Sweetgreen Pickup Experience

Redesigning order pickup to keep pace with a surge in mobile ordering.

Product designService designRetail experience

100+ Completed orders waiting for pickup at once

15 min Window in which they all arrived, at peak lunch

3D render of the pickup cubby wall, with a customer standing in front of it — Fig. 1Each order routed to a specific cubby, not a shared counter.

As mobile ordering grew during COVID, finding a completed order became a source of friction. During peak lunch hours, a single restaurant could have more than 100 salads waiting for pickup within a fifteen-minute window, creating congestion for customers and delivery couriers alike.

I led a project to explore how customers could find their orders faster, and how pickup could work more efficiently for restaurant teams. The concept we landed on assigned each order to a specific pickup cubby, communicating its location through the order-ready notification, the mobile app, and an in-store digital display.

A lock-screen notification reading 'Your order is ready for pickup on the Kale shelf in cubby #18', next to the in-app order tracker showing Received, Preparing, QA complete, and Ready states — Fig. 2The cubby location surfaced at every step, from the notification to the order tracker.

Service blueprint showing the team member flow, back-end system, and customer touchpoints for cubby pickup — Fig. 3The full flow: team member actions, back-end state changes, and what the customer sees.

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