Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman joined Cheddar News to discuss the company's current earnings report, its financial outlook and what lies ahead.

<div class="block">Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman joined Cheddar News to discuss the company&#39;s current earnings report, its financial outlook and what lies ahead.</div>

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Sweetgreen CEO Aiming for Company Profits in 2024

Sweet Green CEO and co founder, Jonathan Neiman has come a long way since starting a salad company from his dorm room at Georgetown University. In 2007. The company now has more than 150 locations across the country, but it has struggled to turn a profit. Well, last week Street Green posted its quarterly results and its shares did fall in the immediate aftermath because it missed expectations. I had a chance to sit down with Jonathan yesterday where we talked about the company's future plans. Take a look. It's been nearly two years since your company ipod here at the New York Stock Exchange. What's the state of business? We just reported earnings and we had a really solid quarter, 22% year over year growth, 3% comps with positive traffic and expanded our store level margins above 20% leading to our first adjusted E do profit as a public company. So nine quarter, nine, th consecutive quarter of 20 plus percent growth and more to come. Higher prices have impacted consumers and businesses alike for two years now is Sweet Green seen any easing of price pressures. We definitely have we've seen much less inflation both on our cost of goods and our labor. We've actually seen our turnover get to some of our record lows. We've seen much better stability at all levels, including our general manager, head coach position, which is really key to delivering great consumer experiences and delivering great financial outcomes. So overall, the labor markets have eased significantly, which has been great. Let's talk more about your latest results, which you referenced earlier. I know the company reported as sales that were actually a little bit short of expectations. Why was that? Well, we have a lot of exciting drivers to continue to continue to drive growth. One of those includes our new loyalty program Sweet Pass. Another is the expanded menu. So a lot of drivers that we're excited about to continue to push our same source sales. I did see your company aiming to be profitable by 2024. How are you going to get there? Disciplined capital, efficient growth. So continuing to open restaurants across the country, we're planning on opening about 35 restaurants this year continuing to drive our margin and lastly just working on our cost discipline and a really building leverage as we get our build, our economies of scale in the business. Higher prices, I think were also a boost to the overall sales metric in this latest quarter. Right price helped with about 33 points of it. Should consumers expect higher prices. The rest of the year, we have no plans for additional price for the rest of the year. I did see, obviously there was some controversy earlier this year after your company did name one of its menu items. The Chipotle Chicken Burrito bowl, Chipotle was against that. They sued. How is competition impacting your business? You mentioned a great bowl that we lost the Chicken and Chipotle pepper bowl. Again, one of our forays into that hardier crave food offering that we're really excited about, you know, competition. We see it in two ways. Of course, we compete with any restaurant that's serving food at the same time, other restaurants that are helping push this idea of healthy food at scale. We believe the pie grows, you know, so many consumers eat fast food every single day. And what we're trying to do is make fast food, something that you should eat every single day. So we're excited about the other, you know, the other peers we have that are pushing healthy food at scale. I know you're also exploring automation in your restaurants and in May open your first automated Sweet Green in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. What is the customer experience like there? So we spent a lot of time on the customer experience because we really wanted to make sure it wasn't just about the technology, but we were really telling the story Sweet Green and about where our food comes from and how it's made. So when you walk into the restaurant, you still see all the food made from scratch. You can order either from a kiosk or from one of our team members or on your app. The food is then assembled by the infinite kitchen. Perfect portioning, perfect accuracy up to 500 bowls per hour. And then one of our team members finishes the bowl on the finishing station. So they're adding the herbs, they're putting the lid on, maybe they're adding avocado, whatever, you know, your finishing is the things that don't go in the machine and they're handing you the ball. So we see this as a technology that's empowering our team members to enjoy their jobs more in creating a better consumer experience for our customers all while creating better unit economics for the business. And I saw that you said that automation is going to provide a faster and more efficient experience for customers, but that it will also unlock inefficiencies as well to help you grow more quickly, explain how that works. So what we expect to do is we will need fewer people to hire per restaurant and we will have higher margins as well as a more consistent experience. So with the combination of these things, it gives us a lot of leverage to continue to accelerate our growth in a very profitable way. Jonathan. My final question for you. Our viewers want to know what is inside your sweet green bowl. You know, I'm always eating off the, off the seasonal menu. So, right now I'm obsessed with the barbecue chicken salad, seasonal. All the way any additions. Uh, double check, double chicken. All right. Add the extra protein. Uh, Jonathan Neiman. Thanks for joining. Thank you for having me.