How I Built This with Guy Raz - Sweetgreen: Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Nicolas Jammet and Jonathan Neman met at Georgetown University in 2003 and quickly bonded over their frustration at the lack of healthy food on campus. So during their senior year, along with a third friend, Nathaniel Ru, they decided to open a 500 square-foot restaurant serving fresh salads made with organic produce. They had no idea what they were doing and almost ran out of money five months in. But today, Sweetgreen has over 100 locations, and is using new technology to re-imagine the fast-casual model, even as it faces unprecedented challenges from the coronavirus crisis. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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You can join the conversation live at Facebook.com slash how I built this. They happen Wednesdays and Fridays at 12 noon Eastern. Again, that's Facebook.com slash How I Built This. and you don't need a Facebook account to watch. Okay, and now on to a brand new episode of the show. And just a warning, there's a little salty language in this episode. So if you're listening with kids, just be mindful. You went to your executive team and you present this plan.

And within a year, they all left. Basically, your entire top-level execs are gone. Yeah. I remember, like, the last one where we thought it couldn't get any worse. and I get the text from someone, and it's always like the worst text when someone says, hey, can you talk? And then, so the last person quits,

and we're just like, oh, God, what are we going to do? From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how three friends from college opened a salad shack in Washington, D.C., and grew that into stories. sweet green, a chain of salad restaurants that wants to transform the way we think about fast food.

Okay, so first, before I get into today's episode, how are you doing? How are you feeling? Because on my end, I think I'm probably going through what you're going through, which is a mixture of anxiety and hope. And as far as this show is concerned, as corny as it may sound, a renewed sense of mission. Because, as I've said before, how I built this is not really a show just about business. I've never thought about it that way. It's a show about possibility, and possibility isn't just about all of the good things that can happen. It's about the possibility for things to go downhill. Possibility encompasses failure and loss, but also rebirth and triumph and creativity and a path forward, which is why this show isn't something I just hope.

I'm actually a fan of these stories. I love them. They're like rocket fuel for days when I'm feeling down or unmotivated, kind of like these days, right? Which brings me to today's story because it really is about possibility and all it entails. Sweet Green started out as a classic problem looking for a solution. The problem was bad food options. Three undergraduates at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. were sick of bad cafeteria. food. Jonathan Neiman, Nicholas Jameh, and Nathaniel Roo wanted fresh, healthy, vibrant salads. Not iceberg lettuce with some gloppy ranch dressing. They wanted things like avocado and arugula and red cabbage and fresh kale. And believe it or not, these things were not easy to find at restaurants in Washington, D.C. in 2007. So Jonathan, Nicholas, and Nathaniel decided

to solve the problem themselves. A better lunch option for them. and for their fellow students at Georgetown. With some seed money they raised from friends and family, they fixed up a rundown shack near campus, they launched a take-out salad restaurant a few months later, and almost didn't make it out of year one when the cold winter weather slowed business to a trickle. But nearly 15 years on,

none of these three founders could have imagined that Sweet Green would become one of the leading fast-casual salad restaurants in America with more than 100 locations. And last year, investors valued sweetgreen at more than a billion dollars, a billion dollars for salad. But actually, what's probably most interesting about the sweet green story is a major pivot the founders took in 2018 when they decided to slow down the expansion of their restaurants. But we'll get there. The thing is, when I spoke to Jonathan and Nicholas back in early March, none of us knew that just days later, the entire world was about to change in a most profound way.

So at the end of this episode, I'll reach back out to them for an update about how things are going right now. But for the moment, let's dive into that first conversation with Jonathan Neiman and Nicholas Jemey. So Nicholas, tell me, you grew up born and raised in New York City. I was born and raised in New York City. My parents had come to the U.S. a few years before I was born. and my father was French and my mother was Swiss Lebanese. And so I grew up in a very, what I would say, strict French household. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And French speaking, so it was actually my first language. And they ran a restaurant in New York. It was called La Caravelle. It was called La Caravelle. And it was one of those very old school fine dining French restaurants of a former generation. Typical ladies who lunch, you know, Jackie O. would go there for lunch a couple times a week. And it was a really chic, old school New York environment. and where you'd sit down for a three-hour lunch.

And what do you remember as a kid? I mean, would you be in there all the time? You know, most of my childhood, I actually remember being either there in the restaurant or in the kitchen there or in the office. And if I wanted to see my parents and wanted to spend quality time with them, I was quite often at the office with them.

And, you know, looking back now as an adult with a business, I commend my parents because they did a great job balancing and they'd come home sometimes for dinner and then they'd run back to the restaurant at night. But there wasn't one weekend where they didn't work. I think my dad didn't take a day off for, I would say probably a decade at least. And I'd watch him get up at 5 in the morning every day. And, you know, he'd go do everything himself.

Flower Market, Monday morning, 5 a.m., fish market, meat market. He wanted to go actually see the product, meet the vendors, and actually, you know, bring it back to the restaurant. He was very hands-on. And then when the restaurant opened, he was there greeting every single customer. There wasn't one guest that walked into that restaurant that wasn't greeted by my parents. So when you, it was time for you to go to college. you went to Georgetown. And was it your, I mean, did you have a sense already then that you wanted to, what you wanted to do?

Like, did you think, I'll go study finance or economics? I'll go to a bank and I'll come back to New York and work on Wall Street or something like that? Growing up in that environment, watching my parents run that business, I always love the idea of being an entrepreneur. And so even in high school, you know, I became pretty obsessive with the idea of just being an entrepreneur and trying to learn as much as I could. In high school, I fought really hard to start the entrepreneurship club. And so there's a group of students that would get together every week and just, I see. sex businesses, talk about entrepreneurs. You were that kid.

I was that kid. Oh, my God. Wow. All right. So I want to just hit the pause button for a sec and bring in Jonathan Neiman because you grew up in, where did you go? In L.A.? I grew up in Los Angeles. Yeah.

And your family were Iranian Jews. They left Iran during the Revolution and came to L.A. Like a lot of Iranian Jews and non-Jews. Yeah. So my parents left during the Revolution in Iran, 1979. And they both had to leave suddenly. You know, they were relatively well off in Iran. And then one day their life changed.

And they had to leave almost everything and kind of come to America and start over. Yeah. I kind of lived, you know, like my early childhood was very much always that, that worry that what we had was not permanent and that you could lose it at any moment. And what did your, I mean, when your parents came to L.A. and sort of start over, what do they do? What was their work? Yeah, so my dad worked with his two brothers, and he did what he was doing in Iran, which was he was an importer of textiles, and then he would sell textiles. And so my early memories were going to see my dad at his office, and he had a warehouse,

and I remember, like, my dream was to, like, be able to ride the forklift that would carry, like, the rolls of fabric. And that's what he did. He sold rolls. You know, he would design fabric and sell rolls of fabric to brands and manufacturers to make garments out of. And similar to Nick, I think, starting a business was always almost an expectation. How? Everyone I looked around. Not to be a doctor or an engineer?

