ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Sweetgreen reupped its delivery program called Outpost after most locations paused the service during the COVID-19 pandemic, reports the Wall Street Journal. The program is aimed at office workers and allows employees of participating companies to pick up orders at locations in office buildings without paying a delivery fee.
The program was introduced in 2018, and Sweetgreen started rebuilding the program’s network with new and existing partners in summer 2020. The program had 250 delivery stations at the end of the third quarter of 2021 and more than 500 today. Outpost has opened 18 new delivery stations in the past two weeks.
Sweetgreen sees opportunities in hybrid work policies, where employees are in the office a portion of the time, because the company believes corporations will move away from providing cafeterias. The company also sees Outpost as part of a strategy to encourage repeat business.
“The Outpost customer is even more frequent than a digital customer that maybe doesn’t have access to an Outpost,” Daniel Shlossman, chief digital officer at Sweetgreen, told the Journal.
Many companies are asking employees to return to the office this month or in April, including American Express, Wells Fargo and Verizon. Current office occupancy is at 40.6% across 10 major U.S. cities, according to data from Kastle Systems, a nationwide security company that monitors building access swipes.
JP Morgan’s employees were required to return to work at the beginning of February, and the financial company recently announced it will resume hiring unvaccinated people beginning April 4, reports Reuters. The company also is dropping the mask mandate in its offices for all employees, as well as mandatory testing for unvaccinated staffers. Employees will no longer have to report COVID-19 infection and associated contact tracing and notifications.
"We are learning to live with COVID as part of our new normal," the bank said in a memo obtained by Reuters.
Sweetgreen launched a pilot salad subscription program, which started on January 16 and expired on February 15. For $10 a month, subscription members received $3 off their purchase of $9.95 or more each day (limited to one per day). The company has not released metrics or spoken on the results of the program yet.
Fast casual restaurants flourished during the pandemic. Though fast-casual visits were down during the peak of the 2020 lockdowns (-23% in the quarter ended June 2020), by year-to-date August 2021, they had risen 8%, and traffic was flat on a two-year basis.
What was their secret to surviving a global pandemic that caused many businesses to take big hits or close permanently? Fast casuals leaned in on the tools that were already part of their business model to effectively reach their customer—think digital ordering, loyalty, pickup and drive-thrus.