Salad and Go

How it happened

Salad and Go sold a made-to-order salad for under $6 out of a tiny drive-thru building with no dining room and no seats. Tony and Roushan Christofellis opened the first one in Gilbert, Arizona in 2013 and were bought out by private-equity firm Volt Investment Holdings in 2021; ex-Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison arrived in 2022 and more than doubled the chain to a peak of 146 stores across four states, on a valuation Restaurant Business put at $1.1 billion. The expansion is what killed it.

Court filings describe $47M+ invested and $25M+ borrowed for the Texas and Oklahoma push, and a central commissary that cost over $72M to build and carried $15-20M a year of overhead — all to serve markets where nobody knew the brand. Forty-one Texas stores closed in September 2025 and 32 more that January; a sale process opened in February 2026 never closed, and a cyclospora outbreak that never implicated the chain scared diners off lettuce at the worst possible moment.

And Go Concepts filed Chapter 11 in Houston on August 4, 2026, shut all 70 remaining restaurants the next day, and sold the real estate to Dutch Bros for $105M. Glassdoor reviews trace the churn from inside: across 2024-2026 more than a dozen employees, from crew to district managers, described management that never stopped changing, and reviewers said repeatedly that the company promised internal advancement while filling manager roles from outside. The last review posted before the end, dated the day of the filing, gave constant management turnover as its only complaint.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.