Chad Brauze: And this, and so that was like two years of,I I, that's actually how I describe your program. Like it's very to the point. Yeah. I put my recipes in it auto calculates everything. I drop in my invoice costs and it runs nutrition for me. I give it a serving size to the point. It's like those three things that I need, I need like a scalable recipe.
I need. My nutrition and I need like an estimate of my cogs.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Does it right for me.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. Very mind blowing. How quick it did it.
Josh Sharkey: Well I appreciate that. It's funny how much work it took just to get to that simple point. Oh, can I? Yeah, because I know what
Chad Brauze: it's like to build the spreadsheets. 'cause I was building basically a spreadsheet from scratch every time.
I mean this is since I started working at blowing restaurants. But then when I get to the big time, like Chipotle Burger King here, like I would run them spreadsheets myself. Yeah. And it was, I'd build the model every time from scratch just 'cause I don't wanna miss anything. Because it's hard to cut and paste.
'cause there's, like you said, they're sometimes they're a little specific to like what your product is. Yeah,
Josh Sharkey: yeah.
Chad Brauze: And I'd come up with these monstrosities of like five pages. You don't know what to update. I'd forget what the formula was and I had to go back and like retrain myself, like, okay, I do what this, and then that and okay.
It was, I converted to grams there and it was just, um, a breath of fresh air when I got mees.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. And it's, it's crazy that that happens at that scale too. Well, anyways, let's, let's get into, first of all, yeah, yeah. Let's, let's talk. First of all, [00:05:00] welcome to the show. I'm really honored to be here at the Sweet Green Headquarters, and you have just an insane background, uh, which makes sense for Sweet Green to hire someone like you, because before Sweet Green and Chipotle and Burger King, you were, uh, working with Danielle and a bunch of, you know, incredible chefs like that, Thomas Keller.
Really the best of the best. So you've been sort of on. The, the best of the best on both sides of the coin, which doesn't happen very often. So I wanted, I want, there's a lot obvi, there's a lot of questions I have obviously about that because I'm fascinated. But to start, like what is a, what is a day in the life of the head of culinary?
It's wheat green.
Chad Brauze: Um, okay. I'm a morning person. I'm up early. 4, 4 0 5. I usually beat my alarm by a couple minutes, which is Wow. Are you from LA the Way? No, no. I'm from, I lived south of here in Orange County, but I'm from Michigan originally. Oh, okay. I grew up outside of Ann Arbor, small town called Brighton.
Oh yeah. First place I worked at Brighton Bar and Grill. So shout out to Scotty Heath there. His dad's place, he [00:06:00] runs a record label now up in San Francisco. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Taint Crimes. They do a lot of metal and punk. That's cool. Good thing. Yeah. But um, yeah, I. Day for me starts about 4:00 AM. Um, I go to CrossFit every day.
I do maybe five, six days a week of that. It's just good because I walk in the door and I like to work out. I don't have to think about it. You just show up like your workout for the day is written up on the whiteboard. Like they coach it through it and then it's just lifting weights, doing pull up, stuff like that.
Running around. Do you do the competitions, Sue? No, I didn't do competition. I'm just in it for me. Yeah, like I'm not that good, you know, I just get a little bit better every week.
Josh Sharkey: I like, I like CrossFit. Other than when they push you for the competitions? Yeah. No, because like I just wanna work out.
Chad Brauze: Yeah.
Yeah. I just, I just do it to work out. Yeah. I've got a couple good guys that work out with me in the morning, so like we compete with each other, but that's about it. Like. When I com, you know, outside of the gym, I'm not that good. Yeah. But in the gym, it's fun. 4:00 AM What time do you go to sleep? About 8 0 5, 8 30.
I got two little kids, so we put them to bed. Then we get to bed, dude. How, how old are your kids? Uh, six and nine. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: I have a four and a 6-year-old. So basically kids go down and then you ride to bed, kids
Chad Brauze: go [00:07:00] down. I might read something on the Kindle, you know, like look up a cookbook. Mm-hmm. But then try and, you know, hit the, hit the hay.
But it, to me it's a luxury. Like after being. I worked in New York City for so many years, like up late at night. Yeah. Like going to bed at 2, 3, 4 in the morning. Even like five in the morning if we went out afterwards. So now like going to bed early and waking up early, that's like a treat. 'cause so much of my life, I just was up late.
Yeah. It's something nice.
Josh Sharkey: Is that also like a west coast thing? Because most people that I, uh, uh, even like a lot of my team, they just get up earlier.
Chad Brauze: You know, the thing that I can do or the reason I can do, it's, 'cause I started on the East coast and when I moved out here, I was still in that timeframe, but it's three hours off now.
So. Before I used to wake up at, you know, nine, 10, take three hours off that at six in the morning already. So
Josh Sharkey: yeah,
Chad Brauze: moving out here made it easier.
Josh Sharkey: It's like, it's amazing. Get the whole day ahead of you.
Chad Brauze: Oh yeah. You get so much stuff in.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Alright, so after CrossFit,
Chad Brauze: after CrossFit, get into the office here.
Um, usually have breakfast here, so we got a lot of good snacks. Um, I'm big on good culture, so we get good culture. Cottage cheese here. Have you had that one before?
Josh Sharkey: Um. It's fantastic.
