Sweetgreen, Inc. (SG) Business

ITEM 1. BUSINESS

General

Sweetgreen, Inc., a Delaware corporation (together with its subsidiaries, “Sweetgreen,” “we,”, “us,” or the “Company”) is a mission-driven, next generation restaurant and lifestyle brand that serves healthy food at scale. Our bold vision is to be as ubiquitous as traditional fast food, but with the transparency and quality that consumers increasingly expect. As of December 28, 2025, we owned and operated 281 restaurants in 24 states and Washington, D.C.

Our Menu Offerings

We have designed our menu to be delicious, customizable, and convenient to empower our customers to make healthier choices for both lunch and dinner. We are constantly seeking ways to enhance our menu, all while honoring our food ethos.

Core Menu

Our core menu consists of a curated set of signature items offered year-round across all locations, designed to deliver consistent quality and reflect our food philosophy, supported by a disciplined and scalable supply chain. Guests may also create a custom salad, bowl, or plate from a broad assortment of ingredients and signature dressings, enabling meaningful customization within a standardized ingredient system.

We supplement our core offerings with seasonal and limited-time items that allow us to introduce new flavors and test innovation while maintaining operational consistency. Through our owned digital channels, we also offer exclusive menu items and curated collections that support discovery, personalization, and guest engagement.

Our Strategy

Sweetgreen's mission is to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food. Over the past year, our leadership team has evaluated the business and refined our strategic priorities to strengthen execution, enhance the guest experience, and build a more durable financial model. We refer to this framework as the Sweet Growth Transformation Plan which is centered on five strategic priorities:

1.Operational Excellence

Drive consistent execution across our restaurants to deliver great food, smooth operations, and reliable guest experiences.

2.Food Quality + Menu Innovation

Differentiate through high-quality ingredients and scratch cooking while continuing to evolve the menu in ways that resonate with guests.

3.Personalized Experience

Increase customer frequency and average check through targeted digital engagement, personalized messaging, and relevant offers.

4.Brand Relevance

Attract new guests by amplifying what makes Sweetgreen distinctive, relevant, and culturally compelling.

5.Disciplined Profitable Investment

Deliver sustainable growth by prioritizing returns, maintaining cost discipline, and allocating capital with rigor.

6

Table of Contents

Our Supply Chain

We have built a differentiated, end-to-end supply chain that culminates in delicious, high-quality food for our customers. Our sourcing and operating standards are guided by the Sweetgreen Way, which is our internal ethos based upon our commitment to ingredient quality, responsible sourcing, and in-house preparation.

We work with a broad network of domestic food partners, including farmers, manufacturers, and distributors. We prioritize ingredients that meet our standards and align with our food philosophy, and we maintain direct relationships with many of our growers and producers. Our supply chain is organized into regional distribution networks, managed in consultation with our lead logistics provider, which promotes consistency, scalability, and operational reliability. As we enter new markets, we seek to leverage existing relationships while maintaining these standards.

Quality Control and Food Safety

At Sweetgreen, we refer to food safety as our “license to operate,” and that starts with our food supply. We require our suppliers to provide appropriate food safety certifications as part of the onboarding process. After onboarding, we work with our suppliers to ensure they adhere to our product quality specifications. We also follow a Comprehensive Food Safety Plan (“CFSP”), which includes our Approved Supplier Program, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points Program, guidelines for restaurant design, construction and maintenance, new product commercialization processes, and crisis management. As part of our CFSP, we have a set of “sweet clean standards” for our restaurants, which are guides for operators to ensure our approach to food safety and cleanliness is consistent and scalable across our restaurant fleet. Food safety is an integral element of our field leadership bonus plan; our operators do not receive certain bonuses unless they meet our food safety thresholds for the relevant period. On top of our CFSP sits a system of verification, audits, and monitoring to ensure our food safety is not compromised.

