Inc.

Sweetgreen spends all this money on this pricey rollout, and five months later, they had to discontinue the item completely. One of the other C-suite members that they recently brought in, a new chief operations officer, you reported that the COO had a big hand in the rollout of wraps, and that there was sort of a difference between the rollout of Ripple Fries, which ultimately was a little bit of a failure. What can you tell us about this new individual, this strategy? Yes. Sweetgreen brought in Jason Cochran, who is, you know, a real... this guy is a super veteran of the industry. To be honest, they needed that. You know, the last time they had a major rollout, you mentioned, was the Ripple Fries, which was the Sweetgreen version of french fries. You know, they were baked in avocado oil, but Sweetgreen made a lot of logistical mistakes. They only tested the Ripple Fries in seven locations. All of those locations were in Los Angeles, and they just got so excited about the product, they're like, yeah, we're just going to go nationwide. And listen, people really did like the fries. I personally liked them. The problem was the fries had to sit out for, like, 20 or 25 minutes, and the quality would degrade pretty quickly. So anyway, Sweetgreen spends all this money on this pricey roll out, and five months later, they have to discontinue the item completely. Jason Cochran, you know, this logistical guy, he'd also been, you know, at Chipotle responsible for 3000 restaurants. He comes in and he insists Sweetgreen test these wraps in, I think it was 67 locations. And they're not just testing the making of them, but they're also letting them sit out for two hours before delivery to see how they're going to hold up. Like, are they going to get soggy? Are they going to be gross?