It’s one of the great questions of our modern age: How does Sweetgreen lose money selling $14 (and up!) fast casual salads and bowls? And not just a little money but $442 million in the last three and a half years and more than $908 million since 2014.
Sweetgreen is having a disastrous 2025, with same-store sales down 7.6% in the second quarter after a Q1 drop of 3.1%, and a now aborted rollout of fries (how do you mess up fries?). The stock is down more than 70% this year. No one has ever grown a salad chain to Sweetgreen’s size, 260-plus restaurants and 2025 revenue tracking to more than $700 million. But if the company is to achieve its lofty goals, 1,000 locations mainstreaming its healthy and sustainable ethos, its founders—CEO Jonathan Neman, chief concept officer Nicolas Jammet, and chief brand officer Nathaniel Ru—need to step aside. Let me tell you why.
- What the fries debacle reveals about Sweetgreen’s problems
- How the founders’s obsession with tech ignores the secret that’s underpinned popular chains both customers and investors have loved
- Why the Sweetgreen founders can’t be fired
Sweetgreen did not respond to a request for comment by press time. We’ll update this piece if the company responds.
Fry Guys
“A salad with a side of fries” is such an American cultural cliché that there’s even a podcast that adopted the phrase for its title. So in March 2025 when Sweetgreen added Ripple Fries to its menu nationwide, the move made perfect sense. ”This is a way to show that you can come to Sweetgreen, eat a salad, and have a little bit of a permissible indulgence around fries,” CEO Neman told Fast Company in a piece timed to the rollout.
