Dive Brief:
- Cava posted same-store sales growth of 2% in Q2 2025, according to the brand’s earnings release, with that growth driven by pricing actions and menu mix shifts and relatively flat traffic.
- In an interview, CFO Tricia Tolivar emphasized the brand’s two- and three-year comps growth, which include more than 19% three-year traffic growth. Lapping last year’s steak debut also limited Cava’s same-store sales growth this year.
- Q2 2025 seems to have finally hit the pause button on fast casual’s ability to take share from QSRs: McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Domino’s all outperformed Cava, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Wingstop and Shake Shack.
Dive Insight:
A great many QSRs — Pizza Hut, KFC, Jack in the Box — posted weak quarterly performance, but throughout 2024 and into this year, segment-leading fast casuals tended to grow sales faster than segment-leading QSRs.
Tolivar said on the earnings call that the macroeconomic environment “creates a fog for consumers where things are changing constantly. It's hard to see clearly. And during those times, [consumers] tend to step off of the gas.” The chain trimmed its full-year sales outlook from 6% to 8% comps growth to 4% to 6%, as a result of this macro weakness.
Cava's same-store sales
Despite the uncertainty, Cava is still seeing growth in its market share and hasn’t seen significant shifts in consumer price sensitivity, Tolivar said, which could bode well for the brand.
“When looking at premium attachments — incidence of premium items — we're not seeing any shift. In fact, we're seeing increases. Our fan favorite pita chips continue to grow in incidence, and that's a premium item that's often attached,” Tolivar said. She added that the brand’s sales remain consistent across income cohorts and market types.
On the brand’s earnings call, Tolivar said some of the sales stagnation was caused by a honeymoon effect with the 2024 cohort of store openings. Last year’s openings were particularly strong — the brand’s entry to the Chicago market l was its strongest new market opening up to that point — and the chain hasn’t seen quite the same level of sales performance this year.
“What we're experiencing is incredible results from our 2024 class as well as our '25 class, with the '24 class coming into the [comparison] base and having an impact on sales from a same-restaurant sales perspective,” Tolivar said. The 2024 cohort is still outperforming the brand’s initial expectations, however.
Cava is one the major brands shifting back toward a focus on in-restaurant experience, alongside Starbucks. The brand has developed a repertoire of design elements — nicer seats, warmer colors, softer curves, sometimes greenery like olive trees — to make its stores more welcoming, Tolivar said. This effort, Project Soul, has been ongoing since early 2024, and Tolivar said that the class of 2025 stores incorporate about 80% of the design tenets of Project Soul.
Starting next year, all new openings will have the complete Project Soul design package, Tolivar said. The brand will continue updating existing stores with some elements.
