YouSaid · the spoken record

Ted Xenohristos

lines on the record: 88
first: 2023-11-27
most recent: 2023-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I tell people to visit that restaurant today, and you can still see a lot of the heel and shoe marks on the bar from all the dancing on it. There were just crazy, crazy things always happening, but the craziness of the restaurant business is something that I've always been attracted to. So I kind of actually miss those moments.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But all along the way, we've had so much help. I in no way take credit for anything that has happened the last 16 years. We have had people have busted their ass in the kitchens for us. People have busted their ass growing these restaurants, building these restaurants, doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I get a lot of the credit. People come and thank me all the time and say, your restaurant's amazing. What you do is amazing. But the people that work every single day in those restaurants, they are doing a lot of the hard work. And they have really helped us build this brand and make this what it is today.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that anytime you're successful in life, you got to get lucky. I mean, I was lucky that that banker walked through my door, but he saw the hard work that we put into that restaurant, and that's why he gave us that loan. I was lucky enough to meet Brett.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I like the term. I saw that term that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. And I really believe that. I mean, you can have all the talent in the world, but if you don't work hard, it will all go to waste. And I think we've had a lot of counterintuitive decisions along the way going to LA is our second market, buying a company three times our size that was struggling and converting it. People used to ask me like, you know, the baseball analogy, what inning are you in? And you say, well, we're in the early innings, but I still think we're coming.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You join this group as a consultant in 2009, and then you were asked to become CEO and ran this DIPs business for a while, and then you guys started to expand this thing. And here we are in 2023, multi-billion dollar market capitalization for Kava, approaching 300 locations, how much of where you are today do you attribute to the work you put in, your intelligence, your strategic thinking, and how much do you think has to do with getting lucky?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see Mediterranean as the next big, large scale cultural cuisine category, and we want kava to be synonymous as the defining brand of that category. And so we're just excited to have that opportunity to bring it to people across the country”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we would have gotten some cash and whether or not it was a lot or a little depends on how you look at things. We didn't start it for that, right? And I don't think we started the first restaurant for that, and I don't think cash has ever been the number one driver. I think I remember back to my mom working in this restaurant industry and how hard she worked. And, you know, at the end, there was nothing really left for her. And I wanted to create something bigger and better. And there were so many moments along the way of believing in Brent and believing in this business, he told a story of, you know, what I think you asked the question, what did we learn from our first restaurant? And there were so many things within that restaurant that we learned, right, about operationally and how we can make it better. But what he left out was we ran out of money after two restaurants. And our investors didn't want to give us any more money. And so we went and took a loan out against everything that we had worked for. We took a loan against our full-service restaurants, against these fast casuals, really because I believed in bread and what he could.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think when we decided to bring Bret on and we gave him the keys of the kingdom, as I say, we believed in him. I definitely believed in him, no matter what happened, you know, when he felt like he chose that wrong location at the mall, I felt like we just had to work harder because there was a reason he chose it. And we had to work harder to prove that out, you know, where he felt like he had made a mistake with Zoe's he had mentioned again, I felt like it was our job to deliver on what he envisioned by buying that Zoe. So, you know, originally we had in one of those investment deals early on, one of these big VCs wanted to kind of buy the whole company.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I think for me being a founder, I really gently care about how they're going to grow their careers here. My mom was beat down in this industry. I don't want that for people. I started this restaurant business to change that. And look, are we perfect? Are we where we want to be? We're at almost 300 restaurants. Chipotle has over 3,000, right? Panera has 1,000. So as we grow, we have to continue to offer more to those team members to keep them, to bring them in. And those are things that we're working on. So I really honestly think to Brett's point that we care about our employees and that we give them the opportunity for growth.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ultimately, it comes down to whether the team members believe or not, whether we care about them. And it's other things like hearing where they're struggling. We had this thing, we go out and we visit the restaurants. And at the end of my visit, I say to the team, okay, I have a magic wand and I'm going to grant you three wishes. What are the three things that I can grant you that's going to make your day completely better? What is like the bane of your existence when you wake up every day that you think about that's getting in your way here? And I remember like I would go like five restaurants in a row. They're like, Brett, people love our pickled onions, but man, my arm is so tired from chopping and slicing onions. I'm like, I hear you. And got with Ted and worked on Ted because we had been looking at pre-sliced onions, but they were dehydrating too much. And so Ted worked with our produce suppliers and got a vacuum sealed pre-sliced onion for them to pickle in house that they no longer have to do.