Local veggies, national scale: Sweetgreen co-founders

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What started with three college friends looking for a healthy lunch in D.C. grew into Sweetgreen, a fast-growing restaurant business focused on salads and grain bowls. From a tiny 500-square-foot storefront to more than 220 locations nationwide, the Sweetgreen journey includes booking The Strokes for a "salad festival," adopting cutting-edge technology, and proving that fast food can include locally-sourced, farm-fresh ingredients. Listen to co-founders Jonathan Neman, Nathaniel Ru, and Nicolas Jammet share how they have scaled the business in alignment with its core values, to a public company valued at $2.5 billion.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey listeners, on May 13th, we invite you to join us and Reed Hoffman for a new virtual strategy session presented an alliance with Capital One business.
0:11.0	You'll hear insights from fellow entrepreneurs about how to be at the forefront of leading
0:15.8	change with AI.
0:18.0	So go to masterrescale.com AI strategy right now to register for free. Again, that's Masters of Scale.com A.
0:27.0	I Strategy. Looking forward to seeing you there. Oh no. I think it was a few days before that that we were opening.
0:44.6	We had the laptop with all of the recipes that we had stored on it, sitting in our apartment,
0:51.2	and it got stolen. And this was before the cloud.
0:54.0	And so we had to spend the last 24 hours before we open
0:58.0	trying to re-memmarize all of the recipes
1:02.0	and sit in this kitchen all day to kind of reformulate them,
1:05.6	whether it's the dressings, how we put things together.
1:08.8	We had this thing called Sweet Flow, which was our organic frozen yogurt, and it had a very specific recipe in the ratios and I just figured out everything else, but that was the last thing.
1:21.0	I just still have this burning image of my mind,
1:22.8	Nate standing over the machine. All night, he's putting together different recipes.
1:28.2	His hands are like deep in the machine. We have to clean it and keep doing it. and I remember like right before we're opening
1:33.4	and like he pulls it out he's like I think this is it.
1:36.5	I like all tastes were like okay that's it and that was that was the recipe.
1:41.6	We just had to push through and that was the recipe. We just had to push through.
1:44.0	And it was kind of that gauntlet moment for us to kind of say,
1:48.0	hey, we're going to do this and even if it's not 100% perfect,
1:52.0	showing up and just opening our doors day one.
1:56.5	It was a really big milestone for us.
	...

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