Lachlan's avatar@lachlanjc/eduCourses
Food & Nature in Cities

Fiber Bowls of Promises: Unpacking Fast Casual Food

I. Background

Last fall, sitting in the Tisch student lounge, I watched several classmates pull fiber bowls out of bags bearing the brand DIG, rendered all caps in a condensed sans serif font on the bags. In one flash of the logo, I intuited the brand behind these bowls as one that hired a branding agency, therefore a chain that had corporate funding instead of homegrown, and its bags were optimized for takeout, probably digital orders. Instead of searching my maps app or Google or DoorDash, I searched the iPhone App Store to find the brand, downloaded their app, and later that week tried the food, all without speaking to humans. The logo did all the talking to me.

Inside the restaurant, picking up the fiber bowl with my name labeled on it, the white subway tile and wooden shelving for pick-up orders all but confirmed it was a venture capital-backed chain. Writer Kyle Chayka named this aesthetic in 2016 “AirSpace,” a “harmonization of tastes” across global cities that pushes a unified, sanitized look into spaces designed for the same class of people as they travel the globe1. The food was warm, freshly-made, and signs on the walls assured me of many health and environmental benefits. That DIG location frequently advertises its pride in baking, rather than frying, chicken for sandwiches; a way of participating in the industrial chicken food economy that allows customers to feel superior to those of the always-packed Raising Cane’s two blocks away.

As I discovered through a quick Google search on my iPhone while eating—the social code of these fast casual restaurants, defined by the prevalence of solo diners, nearly requires one to be distracted while eating, most likely with both an iPhone and AirPods—DIG raised nearly $140M in venture capital funding.2 They are eager to align themselves with conscious capitalism, putting them in a long line of food lineage I first became aware of from chains like Chipotle in the late 2000s3. It’s a promise to customers of a product like fast food—it’s available in whatever city you’re in, reliably consistent, affordably priced—but better: for the environment, for your health, for workers. Your dollars make a difference here, at least to their investors.

As I departed the NYU campus dining plan last year, the fast casual chains were ready for me. DIG on the NYU campus promotes their student/faculty discount with a sign on the door encouraging visitors to “let DIG be your dining hall.” Though the idea feels American, other global cities have rapidly embraced the fast-casual bowl concept; visiting coworkers in London, each day we ate a different kind of bowl, like Coco di Mama’s pasta bowl assembly line. When I studied in Berlin, I unconsciously sought out the German equivalents of American chains, finding Chupenga for a(n absolutely tragic) imitation of Chipotle, Beets&Roots for a sweetgreen/DIG equivalent. I went weekly to the latter’s location across from the headquarters of HelloFresh in Germany, the tech-first food service that delivered me groceries during my “learn to cook” era over the summer while working at my conscious-capitalism tech job.

My Chipotle, DIG, sweetgreen, CAVA, and NAYA (few can resist special custom capitalization schemes) meals turned into a regular rotation of consistent, quick-to-reorder food to choose from for each meal out. For the urban upper middle class, fast casual chains have rapidly become the default way to eat (on weekdays, at least). It’s not only the huge chains; small businesses have sprung up to serve the same niche without the corporate backing, like Ambo for Indian bowls on the NYU campus. And the idea is not just urban: on road trips, Panera and Chipotle provide the American market penetration to serve a consistent casual meal in small towns that feels like a step up from Subway and McDonalds.

II. Defining fast casual

Fast casual has no legal or categorical distinction compared to fast food brands. (The defining parameters have become a regulatory flash point recently in California, where Panera has attempted to reclassify itself to skirt new labor regulations requiring fast food companies—a definition they clearly fall under—to pay workers a higher minimum wage, through a subclause that carves out fast food chains that sell bread separately as fast casual, leading to accusations of pay-to-play politics.4) Fast casual restaurant chains generally share venture funding or private equity corporate structures, a focus on food quality and freshness on the menu, healthier preparation methods, climate and environmental ambitions, digital ordering options, and project the type of images tech companies popularized. Many use increasing physical automation in food preparation and AI, hoping to capitalize on any technologies that can scale profitability. These companies are highly vertically integrated; unusually for a restaurant, DIG owns its own farm in upstate New York, “Dig Acres,” and most fast casual chains have in-house tech and marketing teams companies traditionally would have outsourced.

These chains have become the default way to eat for an audience tilting younger and wealthier, but with little questioning. Their recent sustainability pushes, including sweetgreen and Just Salad’s carbon footprint labeling of menu items, push a moral standard onto customers, asking them to expect more of their food purveyors. Across financial structure, branding, health, sustainability, packaging, digital technology, and automation, these chains have changed how cities eat in ways deeper than consumers expect, but have simultaneously oversold their benefits at every turn. Their commodity-productization of food, expanded upscale beyond the fast food of the twentieth century, has changed cities’ relationships with eating, and demands investigation.

III. Health

From baked chicken instead of fried to the premise of a salad-based restaurant, health and nutrition claims have been a primary way to lure a country suffering an obesity epidemic off fast food into higher-priced fast casual eating. Researchers have investigated, and one 2016 study measured the calorie counts of entrées across both types of restaurants, concluding “fast-casual entrées had significantly more calories per entrée (760±301 kcal) than fast-food entrées (561±268; P <0.0001).”5 I take issue with some of the exact methods these researchers use, such as their classifications of various restaurants; Culver’s and Five Guys fit into the qualifications of fast food to me, not fast casual, and the industry has leaned harder into nutrition since the study, with chains including sweetgreen not rising to prominence until later. Nonetheless, the results make it worth calling the general expectation of fast casual healthiness into question. The food on the menu is far from the only area.

IV. Packaging

Plant fiber bowls are one of the most recognizable features of many fast casual meals, serving as a reminder of their groundedness in nature across the meal’s lifecycle, from the farm-fresh ingredients to more sustainable disposal; most are marked as compostable, unlike the Styrofoam and plastic packaging fast food has historically been associated with. Though some chains like sweetgreen have in-store compost bins, friends who have worked at other chains said managers required waste all go to trash dumpsters. At DIG, haphazardly-posted printer paper signs inform customers the compostable packaging is destined for “TRASH ONLY!!!” Outside the restaurants, where a majority of fast casual meals are consumed, composting options remain inconsistent and sparse nationwide. Most chains put all online orders in paper bags but lack paper recycling in-store or accept the bags back. Though some have added silverware preferences to online ordering systems, many stores ignore them, causing further plastic waste.

In 2019, independent food newsroom The Counter had a material scientist analyze the bowls of sweetgreen, Chipotle, and DIG meals from various Manhattan locations, who discovered the fiber had linings high in PFAS.6 The chemicals “allow these bowls to hold hot, wet, and greasy food, which would quickly destroy any untreated paper product.” But these compounds never biodegrade (hence the colloquial term “forever chemicals”), building up inside our bodies and the environment—countering the restaurants chains’ marketing of the packaging as 100% compostable—and are linked to cancer and reproductive harm. Customers get a dose with each meal, restaurant workers all day, and the upstream factory workers constantly.

The life of this PFAS-ridden packaging has been bookended by urban regulation: in 2013, New York City banned single-use Styrofoam food packaging, leading to the rise of molded fiber, and in 2020, San Francisco banned food packaging intentionally manufactured with PFAS. In response to this law and The Counter’s investigation, sweetgreen and Chipotle found a new supplier of PFAS-free bowls, which they began rolling out in 20207. Sadly, The Counter ran out of funding, and never published follow-up testing, but Consumer Reports in 2022 did, discovering many packaging items from fast casual chains that claimed to phase out PFAS continued to contain dangerous levels, though decreased8. As of 2024, twelve states have followed San Francisco’s lead in restricting PFAS in food, and in February, the FDA “announced that grease-proofing substances containing PFAS materials are ‘no longer being sold by manufacturers for food contact use in the U.S. market.’”9 This is a result of a voluntary commitment from current producers, though, not a ban or formal restriction. We continue to rely on the interest and goodwill of food suppliers to use safer materials.
PFAS is not the only health issue invisibly embedded in food packaging, either. In 2024, Consumer Reports tested dozens of popular fast foods for bisphenols (the family of chemicals to which BPA belongs) and phthalates, which are separate but similarly dangerous chemicals from plastics, which have been linked to high blood pressure and reproductive issues, and discovered them in everything from the aluminum foil wrapping Chipotle’s burritos to Domino’s pizza boxes.10 The study indicts the food industry beyond fast casual chains, from Cheerios to infant food to Land O’Lakes butter wrappers, suggesting that even outside the fiber bowls, the ingredients in restaurants’ food supplies are likely similarly contaminated.

While this paper is partly a response to the lack of critical thinking consumers have brought to fast casual chains’ marketing, the PFAS/plastic chemicals scandals demonstrate that consumers are left unable to evaluate many claims. Testing for PFAS requires specialized equipment and protocols, and many consumers have never heard of the chemicals in the first place. Chipotle told The Counter their packaging complied with federal standards, and the FDA indeed had already approved dozens of PFAS for use in food. Though incidents like Chipotle’s scattered e-coli outbreaks are easy news stories with highly visible results, the packaging scandals suggest our definition of food safety for regulation is dangerously limited. The only solution to these issues is ambitious new safety regulation paired with enforcement bodies completing regular testing of our food supplies, across commercial, grocery, and restaurant verticals. The FDA has not banned many of these chemicals sooner due to the American model of new chemicals being considered safe until overwhelmingly proven dangerous, at which point they can be regulated out if the current administration’s ambition to do so trumps corporate lobbying pressure. PFAS, specifically the smaller-molecule varieties Chipotle uses, have not been in popular use long enough for conclusive studies about their long-term effects, though initial reports suggest debilitatingly-depressing outcomes.

Brands’ marketing of their food’s health and environmental impact deceived customers. The price of the speed of innovation in fast casual food, in this case its packaging, is paid not only via Apple Pay in apps and Square checkout terminals, but also by our bodies and environment forever. Even if the bisphenols and phthalates and PFAS are truly phased out by restaurants and grocery stores—and we should hope they are, soon—the ones already manufactured cannot be contained, destroyed by currently-available technology, or dissipated safely, and will live on, poisoning us at some dosage forever.

V. Sustainability

Closely intertwined with the human health effects are the environmental health effects of food. Research shows the topic is on diners’ minds: according to the National Restaurant Association’s State of the Restaurant Report 2023, 72% of adults “would more likely visit a restaurant that partakes in sustainable and environmentally friendly practices,” with even higher numbers for millennials and Gen Z adults.11 2023 research on Gen Z consumers and plant-based food looked into whether plant-based meal labeling elicits feelings of pride or guilt and how that affects their purchasing decisions.12 The findings: “Both guilt and pride significantly influenced the decision to switch eating patterns from conventional meat to plant-based protein at restaurants. And, finally, environmental concern significantly moderated the effect of emotional value on guilt.” Companies have the opportunity to push diners toward lower-carbon, plant-based meals through the composition of menu items and the design of menus themselves.

In the last two years, a few fast casual restaurants have joined a small number of retail brands in labeling the carbon footprint of menu items. Unfortunately, this feels more like a marketing exercise than a climate-focused one. One 2017 experiment investigated the consequences of carbon footprints on menus.13 After completing lifecycle carbon analyses to calculate carbon footprints and including provenance of some ingredients to the menu of a UK restaurant frequented by a similar crowd, the researchers surveyed visitors after their meals about the effect. The results were undramatic, with most diners caring more about the price, service, and food than carbon intensities. In 2023, another group of researchers investigated how carbon labels influenced consumer behavior in a UK fast casual context.14 Similar to the earlier experiment, the authors find that “next to price, food provenance and nutritional value determined consumer choice” and “carbon values on a menu was well perceived, some skepticism attached to their prospective use as a determinant of consumer choice.” The carbon label had “no immediate effect.”

