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There's more to salad than just lettuce

Panera Bread, Einstein Bagel Bros. and Atlanta Bread serve salad, so do Fazoli's, McAlister's and Schlotzsky's. Casual-dining restaurants serve up $8-$10 salads for lunch and dinner every day. So how do fast-casual salad concepts differentiate themselves with a single menu item?

April 30, 2006

As a country club restaurant manager in the 1980s, John Scardapane learned a profitable lesson he never forgot: salads had the highest percentage of add-ons at the cash register. Wanting to further that trend, he started displaying those colorful add-on ingredients where customers could see them as they waited in line to order.

 

Scardapane then took over a fledgling pasta shop in a New Jersey mall's food court and created a salad-centered concept that in one year became the highest-grossing restaurant in the food court. That store became the nucleus for Saladworks.

 

John Scardapane created Saladworks in the 1980s and now has 76 stores.

More than 20 years later, Saladworks has 76 franchise stores primarily on the East Coast. Now an established player in the salad business, Scardapane said he welcomes the proliferation of similar concepts across the country. The more stores that open, the more consumers notice salad concepts, said Scardapane, who noted his sales were already up 8 percent over last year.

 

Everybody's doing it

 

Panera Bread, Einstein Bagel Bros. and Atlanta Bread serve salad, so do Fazoli's, McAlister's and Schlotzsky's. Casual-dining restaurants serve up $8-$10 salads for lunch and dinner every day. So how does Saladworks differentiate itself with a single menu item?

 

"It's difficult in the beginning because you basically have to teach the consumer what the product is," Scardapane said. "Because salad is in our name, people think 'Oh, it's a salad bar.' It's not, it is custom made. Once you get them in the door, they're hooked."

 

Longevity in the salad business stems from the quality of ingredients offered. Working closely with distributors dedicated to freshness is a vital factor for fast-casual salad stores, where shelf time is limited, said Brian Sill, co-founder of Deterministics, a restaurant consultancy firm.

 

"The success of the concept is geared around the fact that salad isn't just salad. It's a deli approach—chopped this, diced that," Sill said. "You can customize your own salad to your own taste. The creativity comes from yourself."

 

The trick for fast-casual salad success is leveraging the fresh, healthy foundation of salads and capitalizing on premium additions such as proteins, specialty cheeses and a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, said Karen Malody, principal of Culinary Options, a Seattle-based consulting operation.

 

Created by two chefs, Mad Greens is a hot concept in Colorado.

A newer salad upstart is Colorado-based Mad Greens. The brainchild of chefs Marley Hodgson and Dan Long, the concept targeted Americans' growing proclivity for natural foods by offering more than 70 ingredients to top its greens.

 

"The bottom line is that we're serving salads that are higher-end," Hodgson said, adding that Mad Greens' offers steak, shrimp and salmon, as well as grilled portobellos, marinated tofu, goat's cheese and pumpkin seeds. "People expect freshness and the price of doing business is more expensive."

 

Since 2004, Mad Greens has opened just two stores in Denver, opting to grow slowly and steadily.

 

"We feel it's important to have a good base," Hodgson said. "If you franchise quickly out of the gate, you don't have an opportunity to truly get to know your own concept. It's not fair to a franchisee when you don't have it all figured out yet."

 

To stay profitable, fast-casual salad concepts must forge close relationships with vendors to keep fresh ingredients in stock constantly. Scardapane negotiates yearly contracts with his lettuce growers, establishing a committed price for an entire year.

 

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Relative newcomers Hodgson and Long have learned the same lesson. Now that Mad Greens is proving profitable, distributors and vendors are more able to fix pricing and establish cost ranges year over year in the sometimes tumultuous and always weather-dependent produce production. But not everything in the salad business is about quality.

 

"We'd be lying through our teeth if we didn't say we put an enormous emphasis on speed," Hodgson said. "Today's consumer has learned that you don't have to sacrifice quality to get good food fast."