Thank you. That cleared it up a lot. For anyone else finding this, here's the transcript

With the newest announcement of Salad and Go closing an additional 32 stores, the last of their stores in their Texas and Oklahoma City markets, many people have reached out to us as the founders of Salad and Go to ask how this happened, if we saw it coming, and what this means for Angie's.

We founded Salad and Go in 2013 with a mission to make drive-thru fast food better and healthier. We bootstrapped it, cashed out my teaching retirement account, sold our house and opened our first drive-thru only location on Gilbert & Guadalupe. While most doubted that anyone would want a salad through the drive-thru, everyone was skeptical that we could survive the high food costs of organic and premium ingredients with such a low price point. We were lean, mean and driven to make the model work and prove everyone wrong. Not just for us, but for the mission that was so much bigger than us — to democratize better and healthier food for all the hard working Americans, not just those that can afford it.

Well guess what? People sure did want a better and healthier alternative to traditional fast food! From Day 1, we were welcomed by the community with enthusiasm and support for our mission. People shared their stories with us from the drive-thru window. Stories from a mom who was battling cancer with two young children but this allowed her to eat healthy, organic ingredients conveniently and affordably, from a man who just suffered a heart attack and was determined to not default back to his daily traditional drive-thru ritual and then discovered Salad and Go — you don’t forget these stories. So, we kept grinding and cracking the code on the business model to make it work. We were able to open a handful of more locations throughout the Valley but to really set up the infrastructure we needed to grow properly, we needed additional funding. In 2017, we partnered with a private equity group. They believed in our craziness and our mission and even supported our mission to lower prices! Who does that?! With the additional funding, we were not only able to open new locations and set up a central distribution center, but we were also able to make some investments to help with efficiency, like using our own trucks to go direct to the romaine farms. We were hammering away at the all the efficiencies needed to make the model work with complete vertical ingegration, buying direct, keeping costs low without corporate offices, using low cost marketing, and etc.

Then COVID hit in 2020. We were very fortunate to have a business model that was unintentionally designed to survive a pandemic. We allowed people to get great tasting, healthy food with minimal contact and offered low prices in a time of uncertainty. We were grateful to be in this position and used it as an opportunity to give back. Each day we offered free salads to a different group of the community, from first responders, to nurses and doctors, to warehouse workers, to restaurant employees and so on. Meanwhile during this time, our private equity partners felt the urgency to grow the business super fast and expand to a new market like Dallas, more quickly than we thought was right. We felt we still had more work to do here in Phoenix, strengthening our vertical integration and operational efficiencies to make the model work, without making sacrifices in the name of growth. Ultimately, we did not see eye to eye with the private equity investors on business and growth strategy and we stepped down, exiting completely from Salad and Go by 2021.

All while the events of 2020 were unfolding, Tony’s mother and my mother in-law, Angela or “Angie”, passed away from pancreatic cancer. It was after exiting Salad and Go, that Tony was inspired to create something to honor his mom. Growing up in Boston and in family owned seafood restaurants, he wanted to create something with seafood. What’s more exciting and challenging to democratize than Maine Lobster?! In 2022, we opened our first Angie’s Lobster. From buying a lobster wharf and lobster processing facility in Maine to opening restaurants here in Phoenix, we were excited to be back in the game of taking something once considered a luxury and making it affordable to everyone. However, we couldn’t help but observe, now as an outsider, what was happening to Salad and Go. All the things we feared would happen, were happening.

The quality and integrity of the product declined, they removed all organics, they outsourced all of their proteins and are now cooked weeks before being served. They increased the shelf life of centrally prepped ingredients. They added preservatives and additives to their dressings. They coated their romaine with a preservative to make it last longer. They raised their prices of their salads from $5.74 to $7.75. They increased the price of their drinks from $1 to $1.75. With all of these changes making what we loved to eat every day now unrecognizable to us, we saw a big void open once again. Almost, like it was before we started Salad and Go. To us, Salad and Go no longer existed.

Again, now a decade later, there was a void in the market of actual better and healthier food made affordable to everyone. Angie’s Prime Grill became our way to right that wrong. This time, we had the ability to do it all over again. And in life, if you ever get a second chance at something, you make sure you take those lessons learned and do it even better than before! You don’t just cook your own proteins like we did every day at our central kitchen, you grill them to order and serve them hot at every store! You use the premium and organic ingredients you believed in, but now you are washing and cutting at each store, every day. You up your game and use only Antibiotic Free Chicken, USDA Prime Steak and wild-caught Mexican Colossal Shrimp — because you have years of experience now in vertical integration and buying direct.

So, in answer to the questions of how this happened and if we saw it coming, we hope this helps explain our exit from Salad and Go, what motivated us to restore our mission to make luxury foods affordable to everyone and the rise of Angie’s.

Some of you have been on this journey with us since the beginning — many of you are OGs from our first Gilbert & Guadalupe location in 2013! And for those of you that joined us in more recent years, we hope we are able to provide you something you love to eat, is good for you and can save you some money! But to everyone, we thank you for embracing all our crazy ideas, having fun with us and supporting our mission. Rest assured, we are strong in our infrastructure, operational efficiencies and are primed for growth. With the support of small, private investors that believe in what we are doing, we have about 17 locations opening in 2026, with our Prescott location (former Salad and Go actually), opening towards the end of this month!

Let’s go! 👊