Consumers are used to reading past sodium warnings at Chipotle and caffeine warnings on lemonade at Panera, or spending above their budgets on a splurge item. Carbon metrics exist in the same realm, with less comprehension from consumers, some skepticism about their accuracy, and classes of customers actively disinterested in them. Carbon footprint calculation per menu item is a process small-scale restaurants do not have the expertise, funding, or resources to undergo; they are not a solution across the food system. The resulting numbers are estimations, exacerbated by inconsistency in preparation by workers. Most customers don’t understand industry-standard units such as “kgCO2e” or how to think about specific amounts of carbon, and customers who do prioritize low-carbon eating will use their intuitive understanding of meat and dairy quantities, among other ingredients, as proxies for emissions. Restaurants carefully selecting the ingredients and dishes on the menu, and their prominence, has more effect on a restaurant’s carbon footprint than giving consumers a broad choice and leaving sustainability in their hands with carbon labels. And while Chipotle, sweetgreen, and Panera have announced versions of sustainability labeling, I have yet to encounter them in-person.

In their announcement of its 2027 carbon neutrality goal, sweetgreen highlighted “menu development” as one of the three core methods, using carbon footprint analysis as a “catalyst for introducing even more plant-powered salads and soil-friendly ingredients,” providing the example of a carbon-negative kelp in a salad.15 This past week, the company introduced steak to its menu16, long known to be one of the most water- and carbon-intensive foods to produce. Asked by social media commenters and reporters how these two actions fit together, the company pointed to regenerative agriculture, a land management technique that can reduce emissions, and carbon offsets, a disastrously unreliable scheme to pay other companies to avoid carbon emissions on one’s behalf. In other words: don’t worry about it.

The food system must undergo dramatic decarbonization for the world to meet its climate goals. For the standard consumer of fast casual chains, who is interested in sustainability on the whole, seeing legitimate climate-action firsts like carbon labeling of menu items alongside promises of carbon offsets gives the impression companies are taking bold steps. And steps like sweetgreen’s use of 100% renewable electricity do deliver climate benefits. But these steps are undermined by menu choices that prioritize diners’ existing palates over emissions, such as sweetgreen and Chipotle both heavily promoting beef to drive sales, and reliance on low-impact schemes including carbon offsets. Offsets are no substitute for reducing emissions, especially when the cost is passed onto consumers, such as in the app of Just Salad, where offsets are a per-order customer choice. Carbon labels’ presence on chain menus provides more value as brand marketing—telling consumers a story about the company—than answer consumers’ questions, and evidence shows they does not tilt customers toward lower-carbon options. These labels attempt to set new moral standards only attainable through chains’ scales and marketing power for all food we eat, yet drive little emissions change.

VI. Technology

A key differentiator of more recent fast casual chains is to identify themselves primarily as tech companies who operate platforms for food, in contrast to older brands such as Chipotle, which started as food brands that have embraced technology departments for online ordering. From its first pitches, sweetgreen billed itself as a unique tech company, running on the latest innovations (read: hype waves) in the industry, whose product was salads. In their 2018 announcement of further venture funding, they describe themselves as a “digital platform,” with around half of customer orders originating in their app or website17. “sweetgreen believes that software focused on personalization can help to meet customers [sic] growing demand for easily accessible, real food,” it writes.
The focus on tech extends beyond the customer experience, into back-of-house technology and supply chains. Nothing exemplifies this better than sweetgreen’s press release, where it declares: ”sweetgreen views blockchain as the most viable solution available to enable radical transparency at a systematic level, which in turn can create better tasting produce and insights around each ingredient from seed to restaurant.” To my knowledge, beyond marketing posts on trendy online platforms such as Medium offering few technical details, the company has never detailed precisely how blockchains were or are used. In recent years, since the crash of cryptocurrency prices and the declining cultural relevance of crypto and blockchains, this “most viable solution” has disappeared from the company’s PR, yet the salads remain fresh.

