Cava continues to outperform fast-casual competitors including Chipotle and Sweetgreen, reporting on Tuesday a 9% increase in same-restaurant sales and 5.3% growth in guest traffic during Q2 2026. Those figures represent a slight deceleration from Q1 marks of 9.7% and 6.8%, respectively, but the chain still beat Wall Street expectations.
Along with trumpeting its category-defining brand and resonance of its value proposition, CEO and Co-founder Brett Schulman noted on an earnings call the success of the Mediterranean Summer Supper Series, a three-part dining experience the chain launched this summer in collaboration with Airbnb. The experiences brought together nearly 300 guests and generated more than 6 million views on content across the events, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
“I think you'll be seeing some more analog-type experiences from us that then can create that amplification or network effect on social channels versus some of the tactics that were more utilized over the last couple years that I think have been challenged in the recent changes in the landscape on social media,” the executive said on the earnings call.
Cava’s competitors are active on the marketing front. Chipotle expects marketing costs to represent about 3% of sales for the full year, while Sweetgreen last year increased marketing spend and has recently shifted marketing mix toward upper- and middle-funnel media.
To further boost its marketing efforts, Cava, which went public in 2023, is currently in the process of bringing on a new CMO who will be focused on brand marketing and creative, Schulman said on the call. Andrew Rebhun, previously the chain’s chief marketing and experience officer, joined Panera as CMO last week.
Marketing Dive earlier this summer connected with Nitya Madhavan, senior vice president of brand and marketing at Cava, about the chain’s efficient marketing, approach to creators, artificial intelligence experiments and more. The executive currently has a remit that spans the full marketing funnel: creative, public relations, communications, social partnerships, brand marketing operations, media, loyalty and user experience.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
MARKETING DIVE: Cava spends just over 1% of revenue on marketing. How does that affect your strategy?
NITYA MADHAVAN: We are very lucky that we are a brand that is growing quite rapidly, and we're on track to hit that 1,000 restaurant mark by 2032. As we grow, we consider it an opportunity to expand the understanding of our brand and grow awareness, so we employ a lot of local marketing efforts, whether it's reaching out to local creators or influencers to help spread the message or tapping into the community.
In terms of how are we doing that with such an efficient marketing spend, we use social as a key part of our strategy, both organic and unpaid, but it's really important to us to be partnering with creators and building content that feels very aligned to our values.
We're not in the business of chasing trends or paying for somebody to like our brand or like our food. We are able to partner with these people and brands where it's clear that their love for Cava, their understanding of Cava and the benefits of having food that's both nourishing and delicious really comes through, so we've been able to maximize our reach that way.
How are you approaching creators as that part of marketing continues to grow across industries?
Social has changed a lot in terms of what people are seeing and how people are creating content. We have a pretty robust in-house social team that is responsible for both thinking about our overall strategy. But also we do content creation in house, and we've actually increased the investment in that, and brought on more people dedicated to that in-house.
We have our own partnerships with creators who reach out to us, or we have our relationships with people that we worked with in the past, or want to work with. But where it makes sense, we also partner with agencies, like our New York bear stunt in April – that was actually a fun idea that came to us from one of our social agencies, Loop. It was something that we'd been talking about — bears love salmon. They also had similar inspiration, so we brought them in to help execute that.
You previously worked at Instagram and Meta. How do you see social channels evolving?
We're constantly watching how the algorithms are changing and what people are watching. We are all social media natives ourselves, and so we see it too, in terms of what content is being served to us, and we've taken some new bets this year, and really tried to think about how we think about content
A great example is our Bowlmates dating show, where we created a separate channel, knowing that content can have its own moment [and] knowing that the algorithm is serving content to people that don't just follow you anymore. How do you reach these non-followers and really help them understand the story, and and tap into what people are watching, which is a lot more short form content?
I saw Instagram is going on TV, so this space is just going to continue to grow and get a little bit more complex, and I think we are open to trying new things as long as it continues to really connect back to our concept and essence and who we are and aligns to the values.
How is Cava approaching loyalty as part of the marketing flywheel?
We have significantly invested in and improved our loyalty program over the last year. For us, loyalty is more than just a way for people to build points and spend with us, but it's about building that relationship with guests by being able to give them access to information, give them rewards, make them feel part of our community and our brand.
We will be investing in more personalized experiences. We were doing a lot more gamification ideas this year, and fun ways for our loyalty members to engage with the brand through the app, whether it's collecting badges, doing some fun games — a lot of fun ways to explore and invest in our brand, but also give a reason to come back.
The other thing is that we launched our tiers program this year. We have the three main tiers, but then for our most frequent and most loyal guests, we have a secret tier, Oasis, that's invite-only. Again, this idea of being part of this community and really building a personal connection with some of our Oasis members and our loyalty members is our goal. We think that personalization and recognition of these loyalty members is going to be increasingly important, and it's something that we want to do, because seeing people connecting with people, building those one-to-one experiences and connections is what we want to strive to do within our restaurants every single day.
Artificial intelligence continues to be the focus of the marketing world. Where is Cava with regards to AI?
We are definitely looking at AI: how do we improve from an efficiency and productivity perspective, but also we're watching and trying to understand what is the role of AI from a creative generative perspective for the industry, for Cava, et cetera.
We are very open to it, but we also want to be careful and really thoughtful about how we use AI. We've definitely integrated it from a process perspective internally, and how we're thinking about AI as we think about the work that we do to be more efficient and how we bring ideas to life. But in terms of actually integrating AI into our outward facing creative, you're not going to see a lot of that yet. A lot of that is still very organic, it’s human-captured content, it's human interactions with our guests, and that's something that we want to continue to invest in.
I’d love to have this conversation again in six months, and see where we are, because it's definitely something that's top of mind for the team to constantly be aware of exploring and understanding how we're marketing.
