Meet The Montreal Sisters Behind The Mandy’s Salads Empire
Mandy (left) and Rebecca Wolfe, the founds of Mandy's Salads.
“This is where Jennifer Aniston sat.”
I’m perched on a millennial pink leather banquette in Mandy’s Gourmet Salads’ flagship location in Montreal’s Old Port. To my right, Rebecca Wolfe gives me the celebrity dish while tucking into a pretty porcelain bowl of veg. To my left, Mandy Wolfe—yes, the Mandy—is eating a Wolfe, the cult salad of her own creation: a $20 mix of kale, mesclun greens, arugula, avocado, cherry tomatoes, shredded carrots, quinoa, walnuts, parmesan and tamari dressing. And then there’s me, with a Wolfe of my own, sandwiched between salad royalty.
As we chew (and chew, and chew), a steady stream of customers outfitted in a mix of athleisure and office casual winds its way past mountains of Mandy’s merch—Chocolate bars! Scented candles! Hand soap!—to order their own Wolfes or Habibis or Cactus Cowboys. In the sizeable open kitchen behind the Carrara marble counter, a perpetually scooping team of salad artists assembles each bowl from a vast well of perfectly prepped ingredients. For every customer who takes their salad to-go (in a pink-and-green paper bag, natch), another stays put, pulling up a lacquered rattan bistro chair to a marble bistro table and taking in the airy, checkerboard-floored space (a former printing press) while an eclectic mix of Euro folk plays at perfect volume in the background. It’s the complete antithesis of all those sad desk salad memes.
The 75-seat Old Port location—often graced by celebrities shooting films in town, including Aniston, Adam Sandler and Owen Wilson—is the crown jewel in the Montreal-based salad chain’s palm-fronded pastel empire. Mandy’s 15-restaurants-and-counting portfolio now includes Toronto and Ottawa, with Vancouver and Calgary on the horizon. (The chain is privately owned by Mandy, 47, and Rebecca, 42, who remain hands-on and have no immediate plans for franchising. “Too scary,” says Rebecca.)
Aside from the endless merch, there are two bestselling cookbooks, an ever-expanding line of grocery-store products, a Via Rail partnership (and one with Air Canada in the works), as well as ambitions for an eventual U.S. expansion. “We’d love to become the Starbucks of salad,” says Rebecca. She’s also working on a housewares line, Mandy’s Maison, that will include tableware and textiles. The ultimate goal, aside from Starbies-style world domination? “Mandy’s wallpaper,” says Rebecca, who currently sources the whimsically patterned papers found in the restaurants from brands like Anthropologie and de Gournay. “That’s the dream.”
In 2004, after studying at the Parsons School of Design in New York City, 21-year-old Rebecca Wolfe returned to Montreal with a tender green leaf of an idea. She could find a decent salad bar inside almost every corner bodega in NYC, but not in Montreal. And so, she convinced Mandy—the 26-year-old foodie of the family, who has been baking a version of the restaurant’s now famous brown-butter-laced chocolate chip cookies since she was 11—to quit her teaching job. Then she convinced her boyfriend (now husband) Vince Cavallo to let her open a salad counter in the back of his Westmount clothing store, Mimi and Coco, rent-free. And unto us, Mandy’s was born.
Rebecca decorated the 200-square-foot space—originally called Coco Café, until Chanel caught word—and Mandy developed the recipes, a mutually agreeable division of labour that remains in place today. The sisters would spend their mornings shopping for salad greens at Costco and meat at a Mile End butcher, their afternoons slinging salads (which they first served in 500-mL clear plastic containers) and their evenings making dressings and roasting chicken breasts at their apartments because the store didn’t have a stove. “We did a lot of stuff at home, much to the illegal nature of it,” says Mandy with a laugh. After nine years of steadily gaining a following—and opening a second salad counter at another Mimi and Coco location—they rented a 500-square-foot storefront on Sherbrooke Street.
“It was terrifying,” says Rebecca, “but on day one, someone was waiting at the door for us to open.” The Sherbrooke storefront was the first time Rebecca could fully flex her design skills, and she decorated the space with sage green patterned wallpaper, a white-washed antique cash counter and the first of the brand’s now-signature feature walls of joyful black-and-white Wolfe family photos.
Rebecca had also pushed to rename the business—which at that point was called Greens & Co.—after her sister. Her reasoning? Whenever someone stopped her on the street and asked where she got the salad she was eating, she said “Mandy’s.” (Mandy’s stickers, which they started putting on their containers, were their first foray into branding.)
After what Mandy describes as two “rock-and-roll” years at Sherbrooke, sales increased 300 percent over what they were doing at the counters. (One counter closed in 2013; the other remained open until 2023.) In 2015, the sisters, both pregnant at the time, decided to open a second standalone location on Crescent St., in the heart of Montreal’s downtown.
By the time Mandy’s opened on Crescent St., fancy greens were becoming a hot commodity—but the ambiance of most fast-casual salad restaurants remained iceberg basic. The Canadian chain Freshii was pumping out Fiesta salads and Pangoa grain bowls in upwards of 200 fluorescent-lit locations across 15 countries. In the U.S., salad super-chains Sweetgreen and Chopt were steadily opening minimalist storefronts, while the Kardashians were regularly filmed eating huge takeout salads from a no-frills counter called Health Nut, located in a Calabasas strip mall.
“A lot of salad restaurants feel so clinical,” says Rebecca. “You don’t feel sexy in there. You don’t want to go there for dinner.” On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine the KUWTK clan gathered around the Old Port location’s pink banquette, clutching the brand’s signature golden forks.
“Mandy’s is an experience from start to finish,” says Kelly Higginson, president and CEO of Restaurants Canada, a non-profit that advocates for the country’s food service industry. The brand, she notes, occupies the wellness space that’s so appealing to Gen Z consumers—who, along with millennials, are now the most important demographic to the future of the restaurant industry. “They’re not spending as much of their money on late-night partying. They’re spending $45 on a yoga class,” she says. “Mandy’s falls into that [same] category.”
Earning this powerful demographic’s buy-in goes beyond what’s on the menu. “In the current restaurant environment, you need more than good service and good food,” says Jacob Mancini, vice president of restaurant finance at the National Bank of Canada. “Gen Z wants something unique, something Instagrammable—and that’s what Mandy’s is.” They’re also willing to pay for it. Most of Mandy’s salads—which are packed with a ridiculous number of ingredients, 90 percent of which are sourced in Canada—can veer into $25 territory after tax and tip.
Both Mancini and Mandy’s president Vanessa Fracheboud (who is also a Restaurants Canada board member) stress that a successful restaurant brand needs to live outside the four walls of its locations. “If you want to have a cult following, you need people to bring a little piece of [the experience] back home,” says Fracheboud. She was a card-carrying member of the Mandy’s fan club long before the Wolfes hired her in 2023. “Whenever someone on my team at my previous job was promoted,” she says, “I brought them to Mandy’s to celebrate.”
After the 2,000-square-foot Crescent Street restaurant opened, Mandy and Rebecca were still a constant presence at all three locations—so much so that Mandy wore her first baby strapped to her chest while she worked the cash, until one fateful day when the baby projectile vomited milk onto a customer. “She was a mother too, and we had known her for years, but still...” says Mandy. “By the time I had my second baby, I had a nanny.”
Big broods run in the family; the sisters now have seven kids between them. Mandy and Rebecca themselves are two of four, born and raised in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and Westmount neighbourhoods. Their late dad, Jason Wolfe, was a fashion importer (first lambskin, then Ralph Lauren) and their mom, Judy Wood, was a teacher and flight attendant turned stay-at-home parent who now occasionally pops up on Mandy’s socials.
As their empire grew, the Wolfes hired a consultant to help them build and train a team. “We couldn’t be behind the cash anymore,” says Rebecca, “but we needed to make sure the guest experience would be the same when we weren’t there.” Today they employ 400 workers across 15 restaurants, plus 40 head office employees who work out of a refurbished warehouse in Montreal’s trendy Saint-Henri neighbourhood. Hiring Fracheboud allowed the Wolfes to focus on their passions—design, merch and brand aesthetics for Rebecca, developing seasonal menus and products for Mandy—while also visiting their current and future locations and filming videos for Instagram and TikTok. (They recently dressed up as fried eggs to promote Mandy’s new breakfast offerings.)
From the start, says Rebecca, she wanted to humanize the brand. Hence the name, the cookbooks full of family memories (“When the first cookbook was published, we were like, ‘Oh, shit, we just published a diary,’” she says), the sisters’ constant social media presence and the now-ubiquitous photo walls. “They help guests connect with who we are,” says Rebecca, who seems more comfortable in the spotlight than her sister. When I ask Mandy if she likes being the brand’s namesake, she hesitates. Rebecca jumps in: “Yes, you do!” Of the two, Mandy is more reserved in personality and style—her Green Goddess vibes are a zen counterpart to Rebecca’s leopard-like flash. (Wildcats, perhaps uncoincidentally, are a common design motif in the restaurants.)
Being the main characters in their brand story also means people know exactly where to direct their complaints, whether related to avocado shortages—“If we run out, it ruins their day,” says Mandy—or other matters. “We got so much heat for staying open [for takeout and delivery in the early days of the pandemic],” says Rebecca. “People we knew and loved in our community were publicly hating on us.” Five years later, a meet-and-greet with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre caused another uproar.
“We were asked to host a lunch for him,” says Rebecca. “He wanted to meet entrepreneurs.” The resulting photo op—the sisters and Fracheboud alongside Poilievre and two other local politicians—went viral after Poilievre posted it online, leading some Mandy’s fans to call for a boycott. (While commenters in one Reddit thread were mixed on whether to go cold turkey on the restaurants, they agreed the cookbooks were excellent—and suggested the boycotters buy one.)
“It was the biggest mistake,” says Mandy of the meeting. “We’ve always been very clear about not associating religion or politics with Mandy’s,” continues Rebecca. “But I think because we’ve been loud on some social issues, and not others, it’s like we can’t win.”
As our lunch winds down, the sisters disappear into the kitchen, and the manager of the Old Port location—a woman named Kelly who has worked for Mandy’s since 2006—immediately slips over. “These women are beautiful people on the outside and the inside, and you can quote me on that,” she says. The declaration seems entirely heartfelt and unrehearsed; throughout the day I meet multiple employees who have been with the brand since its salad days.
The restaurant’s many repeat customers are similarly devoted. “I crave the Wolfe salad at least once or twice a week,” says Janna Zittrer, a 41-year-old Montreal-born, Toronto-based copywriter who has been frequenting Mandy’s since its 500-mL plastic container days. “They were one of the first brands to millenify the takeout salad and make it sexy.”
Three locations, two sexy salads and one kale-and-mint smoothie later, my Mandy’s immersion has drawn to a close, and I’m on the drab grey train back home to Toronto. There is no sultry version of “The Girl from Ipanema” playing in the background, no pink porcelain jaguars in sight. One bright spot: VIA started selling pre-packaged Mandy’s salads last fall. When the food cart comes rolling down the aisle, the 20-something woman seated ahead of me has the same idea—but unfortunately for both of us, they’re already sold out.
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Maureen Halushak is the editor-in-chief of Chatelaine. Outside of work she's an avid runner, writer, reader and dog walker.