Our Real Estate

We opened 35 and 25 Net New Restaurants in fiscal years 2025 and 2024, respectively, bringing our total count as of December 28, 2025 to 281 restaurants in 24 states and Washington, D.C. We expect to open fewer new restaurants in 2026 than we did in 2025.

We utilize a rigorous, data-driven real estate selection process to identify new restaurant sites with both high anticipated foot traffic and proximity to workplaces and residences that support our multi-channel approach.

We continue to test new restaurant design concepts to bring Sweetgreen into a wider variety of trade areas and markets, including but not limited to a mobile pickup lane for digital orders. We have thoughtfully designed our restaurants to both reflect the culture and feel of our local communities and to support our multiple digital channels.

Our People

We believe our team members are central to delivering the Sweetgreen experience and executing our long-term strategy. Our approach to human capital management focuses on attracting, developing, and retaining talent, while fostering a culture that supports operational excellence, leadership development, and consistent guest experiences.

Workforce Overview

As of December 28, 2025, we had a total of 6,486 employees, 248 of whom worked at our Sweetgreen Support Center and 6,238 of whom worked in our restaurants.

7

Table of Contents

Total Rewards

We offer competitive wages and a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the financial, physical, and mental well-being of our employees. Our benefits for eligible employees include medical, dental, and vision insurance, paid time off, paid parental leave, and equity incentives for our Head Coaches (our restaurant general managers). We regularly review our compensation and benefits programs to remain competitive within the industry.

In 2025, Forbes included Sweetgreen in their list of America’s Best Large Employers and TIME recognized Sweetgreen as one of America’s Best Midsized Companies, each for the second consecutive year.

Restaurant Team Structure and Career Development

We believe we have designed a structured and transparent career pathway that emphasizes internal advancement and leadership development. We believe developing leaders from within strengthens operational consistency and reinforces our culture. Team members may progress along a defined path to restaurant leadership roles, including Head Coach, in as few as three years.

In 2025, we introduced additional leadership roles and development programs intended to support food quality, people leadership, and internal mobility. During fiscal year 2025, 52% of open restaurant leadership roles were filled with promotions of existing employees.

Talent Acquisition and Retention

Our staffing strategy prioritizes internal promotion while supporting growth through scalable and efficient hiring practices. We utilize digital tools to streamline recruiting and scheduling, enabling Head Coaches to focus on restaurant operations and the guest experience. We also provide targeted staffing support for new restaurant openings and locations with elevated staffing needs.

We seek to attract and retain employees who align with our purpose and values by offering competitive compensation, development opportunities, and a supportive work environment.

Culture and Employee Engagement

Our approach to team and culture is guided by our core value of “Win, Win, Win,” reflecting our belief that investing in the team member experience benefits our employees, our guests, and our business. We aim to maintain a positive, inclusive, and engaging workplace where employees feel supported and motivated to deliver exceptional guest experiences.

We periodically seek feedback from employees through confidential engagement surveys and use these insights to inform actions and improvements across our restaurants and Sweetgreen Support Center.

Our Impact

Our mission to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food extends to positively impacting the lives of our customers, team members, and citizens of the communities we serve. Below are select examples of the ways we give back to our local communities.

•Donating Healthy Meals: During each new restaurant opening, we distribute fresh Sweetgreen meals to local charities, including food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens, to help alleviate food insecurity in the community. For every meal purchase on opening day, we donate a meal to a local nonprofit impact partner to distribute to someone in need. In 2025, we donated approximately 100,000 meals to people experiencing food insecurity through our new restaurant opening program.

•Wildfire Relief: In January 2025, we mobilized our team in response to the devastating wildfires affecting our hometown of Los Angeles. We donated more than 5,000 nutrient-dense Sweetgreen meals over three weeks to fuel the relief effort and support first responders fighting the Palisades

8

Table of Contents

and Eaton Fires. We also handled transportation logistics for bulk donations of fresh produce from our supply chain and shelf-stable snacks and beverages from brand partners.