As crypto has fallen, artificial intelligence has risen, and these tech companies have seamlessly switched their narratives to match, both driving and responding to investor expectations. With a crop of word salads that made me more ill than Chipotle’s e-coli ever could have, restaurant technology executives including sweetgreen’s CTO weighed in this year to FastCasual.com on the “operational efficiency” they’re extracting from nebulous forms of AI, “to analyze customer data, preferences and behaviors to unlock highly personalized experiences for guests.”18 Unlike tech companies that sell products where customers directly interact with experiences not possible without AI such as large language models, similar to the blockchain claims, it’s challenging to ascertain from the outside whether any AI is in use by restaurants.

While a sprinkle of AI might make venture capitalists salivate, do customers want AI in their salads? One study surveyed Japanese consumers on the impact of AI and automation on perceptions of food quality, discovering “foods cooked by AI negatively influenced evaluations of three dimensions of restaurants’ quality, such as food, service, and ambience quality, decreasing the intention to visit the restaurant.”19 “This effect was higher in luxury restaurants compared to casual dining,” they note. If AI brought “operational efficiencies” significant enough that chains lowered their menu prices, I suspect buyers would gladly accept that in fast casual contexts, but the era in which AI has risen to prominence has coincided with record food price inflation.

Tech may have been infused into every industry, but online ordering and the possible presence of blockchain does not make a company a tech company. The economics of tech are defined by the divorcing of linear labor costs from revenue; no matter how much a restaurant adds computers for ordering and in supply chains, ultimately selling a salad requires human labor per bowl, whereas an online content subscription has fixed production costs and near-infinite scaling potential with negligible marginal costs. Fast casual restaurants embrace the model of tech companies with distinctive “modern” branding, scaling up with identical locations, capturing markets with low-friction ordering and delivery options that make trying and repeating meals easier for consumers, to create a scaling machine that increases revenue compared to traditional models. Veneers of technology companies are deployed by chains to set themselves apart in the market and promise greater returns to investors, but do not stand up to scrutiny.

VII. Automation

The margins enabled by further divorcing revenue from human labor are endlessly appealing to investors, especially to companies like sweetgreen that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and remain unable to turn a profit. The next answer chains have turned to is physical automation. Robot workers are appealing: they don’t require benefits like healthcare, get sick and contaminate food, ask for wage increases or unionize, and when fully operational, never take breaks or shortcuts making food. Automation further provides a solution to the problem of consistency; robots can dispense precisely the same amount of each ingredient every time, never skipping steps or forgetting ingredients, reducing customer service cases.

“Traditional” fast casual chains have dipped their toes in automation. In 2021, sweetgreen acquired Spyce, a Boston restaurant company known for its “robotic kitchen and conveyor belts [which] are able to cook and serve its warm bowls and salads without any human intervention,” allowing human workers to focus on ingredient preparation steps not yet automatable.20 Two years later, in May 2023, sweetgreen announced the launch of “sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen,” their first automated kitchen location in Naperville, IL21 Featuring only one human worker and a suite of robots, the company “expected [robotic kitchens] to cut labor costs in half while boosting throughput,” with the CEO noting the technology could “unlock efficiencies that will enable us to grow more quickly as we scale.”

Chipotle has dipped into automation as well, with a robot it named “Chippy” to produce tortilla chips, and another for scooping avocados (a finishing step the sweetgreen Infinite Kitchen model leaves for an employee to add the human touch) for guacamole. In October 2023, it announced a collaboration with robotics company Hyphen22 to automate the production of digital orders for its bowls and tortillas, with a conveyor belt running underneath its back-of-house ingredient station so human workers and employees could collaborate to complete orders together. The press release did not include a timeline or projected scale for the rollout.

