Happy Thursday

This week's feature episode was with Maddy Shannon, the Head of AI Product and Strategy at Spot On POS. I met Maddy in Boston this past year while we were both speaking on panels at BU about AI and product. During a dinner that evening, we spent almost the entire time talking just that: AI and product.  

Though seemingly very different backgrounds, she also came from fine dining restaurants prior to building software.  Originally a Stanford MBA grad in applied mathematics turned Bain consultant, she always wanted to be in restaurants.  So Maddy switched to restaurant finance, working at Alinea in Chicago and then Single Thread out west, before joining Spot On.

Two threads stood out during our conversations. The first was a new perspective on service, hospitality, and product.

She shares that the more common 'Surprise and Delight' is flawed in that it is inherently (at least in expression) absent of planning and data. Rather, she shares, a better approach is to 'Anticipate and Deliver'. This requires having a deep understanding and empathy for what your customer expects and where they are at emotionally, then deliver above and beyond that expectation at the right time with every detail of their experience.

The second thread seems to pop up for me often during the show, and something I believe deeply to be true. The perception of what the cost of a meal should be is far less than what the cost of the meal (or rather the experience) actually should be.  

I am a big fan of the Kaisen philosophy and process. So I love how Maddy explained that at Single Thread Hospitality, they turned the noun Kaisen into a verb.

Kaisen is continuous improvement through many small iterative changes. It is also how good becomes great becomes phenomenal. And it comes up often for us at meez, especially as of late with so many new updates we are releasing much more frequently. That speeding up of releases came from continual improvement to our process of development over the years, coupled with incorporating AI into our workflow of building.

I've never been more excited about what we are releasing as of late. From the meez MCP that you can connect to your AI tools, to recipe approval workflows, automated server cards, and the meez Intelligence platform that allows you to use your data the way you want, and build the metrics and notifications you need to improve your business.

Feel free to reach out or reply here, and I'd love to share how we can help kitchens at scale make step-function improvements to the operation and the bottom line.  

And speaking of little improvements over time, this week's recipe is a chicken liver mousse that I have been iterating on for over a decade.

🎙️ The meez Podcast

Maddy Shannon on the Anticipate and Deliver Approach

Maddy went from Bain to the business team at Alinea, to being the only numbers person at SingleThread, to leading product strategy at SpotOn. That path shows up in how she thinks. We get into why great hospitality goes invisible when it's done right, why guests undervalue what a restaurant actually gives them, and how to use AI to find what matters in a mountain of data.

• Why great hospitality becomes invisible
• The anticipate and deliver approach
• Why guests undervalue what they're paying for
• Rethinking how a restaurant prices a meal
• Kaizen: continuous improvement as a daily habit
• Using AI as a second brain

👉 Watch the full episode

🤔🌶️ Hot Take

You're Not Paying for the Prawns

There's a perception that a restaurant meal should cost what the ingredients cost. That doesn't happen in any other business. I think it's because everyone cooks at home, so the presumption is that a restaurant is just like cooking at home, and there's no reason to pay more.

Go to a day spa, and you'll happily pay $150 for the privilege of being in the room, before you've bought a single smoothie or sandwich. Sit down at a restaurant, and you see a price list for what is effectively the entire experience. The prawns are $25. But they're one line item out of many, and not even the important one.

You're paying for the lighting, the music, the space between the tables, the glass that keeps getting refilled, the sourcing of the best prawns at a reasonable price, the person clearing your crumbs, and the fact that you don't have to cook it or clean up after.

"I could make this at home for $5." No, you couldn't. Not on demand, not for whoever shows up, whether you need 200 prawns or 20. You're paying for the experience and the manufacturing behind it that most definitely can't be recreated at home. And most importantly, you're paying to let someone else take care of you, so you can just unwind and be with the people you love.

Maddy made this exact case a few years back in a talk at her alma mater, Stanford, and it's how I first learned who she was.  It comes up at least a few times a season on the podcast, and I hope it sparks some new ways of thinking.

One idea Maddy had that I really like is simply creating one single price for the meal. Not requiring a set menu/tasting menu, but rather a single price to choose from the menu.  It would take some work, and I imagine there could be some nuance like add-ons for expensive wine or white truffles, etc. But I think it's worth considering.

👉 Would love to hear your thoughts.  Chime in on Instagram or LinkedIn

📔 Chef Notes

What Have You Kaisen'd Today?

At SingleThread, they used Kaisen as a verb. "You really Kaisen'd those napkin folds." What's super interesting about this is it broadens the aperture of how we think about the use of Kaisen. It has typically been applied to manufacturing.  But I feel like this opens it up to literally everything.
 
The flip side of this is that I think that the number of things you want to 'Kaisen' is not limited to your resources, at least in order to do it fully. Resources being time, money, people, and demand.

For example, if you want to slowly improve bread-and-butter service. You really want a maniacal focus on every step of the process, and that requires those resources.

How many things you can choose to improve at one time must be limited to your resource constraints; otherwise, you are diluting the premise of Kaisen; ie if everything is important,  then nothing is important.  

No matter what, time is the most important of those resources. What's on your Kaisen list today?

👉 Chime in on Instagram or LinkedIn

Recipe:

Chicken Liver Mousse

My wife loves a good chicken liver mousse.  So I make it at most holidays.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Passover, and Easter all typically have it on the menu.  At Thanksgiving, though, I typically just take the two big turkey livers and use them to make the mousse; you don't need much to make a lot.

What's important about this recipe is the technique just as much as the ingredients.

Ingredient-wise, using very high-quality booze is important.  A great Brandy, Madeira, and Sherry make a big difference.  And of course fresh chicken livers, and high-quality butter and cream.

But the technique is more critical. You MUST dry the livers thoroughly before searing; otherwise they steam instead of sear, and you want a really nice caramelization to them. And caramelized onions are always an exercise in patience and timing.  Don't salt them right away so they have a chance to cook down a bit before all the liquid starts coming out. Then the right timing for when you turn the heat down from high to medium-high to medium, then down to low is how you get perfectly caramelized onions that are not cooked too much and not too dark before they cook through nicely.

And there is so much fond every step of the way. After searing the livers. After caramelizing the onions. The booze is the vehicle to pick up that fond in addition to its flavor, so don't miss scraping all of that off.

You can add more whipped cream if you like; as well, if you like a lighter flavor, use less if you want more of the chicken liver to come through. And of course, you must pass this liver mixture through a tamis or chinois; otherwise, you don't have the texture that makes this so elegant.

👉 Get the recipe

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