Salad and Go - Beyond the Plate Hero

By Marilyn Noble | May 14, 2020

At Salad and Go, Compassion is a Corporate Value

When Roushan Christofellis and her husband Tony founded Salad and Go in 2013, they had a mission in mind: to bring healthy, fresh food to eaters in a fast food format at a reasonable price. The concept was simple. They concentrated on one thing—salads—made with the best ingredients they could find. To keep the price point low, they planned their stores with a tiny footprint and offered drive-through and walk-up service only. The first, in Gilbert, Arizona, was a little over 600 square feet.

Now, salads are a generous and creative 48-ounce serving of greens, vegetables, fruit, grains, and healthy fats, priced under six dollars with either chicken or tofu. Steak and shrimp are available for a slight upcharge. Almost everything is organic and made to order phenomenally quickly, even for fast food. It’s not unusual to see dozens of cars at the drive-through window, but the line almost never stops moving, and it only takes a few minutes for everyone to get through and on their ways, salads in hand.

The chain has spread throughout the Phoenix metro area with more than twenty locations. Brandi Hale is the head of people and culture at Salad and Go and the company’s self-proclaimed biggest cheerleader. “It really is a special place,” she says. “It's a company that just gets it. They get that doing good is just the right thing to do. They have lots of integrity.”

When the order came to shut down non-essential businesses in Arizona, including restaurants, Salad and Go with its take-out only model was uniquely positioned to not only survive, but to thrive. And because the company was doing well, it was imperative to share that success with the local community.

Hale says that over a five week period in March and April, the company donated around 250,000 dollars’ worth of salads and breakfast burritos to healthcare workers, first responders, food bank staffers, and others in the community working in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. She says that when those workers came through the drive-through for their free food, many also wanted to donate to non-profits doing relief work, so the company has been collecting funds both at the window and via their app and website for St. Mary’s Food Bank and UMOM New Day Center, a non-profit offering a crisis shelter, housing and support services for people experiencing homelessness.

As the relationship with the non-profits began to evolve, Hale says the company looked at other ways to help. By engaging with customers and social media followers, they developed a list of local non-profits in need of fresh food and set up a program to donate about 5,000 salads a week to various organizations who get them into the hands of people in need. The only stipulation is that the organizations have to be able to pick up the ingredients from the Salad and Go distribution center and assemble the salads themselves, but even that isn’t an obstacle. Waste Not, a local non-profit that rescues excess restaurant food and delivers it to organizations feeding hungry people, has been helping with deliveries, and a Salad and Go team visits the receivers to teach them how to assemble salads quickly and with no waste, and so that they meet the company’s strict standards.

“We don't care who you are, if you're receiving a Salad and Go salad, we want it to be our same quality, healthy and delicious product,” says Hale. “We want everybody to have the same experience.”

The week we spoke, Hale told me they had donated 450 salads to UMOM and 100 to Chicanos por la Causa on Monday, 1,500 to St. Vincent de Paul on Tuesday, 1,500 to Salvation Army on Wednesday and 1,500 to Midwest Food Bank on Thursday. She says the company has no plans to scale back or stop the program, virus or no, and she’s still hearing from other organizations that want to provide fresh salads to their constituencies.

Why is Salad and Go doing this? “From the leadership all the way through our support team, we talk about compassion as one of our core values as a company,” says Hale. “We’re really excited that now we're being compassionate to our community. And that is so key to what this company is built on.

“This company is very special,” she adds. “It just is.”

Who do you want to recognize? You can nominate additional local heroes in our Beyond the Plate collaboration with Niman Ranch at bit.ly/2SFoIrA For each submission, Niman Ranch will donate a serving of all-natural meat to help with COVID-19 relief.