March 1, 2024 • 32 mins
Salad and Go’s mission -- to make fresh, nutritious food affordable and convenient for all -- is unique in the restaurant industry, CEO Charlie Morrison tells Bloomberg Intelligence. In this episode of the Choppin’ It Up podcast, Morrison sits down with BI’s senior restaurant and foodservice analyst Michael Halen to explain how the company’s vertically integrated approach allows it to sell salads and wraps for under $7. He also comments on this year’s plans to boost brand awareness as well as its expansion into catering and delivery.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Welcome to Chopping It Up. I'm your host, Mike Hallon,
the senior restaurant and food service analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Today we're joined by Charlie Morrison, CEO of Salad and Go.
Thanks for doing this, Charlie, My pleasure great to be here.
All right, So, I'm sure many in the audience are
unaware that you moonlight as a farmer. So when are
(00:37):
we going to see the bottom in corn and soybean prices?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Man? Oh, well, actually right now they're lower than they
were in the fourth quarter, So that's good, I actually
believe it or not. I have I don't remember how
many bushels of beans in the grain elevator waiting to sell,
and my wife is like, hey, when are you going
to sell those peans? You got to get that done
for real. Yeah, I am. I got a place in
(01:03):
Kansas that's my home and we farm, and I also
have some cattle out there, and it's a it's a
fun thing to do to get away to decompress, but
it also gets you much closer to the root of
what it is we do in restaurants, which is, you know,
making fresh food available for people all over the place.
(01:25):
So Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, it's very cool. You're also in the process of
establishing your farm as regenerative, So what are the some
of the requirements that you have to adhere to do that.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, it's a process, And to be very candid with you,
I'm still learning. When I got to salad and goo,
I got a lot more, a lot closer, I guess
to you know where the food is ultimately coming from,
and I think, you know, consumers want that as well,
and so smarter for me to make sure I'm getting
closer to it. And then when I have my own farm,
(02:00):
I'm starting to learn about what's happening with tilling and
spraying and everything that goes on in in farming today.
And it's challenging. It's having a negative effect on our environment.
It's impacting soil erosion and desertification of soils, and we
need to figure out a way to fix that because
(02:20):
fixing that ultimately has a connection to our carbon footprint
and being able to take carbon out of the atmosphere
and put it back into the ground where it belongs.
So the concept of regenerative farming in a simplistic way,
my simplistic way, I'm no scientist. Is the idea of
letting the land be the land and keeping keeping your
(02:42):
you know, your your grasses and your crops. You know,
in a point where you're always having something growing right,
there's always something in the base. There's mulching, no tilling,
you know, establishing a groundcover that can retur the moisture
and the soil and also retain the carbon from the atmosphere.
(03:04):
I inherited this farm and it was a till kill
till kill, and so it takes a few years to
actually make this happen where you can start to plant
Kraffer crops, put them in play, have them available year round.
And what I've learned really quickly is I have fewer weeds,
I have to use less chemical, less fertilizer. I'm getting
(03:25):
more abundant yields. We had a drought year last year,
and we had some of the best yields in the
area compared to anybody on our products. And so as
I continue to do this, probably over the next two years,
we'll get better about it and ultimately do our part
in my seven hundred acres or so to give back
to the environment as best we can and hopefully use
that as a way to inspire others to adopt an
(03:48):
approach to regenerative farming that's necessary in our society.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
I love it. I feel like it doesn't get enough
attention compared to stuff like plant based meat. It's just
not as sexy, right, But you know, I see that
companies are starting to pay more attention to it, which
I think is a very good thing.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah. Look, I think I think companies should adopt the
practices into their supply chain strategies as quickly as they can.
The sooner they do it, the better. It's hard to
force it, but I think you can teach and educate,
and the more we learn about what really is happening
with their carbon footprint, the better good stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
All right, So you had a phenomenal run at Wingstop,
and to be completely honest with you, I was surprised
when I heard you were taking the Salid and Go job.
So why don't you share what attracted you to the brand?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, you're right, I mean, what an amazing opportunity to
have led Wingstop for ten years and through its IPO
and growth and quite frankly just watching it literally down
the street. The team's right down the street from me.
Now and seeing the great work that they're doing to
carry on the performance and continue to grow that brand
is And you know, in twenty twenty, I got a
(05:04):
phone call from a recruiter friend of mine and they said, Hey,
there's this small little company and based in Phoenix, Arizona
that is doing something really unique and a bit disruptive
in our space, and they're looking for board members and
they want to talk to you. And I really think
you ought to take a look at it. But it's
only twenty stores, and I was like, I don't know,
(05:24):
you know, startups, you know, those are challenging and what
are we doing? But I got to know this brand
Salad and Go, and I did some research. It was
during the pandemic, so it was a little hard to
see the stores, and you know, they were only twenty
in Phoenix, and you know, we needed to grow. But
everything I listened to and learned about and saw, and
then eating the food and understanding its origin and how
(05:47):
it was built and the value orientation of this brand
caused me to believe that like, aside from brands like
Wingstop and a few others, there's only a few that
I can clearly say are in a category by itself,
this one was there, and so to be a board member,
I thought, Yes, this is something that excites me, that
energizes me, and I'd love to be a part of
watching the growth story in Deferral fast forward about you know,
(06:10):
I don't know twelve or fourteen months in the process,
and as a board we said, we clearly need to
find a CEO that can help carry this thing for
the long haul. And as we were evaluating prospects, I
continued to say no to everybody, and there's just nobody
I really liked it. I felt like was best fit
for this brand. And I was also kind of reflective
(06:33):
having a reflective period at Wingstop. It had been ten years,
got a great team. I might be in their way.
It may or may not be one last thing I
do and I just retire or whatever, go farm, as
we talked about. But my wife and I sat and
talked and I said, you know, I love this brand.
She said, I know you do, and you're not ready.
She was clear about that, like, go do something and
(06:53):
have fun. And this is what I love to do
is build brands and build them from the early stage,
which we did at Wingstop, and continue to grow that,
and so I threw my hat in the ring and
I said, hey, what if I do this and would
you guys be be excited to a small private equity
group that owns us And they said, really, like, that's
that's interesting. Let us get back to you. And they
(07:13):
came back and said yes, And so you know, we
work something out and lo and behold. I quit my
job one day, unexpected to the whole world, but I
did it not to surprise anyone, but I knew I
clearly had a great team, and Michael Skipp was an
exceptional CEO and he's doing a really good job over
at wing Stuff, and the team was well suited to
carry this on. And quite frankly, it fueled a passion
(07:36):
for me to go take something on. And what I
love about this brand the mission orientation is very clear.