No, it was... Because every time I've interviewed an Iranian-American, they say, oh, my parents wanted me to be a doctor or an engineer. It wasn't that they talked about me being an entrepreneur, but that's all we saw is I saw my dad work with his two brothers, saw most of their friends were entrepreneurs. And not a lot of people had big businesses, but they worked for themselves. We didn't know a lot of people that had jobs.

And from a very young age, that's what I wanted to do. So you go to Georgetown for college as well. I mean, did you guys even know each other from day one? Were you, like, best friends? Or, like, what's the story? What do you remember, Jonathan? Yeah, so Nick was the first person I met when I got to Georgetown. So I remember very vividly, you know, you cart all your stuff into the dorm,

and I see Nick and his mom Rita right next door to me. And he was the first person that greeted me when I walked into my dorm. Yeah, it's funny. Growing up in New York, I had actually never, oddly enough, never been to L.A. It didn't really have any friends from L.A. And so I met this kid, and I'm like, well, he seems different. He's from L.A. He's wearing a Lakers T-shirt. And he's got a different energy about him.

And, you know, I knew we'd be friends. But first person I met at Georgetown. And were you friends right away, or did you kind of have your own groups of friends? We were friends, but we were, it was really interesting now, considering what we do together. We were friends that shared, really, the thing that we shared the most was a love for food. So, like, from the very beginning, it was, we were food. friends. You know, in college, you kind of have these, like, functional friends. You have food. Friends you go see concerts with, friends you go to do movies with. Nick and I were food. Well, I understand it about Nick,

because he grew up around food. He grew up around restaurants. But what was your thing? Like, where'd that come from? I just always loved food. Some people eat to live and others live to eat. I just, like, loved the experience of food, the sharing of food, everything about it. It just has always been something I've loved. So you guys were your friends and you meet this other guy, Nate, and did you also become friends with him pretty quickly? Yeah, Nate and I became very close friends immediately. Nate's also from Los Angeles. Right.

And so Nate and I just saw each other and immediately bonded. You know, I remember seeing him in a counting class, he was sitting in front of me, and he was wearing an L.A. Dodgers cap, and I was wearing like a Lakers T-shirt, and we looked at each other and were like, we're going to be friends, and we just bonded over being from L.A. and loving music. And we became fast friends. Nate and I ended up being roommates for two out of the four years of college. Wow. All right. So you guys are all at Georgetown. This is in the early 2000s. And it comes time to graduate. How did the idea of, hey, even before you start speaking about it even begin? Would you talk about it in college? Like, hey, maybe we should like do something together after college. Were you having those conversations? I think the three of us all had this entrepreneurial it. And, you know, all of our parents.

were immigrants. All of our parents were entrepreneurs. Nick talked about starting the Entrepreneurs Club in high school. I also started the entrepreneur. I just found this out. He was also that kid. I was also that kid. I found this out this week. I also started a young entrepreneurs club in high school. And so we kind of like, we were the three kids that knew we wanted to start a business. And we didn't know what that business was going to be. We just knew we wanted to do something and maybe do something together. Had the idea of like doing a salad based like lunch place. How did that, how did that, How did they even come about?

So at the time at Georgetown, there was one class called entrepreneurship. It wasn't a major. It wasn't a minor. There was this one course taught by a professor named Will Fenerty. And the three of us actually took the class separately. John, I think I was your TA, actually. Nick was my TA in class. I loved it so much.

I stayed on as a TA. And they talked about how to write a business plan, how to concept of business. One of the things he talked about in that class was some of the best businesses are started by people just trying to solve a problem they have in their lives. And so at the same time, we were having that conversation. the food on campus was really bad, like cafeteria especially. And as a freshman, you're forced to buy a meal plan. They force your parents. There's a minimum you have to buy it.

It's really bad. You can go there for random lunch, but to have every meal there was really tough. And we were sick of eating the closest thing we had to healthy food was maybe Chipotle or Subway. It was just that constant complaint that we had a problem in our own life. And then we heard all of our friends complain about it. And so when we were just, the original idea was, we wish this was here at Georgetown while we were here. You wish what was there?

We wished that there was a healthy place to eat that was affordable and convenient and delicious. Right. And we just want, we thought it was going to be really easy. We thought we could open a restaurant in two months, and we didn't really know exactly what the cuisine would be. And so the first location was across the street from where we lived. And on the corner was this old burger shop that was now closed. It used to be called the Little Tavern.

The whole time we were at school, it was empty. It was tiny. It was 500 square. feet and it had a for lease sign on it. And we looked at that, we're like, that's perfect. That's where we should do it. But it was the fact that it was so small had to keep it really simple. Yeah. And it was that constraint that was, we're going to do one thing and we're going to do it well. All right. So there's a 500 square foot restaurant that's available for lease. It's empty. You guys are seniors in college. You're 21, 22 maybe. You all of a sudden you're saying,

Hey, you know what? Let's see if we can get that place and open up our salad restaurant. And when your parents were saying to you in the fall of your senior year, hey, Nick, you know, hey, Jonathan, you're going to graduate in May. What are you going to do? Because that's what every senior in college, like, that's a question they get asked. In the fall of that year, we were saying, we're going to open up a restaurant. Is that, were you saying that already? It wasn't real at that point yet.

And just to paint a bit of the picture, at first I didn't tell my parents because obviously they were in the business and they'd probably warn me against it. But the way we actually got started, we wrote the business plan, which our first version of a business plan was like two pages. It was like one page of financials, a photo of some chair for a design reference,

and kind of like a menu concept. And so to John's point, once we saw that little hut, we said this is where it's got to start, and we somehow found out who the landlord was, called the number in the window. First of all, it took us almost two months to get a meeting because we called her,

her name is Marcy, and we called her, she wouldn't take us seriously. She thought we were kids doing the school project. You were calling her saying what? Saying, hey, we have this idea for this restaurant on the corner. Can we come have a meeting? And once she finally, you know, John called her every day for 30 days.

I'll never forget. And she finally called back and said, I'll take a meeting if you stop calling me. Got it. Yeah. And that's when she said, you know what? Go back and write a real business plan and show me something real and maybe we can talk. All right. So you go to Marcy with a business plan.

A better business plan, presumably, what, a couple days later or a week or so later? How did you improve that business plan? Well, she asked us to do a few things. She asked this to really build out a full business plan, which meant building out some financial projections, which meant building out the team that was going to help execute this, whether that be the architect, the engineer. She's like, do you know how to build a restaurant?

She's like, you need an architect, you need an engineer, you need a kitchen designer, you need to think about all of these things. Yeah. And I remember we went and stood on the corner and counted people, and we stood in front of the subway, We stood in front of the Tripoli, we sit in front of the Dean of Duluca, and then we stood in front of our corner. And we would just count. How many people are walking by?

