Sweetgreen

“Sweetgreen has an additional layer when we think about capital allocation due to our digital penetration, which is about 75% of our orders are digital, which gives us another lens that is really interesting, which is customer level economics.”

“We started building restaurant two and three, and really started to lay the foundation for what we believe will be the McDonald's of our generation.”

“We shoot for significantly higher than that, and I think what allows us to do that, and the reason our return on capital has increased over time, has largely been the efficiency of the boxes due to our digital investment.”

“And I tell my team all the time, these things go hand in hand. Don't tell me, like, we're going to do things that are great, but they're not going to make money. You have to be able to mirror the two, this Capitalism with the social good, and I think people ge…”

“A couple of our early winners, we almost did not make it. You know, we were pulling lines of credit, paying staff on our credit card, really doing anything we could do to save and stay alive.”

“We started a music festival that we ran for seven years, 25,000 people, you know, and the idea there was, can you have a music festival with The Weeknd and Kendrick Lamar and The Strokes playing, but you're eating a bowl of quinoa and organic green?”

“Where most restaurants, the more stores they put in a region, the stores will cannibalize themselves. For us, the more stores we put in a region, they actually all grow. So the average unit volumes grow because our customers become more frequent.”

“Alongside his co-founders, John has scaled Sweetgreen from one small restaurant to one of the US's leading food brands with over Three hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“So most restaurants just look at the box economics. We're also able to look at customer level economics, which is much more similar to like a SaaS or e-commerce company, understanding things like LTV to CAC.”

“We ran the company as co-founders and CEOs for the first eight years.”

“In the early day, you know, right when COVID hit, we pivoted our outpost program and set up 400 outposts at hospitals serving free food to the front line.”

“We find it to be incredibly important. And as it's our best customer acquisition channel, what it does is it's, there's no better way to really illustrate what we're all about than a retail... You know, it is by far our best acquisition channel.”

“I like to remind myself, you know, we have a 150 restaurants. We can have probably five or 6000 just in the US. So all of these new ideas that sometimes we get excited about, just think about it, like if we just scaled our core business alone, the opportunity …”

“Imagine I become CEO four years ago. Within three months, the whole executive team is gone. We're sitting there almost running out of cash and trying to pivot the company and wondering, like, are we suited to do this?”

“Today, we have a line for in-store guests, but then we have, in some cases, one, two, up to six lines that In the back or in the basement or upstairs somewhere that is essentially our dark kitchen for the digital business.”