It's to make fresh, nutritious food affordable inconvenient for all,
and that for all element about making food that's healthy
and good for you to everyone at a value price point.
You know, has a lot of the same attributes of
what Amazon was created around at Costco and others, and
(07:58):
so in our space that's hard to find to me.
It was an opportunity to really take on something great,
so I did.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, I'm sure the private act not to give you
a big head or anything, but I'm sure the private
equity group didn't have to think too long about that decision.
Very cool. How is Salad and Go able to sell
salads at such an attractive price point?
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, I mentioned the model. In the nature of this
model is very disruptive. It's disruptive in the world of restaurants.
It shows up just like anybody else. So it's a
double drive through only seven hundred and fifty square foot
box that we make eight salads that are our feature
menu items, and then you can build any salad you want.
(08:42):
You can take any salad to turn it into a wrap.
And then we compliment even the salad offering with the
breakfast offering, so that you can show up in the
morning and get your breakfast burrito and get your salad,
and you've got lunch and breakfast covered in the same occasion.
And we sell our salads for under seven dollars. And
that's protein. It's in a forty eight ounce bowl, which
(09:02):
yields about a pound of product in total, which competes
with every other salad that you know out there and
people ask me like, how do you do this for
roughly half the price, if not more than what's available
in other salad concepts. And the answer is, we've completely
flipped the model and recognized that there is a bit
of an I don't know if it's broken, but it
(09:23):
needs to be revised the model of food service today
because it's very labor intensive in the back of the
house to be able to cut, wash and prepare produce
for a salad. You have all the supply chain elements
that exist from the growers, the farmers themselves, through the
intermediaries to the distributors to the store. And this brand
(09:46):
was designed from the get go to disrupt all of that.
And you've been around the restaurant industry a long time,
I have too. Usually when brands get really scaled and
really big, that's when they start to vertically integrate. This
one's being done from the very get go, which someone's say, well,
that's wildly capital intensive. Why would you do that, And
the answer is, because we want to start with that
low price offering from the get go and scale this
(10:08):
brand so that we can maintain that over the long term.
Which I mentioned before is more of the Amazon Costco
style of approach than it is a traditional restaurant approach.
Quite frankly, if I bought all of our ingredients off
the street the way they're designed today, I wouldn't be
able to sell a salid for that price. And the
key unlock here is we're taking all labor out of
the back of the house and we're centralizing it in
(10:29):
a large central kitchen. These central kitchens ultimately will be
about one hundred thousand square feet in size. They'll be
able to support four to five hundred stores worth of product,
and those four to five hundred stores will be located
within about a day or two proximity of that kitchen.
So logistics is a big piece of the unlocked. But
what we do is we bring the product from the
(10:52):
grower who we know, straight to the kitchen. We cut,
wash bag and prepare that product and send it to
our stores. So in many cases, the romain that you're
eating in your salad, that romaine led us was in
the field five days ago and is on your fork today.
It doesn't happen exactly that way every time, but usually
(11:12):
plus or minus a few days, which is much different
than what you experienced in the grocery store or even
in restaurants, where those products are given techniques to extend
their shelf life so that it can travel through that
big supply chain. Otherwise you got to do all this
stuff in house. If you do it in house very
expensive labor, you're going to charge a much higher price.
(11:33):
So we've been able to do this. What's great about
the brand too, is we can do it by still
paying our people more than fifteen dollars an hour, and
we can pay our people in our central kitchens as
much as twenty dollars an hour. So we're accommodating today's
wage environment with a differentiated model of production. Very cool.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I have a couple questions about that answer. How many
customers are coming through and ordering breakfast and lunch. I
think that's unique, new one for me. I haven't heard
that before.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
I think it's the only option in our industry where
you can accomplish two day parts in one and twenty
percent of our business is done before lunch. Okay, so
then of that about half of it is split between
true breakfast items, and then people get grabbing their salad
for lunch as well. Some only get their salad and
they opt out of breakfast. Some only get breakfast and
(12:24):
opt out a salad. But the combination of all of
it already creates a really balanced day part for us
that I think we can grow. The key is awareness.
We just got to tell people more and more that
this option exists. But I'm unaware of any other quick
service chain, for sure, or any other chain where you
can get both in one day part.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah, smart, I feel like there's some really good upside there,
just through education, right of course about it. Yeah, and
you mentioned you talked a little bit about the distribution centers.
How many do you have right now and how many
restaurants did they support?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
We have two. Our original one was built in Phoenix,
where the brand originated, and that one is scaled in
size so that it can handle all of Phoenix. Today,
our stores in Las Vegas, and soon we'll be opening
in southern California, so we anticipate that everything out of
Phoenix will handle that entire region. We also have another
one in Dallas, and that facility is where the newest
(13:18):
one is getting ready to open. We had a kind
of a one point zero version. We're opening our full
long term facility here very shortly, and that one will
service all of Texas, which we have stores now in Dallas, Houston,
San Antonio, Waco, Austin. We're up into Oklahoma as far
north as Tulsa. We'll probably go as far as Kansas City,
and then we'll start to branch out towards the east
(13:40):
and get into markets like Atlanta, Nashville and others as
we expand. So that facility has a lot of stretch.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Okay, cool. And at the store level, what's the sales
mix per channel.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Between drive through and online?
Speaker 1 (13:55):
There's only two okay, yeah, that's right. Nobody in the restaurant.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, there's no dyning. So it's only seven or fifty
square feet, so it's essentially a kitchen. So all of
our customers come through the drive through in one way
or the other. They either order ahead and go through
a dedicated mobile pickup lane, or they go through the
drive through. It's still you know, about eighty percent drive through,
twenty percent online, which we think we can improve on
that just as much.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Great you mentioned were some of the places where the
chain is geographically strong. Right, Who is the typical Salad
and go customer?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
It's interesting. I'll start first with just a generalization who
the typical salad customer is, because at Salad and Go
our mission is for all. But a typical salad eater
tends to be more female, a little bit higher income,
a little less less ethnically diverse. So they live in
the suburbs in most communities, and that's where you tend
(14:51):
to see a lot of salad concepts popping up, or
in really densely populated areas, high rises, stuff like that
in the cities. What we have been able to demonstrate
and prove in our initial markets and even in our
new markets is the price point is really the trigger.
So it's very expensive to eat salad every single day,
and people just don't. So if you're more affluent, you're
(15:12):
more likely to be a salad eater than is if
you are less affluent. And what we have uncovered is
that that's not really the bias. The bias is price,
not who you are. And so what we found is
a very mixed demographic, which is great. It's more of
the complexion of America than it is you know, the
core salid eater, and so it varies. It's used, you know,
(15:35):
an even balanced between male and female, a definite balance
around income levels, and a definite balance around ethnicity, which
is great. That's the four all element we want for
this brand, and it really is the idea of democratizing
healthy food. And that's the problem in America right now
is it's just too expensive for people to eat healthy.
