No joke: Dutch Bros is buying up Salad and Go real estate

OK, I need to buy a lottery ticket. Yesterday I was joking around with several of you readers that Dutch Bros Coffee should scoop up all the closing Salad and Go locations – perfect little drive-thru boxes, prime corners, no salad required. Turns out I was seeing into the future.

Court filings show Boersma Bros – the Oregon-based holding company tied to the founders of Dutch Bros – has agreed to buy up to 65 former Salad and Go locations across Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas for $105 million, with plans to convert them into Dutch Bros stands starting next year.

Why this deal makes sense

The appeal here isn’t really about salad or coffee – it’s about real estate. Salad and Go’s whole model was built on tiny, drive-thru-only footprints, often under 1,000 square feet, tucked into corners bigger chains skipped. That’s more or less exactly what Dutch Bros looks for when it’s scouting new locations.

Dutch Bros CEO Christine Barone framed the purchase as a direct boost to the company’s expansion targets, saying the sites would let the chain deepen its presence in states where it’s already built brand awareness.

It’s the second time this year Dutch Bros has grown by buying someone else’s real estate instead of building from scratch. The company acquired the 20-unit Clutch Coffee Bar chain back in January. That approach is central to its plan to hit 2,029 locations by 2029. (The company finished the second quarter with just under 1,200 shops.)

Meanwhile, Angie’s doubles down

Tony and Roushan Christofellises, who founded Salad and Go before selling the brand in 2021 and later launching Angie’s Food Concepts, weren’t shy about weighing in. In a statement posted this week, Angie’s says it’s ‘‘making a promise’’ to double down on the mission Salad and Go was built on, rather than pull back.

The pledge is heavy on specifics: $4.99 large salads with grilled-to-order, antibiotic-free chicken, 99-cent drinks every day, $3.99 breakfast entrées, and a $9.99 dinner-for-two deal after 4 p.m.

Angie’s says it’s sourcing organic, premium ingredients cut fresh in-store daily, using only extra virgin olive oil in its cooking and dressings, and moving its fryers from soybean oil to high oleic canola oil as a first step toward a healthier frying oil.

The company also says it’s skipping syrup-heavy sodas in favor of scratch-made drinks, plans to keep paying wages among the highest in fast food, and intends to expand only ‘‘efficiently’’ rather than chase rapid growth.

It reads like a pointed contrast with what happened to Salad and Go after the sale – deliberately positioning Angie’s as the slower, more disciplined version of the same original idea. The statement closes with a tagline that leaves little doubt about the intended comparison: ‘‘Better Food. Lower Prices. Built Differently.’’

A fitting, if bittersweet, next chapter

There’s a certain symmetry to it. Dutch Bros itself moved its headquarters to Tempe last year and has been building out its Arizona presence aggressively – meaning a chain that also prizes efficient, no-frills drive-thru real estate is now inheriting the very shops the Christofellis first opened in Gilbert back in 2013.

For Valley regulars, that means the buildings will likely stick around – just with cold brew and Golden Eagles instead of $6 salads. No word yet on which specific locations get converted first, or what happens to the brand’s remaining Texas and Oklahoma real estate, which was already dark well before this week’s bankruptcy filing.