After nearly eight years, we’re dropping the ‘Inn’.
While the change merits an explanation, this post isn’t about high design, fancy font types or color theory. It’s about sharing our evolution with you transparently, so as we grow and evolve we don’t leave you scratching your head.
Here’s why:
By year’s end, we’ll have opened 35 restaurants in three cities (see you soon, Philadelphia), partnered with over 100+ independent farms, harvested over 250,000 pounds of our own organically-grown vegetables, and taught thousands of people how to cook in our kitchens.
Over the next 18 months, you’ll see us enter more cities (DC and Chicago–we’re coming for you), open our first full-service restaurant, launch our new delivery platform Room Service, and begin to test other ways to share our mission, and our vegetables, with you.
Internally, we’re working to ensure that we grow the people in our kitchens and on our teams just as intensively as we do our vegetables. To this end, we’re buying some land in Upstate New York that we can call home. While we’ll grow more vegetables for our restaurants there, it’s also where we’ll build our first training center–a place where a new generation of cooks can learn how to grow and cook food without the burden of massive student debt.
In short, Dig has become more than a restaurant. It’s a shared belief that access to good food — picked recently enough to enjoy its full set of nutrients, carried only as far as it needs to, grown and cooked by first names, and priced to feed a neighborhood — shouldn’t have to be a movement, an ethos, a privilege, or even a doubt. So, today we’re making a transition that reflects the full scope of our ambitions by officially changing our name to Dig.
In some ways, this is bittersweet. We have loved being Dig Inn over the past eight years. Back in 2011, we chose our name because it channeled our commitment to cooking from scratch. Dig Inn sounded homey and nostalgic, just like the food we wanted to cook.
Still, it’s time for us to cut our name in half and drop the wordplay. It’s a symbolic gesture, but it reaffirms that, although we’re now building something larger than restaurants, this isn’t rocket science. It’s soil, water, and sun. It’s farmers, chefs, and guests. It’s just good food.
We’ll always be devoted to cooking seasonal vegetables. But this change gives us space to enter the next chapter, while continuing to serve the same sweet potatoes that you know and love.
As always, thank you for your believing in Dig. Your support makes our work possible and we’re so grateful to share this journey with you.
With Gratitude,
Adam
Founder
