Creative foodies behaving like a tech team: Inside The Salad Project’s innovation story

Clem Haxby is the first to admit that The Salad Project did not start out with a grand technology strategy. On stage at MCA Innovation Conference 2026, the Director of Product laughed off any idea that it was all mapped out.

However, what the brand did have in 2021 was a clear picture of the experience it wanted to give guests. That picture, more than any roadmap, has shaped its technology since.

Here are some of the highlights from Clem’s conversation with Danna Gurbaxani, Chief Revenue Officer at Vita Mojo.

A tech business… with no tech background

When The Salad Project opened, the fashionable line among fast-growing quick service restaurant brands was: “We’re a tech business, we’re not a food business.” The founding team liked the sound of that, until they realised none of them knew much about tech.

Clem’s background is in culinary arts, and the co-founders, James and Florian, are hospitality specialists, not tech experts. So the thinking became, “We want to create a hospitality experience that didn’t exist in the QSR realm already.” And for The Salad Project, that meant meeting customers where they already are, rather than trying to create something they didn’t realise they needed.

The launch goal was simple: queues out of the door. But then, as Clem said, “People get quite angry when they have to queue for too long.” So the goal became: “We need to be really quick at serving the salads, so Ops can deal with that, and then for the people who just have no time, which is lots of our customers, we thought, from day one, we need to make sure there’s a hack: skip the queue, order online.”

This defined The Salad Project’s experience from the start: the operations team focused on speed, and for any customers still short of time, Click & Collect offered a way to skip the queue altogether.

Choosing one partner over a patchwork

This early stack had a gap at its centre. The Salad Project launched with a different POS provider, and its tills, loyalty scheme and online ordering were unable to share data.

As Clem put it, “Again to show how little strategy there was at the time, we had no link-ups between our in-store experience and loyalty system for customers and online. So despite us wanting to be this 360 brand, meeting customers wherever they are, we weren’t actually talking to them about it.”

So two and a half years ago, the business faced a choice: bring in another third party to stitch the data together, or commit to a single platform. It chose Vita Mojo, which was already providing its Click & Collect platform.

As Clem said, “If we’re going to make this work, either we can bring in another party to try and link up all of our data sets, or we actually just put all of our eggs in the basket with one really brilliant partner, which has been Vita Mojo, to make sure that we can give our customers loyalty that carries from in-store to online.”

Clem was candid about the bumps along the way. Vita Mojo took over the POS first, while a third-party loyalty stamp system stayed in place, and the app launched before guests could technically earn points through it.

But now, as Clem put it, the brand has “an epic experience for our customers where they can, regardless of what store they’re in, either order to skip the queue, they can order on Deliveroo, or they can come and queue and every single time they visit us they can points that they can redeem on any of those channels, to continue their love of The Salad Project.”

From buying software to building it

In the early days, Clem said, the attitude was simple: Vita Mojo had a solution, so the team bought it and used it. Now that the founders are “no longer chopping chicken and serving salads” themselves, there’s more time to think about how the technology could really benefit the brand and its customers.

This vision shows up in quarterly co-innovation sessions with Vita Mojo. Some projects remain exclusive to The Salad Project, so the brand doesn’t become another “one-coloured QSR experience”, while others benefit every single Vita Mojo customer.

Clem’s team of recipe developers and product people now behaves like a tech team. It works in sprints, and each person has a quarterly goal to build something that helps the business scale. This quarter alone, it has built live forecasting for suppliers and store purchasing, plus Absolutely Salad Project, a tool that gives guests full transparency on what they are eating.

Habits run through everything The Salad Project does. The brand even uses the word HABIT as an acronym for its product checklist: every dish must be Hearty, Adaptable, Best in the business and Bold in flavour, Innovative and Trustworthy.

As Clem said, “We’re really obsessed with habits, and what’s great now is we can use technology to make sure we’re holding ourselves to that standard from a product perspective. We’re also giving it to our customers and supporting their habit building from a reward perspective.”

Now that thinking is coming to loyalty. Ten visits over two years means far less to the team than 10 in a fortnight, or a guest whose visits creep up month by month. Connected first-party data lets the team spot and reward those patterns.

“These are the kind of data points that we want to track and reward, so that people’s experience with The Salad Project is unique to them, as opposed to something that everyone experiences in the same way.

Standing out in a crowded salad market

The competition has obviously grown. When The Salad Project opened, Clem said, London had roughly six salad bars. By last November, the team counted 63.

To stay unique, rather than chase every daypart, the brand owns one moment. That means no breakfast menu. As Clem said, “I’m not going to spend my very limited time developing breakfast. I’m going to use it to make sure that my Caesar salad is the best Caesar salad in London, but also the world, and is delivered to customers in the best possible way.”

That means obsessing over every detail, in store and online: the site design, the volume of the music and how it shifts from day to evening, even how the Deliveroo page helps guests choose.

For Danna, that level of care is exactly what technology now has to keep up with. SaaS platforms have always been one-to-many by design: one product, built once and rolled out to every customer. AI is changing that, allowing Vita Mojo to build features unique to a single brand, like the projects Clem has described. “Now we’re able to deliver things that are one-to-one for your brand so that you can deliver things that are one-to-one to a guest,” Danna said, “I think that’s truly the essence of it all.”

The Salad Project is putting AI to work inside its own business, and Vita Mojo is doing the same. The result is a partnership that lets a growing brand stay personal. For a business built on the idea that every guest’s habit is their own, that matters more than anything.