Every food trend eventually runs its course, or just recedes to become part of the culinary landscape. That’s arguably what has happened to build-your-own-salad or grain bowls, the once-hot office lunches that are now often and perhaps unfairly derided as “slop bowls.” That shift in taste leaves companies like Chipotle Mexican Grill, Sweetgreen, and Cava, which built large businesses on the popularity of bowl-based food, scrambling to reinvent their offerings.
So-called bowl fatigue and high menu prices have led to often softer business at companies forming the vanguard of this food movement. This week, Sweetgreen, where business has been slow, said it was introducing wraps in select U.S. markets, touting the food trend you might remember from the 1990s as a “handheld format designed to deliver the portability and satisfaction guests crave.”
“We expect wraps to be a huge moment for our brand,” Sweetgreen cofounder and CEO Jonathan Neman told Wall Street analysts on Thursday afternoon on a call to discuss financial results. And wraps are popping up at a number of the chain’s rivals, too: Chopt, Just Salad, and even McDonald’s and Popeyes have added or brought back wraps in the past year.
With its shrinking customer base, Sweetgreen has a lot riding on these wraps: chicken Caesar, chicken jalapeño ranch, and chicken salad bacon club. On Thursday, Sweetgreen posted an 11.5% year-over-year decrease in same-store sales (including restaurants open for at least one year) in its most recent quarter. Its shares have fallen 90% since its IPO in 2021.
But Sweetgreen is not alone in needing to adjust its menu: Chipotle said this month that it was speeding up its pace of new menu item introductions, with a focus on protein-oriented options (another food trend, this one related to the rise of weight-loss medications). “We are trying to differentiate our brand from the sea of sameness,” Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright recently told the Wall Street Journal. Chipotle’s same-store sales declined last quarter, and the company expects them to be unchanged this year.
Yet another company (albeit one enjoying strong growth) that is expanding its menu is Cava, whose CEO, Brett Schulman, this week offered a defense of his Mediterranean food chain’s mainstay bowls, saying that customers simply “want a great meal” whatever vessel it is presented in. Still, Cava did announce new, sizable change-ups to its menu such as pomegranate-glazed salmon and roast garlic shrimp. “We have unique ways through all these different categories to continue to drive excitement and interest and frequency,” he told Wall Street analysts this week.
It’s also possible that people aren’t experiencing “bowl fatigue” so much as old-fashioned sticker shock: Many restaurant chains may have raised prices too quickly after the pandemic, pinching consumers struggling with broader inflation and making many feel like a “slop bowl” is an extravagance rather than an affordable, healthy meal.
Caitlin Daniel, a Harvard lecturer focused on the sociology of food, articulated this point of view: “By the time you’re talking about spending $60 or $70 for a dinner for a family of four, you may as well swing by Whole Foods on the way home instead, get some food at the hot bar, make some rice and broccoli, and call it a day.”