(15:56):
They're relegated in a lot of cases to a burger
and fries and a drive through that's quick because that
fits their lifestyle. There's no reason salads can't do that
and achieve both. And so we're able to sell a
product that is less than that Burger's and prize and
give you a healthy option.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
All right, So how many units do you have today
and are they all company owned?
Speaker 2 (16:15):
The entire brand is company owned, and we do that
because of the central production nature with those central kitchens.
We think that's the best and quite frankly, we love
the unit economics as well. But they're one hundred and
thirty one today. We've been opening at a rate of
about one a week throughout twenty twenty three and expect
that to continue in twenty four and then accelerate in
(16:37):
the years beyond.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So you and economics must be strong. Would you like
to share any of that data?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Well, the one thing I can share with you is
our early indications and understanding of strong mature markets, say
that the store volumes can meet or exceed two million
dollars and so on a small footprint. Obviously, investment costs
are much lower, and so we're comfortable that the brand
generates a great cash on cash return once to achieved maturity.
(17:06):
And so in a startup nature, we're trying to build
awareness and grow the brand and like anybody else would,
and we're doing it fast, but it does yield a
great economic model over the long term.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, lower build costs without you know, if you're not
building a dining room, you don't need digital menu boards
inside and all that other good stuff right.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Precisely, Nor is there any cookine equipment. It's all refrigeration
and assembly aligns essentially in the store, so it's a
very minimal build out.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love
to franchise your business.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
I get a few calls and no doubt, no doubt.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, no surprise. What initiatives are in place to boost
same star sales this year?
Speaker 2 (17:50):
A lot of them. The biggest one any startup company
like ours faces is awareness you know, we build these
cute little building is sit on the street corner and
they're white with orange trim and they're really bright, and
so people drive by and they're wondering, what is that
and then they learn about it. Could it be it's
too good to be true? Can I get a salad
(18:10):
for under seven dollars? And so there's that dance we do,
But the biggest one is just generating awareness of this
brand and telling our story and articulating the mission and
what it's all about. The faster we do that. What
we know about our customers is as soon as we
tell them the story and as soon as they try it,
they're as likely to repeat as they would be if
(18:31):
you were a coffee concept or something like that. And
so the frequency is quite great, and so for us,
it's a matter of just getting more people aware, filling
the top of the funnel and bringing them in and
delivering a great product along that line. This brand is
really well set up for two of the real hot
growth items in our industry, including catering and delivery. We
(18:56):
actually just launched our pilot for delivery yesterday as a brand,
and so we're excited about that and partnering with DoorDash.
We believe the delivery can be a great opportunity for
this brand. The product travels well, it works well at
lunch right like everybody needs it, and so we think
that's going to be a good unlock for us. The
other is catering a little harder to do in a
(19:17):
little tiny footprint like ours, and so we're looking at
options to create dedicated kitchens where we can actually then
run lots and lots of salads out to customers and
get those in their hands for large order opportunities, big events, meetings, etc.
And so those are a couple of big initiatives, and
then menu ideation. The beauty of a salad or a
(19:40):
wrap is that you have a lot of ingredients you
can play with. There's a lot of ways to create
cravable opportunities. And because we produce not only all the vegetables,
we make all the dressings from scratch, we make all
of our drinks in the syrups for those from scratch,
we have a lot of opportunity to really play with
the menu. It's a chef driven brand. Our chef was
(20:02):
a Michelin Star trained chef. He worked at the Likes
of Michael Mina and Charlie Trotter's and the French Laundry,
and so he brings an amazing repertoire to the table
so that he can take really simple foods and turn
them into really, really craveable items. So we're going to
continue to menu to innovate the menu and bring unique
(20:22):
flavors along as well.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, that's very cool. If somebody tries to eat healthy,
I'm always asking the server whether you know what dressings
are made in house? So that's that's really great to hear.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
One percent of ours are made in house, no additives
or preservatives as well. So they are and they're paired beautifully.
One of the nuances of our business. And what Chef
figured out is we can also yield more of the
stock of the romain. If you know a stock of romain,
it has you know, the core element and you know
the center cut of the romain. But he also had
(20:55):
these green leafy tips. Those tend to be kind of bitter,
so he has paired every dressing to pair up with
those those more bitter leafy tips, and that plus the
heart become a product that we utilize more of. So
it's also you know a better utilization of the plant,
but pairing up the dressings and flavors to make them work.
(21:17):
It's he's he's really really brilliant in his approach to
how he puts those together.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, very smart.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
All right.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
It's a as a smaller regional brand, i'd imagine, you know,
you're doing more more social media marketing, more online digital marketing.
Can you talk a little bit about the marketing plans
we do.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
You know, because of the regionality, we tend to keep
things you know, near and where our customers are. But
I also believe the mission orientation of this brand lends
itself to a national story too. So not only do
we want existing markets to be you know, growing at
a at a rapid pace, you know, to achieve those
(21:58):
targeted volumes, but the same time, we want to soften
up the new markets because we're going to grow fast
in order for us to optimize our model with our
big food central kitchens that we prepare the food in.
We want to hit the markets as quickly as we can,
and we want to soften them up by making sure
that people know that this is coming. So that lends
itself to a lot of you know, work in the
(22:21):
community to tell the story and expand our public relations
and our voice in that regard, leveraging influencers things like that.
At the same time, we do a lot of local activation.
We just launched our first food truck that we're taking around.
We had it out on the streets of Vegas on
Las Vegas Boulevard last weekend around the Super Bowl handing
(22:41):
out free salads and the ideas getting we want to
get food in people's mouth, to tell them the story
and let them get that first bite experience of how
great this product is. So we're going to have it
driving all over the place, giving away free salads and
getting people excited about the brand. I think influencers are
a big opportunity for us, notably people who are centered
(23:02):
on nutrition. That's a great opportunity for us to tell
our story because people are looking for really high quality,
thoughtful alternatives that are also value oriented and it's just
hard to find. And I think if we can tap
into people who are expert nutrition that can tell our story,
I'm all the better as well. So there's a lot
going on, and then we do employ some of the basics,
(23:24):
telling people about new products, putting up some digital billboards
in and around the cities to make sure you know
where to go to find us out and go. We're
pulling out all the stops. We hired on board a
fantastic leader for marketing this year, a lady named Nicole Portwood,
and one of her best claims to fame, although she's
(23:47):
done some amazing things, is that she started in the
very early stages with the little vodka brand out of
Austin called Tito's and turned it into the big monster
brand that it is today. And so she knows a
little bit about taking regional startups and turning them into
powerhouse brands good stuff.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Is there any new technology you're implementing in the stores
this year?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
You know? I mentioned our newly formed partnership with DoorDash
to start delivery that is built upon a platform that
was really consistent with what we had at Wingstop, and
so took a page out of that playbook. Actually, our
head of Operations and Technology as a gentleman that I've
worked with in the past, and he's trained a lot
(24:32):
of CIOs around the country, including the one we had
a Wingstop, and so we have partnered together to build
a platform that we can hang unique technologies off of
and integrate those into the stores so that we could
leverage mobile ordering and delivery as key drivers of our
business in the future. Aside from that, we've already started
building a guest data platform for this brand so that
(24:54):
we can engage in one to one marketing. We don't
have a loyalty program. We don't think we need it
because our price points are so great to begin with.
