What Sweetgreen Can Teach Startups About Scaling Intimacy

Co-founder Nathaniel Ru draws on his experience scaling Sweetgreen to offer startups a clearer window into how rapidly growing companies can stay connected with customers, partners and employees.

Over Valentine’s Day weekend in 2016, a winter storm wiped out most of New England’s peach crop — a development that left Sweetgreen's supply chain team scrambling.

In the thick of summer menu planning, the group was forecasting supply for the restaurant chain’s popular peach and goat cheese bowl and coming up short. While other fast-food companies might have opted to truck in less-than-fresh peaches from a far-flung location, Sweetgreen’s team on the ground took a different route.

They swapped out the peaches for locally grown (and unscathed) blueberries and strawberries, whipping up a brand-new menu item that was dubbed the “Patriot Bowl” in an homage to the region. It quickly became one of the most popular orders throughout Sweetgreen’s northeastern restaurants — and is now a prime example of a concept that co-founder and Chief Brand Officer Nathaniel Ru calls intimacy at scale.

“When we started out, you had two choices: food that was either fast, cheap, and unhealthy or slow, expensive, and fresh. We wanted to create a place where you didn’t have to sacrifice price for flavor or convenience. For us, intimacy at scale is about proving that that we can serve healthy, real food at scale, while still making it feel like your Sweetgreen and not just a Sweetgreen,” he says. “There are all of these cautionary tales about startups or restaurants that grew massively, transforming into slow-moving corporate entities where quality takes a nosedive, products become more bland, customers are no longer at the center, and employees feel less involved and inspired. We’ve been determined to avoid that.”

Ru and his two co-founders, Jonathan Neman and Nicolas Jammet, started out on a journey to bring this philosophy to life more than 11 years ago, opening up a 500-square-foot restaurant in Washington, D.C. just a few months after graduating from Georgetown. Cozy and decorated with local art, this first location became anchored into the folds of the community, providing a stable foundation for further expansion along the Eastern seaboard. By maintaining a flexible supply chain and crafting a seasonal, curated experience for customers, Sweetgreen has bottled the essence of its humble beginnings as it has scaled, tapping into that familiar-yet-fresh feeling to fuel impressive growth.

The company now boasts more than 3,500 employees and nearly 100 locations in eight states, with plans to double the number of restaurants in the next year. But Sweetgreen has been growing beyond mere physical footprint as well. From launching enterprise office delivery and using blockchain to track ingredients to unlocking unicorn status and raising over $300 million in funding, the company seems to share more DNA strands with tech startups than with their fellow fast-casual competitors.

In this exclusive interview, Ru draws on his experience scaling Sweetgreen to offer startups a clearer window into how rapidly growing companies can maintain intimacy with customers, partners and employees. He deconstructs the essential strategies for authentically approaching new markets and collaborations, while diving deeper into the tactics Sweetgreen used to infuse intention into its supply chain, mobile app and team building efforts. Founders looking to build a company that can withstand growing pains and stay connected with customers will benefit from Ru’s masterclass on building a brand steeped in community.

TAKE A LEAF FROM THE PLAYBOOK FOR SCALING INTIMACY

As more cooks crowd the kitchen and new locations are spun up, standard operating procedures and efficiencies are introduced to maintain consistency. Soon enough, the culture gets watered down, the products lose flavor and the founding spark of creativity dims as a cookie-cutter approach takes over.

This description could just as easily apply to a scaling tech startup as to a rapidly growing restaurant chain (and as we’ve previously noted, there’s considerable overlap in the skillsets of chefs and product managers as well). As Ru is quick to point out, companies in both industries face an inherent tension between scale and intimacy.

“Focusing on intimacy is much easier when you're starting out. It’s hard to reverse engineer or revive it once you’ve reached a certain size,” says Ru. “That’s why building the mindset to embrace change and flexibility from the beginning is important. It’s easy to concentrate on sales and growth, but losing the storytelling and emotion of your early days is a recipe for a transactional approach that won’t last.”

