How one drive-thru chain aims to revolutionize salads
Drive-thru salad restaurant Salad and Go is set to expand in 2024 and beyond, and CEO Charlie Morrison believes the “double drive-thru” model will revolutionize affordability and accessibility for healthy foods.
According to Morrison, the salad business is a “pretty fragmented market” with space to grow and expand. Salad and Go offers a 48 oz. salad meal with one protein for $7, which appears to be an increasingly cost-effective value deal compared to competitor offerings from CAVA (CAVA) and Sweetgreen (SG).
Morrison states the company’s priority is to redeploy “specialized labor." With fewer laborers in the central kitchen and more staff working within the supply chain, Morrison believes this will allow for higher wages of over $20 per hour.
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Video Transcript
BRAD SMITH: Well, let's talk a little bit about the bellies, and the business of bellies out there. The drive-thru chain taking you on quick service restaurants, Salad and Go, is looking to battle the likes of Sweetgreen and CAVA, with its drive-thru only concept. The chain looking to more than double its footprint next year and push its cheaper pricing model as consumers grapple with inflation.
Charley Morrison, Salad and Go CEO joins us now live in living color in studio alongside Yahoo Finance's executive editor, Brian Sozzi. Great to have you here with us, first and foremost, I mean, this is some amazing work that you and the team are doing. Why decide to go this route, this direction for what is a very becoming increasingly crowded space in the salads?
CHARLIE MORRISON: Well, I think there are a lot of people out there that sell salads. There are a few chains around that are coming along. But it's a pretty fragmented market right now. If you look at it, there's no one of really any size and scale that really has developed a brand that can put thousands of locations in the ground. We believe we've done that. At Salad and Go, we have a concept that's built on a double drive-thru. Our focus is providing fresh and healthy food that's affordable and convenient for everybody.
And affordability is a big key to it. We sell a salad with protein in a 48-ounce bowl for under $7. We add a drink for another $1.49. And our focus is making sure that customers have access to really healthy food that is affordable for them. And today, nobody's doing that. So we believe while it might be a fragmented market, salads are on every menu in America, we're the ones who are going to really create the organization that's going to make everybody have access to that great healthy food.
BRIAN SOZZI: And Charlie, I should mention you really helped build Wingstop from the ground floor, well over what, 1,000 locations. So you are no new but to what you're doing over here at your new company. But why is it so expensive to go out now? I walk down the street. I go to shops. And you're over $24 a salad. I showed you my order coming in last night for Panera Bread, $73.56 to have two sandwiches and two soups delivered. I will take this offline.
BRAD SMITH: OK.
- Yes.
BRIAN SOZZI: Why are these companies charging these prices, and are consumers finally balking?
CHARLIE MORRISON: Well, I think the model in a sense might be broken. The challenge today with high labor costs, with the supply chain challenges we've had over the last couple of years has driven up costs dramatically. And what needs to happen is we need to retool and think differently about this. The way we've built this model at Salad and Go is to have a central kitchen, a large commissary where we actually bring all the produce in direct from the growers. So straight from the field. We make that. We prepare it, wash it, cut it, and make it available to our stores.
Our stores are only 750ft in size. It's all about assembly of that salad to order. And that takes a lot of pressure off the cost structure. So less labor in the stores. We redeploy the specialized labor into our food production facilities. And when we do that, we can pay them over $20 an hour for very specialized, high care, focused execution. It simplifies the model and allows us to charge that lower price. I think if you're tasked with a large kitchen in your restaurant and the need to staff that, it's a real challenge for this industry and one that we have to overcome.
