The Real Reason Sweetgreen Collapsed (From $5B to Broke)

Описание: Sweetgreen was supposed to be the future of food. A $5 billion health-tech unicorn that would change how America eats. Premium salads, slick mobile ordering, sustainability focus - everything looked perfect on paper.
Then it all fell apart.
The stock that opened at $52 is now trading in single digits. The company has never turned a profit. They're doing layoffs, cutting forecasts, and Wall Street has completely lost faith. So what actually happened?
In this video, I'm breaking down the entire collapse of Sweetgreen - from three Georgetown grads selling salads out of a tiny shop to a massively hyped IPO to a company desperately fighting for survival.
Here's what went wrong:
The Price Problem - When your core product costs $15-$20, you're immediately limiting who can afford to be a regular customer. That works great for a niche brand, but Sweetgreen needed mainstream scale to justify their billion-dollar valuation. They were stuck in a catch-22: couldn't lower prices without massive scale, couldn't achieve scale because prices were too high.
The Pandemic Shift - Sweetgreen's entire business model relied on urban office workers grabbing expensive salads for lunch. When remote work became permanent and people started watching their spending, that customer base evaporated. Fewer people in offices + inflation + expensive salads = disaster.
The Robot Bet That Failed - Instead of fixing their core business, Sweetgreen spent big on automation. They bought Spyce robotics, promised "Infinite Kitchens" with robot-made salads, and told investors this would cut costs and boost margins. It didn't work. The robots were slow, expensive, and eventually they had to sell the whole thing off at a loss.
Never Actually Profitable - Here's the thing nobody talks about enough: Sweetgreen has NEVER been profitable. Not once. They've been burning through cash since day one, betting that eventually scale would fix everything. But when you're three years past your IPO and still losing money every quarter, investors start asking hard questions.
The Identity Crisis - Were they a tech company or a restaurant company? They pitched themselves as tech to get that sweet tech valuation, but at the end of the day they're selling salads. All that money spent on apps and automation could have gone into actually building better restaurants.
I also cover the Chipotle lawsuit mess, customer complaints about shrinking portions and declining quality, the multiple rounds of layoffs, Wall Street downgrades from Goldman Sachs and others, and why their current turnaround strategy probably won't work.
The bigger lesson here is about hype versus fundamentals. Sweetgreen had everything investors love - health trends, tech angle, ESG credentials, cool branding, celebrity backing. But none of that matters if your unit economics don't work and your addressable market isn't actually big enough to support a multi-billion dollar valuation.
This is the cautionary tale of what happens when venture capital, unrealistic growth expectations, and premium pricing collide with economic reality.
Have you ever eaten at Sweetgreen? Do you think $18 salads are justified or ridiculous? And can they actually turn this around? Drop your thoughts below.
If this breakdown opened your eyes to what really happened behind the hype, hit that like button and subscribe because I'm covering more stories like this where billion-dollar companies implode despite having everything going for them on paper.

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