Sweetgreen Cuts Outlook After Cyclospora, Then Bets on a Chef

Sweetgreen slashed its full-year outlook in August, projecting same-store sales to fall 7% to 8% — a sharp deterioration from its earlier forecast of a 2% to 4% decline — after a summer cyclospora outbreak it had no part in causing.

Federal investigators tied the outbreak to iceberg lettuce from central Mexico. Sweetgreen doesn't use iceberg lettuce and doesn't buy lettuce from Mexico, according to cofounder Nic Jammet, who serves as the company's chief concept officer. The damage came anyway. The CDC declared the outbreak over on September 11.

"It was a painful summer because that was like the headline for all summer," Jammet told Fortune.

He worries the coverage of this summer's recalls may have pushed consumers toward a troubling conclusion: that "the safer thing is actually highly processed food." He has even watched farmers till fields of greens back into the ground.

The outbreak hit a chain already deep in a turnaround. The pre-pandemic desk-salad boom has never fully returned, and same-store sales dropped 11.5% year over year in 2025. Still, the stock has gained nearly 28% year to date under CEO Jonathan Neman, whose plan rests on tighter operations, marketing, menu changes and pricing.

The recovery now shows hard evidence. On September 28, Wells Fargo analyst Anthony Trainor upgraded the stock, citing a faster-than-expected recovery; shares hit their highest intraday level since the outbreak began in mid-July. Foot traffic data from Placer.ai showed Sweetgreen's average visits per location rose 5.6% year over year from July 6 through September 11, while rival Chopt's fell 7.7%.

"I feel like we're on the other side of cyclospora, and the world has kind of moved on," Jammet said. "At the end of the day, we moved past it, and so we're excited to be on the other side of it."

A first chef-in-residence

On Tuesday, Sweetgreen named cookbook author Molly Baz its first chef-in-residence. Her menu runs three limited-edition items — a Caesar wrap, a pickle Caesar salad, and a scoop of chicken salad with a pickle spear — available through November 9. Jammet called the Baz collaboration one of the biggest of the year, capping a run that included summer partnerships with Alice Waters and the tinned-fish brand Fishwife.

The collaborations, he said, are "bringing back a bit of that drumbeat that, you know, really built the brand." The new menu also builds on the chain's push into wraps this year, part of a broader effort by bowl chains to shake the "slop bowl" label. The response to wraps "has been really great," Jammet said.

He rejects the office-lunch-bowl framing entirely. "Sweetgreen is not a slop bowl," he said. "It is high-quality ingredients composed and cooked from scratch."

"It really becomes food that you could eat every day," Jammet added. "It's not like one specific flavor, one specific cuisine."

Never waste a crisis

The founders have been here before, on a smaller scale. A week before Sweetgreen opened its first store in 2007, a break-in cost Jammet and his cofounders, Neman and Nathaniel Ru, the laptop holding their recipes and training materials. There was no cloud backup then. The three stayed up all week rebuilding the files from old emails.

"Even though that was a crisis, it really forced us to just think about this idea that, like, never waste a crisis," Jammet said. "Shit's always going to happen to you, so you've got to be ready to find solutions."

His advice to other restaurateurs dealing with this summer's fallout is the same: "Try to stay long-term focused, and honestly, we try to stay as close to the customer as possible." For Sweetgreen, that meant emphasizing its supply chain and staying focused on execution in stores rather than letting the company "get too distracted by the narrative."

From La Caravelle to fast casual

Jammet grew up in La Caravelle, the Manhattan French dining room his parents, André and Rita Jammet, ran until it closed in 2004. The restaurant was a Kennedy family favorite; its head chef recommended the cook Jacqueline Kennedy hired for the White House kitchen, and it was nominated for the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Restaurant award shortly before closing.

"My parents ran it together, like mom and pop, there every day. If my dad wasn't there, they weren't open," Jammet said. He and his brothers — his twin Patrick and older brother Christophe — sat in booths "in our little suits and ties" while customers wondered why toddlers were "eating canelés and soufflés by themselves."

Fine dining and fast casual run on the same principles, Jammet argued: high-quality product and "people leaving better than when they came in."

The Sweetgreen Challenge

Sweetgreen's case for fresh food got an unlikely proof point this year from Tim Donohue, a 27-year-old ad agency copywriter from Hoboken, N.J. Inspired by Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, he ate only from Sweetgreen's menu, twice a day, for 25 days. He lost nine pounds — though he also stopped drinking — and spent just under $1,000.

Sweetgreen turned his video into the Sweetgreen Challenge, a 30-day version that gave 30 fans a credit of $700 a week toward meals plus $500 to compete.

"We don't expect people to eat Sweetgreen twice a day, but it just is kind of like the extreme challenge of it all to show you the power of the decisions you make around what you're eating and how it makes you feel," Jammet said.

Donohue said Sweetgreen never paid him for the video, though it gave him a "generous amount" of reward points after the challenge launched. He still eats there three times a week.

"I actually thought that when this project was done, that I would swear off Sweetgreen and never eat it ever again in my life," Donohue said. "And to my surprise, one week after I finished this challenge, I was just genuinely craving it."

With traffic rebounding, an analyst upgrade in hand, and a high-profile culinary hire running through November 9, Sweetgreen enters the fall with momentum its August guidance cut didn't anticipate.