Homegrown, the sandwich chain that focuses on sustainable farming and environmentally pleasant practices, introduced that it will be winding down operations at 10 of its 12 places, leaving solely the Mercer Island and downtown Seattle retailers, King 5 reported late final week.
The chain was based in 2009 by Ben Friedman and Brad Gillis and was notable for having its personal farm in Woodinville. From the beginning, it had an unusually robust sense of social accountability, which was intimately linked to its picture — its web site says that even the constructing supplies used for its shops are environmentally pleasant. “Sandwich environmentalism” was a time period the founders have been utilizing at one level. For over a decade, Homegrown grew at a gradual clip, at one level even branching out into the San Francisco market, whereas additionally promoting sandwiches wholesale underneath completely different model names. As 2020 COVID lockdowns got here into impact, Homegrown began a grocery supply service referred to as Homegrown Items and later purchased the meals tour firm Savor Seattle, which had itself began a meals field side-business.
However Homegrown Items apparently shuttered sooner or later, as did these San Francisco shops. (Eater Seattle reached out to Homegrown asking precisely when that occurred, however didn’t hear again.) And now a sequence that was as soon as on the rise is drastically scaling again.
On September 15, a lot of the Seattle-area places will shut as nicely, resulting in 158 employees dropping their jobs, in accordance with the Puget Sound Enterprise Journal. The high-minded mission Homegrown began with doesn’t make it proof against the fundamental financial forces making it exhausting to run a restaurant proper now. “Like different eating places throughout the nation, financial impacts, together with rising labor prices and meals costs, have created an unsustainable mannequin for holding all our places in enterprise,” Gillis stated in an announcement to the Journal.
The closure announcement comes not lengthy after a interval of battle with the chain’s unionized staff. When drivers for its wholesale division introduced plans to unionize in 2022, Homegrown put in cameras that monitored them whereas they labored. The chain’s restaurant staff voted to kind a union later that 12 months and in 2023 some went on strike to protest the firing of a union chief. In March, that strike ended and the contract was ratified; notably, it included a provision that gave them time-and-a-half pay on particularly scorching days, a uncommon “warmth safety” profit.
The non-restaurant arms of Homegrown’s enterprise, together with its catering operation, don’t look like affected by this announcement.
