The ‘Platform’ Question
Can a luxury salad bar chain be a platform?
Elizabeth Dunn digs into the details of restaurant chain Sweetgreen in his piece, In a Burger World, Can Sweetgreen Scale Up?, and encounters the ‘platform’ question:
About a year ago, after raising $200 million in new capital from firms including Fidelity Investments and Evolution VC Ventures, Mr. Neman appeared on CNBC and talked about Sweetgreen’s evolving from a mere restaurant into something more thought provoking: a “food platform.” On Kara Swisher’s Recode podcast, he compared Sweetgreen’s kitchen technology to Uber’s turn-by-turn directions for its drivers, and discussed how blockchain and big data could evolve the menu into something like a Netflix queue.
What is it supposed to mean when you put ‘platform’ next to another noun? Does it mean something more than explosive growth? Does it imply the disruption of some existing way of conducting business? Does it require ecosystem economics, where expansion leverages the contribution of partners who are participating for their own ends?
If so, then Uber can certainly be thought of as a platform — although an exploitative one — but I don’t see how Sweetgreen can be lumped into the platform discussion. Even if Sweetgreen is helping its customers to meet their life goals — the prototypical ‘conscious…
