How Sweetgreen Became A $1 Billion Salad Start-Up

Sweetgreen is now the restaurant world’s first “unicorn,“ valued at over $1 billion. Started by three college friends out of their dorm room at Georgetown University, the salad company has 91 locations with more in the works and is vying to become the digital food platform of the future. Introducing The Upstarts, a new series about the companies you love that came out of nowhere and are now everywhere. Sweetgreen is the first-ever unicorn salad start-up, luring lunchtime lines across the country with its millenial- and Gen Z-friendly $12 salads. Now, the brand that brought the farm-to-table trend to fast-casual dining wants to be “the Starbucks of salads.“ “If I had told you 25 years ago, when Starbucks only had a few locations, that someday it would be a global phenomenon … nobody would have believed that. ... But, that’s what happened,“ Sweetgreen investor and billionaire Steve Case told CNBC. Today, Starbucks has a market value of nearly