The Crispy Chicken Salad: Not a Sandwich, Not Not a Salad

At sweetgreen, we know there’s nothing quite like the satisfying crunch of cabbage. So naturally, our arugula scientists were drawn to the internet’s (occasionally bizarre) obsession with all things crispy. We’re talking: the fried chicken sandwich that sold out in seconds, this viral ASMR YouTube video, and Oxford professor John S. Allen’s poetic assertion that “crispy is king because it offers a multi-sensory experience — sight, taste, feel, and especially sound, piled together like a tin roof sensory sundae.”

Our culinary team was intrigued. And more determined than ever to unleash the lettuce on this deep fried phenomenon. On a mission to unfry your life (your meal, and your mind), the Crispy Chicken Salad is the unsandwichy antidote to the last ten months of zoom, gloom, and pizza.

We first developed the crispy rice topping back in the fall of 2019 to infuse the signature crisp into our Crispy Rice Bowl. Organically and domestically sourced by our intrepid supply chain, ours is a patented mix of brown rice and the cover-crop sorghum — a drought tolerant, naturally gluten-free grain that protects the soil from pests and erosion. Together, they form a craveable texture that’s somewhere between airy, crispy, and crunchy. We’ll let the tweets speak for themselves.

Next, our culinary team set out to concept our winter menu and design a breakout bowl that would thrive in colder months. When it comes to our menu, we like to think of Mother Nature as the ultimate creative director. So when winter’s frozen ground limits access to fresh produce, we look to storage crops — sturdy root vegetables that have been picked earlier in the season and stored for optimal flavor, and ancestral techniques such as preserving and pickling. Translation: Our Crispy Chicken Salad boasts zingy, locally sourced pickles that are savory, briny, and even blended into our house-made remoulade.

After months of tinkering to achieve the precise balance of crispy (not to be confused with its equally formidable counterpart, crunchy), a sandwich successor was born. Featuring a double scoop of super sustainable crispy rice — plus blackened chicken, tangy remoulade, and local pickles — the Crispy Chicken Salad is all of the fun, with none of the bun. Now, you can finally have your crisp and eat it, too.

And here, 11 things you’d never guess about the Crispy Chicken Salad:

1. It’s not a sandwich.
2. It’s not not a salad.
3. It will give you the silent treatment if you mistake it for its more clamorous cousin “crunchy.”
4. We source our crispy rice from two partners — our sorghum comes from NuLife Market and our organic brown rice from California Cereal Products (which, surprisingly, is not where your fruit loops are born).
5. Our supply chain team heroically secured 23,430 lbs of this coveted, crispy grain in just 30 days (despite many challenges, including one factory fire).
6. The Crispy Chicken is dressed with Cajun Remoulade, which is basically our culinary team’s very own “special sauce.” While traditional remoulade is made with mayo, Creole seasoning, and pickles, we make ours with a fluffy blend of mayo and yogurt (for a lighter spin), plus our signature house-made hot sauce — oh yes, and lots of pickles.
7. Pickles add a zingy bite to the salad (and the dressing, too!) — plus, they’re locally sourced in each market, so each briny cuke has its own unique story.
8. Our culinary team added a drizzle of honey to earlier versions of the salad, but ultimately decided that this touch of sweetness detracted from the Crispy Chicken’s other flavors.

9. Sorghum, one of the two grains that make up our crispy rice, is a cover crop — it’s basically a plant whose primary function is nourishing other plants. You could say it’s the intern of the biodynamic farming world.

10. To create the floating crispy rice effect featured in our photoshoot, our in-house creative team utilized three hand-cranked food conveyor belts, each 2 feet long and 10 inches wide, as well as ingredients strung along fishing wire.

11. Nothing slips by our copywriters (okay, fine, we were in this misnamed Slack group for at least three weeks before anyone noticed the typo — wish us better luck on the campaign).