It’s been a tough period for fans of salad. Sweetgreen, the fast-casual salad chain, has struggled and its share price had 2025’s worst performance outside of Fat Brands.
Salad and Go, which had plans to revolutionize the fast-food industry with its drive-thru salads, has closed all of its restaurants in Texas and Oklahoma, largely because those locations just didn’t do enough business.
Both chains are different, and they have their own respective challenges that brought them to this point. Salad and Go is trying to offer low-priced salads in a drive-thru format and grew too fast. Sweetgreen offers salads and bowls, typically at prices that may be too premium for today’s consumer.
But the two add to the same, fundamental problem: Not enough consumers eat healthy often enough to for salads to carry restaurant chains.
Both chains certainly have their positives. Salad and Go is one of the industry’s most innovative restaurant companies. It seemed to have some potential to find the holy grail of the restaurant business: Offering healthy items at a low price in a convenient format.
Sweetgreen has an advanced way of thinking and a phenomenal menu. I’ve never walked out of one of the chain’s restaurants regretting my decision to go there.
Yet “healthy” is a volatile concept. Consumers’ views of what constitutes healthy is prone to fads and changes that may or may not be driven by actual science. For decades we were told red meat was bad. This week the federal government just said it was good.
We often hear people talk about how “today’s consumers” want to “eat healthier.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
As we said in this story, only one out of five consumers said in an Alvarez & Marsal survey that they choose a quick-service restaurant for their healthy options. That same survey found that 70% of consumers value both comfort and health when they pick a restaurant.
Diners may say they want healthy options. And they will certainly visit chains they “think” are healthy. But that is secondary to their real desire: indulgence.
We do not go out to eat because we want to eat healthy. We go out to eat for a celebration, a treat or a break from the monotony, even if all we’re doing is grabbing a latte on our way to work.
To be sure, many consumers do want healthy items when they go out to eat and that can certainly fuel some business at salad concepts. That has carried plenty of smaller chains and a lot of them do just fine.
It’s more a question of whether demand for salad is enough to warrant the kind of growth these chains and their investors demand. At this point it’s not clear that it does.
Salad and Go is gunning for a substantive market presence and thought that it could have the same success in Texas and Oklahoma that it enjoyed in Arizona. It hasn’t, which will require the company to maintain a slower pace of development.
Sweetgreen, meanwhile, has generated ultra-high valuations, which demand that the company reach a certain size. The company’s sales issues keep that in question. They also worsen the company’s profitability, which has been nonexistent since its 2021 initial public offering.
Maybe, someday, these companies figure out an equation that works well enough to generate sales with a focal point of salads. But it won’t be easy, because it never has been.