Simply Salad - Healthy Food For All Angelinos

Food insecurity and access to basic needs

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Over the 14+ years we have been in business, we have become acutely aware of the fact that healthy restaurant options just don’t exist in most neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Most major street corners and shopping centers east of the 405 Freeway and south of the 10 Freeway are filled with fast food, junk food, and other options that while tasty, only contribute to the obesity and many related health issues plaguing our communities. Most companies that could potentially help alleviate this issue are afraid to open locations in these communities. They’re afraid that the business won’t work and they just don’t believe that Angelinos want this (healthy food). We have proven with our 14+ year track record that they do…and we’d like to help support the community and do a lot more of it!

This grant will help us open and operate a location in the Los Angeles community of Inglewood. Inglewood is the “City of Champions” however today, the city has effectively zero healthy restaurant options. Fast food concepts such as, Wendy’s, In-N-Out, The Habit Burger, Del Taco, Wingstop, Jack in the Box, McDonald’s, Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken, and many others dominate the restaurant landscape and make it nearly impossible for the residents of Inglewood to eat healthy. While residents may be able to find a salad at a fast food restaurant, Everytable, or Sizzler on W. Manchester, it is not right that for an area with 100,000+ residents, there are only a handful of places to find nutritious and flavorful food.
The grant will help us build awareness of our location and will allow us to do much more in terms of community involvement, sampling, sponsorships, and general awareness building that Simply Salad will exist on Century Blvd.The grant will help fund our most important location in our company’s 14+ year history and we want to make a big deal out of it and make an impact that touches millions of people (that is not a typo).

While this grant will help us to specifically make an impact on the immediate community of Inglewood and it’s 100,000+ residents & millions of visitors through Sofi Stadium and surrounding attractions, LA County will be different because the healthy food inequity that exists will be eliminated in Inglewood and over time in all of LA County. We already sell more salads every day in Los Angeles communities that don’t have access to healthy food than any other restaurant or company and this grant will only help us accelerate. Despite what we already do, the fast food community is ~200 times larger and we have a long hill to climb to close that gap.
If our work is successful, finding healthy and affordable food will be as easy as finding a Big Mac. The impact that this would have on our residents, healthcare, and quality of life is immeasurable.

We measure our impact through three ways:
1) Customer traffic counts: Today throughout Los Angeles we are already serving over 1,000,000 customers per year and are growing our customer counts by 20-30% vs. last year. Angelinos vote with their wallets and purses every day to visit Simply Salad because the value and quality we offer is unmatched elsewhere in Los Angeles;
2) Customer satisfaction scores: Whether viewing through Google or Yelp reviews or evaluating on a Net Promoter Score (NPS) basis, our customer satisfaction scores are another proof point that our impact is self reinforcing and accretive to the communities in which we operate; and
3) Inbound customer and business partner feedback: We regularly receive feedback from customers about how happy they are that they now have healthy options in their neighborhood. One customer recently wrote us “I never eat salads. I love eating salads from Simply Salad.”, which is a perfect example of the impact we make.