Salad Faster, Easier With New Changes at Saladworks

Saladworks has been around some 30 years, reports note, and this green-heavy restaurant chain has been delivering value ever since. With all the changes in the restaurant field, however—particularly when it comes to quick service restaurants (QSRs)—Saladworks would have to change as well in order to succeed. Thankfully, the company seems up to the challenge thanks not only to recently-opened new locations, but also to some powerful new tech and a new boss to oversee it all.

Saladworks brought in Paul Tripodes, who previously handled Moe’s Southwest Grill among others, to lead an effort which will feature not only new stores in Atlanta and Dallas / Fort Worth, but also a new summer menu featuring not only new salads. This new effort will also include a new beverage choice, the agua fresca. Agua fresca features fruits and vegetables as a base backed up by agave sweetener.

This is a great start, but the technological side of this is what we’re interested in, and it’s a doozy. Not only is there a new cloud-based point-of-sales system in play, but also online ordering options—which will likely have a mobile basis as well—a system-wide intranet, internet hardware, and the Punchh loyalty program incorporated in the mobile app.

It’s clear that Saladworks is keeping up with some of the new advances in QSR operations, but it’s still not quite as good as it could be. The company does have an app, currently found on the Apple and Android app stores, that boasts the aforementioned rewards program, along with special offers and news, but why there isn’t more tie-in with the planned expansion isn’t immediately clear. There’s a lot of room to use the mobile app as an ordering and payment platform; for QSRs, this is becoming increasingly required as QSR operations discover the huge boost to throughput represented by taking ordering and payment processes largely away from the counter.

Still, Saladworks is clearly making progress here. While a salad can be built in minutes, Rome was not built in a day, and hopefully Paul Tripodes has some future expansion plans to bring mobile payments and mobile ordering systems into play to speed up the salad slinging at Saladworks.