For eight straight years, Mediterranean food has been rated as the top diet by the U.S. News & World Report.
To Luna Grill president Rich Pinnella, that’s one of the many signs that growth in this segment is not a fad.
His brand is a good example. Luna Grill has experienced four straight years of same-store sales growth and eight straight quarters of transaction growth. In the first quarter, the fast casual’s comps rose almost 9 percent, fueled by traffic. On a two-year basis, it’s 15 percent same-store sales growth.
The San Diego Wave, a part of the National Women’s Soccer League, had been serving Luna Grill’s food even before the restaurant reached out about a possible partnership. Additionally, the chain’s number one catering customers are typically from the medical industry, a sector that’s very much aware of health and wellness.
“[The Mediterranean diet] is here to stay. It was here long before us and it’ll be here for a long, long time,” Pinnella says. “And eating patterns and eating habits are changing. I’ve got kids, and it’s very different today than when I was growing up in terms of what people are eating. They’re conscious about what they’re putting in their bodies and they’re conscious—millennials and Gen Z—about how it fuels them. When my kids played sports, we were never told what to feed our kids before a soccer game so they’re not gassed at the end when they have a doubleheader or something. And so more and more, we’re seeing that whether it’s for health and wellness or for sports related, we’re seeing a lot of shift for the better in terms of what people are eating.”
The restaurant has around 50 units throughout California and Texas.
Sean Pourteymour founded Luna Grill in 2004 with his wife Maria Trakas Pourteymour. The menu offers a variety of authentic Mediterranean dishes, like the Garlic Bonfire Shrimp Plate and Bistro Beef Kabob, which are seasoned, marinated, and cooked over an open flame. There are also salads, bowls, pitas, desserts, and meals for the family.
Two decades later, the founders maintain the goal of not just being a restaurant, but serving as a replacement kitchen “for all the rooftops around it.” That’s why the brand targets suburban markets and has always had a high percentage of off-premises orders, even before COVID.
“Especially in the U.S., not a lot of people cook,” Sean says. “I mean, you look at new apartments that they built, you barely have a kitchenette in there anymore. It’s just, that’s how it operates. And so I think we’re a restaurant by default, but first people look at us as their meal at home, so they pick it up from the kitchen and bring it home, and I think that speaks to our positive trends that we’ve experienced for a long time in that traffic growth because we are easy. And for you to go to the grocery store to buy all the ingredients and the time and clean up and all that, it would be more expensive. That’s why we’re so focused on quality all the time. We never ever give up on quality.”
Luna Grill slowed unit expansion during COVID because of the unknown, but the fast casual is back on track with six to seven openings in 2025 (12 percent growth year-over-year). With the flywheel of permitting and signed leases now in full swing, the concept should hit 20 percent unit count growth in 2026. In the years after that, Luna Grill hopes to hit somewhere between 20 percent and 25 percent. Anything over that number, Pinnella says it’s “pretty hard to control and then you start to lose your standards. So we want to be aggressive and responsible in terms of our growth.”
The brand also brought on CMO Billy Grenham, the former head of global marketing and communications for Taco Bell.
“The future is so exciting for a brand that puts their heart and soul into everything that they do,” Grenham says. “This is scratch made, this is cooked to order, these are premium proteins, but it’s also like a very digital-first approach. And the things that I’ve been able to see with our loyalty app Club Luna, our participation rate is off the charts, and now my job is to get more people into that engine, leveraging the mission of inspiring good food choices through partnerships, professional athletes, yoga studios, dieticians—everything is on the table with this brand because we can be unapologetic about what we serve and how we serve it, which is incredibly exciting.”
California is the home market, so Luna Grill will continue to grow there. The brand is also finding more opportunities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The brand will enter Arizona for the first time this year, and Nevada will be next.
“So whether we’re working with influencers or new markets, those who are aware of us, we want to play with those people,” Sean says. “And it’s amazing how much awareness actually we have because the brand’s 20 years old and been in San Diego for 20 years, so we’ve been here for a while. Now we’re having our second stage of growth. Pretty amazing the amount of people in Arizona who want Luna Grill. Pretty amazing the amount of people in Nevada. So when we go and do market research and we hear about that, it’s much easier to do that.”
Luna Grill, which is completely company-owned, has received franchising inquiries from around the world. Sean will never say “absolutely no to anything in the future,” but it’s not something the chain is considering currently.
Instead, the fast casual is focused on ROIs and pushing the company forward in a “controlled way.”
“Inspiring good food choices is just so spot on right now with what’s going on in the Mediterranean space,” Sean says. “I think for us, building the team that we have, we’ve brought in the right people and the right executive team who not only comes with that functional expertise, but actually comes with an absolute slant to caring about people and culture and because you’ve heard it before and you will hear it from good companies—we are a people company that happens to sell great-tasting Mediterranean food. And the culture is what I’m probably most proud of and the driving force behind how we treat each other, how we treat our guests, and the work that we produce. People genuinely care about what we do and how we do it.”