Sweetgreen

One operating model. Different ways to experience.

I designed Sweetgreen’s first drive-thru and curbside pickup experiences, built on one modular operating model.

Company: Sweetgreen
Focus: Service design, retail experience

Rendering of a Sweetgreen drive-thru location, with pickup bays and directional arrows on the pavement

Sweetgreen was expanding into new ways to order.

Drive-thru and curbside pickup were new for the company. Each format needed to feel like Sweetgreen without inventing a new customer experience every time.

The journey had to flex with the format.

Instead of designing each format on its own, we built customer journeys and employee workflows that could expand or contract with each site.

One format’s order journey mapped on its site: order ahead, assemble, QC and convey, arrive and pick up

Sweetgreen’s first drive-thru pilot.

At Highlands Ranch, every step from entering the lot to exiting was mapped to the signage, tech, and hardware it needed.

Site plan of the seven-step drive-in journey at Highlands Ranch, with renderings and requirements for each step

One experience, two sides of the operation.

The service blueprint lined up every customer step with what the front- and back-of-house teams did at the same moment.

Service blueprint for the drive-in order flow across customer, front-of-house, and back-of-house swimlanes

A modular model that enabled scale.

100+new locations supported in a single year

4new restaurant formats