The Salad Kitchen Signs a Ninth London Site, Withheld Details and All

The Salad Kitchen has secured a ninth site, trade title Propel reported on 5 November, pushing the London salad brand past the eight shops listed on its own website. That single headline is nearly all the hard information in the public domain. The location, the opening date and the landlord behind the new site sit behind Propel's subscription wall, so independent verification is not possible from the report alone.

The founders are Sam Cole and Ross Cannon, according to the coverage read. Beyond those two names, the deal itself is opaque. No funding details, no lease terms and no franchisee identities have surfaced in any of the sources consulted for this article.

What do the eight existing stores reveal?

The brand's website lists eight shops under the heading "One city, eight stores." They are concentrated in the City and central London:

• Devonshire Square, near Liverpool Street
• Welbeck Street, Marylebone
• Whitecross Street, Barbican
• Leather Lane, Farringdon
• Avery Row, Mayfair
• Queen Victoria Street, near Mansion House
• Royal Exchange
• Jubilee Place, Canary Wharf

The opening hours point to an office-led business rather than a weekend destination. Welbeck Street, Whitecross Street and Leather Lane trade on weekdays only, closing between 2:30pm and 3pm. Devonshire Square, Avery Row, Queen Victoria Street and Jubilee Place stay open until 8pm or 8:30pm from Monday to Thursday, then close earlier on Fridays. Royal Exchange runs the longest hours of the eight — until 9pm Monday to Thursday and 6:30pm on Fridays. Not one of the eight shops lists any weekend hours on the site.

The takeaway: this is a commuter-and-desk-worker concept, not a seven-day high-street chain, and any national expansion plan will have to answer how the model travels beyond office districts.

How big does the brand actually want to get?

MCA Insight, another trade title, earlier ran a report headlined "The Salad Kitchen sees scope for 100 sites." That report said the London-based salad bowl concept plans to grow nationwide through franchising and carries a long-term ambition to be "bigger than Pret." Pret A Manger operates hundreds of UK shops, so the stated target implies a multi-fold increase from today's nine.

The caveat is sizeable. The date of the MCA Insight report was not visible, and its detail sits behind a paywall. How many of the nine sites — if any — are run by franchisees rather than company-owned is not known. The franchising claim, in other words, is currently an ambition on paper, not a documented structure.

For context on the mechanics, UK franchising means a franchisee buys the right to trade under a brand's name and system; prospective franchisees typically press a franchisor on fees, support, and site selection before signing. Whether The Salad Kitchen has answered those questions for any partner is not public.

What is not being said?

The gaps in this story are as instructive as the announcement. The sources read do not disclose:

• the location of the ninth site
• its opening date
• the landlord
• the funding behind the roll-out
• whether any shop, new or existing, is franchisee-operated

The full Propel report remains behind its subscription. Until the brand or its founders confirm details, the "ninth site" is a claim, not a verifiable opening.

Where does this leave the competitive picture?

A move from eight sites to nine is a small step in raw numbers — one store, roughly a 12.5% increase in footprint. It matters more for a brand whose stated aim is a national network, because cluster growth is how London food-to-go brands typically scale. L'Express Franchise has reported on Urban Greens opening its seventh London site as one example of that pattern: multi-site operators expand near transport hubs and office clusters before leaving the capital.

The Salad Kitchen has not published a site target for the coming year in the sources read. If the 100-site ambition and the "bigger than Pret" framing are to be taken seriously, the brand will need to disclose far more than a paywalled headline — starting with where store number nine actually is.