The sad desk salad hits the suburbs
A rosier-than-expected forecast from Sweetgreen triggered a series of analyst upgrades.
Forget semiconductors, perhaps the real technology of the moment is salad.
Shares of Sweetgreen, the salad and grainbowl spot urban professionals flocked to in the before times, are on a tear.
They’re up more than 100% this month and have more than tripled over the last year.
Sweetgreen executives forecast first-quarter — and full-year — sales would be above where Wall Street analysts were expecting, when they reported results on Feb. 29.
Interestingly, while the company was once associated with the lunchtime rush of young workers in major urban centers, Sweetgreen’s better-than-expected outlook doesn’t really suggest any kind of return-to-office upswing.
Rather the company has been gaining traction by shifting its strategy to the ‘burbs.
“What we're doing with Sweetgreen is we're broadening our footprint and broadening into new markets,” the company’s chief financial officer told an conference of analysts earlier this month. “We certainly have left the urban centers in a large way and have, yeah, grown much more in the suburban markets.”
For the record, the shares are still below their November 2021 IPO price of $28.