That's the that's the hook. The key is making sure
we're engaging, we guess and so you know, even with
one hundred and thirty stores, were already have built a large,
large platform of first party data to be able to
engage with our customers and grow. So I would say
(25:15):
we're TechEd forward and we had to do some catch up,
but we've got the platform the place to grow for
the future.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Great, all right, So five cars in the drive through
line might be prohibitive for somebody like McDonald's, right, I
think the customer may just say, like, that line's too long,
I'm gonna I'm gonna keep going to Wendy's or whatever's
next down the road. It might be twenty five for
Chick fil A. When does a salad and go customers
say that line's too big for me to wait on.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
I'm not quite sure yet because I don't know if
I've hit the peak. I will tell you it is
definitely more of your Chick fil A example than it
is anything else. We tend to see twenty plus cars
stacked up in a drive through. However, we do employ
some techniques like others do to line best by having
team members out in the drive through helping accelerate the order.
(26:07):
But our product is really easy to assemble. It's a
quick assembly. There's no cooking. So as soon as you
are giving us that order and we're hearing that in
our headset, we're already starting to assemble your salad. The
time from the speaker when you order your food to
the window and out is usually well under four minutes,
and so that's best in class and QSR. So our
(26:30):
customers are well adapted to the fact that that line
is always moving and it's not a turnoff to see
twenty to twenty five cars in the drive through.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
That's great. How many employees do you employ during that
lunch rush, I guess, And if you could just talk
about breakfast maybe versus that lunch rush to kind of
give us some idea.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah, the beauty of the salad and Go and the
way we design this model is you can run it
with as few as three team members on a shift
at the lower volume times when you hit a peak
rount lunch or breakfas usually breakfast four or five. Usually
at lunch we can scale up to about eight. You
really can't physically put more bodies in a seven or
fifty square foot box than that, and which is great.
(27:12):
So the beauty of this brand is, you know, the
labor is not our challenge, and finding people who want
to work there is not our challenge because again they're
not standing in front of a fryer or a flat grill,
you know, and all the heat and everything. It's like
cold in there and cool and it feels good and
you're assembling salads and it's really good food and you're
inspired by the great work that you're doing every day
to make America healthier. And so we tend to have
(27:35):
a roster of about fifteen to twenty people that make
up the shifts that end up being anywhere from three
or four to as many as seven or eight people
on a shift.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
It sounds like there's not too much downtime either, which
is always nice, right, It makes the theay go buy
a lot.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
You are Yeah, yeah, at our low price point, transactions
are key and throughput is important, and so we've engineered
things so that we're moving really fast. So yeah, you're
not standing around very often, and people do enjoy that.
They want to go to work and be busy. They
don't want the time to let drag buy and so
we've designed a model to be exactly that.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
So are they all stand alone or do you have
some that are like end cap units.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
They are all standalone drive throughs. We don't have any
in caps today. We have one location in the mall
that's a unique one and we think that there is
opportunity for us to show up in a you know,
more traditional strip center location. That's something for down the road.
But today all stand alone drive throughs.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
I'm sure those landlords would would like the volume, that's
for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's something we've got to figure out.
We like drive through because it's speedy, convenient. It's what
consumers are asking for in today's world. They don't want
to get out of the car if they don't have
to then get it delivered. Even better, but walking in
it's a little more of a challenge. So we're going
to approach that with care and make sure that in
the right market it might make sense, but not everywhere.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
January was a tough month for industry sales. A lot
of our companies. I'm in the I'm in the middle
of earning season. A lot of our companies talked about
the cold weather, you know, and they've also talked about
some improvement here in early February. Are you kind of
seeing a similar situation?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, you know, I've always believed in the adage that
leaders tend to use, which is when things are going great,
it's leadership, and when it's not so good, it's the weather.
And I will tell you in this case, is the weather. Yeah,
it's It's been a tough, tough start of the year,
even the markets were in I mean, the West Coast
got hit hard. Phoenix, it's been really cold. Texas it's
(29:37):
been cold and snowy. We're not exposed to the East
coast challenges, but that seems to be more normal. What
I will say is we held our own beautifully through it,
and it's a testament to the brand's the awareness picking
up of the brand and growing, but I think we're
well insulated from it as well. You know, we offer
a value occasion. We won't get traded off or something else.
(30:01):
And I think if you can implement delivery and things
like that, you're going to be able to mask yourself
some of the challenges. But yeah, we've seen some of it,
but I think most of it's pasted it. It's beautiful
weather right now and we're taking advantage.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Of that good stuff. You know. Thanks again for this, Charlie.
Where can the audience go to find a nearby salad
and go and what social media platforms is the brand
big on?
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, we're big in Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, the usuals. You'll
see us on LinkedIn if quite a bit talking about
the you know, success of the brand and where we're
going to visit a salad and go again. We're open
in all the key markets in Texas, So that's Dallas
where we have forty one stores, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Waco,
(30:48):
We're up in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Las Vegas. We've already
got four stores in the ground. We're gonna add eight
more this year in Phoenix. That's our core market Tucson
with nearly sixty stores to markets, so plenty of options,
and then coming this year, hopefully maybe late in the year,
Southern California will be out there as well.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
All Right, good stuff. I'm gonna have to try one
in April when I'm down at the Restaurant Leadership Conference.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
I would love to host you there.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
All Right, good stuff, Man, this is great. I wish
you luck. This is a this is an exciting story. Man.
I wish you nothing but luck. Even though you're a
Chiefs fan and I'm a diehard Rader fan, i wish
you a lot of luck, and I'm excited to follow
the story going forward.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well, I can't wait to continue to take you on
the journey and share our success as we continue to grow.
We're excited about it.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
That's great. Yeah, I'll have you back on to give
us an update. Big thanks to the audience for tuning
in as well. If you liked the episode, please leave
us a rating. Click the bell if you'd like to subscribe.