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why are you changing the hummus to kava hummus? Why are you changing Zatziki to kava zadiki? We were obviously. It was really hard to explain why we were changing these things and what we were doing them for because people just didn't want to hear it. And I think a lot of this work that we were doing, it was ultimately bringing us closer to decision to convert all the Zoe's locations to Kava locations. And ultimately, that was going to be what we were going to go forward with.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's where we started. You know, we have this document called Concept Essence that talks about our food, our people, our design, you know, everything that we do, we look through the document. So something like pimento cheese, right? Tasted good, was delicious, but didn't really fit Mediterranean essence, didn't really fit our concept essence. So it was gone. Chicken salad, things like that, right? What we found out, which is a pretty funny story. On the day that we opened, reopened that restaurant after we had reworked the whole menu. And I was talking to customers, and it was really funny. These Zoe's customers have been coming. A lot of them for just one item. Some people were coming just for like a tub of pimento cheese or a tub of chicken salad. And I had a few customers just go nuts on me, you know, and say, what are you doing here? Nobody asked you to come here. Nobody asked you to change these recipes.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we took over that restaurant in Park Potomac and we just started to work on it. We started to figure out, you know, they were doing things like serving a full chicken. And it was taking 40 minutes to serve that chicken because you had to cook it from scratch and or you pre-made them and you end up throwing them away. So how could you get rid of items that were being wasteful? How could we reduce the pantry size? How could we make it easier for the team to operate without having thirty people in the restaurant? We started to look at all that and break it all down. We looked at quality of the food. We looked at how we serve it, how we cook it. Dimitri was hard at work in the kitchen with the culinary team. We had some of our operations team members come in and really help with that. Finance to really drive home what the numbers should be. So it took a big team effort to really try to fix that Zoe's menu that was hemorrhaging at the time.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uh oh, what did we just buy? I remember landing in Jacksonville and calling my wife and said, I think I just undermined 10 years of hard work. I'm not quite sure this was the right decision. So we get back home from Jacksonville and we had our holiday party a few days later. And I pulled Dimitri aside at the holiday party and I said listen, we've got this Zoe's location actually here in this area in a place called Park Potomac. I said, I need you guys to turn that into a test kitchen, figure out how we fix this menu and fix this business so it doesn't drown kava.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took us a while to convert them because we had to stabilize Zoe's first. We weren't able to get to those conversions right away. You know, Zoe's was three times our size and it was struggling as a public company. And I'll never forget, we closed on the acquisition the day before Thanksgiving in 2018. And I remember when we were looking at the deal, the metaphor we used is we knew we were acquiring a melting ice cube and we just had to stop it from melting. And I was on a plane from Denver to Jacksonville. And I get the most recent month report of Zoe's sales. And when we were negotiating the deal, the sales were declining about three to four percent same restaurant sales, you know, year over year. And I get this report just sent to my inbox, and I open it up, and it's minus 12.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% of Zoe's portfolio was in the suburbs and the Sun Belt. So we saw this as a way to accelerate our expansion in a large part of the country, the Sunbelt that we were already trying to get sites in. We had a few kavas that were across the street from Azoe's and we were doing almost twice the revenue and that emboldened us to make that decision and take Zoe's private.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was similar but different. It was a counter service format, but it was more founded as Southern fresh market fare with a Mediterranean flair. The brand's original menu had like chicken salad, egg salad, tuna salad sandwiches, and then Greek salad and hummus. And as time went on and it changed ownership and went public and Mediterranean diet grew in popularity, brands like us came on the scene. They started to add falafel and harissa and taziki without losing the pimento cheese off their menu. And I think what happened was their guests got a little confused and the operations got overcomplicated and really started to deteriorate service.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they were struggling as a public company. Their sales were declining. And I met with Ron as I do a couple times a year and we were having lunch and he said he talked to me about that Zoe's had approached him. And he said, you know, what do you think about if our investors put together the capital, we acquire it and give it to you, Brett and your team? That's a big idea. That's not quite what we were thinking about. You know, we're on this straight organic growth path. We've got a lot of momentum. We're over 65 restaurants at this time. We've got New York open now, LA open. We're signing deals in other markets. We're just on this straight heading. And here is this left hand turn that's being put in front of us.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at that point, we felt like there was real potential that this could resonate in most parts of the country, if not all. And as we built out LA, it taught us how to open a large new market. And it has become one of our most successful markets now in the Southern California region. So that really, again, was another validation that if we execute this right, this cuisine and our proposition is really resonating with consumers and can be something we take to communities across the country.