Salad chain Sweetgreen is known for healthy, locally sourced ingredients — and for small portion sizes.
But if you want more food for your dollar, one TikToker has an incredible hack for you: Order your meal right before the store closes.
The scoop
TikToker Delilah (@delilah_isabel) discovered this trick by accident when she visited her local Sweetgreen in the evening. Delilah was used to their standard small portion sizes. But this time, when she bought a salad bowl, she was shocked to see an employee adding huge scoops of hot ingredients to her dish.
"So I asked her, I was like, 'What happens to all of the hot stuff at the end of the night?'" Delilah says in the video. According to her, the workers are required to throw away all the leftover hot ingredients such as proteins at the end of each day.
"So of course then we get into this huge discussion about food waste and we're both like 'What should we do about this?'" she continues, laughing. The answer, apparently, was to give as much protein as possible to the last few customers of the day.
Given that Sweetgreen places value on issues like eating local (an effort to minimize pollution from transporting food), it's probably not surprising that many employees care about related issues like food waste. While handing out extra food at closing isn't an official policy, Delilah says she's continued to return at that time of day and has received larger portions each time.
How it's helping
This hack is great news for anyone eating on a budget or who's feeling extra hungry that day, as they'll get more food for the same price. At the same time, putting the leftover food to good use helps reduce waste.
What everyone's saying
Commenters backed up what Delilah shared.
"My roommate used to work there and hated throwing away the food so she used to do that all the time," says one commenter.
Others shared the alternate ways that restaurants can handle the issue. "At the sg i work at staff gets to take home whatever hot food is leftover!" says another.
Want more? Follow The Cool Down on Instagram and join our Weekly Newsletter for cool stories and easy tips that save you money, time, and our planet.
Cool Picks
