Salad and Go’s Texas Leases Just Sold for $3.57 Each

The market: what the docket says

Salad and Go filed Chapter 11 on August 4 and closed all 70 remaining stores the next day. It arrived in court with a buyer signed. Dutch Bros agreed to pay $105.0 million in cash for 51 drive-thru leases in Arizona and Nevada, per the sale motion, which works out to $2.06 million a door. The agreement confirms its own math: if Dutch Bros rejects a site before closing, the price drops by roughly $2.1 million per lease.

The same motion conveys 14 Texas and Oklahoma leases, all closed since January, for $50. Total. Twelve of the fourteen are in Texas, so the state’s leases in this deal price at about $3.57 each.

The company’s stated reasons for the collapse include soft consumer spending, past growth decisions, and July’s cyclospora outbreak. The sequence in the record reads differently. Salad and Go closed 41 Texas and Oklahoma stores in September 2025. It closed the rest of both states, and its Garland production facility, in January 2026. The outbreak began ten months after the first wave, and federal investigators traced it to Taylor Farms iceberg served at Taco Bell, never to Salad and Go. The CFO’s first-day declaration, as reported by Restaurant Dive, states the Central Region was significantly cash-flow negative before corporate overhead, and credits the outbreak only with accelerating losses in the final 90 days. The lettuce didn’t kill this company. The lettuce showed up to the funeral.

The sale is contested. 7 Brew argued at the August 7 hearing for an auction, per Restaurant Business, against a $3.8 million break fee and a $10.0 million minimum overbid, and the debtor’s counsel reports outreach on roughly 100 other sites. If a judge orders an auction, $2.06 million a door is a floor. The Texas number needs no auction.

The menu: what Texas actually pays for a salad

Salad and Go’s blended item price was about $6.42 in 2022, per company figures reported by trade press. The market it needed to pull lunch traffic from tells you what that meant. The Texas median entree salad sells for $11.00 in 2026, up from $9.24 in 2021, a 19 percent climb. A quarter of the market sits at $9.00 or below, and only about one salad row in ten prices under $7.00, mostly steakhouse side salads. Salad and Go was pricing 36 percent below the Texas median of its own year, and the market moved away from it every year after.

Geography sharpened the problem

Tarrant and Collin are the most expensive salad counties in the state at an $11.99 median, with Denton at $11.49, against $10.00 in Bexar and $10.50 in Travis. The DFW suburbs, where Salad and Go concentrated its Texas build-out, are where full-service operators price salads highest. Its CFO’s declaration adds that the specific sites chosen there had poor car access and low visibility.

Inside the menus, Texas is a Caesar economy

Caesar dressing appears at 63 percent of venues, romaine at 58, croutons at 48, chicken at 41. The fast-casual staples barely register: kale on 2.5 percent of menus, quinoa on 1.3, arugula on 3.7. Pricing follows one rule. The greens set the floor and the protein sets the price: romaine, Caesar, and crouton salads carry a $9.99 median, spring mix $8.99, while salmon runs $16.00, crab $15.95, egg $14.97, shrimp $14.00. The clearest expression of the rule is the wedge. Iceberg appears on just 5 percent of Texas menus yet carries a $12.95 median, because 61 percent of its mentions are wedge salads, the format that sells the cheapest green in the cooler for $13 with bacon and blue cheese. Full service prices the plate.

The operation: perishability is a forecasting problem

Salad and Go’s stores were roughly 750 square feet with no real kitchens. Everything arrived prepped from a commissary, and the Texas commissary was built ahead of everything else: roughly 112,000 square feet in Garland, designed to serve as many as 500 stores, with more than $47.1 million in build-out against a total project cost near $72.5 million and $15 million to $20 million a year in fixed overhead, per the court filings as reported.

Fresh produce makes that structure unforgiving. Cut greens hold for days, not weeks, and there’s no freezer to absorb a miss. Prep too much and it’s shrink by Thursday. Prep too little and stores sell out of the only thing they sell. A central commissary concentrates that forecasting problem: every daily production decision in Garland was a demand forecast for an entire state, and every error got trucked to dozens of stores at once. The model works when volume is dense and predictable enough to keep the plant busy and the misses small. Texas offered neither. The chain peaked at 146 stores across four states, the region Garland existed to feed never came close to its design capacity, and the overhead ran regardless. The building is on the sublease market now.

The commodity: what the lettuce tape shows

Input costs gave no relief on the way down. As of June 2026, fruit and vegetable CPI was up 5.3 percent year over year and the producer price index for poultry up 11.8 percent, per BLS and FRED series, against a market where operators reprice in steps of 11 to 14 percent when they move at all.

The outbreak’s clearest measurable trace is also here, in the wholesale tape rather than in any restaurant’s collapse. Iceberg at the Los Angeles terminal slid from roughly $50 a carton in mid June to the high teens by the July 17 recall, a decline that began weeks before Taylor Farms acted. What changed after the recall is that the price never recovered. Every post-recall week printed between $15.00 and $19.17, which is 30 to 47 percent below the same weeks of 2025, a summer when iceberg rebounded repeatedly from similar lows. Romaine’s summer stayed in line with the prior year. The recalled product trades below its own history. The adjacent one doesn’t.

Four lenses, one conclusion

The docket priced Texas at $3.57 a lease. The menus show a $6.42 operator underneath an $11.00 market that prices plates, not ingredients. The operation shows a forecasting problem scaled up before demand existed. And the commodity tape shows the outbreak arriving late enough to mark down lettuce, and far too late to explain a company that had already left the state.

Menu pricing, ingredient penetration, and commodity figures are drawn from the Pourcast verified menu pricing corpus and public BLS, FRED, and USDA Market News series; statewide salad figures cover roughly 3,600 Texas venues with 2026 verified pricing, and ingredient penetration is measured on a text-mention basis across venues with described salad rows. Bankruptcy figures trace to filings in In re And Go Concepts LLC, Case No. 26-90753, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, including the sale motion as reviewed by Daily Coffee News and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and to the first-day declaration as reported by Restaurant Business, Restaurant Dive, and QSR. Salad and Go’s own menu prices are company figures reported by trade press; the corpus covers full-service venues, so the fast-casual segment, Salad and Go included, is measured here through the market around it.

Pourcast is a Texas hospitality intelligence platform. All Pourcast analysis is derived from public records. pourcast.ai