How many people are at the university? How many salads do we have to sell a day? And that was all happening before winter break. Yeah. And that's when we were going to make a call. Is this what we were going to do or not? And that location, it's on M Street in Georgetown, right? I think just it's important to point out, this is at the very, very end of the retail district of

or at least at that time it was. Like most people really didn't go far beyond M in Wisconsin at that point. I mean, there's no argument. It was on paper a bad piece of real estate. Yeah. And that's why I think she gave us a chance because that piece of real estate had sat there empty for five years. And she said, you know what? Why not? What have I got to lose? What was the rent going to be? The rent was $3,000 a month. And what was the terms? How long did you have to sign a deal for? Two years? Five years. So she agrees to do this deal with you. And then what? Then what do you do? Then it was time to raise money.

We had this business plan that was more buttoned up. We had a landlord that was willing to give us the space. And we had found an architect, someone that she knew, so she felt confident in us actually building this. And I guess she just saw something in us and we had gotten to know her and she said, you know, these kids might actually get this thing open. And how much money did you think you needed to raise to get this out of the ground? We thought we needed $100,000. Okay, $100,000 that was going to cover the deposit and the rebuild and, you know, your, first couple months of just produce sourcing.

And by the way, in terms of the architect and what did it look like inside? It was a concrete box. Yeah, it was a concrete box. It was, we really didn't know anything. You know, we never, you know, Nick, Nate and I had never worked in a restaurant. Nick had some experience working in a restaurant, but clearly never built a restaurant. And so the space, which, you know, in my head, you see that front line, that like, that line that we make our salads on today.

in my head I figured we could just go buy one of those and plop it in and didn't really think about the fact that it needed power, water, like a bathroom, all of the things that make a restaurant. There was no bathroom there was no bathroom. There was no plumbing. There was no plumbing. It was no sewage, no electricity. There was no electricity? You should not have opened a restaurant in this space. Oh, so it was literally a concrete shack. It was literally a concrete shack.

You know, we always say, thank God we knew nothing because today or even a couple years in, we would have never even. even agreed to go tour a site like that. It was so bad. Yeah. But it ended up being the perfect place to Star Sweet Green. All right. So you get the architect and what, did you have to put in plumbing and electricity? Yeah.

So I remember when we got the first bid back from the architect who just did like a projection of how much this was going to cost. And we thought $100,000 was pretty conservative. We're like, that's a lot of money. We get it back and it's like $350,000. And we just remember looking at each other like, oh, shit. This isn't going to work. So, I mean, obviously, I mean, you did decide to go forward with it. Where did you go to raise the money?

We started raising money from, you know, anyone that would listen to us. It was friends in school, old teachers, old bosses. We'd each put in some of our savings, but really not much. It was really this process of selling this business plan. And what was the, like, was there a minimum amount you were asking people to give you? If someone was like, I'll give you $2,000. We took $2,000. You take it.

We did take it. You did take it. Okay. We asked everyone we could, and it was really hard. I mean, I think the raising money piece is something that, you know, you come with no experience. You know, people are looking at you. They're like, okay, so what have you done before? And everyone knows the fact that 99% of restaurants fail in their first year.

But you just needed a few people to say yes. And once you found a few people to say yes, they knew a few friends that would then say yes. We probably spoke to 250 people, and we got at the end, we got 50 people to say yes. And how much did you guys raise? We ended up raising almost 300,000, and it did cost about $350,000. So we were short $50,000 or so, which means we owed the contractor $50,000 at the end, which means the contractor owned a piece of our company at the end. Wow.

And what about the food? Did you start coming up with recipes of salads to serve? the food was really the fun part because that's where... What was going to make it special? What was going to actually get people excited to eat this? And, you know, fast forward to second semester, we had raised some money, we finally signed the lease, we made our first batch of sweet green t-shirts

that we all wore every single day, so it felt real. And it was time to figure out the product. And I remember it started just with us. You know, we saw a produce truck drive by, and we just called the phone number on the produce truck and got this produce rep to come to our dorm room with samples. And that's how we started to figure out the menu and what we wanted to serve.

Wow. What was the produce truck? Keene produce. Oh, yeah. You see those all around the Atlantic. They are still our partner today, and I'll never forget, Joanna, who was our rep, showed up at my dorm room. And she's like, is this the right address? She came with a couple cases of arugula. And I said, yeah, just put it in the fridge right there. And she saw a bunch of college kids partying. And she must have thought we were crazy. So this is a produce distributor. You know, you're 22, and you have zero experience in business and restaurants. And were they skeptical? Are they? skeptical when they met you? Actually, they were really good partners from the beginning. There's something, I think, when you're 21 years old trying to start a business, I feel like people were kind of rooting for us. And we always went in very honestly and said, we don't know anything. We've never done this before. Can you help us? They wanted to see us be successful because we weren't approaching it the same way other restaurants were. Like from the very beginning,

we went in and we asked for local and organic food. And they're like, wow, that's different. Why are you, know, what's going on here? Yeah. And so I really think that people wanted to help us from the very beginning. And then in terms of the menu, how do you come up with that? You know, again, we were all big foodies, and we understood that we wanted the menu to be food that you could eat every day that would make you feel good and food that people would get excited about.

And so we started doing these tastings in our dorm room, and we'd invite 10 to 15 friends at a time to come try it and give us their feedback. And that's how the first menu was born. And in terms of like coming up with the first menus, because it's obviously you can make your own salad however you want, right? It's just a bunch of greens and you can vegetables, you can add stuff to it, but you have recommended combinations that you can go in and what was the first like? So the first, the first menu and part of why we called it sweet green was the first menu was salads, wraps, and frozen yogurt. It was really important for us for it not to just be the make-your-own, but to have these shrews. chef-crafted combinations.

And I remember the first, one of the very first things we made was the guacamole greens. Yeah, what was that salad? So that salad was, the whole idea was taking the flavors and ingredients that go into a guacamole and deconstructing them into a salad. So a bowl that's more vegetable, that's more plant-based. But you still get that experience of crunching into the tortilla chips and the avocado and the dressing. And it becomes a really critical moment.

It was like on arugula or? Yeah, it was mixed greens and arugula. Got it. Okay. and then it's time to, because I'm assuming you signed the lease in the spring of 2007, right, and you needed to build this thing out. So our plan was to open in April. April of 2007.

April and 2007. When did you sign the lease in like February? In like January, February, we signed the lease. But again, we had no idea what we were doing. We thought building a restaurant, we didn't understand that you had to get permits. We didn't understand. To build an ADA-sized bathroom inside, that you had to like have a storage room. And that takes all these things.

It takes a lot of time. And what we didn't realize back to this being a concrete box, in order to get electricity and water and sewage to the space, we had to rip up the street. So the permitting was a complete nightmare. And beyond that, we didn't have enough space in the restaurant, we found out, to do everything we wanted to do. We didn't have enough storage space.

Yeah. And so what we figured out what to do was right behind us was a parking lot. Yeah. So we went to them and we said, can we rent two parking spaces? And we'll build a storage unit within the two parking spaces. And we'll put all our refrigeration, our extra refrigeration, and all our dry goods in these two parking spaces. And then we would get a cart. Our idea was we're going to get a cart and we're going to roll down the parking lot for the food.