Check back in a couple of weeks for a discussion
with Zach Goldstein, the CEO and founder of Thanks
Welcome to Chopping It Up. I'm your host, Mike Hallon,
the senior restaurant and food service analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Today we're joined by Charlie Morrison, CEO of Salad and Go.
Thanks for doing this, Charlie, My pleasure great to be here.
All right, So, I'm sure many in the audience are
unaware that you moonlight as a farmer. So when are
(00:37):
we going to see the bottom in corn and soybean prices?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Man? Oh, well, actually right now they're lower than they
were in the fourth quarter, So that's good, I actually
believe it or not. I have I don't remember how
many bushels of beans in the grain elevator waiting to sell,
and my wife is like, hey, when are you going
to sell those peans? You got to get that done
for real. Yeah, I am. I got a place in
(01:03):
Kansas that's my home and we farm, and I also
have some cattle out there, and it's a it's a
fun thing to do to get away to decompress, but
it also gets you much closer to the root of
what it is we do in restaurants, which is, you know,
making fresh food available for people all over the place.
(01:25):
So Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Yeah, it's very cool. You're also in the process of
establishing your farm as regenerative, So what are the some
of the requirements that you have to adhere to do that.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, it's a process, And to be very candid with you,
I'm still learning. When I got to salad and goo,
I got a lot more, a lot closer, I guess
to you know where the food is ultimately coming from,
and I think, you know, consumers want that as well,
and so smarter for me to make sure I'm getting
closer to it. And then when I have my own farm,
(02:00):
I'm starting to learn about what's happening with tilling and
spraying and everything that goes on in in farming today.
And it's challenging. It's having a negative effect on our environment.
It's impacting soil erosion and desertification of soils, and we
need to figure out a way to fix that because
(02:20):
fixing that ultimately has a connection to our carbon footprint
and being able to take carbon out of the atmosphere
and put it back into the ground where it belongs.
So the concept of regenerative farming in a simplistic way,
my simplistic way, I'm no scientist. Is the idea of
letting the land be the land and keeping keeping your
(02:42):
you know, your your grasses and your crops. You know,
in a point where you're always having something growing right,
there's always something in the base. There's mulching, no tilling,
you know, establishing a groundcover that can retur the moisture
and the soil and also retain the carbon from the atmosphere.
(03:04):
I inherited this farm and it was a till kill
till kill, and so it takes a few years to
actually make this happen where you can start to plant
Kraffer crops, put them in play, have them available year round.
And what I've learned really quickly is I have fewer weeds,
I have to use less chemical, less fertilizer. I'm getting
(03:25):
more abundant yields. We had a drought year last year,
and we had some of the best yields in the
area compared to anybody on our products. And so as
I continue to do this, probably over the next two years,
we'll get better about it and ultimately do our part
in my seven hundred acres or so to give back
to the environment as best we can and hopefully use
that as a way to inspire others to adopt an
(03:48):
approach to regenerative farming that's necessary in our society.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
I love it. I feel like it doesn't get enough
attention compared to stuff like plant based meat. It's just
not as sexy, right, But you know, I see that
companies are starting to pay more attention to it, which
I think is a very good thing.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Yeah. Look, I think I think companies should adopt the
practices into their supply chain strategies as quickly as they can.
The sooner they do it, the better. It's hard to
force it, but I think you can teach and educate,
and the more we learn about what really is happening
with their carbon footprint, the better good stuff.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
All right, So you had a phenomenal run at Wingstop,
and to be completely honest with you, I was surprised
when I heard you were taking the Salid and Go job.
So why don't you share what attracted you to the brand?
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Yeah, you're right, I mean, what an amazing opportunity to
have led Wingstop for ten years and through its IPO
and growth and quite frankly just watching it literally down
the street. The team's right down the street from me.
Now and seeing the great work that they're doing to
carry on the performance and continue to grow that brand
is And you know, in twenty twenty, I got a
(05:04):
phone call from a recruiter friend of mine and they said, Hey,
there's this small little company and based in Phoenix, Arizona
that is doing something really unique and a bit disruptive
in our space, and they're looking for board members and
they want to talk to you. And I really think
you ought to take a look at it. But it's
only twenty stores, and I was like, I don't know,
(05:24):
you know, startups, you know, those are challenging and what
are we doing? But I got to know this brand
Salad and Go, and I did some research. It was
during the pandemic, so it was a little hard to
see the stores, and you know, they were only twenty
in Phoenix, and you know, we needed to grow. But
everything I listened to and learned about and saw, and
then eating the food and understanding its origin and how
(05:47):
it was built and the value orientation of this brand
caused me to believe that like, aside from brands like
Wingstop and a few others, there's only a few that
I can clearly say are in a category by itself,
this one was there, and so to be a board member,
I thought, Yes, this is something that excites me, that
energizes me, and I'd love to be a part of
watching the growth story in Deferral fast forward about you know,
(06:10):
I don't know twelve or fourteen months in the process,
and as a board we said, we clearly need to
find a CEO that can help carry this thing for
the long haul. And as we were evaluating prospects, I
continued to say no to everybody, and there's just nobody
I really liked it. I felt like was best fit
for this brand. And I was also kind of reflective
(06:33):
having a reflective period at Wingstop. It had been ten years,
got a great team. I might be in their way.
It may or may not be one last thing I
do and I just retire or whatever, go farm, as
we talked about. But my wife and I sat and
talked and I said, you know, I love this brand.
She said, I know you do, and you're not ready.
She was clear about that, like, go do something and
(06:53):
have fun. And this is what I love to do
is build brands and build them from the early stage,
which we did at Wingstop, and continue to grow that,
and so I threw my hat in the ring and
I said, hey, what if I do this and would
you guys be be excited to a small private equity
group that owns us And they said, really, like, that's
that's interesting. Let us get back to you. And they
(07:13):
came back and said yes, And so you know, we
work something out and lo and behold. I quit my
job one day, unexpected to the whole world, but I
did it not to surprise anyone, but I knew I
clearly had a great team, and Michael Skipp was an
exceptional CEO and he's doing a really good job over
at wing Stuff, and the team was well suited to
carry this on. And quite frankly, it fueled a passion
(07:36):
for me to go take something on. And what I
love about this brand the mission orientation is very clear.
It's to make fresh, nutritious food affordable inconvenient for all,
and that for all element about making food that's healthy
and good for you to everyone at a value price point.
You know, has a lot of the same attributes of
what Amazon was created around at Costco and others, and
(07:58):
so in our space that's hard to find to me.
