Sweetgreen

Sweetgreen set out to connect people to real food. We set out to translate that into a brand and a way of ordering it. many of the leadership from Gin Lane now at Little Plains worked closely with the sweetgreen team for over half a decade to build out one of the most advanced online order ecosystems.

Over those years, we defined the brand's visual language, rebuilt the ordering infrastructure end to end, and shipped two products: a responsive web app and a native iOS app that helped make Sweetgreen one of America’s most digital fast-casual companies.

Fast-casual in the early 2010s was a race to be quick. Sweetgreen was trying to be quick and good - better ingredients, a real point of view about food, an experience that felt like hospitality rather than a transaction. The problem we took on was how to carry that feeling into a phone. Digital ordering at the time was built for speed and nothing else. We wanted the efficiencies without the coldness that usually came with them.

The customer we designed for wasn't looking for a novelty. They wanted convenient, healthy food that fit the life they were building, and they wanted the brand to know them a little. So we started from the customer and worked back to the technology at every stage, rather than the other way around.

The first job was turning the brand's principles into a visual language. Sweetgreen had raised the bar on what fast-casual ingredients could be, and the art direction had to earn that. We built it around the freshness itself: tactile photography, clean design, an optimistic voice. The food had to look like something you'd want in your hands.

That principle drove one of the project’s more daunting production calls. If we were going to let people build any salad they wanted, we had to shoot every ingredient - more than sixty of them. Working with design director Gordon Sexton, we developed photo guidelines and ran a three-day shoot, capturing each ingredient on white for maximum detail, then each signature salad fully composed, arranged in a pie-chart configuration so you could see how the flavors worked together. In a salad, no single ingredient is the star. The salad is the sum of its parts, and the photography had to say that.

Before any of the UX, we went behind the greens. To design a platform that streamlined the whole operation, we needed to understand it from the inside. So, we interviewed managers, shadowed employees, rang up orders, and mixed salads. Journey mapping and semantic differentials gave us structure, but the real insight came from standing behind the line during a rush and seeing where the digital and physical experiences would have to meet.

The visible product sat on top of an invisible rebuild. To connect all the brick-and-mortar stores to a single ordering experience, we rethought Sweetgreen's technological infrastructure, the native iOS application and the middle layers required to tie the stores together. The point was to blend the best of the physical dining experience with the efficiencies of digital, at every touchpoint, and that only works if the systems underneath can actually talk to each other. The new ecosystem let sweetgreen adapt as the business grew, and it seeded a model of service that moved fluidly between physical and digital space.

Everything orbited one moment: building the salad. Getting it right meant balancing a highly visual layout, simple controls, and real customization without overwhelming anyone. Customers could start from scratch or from a signature combination, choose multiple portions of any ingredient, and see the impact on price and calories calculated in real time. They could also dig into where an ingredient was sourced, down to the local farm. The constraint that made it honest: users had to feel free to build the salad they wanted, but only one that Sweetgreen could actually make and fit in its containers. We defined those business rules with Sweetgreen's team and built them into the interface so the freedom never broke the kitchen.

For anyone avoiding meat, dairy, gluten, nuts, or anything else, dietary-restriction filters highlighted the ingredients to watch in each chef-designed salad, so people could reconfigure to suit their needs. Underneath, we built a custom content management system that let store "Head Coaches" modify sourcing and availability all the way down to the single ingredient, and real-time analytics that gave operations leadership hour-by-hour throughput, wait-time impact, menu-item affinity, and the most popular modifications. The customer-facing simplicity was possible because the back-of-house tooling was doing the hard part.

With the new desktop platform and mobile app live, online ordering climbed from a single-digit share of the business to almost a third. That opened the real opportunity: turning transactions into relationships. We focused on loyalty built through genuine understanding of each customer's needs and behaviors: personalized home screens with quick reordering, a greeting by name, an experience curated closely enough that it produced a sense of being cared for. Conversion followed the care, not the other way around.

As the operations team focused on rolling out online ordering across the country, our product team turned to the future: a native iPhone app that took nearly a year to build. Going native let the design take advantage of iOS directly — zooming into individual salads, swiping favorites, gliding through swappable ingredients — for a more intuitive sense of place, depth, and responsive tactility than the web could offer. Along the way we helped sweetgreen bring ordering and rewards closer together, overhaul store ops to speed up pickup, and stand up an in-house tech team.

The next step was folding sweetgreen's popular rewards program into ordering so the flow from app to restaurant lost its friction. A single-sign-on flow invisibly merged each user's ordering and rewards accounts. Real-time rewards let people check their status and progress toward their $9 perk at a glance. And if they were ordering in-store, a shake from any screen pulled up a personal barcode to scan and pay. We also built Fast Faves — set any item, including full customs, as a favorite for one-tap reordering — and were among the first to integrate with Apple's HealthKit, so customers could track a meal's dietary impact through Lifesum, MyFitnessPal, or UA Record.

Holding all of this together was a systematic design language. We translated strategy into a product where the prioritized features actually manifested the connection between a person and their local sweetgreen store, then built a design system that kept the experience fluid across touchpoints and breakpoints. Visual design, branding, interaction, and motion moved as one system rather than a set of separate decisions.

The iOS app launched in January 2016 to strong reviews from customers and press, and it positioned sweetgreen as a leader among a new set of fast-casual brands redefining how America eats. In the years after, sweetgreen opened more than a thousand "Outpost" pickup hubs in offices and hospitals. By the quarter ending September 26, 2021, 68% of sweetgreen's total sales came from digital transactions, ahead of a digital powerhouse like Chipotle, whose digital sales were 42.8% that same quarter. The digital-forward approach helped the company build deeper relationships with customers, weather a pandemic, and prepare for the future of work.

It's some of the work we're proudest of, and it holds up. A lot of the team that built it is still building, now at Little Plains.

See sweetgreen at sweetgreen.com.