John Karangis leaves Shake Shack for Sweetgreen
After eight years building Shake Shack's menu, the chef becomes Sweetgreen's executive chef and vice president of culinary, tasked with reviving sales.
John Karangis has left Shake Shack after eight years to become executive chef and vice president of culinary at Sweetgreen, the fast-casual salad chain announced on Thursday.
Karangis joined Shake Shack in 2018 as its first executive chef and VP of culinary innovation, a role created to professionalise the burger chain's menu development. Before that he spent seven years as executive chef for Union Square Events, the catering arm of Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group, and worked earlier at Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern.
Karangis inherits Sweetgreen's stalled menu push
A kitchen hire is a bet on taste that scales, not just taste that impresses once.
At Sweetgreen, he replaces Chad Brauze, who left in June after three years in the same post. The 285-unit chain has leaned on menu innovation to reverse flagging same-store sales, rolling out a line of wraps in May, seasonal bowls and collaborations with cookbook author Molly Baz and retailer Fishwife. The wraps briefly lifted sales before a national cyclospora outbreak tied to the chain hit salad demand across the board this year.
Karangis will lead culinary strategy, working with marketing, operations and the supply chain team on new ingredients and dishes, Sweetgreen said. "Sweetgreen has built an exceptional brand around fresh, high-quality food," Karangis said of the move. CEO and co-founder Jonathan Neman called him someone who "understands how to take a great idea from the kitchen and make it something customers can enjoy every day."
Shake Shack has not named a successor for the role Karangis leaves behind. He had overseen the chain's menu as it expanded past 500 locations globally, working alongside recipes built around founder Danny Meyer's original burger concept.
A chain still chasing its post-pandemic growth
Sweetgreen went public in 2021 on the promise that salads could scale like burgers. Four years on, the company is still testing what that looks like in practice, cycling through culinary leadership roughly every three years while rivals and struggling healthy-food chains test their own paths to growth. Karangis arrives with a résumé built on both fine-dining catering and chain-scale menu engineering, the exact combination Sweetgreen's board is betting can do both at once.