It was an opportunity to really take on something great,
so I did.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yeah, I'm sure the private act not to give you
a big head or anything, but I'm sure the private
equity group didn't have to think too long about that decision.
Very cool. How is Salad and Go able to sell
salads at such an attractive price point?
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, I mentioned the model. In the nature of this
model is very disruptive. It's disruptive in the world of restaurants.
It shows up just like anybody else. So it's a
double drive through only seven hundred and fifty square foot
box that we make eight salads that are our feature
menu items, and then you can build any salad you want.
(08:42):
You can take any salad to turn it into a wrap.
And then we compliment even the salad offering with the
breakfast offering, so that you can show up in the
morning and get your breakfast burrito and get your salad,
and you've got lunch and breakfast covered in the same occasion.
And we sell our salads for under seven dollars. And
that's protein. It's in a forty eight ounce bowl, which
(09:02):
yields about a pound of product in total, which competes
with every other salad that you know out there and
people ask me like, how do you do this for
roughly half the price, if not more than what's available
in other salad concepts. And the answer is, we've completely
flipped the model and recognized that there is a bit
of an I don't know if it's broken, but it
(09:23):
needs to be revised the model of food service today
because it's very labor intensive in the back of the
house to be able to cut, wash and prepare produce
for a salad. You have all the supply chain elements
that exist from the growers, the farmers themselves, through the
intermediaries to the distributors to the store. And this brand
(09:46):
was designed from the get go to disrupt all of that.
And you've been around the restaurant industry a long time,
I have too. Usually when brands get really scaled and
really big, that's when they start to vertically integrate. This
one's being done from the very get go, which someone's say, well,
that's wildly capital intensive. Why would you do that, And
the answer is, because we want to start with that
low price offering from the get go and scale this
(10:08):
brand so that we can maintain that over the long term.
Which I mentioned before is more of the Amazon Costco
style of approach than it is a traditional restaurant approach.
Quite frankly, if I bought all of our ingredients off
the street the way they're designed today, I wouldn't be
able to sell a salid for that price. And the
key unlock here is we're taking all labor out of
the back of the house and we're centralizing it in
(10:29):
a large central kitchen. These central kitchens ultimately will be
about one hundred thousand square feet in size. They'll be
able to support four to five hundred stores worth of product,
and those four to five hundred stores will be located
within about a day or two proximity of that kitchen.
So logistics is a big piece of the unlocked. But
what we do is we bring the product from the
(10:52):
grower who we know, straight to the kitchen. We cut,
wash bag and prepare that product and send it to
our stores. So in many cases, the romain that you're
eating in your salad, that romaine led us was in
the field five days ago and is on your fork today.
It doesn't happen exactly that way every time, but usually
(11:12):
plus or minus a few days, which is much different
than what you experienced in the grocery store or even
in restaurants, where those products are given techniques to extend
their shelf life so that it can travel through that
big supply chain. Otherwise you got to do all this
stuff in house. If you do it in house very
expensive labor, you're going to charge a much higher price.
(11:33):
So we've been able to do this. What's great about
the brand too, is we can do it by still
paying our people more than fifteen dollars an hour, and
we can pay our people in our central kitchens as
much as twenty dollars an hour. So we're accommodating today's
wage environment with a differentiated model of production. Very cool.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
I have a couple questions about that answer. How many
customers are coming through and ordering breakfast and lunch. I
think that's unique, new one for me. I haven't heard
that before.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
I think it's the only option in our industry where
you can accomplish two day parts in one and twenty
percent of our business is done before lunch. Okay, so
then of that about half of it is split between
true breakfast items, and then people get grabbing their salad
for lunch as well. Some only get their salad and
they opt out of breakfast. Some only get breakfast and
(12:24):
opt out a salad. But the combination of all of
it already creates a really balanced day part for us
that I think we can grow. The key is awareness.
We just got to tell people more and more that
this option exists. But I'm unaware of any other quick
service chain, for sure, or any other chain where you
can get both in one day part.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Yeah, smart, I feel like there's some really good upside there,
just through education, right of course about it. Yeah, and
you mentioned you talked a little bit about the distribution centers.
How many do you have right now and how many
restaurants did they support?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
We have two. Our original one was built in Phoenix,
where the brand originated, and that one is scaled in
size so that it can handle all of Phoenix. Today,
our stores in Las Vegas, and soon we'll be opening
in southern California, so we anticipate that everything out of
Phoenix will handle that entire region. We also have another
one in Dallas, and that facility is where the newest
(13:18):
one is getting ready to open. We had a kind
of a one point zero version. We're opening our full
long term facility here very shortly, and that one will
service all of Texas, which we have stores now in Dallas, Houston,
San Antonio, Waco, Austin. We're up into Oklahoma as far
north as Tulsa. We'll probably go as far as Kansas City,
and then we'll start to branch out towards the east
(13:40):
and get into markets like Atlanta, Nashville and others as
we expand. So that facility has a lot of stretch.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Okay, cool. And at the store level, what's the sales
mix per channel.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Between drive through and online?
Speaker 1 (13:55):
There's only two okay, yeah, that's right. Nobody in the restaurant.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, there's no dyning. So it's only seven or fifty
square feet, so it's essentially a kitchen. So all of
our customers come through the drive through in one way
or the other. They either order ahead and go through
a dedicated mobile pickup lane, or they go through the
drive through. It's still you know, about eighty percent drive through,
twenty percent online, which we think we can improve on
that just as much.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
Great you mentioned were some of the places where the
chain is geographically strong. Right, Who is the typical Salad
and go customer?
Speaker 2 (14:28):
It's interesting. I'll start first with just a generalization who
the typical salad customer is, because at Salad and Go
our mission is for all. But a typical salad eater
tends to be more female, a little bit higher income,
a little less less ethnically diverse. So they live in
the suburbs in most communities, and that's where you tend
(14:51):
to see a lot of salad concepts popping up, or
in really densely populated areas, high rises, stuff like that
in the cities. What we have been able to demonstrate
and prove in our initial markets and even in our
new markets is the price point is really the trigger.
So it's very expensive to eat salad every single day,
and people just don't. So if you're more affluent, you're
(15:12):
more likely to be a salad eater than is if
you are less affluent. And what we have uncovered is
that that's not really the bias. The bias is price,
not who you are. And so what we found is
a very mixed demographic, which is great. It's more of
the complexion of America than it is you know, the
core salid eater, and so it varies. It's used, you know,
(15:35):
an even balanced between male and female, a definite balance
around income levels, and a definite balance around ethnicity, which
is great. That's the four all element we want for
this brand, and it really is the idea of democratizing
healthy food. And that's the problem in America right now
is it's just too expensive for people to eat healthy.
(15:56):
They're relegated in a lot of cases to a burger
and fries and a drive through that's quick because that
fits their lifestyle. There's no reason salads can't do that
and achieve both. And so we're able to sell a
product that is less than that Burger's and prize and
give you a healthy option.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
All right, So how many units do you have today
and are they all company owned?
Speaker 2 (16:15):
The entire brand is company owned, and we do that
because of the central production nature with those central kitchens.
We think that's the best and quite frankly, we love
the unit economics as well. But they're one hundred and
thirty one today. We've been opening at a rate of
about one a week throughout twenty twenty three and expect
that to continue in twenty four and then accelerate in
(16:37):
the years beyond.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
So you and economics must be strong. Would you like
to share any of that data?
Speaker 2 (16:44):
Well, the one thing I can share with you is
our early indications and understanding of strong mature markets, say
that the store volumes can meet or exceed two million
dollars and so on a small footprint. Obviously, investment costs
are much lower, and so we're comfortable that the brand
generates a great cash on cash return once to achieved maturity.
(17:06):
And so in a startup nature, we're trying to build
awareness and grow the brand and like anybody else would,
and we're doing it fast, but it does yield a
great economic model over the long term.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, lower build costs without you know, if you're not
building a dining room, you don't need digital menu boards
inside and all that other good stuff right.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Precisely, Nor is there any cookine equipment. It's all refrigeration
and assembly aligns essentially in the store, so it's a
very minimal build out.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love
to franchise your business.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
I get a few calls and no doubt, no doubt.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, no surprise. What initiatives are in place to boost
same star sales this year?
Speaker 2 (17:50):
A lot of them. The biggest one any startup company
like ours faces is awareness you know, we build these
cute little building is sit on the street corner and
they're white with orange trim and they're really bright, and
so people drive by and they're wondering, what is that
and then they learn about it. Could it be it's
too good to be true? Can I get a salad
(18:10):
for under seven dollars? And so there's that dance we do,
But the biggest one is just generating awareness of this
brand and telling our story and articulating the mission and
what it's all about. The faster we do that. What
we know about our customers is as soon as we
tell them the story and as soon as they try it,
they're as likely to repeat as they would be if
(18:31):
you were a coffee concept or something like that. And
so the frequency is quite great, and so for us,
it's a matter of just getting more people aware, filling
the top of the funnel and bringing them in and
delivering a great product along that line. This brand is
really well set up for two of the real hot
growth items in our industry, including catering and delivery. We
(18:56):
actually just launched our pilot for delivery yesterday as a brand,
and so we're excited about that and partnering with DoorDash.
We believe the delivery can be a great opportunity for
this brand. The product travels well, it works well at
lunch right like everybody needs it, and so we think
that's going to be a good unlock for us. The
other is catering a little harder to do in a
(19:17):
little tiny footprint like ours, and so we're looking at
options to create dedicated kitchens where we can actually then
run lots and lots of salads out to customers and
get those in their hands for large order opportunities, big events, meetings, etc.
And so those are a couple of big initiatives, and
then menu ideation. The beauty of a salad or a
(19:40):
wrap is that you have a lot of ingredients you
can play with. There's a lot of ways to create
cravable opportunities. And because we produce not only all the vegetables,
we make all the dressings from scratch, we make all
of our drinks in the syrups for those from scratch,
we have a lot of opportunity to really play with
the menu. It's a chef driven brand. Our chef was
(20:02):
a Michelin Star trained chef. He worked at the Likes
of Michael Mina and Charlie Trotter's and the French Laundry,
and so he brings an amazing repertoire to the table
so that he can take really simple foods and turn
them into really, really craveable items. So we're going to
continue to menu to innovate the menu and bring unique
(20:22):
flavors along as well.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
Yeah, that's very cool. If somebody tries to eat healthy,
I'm always asking the server whether you know what dressings
are made in house? So that's that's really great to hear.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
One percent of ours are made in house, no additives
or preservatives as well. So they are and they're paired beautifully.
One of the nuances of our business. And what Chef
figured out is we can also yield more of the
stock of the romain. If you know a stock of romain,
it has you know, the core element and you know
the center cut of the romain. But he also had
(20:55):
these green leafy tips. Those tend to be kind of bitter,
so he has paired every dressing to pair up with
those those more bitter leafy tips, and that plus the
heart become a product that we utilize more of. So
it's also you know a better utilization of the plant,
but pairing up the dressings and flavors to make them work.
(21:17):
It's he's he's really really brilliant in his approach to
how he puts those together.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, very smart.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
All right.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
It's a as a smaller regional brand, i'd imagine, you know,
you're doing more more social media marketing, more online digital marketing.
Can you talk a little bit about the marketing plans
we do.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
You know, because of the regionality, we tend to keep
things you know, near and where our customers are. But
I also believe the mission orientation of this brand lends
itself to a national story too. So not only do
we want existing markets to be you know, growing at
a at a rapid pace, you know, to achieve those
(21:58):
targeted volumes, but the same time, we want to soften
up the new markets because we're going to grow fast
in order for us to optimize our model with our
big food central kitchens that we prepare the food in.
We want to hit the markets as quickly as we can,
and we want to soften them up by making sure
that people know that this is coming. So that lends
itself to a lot of you know, work in the
(22:21):
community to tell the story and expand our public relations
and our voice in that regard, leveraging influencers things like that.
At the same time, we do a lot of local activation.
We just launched our first food truck that we're taking around.
We had it out on the streets of Vegas on
Las Vegas Boulevard last weekend around the Super Bowl handing
(22:41):
out free salads and the ideas getting we want to
get food in people's mouth, to tell them the story
and let them get that first bite experience of how
great this product is. So we're going to have it
driving all over the place, giving away free salads and
getting people excited about the brand. I think influencers are
a big opportunity for us, notably people who are centered
(23:02):
on nutrition. That's a great opportunity for us to tell
our story because people are looking for really high quality,
thoughtful alternatives that are also value oriented and it's just
hard to find. And I think if we can tap
into people who are expert nutrition that can tell our story,
I'm all the better as well. So there's a lot
going on, and then we do employ some of the basics,
(23:24):
telling people about new products, putting up some digital billboards
in and around the cities to make sure you know
where to go to find us out and go. We're
pulling out all the stops. We hired on board a
fantastic leader for marketing this year, a lady named Nicole Portwood,
and one of her best claims to fame, although she's
(23:47):
done some amazing things, is that she started in the
very early stages with the little vodka brand out of
Austin called Tito's and turned it into the big monster
brand that it is today. And so she knows a
little bit about taking regional startups and turning them into
powerhouse brands good stuff.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Is there any new technology you're implementing in the stores
this year?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
You know? I mentioned our newly formed partnership with DoorDash
to start delivery that is built upon a platform that
was really consistent with what we had at Wingstop, and
so took a page out of that playbook. Actually, our
head of Operations and Technology as a gentleman that I've
worked with in the past, and he's trained a lot
(24:32):
of CIOs around the country, including the one we had
a Wingstop, and so we have partnered together to build
a platform that we can hang unique technologies off of
and integrate those into the stores so that we could
leverage mobile ordering and delivery as key drivers of our
business in the future. Aside from that, we've already started
building a guest data platform for this brand so that
(24:54):
we can engage in one to one marketing. We don't
have a loyalty program. We don't think we need it
because our price points are so great to begin with.