Competition

We face significant competition from restaurants in the fast-casual dining and traditional fast-food segments of the restaurant industry. These segments compete on factors such as taste, price, food quality and presentation, service, location, and restaurant condition. Our competitors include locally owned restaurants and regional and national chains that offer dine-in, carry-out, delivery, and catering services. Many of our competitors have operated longer and have a more established market presence with substantially greater financial, marketing, personnel, and other resources than we do, and therefore may be better positioned to succeed in the highly competitive restaurant industry. Among our competitors are national and regional fast-casual restaurant chains, restaurants emphasizing clean, real ingredients and health-conscious dining, and traditional quick-service restaurants.

As we continue to expand into new markets and further develop our digital channels, we also face growing competition from both new entrants and existing restaurants that have increased their digital presence through delivery and take-out platforms. We compete with delivery kitchens, food aggregators, and third-party delivery marketplaces such as DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats, as well as grocery stores that focus on freshly prepared or organic foods. The delivery marketplaces, including those we partner with, retain customer data for Sweetgreen orders and may use that information to promote other restaurants. Competition from food aggregators and food delivery marketplaces has also increased in recent years, particularly with the significant increase in restaurants that previously focused on dine-in service and have increased their reliance on take-out or delivery, and competition is expected to continue to increase. Any of these competitors may have, among other things, greater operational or financial resources, lower operating costs, better locations, better facilities, better management, better digital technology, increased automation and production efficiency, more effective marketing, and more efficient operations. Additionally, we face the risk that new or existing competitors will copy, and potentially improve upon, our business model, menu options, technology, presentation, or ambience, among other things.

Trademarks and Other Intellectual Property

We protect our intellectual property primarily through a combination of trademarks, domain names, copyrights, and trade secrets. Since our inception, we have undertaken to strategically and proactively develop our trademark portfolio by registering our trademarks and service marks in the United States and various strategic foreign jurisdictions. Domestically, we registered our core marks (“Sweetgreen,” “SG,” and the Sweetgreen logo) and certain other marks, such as “SG Outpost,” “Sweetgreen Outpost,” and “SweetPass.” Internationally, we currently have registered our core “Sweetgreen” mark, along with selected other marks, in foreign jurisdictions including Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Most of our marks are registered in multiple international trademark classes, including for restaurant services and related goods and services. We are currently pursuing additional trademark and trade dress registrations in the United States and will continue to pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe they would be beneficial and cost-effective. We have obtained a registration of the Sweetgreen.com domain name as well.

We have procedures in place to monitor for potential infringement of our most important intellectual property, and it is our policy to take appropriate action to enforce our intellectual property rights, taking into account the strength of our claim, likelihood of success, cost, and overall business priorities.

Government Regulation

We are subject to various federal, state, and local regulations, including those relating to building and zoning requirements, public health and safety, and the preparation and sale of food. The development and operation of restaurants depends to a significant extent on the selection and acquisition of suitable sites, which are subject to zoning, land use, environmental, traffic, and other regulations and requirements. Our restaurants are also subject to state and local licensing and regulation by health, sanitation, food and occupational safety, and other agencies. We may experience material difficulties or failures in obtaining the necessary licenses, approvals or permits for our restaurants, which could delay planned restaurant openings or affect the operations at our

9

Table of Contents

existing restaurants. In addition, stringent and varied requirements of local regulators with respect to zoning, land use, and environmental factors could delay or prevent development of new restaurants in particular locations.

Our operations are subject to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Act, which governs worker health and safety, the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, which governs such matters as minimum wages and overtime, and a variety of similar federal, state, and local laws (such as fair work week laws, immigration laws, laws governing the employment of minors, various wage & hour laws, termination and discharge laws, and state occupational safety regulations) that govern these and other employment law matters. We may also be subject to lawsuits or investigations from our current or former employees, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, or others alleging violations of federal and state laws regarding workplace and employment matters, discrimination and similar matters, and we are and have been a party to a number of such matters. These lawsuits and investigations often require significant resources from our senior management and can result in material fines, penalties, and/or settlements, some or all of which may not be covered by insurance, as well as significant remediation efforts that may be costly and time consuming, and which we may not implement effectively.

