Restaurants come and go, often with little warning, but this was a shock.
On Aug. 4, 2026, Salad and Go, the Arizona-born restaurant chain, announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and would be closing all of its Arizona and Nevada locations.
The next day.
This was a surprise, including to the company's employees. The announcement led to long lines for a kind of victory lap of a last day for the franchise, which Tony and Roushan Christofellis started in 2013. They left the chain 2021, having watched the quality dip and the business expand faster than it should have. (They have since started Angie's, another affordable, healthy fast-food chain.)
The Salad and Go story gets stranger by the day
Let's not sugarcoat it. Salad and Go's quality had definitely dipped, as any longtime
customer could tell you. (Mushy cherry tomatoes were the last straw for me.) But it was such a good idea, and there was always the hope it would get back to its glory days.
No more.
Dutch Bros., the coffee chain, swooped in quickly to buy the stores, but now there is competition from another coffee company, 7 Brew, which claims it submitted a better offer. It's a wild twist in a story that seems to get stranger by the day.
That's why, on this week's episode of Valley 101, a podcast by The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, we answer the question: What happened to Salad and Go? We talked to Eddie Fontanez and Corina Vanek, reporters for The Arizona Republic who have been covering the story, and to Tony Christofellis, who it's fair to say has some pretty strong feelings about the direction his franchise went in.
Listen to the episode
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Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Subscribe to the weekly Watchlist newsletter.
This episode was produced by Amanda Luberto and Tori Weiss. You can reach Amanda at amanda.luberto@arizonarepublic.com or follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @amandaluberto. Reach Tori at tkweiss@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What happened to Salad and Go? The decisions that took it off-course
