13 years after debut in Gilbert, Salad and Go is closing for good

Salad and Go is serving its last salad. The Gilbert-born drive-thru chain confirmed today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will shut down all 70 of its remaining locations in Arizona and Nevada after final service Wednesday.

It’s a stunning end for a concept that started in a 750-square-foot shed of a building in Gilbert back in 2013, and one that closes the loop on a wild 13-year run: explosive local growth, a private-equity buyout, a swing for national scale, and now, a full stop.

Born in Gilbert, built on persistence

Tony and Roushan Christofellis opened the first Salad and Go in Gilbert in 2013 with a simple pitch: healthy, drive-thru-fast food that didn’t cost more than a burger combo. Salads, wraps, soups, breakfast burritos, and cold brew, all served out of tiny footprints that could fit into corners other chains would skip.

What turned that idea into a real regional player wasn’t a single big swing – it was Roushan’s relentless attention to the daily grind of running the business. MXSW covered all of those grinding, incremental wins, including a 19-month campaign that methodically drove salad prices down to $5.74 and a commitment to raise its starting wage to $15 an hour in 2020.

Neither of those was a flashy headline-grabbing move – they were the kind of patient, operational discipline that compounds over years. That day-to-day diligence is largely what took Salad and Go from a single Gilbert location to a Valleywide institution by the time the Christofellises sold the brand in 2021.

New owners, bigger ambitions, bigger problems

The Christofellises sold Salad and Go to private equity firm Volt Investment Holdings in 2021 and stepped away from day-to-day operations. Volt moved headquarters out of Arizona to Texas and, in 2022, brought in former Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison to push an aggressive national expansion.

It worked, for a while – Salad and Go nearly doubled in size over two years, cresting more than 140 locations nationwide by May 2025, pushing into Texas and Oklahoma in a big way.

But the fast-scaling era didn’t hold. Morrison left the company in 2024 amid disagreements with the board over strategy, and in early 2025 the chain faced a CBS News investigation over allegations of undercooked chicken at Texas locations.

Mike Tattersfield – the former Krispy Kreme CEO who also led Caribou Coffee, Einstein/Noah, and Panera Brands – took over as CEO in April 2025 and later called the growth-first plan flawed. The retreat started almost immediately.

Salad and Go closed 41 Texas and Oklahoma stores in September 2025. By January 2026, it closed the remaining 32 locations in those states entirely, moved its headquarters back to the Valley, and narrowed its focus to 62 Arizona stores and seven in Las Vegas – a strategic full-circle homecoming, at least on paper.

The final chapter

That homecoming didn’t stick. In its bankruptcy filing, Salad and Go pointed to sustained pressure on consumer demand, the lingering effects of its aggressive growth years, rising costs, and a July 2026 Cyclospora outbreak that shook consumer confidence across the fast-casual sector – even though the company says it wasn’t implicated in that outbreak.

‘‘This is a painful day for everyone who built, worked for and loved Salad and Go,’’ Tattersfield said in the company’s statement. ‘‘We are proud of what we built together and grateful to every team member, guest and partner who believed in it.’’

Over its 13 years, Salad and Go served more than 60 million meals.

Life after Salad and Go

As for the Christofellises, they didn’t sit still after 2021. The couple went on to launch Angie’s – a venture that let them get back to the kind of hands-on, incremental restaurant building that made Salad and Go work in the first place.

Whatever comes next for the drive-thru salad category in the Valley, it’s hard not to note the irony: the brand that made its name on healthy, affordable, disciplined growth in Gilbert ended up undone by the opposite instinct once it left the founders’ hands.