Sweetgreen is on the hunt for its most loyal customers. After piloting a subscription program earlier this year, Sweetgreen is debuting a new rewards offering today.

The deets: Called Rewards and Challenges, it enables customers to opt in to participate in weekly challenges, like spending $20 to receive $4 off toward their next purchase, adding a side item to receive a free beverage, or ordering delivery to receive free delivery on their next order.

• The feature is also meant to see what personalized elements consumers respond to as part of its future loyalty program.
• Throughout the past year-plus, Sweetgreen has been “testing personalized and cohorted offers” and iterating depending on the type of customer and their needs, Daniel Shlossman, Sweetgreen’s chief digital officer, told Retail Brew, with Rewards and Challenge being the latest.

“The beauty of something like Rewards and Challenges is that…you can give someone a challenge that is very different based on who they are as a customer versus someone else,” Shlossman said.

Trial and error: Shlossman said he hopes Rewards and Challenge will work in tandem with something like Sweetpass—the $10 subscription service the company tested for a month earlier this year. (It offered customers a $3 credit on certain orders once a day.)

• Sweetgreen sold just under 17,000 passes over the course of the pilot, according to the company. It found that 90% of customers surveyed said they were interested in purchasing a pass again after the trial, Shlossman said.
• And, as a bonus, 60% of subscribers were new, lapsed, or low-frequency customers.

“We’re gonna test our way there. We’re gonna continue to talk to customers about what they want, and this is that kind of next step in the process,” Shlossman said.

Looking ahead…What does the future of Sweetgreen’s broader loyalty program look like? Shlossman didn’t share a timeline but said it could feature a subscription and personalized promotional capabilities.

Sweetgreen is also very much about targeting digital customers: Those sales accounted for 66% of the company’s revenue of $102.6 million in Q1. “That’s really important for us to have that strong digital base,” Shlossman said. “We believe that [by] layering on things like Rewards and Challenges, we’re going to be able to up that value—especially as we’re heading into these tough economic times.”—KM

In the wake of the US Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, more companies vowed to assist employees who’d need to travel out of state for abortion access, following a wave that did so after a draft of the decision was leaked in May.

• Dick’s announced on Friday that it would provide up to $4,000 in travel reimbursement to any employee, spouse, or dependent (and one support person) who lives in a state that “restricts access to abortion,” and is enrolled in its medical plan.
• Other brands have also committed to reimbursing employees for abortion-related travel expenses, including Amazon, Patagonia, H&M, Disney, Starbucks, Levi Strauss & Co., PayPal, Yelp, Microsoft, and DoorDash.
• Following a law severely restricting access to abortion in Texas in 2021, Salesforce said it would pay to relocate employees living in Texas who “have concerns about access to reproductive healthcare in your state,” according to a Slack message to employees obtained by CNBC.

Last month, after the draft of the Roe v. Wade decision was leaked, a Retail Brew/Harris Poll survey asked consumers how retailers’ stances on abortion would likely shape their shopping behavior.

More than half of Gen Z respondents (52%) said they’d be much or somewhat more likely to shop at a retailer that announced it will provide financial assistance for employees who need to travel out-of-state for abortion, followed by millennials (41%), Gen X (28%), and boomers (25%).

• Responses also differed depending on income: 46% of those who earned $100,000+ said they’d be more likely to shop at a store that assisted employees with travel for abortion, compared to 27% of respondents who earned $50,000–$99,000, and 26% of those who earned <$50,000.

Check out our wrap-up of the survey here.—AAN

In the most volatile of times, companies often turn to market forecasts to understand how much pain they’re in for—and how long. But a wave of machine-learning startups wants to bring more immediacy to the practice. Enter “nowcasting,” which, as Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field put it, analyzes “up-to-the-minute data on everything from shipping costs to the prices of different cuts of beef.”

She recently spoke to Tony Nash, the founder and CEO of Complete Intelligence, a ML startup that specializes in “nowcasting,” about how it all works. Here’s an excerpt from her Q&A:

Can you put the idea of nowcasting in your own words—how it’s different from forecasting and the nature of what you do at Complete Intelligence?

So Complete Intelligence is a globally integrated machine learning platform for market finance and planning automation. In short, we’re a machine learning platform for time series data. And nowcasting is using data up to the immediate time period to get a quick snapshot on what the near-term future holds. You can do a nowcast weekly, daily, hourly, or minutely, and the purpose is really just to understand what’s happening in markets or in a company or whatever your outlook is right now.

And what sort of data do you use to fuel these predictions?

We use largely publicly available datasets. And we’re using billions of data items in our platform to understand how the world works…Macroeconomic data is probably the least reliable data that we use, so we use it for maybe a directional look, at best, at what’s happening. Currencies data is probably the most accurate data that we use, because currencies trade in such narrow bands. We use commodities data, from widely traded ones like oil and gold, to more obscure ones like molybdenum and some industrial metals. We’re also looking at individual equities and equity industries, and we track things like shipping times for goods—shipping times…are usually pretty good indicators of price rises.

Click here to read the full story on Emerging Tech Brew.—GT

Today’s top retail reads.

Think slow and hard: The tough choices fashion brands are making on inventory ahead of a possible recession. “This is one of those times where you have to be comfortable leaving a little bit on the table,” said Lively founder Michelle Cordeiro Grant. (Glossy)

At last blush: How Revlon ended up one step behind. (Financial Times)

We raise: The tech helping retailers try price hikes in real time. (Forbes)

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Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• “When I see brands get Gen Z wrong, we’re trying to put them in a box”: Understanding Zoomers’ purchasing behavior
• Making the case for Kellogg’s three-way split
• Where are they now: instant-delivery edition

Ahhhh, work travel, we’ve missed you. We love a conference, don’t you? Free food, smart people with inspiring ideas...aspirational breakfast meetings.

Which brings us to Retail Brew’s newest debut: The Sku: A Retail Brew Summit. Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• Meeting demand and maximizing profit
• Managing your organization across channels
• Creating omni-channel engagement with customer journeys
• Sustainability: Who is doing what and how?
• Using technology to drive sales

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