Another Boardman blooper: confuses hip fast-casual salad chain with Chinese takeout in Queens

Sweet Garden in Queens (credit: Zomato)
Sweetgreen, the “unicorn” startup, AKA an IPO candidate with a value of $1 billion (credit: Nation’s Restaurant News)

You can’t make this stuff up! In his near weekly blooper,  The Union’s weekly columnist George Boardman writes: “One of newest trends in the restaurant industry is the $15 lunch salad at upscale chains like Chop’t, Sweetgarden and Just Salad. This trend is so hot that Sweetgarden recently completed a $200 million round of funding that values the company at $1 billion.”

Sweetgarden? Huh? Does our crackerjack journalist-turned-PR flack and  “business reporter” mean “Sweetgreen” (not Sweetgarden)?

—An article in Forbes magazine, “Why $200 Million Will Make Sweetgreen The Next Big Thing In Delivery (And, Yes, A Unicorn),” is HERE.

“We want to go beyond a food company and become a platform,” Neman, Sweetgreen’s co-CEO, told Forbes in an exclusive interview after closing the $200 million round, which brings the company’s total equity raised to $365 million and values the chain at more than $1 billion.

—Or as Restaurant News reported: “Fidelity Investments has made a $200 million investment in Sweetgreen, bringing the fast-casual salad chain’s total equity raised over the past five years to $365 million, the company said Tuesday.  The Fidelity funding round values the 90-unit Los Angeles-based brand at more than $1 billion, the company said.”

I did, however, find a Chinese takeout joint in Queens called Sweet Garden (two words, not one). The menu is here.

You go George! Ringing in the New Year with another correction.

Author: jeffpelline

Jeff Pelline is a veteran editor and award-winning journalist - in print and online. He is publisher of Sierra FoodWineArt magazine and its website SierraCulture.com. Jeff covered business and technology for The San Francisco Chronicle for 12 years, and he was a founding editor and Editor of CNET News for eight years, among other positions. Jeff has a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley and a master's from Northwestern University. His hobbies include sailing, swimming, and trout fishing in the Sierra.

3 thoughts on “Another Boardman blooper: confuses hip fast-casual salad chain with Chinese takeout in Queens”

  1. Local Susie Bavo made another cogent point about Boardman’s latest column in The Union on Facebook: ” He missed the point of this weekend’s Sustainability Conference too. Like it’s a bad thing for farmers to be profitable?”

  2. What a hoot! I notice George Boardman has quietly corrected his online article to read “Sweetgreen” instead of “Sweetgarden.” Of course the print edition is wrong. You are welcome, George!

  3. What a hoot! At the end of this week’s article, Boardman runs a “correction” claiming that Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain, was “misspelled.” Huh? In fact, it was the wrong name all together: “Sweetgarden.” Sweetgreen vs. Sweetgarden. That’s obviously more than a “misspelling.”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: