Melissa Burghardt is a business executive and advisor with an expertise in scaling innovation across multiple industries.

Melissa has worked across food and technology developing teams and platforms that increased access to healthy food, helped small businesses grow, and optimized digital marketplaces globally. She is an expert in product strategy and innovation, leadership and team development, scaling business execution, and business transformation. Melissa leads by listening, building high-impact teams, meeting unmet needs, and creating interdisciplinary operations. She is passionate about unlocking potential and elevating individuals and teams. 

As Vice President of Ops Innovation and Ops Services at Sweetgreen, Melissa led structurally simplifying the operating model to make it easier to run a Sweetgreen restaurant, develop leaders from within, and scale the business. The new model is digitized and insights-driven for continuous improvement, leverages automation, and has clear team structure and career development. It delivers better and more consistent performance and experiences. 

Melissa was previously Chief Operating Officer at Miso Robotics where she drove initial commercialization of Miso’s food robotics and AI platform.