The Menu Is Not the Strategy

Sweetgreen had a problem most restaurant brands would love to have: people knew exactly what it was.

The company had built an unusually strong following around salads and grain bowls, particularly among younger, health-conscious urban customers. The association was clear, distinctive and valuable. But it also limited the number of people who considered Sweetgreen and the occasions for which they considered it. For many consumers, salads were lunch rather than dinner, healthy rather than craveable, and light rather than satisfying. Sweetgreen had become very good at serving people who already wanted what Sweetgreen offered.

The challenge was reaching everyone else.

I began working with the company as it was exploring ways to broaden its appeal. The obvious answer was to expand the menu: add more hot food, feature more protein, create more substantial dishes and develop offerings that might appeal to men, families, suburban customers and people who simply did not love salads.

The natural inclination was to begin with the food. Develop a range of new menu items, put them into restaurants and allow customer response to reveal what Sweetgreen should become.

I thought that sequence was backwards.

A menu can tell you what people are willing to buy. It cannot, by itself, tell you what a brand should stand for. If a company allows a series of individually successful products to define its strategy, it can easily end up with a menu that sells reasonably well but a brand that no longer means anything in particular.

That risk was especially significant for Sweetgreen. Its narrowness was both its limitation and one of its greatest strengths. People understood it. A larger menu might broaden the audience, but it could also make the experience more complicated, operations more difficult and the brand less distinctive. The worst outcome would be to alienate the people who loved Sweetgreen without changing the perceptions of those who did not.

This is a common trap for successful companies. Growth slows, so they add more things. Each addition is rationalized as a way to reach a new customer or capture a new occasion. Before long, the business is trying to be more things to more people, but has become less meaningful to everyone.

The better question was not simply, “What else should Sweetgreen sell?” It was, “What larger idea is Sweetgreen capable of owning?”

The answer needed to build on what the company had already earned. Sweetgreen had genuine credibility around real, healthful food. It had proven that a meaningful audience would choose food that was nourishing, responsibly sourced and thoughtfully prepared. But healthfulness alone was unlikely to create broad appeal. The food also needed to feel delicious, substantial, emotionally satisfying and worth the price.

The opportunity, as I saw it, was not to abandon the foundation. It was to complete the idea.

Sweetgreen could become a company that made nourishing food genuinely craveable: food people chose not because they were dieting, compensating for the weekend or trying to be virtuous, but because they actually wanted it. That was a broad enough idea to include salads, hot meals, proteins, carbohydrates, children’s food and entirely new formats without turning Sweetgreen into a restaurant that served everything.

I saw the opportunity as making nourishing food feel genuinely desirable — delicious, satisfying and craveable enough to become part of how people wanted to eat every day.

Once that idea was established, the menu could be designed to express it.

That distinction is important because customers do not experience strategy as a positioning statement. They experience it through food, language, packaging, price, service and the physical restaurant. Every one of those choices tells them what the brand is.

Consider the seemingly simple goal of convincing people that Sweetgreen served food that was hot and hearty. It was not enough to add warm ingredients to an existing bowl. The food needed to look fundamentally different from a salad. Protein needed to appear as the main course rather than a topping. The meal needed a recognizable structure. Ingredients needed to be simple enough that customers could immediately understand what they were ordering. Names needed to evoke foods people already knew and wanted. The packaging needed to present the food as a meal rather than another variation of a bowl.

Even naming could change the perception of an item. One proposed dish was called “Crunchy Spicy Salmon & Rice.” It was unclear what “crunchy” described, and leading with “spicy” risked narrowing the audience before anyone had tasted it. “Miso Glazed Salmon & Rice” did more useful work. It described the preparation, created appetite appeal and gave customers a familiar idea of what to expect.

Packaging presented a similar problem. Sweetgreen’s familiar bowl was efficient and distinctive, but it made almost everything look like a salad. Hot and cold ingredients ran together, protein sat on top, and a potentially substantial meal still communicated “bowl.” A package with clearly separated components immediately created a different expectation: a main course, sides and a complete meal.

This was not merely a design concern. It was a marketing concern, an operational concern and ultimately a growth concern. Marketing is not something that gets applied to a product after the product has been created. The product itself has to communicate.

The existing restaurants created another challenge. Many had been designed around a relatively narrow menu and a very specific service model. Adding genuinely different food could require new equipment, changes to the service line, more complicated preparation and expensive infrastructure such as ventilation, utilities and grease traps. The easiest new items to introduce were therefore not necessarily the items most capable of changing the brand’s appeal.

I recommended separating the work into different tracks. Some near-term improvements could be made within the limitations of the existing restaurants. Other restaurants might accommodate additional equipment without major infrastructure changes. But the company also needed to imagine a future Sweetgreen designed from the ground up around the brand it intended to become. Most of the company’s potential growth still lay ahead and should not be permanently constrained by the design of its first hundred restaurants.

That is another trap companies frequently fall into. They allow yesterday’s operating system to define tomorrow’s strategy. Instead of asking what the future experience should be, they ask what the existing infrastructure will permit. The result may be practical, but it is rarely transformative.

In the years since this work, Sweetgreen has continued to experiment with ways to expand beyond its original identity. That is understandable. The pressure to broaden the audience is real, and no restaurant company can remain static. But the fundamental question remains unresolved by the addition of any particular dish or format.

The question is not whether Sweetgreen should sell salads, hot meals, wraps or something else. It is what all of those products should mean together.

Sweetgreen still possesses something most restaurant brands never develop: authentic credibility around food that is better for people and the way they want to live. But that credibility needs to be attached to a more powerful consumer promise. Healthy food cannot merely be admirable. It has to be food people desire, food that satisfies them and food they believe is worth buying frequently.

That would allow Sweetgreen to serve far more than salads without becoming a general-purpose restaurant. It would create a clear standard for deciding which products belong, how they should be prepared, what they should look like, how they should be described, what the restaurants need to become and what the company should communicate.

The menu can bring that strategy to life.

It cannot create the strategy on its own.