How Sweetgreen’s app strategy helped them thrive

Walk into any trendy office in Soho NYC at lunchtime and it’s highly likely you’ll see someone eating a Sweetgreen. The salad chain was founded in 2006 in Washington DC and steadily expanded its footprint across the East Coast of the U.S. over the following years.

The founders – Nicolas Jammet, Nathaniel Ru, and Jonathan Neman – spotted a gap in the market, positioning the brand as a healthy, environmentally conscious alternative to the other fast casual offerings available at the time. Sweetgreen has five rotating seasonal menus, with items based on the fresh ingredients available in each location to appeal to their target audience. But it’s Sweetgreen’s app strategy that has enabled it to play a different game to its competition.

Launched in 2015 the Sweetgreen app has fast become the center of the Sweetgreen ecosystem. Customers can order, deliver or pick up but the brand has a smart membership strategy, including rewards, access exclusive menu items and referral bonuses.

The App features prominently on the homepage to drive conversion

Whilst many of their competitors also entered the app market at the similar time, they often leveraged an app as a secondary part to their ecosystem with the in store experience still the priority. Sweetgreen took a different approach and rather than being a bolt on to the business, they made their app the strategic center of the customer relationship. On their website, messaging prioritizes driving app conversions, limiting funnel leakage and increasing their known user base with every conversion. A Window Theory was implemented, making special features and menu items available to app users only. This approach of creating a window view of the benefits available on the other side of sign-up also had the added benefit of turning the app into a marketing tool around each new launch.

At the same time, in-store, the experience was also focused on driving to the app. The in-store pick-up location was prominently featured, with clear signage indicating that it was for app users - ultimately informing anyone in line to order that they could have an easier experience as an app user.

Even the moment of payment in store became a point of potential conversion, with clear signage indicating the benefits of paying with the Sweetgreen app, where rewards could be claimed and challenges unlocked. In 2016 Sweetgreen went cashless, which enabled them to further drive app sign-up. Employees were driven to ask if users were members and paying with the app or whether they would like to become one at point of sale.

This approach maximized every touchpoint available to Sweetgreen to turn anonymous users into known users. All marketing spend was used efficiently as a result, with users converted into members, meaning they could be communicated to directly, for free, through owned channels such as app notifications.

Sweetgreen was only able to bring all the relevant departments together to drive this approach by developing a top-down strategy to own the customer relationship – and it paid off. Sweetgreen counted 68% of sales through its digital channels in 2021. If you’re in any doubt as to why they would make this decision, their S-1 filing at IPO spells it out:

‘We will face increasing competition from delivery kitchens, food aggregators and food delivery marketplaces (such as Doordash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, and others), grocery stores (particularly those that focus on freshly prepared and organic food), and other companies that are enabling the delivery of food to customers, including such delivery marketplaces that we partner with to deliver sweetgreen food to customers. These food delivery marketplaces own the customer data for sweetgreen orders placed on such marketplaces and may use such customer data to encourage these customers to order from other restaurants on their marketplaces.’

Owning the customer relationship is pivotal to growth at scale and an app is often central to that.

THE TAKEAWAY

Determine the center of your ecosystem
Develop a strategy that delivers acquisition using all relevant touch-points
Integrate membership strategy into your app strategy to increase benefits

GO DEEPER

Listen to Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman talk about the future of how they intend to ‘meet customers in every different use case’ here