Sweetgreen is betting that you want fries with that salad

[ResidentialBusiness]

After a year of development and months of testing, Sweetgreen’s “ripple fries” land in the salad chain’s roughly 250 locations today. 

“This is a way to show that you can come to Sweetgreen, eat a salad, and have a little bit of a permissible indulgence around fries,” says CEO Jonathan Neman during an interview at the chain’s Los Angeles HQ.

Better known for its healthy salads than starchy sides, Sweetgreen’s embrace of the traditional fast-food staple is also bound to raise eyebrows, coming from a company that has long coveted the ubiquity of McDonald’s but long struggled with turning a profit from its higher priced healthy fare. (The company narrowed its net losses by 20% in 2024 to $90 million.) “I think it’ll spark some conversation,” Neman adds, smiling.

And, of course, this being Sweetgreen, there’s a health-conscious twist: These fries aren’t fried at all, at least in the traditional sense.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF FRY

Where most fast-food french fries are dunked in deep vats of canola oil, the ripple fries, a name that Sweetgreen’s chief concept officer Nicolas Jammet says they plan to trademark, achieve their crisp exterior via another route. They’re tossed in avocado oil and potato starch, then “air fried,” or roasted at high heat inside an industrial convection oven. Each order comes with a choice of dipping sauces: a garlic aioli, which was recommended by a group of Sweetgreen customers, and a pickle ketchup, created in house.

“We don’t think we’re really a ketchup brand,” says Sweetgreen head of culinary Chad Brauze. But after some experimenting—adding fistfuls of fresh dill and a little maple syrup to a batch of Sir Kensington’s ketchup, the team “fell in love with it.” 

Brauze, who previously worked in corporate kitchens at Burger King and Chipotle before joining Sweetgreen in 2023, has spent weeks training kitchen workers to make the fries. 

[Photo: Sweetgreen]

Employees push each russet potato through a machine calibrated to slice them to a particular thickness, a process that takes about 25 minutes for 120 potatoes. Getting the right cut requires some practice, feeding one potato into the machine at a time under constant pressure. Brauze concedes that the cutting is a huge variable that, done incorrectly, could doom an entire batch. But it’s easy enough to master: During my time in Sweetgreen’s Los Angeles test kitchen, Neman’s 4-year-old son came for a visit and fed a few potatoes through the machine with reasonably minimal assistance. 

They’re cooked in batches every 30 minutes or so, and finished with salt and dried herbs. Jammet calls the end result “craveable,” a term common with fast-food execs describing menu items they hope will hook customers. This new side is no exception. 

And indeed, they taste similar to any other high-end french fry: a salty, crispy outside with a light and fluffy interior, but without the greasy aftereffect. (I absentmindedly finished a full container as we walked through the test kitchen and didn’t need to wipe my hands on a napkin afterward.) It’s a standard taste for fries, but an unusual taste for Sweetgreen, which traditionally gets all of its crunch from romaine greens, croutons, and the occasional tortilla chip.

MORE THAN JUST A SALAD PLACE

Ripple fries are a splashy addition from Sweetgreen, which has been trying to push beyond salad for years, introducing dinner-friendly “protein plates” in late 2023, and permanently adding steak to its menu last year. It’s all an effort to expand reach. 

“The idea is making sure that we can define Sweetgreen around the approach to food and the belief in the food system that we want to change,” says Jammet. “Not just like, ‘That’s a salad place.’” 

Sweetgreen has long touted its position as a kind of fast-food disruptor, offering high-quality food, made from scratch, sourced from ethical producers and free from additives like preservatives and food dyes. And it’s long appealed to the health-food set. 

In 2023, Neman announced Sweetgreen would work to reduce the amount of seed oil it used in its restaurants, and in January, it started promoting a limited-time, seed oil-free menu, which was received by some customers—incorrectly, Neman says—as a political move. 

President Trump’s controversial Cabinet pick to lead Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has said Americans are being “poisoned” by seed oils. (Evidence suggests otherwise.) And during the early days of President Trump’s first presidency, Sweetgreen made green hats bearing the slogan, “Make America healthy again.” The catchphrase has since been adopted by Kennedy as a kind of rallying call to supporters that include online wellness influencers. A few weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, Neman posted a photo of himself in the hat on X, writing that he was “glad the long overdue discussion on food and health has gone mainstream.”

Despite the fact that social media discussions of seed oil have reached a fever pitch, Neman believes people on both sides of the aisle are responding to Sweetgreen’s effort to reduce its use of the ingredient. 

The seed oil move “has nothing to do with politics,” he says. “Actually, at the time [of the announcement], we were hearing about it from customers on the other side of the political spectrum. We’re just listening to our guests.”

[Photo: Sweetgreen]

A ‘RIPPLE’ EFFECT

Sweetgreen has spent months testing the fries in some of its 25 Los Angeles-area stores, but customer behavior has been unpredictable since January’s devastating fires. During the company’s most recent earnings call, chief financial officer Mitch Reback said that the fires “significantly disrupted operations” in Los Angeles, where stores make up nearly 15% of Sweetgreen’s revenue. 

“We know that people will attach it to their meal. The question is, will people come in more because of it?” Neman says. “Will it drive actual core transactions for us, or will it just drive ticket?” 

Ideally, the fries do both, encouraging existing customers to add onto their orders and drawing more people into Sweetgreen stores. While in-store traffic was up slightly in 2024, 2% for the year, Sweetgreen’s same-store sales growth of 6% is mainly attributable to price increases. A “craveable” menu item could be a good way to boost same-store sales and encourage repeat visits. 

In the meantime, the company is working on delivering more efficiencies for its customers and investors. Sweetgreen plans to open 40 new restaurants in the next year; half will be robot-assisted “Infinite Kitchens,” which can dispense fresh ingredients into bowls at a rate of up to 500 per hour, enabling restaurants to service online orders and walk-in customers more quickly. It will also retrofit a couple of existing restaurants with the automated tech, prioritizing the busiest locations. Sweetgreen is planning to enter new markets, opening locations in Sacramento, Calif., Phoenix, Ariz., and Cincinnati, Ohio. 

As his chain moves into new places and more mealtimes, Neman sees the fries as becoming something of a calling card—perhaps as iconic as the salads that started it all. “It’s the first time we have a truly signature side,” says Neman. “The other sides were fine, but now we have this staple. And they’re really addictive.” 

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