Looking for a Cheap or Low-Calorie Salad for Lunch? We Made a Tool to Help You

Lots of office workers choose salad as their lunch because of its convenience and healthiness. Comparing to a sandwich, salad usually has a higher price but lower calories.

We collected price and calorie data on salads from five popular restaurants. Pick your favorite protein the finder will show you where you can get either the cheapest salad or the one with the fewest calories. The prices and calorie counts listed below are based on orders with no alterations substitutions. Figures may vary with different customizations.

Click a protein and see the result below:

Find the nearest store.

Vegetable-only salads are not always the healthiest options. Many chicken salads, Caesar salads, and seafood salads often contain fewer calories than their vegetarian counterparts. The lowest-calorie salad on the list is, surprisingly, Chop’t’s California Steakhouse salad, with 230 calories, followed by Corner Bakery’s Spinach Sweet Crisp Salad and Chop’t Palm Beach shrimp salad, each with 240. The highest-calorie salad is Chop’t’s Texas Po’Boy chicken salad, which clocks in at 680.

For money-savers, a Caesar salad—even one with chicken—is often an affordable choice, though you might want to avoid seafood-based salads as much as possible. The cheapest seafood salad is Pret a Manger’s Salmon and Pickled Veggies Power Lunch, which at $9.29 is still more expensive than the most expensive Caesar, Sweetgreen’s Kale Caesar ($8.75). In fact, the three cheapest salads on the list are all Caesar salads: Chop’t’s Kale Caesar ($6.29) and Mexican Caesar ($6.49), and Corner Bakery’s Classic Caesar ($6.49).

Want to find more about your favorite salad? Check the full list below. Click the header to sort the column:

Manyun Zou

Web Fellow

Mandy is a web fellow at Washingtonian. She is a senior at Missouri School of Journalism. She focuses on reporting and visualizing news stories, in an effort to tell data-heavy stories in a more interesting and interactive way. Feel free to shoot Mandy an email or @ her at Twitter for ideas and thoughts.