Salad-focused dining chain Chopt opens second CT location in Stamford
On Oct. 6, the fast-casual dining chain Chopt Creative Salad Co. opened its second Connecticut location at 1081 High Ridge Road in Stamford ”“ six years after opening its first Connecticut location at 1271 E. Putnam Ave. in Greenwich”™s Riverside section.
For a chain with 65 locations nationwide, Chopt”™s expansion in the Connecticut market seems a bit pokey ”“ and even CEO Nick Marsh admits there is a need for more speed.
“We’re not moving fast enough in Connecticut,” he laughed. “We love doing business here.”
Marsh said his company looks for “the intersection of business life, family life and high school, and then we try to find locations to tie all of those elements together. Stamford clearly fits that bill, and our Greenwich location fits that bill.”
Marsh quickly added Stamford and Greenwich weren”™t the only Connecticut locations for Chopt, insisting that the chain would “like to continue moving north and east in the state. We think there are a lot of opportunities and I’d like to get there faster.”
Chopt was founded in 2001 by Tony Shure and Colin McCabe, who had the idea of moving salad to the front-and-center meal rather than segregating it as a side dish. Marsh came to the company in 2006 as an investor after 11 years of running Xando Coffee and Bar.
“Tony and Colin are still involved with their obsessive, passionate focus on creating the best salads with the best dressing flavors,” Marsh said. “We have 21 different dressings that are all made from scratch ”“ things that you’re just kind of not finding anywhere.”
Marsh has coordinated the New York City chain”™s expansion, which includes four Westchester locations: Dobbs Ferry, Mount Kisco, Rye Brooke and Scarsdale. He admitted that restaurant industry success is still constructed the old-fashioned way, by pleasing the individual while ingratiating the business within its community.
“The beauty of the restaurant industry is that no matter how much technology moves forward and how much marketing moves forward, it is still with one customer and one salad at a time,” he said. “A lot of our marketing is really grassroots local store marketing. We kicked off with an opening day in Stamford with all of our proceeds donated to the local Boys and Girls Club, and that was a huge success.
“We will be very focused on sponsoring local sports teams,” he continued. “We will get involved in the local high school and middle school. We recognize that in order to be sort of the favorite salad place in the community, you have to be a part of the community.”
Marsh acknowledged that opening a new restaurant at this time has the added pressure of disruptions in the supply chain that have impacted a wide stretch of the national economy. While defining the supply chain situation as “extraordinarily challenging,” he insisted that Chopt would not cut corners or opt for inferior products due to the unprecedented situation.
“We are very unlikely to use a substitute if we can’t get the exact product that we developed for our salads,” he said.
Marsh also noted that Chopt has dodged an ongoing problem facing the restaurant industry concerning labor shortages.
“We’ve been pretty lucky on the employee front ”“ we have a tremendous amount of stability on our team overall,” he said. “We have district managers and regional vice presidents who have been with the company eight, 10, 12 years. If you create a level of stability and leadership, it flows throughout the organization. That helps us through difficult times, and there are certainly challenges right now.”
Looking ahead, Marsh identified expanding the chain”™s digital business as a key priority moving forward.
“If you come to the Stamford store, you’ll see about one-quarter of the space is dedicated to a pick-up wall,” he said. “This reflects the fact that more and more of our customers are using our app and our website in order to order ahead.
“That was starting to happen before the pandemic,” he said, “and it is obviously accelerated over the course of the past year ”“ and we will continue to redouble those efforts.”