Sweetgreen launches wraps at $10-$15, targets 5,000 US locations and eyes drone delivery

Sweetgreen launches wraps, targets 5,000 US locations

Jonathan Neman's pitch for Sweetgreen's new wrap line is simple: wraps start at $10.45, nothing goes above $15, and a version without lettuce effectively functions as a burrito. The company spent about a year developing a custom four-ingredient tortilla, a deliberate contrast to the roughly 22-ingredient tortillas common across the fast-casual market. Four signature wraps launched this week, and all are customizable.

The pricing is intentional. With consumer sentiment near multi-year lows, Neman wants something on the menu that people can buy daily without guilt — financial or nutritional.

Feedback infrastructure

Neman says he spends roughly a quarter of his time in restaurants, talking directly to customers and team members. Sweetgreen also runs traditional focus groups — Neman sat in a conference room with groups of customers every day for a week testing the wraps — and leans on social listening across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit.

About a year ago, Sweetgreen became one of the first customers of Listen Labs, an AI-powered survey and focus group platform. Neman says it has cut feedback timelines by roughly 10x at about half the cost of traditional methods. The platform lets Sweetgreen pull a demographically segmented cut of customers by age, psychographic group, and geography, faster than conventional research allows.

On social listening, the lesson is timing. A chimichurri steak bowl is currently going viral on TikTok — Sweetgreen has all the ingredients — and Neman's view is that the window to act was a month ago, not now. Sweetgreen posted a video this week to gauge reaction, and if the response holds, the bowl could appear on the menu. The mechanism is straightforward: spot it before it goes viral, create content, then actually serve it.

“This week we launched probably our biggest new category in company history. We launched wraps... The response so far has been awesome... If you look at Chipotle, they're at about 4,000. They give a target of 7,500 stores in the US. Our first target is a thousand stores, but we think over time should be able to get to about 5,000 units in The United States.”

Operational focus over innovation

Sweetgreen will close 2025 with approximately 300 restaurants. The long-term target is 5,000 US locations, benchmarked loosely against Chipotle, which operates around 4,000 and has guided to 7,500.

Neman is explicit that the near-term priority is execution over innovation. The technology edge Sweetgreen had in the 2010s — digital ordering, mobile payment, delivery — has been commoditized. What matters now is consistency: staffing at peak hours, no stock-outs, and a culture of saying yes to customers. He tracks health through what Sweetgreen calls the comeback rate, measuring what percentage of customers return within 30 days, and has aligned the entire organization around it.

G&A has been flat or declining for five years despite revenue growth, which Neman attributes to the technology infrastructure and AI tooling the company has layered in for predictive food ordering and kitchen management.

Drive-throughs and real estate

Sweetgreen just opened its first drive-through featuring an Infinite Kitchen in Costa Mesa, CA, and Neman says the unit is performing well. Getting drive-through locations is difficult — zoning restrictions mean you typically have to take over an existing drive-through slot, competing against Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's, which run AUVs of roughly $8M per restaurant and can outbid most challengers on rent.

On broader real estate trends, the best streets continue to command higher rents while secondary locations have stayed relatively stable. The biggest headwind isn't demand — it's the rise in interest rates, which has reduced the tenant improvement allowances landlords are willing to offer.

Drone delivery

Neman has done early exploratory work with Zipline but isn't making it a near-term priority. His framing: sub-30-minute delivery is the threshold that drives app opens, and drones can credibly get there in suburban markets. Current constraints are order size — drones can't handle large group orders yet — and the infrastructure requirement of building a dedicated portal into the restaurant. He expects drone delivery to matter over time, particularly in markets like Texas where the suburban geometry suits it. Double-digit share of delivery orders within a year or two he sees as unlikely; eventually, he thinks it lands.