Say what you will about Salad and Go, but it does not aim low.
In 2020, Salad and Go was a little-known chain that sold drive-thru salads from about 20 locations in the Phoenix area. But it had plans to become much larger. And when it needed a new board member, it targeted someone with a bit of experience in that area: Charlie Morrison, CEO of 1,700-unit Wingstop.
“I did not know about Salad and Go, I’ll be very honest,” Morrison said on the most recent episode of the Restaurant Business podcast A Deeper Dive.
He wasn’t the only one. The company did little marketing—even after it shockingly named Morrison its CEO earlier this year—making it a relative unknown outside of its home market.
That is about to change, at least if Morrison has anything to say about it. The company believes it has found the right combination of price, healthfulness and convenience, and has plans to quickly grow across the country with a model that sells salads from small huts with drive-thrus for less than the price of a McDonald’s value meal.
If it works, it could become the healthy fast-food concept consumers have long wanted.
The Salad and Go story
Roushan Christofellis, an elementary school teacher, wanted a healthy dinner she could get quickly from a restaurant. She and her husband, Tony, were intent on eating healthy after watching their parents struggle with health issues. Yet they found the lack of healthy, convenient options frustrating.
“We found ourselves to be almost jealous of those people that would swing through the drive-thru from their air conditioned car and be done in five minutes,” Roushan Christofellis told Fast Company in 2016. “You either succumb to eating traditional drive-thru fast food if you wanted to enjoy the speed or you were able to eat good food. We almost felt like consumers were being forced to choose between their health and convenience and affordability.”
The couple decided to fill that need with a drive-thru salad concept. The first Salad and Go opened in Gilbert, Ariz., in 2013.
The model is simple. All of its stores are small, about 700 square feet, with double drive-thrus. There is no indoor seating.
Much of the prep work is done off-site at one of the company’s two large production facilities, one in Phoenix and another in Texas. Locations sell breakfast burritos in the morning and salads, soups and wraps for lunch and dinner. Workers put the orders together in the restaurants assembly-line style.
The pre-production work keeps costs low. None of its salads or wraps cost more than $6.24, and the breakfast burritos cost $3. “What’s interesting about Salad and Go is we can actually get a two-daypart occasion out of one,” Morrison said. “So, you can come in, order your burrito for breakfast, get your cold brew and your salad for lunch or dinner, all for about 10 bucks.”
That’s not much more than the price of a single meal at a fast-food restaurant. For instance, a Grilled Chicken Sandwich meal at a Scottsdale Chick-fil-A will cost you about $10.19.
“That kind of value is unheard of in our industry right now, and it’s also unheard of to be able to buy your lunch at breakfast,” Morrison added. “We believe that’s going to be a big, meaningful part of our business long-term.”
Salad and Go’s executive chef and co-founder is Daniel Patino, who worked at The French Laundry, Daniel in New York City, Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Stars in San Francisco, and who was the executive chef of Bourbon Steak at the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Resort.
Patino “was really well trained around the culinary arts and the importance of using fresh, high-quality ingredients and transforming those into amazing food that’s not just relegated for fine dining," Morrison said. "It can actually be applied in something as simple as a QSR concept that sells salads.”
A Look at Salad and Go
Strong growth
Salad and Go has been one of the industry’s quickest-growing chains. System sales have increased 154% over the past three years, including 67% last year, according to data from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic. Unit count grew 53% last year and is up by about a quarter since then. Average unit volumes now total more than $1 million.
The company currently operates nearly 60 locations in Arizona and Texas. It plans to open soon in Oklahoma, and it is eyeing Las Vegas as another potential market, Morrison said.
Much about the company remains a mystery, however. Wingstop announced Morrison’s departure and new job in March. It took Salad and Go until July to send out a release about the new hire.
Salad and Go did receive some national notoriety a few years ago for the potential of its drive-thru salads, but has been mostly quiet since. Salad and Go bought out the Christofellises in 2020.
The company is primarily owned by Volt Investment Holdings, an investment firm that works with companies that have “large growth potential as measured in decades, not years.” Morrison himself also owns an equity stake.
Salad and Go is not franchised, though Morrison said the company is “well-capitalized” to fulfill what are aggressive growth plans.
And those growth plans are aggressive. The company plans to use its hub-and-spoke model to expand quickly in existing markets and then into other regions of the country. For instance, it operates 15 locations in the Dallas market. It expects 30 by the end of the year and wants to build 40 to 50 next year.
“We could have well over 1,000 restaurants put into place very quickly by scaling the way we are,” Morrison said.
Salad and Go expects to expand throughout the South before moving into other markets. “Yeah, there’s no limit,” Morrison said. “Salads are eaten all over the United States and all over the world. It’s not a foreign concept to eat a salad up in the Northeast. It’s just a matter of when we build these production facilities that we set them up to grow in the markets we think we’ll have the best success.”
The Wingstop CEO
It’s difficult to fully understand just how much of a coup it was when Salad and Go plucked Morrison to be its chief executive.
Morrison had worked with several restaurant companies, including Pizza Hut and Boston Market in the 1990s. He led the Steak and Ale chain for two years before the Great Recession, when he was tapped to be the CEO of Pizza Inn, where he helped usher in the “fast-casual pizza” segment with the creation of Pie Five.
In 2012, he was tapped to be the chief executive at Wingstop, which then was owned by Roark Capital and had about 500 locations. Morrison guided the chain through its 2015 IPO as part of a decade of remarkable growth.
By the time he left, the brand’s unit count had more than tripled to more than 1,700 locations. System sales grew by 500%. It was so successful during the pandemic that Wingstop inspired dozens of virtual brand competitors. Morrison made $17.5 million in salary, bonuses and other incentives over the past three years, according to federal securities filings.
