Nicolas Jammet and two of his Georgetown University classmates cooked up the idea for Georgetown frozen yogurt and salad joint Sweetgreen when they were still undergraduates. Now, with business booming, the trio is opening a second location in Dupont Circle and possibly a third one elsewhere in the city later this year.
How did you come up with the idea for Sweetgreen?
Basically, going to Georgetown for four years, we knew what the market was like. I’m from New York and my two partners are from L.A. — we kind of knew there were these new quick-service options opening up, but we didn’t see anything like that in D.C. We were seniors a year and a half ago and started developing it then. We were doing construction in the middle of finals and stuff, and we finally opened that August.
Did you work on the idea in a business class?
Two of us were finance majors and one a business major. All three of us took a class called entrepreneurship at Georgetown. We didn’t do the business plan for Sweetgreen for the class because you weren’t allowed to do bars or restaurants, but we pulled everything we learned from that class and put it to use the next semester.
You guys were the first to bring the Pinkberry concept of natural frozen yogurt to D.C. — was Pinkberry your inspiration?
Our yogurt is different from Pinkberry’s. We spent a lot of time in test kitchens developing our own recipes — how we wanted the texture to be, how sweet we wanted it to be. Pinkberry was the first to bring it back to the forefront and make it trendy again, but frozen yogurt back in the day — this is how it started out. I think the natural frozen yogurt flavor kind of got lost when places like TCBY started opening up.
