If you haven’t heard the new hype it town, it’s Sweetgreen salad-bar and fro-yo restaurant! This place is not only healthy, but extremely sustainable as they offer local organic home grown food to it’s consumers in 100% recyclable packages, and the entire store is designed with sustainable furniture and energy efficient LED lighting.

The founders Jonathan Neman, Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru  are on board to be opening their 11th restaurant soon. These young entrepreneurs graduated from Georgetown University and saw a clear void in the market for healthy fast food options. Not only did they fill this void, but did so and made it feel even more AWESOME to eat healthy and local again.

The boys do a good job, living, breathing and preaching their mantra of living green and also giving back to their community. In fact, one part of their business model is to be an active citizen in their communities, so there are several live bands who play in their restaurants, local cool merchandise to purchase, or other events that Sweetgreen partners with in the communities in which they reside. The live music in their business model, as now become an annual music festival called Sweetlife Festival featuring very popular DJ artists who come out to play.

What I really like about this story and brand, is how much they levered social media marketing and branched from not only being a restaurant food chain but into becoming a lifestyle brand with a zest for life. The more I read on the company, the more I come to notice that their business model is not just a restaurant to eat, but a place to connect with people through good food, music and other good causes.

In fact, the boys do such a good job of building their brand over social media that they have approx 12,000 twitter followers, 11,000 instagram followers, and 20,000 like on facebook. They have recently even tapped into a trend via it’s consumers who take pictures of their dinner plates and hashtag #foodporn. Rather than hashtagging foodporn, Sweetgreen has started #saladporn as a way to make consumers crave salad.

As you can expect, these gems are not only now loaded (they recently had $22 million invested into their company in Dec for further expansion) but they also were on Forbes 30 under 30 list, for being top new-coming entrepreneurs, having over $25 million in revenue annually, and with that expecting to increase by 50%.

Moral of the story, and what ties back to the video we watched in class, it is possible to do good for the environment and community, and personally benefit as well. Best touch of it all is their zesty touch of social media marketing, and really leveraging consumer trends to keep them differentiated.

Sources:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/from-salad-shop-to-music-festival-sweetgreen-branches-out/2013/06/14/234aaeb4-cd2d-11e2-8f6b-67f40e176f03_story.html

http://sweetgreen.com/our-story/

http://mashable.com/2013/11/14/sweetgreen/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kat-haselkorn/5-local-startups-position_b_4541463.html

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/03/salad-days/