Salad and Go, by contrast, had 50 units in two markets, less than 3% of Wingstop’s unit count. And salad, though quite popular on restaurant menus, has yet to prove itself out to anything close to the scale of Wingstop.
But the real coup came in November 2020, when Salad and Go convinced Morrison to join its board. “It was a very small company, and I was running a pretty big company, and so I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting,’” he said. “It might be too small, but if you think about the people who are involved in what we’re doing and the mission of this company and where we want to go, it’s very easy to get very attracted to this thing.
“Once I learned a lot about it, I guessed right this thing has all the right pieces of parts to be a very successful and scalable concept.”
By the time Salad and Go was looking for a CEO, he was ready to offer himself up for the job. “It has all the attributes of the kind of brand I admire,” Morrison said. “It’s simple. It has a very focused menu. It has a core offering that in this case is salad; it’s complemented by a simple operating model that can scale very easily and, last, it has a great consumer appeal, both in terms of value and quality.”
And Morrison suggested that it was time for him to move onto something else. He had been at Wingstop for more than a decade. He had a ready-made heir apparent in Michael Skipworth, now its CEO. And he lasted far longer than most public company executives. When he left, Morrison was among the longest-tenured chief executives at publicly held restaurant chains.
“It was a great run,” Morrison said of his time at Wingstop. “I love the company. I still do. I’m still a shareholder in the company. I’m very excited for Michael and the team. I think they’re gonna do a great job. He was well-placed and ready, and I knew he was ready. I didn’t want to be in his way, either.”
The salad market
Healthy fast food has always been something of a restaurant industry holy grail. Convince customers that your delicious fast food is healthy, and watch them march right in. Sandwich chain Subway used that with great success for 15 years before the idea shattered under the weight of Jared Fogle’s, uh, legal problems.
Entrepreneurs have tried for years, however, to give customers healthy QSRs, with limited success. While fast casuals like Chipotle Mexican Grill and Panera Bread have succeeded at least in part by attracting customers interested in eating healthy, for the most part there is nobody truly holding the mantle of “healthy fast food.”
For a while, it appeared that Canadian fast casual Freshii might have found that combination. But its system sales are down 21% globally over the past three years, and its founder, Matthew Corrin, has left to lead a company that outsources fast-food counter service. Zoes Kitchen was another likely contender, but its sales are down nearly 50% over the past three years.
Morrison is aware of the challenge. “One of the things we have to overcome is the misperception or the skepticism that I’m going to get a fresh salad where all the produce was cut yesterday or the day before, and it was shipped in from the grower four days before, and it’s made by a Michelin-star chef and his recipes,” he said. “But tasting is believing, and that’s where our focus will be.”
To be sure, Salad and Go is not the only company gunning for this market. There are several salad chains—notably the now-publicly traded Sweetgreen, along with much smaller Just Salad and Salad Station.
At least part of the problem with the salad market has been location. Salad and healthy chains often target either business customers or suburban moms and focus mostly on lunch. They also tend to be in-line stores with generally little in the way of convenience.
Yet drive-thrus generate the bulk of the fast-food business. In other words, a company isn’t going to get the fast-food crowd unless it can get the drive-thru crowd.
Unlike most of its competitors, Salad and Go started as a drive-thru salad concept, making it part of the company’s foundation. It doesn’t have to rework its model to fit a drive-thru. And the concept works anywhere.
“Our model does not dictate that we have to be in a certain type of trade area to succeed,” Morrison said. Most salad concepts, he said, target a very specific customer base. But Salad and Go has worked wherever it’s gone. “That opens up a much bigger pipeline of potential,” he said.
A few select salad chains
Here are some of the country's biggest salad chains and their 2021 U.S. system sales.
% Change:
Source: Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report.
The drive-thru revolution
Drive-thrus are all the rage now. Sweetgreen has added them, as have numerous other fast-casual and health-focused concepts. A growing number of chains are experimenting with seatless restaurants, and the giant Taco Bell just opened one that has four drive-thru lanes. The beverage chain Dutch Bros also helped usher in a revolution in drive-thru-only coffee that is taking off right now.
The risk for Salad and Go is twofold. First is the cost. All these people demanding drive-thru units means the cost of said locations is going up. And it’s not just restaurants: Banks and other companies want these sites, too.
But Salad and Go’s diminutive size means it can target a much smaller footprint than other chains. “We don’t have to have a big piece of property to make this work,” Morrison said.
Another challenge is demand, and that might be a bigger issue. For all its hype last year, Dutch Bros has encountered some traffic issues in this one. It largely cited gas prices and inflation, but it’s also possible that consumers are normalizing their behavior. Indeed, executives with McDonald’s said its drive-thru traffic has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels.
While that remains considerable—the drive-thru generated 70% of McDonald’s sales pre-COVID—it means the market may be more limited than people expected. And with so many companies adding drive-thrus, that could limit the potential further.
But Morrison believes that market will be there, especially as consumers shift toward more value.
“I think the pandemic taught us a couple of things,” Morrison said. “No. 1, there was an extraordinary need for convenience and availability of product beyond walking into a restaurant, and drive-thrus will be around forever. Customers are going to get more concerned about the expense of delivery, and they’re going to choose to exercise their vote and look for other forms of convenience, if we don’t see a meaningful reduction in delivery costs.”
Indeed, value may be the most notable aspect of the brand’s appeal. Salads have a reputation for their price, and much of the criticism aimed at companies like Sweetgreen is about price point. There is no real value-focused salad concept out there, and if this works, then the bet Morrison made this spring will pay off.