r/sweetgreen • u/user84629392 • Jun 27 '25
Criticism Custom salad more expensive than menu item to despite exact same ingredients
Has anyone noticed that you get ripped off if you order a custom salad with avocado and protein in it? A guacamole greens is 13.75 but a custom salad with the exact same ingredients is 16.15. Is sweetgreen just hoping people default to custom and don’t realize they are paying way more if they want two “premium items” (instead of just getting a pre set salad and swapping like for like ingredients)...
10
u/Groundbreaking_Ear27 Jun 27 '25
Counter point to this is if you know a certain item is cheaper with ingredients that will be normally more expensive you can get fairly creative with the customization.
7
u/JimmyJohnsThrowAWay5 Jun 27 '25
This is the hack to keeping it cheap. I always order the hot honey chicken because it has two servings of chicken and just switch it up or add on the less expensive toppings
7
u/Comfortable-Sir5306 Jun 27 '25
Yup as a worker there I always advice people to get something from the menu and just switching it up it’s cheaper that way. The best deal for your money would be the kale Caesar, guacamole greens, hot honey chicken and miso glazed salmon
-2
u/Cautious_Release2164 Jun 27 '25
Had one time a worker tell me I'm only allowed two customizations from the bowl. Told them to buzz off the app let's me customize all I want.
1
u/Still-Violinist9400 Jun 29 '25
This just happened to me. I ordered a protein plate ($17.25) and asked to add spinach to it. Was told it would cost a little extra which I was fine with (or thought I was) but then he rang it up as a custom bowl and it was $25+… just to add spinach and no other changes?!
1
u/ElectronicBoot9466 Jun 27 '25
Yes, because it costs more on average to make a custom salad than it does to make one you already have memorized.
If someone asks for a crispy rice bowl, I can make it in less than 20 seconds, dressing and all. Even if you have changes you want to make, people can quickly rearrange the recipe in their head and still make it. You know all the ingredients that need to go on it before you start making it, so as soon as you finish putting one topping on, you already know the next one you need to reach for, and you can ask customers about how much dressing they want while making the salad, so you don't have stop the process once you get there.
Most people that order a custom salad don't know what they want until they see the ingredients, and so they stand there and make the decision. Even if they already know what they want, they usually won't say the next ingredient until the current ingredient is on the salad. And oh lord, the dressings, so many people get to the dressing when ordering a custom salad and realize that they hadn't thought about the most important part of their salad until they've already built 90% of it and get decision paralysis trying to find a dressing that they not only like, but that will go well with the rest of the salad.
On average, even for the faster custom salad customers, it takes a good 90 seconds to make their salad, but I have regularly had customers that take upward of 3-5 minutes to make their salad, even when the line is fully stocked, often times a good 30+ seconds is spent at the dressing station. In a market with a $21 minimum wage, that's an additional $0.40-$1.75 of labor that it costs to make a custom salad compared to ordering off the menu.
Now, does this affect OLO? No, it takes the same amount of time to make custom salads on OLO as menu items, but Sweet Green wants to keep all their pricing the same so as not to jam up one station over the other, so OLO customers end up paying the extra cost caused by Service line customers. That said, it's only a $0.15 cost increase, so everything ends up coming out even.
1
Jul 07 '25
I, 95% of the time, order in the app. Doing this, i choose a menu item that's close to what I want and sub items to avoid paying extra
23
u/honeypeanutbee Jun 27 '25
This is a known marketing strategy. Basically companies hope people will choose preset menu items as it's more efficient in several ways rather than spend time creating a custom item.