For Sweetgreen, scaling intimacy revolves around expanding access to healthy food without compromising on the core, inherently local spirit the company started out with — a guiding light that requires a mindset different from that of their food industry peers. “In our space especially, many food companies obsess over building more restaurants. But we try to think more about deeply about customer-centric metrics, focusing on NPS, frequency by channel, social sentiment and overall loyalty over time,” says Ru. “And we believe we can increase that value by thinking less like a traditional restaurant company and more like a customer subscription business.”

To further unpack the thinking behind scaling intimacy, Ru details the four core principles that have formed the ethos of Sweetgreen’s approach, sharing the mistakes he and his co-founders learned from along the way.

1) Slow down to speed up.

“Like many startups, we started off with a few core values, but it quickly ballooned from there. I think at one point we got up to 20 values and we couldn't even memorize all of them. That was definitely a reflection of us trying to do too much in our early years. Over time we learned the power of saying no and slowing down,” says Ru.

While it’s tempting to grow as fast as you can in every dimension, it’s the decisions that you say no to that define who you are.

“After opening our first restaurant, we immediately thought we could open all over the country in L.A., New York and Miami within the first three years. There’s a lot of pressure for startups and restaurants alike to expand to new markets quickly. But eventually we realized that by saying no to expansion, we could focus on building the brand and get stronger, not just bigger,” says Ru. “We made the decision to stay in D.C. for the first six years, and honestly, it was one of the best things we ever did.  It allowed us to build a network effect and really learn from our mistakes before we took that blueprint to new markets. Whether it was connecting to the local farmer’s market, building out an entirely local supply chain, scoping out real-estate or working on social impact projects, we incubated every tactic in D.C. first so we could put deliberate and authentic growth at the center.”

2) Study the community.

Further embodying that philosophy of taking things slow, the Sweetgreen team takes its time before entering a new market, knowing that the exact same launch playbook won’t work in every location.

“Unlocking intimacy and the ability to resonate with customers hinges on doing the legwork to understand them. You have to connect with each community differently. At least a year before we enter in a new market, we’re introducing ourselves to the community and taking the time to understand its unique culture so we can so that we can show up in a more meaningful way,” says Ru.

“We’re students first, analyzing each community before every new market launch. For example, we’ve been immersed in Houston now for over a year, meeting with the largest farmer’s market, combing through real estate options, working with local artists and architects, learning about what people who live in that area like to do and eat, and looking at historical data for everything from traffic patterns to demographics,” he says. “We’ve also created our own mindset model that we overlay on different ZIP Codes to gauge how well we would perform in certain regions. So in the case of Houston, our diligence has led us to apply new tactics, such as introducing heartier food plates, serving beer and wine, and adding in more seating to cater to the culture of driving.”

3) Embrace modularity.

In Ru’s eyes, Sweetgreen’s earliest stumble was underestimating how fast the world was changing. “When we first started expanding outside of D.C., we were essentially building the same version of the Sweetgreen restaurant over and over again, focusing purely on adding more locations, instead of lasering in on the expectations of the customer” he says. “Over time, we’ve discovered the power of modularity, designing our restaurants to embrace change. Just as a fashion retailer changes merchandise by season, our locations have the flexibility to change menus, ambiance and decor, feature local artists and different playlists.”

And with Sweetgreen’s ambition to become the “Starbucks of real food” that flexibility could come in handy. “It gives us room to grow if we want to go international. Imagine what Sweetgreen would look like, say in Japan,” says Ru. “We’ve intentionally held the space in our brand to allow for Sweetgreen to fit in many different environments.”

Sweetgreen has also explored another dimension of modularity: addressing the recent explosion of delivery apps and online ordering. “We had to figure out how we could provide Sweetgreen anytime, anywhere. We built our own app, but we've also introduced Outpost, a shelf-based free Sweetgreen delivery to offices. It’s not our traditional storefront and it’s not typical delivery either,