Salad and Go collapse leaves employees without severance

Article originally posted on Phoenix Business Journal on August 14, 2026

The temperature was already 105 at 11:30 a.m. when Kyle Waage waited in line outside a Salad and Go in Mesa to get his final meal from his favorite restaurant.

Waage was one of more than a dozen people trying to find shade around the pick-up window at the Alma School Road and Southern Avenue location of the Arizona restaurant chain that scorching hot day on August 5. At the same time, more than 20 cars were in a line that snaked through the shopping center’s parking lot as their drivers waited to get salads and lemonades from the drive-thru.

It was the final day of business at Salad and Go, and Waage, like thousands of others around the Valley, wanted his last chance to eat at the place he visited at least four days a week.

It started when Waage was going to the gym a lot and he wanted a quick, easy and healthy meal. That habit has stuck for years. But the things that attracted Waage to Salad and Go at first – the low price point and tasty, healthy food – started to change.

“I remember when this place first opened, you got a salad, a drink and a burrito for like $7.50 or something like that,” Waage said. “I’ve been OK with the prices going up – this salad and a drink I got [today] was like $14.”

He also noticed that the company switched to a different type of chicken, which he said didn’t taste as good, but remembered telling himself, “I’ll get used to it.”

“Then they changed the flavor of the cucumber mint lemonade – that used to be my favorite. It tasted like s–t after that,” Waage said. “I could see that they’re making some changes to save money – then they still failed.”

In the late afternoon on Aug. 4, Salad and Go filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division. That evening, the company announced it would be closing all its stores – around 70 in Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas – at the end of business the next day.

And just as quickly as that announcement caught customers like Waage and employees by surprise, an equally startling transaction followed on Aug. 5, when Arizona beverage chain Dutch Bros swept in to acquire multiple Salad and Go stores out of bankruptcy.

From local and trendy to private equity owners

While the end for Salad and Go came quickly, its demise began several years earlier, soon after it was acquired by a New York private equity firm.

An early marketing slogan for Salad and Go, which was founded in Gilbert in 2013, described the company as a “drive-thru revolution.”

Its founders, including married couple Tony and Roushan Christofellis, said that the early goal was to have low prices, healthy food and happy employees. This sometimes led the company to do things that weren’t common among its competitors in the quick-service restaurant industry.

The company built a loyal following by emphasizing low prices and higher wages, including a 20% price cut in 2018 and a move to a $15 starting wage during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The chain’s success in the 2010s attracted the attention of outside investors who wanted in on the action. In 2020, the Christofellises relented and sold his shares of Salad and Go to East Coast private equity firm Volt Investment Holdings, which took the reins and planned a heavy blitz into Texas – adding more than 60 stores in that state in just a few years.

“Every meeting that they had was about growth, how to grow fast,” Tony Christofellis told the Business Journal on Aug. 5. “No one was focusing relentlessly on how to make your food better, healthier, at a lower price. Ultimately, that did them in.”

Christofellis left Salad and Go and started Angie’s Prime Concepts in 2021, another successful drive-thru focused chain with low prices and higher-quality food including lobster and steak.

Salad and Go workers had no warning

At the same Mesa Salad and Go location where customer Waage kept going to even after he noticed the quality of the food drop, the workers there could tell they were not getting the respect the company used to be known for.

“They’re not giving us severance. They’re not paying out our PTO, and they’re not paying out our sick time,” Jane Stanley, the manager of the Salad and Go at Southern and Alma School in Mesa, told the Business Journal.

Salad and Go employees were told around 6 p.m. on Aug. 4 the company would close its doors the next day, Stanley said. She said members of her team that were working when the announcement came out heard about the closure from customers who read the news online.

Still, on the store’s final day, there were close to a dozen people showed up to work in the small Salad and Go building in Mesa to serve the seemingly never-ending line of cars, because Stanley said her team really loved their jobs.

“One thing Salad and Go was really good at was attracting really good workers,” Stanley said. “Everyone here did not deserve what happened.”

Managers from multiple Valley retail establishments including Angie’s, Dutch Bros and Chick-fil-A, visited Stanley’s Salad and Go location on Aug. 5 and encouraged employees to apply at their nearby locations.

“We’re opening three new Angie’s in Phoenix in the next six weeks,” Christofellis said. “We’ll be able to take some really good people and get them on the team at much higher wage than they were getting paid before.”

At the time of the Chapter 11 filing, Salad and Go employed 1,300 people. Nearly 90% were hourly workers.

What led to Chapter 11?

At its peak, Salad and Go had 146 restaurants across Arizona, Nevada, Texas and Oklahoma. As it grew in Texas, the company moved its headquarters to Dallas and thought it could get similar success it had in Arizona in the Lone Star State.

But the brand never took off in Texas. In 2025, the company thought it could right the ship, but it meant closing more than 40 stores in Texas. Then in early 2026, Salad and Go exited Texas and Oklahoma, leaving behind dozens of stores, a huge distribution facility in Dallas, and 600 people without jobs.

CEO Mike Tattersfield told the Business Journal in January the company made poor real estate choices in Texas and that its expansion was “not as thoughtful or as strategic as it could be.”

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