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Can a salad chain become the next big thing in the restaurant business?

A Deeper Dive: Nancy Kruse, the new menu trends columnist for Restaurant Business, joins the podcast this week to discuss whether Sweetgreen can find enough salad demand to grow big.

Will people eat enough salads to fuel Sweetgreen’s potential growth?

This week’s episode of the Restaurant Business podcast “A Deeper Dive” features Nancy Kruse, RB’s new menu trends columnist. You can read her first piece, from Worlds of Flavor, right here.

Kruse is well known for her expertise on menu trends and other issues affecting the restaurant industry.

That makes her perfect for a topic such as this one: Whether there is enough demand for salads to fuel growth of a national salad chain, which is what Sweetgreen is trying to become. Investors are betting that it will, giving the company a valuation higher than many other more established chains several times its size.

To warrant that valuation, it will need plenty of demand for salads. But Kruse doesn’t think demand is its biggest challenge. She talks about what that challenge is, as well as the overall demand for healthful food.

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