Ramsess Salazar was 20 when he left Caracas, Venezuela, alone in 1999. When he arrived in Minnesota, he missed the family dinners he grew up with, so he started cooking for his friends. That eventually turned into culinary school, which led to a stint in fine dining, and then a job offer from Sweetgreen in 2018 that sent him to Boston.
Eight years later, he runs the chain’s bustling Fulton Market store in Chicago and trains the managers who will run its next restaurants. Last month, he got a call from Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman explaining that his work is coming with a new compensation package.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Salazar told Fortune. What surprised him more was that the company’s leaders called him personally: “Which CEO really does that?”
Starting in the first quarter of 2027, Sweetgreen’s top managers can earn more than $200,000 a year in salary, in addition to a revenue-sharing bonus and stock. The top tier is open to “Head Coaches,” Sweetgreen’s name for general managers, who have at least three years with the company and lead its busiest stores. COO Jason Cochran estimated that 10% to 12% of head coaches meet all the criteria. Managers chosen for its restaurateur program, like Salazar, also get $10,000 for every employee they develop into a head coach, with no cap.
Ramsess Salazar outside his Chicago location.Sweetgreen“The idea is now you’re a talent factory,” Neman told Fortune. “You’ve demonstrated you’re good at your job. Now can you train someone else? Future leaders? Train them up, and we’ll pay you $10,000 every single time you do it.”
‘100 grand used to be a big number‘
Neman, who cofounded Sweetgreen along with Nic Jammet 2007, said the plan grew out of the hundreds of store visits he’s made so far. He spends about half his time in restaurants, and the difference between a good one and a bad one “always comes down to a great leader.”
“A hundred grand used to be a big number, but it really isn’t as much anymore in today’s world,” he said. “We wanted the best to be able to make north of $200,000, to be really disruptive to the marketplace.”
The plan is also personal. Neman’s parents immigrated in 1979 “to start a new life and had to start all over,” he said.
“I truly believe in the American dream. I believe that this is the land of opportunity where you can work hard and get far,” he said, adding he thinks that dream is “under attack” among younger people, and “I understand why.” Working in food, however, poses a way to achieve the American dream.
“I think the restaurant industry is one of these amazing engines of opportunity,” he said. “It’s one of those places where anyone can come and get a job without really much education or skills. And if you work hard, for us, within like two to three years, we have team members that can grow into store managers, or head coaches.”
A few dozen managers will immediately qualify for the top pay, he said, and “a lot of people are going to get like 30[%], 40[%], 50% raises.” When he announced it to about 300 managers on a video call, there were “tears on pretty much every call.” He called it “the proudest moment in my 19 years at Sweetgreen.”
He’d wanted to do it years earlier, he said, but the company was “scared” of what paying so much would do to its finances. Sweetgreen is still losing money. Comparable-store sales fell 6.4% in the third quarter, and the company expects the new pay plan to trim its restaurant margins next year. But Neman said it didn’t matter and referenced Costco, Trader Joe’s, In-N-Out, and Chick-fil-A as companies that pay workers well and get better service in return.
To become a restaurateur, a manager is nominated by a regional leader. Then Neman and the COO spend a day at the store, and Neman interviews the staff before the manager. He also makes what he calls “unannounced visits,” ordering without saying who he is. Afterward, he tells employees he works at “the support center.”
Building the bench
Salazar has trained about five managers who now run their own stores. A year ago, he promoted an assistant manager he’d watched rise from the kitchen. “I mean, she deserved it,” he said. “She worked really hard for that, and me being part of that, it made me feel really good.”
His advice to anyone starting out is to share the load.
“At the end of the day, your people make it, or break you,” he said. “Always focus on your goal, and always teach someone along the way with you.”
Maddie MacCoun, a head coach restaurateur in Northern California, took the same path from the bottom when she joined Sweetgreen’s Berkeley store in 2017.
“Sweetgreen was actually my very first job, so I was about 18 years old,” she told Fortune. She became a shift leader in less than a year, then a trainer, then assistant coach at the busy San Francisco SoMa store in 2020. She became a head coach in 2022 and a restaurateur this year.
When she heard about the new pay on a call with Neman and other executives, “it was shocking for me,” she said. She has three employees she wants to promote to shift leaders in the next three weeks.
“We’re kind of going on rapid fire,” she said.
She sees the plan mostly as a goal for the people below her. For assistant coaches, she said, “it gives them a goal to work on their personal development plan and set higher goals for themselves.”
For Salazar, the money means stability. His mother left Venezuela and now lives in Argentina. He said the new pay could let him visit her more than once a year and maybe buy her a house there. “She took care of me for so long,” he said.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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