So you'd have like a refrigerator and just stand-alone refrigerator on two parking spots. Correct. Which would solve that problem. We built a room in the parking garage. But we dry walled two parking spots. And he agreed to this. Yes. So this is where you had your storage facility?

Wait, how physically, how far was it like? It was like, you know, 30 feet up the block down a hallway. So it was like roll a cart. Every day, a couple times a day. A couple times a day, back and forth. Yeah. Wow. And by the way, you were still, this is like your final semester of college.

I'm assuming you kind of had a lighter load of classes, but you were still having to go to class, right? Yeah. We were running in between classes. in construction site. And we both lived across the street. So it was actually pretty convenient, but it was this funny trying to finish our classes and finish out, you know, second semester of our last year, but then also starting this thing that was going to be, you know? Yeah. And funny enough, out of all the restaurants we've opened, out of all the leases we've signed, this first one was almost the one we were least worried about. We had the most confidence

in this one because we were, A, because we didn't know anything. We had nothing to be worried about yet. And B, we were building it for ourselves. We were the customer. So there was a confidence there. I mean, it must have been so exciting. I mean, presumably your friends are like, if those guys are building this restaurant, was there like buzz around it? There was buzz, and, you know, we had a ton of friends and people that were supportive and really believed in it. And at the same time, you know, you get those looks from people like, oh, so that's going to be your real job. You know, I'm going to go work at Goldman Sachs or somewhere else, and you're going to go run a 500 square foot salad shop.

And I think people thought it was cute and cool, but ultimately didn't think it was going to be our full-time job. job. Yeah. And so we graduate, we're building the restaurant, and it was a really weird time because all of a sudden, all your friends leave. Yeah. Everyone leaves D.C., everyone graduates. Everyone goes home or goes on vacation and going on to their jobs, and we were just there. Yeah. And the three of us were living together then, like actually living together and building this thing. And I remember my brother came and lived with us to help us, and he helped us with construction. And we were all doing everything. You were just on-site every day doing whatever we could. All right, summer of 2007, you're building this thing out. It's hot. It's Washington, D.C. in the summer. And finally, you're ready to open. I think it opens on August 1st, 2007.

August 1st, 2007. And the three of you are the only employees, or did you hire some? We had a few other employees. We're going to help you help make this out. So back up a little bit. So a few days before we're opening, our focus was just get the restaurant ready. The menu, the construction, get it ready, and we were really excited for this big opening party.

We started hiring employees, and we're like, let's just go get Georgetown kids to be employees, which we thought was a great idea. So kids show up, they show up to our apartment for training, and we decided we were going to have a big opening party. And so we invited lots of friends, family, we were going to have this big party. So we're all hustling to get this restaurant ready

in time for the opening. And it was the day before we were supposed to open. And we were running back and forth from that restaurant getting ready. And we had left the door open or unlocked. Of our office? Of our office slash apartment. Which was across the street. Okay.

And we had left the door unlocked. We come back and someone had robbed the apartment. And one of the things they had taken was Nick's laptop. Wow. Which had everything on it. It had all of the recipes, all of the training, everything we were going to do to run this restaurant, was all of a sudden gone. And this is the days before the cloud.

So there's nothing backed up in the cloud. This is like on your hard drive on your computer. So we're just like, holy shit. Wow. What are we going to do? Yeah, it was one of those stay up all night and figure it out moments. And, you know, like John said, we'd invited all these people from around the country, all of our families from New York and L.A.

were coming to D.C. for the opening of this thing we had worked on all year. And we knew we just had to figure it out. And so we stayed up all night looking through emails and looking at, trying to piece together, you know, everything we'd created. And we somehow figured it out. You know, we actually remember the party started at 7 p.m. on, you know, the day before opening. And we were still in there at 7.30 p.m., like finalizing the recipes. And we just got it done. And all of our families pitched in. I remember Nate's dad was in the back, making dressing and chopping onions. Your brother was running around buying stuff for us. It was kind of an all-hands-on-deck moment.

So, all right, so August 1st, the restaurant opens. And what was there a line outside? there was a line and we did we sold a lot of salads what we thought was a lot of salads on the day one. The first day we sold just over 100 salads. And then you're off to the races? Like was it? Kind of. I mean, so we opened August 1st, which is a few weeks before students come back. And so August, you know, chugs along.

We're doing well. We have, you know, growing a little bit every day and we're like, okay, we got this. We know how to do this. And we were bracing for this week when all the students came back. We knew that was going to be when our business really was going to be tested. And I remember, I think it was August 29th or August 30th or something. All the students had come back. And this idea of hiring students to be our employees sounded like a great idea.

But once classes start and once all their friends are back, it actually was a horrible idea. Because I'll never forget, first day of classes, every single employee called out. No one showed. Wow. So we had this day. Imagine opening day one month in, first day of classes, the three of us in the restaurant. And I think Nate had just had surgery on. his knee, and you had stepped out for a moment. So there was this moment on that first day of

classes where I found myself alone in the restaurant by myself, by myself, with a line out the door. By the way, I'm assuming you're not profitable yet, or it was a cash flow, like, good enough to keep things going where you could see like, okay, this $300,000 that we raised, we're going to be fine for a while. The first couple months, we actually got to cash flow profitability pretty quickly and then the first winter came. And that's when things got really dicey and really challenged us to think about our business. Up until the winter, things were fine. People were buying salad. Students came back. The line was out the door every day. We hired more employees, non-student employees. September was a great month. October was a great month. And then kids left

on break. Yeah. And the weather started to turn. And our business really changed. And how significantly? It dropped by about almost 70%. Yeah. After the third. Thanksgiving, you know, there's finals, and then I think around December 10th or 15th, when once kids start to empty out, you know, it becomes a bit of a ghost town. There's residents there, but so much of our business was the students. We were these seniors that's opened this business right out of college. Yeah. And so much of our customers were the students.

And today, almost half of our food is warm food. At the time, it was all cold salads with zero seating. Yeah. And very much student-driven. So as soon as the winter hit, it just, our business just disarmes. just disappeared. Were you working at the store every day? Double shifts every day.

You know, I think we, in that winter, realized we couldn't even afford to have as many employees as we thought. We didn't have a manager. And it came down to counting pennies. You know, there were moments in that first December, that first winter that we truly thought the business wouldn't survive. It forced us to think about how the business needed to evolve, right?

For different customers and different weather patterns, how the restaurant itself needed to be different with seats, our menu needed to evolve. But there were some days. that first December where we almost ran out of money. So, I mean, I have to assume that what happened was the weather turned. And so people started coming back? Is that what happened? Yeah, pretty much. We got killed in that winter, but we learned how to run a very lean restaurant

and build an operation that was very, very lean, and so it could survive off of making a few hundred dollars a day. And as soon as the weather started to get better, in that time, we started to learn how to market. We realized that there was this huge connection between fitness, and eating healthy. And so it was partnering with a lot of the run clubs and the yoga studios and anything that was in. What would you do? How would you partner with them?

We hosted a run club. We would do like coupons and samples after yoga classes. You would show up at like yoga places around D.C. Yeah. And we'd give them little like, you know, old school paper coupons. And just like little buy one get one campaigns, simple like classic promo stuff. And that worked?

