How Sweetgreen Can Rid Itself of the Sour Taste It Left in People's Mouths

CEO Jonathan Neman's LinkedIn post about salads and Covid led to social media outrage

#SMW is right around the corner. Join us April 9-11 in NYC to get up to speed on all the latest strategies, technologies and trends you need to be following. Register now.

Welcome to another episode of Survivor: Brand, where brands and their C-suites out-maneuver themselves after inserting their feet into their mouths.

In this week’s episode, Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman suggested in an Aug. 30 LinkedIn post that more than three in four Covid-19 hospitalizations are due to people being overweight or obese. As you can probably imagine, the response toward Sweetgreen has been anything but sweet. The CEO has been accused of fatphobia, and customers are sharing their displeasure on social media, saying the CEO and brand are out of touch and that they will no longer frequent the establishments.


Screenshot of Sweetgreen CEO original LinkedIn post.
Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman suggested in an Aug. 30 LinkedIn post that more than three in four Covid-19 hospitalizations are due to people being overweight or obese.

The worst part of this modern-day reality show: It didn’t need any viewership, and it could have been avoided altogether.

Don’t talk with your mouth—or ICU wards—full

Fellow marketing, branding and public relations counselors will have their own rationale for how Sweetgreen could navigate this crisis. In fact, we should all be having a conversation with our C-suite leaders about where to draw the line of ignorance and when not to say anything at all, regardless of the intention.

As with any adversity, I try to look at situations like these through an objective lens. Perhaps Neman’s thought process follows a similar argument made by others in the food and grocery sectors that eating healthy is the solution for the pandemic, though there’s no scientific proof that supports such claims.

The real issue here is walking the line between sheer lack of awareness around something as vast as a global pandemic and ignorance in promoting salads as a solution.

Last I checked, pharmaceutical companies haven’t invested in lettuce farms.

Headlines and airwaves are permeated with news of ICU units filling up faster and with more frequency as a result of the Delta variant. If salad was a viable answer for addressing the sickness and deaths that we’re seeing in hospitals, then wouldn’t our nation’s health care experts have done something about it by now? Last I checked, pharmaceutical companies haven’t invested in lettuce farms.

A real solution for Sweetgreen

To be clear, there are several ways that Sweetgreen can navigate its brand and leadership around this story. Much of it will show the company as a good corporate citizen where its focus on the environment and sustainability will yield a great deal of positive awareness. (I’ll leave that discussion to other people.)

I am hoping we look at this incident through the same objective lens previously noted. Now, more than ever, brands and leaders need some tough love when they mess up. Sweetgreen’s customers have several options where they can get food, but they have stronger attitudes and perceptions. Those are harder to measure, but shaping those intangibles can have a more profound impact on any short-term revenue loss.

How can Neman tap into that and recognize the gravity of his words? I hope his marketing team is counseling him to support hospitals and health centers in his community and specifically taking a look at the ICU units where Covid is front and center. If he is allowed to travel, he could visit regions where he may not have as much familiarity—perhaps in rural communities where Sweetgreen’s produce may be grown—and where vaccination rates are typically lower.

I hope he talks to the medical professionals and families of patients who are fighting Covid. More importantly, I hope he listens to them. Perhaps then he will issue a LinkedIn post that features an apology, a wake-up call and food for thought.

It’s a heck of a lot better than another episode of Survivor: Brand.