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Overall, I love being there. I wish I could have stayed. My wife and I decided after about 18 months we felt disconnected from family. We felt disconnected from our friends and wanted to come back home. But I just kept traveling back and forth because, you know, I really believed in what we were doing out there. We just the same as building a business here. It felt like we were just starting all over again. I remember when we had the first manager had”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Free food will bring people out. That line was I remember going through the line and telling people, this is going to be an hour from where you're at. And then this is going to be two hours from where you're at. And the line just, I have a video of it just went down the block. Really, really crazy, and so slowly, slowly the business just starts to grow.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we were slow on some days and we couldn't keep up whatever issues we were having because of the expansion being so far away from home, I noticed people coming back, people telling their friends and people really loving what Kava was.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The commissary would provide the dips and spread. So, you know, I moved out there. We thought the restaurant was going to open up much sooner. It ended up being delayed and I was out there kind of doing the commissary. We had huge delays in construction out in Los Angeles. And when we finally did get it open, you know, Brett alluded that we were making our dips in the restaurant. This space was so small. I remember the door of the walk-in box opening and hitting the back of the chair to the office that I was sitting in that tiny little space. So we were making the dips in there and what a challenge it was being 3,000 miles away, having no help, no one knowing what the brand was, no one knowing anything about Kava. We could barely hire people. We could barely keep managers there. Had to have my wife come in and help me run that restaurant. But through it all, what I really noticed was how much the customers loved it.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at the time, you know, we were thinking about the dips and spreads business alongside this business. And we were thinking about a hub and spoke model for our commissary production because we didn't have the shelf life on our dips and spreads that we do now. And we wanted to open in a large market in Southern California was a great customer profile, a really large market opportunity, which was the attraction of doing that. And so we actually opened a small commissary there. But it didn't open until after our first restaurant opened there. So we had to do the dips and spreads in that original Los Angeles restaurant. And the challenge of Los Angeles was so difficult already before we had even opened that restaurant that I went to Ted and I said, what do you think about moving to LA?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outside of the Mid Atlantic. So we had committed to a couple more locations in the DMV, but we started looking at new markets. And we had the brilliant idea, or I made the brilliant decision, to have our second market be Los Angeles. 3,000 miles away from home where no one knew us.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is an interim step where we raised another friends and family round because we felt like we had something that was starting to work, but we didn't have clarity that this was going to be a huge opportunity. And so we did another small friends and family round to open a couple more locations. And I think the tipping point really came when we opened the fifth location. So this was in February of 2013 in a new mixed-use project in Fairfax, Virginia called Mosaic. And we did our community day. We did a free lunch and a free dinner. And we had two hour-long lines. And the restaurant opened for its regular service the next day at twice the revenue run rate of the other restaurants that had opened and the other restaurants all started to grow in concert with it.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so we had a really severe one come through the DC area and it knocked everyone's power out. Yeah, tens of thousands of people were without power for like three, four days. And so people could eat at home. So everyone came to the mall and everyone came and there were huge crowds. And so it drove even greater awareness. And by the end of July, early August, we had such significant lines. We had to get those movie stanchions and ropes to corral the lines so that they didn't block the concourse entrance.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we started this idea of our community day, where about three weeks after we had opened, I mean, the sales were really anemic, we did what's called our community day and we advertised and got out on social media and radio that we were doing this free lunch service. So anybody could come and have free lunch and we didn't require a donation. But if you donated, we would match your donation.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, really, I think it started with the second location. An opportunity came up at Tyson's Corner Center, which is at the time one of the top malls in the country. And there was an opportunity for a location that was at a mall entrance with an interior and exterior storefront. It was a bit of a sleepier entrance. But we opened in March of 2012. And we opened our doors expecting people to show up. And it was tumbleweeds. There were very few people that showed up. And I just remember thinking, oh no, I've made a bad decision. I've undermined this business. This is a lot of money we just committed. We only have so much money to build so many locations and no one's coming. And then it really spurred the idea that has become customary tradition. You know, how do we introduce ourselves to our new neighbors and the new communities?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we had guests walking in who knew the full service, who were like, what do you mean? I have to serve myself here. I have to walk through a line. Where's my lamb chops? Where's my scallops? Where's my martini? Where's my grey juice, you know? Totally. We had many, many moments of that. Yeah, it was a really bit of a struggle in the beginning trying to educate people on what this kava was because the full service was called kava meza, which still exists today, and then this was called kava. And so there was a little bit of confusion as they walked through the front door.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Bethesda, yeah, got it. It was January of 2011. And we had raised money from friends and family to open two to three locations. And this was the first. And it was a good market for this type of fast format. There was a lot of office workers, but there was a lot of also residential and families and high school students. So I remember standing in front of the line with Ted on the Friends and Family Night, and we're looking at the topping section. We're like, this kind of looks like a salad bar. You know, it's just like a bunch of chopped tomatoes, a bunch of chopped cucumbers. And so we were constantly iterating and thinking about how do we elevate it. We did not have dressings at that time. We only had one type of greens. So, you know, it was a very basic version of what we have now. We've always continued to try and iterate and evolve. But yeah, we did not want it to be a salad bar.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the first things we thought about was we had a commissary that we were making the dips and spreads at a central commissary. And we also felt like those handcrafted dips and spreads were the flavor centerpiece of the menu. So we started to think about building the menu around that in that grain bowls and greens and manes that were elements of the full service restaurant, whether spicy lamb meatballs or the chicken marinade that was used at the restaurant. So that's how we started to build out the menu and then Ted and Dimitri really working on how do you take these items from a made to order format to a cook and hold format on the serving line.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really interesting. I remember one investor that I met with when we were trying to raise that original friends and family around, he said to me after I finished presenting the idea to him, he's like, I like this idea. He's like, how many restaurants can you name off the top 100 Washingtonian restaurant list from 10 years ago? And I'm sitting there thinking and I'm like, gosh, I don't know. He's like, exactly. He's like full-service restaurants are hard and it's hard to build a brand around. And he said I love what you're trying to do to take the great aspects of what you have in your full service restaurant and create a brand around it in this fast format that's much more scalable.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was the guys had a lot of customers of the original Kavameze restaurant who were some successful local business folks who had come to them and say, we want to invest in your next Kavameze restaurant. And so we reached out to all of them. We got them all together at the original Caveze, closed for lunch one day. We mocked up all this food, put a presentation together, and we said, look, this isn't going to be another Cavameze, but here's our idea. We want to take the great food of Cavameze, put it in a fast health-based format, open two or three, prove that this has the appeal we think it will, and then look to scale it from there. And that's what we were looking to raise money for. So we got everybody together at that original restaurant in Rockville.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember immediately kind of getting into the kitchen with Dimitri and working on bowl ideas and calling Bretham be like, hey, come up to Kava Emeza at the time, our original restaurant. And we kind of put these bowls in front of them. And it was the start of what we've kind of been doing for the last 12 years here and last 16 years overall, this partnership of kind of working through what the concept would be, what the food would be, how it would look, how it would taste. So we were super excited. I think we love the idea.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had been a customer of the early fast casuals like Chipotle and Panera and had looked at the different business models counter service, the walk the line, assembly line format. And one of the things that struck me that really helped us make the decision was that the walk the line format allowed very efficient labor costs. You know, it's the old Henry Ford production line that allowed you to invest in high quality ingredients. And the guys were already using these great high quality ingredients, whether in the dips and spreads or at the restaurant. And we felt like that's what was going to matter. And if we could bring those high quality ingredients like we served in the restaurant or put in the dips and spreads to a larger audience at a more affordable price point.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we thought that there was opportunity to continue to make it more profitable, which we were able to do. And we wanted to maintain being a culinary brand and really bring Mediterranean to consumers across the country. So having those dips and spreads, being able to be in our customers' refrigerator in our house, being served to their friends and family, having that awareness touch point, having the validation of the quality of being sold in Whole Foods markets was just a great brand amplifier to what we were trying to do in the fast casual.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the restaurants were making profit, the dips, of course, were not. We were funding those with the restaurant profit, but we were starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel coming out of that whole economic collapse of 0809. We were in a good place. Ike was running the books. Brett was actually even helping us a little with that without having any kind of consulting agreement. We were just kind of going to him for advice. And so things were going well at that time.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I literally was interviewing him to be my boss, right? And so, you know, outside advice that we got were like, oh, you're crazy. Why would you want to hire a boss? Why would you want to give this up? And I just saw a bigger picture. I knew and I could see what he was going to bring to the three of us. And it was going to be much bigger than what the three of us were going to accomplish on our own.