That started to work. We realized very early on that it was, Just like trial was so important, especially for a new concept. We just had to get people to try it, and then they would get hooked. So I think it was by the summer of 2008, you guys, you guys had pretty much bounced back. And not only that, you were even thinking about opening a second restaurant. Is that, is it right? Yeah.

You know, when we first, when we started the first restaurant, it was really just one, let's do one restaurant for ourselves. But after we started doing all the research and kind of peeling the onion back on the industry, we realized that this problem that we were having in our lives was a major, major problem. There is no healthy place to eat. And the fast food brand of our generation was, or the generation before us, was McDonald's. And it just didn't make sense that there was no brand to replace that. And so very quickly, about a year in, we started to think about, all right, this can be bigger. So this is early 2009.

But just as an aside, I mean, you are from L.A., and Nicholas, you are from New York. Obviously, you were students in D.C. and students at Georgetown, so I'm assuming that's why you started there. But, I mean, was there any advantage to starting in Washington, D.C.? Because it's not really, certainly at that time, certainly not known as an entrepreneurial city. I mean, you had AOL and, but, right? Yeah, we were so lucky that we started there. We got to make a lot of mistakes. And the sweet green that we started in D.C. would not have been successful in New York or L.A. We needed a lot of, just crushed by the competition. But it gave us, we were there, we were a D.C. only brand for over five years. And it let us really tinker with the model and almost get ready for going to these other cities. We got a lot of attention. We were kind of like a big fish in a small pond. Yeah. So, I mean, fast forward a year, Georgetown is doing gangbusters, just crushing it. And line out the door every day. We figured out the model, you know, the weather hit. And we started to build our second sweet green. We raised about 750 grand for it and started to look for a space that was bigger with seats.

We were going to maybe evolve the menu a bit, and we actually opened it right at the largest farmer's market in D.C., the DuPont Circle Farmers Market. So that was why we picked that site, and we had started to get much deeper into the farmer community, but the problem was that it was on the wrong side of the street. So all the traffic and all the business was actually across the street. So we opened this beautiful, newly evolved sweet green with seats and this new menu,

and we thought it was going to do incredible. We thought it was going to beat Georgetown by 50% sales-wise. and we open our doors day one and it's crickets. When we come back, how the crickets went away and the crowd started to show up. And later on, how a major decision to pivot prompted almost all of Sweet Green's leadership team to walk out the door. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the spring of 2009, and a brand new Sweet Green has just a new.

opened in DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. It's a great neighborhood. Lots of little shops, lots of people. There's even a famous farmer's market with farmers who could provide them with fresh food. But there's one major problem. That new store is on the wrong side of the street, the quiet, empty side. So we look across the street to see all these customers, but none of them were on our side of the street. This is when it really hit us that we had to figure out how to connect with those customers and get them to come try our product. And so, Nate at the time was a, did some DJing on the side. And so went to guitar center, bought a big speaker and a flip table, put it out front, and started just blasting music and trying to

create this energy around our store. And we'd be sampling food outside and playing music, and we'd invite all of our friends to come. And it started to work. And on Sundays, when the farmer's market was, you know, there were thousands of people walking around that farmer's market, they would start to come over to Sweet Green now. And so it started to work. And we started to build this community around music and connecting people to the brand through music. And I just want to want to mention this for a moment. We're not going to have time to sort of get into the details of this part of the story because it could almost be its own episode. But basically, I mean, you eventually built like these sort of music events into a huge, like, full-fledged annual festival called the Sweet Life Festival.

I remember it because I used to look in Washington, D.C. Yeah. And I'm assuming you, this was sort of like a, in part like a marketing thing. for Sweet Green. But, I mean, it got huge. Like, you got huge bands to play, like, Phoenix and The Strokes and Vampire Weekend and Kendrick Lamar. I mean, and mounting a music festival is expensive. I mean, just to pay the band. So how did you... In retrospect, I don't know what we were doing. It makes zero financial sense. The risk we took, the first year especially, the fact that there was not much of a business foundation just in case it didn't work was kind of crazy. but it kind of felt similar to that first restaurant where we just knew that it was going to be successful.

You know, one of the ideas behind Sweet Green was that we felt like anytime you did find healthy food, it had kind of a branding problem. It was never the coolest experience or the coolest brand. And we were so dead set on creating a brand that stood for more than just the food or the transaction. We saw all these other brands out there that we connected with emotionally

and stood for all these other emotions. And we wanted Sweet Green to be a brand that people just wanted to be a part of. And so music was one of those ways that we made that connection. And to John's point, it wasn't, on paper, it was a horrible idea. But it just felt right. And it just worked. It really separated our brand from the rest of these other fast casual brands.

But the cover of the Washington City paper, I'll never forget it, the morning after the strokes plate. We got the full cover with a photo with a headline that said, why did a salad company hire the strokes question money? It's kind of like, what the hell are they doing? Wow. All right. So you pull this festival off and then this becomes a thing. meantime, you guys, the three of you, I mean, you've got now really have to focus, I have to assume, on raising money. I know you got a very significant investment, $22 million.

Steve Case, founder of AOL, he's been on this show. He puts in a big investment into Sweet Green. By that point, when you raised that money, was it pretty easy for you guys to raise money? Not quite. And it came from someone on Steve's team, a guy named Evan Morgan. and Evan Morgan reached out to us. We're sitting down and he's like, I have this great idea. Let me franchise your business.

And you said? We laughed in his face. You said, no way. We're not going to franchise it. Because why? We're control freaks. It's never been part of what we wanted to do because you just can't control what we do. And what we do from a supply chain and scratch cooking perspective,

we were just always scared of franchising our business and have never done it. Okay, but he's looking at you and he's saying, you guys are like 27, 28 years old. Like franchises thing, trust me, you're going to make so much money. That's a pretty convincing argument. Yeah. And to Evan's credit, the reason he wanted a franchise is because he saw, you know, he bought into what we were doing. He believed that a food option needed to exist, a brand to own this next generation of eaters. And so through Evan, we got to know Steve and ultimately raised our first institutional round from Revolution.

And Steve Case can be an intimidating guy. I mean, he's a billionaire. He started AOL. Like, he, you know, he's in the room with you and he's like, okay, here's the money and this is my expectations. And, I mean, you had to have been intimidated by those conversations. Maybe you know him now, years later, but then, you know. Yeah, I think we were, you know, you have to remember, this was 2013. So it's six years into our business.

So for six years, it was almost felt like we were bootstrapping the business getting to this point and just doing it with the three of us. we were always very scared of institutional capital. We were scared of raising money from like VCs or private equity because that's what it felt like. It felt like we were going to maybe lose our soul or it was. They were going to say stop organic. Yeah, exactly. Montanto and get all your stuff, whatever.

Exactly. It was those fears of like we've always had this thing. What we said from the beginning is how do we get bigger and get better, have the food get better? And we were very scared that bringing in capital was going to forward. force us to take shortcuts. It was going to force us to grow too fast. It was forced us to lose control. And in Steve and in all of our partners that we've brought on since then, they know that what makes us special is that we're so protective of our culture and our product. Steve understood

that. And he was more a partner in helping us accelerate that than trying to help make us cut corners. So $22 million in the bank meant that you could really scale it. up, right? Presumably, that's why you were able to go to Philly and Boston and New York pretty soon after. Yeah, and a lot of it was around growth and expansion to new markets. A lot of it was, you know, capital to actually build a real team to think about scale. Yeah.

And what Steve, that capital allowed us to do was not plan for the next year, but plan for the next three or five years. And to build a team to start investing in technology and to really invest in our brand and platform in a way that created a sustainable business. When you really started to expand and grow, I walk into Costco and, you know, half of the produce is organic. I walk into every store now sells organic this, organic that. And I start to wonder how is it really organic and sustainable? Is it really or is it just a different form of agribusiness?

Like you guys were committed to local and organic and you want, you know, these restaurants all over the country. how are you going to do that? How are you going to, and even today, how are you going to make it so it wasn't an organic agribusiness? Early on, we realized as we started to scale the supply chain that things like local and organic were both really important to us, but even more importantly was this idea of full transparency and being fully traceable. We wanted to make sure that we were showing our customers and giving them all the information. And, you know, I'll never forget, I think it was three green number four in Logan Circle was the first. restaurant where we put up the source board, the localist that lists every ingredient and what farm they come from. And at the time, people asked us why we're putting that up. They thought we were crazy. They said, no one's going to want to know that in fast food. No one needs to know where your

chickpeas come from or where your lettuce is from. They'll just trust it. Or customers were used to having a curtain between them and their food. Yeah. And we wanted to open that curtain. And actually at the time, we started also designing our restaurants to be fully open kitchen. So really this idea of building transparency into our model from our supply chain, to our physical experience, to how we talked about our food, and it really defined this next chapter for us of how we started to scale the supply chain and think about how we invest in our farmers, how we invest in making this a reality. All right. So you start to expand, and I think by 2015, you hit 40 locations. By the way, just in terms of, I mean, even with all this capital coming in from Steve and

from other investors, I have to assume that finding locations in those cities was still hard. Because even though you got a lot of money, Starbucks has a lot more and Chipotle has a lot more. And they want that location. They can outbid you. You know, as we started, as the brands started to grow and we started to get more press, actually finding real estate was got a little easier. People wanted you as like a anchor. People wanted us. They wanted like the cool, young new brand.

Right. What started to become a little challenging is as we started to go to cities like New York where rents were much higher, it started to really question the economic model. Like, can we afford those rents? How well will Sweet Green do there? And those are questions we just didn't really know the answer to. And opening our first Sweet Green in New York was probably one of the most pivotal moments in our growth because New York is a completely different model. You know, we've learned so much around just volume and scale, and it's really challenged our model. And New York has been incredibly successful for us, and we're so very fortunate there.

But it's taught us more about our business than almost any other market. I mean, there's a million choices in New York, right? and there's so many concepts that you see in New York from all over the world that seemed great, and then somehow they die. We were so scared to go to New York because the competition and the level of brands and how people show up there, we didn't think we were ready. And it was a very opportunistic situation that led us to New York where one of our friends was helping develop the Nomad Hotel. and there was this one space next door

that they wanted to bring something that was more of a fast food restaurant but elevated fast food. And they called us and they said, hey, can you help us find someone? And we started thinking, we were about to introduce him to a bunch of other companies.

And then I remember we looked at each other and we were like, maybe this is our opportunity to go to New York. It seems like this could be it. But it also leading up to that, we rethought sweet green. We re-red the brain. We readed the menu.

We introduced technology into the experience. That, like, challenge of going to this place that we were so scared of. You say technology, like an app and running online. Yeah, introducing our app. And by the way, when you were, I know you guys were roommates in D.C. In 2014, 2015, were you still roommates? Were you still living in the same place? Yes, up until the last couple years, we either lived with each other or on the same street.

All three of you? Yeah, John and Nate shared a house in D.C. and in New York for a big. and then I always lived across the street with my brother normally. You all have your own places now. Now we're all married and have our own places. I got you. Okay. All right.

Fine. All right. But did you think maybe you just have a compound for you all in your families? We're going to work our way back to that. I got you. So, I mean, this is the other thing. Like, did you ever have any blowout fights? I mean, it's very unusual.

Even, you know, we did. In the same room that we're all sitting in, the founders of Albers. We had them. And, you know, the founders of all. method and a lot of founders, co-founders, went to therapists and coaches and people to work through things, which makes a lot of sense. Did you guys ever have like a coach or therapist come and work with you or help you work through, you know? We've definitely had coaches and folks that have helped us along the way. And the other thing we realized early on was this is just a lot more

fun with partners, with people that are in battle with you through the good times and bad. And we always look at solo founders and think, how do you do this? That you're so hard. founders, your friends. Yeah. We're friends first. No matter what the disagreement may be at work, we remember that, like, there's that foundation of love and trust. And we always just remember we have the same vision.

We really do have shared, like a shared value system in terms of how we operate and make decisions. And so any disagreements are, they're usually the stupid things. I remember some of the biggest disagreements were about who should play Sweet Life Festival. I don't know. is one of our, I think, the greatest blessings in our life is that we really, we get along really well. I mean, it's the question the three of us get the most, how the hell does this work and how are you still friends? And actually, today, we still sit in one office at one desk. And like John said, there's a lot of trust.

And we know that every single day, one of us will be wrong about something and one of us will be right about something. And we just know that over time it corrects itself and we trust each other. All right. So 2016, you move to L.A. You move the headquarters to L.A. there are obvious reasons why. It's the California's the agriculture capital of the United States and you want to be close to. But what was your thinking? Why L.A? So it was a few reasons. The company was growing at that point. We had, I want to say like 50 or 40 or 50 restaurants. We had about 35 people working in our support center at what we called the tree house. But we started to think about the real long-term future of Sweet Green. And it was a few things that one is what you talked about. was being closer to our farmers. Okay. The second was from just the brand and conversation standpoint.

While it was cool being the outsider in D.C., we wanted to be in the center of action where people were talking about health and wellness. And then the third was from like a talent perspective. It started to get challenging, recruiting people in our world to D.C. And so we realized it was probably this point we had while the company was still relatively small to move to L.A. but we wanted to bring the whole team with us

and gave everyone a really nice offer to come move with us and what was amazing that I'm so proud of that time is every single person came with us all 35 people at the time moved across the country and it was such an incredible

cultural bonding moment for all of us to pick up and start over in a new city together. So here's what I'm interested in, right? You know the adage, small business, small problems, big business, big problems.

And just expanding isn't always a great idea. I mean, Howard Schultz, when he went back to Starbucks in 2008, closed like 900 locations because they expanded too quickly. Chipotle expanded too quickly. But this was your strategy. This was your plan when you moved to L.A. in 2016. It was, let's build out more stores and more stores and more stores. Did you start to think about maybe this wasn't actually the way we should think about our business? Yeah, so we started to see the industry shift. You know, when we started Sweet Green, people used to tell us, you know, you're lucky you're in food because it's the one thing that Amazon will never touch, which is funny now because, you know, Amazon owns Whole Foods and they're trying to tackle food. But it was the industry that was not, hadn't been disrupted the way media had or travel had or you name it. But clearly that was very clearly changing. What were you saying?

You were starting to see delivery takeoff. You're starting to see, you know, online ordering takeoff. You're just starting to see how data could be used differently in operating a restaurant. And you started to realize that just opening brick-and-mortar restaurants was not going to be sustainable. Just the nightmare for us was always thinking about Blockbuster. That was the one that we would also say, we would always say let's not get Blockbuster. Let's not get Blockbuster. Because Blockbuster, obviously,

In the 1980s, they were... They were everything, right? And it was about going and get your videotape. And they, you know, the story goes that they had an opportunity to buy Netflix and they didn't. But what happened with Blockbusters, they didn't evolve. And we kind of saw that happening in our world. We saw that restaurants were very much at risk to this disruption. Even though we were ahead from a technology perspective, there was more we could do.

And there was so much more we had to do to stay in front of the customer. It wasn't enough to just make a cool restaurant with great salads. No. No, and I think that was the thing that we noticed the most is that the customer was changing and how they defined convenience was changing. I mean, when Sweet Green first opened, our customers told us, wow, how convenient that I have a place now that I can walk two blocks away and get a healthy block. Wait in line for only 15 minutes and get a healthy bowl. Fast forward five years, they're like, you know, I have to walk two blocks and wait 15 minutes to get a healthy bowl.

And so this definition of convenience was a moving target. And so we saw that our customers were demanding more, and there was this, the experience had to become more frictionless. Yeah, we just knew that the experience had to evolve. You know, the world is changing. The question is always how fast? When does what you do become stale? And we're always, like, we just have this constant fear of being disrupted. And so what we always have tried to do is disrupt ourselves, so someone else does not disrupt us.

So here's where a pretty significant pivot takes place. essentially, from what I've read, 2018, you decide we've got a really pivot, maybe or 2017. And the pivot, just to make it really clear, because we're talking about technology and sort of more specifically, what does the pivot mean? I mean, what does Sweet Cream 3.0 look like from a consumer's perspective? I go into the restaurant and I order salad. How does that change?

So there's a few parts. I think we've learned over the years that it still takes a certain amount of time to build these physical restaurants. And we're at a point where sometimes change is happening quicker than we can build these things. So we've learned how to build our restaurants with enough modularity and flexibility to think about future channels. So one of the biggest differences when we build sweet greens today is around capacity, really thinking about delivery or outpost or online ordering pickup. What's outpost? Outpost is our newest channel that we've launched this past year, year and a half. and it's basically a pickup shelf system that's installed into offices or locations outside of Sweet Green.

Oh, you can order it. It's like an Amazon locker. Exactly. So partnerships with office buildings, hospitals, universities, and you can pre-order your food. It's waiting for you on a shelf. And the beauty is it's completely free for the customer. So you're not paying any sort of delivery fee and you have the convenience of delivery. And you don't have to build a shop for it.

So you can have like a central kitchen in a city where the salads are made and then just deliver it. I mean, we don't think the going and eating in store experience is ever going away, but people are craving convenience in addition to. And there are certain occasions where people may want delivery or may want something direct to their office. And brands have to evolve to that consumer's expectation. All right. You have this idea and this plan, and you had to raise money to make it happen because you're going to make a big technology investment and bring in, like, data engineers. and so like I there's an article I think about about you in ink and it was like is you know sweet green is a food company that's becoming a technology company or something like that and you went to your executive team and you present this plan and within a year they all left with the exception of like the chief financial officer you're all your senior leaders your president and the other executives who had come with a lot of experience from the food industry they they left presumably because they didn't buy into this idea I think And this is like a year ago. It's not that long ago we're talking about.

Yeah, it was two years ago. Two years ago, you're basically, your entire top-level execs are gone. Yeah, it was one of the most challenging times in our history. They didn't see the world changing as fast as we did. And what we saw required a lot more risk and a lot more time versus the path we were on. And probably slower growth. Slower growth up front. It was the vision that we established was,

let's slow down to speed up. We're going to slow down, build a new model, and then we're going to speed up. And I think there was a lot of people there that were less open to the change. And it was a very challenging year for all of us. It was way more risk. And you have to realize just to paint the picture, you know, 2015 and 16 were two of our best years ever. And we could have very easily, it would have been way easier to stay on that path in the short term. Just keep going.

Just keep going. And then go public and maybe cash out. maybe something crashes, but the three of us always wanted to build Sweet Green to be around for 50 or 100 years. And we knew that if we didn't build it the right way, that we were going to hit a wall at some point. We could see around the corner that we were going off a cliff. It felt like we were being blockbustered. Okay, now, to be fair, in 10 years from now, or in 20 years from now, you may be proven to be geniuses with foresight, and your model will be studied in business schools.

There's also a possibility that maybe you're wrong because you're right in the middle of this pivot now, right? Right. And so I'm thinking I'm on your executive team and I have got 20, 30 years of experience in the industry. I'm going to say, guys, the model is there. The playbook is there. Let's open up more restaurants. We're doing well. We're going to make more money. We open up, open up, open up. We go public. We're going to be fine. I mean, you even have – this is public. I'm not – I'm not talking at a school here. You've had board members like Gary Hershberg who left the board because he was saying the same thing. And I think, you know, at that time, certainly. And even now – still, because the concept hasn't been proven, they might have a point. Yeah, that's exactly right. We just saw things differently. We really saw things differently in that to Nick's point, we want to build something for generations. And we knew we had to not only change now,

but build a culture of being able to continually change. And we felt like we were becoming one of those restaurants that just copy-pasted. And that's never what we wanted to build. What we wanted to build was something that constantly evolved. When you went through this, like when you announced us to the senior staff and then basically, you know, they start to leave, was there situations where you actually saying to people, please don't just give us a chance, stay? Or were you like, okay, go? A little bit of both. Each one was its own situation.

But I remember like the last one where we thought it couldn't get any worse. And I remember being in Boston. I was Nick and I and our assistant at the time, J.Y. and we're in the Boston airport after visiting all the stores in Boston. And you get the text from someone, and it's always like the worst text when someone says, hey, can you talk?

Big up the phone. And it's like, you know, Nick looks at my face. He's like, another one. And I'm like, yeah. And then so the last person quits. And then like 10 people. It was like 8 people, I think. And then our flight is canceled.

And we're sitting in the Boston airport. And we're just like, oh, God, what are we going to do? I mean, I'll be honest with you. If my whole team from how I built this left over the course of six or eight months, I would start to doubt my own judgment. I would say, what am I doing wrong? On the one hand, I think that's a natural human response. On the other hand, it takes a lot of resilience to withstand that and to forge ahead. But, you know, while the whole leadership team left, not the whole team left.

Yeah. And there were so many people that stayed with us and our staff. still here with us and stepped up. And it also gave us the opportunity to bring in fresh blood with this, you know, with this vision in mind. And so at the time, it was so painful, but looking back, it was such a blessing. And to your point, we had all those thoughts. You know, we'd ask ourselves, like, what are we doing? You know, the first person leaves are like, okay, fine. The second, the third, by the fifth or six, you know, the three of us are looking at each other saying, like, are we doing the right thing here? And again, back to the point of, like,

having two co-founders, having them here, just like the three of us together reassuring each other, if we were any of us doing this by ourselves, I'm not sure we would have done the same thing. Yeah. And today you're still convinced that this emphasis on tech and other ways of getting sweet greed to customers is the right way to go. 100%. Yeah. More sure than ever. But we'll see.

But you'll see, right? Because it hasn't, it's going to take time. And we're not going to get it all right. There's going to be, and there are parts of this that we get wrong and we learn and we iterate and, you know, we open new versions of sweet green. that have parts of it that don't work, and that's part of the journey is the failures. But that was very much part of it. It was going from a place of, hey, we have this one thing that works.

Let's just keep doing it to let's create a culture where it's safe to fail and okay to try things, and some will work and some won't. And outposts, for example, is one of those things that was a little trial that now has almost a thousand outposts in less than a year. We want a culture and a company that continues to innovate and evolve and not that just does the same thing. Because with the companies that we look around the world, the ones that we admire, are not doing the same thing that they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. They're continuing to evolve. How big do you want this to be?

I mean, do you want this to be? Starbucks, I think, is the biggest food chain in the world after McDonald's, or maybe Subway, I don't know. I mean, do you want to be that big? Do you want people, you know, go into sweet creams all around? on the world, can even do that? I mean, we want to have a really big impact. We want to create a global, iconic, enduring brand that changes people's relationship with food and changes and has an impact on, a sustainable impact on the future of food.

But what I like to think about a lot is, what if every McDonald's was a sweet green? How would agriculture be different? How would the environment be different? How would people's health be different? and that's what gets me really excited. And whatever number of restaurants that is, like, let's just keep going. And what we've always said is go as far as you can see. Once you get there, you'll be able to see further.

How much do you think the success of this business has to do with your intelligence and skill and how much is because of luck in your view, Nicholas? You know, I think luck plays a big part in any success. And I think there's good luck and there's bad luck, and we've had multitudes of both. I believe it's what you do with that luck, how you either double down on the good luck and use that as momentum or try to fight off the bad luck and not let it sink you. And so much of our success has been about the grit. You know, the decisions you make every day, the work that goes in. You know, I credit our partnership a lot to how we've gotten through this together.

But so much of it is what you do with that luck and how you actually capitalize on it. Jonathan, when you reflect on the whole arc of these last 13 and a half years. I mean, it's so much luck went into this. The fact that I walked into Georgetown and met Nick the first day, the fact that I had the opportunity to go to Georgetown in the first place. There's so many things that were lucky breaks for us. But to Nick's point, it was then using that momentum when we were lucky and also having the resilience for all of those times that we almost failed.

Because in this 13 years, it's just like being able to survive, to live another day, to get another chance for a lucky shot. That's Jonathan Neiman and Nicholas Jemay co-founders along with Nathaniel Rue of Sweetcreen. Now, normally, this would be the end of the show. But of course, we are not living in normal time. So just a few days ago, about a month after we recorded this interview, I called up Nick and Jonathan to ask them about how their business is going right now since the pandemic hit. First of all, before we start, where are you right now?

Nicholas, where are you? So I'm sitting in the guest bedroom of my home in Venice, which has become my makeshift office in California. And Jonathan, where are you? I'm also at home. I'm at my home in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. I'm also in a guest bedroom turned makeshift office where I'm spending all of my time now. Yeah. So obviously, so much has changed since our interview just a few weeks ago. Tell me the situation with Sweet Green. I mean, have you, I have to imagine you've had to at the very least furlough. employees and shut down stores. What's going on? So we've had to shift the way we operate all of our restaurants. So all of our dining rooms have been closed, all of our front lines have been closed, and we've shifted to a digital only operation. So we take orders via pickup, which has done contactless, as well as contactless

delivery on our app and through a few marketplaces. Because of where our restaurants are physically located. Our business is especially just we're being impacted in a very, very dramatic way. So in our interview that we did a couple weeks ago, one of the really most fascinating things about that interview was your sort of discussion about your pivot, this idea of people could pick up their salads and lockers and order digitally, and there'd be a whole kind of new ecosystem around it. Can that, I mean, right now in the current environment, can that still work, can that still operate? So as the whole world moved to work from home, our outpost business completely disappeared overnight. It was a large part of our business and the fastest growing part of our

business. And so it literally overnight disappeared. But what we were able to do was redirect all of our outpost capability in logistics towards the people on the front line. So specifically, we were able to redirect and set up outposts at over 100 hospitals around the country. We started by funding them ourselves. And then just recently, we partnered with Jose Andres and his World Central Kitchen to raise additional funds for that.

So far, we funded over 100,000 meals for these hospitals. And we're just getting started here. And you're giving those are, you're giving those away. Yeah, we're giving the food away. We're giving the bowls completely free to people on the front line. when we announced it, we got 10,000 hospitals reached out to be part of the program. So just the response was overwhelming. And I think it just made us realize that during these times, while you want to save your business,

and that's important, first it's take care of your own people, but then figure out how you can use your company for the greater good of the community. Yeah, and I think for 13 years we've been talking about why we started Sweet Green and our culture and values and how we show up every day. And to be honest, they haven't really been tested to an extreme until this moment, right? And we've had some challenging moments over the 13 years, and we've always been super proud of how we've used those values. But to be honest, it hasn't been since this past month that we've really taken stock

and said, this is when they really get tested. And Jonathan, I know that you and Nick and your third co-founder, Nathaniel, recently met face-to-face, socially distanced. What was that conversation like? What did you guys talk about? You know, we sat around and we told ourselves, we can't think about rebuilding our business the way we were building it before. And honestly, it felt like we were sitting back in our dorm room at Georgetown. And we literally took a whiteboard out.

And the question was, if we were starting sweet green today, what would we build? Let's go do that right now instead of just going back to our old plans. We need to be proactive around this and start to plan for the rebound in the next. and the new normal. And so we've always believed that with crisis comes opportunity. And this is a crisis like none of us could have ever imagined or any of us have ever experienced. But with this will come opportunity. And so we've really tried to think about how we can use this time to invest in the business and to come out stronger than we went into it. John, Nick, thanks for the update guys. And we're wishing you a lot of luck and sending you good energy. And we hope that

Sweet Green will get through this and stronger than ever. And that go have a salad, you know, pretty soon. Thank you, Guy. And thanks to all of you for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt and npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with music composed by Rumtin Arablui. Thanks also to Julia Carney, Candice Lim, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Rainey Toll. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR. Not everybody wants to run around the White House or Congress all day. That's where the NPR Politics podcast comes in. At 5 p.m.,

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