We are also subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act (the “ADA”) and similar state laws that give civil rights protections to individuals with disabilities in the context of employment, public accommodations and other areas, including our restaurants, website, and smartphone applications. We are currently a party to lawsuits in which it is alleged that we were not ADA compliant, and in the past, we have settled various lawsuits related to our alleged ADA non-compliance, which resulted in accommodations to our website, smartphone applications, and physical restaurant locations.

Seasonality

Our revenue fluctuates as a result of seasonal factors and weather conditions. Historically, our revenue has been lower in the first and fourth fiscal quarters of the year due, in part, to the holiday season and inclement weather (generally the winter months, though inclement weather conditions may occur in certain markets at any time of the year). In addition, a core part of our menu, salads, has proven to be more popular among consumers in the warmer months. In recent years, the prevalence of hybrid and remote work arrangements have made seasonality in our business less predictable, and we have experienced negative revenue impacts around national holidays. Additionally, we have seen extreme weather conditions and natural disasters cause disruptions to our operations from time to time, including the wildfires in Los Angeles, which impacted our fiscal year 2025 results.

Data Privacy and Security

In the ordinary course of our business, we may process personal or other sensitive, proprietary, and confidential information. Accordingly, we are or may become subject to numerous data privacy and security obligations, including federal, state, local, and foreign laws, regulations, guidance, and industry standards related to data privacy and security. Such obligations may include, without limitation, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, the California Consumer (“CCPA”), and consumer health data privacy laws such as Washington state’s My Health My Data Act, and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (“PCI DSS”). Numerous other states within the United States have enacted or proposed data privacy and security laws. For example, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and other states have passed comprehensive data privacy and security laws. Additionally, we are, or may become, subject to various U.S. federal and state consumer protection laws which require us to publish statements that accurately and fairly describe how we handle personal information and choices individuals may have about the way we handle their personal information.

The CCPA and other regulatory frameworks described above are examples of the increasingly stringent and evolving regulatory frameworks related to personal information processing that may increase our compliance obligations and exposure for any noncompliance. For example, the CCPA imposes obligations on covered businesses to provide specific disclosures related to a business’s collection, use, and disclosure of personal information and to respond to certain requests from California residents related to their personal information (for example, requests to know of the business’s personal information processing activities, to delete the individual’s

10

Table of Contents

personal data, and to opt out of certain personal information disclosures). The CCPA also provides for civil penalties and a private right of action for data breaches which may include an award of statutory damages.

Additionally, although we do not currently have international operations that would subject us to foreign data privacy and security laws (including but not limited to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation), such laws impose significant and complex compliance obligations on entities that are subject to them.

See the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Our Information Technology and Intellectual Property” for additional information about the laws and regulations to which we may become subject and about the risks to our business associated with such laws and regulations.

Corporate Information

We were founded in November 2006 and incorporated in October 2009 in Delaware. Our principal executive offices, which we refer to as our Sweetgreen Support Center, are located at 3102 36th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90018, and our telephone number is (323) 990-7040. Our website address is www.sweetgreen.com. Our Class A common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SG”.

Available Information

Sweetgreen’s Annual Report on Form 10-K reports, along with all other reports and amendments filed with or furnished to the SEC, are publicly available free of charge on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.sweetgreen.com or at www.sec.gov as soon as reasonably practicable after these materials are filed with or furnished to the SEC. We also use our website and official social media channels, including our channels on platforms such as LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, as tools to disclose important information about the company and to comply with our disclosure obligations under Regulation Fair Disclosure. Our corporate governance guidelines, code of business conduct and ethics and our board of directors (“Board”) committee charters are also posted on the Investor Relations section of the Sweetgreen website. The information on our website (or any webpages referenced in this Annual Report on Form 10-K) is not part of this or any other report Sweetgreen files with, or furnishes to, the SEC.