Nicolas Jammet on staying hungry as Sweetgreen scales

Nicolas Jammet was a senior at Georgetown University with a clear next step in front of him: graduation. But before he could get there, he and his two friends, Jonathan Neman and Nathaniel Ru, decided to take a chance on a business of their own.

The three co-founders saw an opportunity to offer farm-to-table food at an accessible price. In 2007, they opened the first Sweetgreen near Georgetown’s campus. What started as a single restaurant has since grown into a national chain with hundreds of locations.

Building a company to that scale hasn’t come without its challenges. For Jammet and his co-founders, that has meant not only figuring out how to scale the business, but also how to grow alongside a company—and a partnership—that started when they were in their early twenties.

Now, nearly two decades after opening that first location, Jammet is focused on keeping Sweetgreen hungry.

“Once you don’t see yourself as an underdog, even if in reality in the space you’re not in the same position you were before...I think it’s kind of dangerous,” Jammet told Founder Brew.

Jammet looks back at growing up alongside Sweetgreen, maintaining an underdog mentality, the importance of building the right team, and what it takes to stay customer- and product-obsessed as a company scales.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You mentioned that your parents were entrepreneurs. How do you think growing up around business owners shaped your understanding to start something of your own?

My parents were in hospitality, so they never wanted to push me into the restaurant business. At the same time, all of our parents believed in the value of building something, creating something. We watched our parents work so hard, blood, sweat, and tears. The line between work and personal is very blurred when you’re a founder and entrepreneur. We grew up understanding that and knew what it took to really build something.

What did you see or experience that made you realize there was a gap in the market and a problem worth solving?

We saw this conversation on food starting to really shift right around the time when, like, Michael Pollan’s books were coming out, Marion Nestle, Super Size Me documentary, you could tell there was this conversation growing around people’s relationship with food, what they eat, how it makes them feel, how it affects their health, and just kind of wanting the curtain to be lifted between them and their food, where it’s from, what’s in it, and how does it make you feel? We wanted to create a place that had this full transparency, that had high-quality ingredients, but again, with food that you still craved, a brand and experience that you wanted to walk around with that bag in your hand…We were very interested in that as food consumers. We were building it for us and our friends at first, and then when we wrote the business plan, we realized there’s a bigger opportunity here outside of Georgetown or outside of DC to rethink the future of what fast food or fast casual can look like.

Have there been moments where the growth of the business has ever put a strain on the relationship with you and your co-founders?

Obviously, being co-founders for 20 years and working together so closely, there’s moments where we don’t agree on things. Over the years [we] have done a really good job of spending a lot of time together talking through those things, and ultimately, a lot of those things were kind of some of the smaller parts of the business. We were always pretty aligned on what we wanted to build and what Sweetgreen could be, but also, that’s kind of the point of having three founders. There should be, you know, a healthy tension, different viewpoints. If we all sat there, all believing the same exact thing, then there would be no push and pull. And so for us, even sometimes when everyone agrees, one person would just take the opposite point and poke at it. And we always believe that the fact that there were three of us [meant that] we ended up with a better decision or better outcome.

Looking back, was there an early setback at Sweetgreen that taught you something you still carry with you today?

Covid was a real setback for us. It was really painful for our industry for so many reasons, and it forced us to really think about the adaptability of the business, and how do we really look at where the consumer is, and how we can continue to serve them, and be really fast at optimizing and evolving the experience around them…The three of us worked really well together because we were pretty complementary. But we were always kind of learning each other. We’ve used executive coaches in the past, and we spend a lot of time together. We spend a lot of time over the years, like a few times a year, just really going off-site and looking at the business plan and understanding, recalibrating…It’s funny now we’re all married and have kids…Our wives are always like, “Yeah, you all really prepared each other for marriage” because having a co-founder is like a marriage.

What do you understand about building companies now that you couldn’t have understood when you started?

Having a really differentiated product and being product-obsessed around the customer is important. You’re only as good as your team, no matter what business you’re in, no matter what you’re selling. It’s a talent game. It’s like running a professional sports team or running a company. It’s all about who can you get on the roster, who’s the talent, how do they work together, how are they complementary?...At our scale now we see that and having different viewpoints on our executive team, or across the leadership, or across even in our restaurants, it’s important to just really be collecting talent. And I’ll tell you, the most important role in our whole company is what we call the head coach, which is our general manager, the folks that are running these almost 300 little businesses, building community, hiring, building teams. Those head coaches are the most critical part of our business. So really investing in them and building that talent roster.

You were once the underdog, when growth was the goal. Now that Sweetgreen is an established business, what is the company optimizing for?

Jon [Neman] and I believe that, like, once an underdog, always an underdog. You have to maintain that way of thinking, and I think once you don’t see yourself as an underdog, even if in reality in the space you’re not in the same position you were. But once you don’t view yourself like that, I think it’s kind of dangerous.

Again, 300 restaurants. We’re not small anymore, but there’s 4,000 Chipotles, there’s tens of thousands of McDonald’s and Subways…there’s some sense of we’re still very much in building mode very early in what this could be. Maintaining that level of curiosity and grit and drive that comes with being an underdog is so important.