With more than 30 locations in Manhattan and many customers who order salads digitally, Sweetgreen has had insight into the movements of its customers, even if they are not yet fully back to eating at their desks again.
The company has seen neighborhoods “start to really light up, like the Upper East Side and Upper West Side,” Mr. Neman said. “The true Midtown office has been the slowest to return, so we have a store in Rock Center, Bryant Park, those sorts of areas which have definitely been the slowest.”
Sweetgreen is also beginning to set up more restaurants outside the city in areas like Westchester County and around Greenwich, Conn., as well as regions of New Jersey and Long Island.
“There’s definitely some following customers in their dispersion,” Mr. Neman said. The company had been planning a suburban expansion before the pandemic, but it has accelerated those initiatives.
Although Sweetgreen said it had been insulated from some of the shocks of the past year because of its online ordering abilities and its robust delivery service, the future of work matters for its business. The company was recently valued at $1.78 billion, and, according to a report by Axios, it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering. Sweetgreen does not share its financials but has said its revenue exceeded $300 million in 2019.
Third-party research firms have found that the company is still recovering from the past year. In the New York metro market, transactions at Sweetgreen were down 20 percent in May relative to 2019, according to Earnest Research, a data analytics company that monitors millions of debit and credit card payments made in the United States.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/business/sweetgreen-return-to-office.html
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