Courtesy of Sarah Haselkorn

The salad station at Green Bean. Green Bean is a new restaurant in the Central West End that focuses on healthy, fast eating. Co-Founder Sarah Haselkorn is a junior at Washington University.

A recent restaurateur of Green Bean, a new salad bar opening in the Central West End, Haselkorn says that she has always been “on a fast track to just do something.” It all began with a summer camp she managed throughout middle school.

“I basically just had girls to my house, and we’d make arts and crafts and do a spa and water day for a week or two every summer,” Haselkorn said. “Thinking back on that, that business was run out of a three ring binder and my expense report was, like, one receipt from Michaels arts and crafts. I made $550 that summer, which was really exciting for me, I guess, as a 12-year-old.”

Haselkorn’s most recent development, Green Bean, is a slightly more complex business model than her middle school endeavor. Originally from Washington, D.C., Haselkorn and her longtime friend and business partner Nick Guzman, a 2011 graduate from Amherst College, thought up the idea for Green Bean last fall. Both had grown up with sustainable restaurants Sweetgreen and Chop’t, which serve as inspiration for their own restaurant.

“There was definitely nothing like those places in St. Louis, and we just thought they were great ideas,” Haselkorn said. “And I mean, I know as a student here I feel like the healthy options that are available are very overpriced or intimidating, like making my own salad from a salad bar. I’m not very good at that. I didn’t know what to put in it. It never tasted good. I never wanted to eat it, and I just felt that if there were more healthy options available people would go there.”

After deciding to commit to the project, the business partners spent last fall drafting a 50-page business plan, combining Haselkorn’s systems engineering major and Guzman’s liberal arts degree to create the optimal approach to this lofty venture. The two presented the document to their family and friends, who soon became their investors. Once the funding was set, they began to transform a small space in the Central West End into a functional business.

“We reused a lot of materials because the whole idea is that we are sustainable,” Haselkorn said. “One of the things we’re doing with construction is that in the demolition [of the old building], we salvaged all the wood that was there before, and we used 100 percent of it for a ton of different things, so that saved us a lot of material costs.”

Aside from the physical construction, Haselkorn contacted a family friend and award-winning chef in Washington, D.C. to help them assemble a menu, which now consists of eight pre-designed salads and a make-your-own assembly line station.

“Sustainable. Local. Fresh. Those are definitely the words we want associated with us,” Haselkorn explained. “We aren’t really into the label organic. A lot of time organic is a label that is purchased, so saying something is organic doesn’t necessarily mean that it is completely the best that it can be.”

All of the food, cutlery and dishes used in the restaurant will be compostable or recyclable. Haselkorn hopes that Green Bean and its sustainable model will not only help motivate St. Louis to catch up with the green movement but may expand to surrounding areas as well.

“We’d kind of like to be a big company that’s a small business if that makes any sense,” Haselkorn said. “We always want to be the neighborhood restaurant. We aren’t ever going to be a chain; that’s not something we want to be. But we would like to impact as many people and communities as we can, and expanding is probably the best way to do that in the future.”

Green Bean will be open for the public by the end of this week. It is located on 232 N. Euclid Avenue. Green Bean also hopes to cater campus events as well as sponsor healthy lifestyle events for the community, such as walks and exercise dates.

“St. Louis has so much potential,” Haselkorn made a point to add before departing. “I just want to see St. Louis get everything that they want because there is a desire for these things, but they don’t have the resources or the people willing to do it. So it’s like, let’s just do it together.”