These experiments have all been limited to small numbers of pilot restaurants, leading to the impression they are too logistically challenging or not profitable enough to bring to scale. One exception is Chipotle’s founder Steve Ells, who in 2024 launched Kernel, a splashy new fast casual restaurant, with its first location in Manhattan, around the promise of delicious vegan food (nearly) entirely prepared by robots. On their “friends and family” public beta day, on which all meals were free, I trekked over with my roommate for lunch. The robots are a primary attraction, and I was far from the only customer stopping to take videos of the salad-shaking robots to share online. For some reason, their burgers that day could not be produced by the machines, so one lone worker stood amongst the robotic arms piling vegan paddies and toppings on hamburger buns. Though food automation tech has a long history, with promises of food-making robots dating back a century, even in 2024, no chain has scaled the technology nationwide, or Kernel 100% across its first restaurant.
Kernel adds to our understanding of fast casual and helps chart the future of the category. As is standard practice, the company raised tens of millions in venture funding. They hired a high-end design agency to produce graphically bold and minimal branding that can be applied across the online ordering system and every restaurant, without custom design work. The restaurant eschews the phone-and-AirPods-required seating competitors feature for a pickup-only model, minimizing real estate footprint to cut costs; Eater notes each location is under a thousand square feet23. Beyond the online ordering and robotic food preparation, tech is further embedded: completed orders are loaded into numbered, locked pickup cubbies, and upon arrival, customers send “Unlock” via SMS message to have thirty seconds to retrieve their meal. This prevents order mixups or thefts, which chains including Chipotle solve with customers needing to provide their name to an employee to have their meal retrieved, and furthers the pandemic-era messaging via anti-tampering label seals that human hands have not soiled the food. At Kernel, instead of employees offering great service, the lack of human intervention in the food or interaction with customers is a selling point, through efficiency, consistency, food safety, and the expectations of lower costs.

Kernel’s menu prices, though made free for the day I went, did not strike me as lower than competing fast casual options. While the operational cost of electricity for robots is low compared to humans, they require massive upfront investment in the machines themselves, alongside a team of robotics technicians and hardware and software engineers that demand salaries dramatically higher than food service wages. As machines break down, technicians must be constantly on call, and restaurants optimized for the model lack the staffing to handle an onslaught of orders without the robots functioning. Adding menu items with new preparation techniques requires new software and sometimes physical upgrades to the robots, locking restaurants into menu choices even if the market changes around them. Approaches like Chipotle’s, where the menu changes are minor, the same core ingredients make up a majority of menu items, the primary labor involved in item preparation is dumping in pre-defined amounts, and workers can step in to complete the same tasks, minimize these risks.

Similar to self-driving cars, some versions of pizza and burger-making robots with contactless vending machines have been both present and the future “right around the corner” for decades, from automats in the 1890s to Kernel. My 93-year-old grandmother remembers reading about these automated restaurants in the 1950s, wondering if her children wouldn’t need to cook manually in the future, similar to how I grew up in the 2010s thinking self-driving car technology would mean I wouldn’t need to learn to drive. In both cases, and unlike some of the blockchain and AI promises these food brands have made, the technology does exist and function, but represents a tiny fraction of the fast casual food produced currently. Investors are pouring billions in venture capital to push automation forward, but that is no assurance. Whether it can make fast casual chains (mired in a decade of financial losses and overpromising) operate profitably and sustainably remains to be seen. If their public statements are true, and the logistics and economics pan out at scale, sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen could move margins and human labor levels for the business sufficiently to make their tech company pitch finally true. It could also be another hype wave the company has latched onto to keep its stock price above zero.

VIII. Conclusion

I decided to dig into fast casual food as I found myself constantly returning to it, feeling virtuous eating it, believing in the story, even as I found eating the food depressing. How do we have the freshest, best fast food in history, these restaurants have become the default way for some of us to eat, and the heavy questions around food feel no closer to answered? Fast casual chains, similar to the rise of direct-to-consumer retail in that industry over the same timeline, cannot break out of many of fast food’s original issues, while needing to answer weighty questions like where to find venture capital returns food businesses never previously had to. Low-paid service workers, predominantly Black in the fast casual restaurants in NYC I frequent, serve wealthier, whiter customer bases under time pressure and increasing surveillance. No matter how many press releases call the “team” part of a “community,” staff and customers rarely feel connected, and these restaurants send money out of communities into corporate structures under pressure to make venture returns (like sweetgreen, CAVA, and DIG) or line private equity pockets (like NAYA and Panera)24. Eating in their restaurants—when that’s an option, unlike at Kernel—reveals customers shoveling in but disconnected from the food, and rarely do employees or customers or executives seem genuinely happy. Automation of food labor further disconnects diners from the food’s preparation; Kernel and delivery apps chart another step in the commodity productization of fresh meals, though unlikely the last. The sanitized branding and templated restaurant designs lack charm or local distinctiveness. The goals that make up the fast casual promise—of perfectly consistent meals, on time, with fresh, local ingredients, made sustainably, packaged responsibly, from a cared-for “community”—cannot all coexist under these corporate models, as much as their marketing says otherwise. We must expand food safety regulations, and continue to investigate and hold accountable all our food suppliers, especially when they try to bury issues in narratives of being technology companies.

