Salad and Go Lives Up to Its Name as Chapter 11 Closes All 70 Remaining Stores (Blame Taco Bell)

Salad and Go is officially living up to its name… just not in the way the founders probably wanted when they came up with the idea.

The drive-thru salad chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Tuesday and will permanently close its roughly 70 remaining restaurants in Arizona and Nevada on Wednesday.

Turns out, Salad and Go’s rapid expansion eventually caught up with the company. Many of its newer restaurants struggled to attract enough customers to justify their growing operating costs.

The cyclospora outbreak made an already difficult situation worse. Salad and Go wasn’t connected to the illnesses, but the public’s growing concern about fresh lettuce still hurt its business.

“A Cyclospora outbreak in July, in which Salad and Go was not implicated, weakened confidence across the industry and compounded these challenges,” the company said.

The waterborne parasite has sickened at least 10,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Michigan health officials said Monday that two people have died.

Salad and Go was far from the only restaurant chain to feel the effects.

Traffic at Taco Bell dropped sharply after the Food and Drug Administration linked iceberg lettuce served at some of its restaurants to the outbreak. The chain removed the affected supply, and parent company Yum Brands has said sales are already recovering.

The concern also reached restaurants that had no connection to the outbreak. Chipotle reported weaker sales as customers became more cautious about eating fresh lettuce.

But the outbreak wasn’t the reason Salad and Go failed. It simply arrived when the company was already running out of options.

Founded in 2013, Salad and Go built its business around small drive-thru restaurants serving salads, wraps and breakfast items. Central commissary kitchens prepared the ingredients before shipping them to individual locations.

That setup was supposed to keep costs down and help Salad and Go sell healthy food at prices closer to traditional fast food. It also gave the company a model it believed could compete with Sweetgreen.

Private-equity firm Volt Investment took a stake in Salad and Go before buying out founders Tony and Roushan Christofellis in 2021.

Charlie Morrison, who previously ran Wingstop and now leads Jersey Mike’s, was brought in to oversee the expansion. Under his leadership, Salad and Go more than doubled its store count.

The problem was that many of those new restaurants never attracted enough customers.

Morrison left in late 2024 following reported disagreements with the board. Former Krispy Kreme CEO Mike Tattersfield took over the following year and began closing underperforming locations in Texas and Oklahoma.

Those closures left Salad and Go with around 70 restaurants in Arizona and Nevada. By then, the company had gone from trying to become the next major fast-food chain to fighting to keep its remaining locations open.

Now, that fight is over.

“This is a painful day for everyone who built, worked for and loved Salad and Go,” Tattersfield said.

Salad and Go listed both its assets and liabilities between $500 million and $1 billion in Tuesday’s bankruptcy filing.

In the end, the company expanded before it had proven that enough people wanted what it was selling. When the new restaurants struggled, Salad and Go was left paying for a larger operation without the sales needed to support it. Management tried to pull back, but the damage had already been done.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.