All food trends will eventually come to an end or gradually fade into the culinary background. Arguably, this is what has happened to the build-your-own salad or grain bowls. These were once trendy office lunches but are now often, perhaps unjustly, mocked as “slop bowls.” This change in consumer preferences has left companies like Sweetgreen and Cava, which built large businesses on the popularity of bowl-based food, in a rush to revamp their offerings.
Recently, this has resulted in weaker business performance for the companies leading this food movement, due to “bowl fatigue” and high menu prices. This week, Sweetgreen, which has been experiencing slow business, announced that it will introduce wraps in selected U.S. markets. It is promoting this food trend, which you might recall from the 1990s, as a “handheld format designed to offer the portability and satisfaction that customers desire.”
“We anticipate that wraps will be a significant milestone for our brand,” Sweetgreen CEO and co-founder Jonathan Neman told Wall Street analysts on Thursday afternoon during a call to discuss financial results. Wraps are also emerging among many of the chain’s competitors: Chopt, Just Salad, and even McDonald’s and Popeye’s have added or reintroduced wraps in the past year.
With its shrinking customer base, Sweetgreen has a lot at stake with these wraps – a Chicken Caesar, Chicken Jalapeño Ranch, and Chicken Salad Bacon Club. On Thursday, Sweetgreen reported an 11.5% year-on-year decline in same-store sales (business at its restaurants open for at least a year) in its most recent quarter. Its shares have dropped by 90% since its IPO in 2021.
However, Sweetgreen is not the only one that needs to adjust its menu. Chipotle said this month that it is accelerating the introduction of new menu items, with a focus on protein-based options (another food trend). “We are trying to distinguish our brand from the sea of sameness,” Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright recently said. Chipotle’s same-store sales decreased last quarter, and the company expects them to remain unchanged this year.
Another company, although one experiencing strong growth, that is expanding its menu is Cava. Its CEO, Brett Schulman, this week defended the mainstay bowls of his Mediterranean food chain, saying that customers simply “like the food” regardless of the container it comes in. Still, Cava did announce some significant new changes to its menu, such as a pomegranate-glazed salmon dish and roast garlic shrimp. “We have unique ways across all these different categories to continue generating excitement, interest, and customer frequency,” he told Wall Street analysts this week.
It’s also possible that people are not so much suffering from “bowl fatigue” as they are experiencing old-fashioned sticker shock. Many restaurant chains may have raised prices too rapidly after the pandemic, squeezing consumers who are already struggling with widespread inflation and making many feel that a “slop bowl” is a luxury rather than an affordable, healthy meal.
Caitlin Daniel, a Harvard lecturer specializing in the sociology of food, expressed this view: “When you’re talking about spending $60 or $70 on a dinner for a family of four, you might as well stop by Whole Foods on your way home, get some food from the hot bar, make some rice and broccoli, and call it a day.”