While meals’ nutrition varies wildly across chains and menu items, fast casual chains have helped drive a renewed focus on fresh, whole ingredients, transparency, and plant-based meals. Flagship options at chains like sweetgreen and CAVA are healthier than those at fast food chains across America in the past. Despite toxic PFAS missteps, and insufficient composting options, the fiber packaging is greener than Styrofoam and plastic wraps and boxes from prior eras, and companies have made progress in lowering PFAS levels. Their public images of being responsible, while not always proactively followed through, requires responding to some criticisms, while older fast food chains maintain their cultural relevance regardless of the horrors for workers, food quality, and the environment uncovered underneath their arches; fast casual chains’ vertical integration helpfully concentrates responsibility. While carbon labels on restaurant menus are more of a red herring than a world-changing climate tool, fast casual chains are nonetheless taking some of the most significant corporate climate action in the food industry, pushing the status quo toward clean electricity and lower emissions and waste.

Food has always been full of contradictions, and fast casual even more so. Like partaking in most parts of modern capitalism, we must hold incompatible ideas in our minds to participate. The great answers to our food system do not come packaged in a molded fiber hexagonal bowl. But while there are concerning trends and slip-ups abound, the food we eat is better, our relations with the environment are improving, there has been no better era—like most aspects of the country—for eating in America than the present.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Chayka, Kyle, “Welcome to Airspace.” The Verge, August 3, 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification. ↩

  2. Crunchbase. “Dig Inn - Funding.” Crunchbase, accessed May 10, 2024. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dig-inn/company_financials. ↩

  3. Hoffman, Alan Nathan. Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. : Conscious Capitalism by Serving “Food with Integrity.” London: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 2014. ↩

  4. Kamisher, Eliyahu, Daniela Sirtori, and Josh Eidelson. “Billionaire Flynn Says He Met Newsom Staff in Lobbying Effort Against Wage Bill.” Bloomberg, March 1, 2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-01/flynn-says-he-met-with-newsom-staff-in-group-lobbying-effort. ↩

  5. Schoffman, Danielle E, Charis R. Davidson, Sarah B. Hales, Anthony E. Crimarco, Alicia A. Dahl, and Gabrielle M. Turner-McGrievy. “The Fast-Casual Conundrum: Fast-Casual Restaurant Entrées Are Higher in Calories than Fast Food.” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 116, no. 10 (2016): 1606–1612. ↩

  6. Fassler, Joe. “The bowls at Chipotle and Sweetgreen are supposed to be compostable. They contain cancer-linked “forever chemicals.” The Counter, August 5, 2019. https://thecounter.org/pfas-forever-chemicals-sweetgreen-chipotle-compostable-biodegradable-bowls/. ↩

  7. Fassler, Joe. “Sweetgreen and Chipotle will remove “forever chemicals” from their bowls by the end of 2020.” The Counter, March 16, 2020. https://thecounter.org/sweetgreen-chipotle-pfas-free-compostable-bowls-by-2020/. ↩

  8. Loria, Kevin. “Dangerous PFAS Chemicals Are in Your Food Packaging.” Consumer Reports, March 24, 2022. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/dangerous-pfas-chemicals-are-in-your-food-packaging-a3786252074/. ↩

  9. Jones, Merrit, Bryan Keyt, John Kindschuh, and Thomas Lee. “PFAS in Food Packaging: State-by-state Regulations - March 2024 (Update).” JDSUPRA, March 11, 2024. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/pfas-in-food-packaging-state-by-state-7701853/. ↩

  10. Friedman, Lauren F. “The Plastic Chemicals Hiding in Your Food.” Consumer Reports, February 8, 2024. https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-contaminants/the-plastic-chemicals-hiding-in-your-food-a7358224781 ↩

  11. Littman, Julie. “Sweetgreen highlights low-carbon menu items with latest collection.” Restaurant Dive, April 18, 2023. https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/sweetgreen-low-carbon-collection-reduced-greenhouse-gases/647877/. ↩

  12. Mahasuweerachai, Patcharaporn, Chompoonut Suttikun, and William Hamilton Bicksler. “From Pride to Plate: How Feelings of Pride and Guilt Lead Gen Z to Plant-Based Consumption at Restaurants.” Young consumers 24, no. 6 (2023): 831–848. ↩

  13. Filimonau, Viachaslau, Christian Lemmer, David Marshall, and Gisel Bejjani. “‘Nudging’ as an Architect of More Responsible Consumer Choice in Food Service Provision: The Role of Restaurant Menu Design.” Journal of cleaner production 144 (2017): 161–170. ↩

  14. Casati, Mirta, Claudio Soregaroli, Jens Rommel, Gloria Luzzani, and Stefanella Stranieri. “Please Keep Ordering! A Natural Field Experiment Assessing a Carbon Label Introduction.” Food policy 120 (2023): 102523-. ↩

  15. sweetgreen. “sweetgreen Pledges to Be Carbon Neutral by 2027.” Business Wire, February 24, 2021. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210224005100/en/sweetgreen-Pledges-to-Be-Carbon-Neutral-by-2027 ↩

  16. St. John, Alexa. “Salad chain says a cleaner farming method will offset adding steak to its menu. What is it?” Associated Press, May 9, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/sweetgreen-carbon-neutrality-beef-emissions-e7c1e1de14d0bdea3388a771d153f1b2. ↩

  17. Sweetgreen. “Sweetgreen Announces its Second Act with $200 Million in Financing Led By Fidelity Investments.” Business Wire, November 13, 2018. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181113006007/en/Sweetgreen-Announces-Act-200-Million-Financing-Led. ↩

  18. Cansler, Cherryh. “Why AI is 2024's top restaurant tech trend.” FastCasual.com, January 31, 2024. https://www.fastcasual.com/articles/why-ai-is-2024s-top-restaurant-tech-trend/. ↩

  19. Nozawa, Chisato, Taku Togawa, Carlos Velasco, and Kosuke Motoki. “Consumer Responses to the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Luxury and Non-Luxury Restaurants.” Food quality and preference 96 (2022): 104436-. ↩

  20. Lucas, Amelia. “Salad chain Sweetgreen bets on automation by acquiring Spyce and its robotic kitchen tech.” CNBC, August 24, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/salad-chain-sweetgreen-acquires-spyce-and-its-robotic-kitchen-tech.html. ↩

  21. Jennings, Lisa. “Sweetgreen's robotic Infinite Kitchen is finally open.” Restaurant Business, May 10, 2023. https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/sweetgreens-robotic-infinite-kitchen-finally-open. ↩

  22. Chipotle. “Chipotle Teams Up with Hyphen to Begin Testing New Digital Makeline.” Chipotle Newsroom, October 3, 2023. https://newsroom.chipotle.com/2023-10-03-CHIPOTLE-TEAMS-UP-WITH-HYPHEN-TO-BEGIN-TESTING-NEW-DIGITAL-MAKELINE. ↩

  23. McCart, Melissa. “NYC Will Soon Be Home to 15 Robot-Run Vegetarian Restaurants From Chipotle’s Founder.” Eater, November 14, 2023. https://ny.eater.com/2023/11/14/23960928/kernel-restaurant-robots-nyc-opening-steve-ells. ↩

  24. Bernstein, Shai, and Albert Sheen. “The Operational Consequences of Private Equity Buyouts: Evidence from the Restaurant Industry.” The Review of Financial Studies 29, no. 9 (2016): 2387-2418. ↩