Brett Schulman’s partners have a joke about the arrangement that brought him into CAVA: they hired their boss. He hears it differently. The three men already had the recipes, the restaurants and the customers. He arrived with experience in finance and packaged food, helped with the business, and stayed. “I’m their co-founder. I’m their partner.” It is an unusually revealing correction for someone whose company now counts its restaurants in hundreds.
By September 2026, CAVA had reached 500 restaurants. Schulman had helped take it public, acquire a much larger competitor and turn Mediterranean dips into the foundation of a national business. Yet the partnership remains the useful starting point. The food preceded his arrival. His contribution was to help work out how many more people could eat it, and what kind of company would be required to serve them.
The fourth chair
His route to that table included a discarded legal career and a finance career that lasted much longer. At the University of Maryland, he studied criminal justice and criminology, imagining law school ahead. His degree was in behavioral and social sciences; he graduated in 1995. An internship steered him toward Alex. Brown. His subsequent financial work included Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown and FBR Securities. Restaurants were still a different chapter.
There was a quieter performance measure at home. His wife, Mary, noticed that Sunday evenings brought a change in his mood as Monday approached. A respectable career had become something he dreaded returning to. It is the sort of domestic observation that earns no space on a résumé, though it can explain the résumé’s next line better than any polished account of professional ambition.
Mary and her mother had founded Snikiddy Snacks. Schulman became its chief operating officer in 2006, moving from financial markets into a business with physical products and retail customers. He stayed in that operating role until 2010 and remained a partner through 2015. The experience gave him something useful to bring to people who knew their food but needed help getting a packaged version onto supermarket shelves.
The introduction came through a college connection to Ted Xenohristos. Xenohristos, Dimitri Moshovitis and Ike Grigoropoulos had opened CAVA Mezze in Rockville in 2006. Their restaurant business had expanded, and their dips and spreads had found a place in Whole Foods. Schulman began by helping with the retail operation. The invitation to become the fourth partner followed. First, he and Mary went to dinner.
What persuaded him was the experience of the room: the staff’s energy, the hospitality, the sense of a family business that welcomed people into it. He called the owners the next day and committed. A spreadsheet could describe what the restaurant earned. Dinner showed him what people might return for. He would spend the following years trying to carry that feeling into a format that could reach a larger audience.
“You do not have to have it all figured out.”Brett Schulman, speaking to business students in 2025
In January 2011, the first fast-casual CAVA opened in Bethesda. Customers could walk along a serving line and assemble their meal. The format made the choices approachable without requiring a long explanation of the cuisine. Moshovitis had a name for it: “chef casual.” A chef’s food could fit into the working day. Lunch, after all, has a habit of arriving with a deadline.
Schulman’s formal company biography dates his CAVA co-founding role to 2010. That matters because the familiar shorthand of a founder story can swallow the people who were there earlier. CAVA Mezze’s original trio supplied the culinary foundation. Schulman helped develop the packaged business and the fast-casual concept. The chronology gives each contribution its place, rather than turning the CEO into the author of everything that came before him.
A small restaurant, a large purchase
Growth did not make every opening an obvious success. At a mall location in 2012, Schulman encountered an alarming lack of customers. The restaurant sat down a corridor where people needed a reason to discover it. With enough money for only a few openings, a quiet room was a consequential problem. The lesson was practical: people who liked the food still had to find the front door.
The distance between that uncertainty and the next major gamble was six years. In 2018, CAVA agreed to buy Zoës Kitchen for approximately $300 million. At the time of the announcement, the buyer had about 65 restaurants; the target had more than 260. The size difference was plain enough to make the deal sound backward. Schulman saw a route into the suburban markets where CAVA wanted to grow.
Restaurant counts at the acquisition announcement. Approximate scale; Zoës had more than four times the locations.
The acquisition brought locations and an organization that needed substantial work. Soon after closing, Schulman recalls opening a report showing a 12 percent decline in comparable Zoës sales. He called Mary, worried about what the purchase had done to years of effort. There is something clarifying about that image: a CEO reading a number on a flight, then reaching for the person who knew the history behind his alarm.
The two businesses also approached their kitchens differently. Zoës operated with 276 ingredients; CAVA had 83. Simplifying the acquired operation became one of the jobs of integration. That comparison captures the unglamorous underside of a restaurant deal. A lease gives you somewhere to serve lunch. A workable pantry, trained staff and repeatable preparation give you a chance to serve it consistently.
Ron Shaich, the Panera founder and a CAVA board member, was among the people whose guidance helped Schulman through the integration. Schulman would describe 2019 as the year he earned his business Ph.D. The curriculum involved narrowing priorities and redistributing leadership responsibilities. A purchase meant to create scale had also exposed the limits of a chief executive trying to hold too much of the operation himself.
Learning to leave the room
CAVA went public in June 2023. The listing added another audience to the restaurant company: investors awaiting financial results and explanations of what would come next. Schulman’s finance background had become relevant in a different setting. This time, the numbers belonged to a business whose appeal he had experienced across a dinner table, and whose daily performance depended on thousands of other people.
He has spoken candidly about what expansion takes away. He cannot attend every opening. People who did well in an earlier version of the business can struggle with the expectations of a larger role. Those decisions are difficult precisely because the relationships matter. His account of leadership has become less about the excitement of doing more and more about choosing where attention is actually useful.
The Spurs’ Gregg Popovich was an influence he named in 2017: a coach whose emphasis on teamwork endured as players changed. Schulman’s interests away from work sound less corporate. He has described family travel with Mary and their three children, including a trip to Iceland and Europe. He listens to Wilco. His family’s verdict on that taste is rather less reverent than a leadership award.
A restaurant company offers many occasions to measure performance. Schulman also wants employees to have latitude in the interaction itself. CAVA’s “love button” allows a team member to give a guest a complimentary meal. The person at the register can make a small judgment about another person. That gesture places some of the company’s hospitality in the hands of someone close enough to see the guest.
The next 500 tables
The 500-restaurant milestone arrived with an opening in Minneapolis on September 23, 2026. All four co-founders gathered for the celebration. Fifteen years separated it from the first Bethesda fast-casual restaurant. Minnesota added a new state to a footprint that now covered 30 states and Washington, D.C. The company was looking ahead to at least 1,000 restaurants by 2032. A round number had become another starting point.
There are useful distinctions inside the growth figures. At the end of the second quarter of 2026, CAVA had 476 restaurants. Its quarterly CAVA revenue reached $365.4 million, up 31.3 percent from a year earlier. Comparable restaurant sales increased 9 percent, including 5.3 percent guest traffic growth. New openings and fuller existing restaurants both contributed. A growing map and a returning customer answer different questions about a business.
Schulman sees the next phase depending on a pipeline of general managers. More restaurants require people prepared to run them. CAVA’s development initiative, Flavor Your Future, addresses that need. His own progression makes the emphasis understandable: every expansion has asked him to do a different job. The same will be true for employees whose responsibilities grow with the company.
He also wants people to keep sitting down together. CAVA’s Project Soul redesign introduces softer seating, greenery and warmer lighting. Digital ordering occupies a substantial share of the business, but a dining room remains somewhere people can spend time. Cameras that help anticipate preparation needs and other operational tools can support the work behind that room. The point of a smoother operation is still the experience it produces.
Schulman’s career has involved learning to trust a different kind of evidence at each turn: his wife’s observation, the atmosphere at dinner, an unpleasant sales report, the judgment of colleagues. Now the company’s ambitions require many more people to exercise judgment without him standing beside them. The fourth partner has helped make the table larger. His continuing job is to make sure there are people ready to welcome whoever comes next.