people is like I think it's not for everyone and if you're gonna do it like be willing to commit 10 years like 10 years of some failure to get there and you know honest on that note everyone's talking right now about Nvidia right and it's just like yeah Nvidia and Ai and this guy started 30 years ago third year overnight success but it was 30 years he's been grinding at this thing and seeing something that like you know he believed in very early on and then continued to evolve into position for that next wave I don't say there's no such thing as overnight success but wishing for that is kind of like winning the lottery so just take the always always believe in taking the Long View yeah I mean talk about planning for the future I think it was 2012 or something he was like we gotta get ready for AI and people were like hey hi what is that so it's just amazing well this is awesome thank you so much for coming on yeah this is super fun thanks for thanks for your shout out on Twitter I've been trying to get do a little because you do a great job on Twitter I've been trying to play with it a little more I never did much tweeting but I'm starting I think I might start uh yeah you should what's your what's your username on Twitter we'll have people follow you at Johnny Nemo at Johnny Nemo okay awesome good to chat and make sure you follow Jonathan on Twitter thanks for tuning in to the deal if you want to stay up to date on the sweetgreen story follow Jonathan on Twitter at Johnny emo Jo n y n e m o I also want to remind everyone that nothing discussed in this episode was investment advice you should do your own research before investing in any of the companies mentioned if you want to support the show I have a request for everyone still listening I'd love it if you could leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts like the video if you're on YouTube and share this with one friend who might like the episode it helps with visibility and getting more guests and it takes less than two minutes if you don't want to miss an episode go to the show notes and subscribe by newsletter the split and you'll get each new episode in your inbox the moment they drop thanks again for tuning in see everyone next time [Music] thank you