 I have a big problem. With all the options we have on this big green earth, I keep going to Sweet Green. Oh, at least six to eight, maybe ten times. Two to three times per month. I've never been in a Sweet Green. I go to Sweet Green about four or five times a month. They're a little bit different than everyone else. It's very trendy. You could go to chopped, just salad, or any other place that sells salad, but why do we keep going back? In the last couple years, brands that don't have a brand purpose are suffering. In the last few years, brands that have taken a stand for something have seen customers buy in, whether it's Patagonia using its tax cut savings on the environment to leave eyes and its get out the vote campaign. Sweet Green is no different. So what does this 12 year old salad joint actually believe in? Our mission at Sweet Green is to connect people to real food. And they have. The privately held company currently valued at a billion dollars started simply. Sweet Green became Sweet Green August of 2007. We were students in college and we had the idea to create a place that was affordable, healthy, and aligned with your values. Values. If you go to Sweet Green's website, you can see the company's food ethos, which runs a gamut of transparency, sustainability, local sourcing, and animal welfare. These elements are what builds a community around values. This needs to be intertwined so that when the brand interacts with you, you feel comfortable enough to connect, even to your own neighborhood. We spend a lot of time studying the communities that we're in before we actually open a restaurant. We spend about a year in every market talking to farmers, understanding the supply chain, and really understanding the neighborhoods that we're going into. So whether it's New York, Los Angeles, or even Texas, Sweet Green really thinks about all different types of customers, different geographies, and really is focused on making sure that we meet farmers even before we meet landlords. Sweet Green's 75-plus locations have a consistent look, with community-inspired touches thanks to a New York-based creative agency, Grand Army. I mean, it was kind of our role to connect the sort of updated Sweet Green brand identity with those values. We saw a ton of opportunities to kind of move the visual identity closer to the way that Sweet Green actually operated as a company, not just from a branding standpoint, but in all of their sort of food sourcing. Yeah, I think maybe one of the more obvious things that sort of push the identity closer to that notion would be just moving some of the colors towards some more natural tones. They had previously used a couple of, like, neon-y, highlighter green-type colors, and you push all the colors into more natural space, something that could be reproduced with more friendly inks, and also match up the kind of tones and colors in the products and the food. It's kind of nerdy colors for nerdy color names. I think the darker green is Kale, and then the lighter green is Sprout, and then I think Slate was the gray that we picked. It was just important to us that the colors sort of didn't mandate the use of any sort of chemical-based spot colors. We wanted everything to be able to be produced in soy inks, which just seemed aligned with the way that they prep their food. We also created a type system that used a lot of hand marks, which also seemed perfectly aligned with the sort of handmade nature of their food. We needed to see everything cohesively interacting, so going into the store, seeing the signage is sort of in sync with how the brand was sort of, it was growing really fast, so it had all these, like, different modes it could operate in, and different kind of legacy things were in play, and then we got to sort of help shift it towards a more cohesive, singular kind of thread. Values-inspired design and a cohesive brand purpose builds a community and keeps customers coming back.