That's the that's the hook. The key is making sure
we're engaging, we guess and so you know, even with
one hundred and thirty stores, were already have built a large,
large platform of first party data to be able to
engage with our customers and grow. So I would say
(25:15):
we're TechEd forward and we had to do some catch up,
but we've got the platform the place to grow for
the future.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Great, all right, So five cars in the drive through
line might be prohibitive for somebody like McDonald's, right, I
think the customer may just say, like, that line's too long,
I'm gonna I'm gonna keep going to Wendy's or whatever's
next down the road. It might be twenty five for
Chick fil A. When does a salad and go customers
say that line's too big for me to wait on.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
I'm not quite sure yet because I don't know if
I've hit the peak. I will tell you it is
definitely more of your Chick fil A example than it
is anything else. We tend to see twenty plus cars
stacked up in a drive through. However, we do employ
some techniques like others do to line best by having
team members out in the drive through helping accelerate the order.
(26:07):
But our product is really easy to assemble. It's a
quick assembly. There's no cooking. So as soon as you
are giving us that order and we're hearing that in
our headset, we're already starting to assemble your salad. The
time from the speaker when you order your food to
the window and out is usually well under four minutes,
and so that's best in class and QSR. So our
(26:30):
customers are well adapted to the fact that that line
is always moving and it's not a turnoff to see
twenty to twenty five cars in the drive through.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
That's great. How many employees do you employ during that
lunch rush, I guess, And if you could just talk
about breakfast maybe versus that lunch rush to kind of
give us some idea.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Yeah, the beauty of the salad and Go and the
way we design this model is you can run it
with as few as three team members on a shift
at the lower volume times when you hit a peak
rount lunch or breakfas usually breakfast four or five. Usually
at lunch we can scale up to about eight. You
really can't physically put more bodies in a seven or
fifty square foot box than that, and which is great.
(27:12):
So the beauty of this brand is, you know, the
labor is not our challenge, and finding people who want
to work there is not our challenge because again they're
not standing in front of a fryer or a flat grill,
you know, and all the heat and everything. It's like
cold in there and cool and it feels good and
you're assembling salads and it's really good food and you're
inspired by the great work that you're doing every day
to make America healthier. And so we tend to have
(27:35):
a roster of about fifteen to twenty people that make
up the shifts that end up being anywhere from three
or four to as many as seven or eight people
on a shift.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
It sounds like there's not too much downtime either, which
is always nice, right, It makes the theay go buy
a lot.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
You are Yeah, yeah, at our low price point, transactions
are key and throughput is important, and so we've engineered
things so that we're moving really fast. So yeah, you're
not standing around very often, and people do enjoy that.
They want to go to work and be busy. They
don't want the time to let drag buy and so
we've designed a model to be exactly that.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
So are they all stand alone or do you have
some that are like end cap units.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
They are all standalone drive throughs. We don't have any
in caps today. We have one location in the mall
that's a unique one and we think that there is
opportunity for us to show up in a you know,
more traditional strip center location. That's something for down the road.
But today all stand alone drive throughs.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
I'm sure those landlords would would like the volume, that's
for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's something we've got to figure out.
We like drive through because it's speedy, convenient. It's what
consumers are asking for in today's world. They don't want
to get out of the car if they don't have
to then get it delivered. Even better, but walking in
it's a little more of a challenge. So we're going
to approach that with care and make sure that in
the right market it might make sense, but not everywhere.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
January was a tough month for industry sales. A lot
of our companies. I'm in the I'm in the middle
of earning season. A lot of our companies talked about
the cold weather, you know, and they've also talked about
some improvement here in early February. Are you kind of
seeing a similar situation?
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah, you know, I've always believed in the adage that
leaders tend to use, which is when things are going great,
it's leadership, and when it's not so good, it's the weather.
And I will tell you in this case, is the weather. Yeah,
it's It's been a tough, tough start of the year,
even the markets were in I mean, the West Coast
got hit hard. Phoenix, it's been really cold. Texas it's
(29:37):
been cold and snowy. We're not exposed to the East
coast challenges, but that seems to be more normal. What
I will say is we held our own beautifully through it,
and it's a testament to the brand's the awareness picking
up of the brand and growing, but I think we're
well insulated from it as well. You know, we offer
a value occasion. We won't get traded off or something else.
(30:01):
And I think if you can implement delivery and things
like that, you're going to be able to mask yourself
some of the challenges. But yeah, we've seen some of it,
but I think most of it's pasted it. It's beautiful
weather right now and we're taking advantage.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Of that good stuff. You know. Thanks again for this, Charlie.
Where can the audience go to find a nearby salad
and go and what social media platforms is the brand
big on?
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, we're big in Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, the usuals. You'll
see us on LinkedIn if quite a bit talking about
the you know, success of the brand and where we're
going to visit a salad and go again. We're open
in all the key markets in Texas, So that's Dallas
where we have forty one stores, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Waco,
(30:48):
We're up in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Las Vegas. We've already
got four stores in the ground. We're gonna add eight
more this year in Phoenix. That's our core market Tucson
with nearly sixty stores to markets, so plenty of options,
and then coming this year, hopefully maybe late in the year,
Southern California will be out there as well.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
All Right, good stuff. I'm gonna have to try one
in April when I'm down at the Restaurant Leadership Conference.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
I would love to host you there.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
All Right, good stuff, Man, this is great. I wish
you luck. This is a this is an exciting story. Man.
I wish you nothing but luck. Even though you're a
Chiefs fan and I'm a diehard Rader fan, i wish
you a lot of luck, and I'm excited to follow
the story going forward.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well, I can't wait to continue to take you on
the journey and share our success as we continue to grow.
We're excited about it.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
That's great. Yeah, I'll have you back on to give
us an update. Big thanks to the audience for tuning
in as well. If you liked the episode, please leave
us a rating. Click the bell if you'd like to subscribe.
Check back in a couple of weeks for a discussion
with Zach Goldstein, the CEO and founder of Thanks
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