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said to us, he's like, Guys, look around, you know, this kind of Mediterranean food is already healthy. And I don't think I realized that I just grew up eating that, right? The prebiotics and yogurt, the amazing qualities of olive oil, the chickpeas, just the natural healthfulness of all the different items that we had at our restaurant, right? And so I remember saying, hey, let's talk. Let's have a coffee. And we sat down and I said to him, hey, you know, I really love what you're doing. The guys love what you're doing. I think what you bring to the table is very different than all the tools that we have. And I would love nothing more than for you to join us as our fourth partner. And I remember, you know, to his credit, he looked at me and he actually told me that that's actually a bad decision. That's bad. You know, he's trying to give me good advice as a business partner already. That's not a good thing to just give away 25% of your equity.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's exactly how I was thinking about that we could raise capital and really grow this into a large player in the hummus and the dips and spreads category that this could be a brand we could scale. And it was around that time that I had experienced the full service restaurant and was really struck by a couple things. I was struck by the authenticity of what Ted Ike and Dimitri had started, just the soulfulness of the brand. And B, here was a way of eating that was satisfying and flavorful. And oh, by the way, it happened to be healthy. And I said to the guys, like, we need to bring this to a larger audience.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Brett, before that happened, right, what was your sort of thinking around the DIPs business? Were you thinking, all right, this is really going to be the thing that grows this overall business? And this thing is going to be, could potentially be huge. Like we should go raise money, we should turn into a brand. Like, was that how you were thinking about it?”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we were super happy to have the help. And what we really saw was that business slowly start to turn around. And I saw him so complimentary of what I do. I like to be a little more creative. I like to be a little loose with the numbers. I'm like the guy with the briefcase of cash, right? And he really just brings this completely different way about thinking about the business. And I really started to think right then and there like how he could help us in our restaurant business.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember the business was using just QuickBooks at the time. And QuickBooks had a manufacturing version that was very relevant so you could build what's called Bill of Materials for those products to have a true understanding of every production you run, what the yield is, what the usage is, what the true costs are in the business. So there was a lot of just experience I had gained through the Snack Food business that I was able to apply very quickly to that business to drive more profitability and efficiency.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things I learned in the snack food business is just how precise and how detailed you have to be. As Ted said earlier, it's a pretty low margin business. And I remember walking in and saying, you know, how much does this tub of hummus cost us to make And it was like, oh, you know, around $2. I said, well, to the third decimal point, hundreds of a penny, you know, including the label, including the seal, like making sure we have all of our costs down, a little bit like Ted talked about what they learned in the full service restaurant, and then how are we monitoring our”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting, guys. At the time, I had been speaking with a former colleague from my finance days about starting up a consulting practice where we would consult with small emerging brands and potentially take equity in lieu of compensation and help create value with that equity interest. And when I met Ted, you know, we kind of clicked right away. And then we were customers of the product. We had it in our refrigerator and really believed in the opportunity in that category”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I had been heads down for four years helping build that business and the exit that we did, it was a success. I wouldn't say it was a tremendous success by any means. Like it was like pushing a boulder up a hill, but it was a tremendous learning experience in what it takes to build a business and build a brand. But now here I was at a crossroads. What was I going to do next? So I did seek counsel from people around me and thinking about what I wanted to do next. And that's where I started thinking about consulting. And even before I started thinking about that is when I got connected with Ted.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, at that time, we had signed a lease for our second location. We were delivering to a few Whole Foods in the Mid-Atlantic and a few smaller other grocery brands. And we were having issues. We were having logistical issues. We were having production issues. It was not profitable. And right around that time, the economy started to kind of collapse.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was not a good revenue stream. It was losing money. It was giving us heartache. I remember even the first delivery I took, the grocery store refused it. I delivered it in the back seat of my car and they said, well, you know, has this been refrigerated since you delivered it? I go, no, we pretty much made it, threw it in my car and brought it over. So I had to throw that all away. Obviously, we were making this stuff without preservatives. As we made it a few days later, these packages were kind of blowing up because we didn't have any preservatives in it. So we didn't really understand the business at all. And it really, really struggled.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that same time, we started talking about doing a second restaurant. We're like, hey, we figured out what we're doing. We must be geniuses, right? Let's go do a second restaurant and let's try to sell, you know, our dips and spreads in grocery stores at the same time. And I remember we would make these dips at night. We would hand scoop them into the packages. We would use these little scales. And then we would use blow dryers to melt the ring of plastic around the top to crimp them and then eventually deliver them to the grocery stores in the early morning.”
2023-11-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · CAVA: Ted Xenohristos and Brett Schulman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT