SWEET
GREEN

The goal was to create a platform that would streamline sweetgreen’s entire operation, so I went "behind the greens" to live a few days in the life of the typical Sweetgreen employee and customer.

As we prepared to kick off a UX & Visual design process, I was eager to tackle the most complicated part of the experience first: the Salad Builder.

I wanted our experience to give users full control over their salads, whether they started from scratch, or with one of sweetgreen’s signature combinations.

In a salad, I thought, no ingredient is the “star” of the show. A salad is quite literally the sum of its parts. This insight lead to a daunting but exciting challenge; shooting each of the (more than 60!) ingredients that compose Sweetgreen’s salads.

I worked with Gin Lane's design director, Gordon Sexton, to develop a system of photo guidelines to structure a three-day shoot, focusing on the fine details that would make the interface vision come to life.

We shot each ingredient on white, adjusting focus and lighting for maximum attention to detail. We also shot each signature salad, fully composed, arranging ingredients in a “pie chart” configuration to showcase how they work together to create Sweetgreen’s flavor profile.

The entire ordering flow is designed to orbit around that crucial moment, but balancing a highly visual layout, simple controls, and powerful customization options was no easy task.

The salad builder would need to empower users to choose multiple portions of each ingredient (within business constraints that I'd defined with sweetgreen's team), investigate it's sourcing information,  while communicating the impact of each choice on calories and price.

Users should feel free to choose the salad that they want, but also, one that sweetgreen could actually build (and fit within its containers!).

Our new ordering platform launched its first beta at the newly opened TriBeCa location (sweetgreen's first in New York City!).

Using tools like Inspectlet, Chart.io, and good 'ol fashioned Google Analytics, I closely monitored how users were engaging with the platform, keeping an eye out for sticky areas in the digital and physical aspects alike. I ordered salads almost every day to get a full sense of the end-to-end experience, and to help sweetgreen find opportunities to refine its operations as it rolled out to more stores.

We built a custom content management system for "Head Coaches" to modify sourcing information and availability for products - all the way down to the individual ingredient.

Real-time analytics tools help operations leadership make decisions for their menu and platform; providing real-time insight into operational data-points such as hour-by-hour throughput, impact to customer wait times, menu item affinity, and popular modifications to each.

As sweetgreen's operations team focused on rolling out the new online ordering experience across the country, our product team turned its eyes toward the future. I defined a scope and process for the team to begin work on a Native iPhone Application that would take nearly a year to complete.

Along the way, we helped sweetgreen bring its ordering and rewards experiences closer together, overhaul its store ops to speed up the pickup experience, and build an in-house tech team.

The next crucial steps were to integrate sweetgreen's popular rewards program more closely into the online ordering experience for more frictionless flow from app-to-restaurant.

The sweetgreen iOS app launched in January of 2016, to rave reviews from customers and news publications alike. The launch positioned the company as an innovative leader among a changing set of fast-casual restaurants that were re-defining how America eats.

In the years that followed, sweetgreen opened over 1,000 "outpost" salad pickup hubs at high-traffic corporate offices and hospitals

As of September 26, 2021, 68% of sweetgreen’s total sales came from digital transactions, beating out digital powerhouse brands like Chipotle, who's earnings accounted for 42.8% of sales that quarter.

sweetgreen's digital-forward approach has helped it build deeper relationships with customers, weather a pandemic, and prepare for the future of work. It has established itself as a titan of its industry, leading the pack and blazing the trail for a digital-first fast-casual future.