“There was a void in fast food salads,” says Bob Goldin of Pantellect, Inc., a food business consultancy in Chicago. “It was an open playing field.” McDonalds may have tried to make a mark on the space, but its core consumers weren’t really buying the home of the hamburger as the spot to get salad at that point, and the dearth of options made it easier to stake a claim in the space. Of today’s frontrunning franchises, Chopt was the first to come on the scene, in 2001; JustSalad and Tender Greens followed in 2006. Sweetgreen didn’t open the doors of its first location until 2007, but has since come out at the front of the pack. (Certainly, there are plenty of other fast-casual spots that sell salad and came first, including Fresh&Co and Pret-a-Manger, but their breadth of menu options puts them in a slightly different category.) Nowadays, Goldin sees fast-casual salad chains as still in the early stages, and the space as filling up — but by no means full.