Sprig lunch: making the right choice the easy choice

How we approached the creation of Sprig lunch

It wasn’t too long ago that I was yet again stuck at my desk, on back to back calls, watching my colleagues go to lunch without me. We had just launched Sprig a few months earlier, but were still solely focused on dinner and it was in that moment, as I scarfed down an old Clif Bar and some Chex Mix, that I realized we really needed to start serving lunch.

My own realization was compounded by the hundreds of e-mails, tweets and phone calls from our customers asking us to expand to lunch. But we didn’t want to just serve lunch, we wanted to provide a lunch experience that was better than everything out there.

Lunch Really is Different from Dinner

We quickly learned that lunch is fundamentally different than dinner: it’s still about quality, convenience and magic, but lunch is also about refueling for the day. It’s about a quick break with coworkers and a lighter meal that sustains you for the work to come. Lunch is also more time-sensitive, so in addition to a new menu, we worked hard on a new delivery system. On average, our lunch deliveries arrive nearly 50% faster than dinner. Based on customer feedback, we’re also delivering lunch straight to your door: no more meeting us at curbside or in the lobby.

Once we realized those differences, we unleashed the talents of our culinary team on a journey of recipe testing, sampling and menu creation. That team includes Nate Keller, formerly Executive Chef at Google; Jessica Entzel, former Pastry Chef for Iron Chef Morimoto and Jeans Georges; and Kyle Connaughton, one of the only chefs in the world to cook at three different 3-Michelin star restaurants. They spent the next few weeks at Kyle’s test kitchen in Sonoma testing menus and potential purveyors. And the Sprig office team was the lucky beneficiaries of their hard work: we spent many-a-team meeting testing out new recipes and passionately debating which bread had the best crunch or how many avocado slices should go in every beet and farro salad.

We also learned that adding lunch service requires some additional purveyors beyond the ones we already work with for dinner. We applied the same, rigorous guidelines to sourcing our lunch ingredients as we do to dinner and today, some of our local partnerships for lunch include: ABS Seafood for our sustainably line-caught sushi-grade ahi tuna, Panorama for our delicious breads, and Laura Chenel of Sonoma for our chevre goat cheese.

Introducing Sprig Lunch

It was just three short weeks ago we soft launched lunch. Starting today, we’re officially including lunch in the Sprig experience. Every weekday from 11am — 2pm, you can now order a healthy, locally-sourced lunch that can be delivered to your office (or wherever you might be!) in just 3 taps and for $9. Which means no more missed meals, no more compromises and thankfully in my case, no more protein bars.