Chad Brauze: Wait,
Josh Sharkey: is
Chad Brauze: that,
Josh Sharkey: that's, that's not [00:08:00] vegan, right?
Chad Brauze: No. It's like, no, it's not vegan. It's uh, it's like a dairy cream or, yeah, cottage cheese, but like really, I like the good
Josh Sharkey: cottage cheese.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. Like 17, 18 grams of protein in one. Nice. Have one of those, maybe a couple bananas, some apples. Like good stuff. Skin of the test kitchen. Um, we get a lot of deliveries. So usually first thing I do is sort through. So what's coming in FedEx? Um, we get samples, stuff we're working on with suppliers. Like people send us things like, Hey, check out our new soda company, or like our new protein bar company.
That
Josh Sharkey: must happen all the time.
Chad Brauze: All the time. Like probably we get 15 to 25 boxes a day. You never know what's gonna be in. It'd be like someone's sending you their cheese that they want you to try out, or like some cool varietal of lettuce shows up. It's, it's fun. It's awesome. It's like Christmas every day here.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. So you, so you, uh, so you get the orders in, put the boxes
Chad Brauze: Yep. Team starts to roll in. We talk through like what we owe the different teams. Like could be we owe like cogs or like money or, you know, um, food costs mm-hmm. Forecasting to finance, and we might have to calculate some of that stuff. So we, we figure out like who, who has responsibilities where, um, Jocelyn's, our food scientists, she'll talk about like what we need to do with [00:09:00] suppliers.
Like we have any samples coming in that we have to try from them or if we owe them any data. Yeah. Um. And then just maybe head upstairs. So our test kitchen's down in the basement, go up, talk to the marketing team, just kinda roll through, um, see everybody say hi, and then get back down to the test kitchen and honestly start cooking.
Figure out like what we're gonna work on.
Josh Sharkey: When you say figure out which you wanna work on, uh, you know, let's just jump into this Yeah. Into the whole r and d process. Is that something that you are thinking about far ahead of time or is it, you know, is it, is it more ad hoc? Like how, how, how does the ideation start?
It depends.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. So sometimes like. We might work on something way far out, like it's just an idea, like a blue sky innovation, and it's just something like, maybe it's a passion project for us. Um, we'll work on those things, but also we have dependencies like marketing team. So I work really closely with the marketing team.
Mm-hmm. In a company like this, or even like Burger King or Chipotle. But at scale, like you've got a team that goes out there and figures out like, Hey, what could we launch that would be good. Like they talk to customers like the insights team does. They see like what's like what other competitors are doing?
Like maybe there's a niche that we could fill out and they [00:10:00] come back with ideas to my team. My team's like, okay, well you wanna do a lemonade? Alright, what would be cool? What we could do like a green lemonade. We could do a strawberry lemonade. We do like something really crazy and we start to put together ideas and we work with the market team going back and forth.
We might take like a big list of ideas and push that to the insights team and they'll go and talk to our customers. They'll talk to you like. Super heavy customers. The people come five days a week, like, would you like this? They'll come to the people that come once a month. They'll go to like what we call lapsed consumer, like maybe someone that used to come a lot, but they stopped and be like, Hey, like we know you haven't been in a while.
Like, if we launch something like this, would you be interested? We got a lot of cool data, like information that we can use to work with, and it's fun. It's like different than in fine dining. When you launch something like you're the chef, you put it out there, you kind of have like a vibe, you've got a feel.
Mm-hmm. Like I think my customers are like this. Sometimes it hits and sometimes like you put a special out there and like no one buys it. Like you might sell three to your regulars and that's about it. It's nice to have the insights team, 'cause they like really do a lot of good, like logical, analytical, like, like thought into what something could, like how popular it could be.
Yeah. Like they get things like purchase [00:11:00] intent. Um, they get you all sorts of cool metrics that like help you design it to be better and like you can improve upon it and send that idea right back out and see like, okay, well they don't like it when it's green, but if it's like a bright orange like. Still buy that.
That's crazy. Yeah, it's fun. It's a different way of thinking about food.
Josh Sharkey: So are most of the ideas is, is the genesis of most of these ideas coming from marketing? Is it, is there? No, no.
Chad Brauze: It's, um, it's like in this company it's kinda a three-way. So founders, so we're founder led, so lots of good ideas coming from there, from marketing and then from culinary.
So a little bit everywhere, but it's, we vibe off each other a lot. Like we might know, we have an idea, we wanna launch like a protein.
Josh Sharkey: Mm-hmm.
Chad Brauze: And from there it's like. My team might cook a bunch of stuff. We all sit down and taste it, figure out like if we like those flavors, and if we do, then we start to throw that into that insights pipeline that I was talking about and seeing like, what kind of information can we get back on it?
Like, okay, it's. Like a spicy chicken, like how spicy do we wanna be? Do you want like notes of garlic in there? Herbs? Like do we wanna tie it to cuisine or we just want it to be spicy chicken and just kind of build off of it that way. [00:12:00]
Josh Sharkey: So is a lot of that back and forth happening before you ever even cook anything?
Just sort of,
Chad Brauze: yeah. We direction, like we'll just sit down sometimes and like talk about things or like, we're active on Instagram and even like going out to eat, like when someone in the group goes out to eat, like send pictures of all the cool things that you had. Just kinda like feed off it that way.
Sounds like so much fun. It is. It's kind of fun. It's so much different than being, like when you run a restaurant, like writing the dishes and writing the menu and like doing that work, that's a big part of it. But you're also like processing payroll, like staying up on maintenance. Yeah, buying your equipment, um, you know, dealing with your investors, your landlord, all those things.
Like at the corporate level, like I'm just straight food. Like I just think about food. I mean, I think about like how we're gonna execute in store, like the labor model. I think about how we're gonna cost it out, but. At the heart of it. I do way much more cooking now than when I was running restaurants. Is that nice?
Because it's just like, yeah, it's just. I never thought it would be like that, but, but that was like a learning, like coming from Yeah. Fine dining to here.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. What is the, so, so once you have landed on an idea mm-hmm. Right. Even if you do [00:13:00] decide, okay, actually it should be an orange lemonade, not a, yeah. I imagine you're trying, you're making 14 different kinds of orange lemonade in four.
It could be doing 50 times. Yeah. So what does that. Like, like who's involved? And then what are the, like what are you mostly? Mostly it's my team.
Chad Brauze: One of our founders, Nick, he's big into food. Nick Jame. Yep. Yep. Um, he comes from New York City as well. Um, his mom, Rita. Mm-hmm. Like huge wine importer there. So he's like, grew up in the food scene.
His parents used to own a restaurant, like a real popular place in Manhattan. Yeah. So if he knows food really well, so usually we cook stuff for him and we kinda just like discuss through it. We might eliminate stuff on our end. He might eliminate something. We narrow it down to like a few and lemme just kinda shop it around the office like.
You know, make a couple gallons of lemonade, put it upstairs in the break room, like see what kind of comments you get. Like someone might slack you like, that was amazing. What was it? Then you know you're onto something.
Josh Sharkey: And how long does that go on for until you decide? We're gonna usually a
Chad Brauze: couple weeks as we play through it and like really kind of solidifying something.
And the next step is depend on like how strong we think the idea is. We can put it into like a taste test where we go to a store, [00:14:00] we invite in like maybe 150 to 200 consumers, like guests of ours. We bring 'em in throughout the day and like they come in, they get some, like, they get something to drink, they record some notes on it.
You know, we take all that, take a look at it and see like, okay, did they like the acidity? They like the mouth, feel the appearance. Like would they pay three 50 for this? Um, we'll put the nutritionals on like, Hey, this has 22 grams of sugar in a serving. What are your thoughts on that? Like, get a lot of feedback and that comes back in.
If we have to tweak it, we tweak it, and if not, then we throw it like into a store. So we've got kind of, um, we call it a stage gate process, and we're like. Step one, throw into one or two stores. Mm-hmm. Figure out like, can we do this operationally? Like can the teams execute it? Can we get the product in?
Does it
Josh Sharkey: matter what store? Or do you have storage? It does,
Chad Brauze: yeah. You kind of pick on what the market you wanna be in. Like let's say you're gonna launch an ice cream, you're probably not gonna put it in a test market in like the Midwest in the middle of winter. You throw that one some warm. So yeah, you put a little bit of thought into it, like you try and match your seasons, match who you wanna sell to, but we'll start with the two store test.
We call it an operations test. Just see. We don't really care what the sales read is like we don't feedback a little bit. If we get negative feedback, we'll [00:15:00] fix it, but um, we're just there to like see, can we run this in the back of house? Step two, if that's all good, like if you get a green light there, you go to market test and that's like 10 to 30 stores.
That one we're pretty picky about. Like we'll pick, we'll try and find a population that's represented the whole chain. Yeah. So you get a good, like easy feel for it. So like you don't wanna go too coastal or anything like that. And that's good. Then we'd probably go to a national rollout.
Josh Sharkey: You get these ideas in and, and then you sort of run, run 'em through insights. When do you start to consider, um, once you're past this sort of the creative piece of this mm-hmm. The profit margin piece, execution piece.
Chad Brauze: So like we love an idea. Next step is does the financial model work? So I work with the supply chain team.
We figure out, okay, what farms are we gonna source from? What's like the window where they're gonna harvest this stuff? And start to calculate all that out. Like, okay, how much does it cost at the field? How much does it cost to push it through logistics chain? So like something's picked at the field, gets shipped to a warehouse and it gets shipped to our store each time.
That adds a little bit of [00:16:00] cost. Yeah. So we figure that out. Then they run your normal yield tests like it's a Brussels sprout. You know, you probably get 75% yield off that once you peel it and chop it. Um, and then build out the financial model. See what like your cook yield is for everything and say, okay, does this make sense financially?
Like, can we do this for. 25% or less food cost with a decent amount of labor. Like a minimal amount of labor. Like we, A cool thing about Sweet Green is we process a lot of things in back of house, meaning like we get cases of kale, case of romaine comes straight from the fields, we strip it, wash it, chop it, serve it.
Right? So I have to make sure whatever I bring in, like it's, I can put a little bit of labor into it, but not too much. Like, I don't wanna, I can't put our teams like Bruno, like making a brunoise of something, right? Yeah. Like it has to be, it has to be a way to automate it within reason, like with Robo cos or Vita Preps, uh, or like immersion blenders.
Um, we do more than most any other chain at our scale. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: I didn't realize how much, how much prep you guys do in store.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. It's pretty crazy.
Josh Sharkey: What do you do with the stems of the kale?
Chad Brauze: Um, sometimes we incorporate 'em, we've actually been working on a program that we're pretty proud of where we buy them when they've been stripped in the field.
Mm-hmm. Which is nice because the stems, which a lot of [00:17:00] times they're tough to use, like they can be too stringy. They can actually go right back into the field and then they plow 'em under. It becomes part of like the ah, that's cool. It goes back into the soil.
Josh Sharkey: It's good. Oh, that's really cool.
Chad Brauze: And then also costs us to ship it because you're now, you've got just a better yield off that base.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, yeah, of course. Is there a, I mean, are there instances when a, a dish kills and you just, everyone loves it, you just couldn't figure out the economics of it?
Chad Brauze: Yeah. We've definitely had in the past, um, gets tougher with proteins. Everyone wants to cook with short ribs and stuff like that, but since everyone wants to cook with them, the price is up.
So you learn to cook with stuff that, um, you can do better with, like, use sued cooking to like kind of influence it.
Josh Sharkey: Mm-hmm. Can you think of something that, that, like that, that didn't really
Chad Brauze: pass? No. I mean, at this point in my career, I'm pretty good at like working to figure out like what's gonna work. I can't think off the top of my head, but there has to, there has to be some out there.
Probably when I was earlier on, like beautiful idea. Maybe either too hard to execute, but not the top of my head. I can't think of one. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Are there times when sort of the, the genesis of the idea comes right [00:18:00] from culinary, but marketing kinda shuts it down? I remember, I remember like doing sunchokes at uh Oh yeah.
Sunchokes. I
Chad Brauze: couldn't get sunchokes on the menu.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I didn't even realize the, the whole like gas piece of this. Yeah. 'cause you know, we just, suns are great. You know, you roast them and they're. They got shot down pretty quick. But does that, does that ever happen?
Chad Brauze: No. If anything, it's like sometimes we might get a little esoteric with like an ingredient and PE and marketing seems like Yeah.
People don't really know what like K Monte is quite yet. Like let's stick with Clementine.
Josh Sharkey: Oh, interesting. Yeah. How do you handle that? Is there, is there like a, something you can sort of advocate for? Like for does Yeah. I mean sometimes you
Chad Brauze: can just keep it in there and it's, well we're gonna put in there 'cause we like the flavor of it, we just won't talk about it.
Like, and the consumers that know will know and the ones that don't, it's still cool.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. When does of dish like feel done for you? And, and by the way, I, I, you know, I asked this, uh, last year at the chef conference to like, you know, the NOMA team and people, and it got some really interesting answers. So, so maybe think about this not just through the frame of [00:19:00] like Sweet Green, generally speaking.
Like when do you feel like this thing's done? And I can kind of walk away.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna give you my restaurant side and then like at scale, like big cooking. So in the restaurant, like I. I think it's done the first night it goes out there or maybe it's done. Like you run it as a special few times you like it, people like it, and you put in your core menu.
That's done. I think in a restaurant you might tweak it and stuff, but generally like once your team's made it a few times and like you feel good and you can source everything and like it's creatable and like people rave about it, it's good. But then when you get to at scale cooking like it's sweet green or like big places like that, it's constantly there.
Like you are always working on it. You are working on, okay, how can we do it more efficiently in the back of house? Like what processes can I change? Your supply chain could change. Like maybe you start sourcing corn from Georgia and then the field, you know, they start sourcing a little bit north and north and north.
So you have to constantly taste like, what does that corn taste like? What does that taste like? Or you might have other supply chain issues, like, we can't get that avocado oil anymore. Like let's try this new brand. Or just all sorts of stuff like that. So it's like you're constantly tweaking. [00:20:00]
Josh Sharkey: Does it ever feel like, okay, now we're, now we're good.
Chad Brauze: When you feel like you're good, usually something's, something's about to go wrong.
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What do you feel like is similar about what you're doing now as it relates to r and d? Many development or even just like what you're excited about relative to what you were doing at Chipotle and Burger King and that, obviously very different brands, but but also really scaled.
Chad Brauze: Yeah, I think, um, we still focus on good flavors, like across all three brands.
Like you have brand flavors you want to hit. You just kind of different paths to get there. So like Chipotle, they want things to taste good, but it's like more Mexican, like Burger King. It's like more traditional, like American, like fast food, like spicy, like really super rich, umami like kind of rich, indulgent, salty, sweet, sour, like hit all those senses and sweet green's, like fresh, flavorful, like from the farm flavors.
But it all tastes good at the end. And I think that's kind of like cool, like it's just different paths to get there. Like either you're going [00:22:00] straight farm to table, like sweet green style, or maybe you take like a little detour of the south of Mexico with Chipotle. Or if it's just like. Trait Glutton is fun.
That's Burger King.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Chad Brauze: What are, what's, what are some things that are like wildly
Josh Sharkey: different?
Chad Brauze: Wildly different? Yeah. Um, probably the attention to detail here at Sweet Green. Like, we wanna go right back to who grows it for us. Um, we're real careful about sugars and like how we use 'em here. Like we basically just use honey maple syrup, coconuts, sugar, and that's about it.
Um, dates, syrup, sometimes you ever, you ever
Josh Sharkey: miss monk Fruit?
Chad Brauze: I haven't done yet. It's so, it's one of those things we call polarizing. Like some consumers love it, some consumers don't. And like when you're dealing with 250 stores and like coast to coast, you gotta be mindful, like you gotta find something that California's gonna like that Michigan's gonna like and New York is gonna like.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Are there any, uh, regions that are like outliers of it works everywhere Other than this one?
Chad Brauze: No. I mean, we're working to, like, things don't really hit the menu unless we know that they're gonna do well. So it also, like, as you think about big at scale stuff. You could do that. Like you could have regional favorites everywhere, but then you gotta train regional favorites.
So you [00:23:00] have to like kind of play it back. Like is it worth, like, having the ops team now has to train five ways to do this recipe. Like as a chef, like am I gonna walk into those stores and like find that it's done five different ways perfectly? Or could I figure out one best way that everybody does, like where what's gonna make me happier long term?
And generally it's um, kind of get, try and get everyone to do the same thing.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. How do you measure. Success in what you're doing. I mean, there's so much that happens after you finish. Yeah. A dish.
Chad Brauze: Okay. The corporate answer is like, oh, the, the KPIs and the metrics good, but like for me, it's when someone I know goes into the store tries it just like unannounced, like maybe one of my chef buddies, my mom, like family friends, like people I went to high school with.
Like, Hey man, I had the ripple fries. They're amazing. That's like my measure of success. Like how many texts, like positive texts do I get when I launch a product?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. And so what are the corporate, you know, metrics? Yeah. You know,
Chad Brauze: it's like, okay, what's your attachment? How many times are people adding to their check?
Like, are you driving traffic? Are you seeing lapsed consumers come back in? I mean, those are all the positive metrics that you wanna have. Like are you driving more [00:24:00] traffic? Are you bringing new people into the stores? Or like those people that didn't come as often, are they coming more often now? Or like, this consumer used to have a $15 check, now they've got a $19 check.
Like those are all really good things for a business.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Tell me about your team. I mean, I obviously met yeah, a bunch of 'em, but,
Chad Brauze: so okay. I've got a cool team. I've got, basically, I've got four core people on my team. So if you think about a product like at scale, like there's this ideation process where you develop it.
So I've got a chef Mark, who's our lead r and d chef, does that stuff. And then from there you might have to commercialize it. So I've got a food scientist, Jocelyn. Um, she's got a master's in food science. She's just really good at stuff, so she can take it to like a supplier or like someone to commercialize it for us and like.
Make sure that it matches what we're doing in store or like at like in the test kitchen. So this might be for like a sauce or something like that. Some of the dressings we upstream, like we have commercialized and it's pretty interesting because, and this is like a big learning thing for me, like if you think about in fine dining, you make a puree, right?
You make a puree in your vita prep and you gotta get a cold real quick. So you may be made like a two kilo batch, you throw that over ice like in a bull, you do the whole spinny [00:25:00] thing. It gets cold in about three minutes now. You scale it up and you make a 5,000 pound batch. You might make it in a giant kettle.
You've got same speed of, of, uh, like the, the blending maybe even faster. 'cause like those machines are cooler.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Chad Brauze: But it's hot now to get 5,000 pounds of something cold, that actually probably takes 25 minutes. 'cause you gotta pump it out of there. So you have to start to think like, okay, the first five minutes are gonna have a different texture and flavor than the last five minutes just because they've been held hot longer.
So you just like start to think about those things. So I've got a food scientist that helps us solve those problems. And then I've got a, an operations person that helps like take ideas live. Like, um, you know, we might think of something in the test kitchen and it's a little clumsy or tricky and she'll go and take those recipes and be like, okay, in store we have this equipment, we've got these portioning tools, here's how we're actually gonna manufacture this in store and kind of tightens it up for us.
Yeah. And I've got a guy named Kurt that actually runs our test kitchen, receives samples, sets up her day for us. It's a small team, but fun.
Josh Sharkey: That's great. That's great to have a small, tight team.
Chad Brauze: Yeah, it's good. And we, we vibe really well. Um, [00:26:00] text a lot. We're always eating in the kitchen. Like you came in there, we had pies from squirrel that
Josh Sharkey: look good.
Good day today. You guys go to eat a lot too? We do, yeah. What, what's the, what's your la spots that you like?
Chad Brauze: Me? Um, I like tacos. I like any, any good taco spot I'll drive by if I'm driving by like. Through the city and it looks good. I'll probably pull up and try something.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. If you, if someone was coming outta town, would you send 'em?
Actually,
Chad Brauze: there's a place off the road here called Holbox. It's really good.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Chad Brauze: Um, yeah, like seafood style tacos.
Josh Sharkey: Mm, really good. Love that.
Chad Brauze: Oh, we could take you there.
Josh Sharkey: I love a good taco. Um, I, you know what I always think about with, with, well actually creativity in general. In a good way is constraints.
Um, you know, like any, I feel like putting some sort of constraint around what you do is a great way to innovate because otherwise I love it. It's like overwhelming. Yeah, it can be. What, what are like some of the constraints for creating food within Sweet Green that you really appreciate and then some that are just a pain in the ass that you have to do.
Chad Brauze: Okay. Things I appreciate. There's only so many things you can bring into the store, right? Like, I've already got a couple vinegars in store. I've [00:27:00] got a nice sea salt. Um, I've got avocado oil, extra virgin olive oil. I've got those. So those are good. Like, I'm not gonna worry about bringing in like almond oil or something else like that.
Like I don't really wanna bring in too many more allergens. So it's good. That kind of keeps us clean when we mm-hmm. When we develop stuff. Um, and there's also only so many things you can bring into a store. So like you, I can't launch, like I can't teach 250 stores worth of teams, like how to make 15 new like skews to go on, or like items to go on top of a salad.
I can do maybe two or three. So that's kind of nice, like. We think up a concept, we have to think, okay, we're gonna reuse the romaine, we're gonna reuse the white rice. Like what can we do? Like we know we've got cabbage from something else. Like what could we use that? Yeah. Like we kind of pick and choose, but it's nice since we have so many fresh vegetables in there, you can do it.
And then I think about, okay, well if I bring in something from the outside, what could it be? Like? How special does it have to be? And then kind of like, go that way. And I'll tell you the troubling part is at Sweet Cream, you can kind of do whatever you want. Like any flavor profile. Like Burger King was easy.
It's like Americana. Chipotle was super easy. It's like, yeah, American Mexican [00:28:00] food, but sweet green man. Any direction. Sometimes you got so much blue sky, you don't know which way to fly.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. It's gotta be, it, it, it does have to be a little bit overwhelming. Yeah. It's a
Chad Brauze: little, sometimes you need some guardrails there to like slow you down.
Josh Sharkey: I mean, have you thought about some um, just very off the beaten path type flavors with I like
Chad Brauze: Ethiopian or things we have Yeah, we, we think about a lot of that stuff, but it goes back to like. I mean, we're always putting those into our, we call 'em concept source when we talk to consumers. Like we throw these concepts out there, and if you don't get enough people that recognize it, like all that work and like all that sourcing can just be for Naugh.
Like Yeah. If no one buys it, like you're really helping out.
Josh Sharkey: It's a lot of, yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot of different work. So we're, we're obviously gonna test, um, we're gonna look at some stuff in the test kitchen day, which I'm pretty stoked about, and I wanted to talk about some of the new dishes that, that have already gone live.
And then, and then the, the new one that's going live soon. Mm-hmm. Because of the new dish that's coming live. Uh, I'd love to talk bit about collaboration and like how you think about Oh, yeah. Collaboration, because it's, it's pretty unique the way that you [00:29:00] guys collaborate or that you collaborate with chefs.
Um, and the new menu item that's coming out, I believe is, uh, yeah. It's a Korean barbecue plate. Yeah. So why don't we talk about collaboration a little bit, how you think about collaboration and how you, you know, what, what, what you've learned about collaboration from Sweet Green and,
Chad Brauze: yeah. Okay. So. We knew that we wanted to do something with Korean barbecue.
'cause it's like it's, we eat a lot, like, especially when we go to New York, we go to K Town also KTown and LA is really good too. And I, I live in Orange County, like there's just a lot of good Korean barbecue down there too. So it's something that we are like really getting excited about eating so much.
Um, and we thought that it do well with our menu. And also like, as we talk to people, like our customers, they were like, yeah, we, you know, sounds cool. Let's do it. So we wanted find a cool partner co I used to live in New York. Um, Nick, one of our founders is really good friends with Simon, their founder. It was just kinda like, like a kind of a good match there.
Um, they've got like a real good food aesthetic. They've got a real good style aesthetic and we thought it'd be fun to do with them. So we reached out and they were all about it like they wanted to work. So also, like, I'm not an expert in Korean food. Like I didn't grow up cooking it. I've never worked in a Korean restaurant.
I know how they [00:30:00] eat the heck out of it, but that's about it. We hooked up with them. Um, they've got a chef there. His name's David. Mm-hmm. Like really good guy. Yeah. Um, have you met David Shi?
Josh Sharkey: Uh, no. I, I, I know from him, but Okay. He's awesome.
Chad Brauze: Really good guy. He's got a little bit of French background, but also just good cook, like really good cooks.
Like the best like way you could describe a chef, like the guy cooks good. We went and talked to him and then just started to kind of riff with him like we wanted to do coats, menu and flavors, but like through the lens of Sweet Green. So using some of our products, um, like some of our. Like our food ethos, like they're sweeteners, like we're using maple syrup and some of this stuff, um, apple juice to sweeten instead of like cane sugar, things like that.
Mm-hmm. Um, but it was just, it worked out really well and it was just a little tricky because they're based in New York, we're based in LA so there was a lot of flying back and forth. Um, a lot of emails, like, we'd email recipes back and forth, try and recreate each other's recipes. Sometimes goods, sometimes bad.
And, but you know, after I think six or seven weeks, we kind of narrowed it down. Yeah. And we're, we're at a good place now.
Josh Sharkey: Well, I mean, what does a good collaboration look like in the end?
Chad Brauze: Both sides are happy. [00:31:00] Like the food's delicious. Um, like it, people like it, but, but ultimately, like you come out of it like a good taste in your mouth, like.
That was fun to work with. Like I can't wait to like see David again, like hang out with him. We're gonna do a little bit of, um, like a launch party in the next week or two. That's awesome. We'll fly out to New in LA or New York? In No, in New York. We're gonna go to Coat. Cool. They've got something they're cooking up.
Josh Sharkey: Dude. That's awesome. Yeah. I love that you're both using Meese as well. Just put the recipes are probably right on there. So when you're, when you're thinking about these collaborations, do you try to think about the specific person first or we think about
Chad Brauze: like what, okay. How do we wanna sell this? Like what do we want to be, um, are we like looking straight farm to table or are we looking for something like Korean barbecue or, and then we kind of like pick a couple people that we think would be cool.
And like sometimes there's an existing relationship, it's better because, you know, you just know they're gonna be cool. Yeah. So David knew, or Nick knew Simon and I knew David A. Little bit. So it just, you know, ended up being a good partnership.
Josh Sharkey: That's great. Well, let's, I, I wanna talk about that dish, but before we get into that one.[00:32:00]
You know, the ripple fry is fairly new. Fairly new, yeah. And you got a bunch of, a bunch of great, uh, press for it. So I'd love to like, what was the genesis of that? How did that come to be? Why did you guys decide to do it? Well, you
Chad Brauze: know, we've got this thing we say here, we're kind of like redesigned fast food or like rethink fast food and what, what's more synonymous with fast food than the french fry And like, you know, as a chef, I love it 'cause it's a potato, right?
Like you start with a potato, you kind of transform it with a little bit of love and it's something great. So a French fry's great. And we were thinking like. How can we do that for Sweet Green? We don't have French fryers. We don't have fryers. Um, we don't have freezers, so I can't like upstream it and bring in like a frozen thing and fry it.
Um, we wanted to air fry it, so we've got really nice ovens. So every store we have has either two or three rationales. So those things like the Rolls Royce of ovens. Yeah. Um, we just started playing around like, how can you air fry something? And like, probably like 250 iterations. We finally ended up on the ripple fry.
So if you don't know what the ripple fry is, it's like, um. Like a round, but with a waffled cut to it. Mm-hmm. And that's good because you get more airflow, which makes some crispier. And it was just a lot of playing around until we [00:33:00] finally got to something nice. But I mean, we, so we cut it in the ripple, which gives it more surface air, so it crisp better.
Um, we, we make like this cool, it's like a, like a avocado, um, potato starch slurry and actually apply the slurry to the outside of it. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So I've never made a slurry with oil before. Um, like I've always done it with water and thickened it that way. We actually put this, we we're running like a normal, like we put this into a store and we got this call from a, a GM one day.
It was like, hey, my team accidentally like mixed the oil with the, the potato starch. It actually works good. And I was like, wait, I've never done that in my career. And this is like 25 year career. Yeah, we took it into the test 'cause we tried it, it actually works really well. So we tossed the potatoes in that.
We roast them on a, a perforated sopa with a perforated, uh, hotel pan. Nice. High heat, low humidity. Run it through like a, that's some work. Yeah, it's some work, but it comes out real nice. Yeah. It's a nice air fried potato.
Josh Sharkey: So you had, I mean, that's, that's some stacks of ovens to get enough fries.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Is it, it's a, it's a
Chad Brauze: russet. It's a russet, yep. Russet Idaho. So good starch content. We tried with a bunch of things. We actually wanted do it with [00:34:00] sweet potatoes. Too much sugar. Yeah, it's tough. I thought, okay. Purple potatoes. Hard to find those.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah,
Chad Brauze: but the rust, it's actually like gorgeous. I mean, it's good for french fry.
It's good for a rip fry. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: How do you deal with, I always found that like right around September, the starch content Yeah. Of these potatoes would, would change. You know,
Chad Brauze: we launched in the spring, so September's coming, we'll see. But we put a lot of feelers out to our teams. Like we, we've got a couple key head coaches, Uhhuh, and we start to notice things we can, I can change oven cycles.
Um, in the past I ran a rotisserie. During the, the, the changeover. We just soak 'em longer. Wash 'em longer in water.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah,
Chad Brauze: cold water. Hopefully that'll, that'll sell too. That's so interesting.
Josh Sharkey: That slurry with the oil. That's so smart. Yeah. Try it
Chad Brauze: man. It's interesting. Damn. It works. So,
Josh Sharkey: I mean, my, my wife air fry basically everything at home.
I. I still don't know what a, what air frying means. I mean, we do it all the time, ally, but what conve, what is air frying, convection cooking? Is it literally just that, like what, what makes air frying different from connect? I mean,
Chad Brauze: in a rationale. I mean, I'm guessing a lot of people that listen to your podcast know what a rationale is, like all the chefs out there.
But that thing on the high, like the level five, [00:35:00] I'm gonna say the reptiles, the 60 or 70 mile per hour wind or air inside that oven. Yeah. So basically it's just convected air, hot air.
Josh Sharkey: Gotcha. So it's basically okay. Yeah, it's like really, really like superpower convection.
Chad Brauze: Superpower convection. Which, you know, in restaurants you're used to that because Yeah.
Whether it's a blot or whatever, like that's a big fan. Yeah. But compare, like, you know, your mom's home oven, if it even has a fan. Well, it's a pretty big thing in the home, but I mean, we've been doing air fry in restaurants for years now.
Josh Sharkey: That's crazy. So did you have to put anything else into the store?
It sounds like you were just able to use the, the existing stack of Yeah, we bought,
Chad Brauze: bought the SOPA and bought the perforated sheet trays, but. Just use the existing ovens that didn't like impact,
Josh Sharkey: like the, you know, the, the like the prep schedule, like all the time. And it's
Chad Brauze: a little, yeah. So early when I was talking about like, how does it affect labor, you kind of see what the size of the prize is like, okay, how much money can we make at these?
And we sell 50 units a day. Okay, so how much labor could we throw at that? And like, what's our food cost gonna be? And luckily for food costs, when you start with a case of 120 count ruit food cost isn't bad. [00:36:00] Yeah. Avocado oil's a little pricey, but. We're not using a ton of it. Yeah. It's like cupping in a recipe.
Are they peeling them? No, no, no. Skin 'em. We just wash 'em and then run 'em through the robo coo. Yeah. And then it's automated, so we use a big two horsepower robo coup with that ripple brick. Yeah. Laid on there.
Josh Sharkey: Do robo coops are like, how do those big robocops are just beasts, man? Yeah.
Chad Brauze: We love 'em.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. What about the focaccia?
I've actually never had the, the, the focaccia, like how does, is that made in store?
Chad Brauze: No, it's not. So bread would be a tough one for us, like proofing and all that stuff. Yeah. So we've got some partners that make it for us throughout the us.
Josh Sharkey: Gotcha. And then did they just like sort of bake it and send in the morning like you own bread?
Yes. We bring it
Chad Brauze: in and then we, um, flash it to bring it back so we get the crust crispy again and then get that crumb warm.
Josh Sharkey: That makes sense. How did that, how did that come to be? Did you, that was a, that sounds like it was a, a partnership as well.
Chad Brauze: Yeah. Um, that was, it was something that Nick wanted, Nick wanted to get a focaccia in there.
We're actually, we're thinking about doing some innovation on it, so. We love the idea of like, what if our focaccia had like heirlooms in the summer in it, maybe rosemary in the fall, like really playing around with it a bit. So more to come.
Josh Sharkey: It's also pretty versatile to, you know, to, [00:37:00] to add things to if you Yeah.
You could bake the dough, you know, if you had the dough proofed mm-hmm. Entrees and then literally you just brought it in out. Yeah. And then you throw your seasonal topping on there. Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Brauze: We think it could be fun.
Josh Sharkey: Um, it, it seems fairly, I mean, fairly foolproof to bake if you have a good program for the Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Um, are you, are there other breads you're thinking of?
Chad Brauze: Um, we're playing with sourdough. We've been doing some stuff on like, maybe a wrap or something like that, but that's far off.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. It's so hard to introduce like new whole net new mediums. It
Chad Brauze: is, yeah. You gotta think, I mean, in a restaurant you launch one thing, you know, you teach Gomer how to make it, you tell the servers about it.
Now you got 250 stores. You really have to change things. Yeah. You like, you, you make some big changes.
Josh Sharkey: Tell me about the infinite kitchen. Like how's that going? The s how does that change AKs? Yeah, we, '
Chad Brauze: em, the AKs here, the infinite kitchens, they're a lot of fun actually. Um, like chef's perspective, they're nice.
So if you don't know what they are, it's like this, um, heat and humidity controlled tube that everything lives in. So if it's a lettuce, it lives in a different tube than like a hot, um, protein does, which is different than like a sweet potato. So [00:38:00] everything's all controlled and then it kind of portions it out in the bowl and we kind of take like.
The not so fun part of the job, which is like dealing directly with people. Like, Hey, gimme a little more of that. A little more of this like kind of drives people crazy. We put that into the machine and now all of our, um. Our cooks focus on like actually hospitality, like greeting people. Mm-hmm. Telling them about the menu or actually cooking food in the back.
So
Josh Sharkey: yeah. So basically prep and then just engagement. Yeah. So all
Chad Brauze: our, so in our IK stores now, it's like you prep and like you do like a good job, like making the food really tasty or you're upfront like guiding people through like here's how it's how you order, oh, like the spicy broccoli. It's a little spicy but not too bad.
And you're like doing actually real hospitality, like real customer service. I love that. It's fun. And we notice like. A lot of good things. Like the turnover's a lot lower in those stores. Yeah. Just because it's just more pleasant. Like there's no, no real nastiness of the job.
Josh Sharkey: You know what's funny is, I don't know about you, but like for me, the best part of cooking in the re in restaurants is prep before service.
Yeah. I mean, service is like a whole, it's just a different thing altogether. They, they're two completely different jobs. Mm-hmm. Like there's, [00:39:00] you know, getting, you know. Styling in your station and just making sure all your prep is done before service, which is like a whole, you know, like all the time. And when are you gonna put this sauce on?
I know I gotta strain this at this time. Mm-hmm. I got these things in the oven and Oh yeah. When you get, that's like 12 things long, like what you're gonna do next. It's, it's for me, that's what I love about, about cooking and service. It's a completely different thing. It's a really, it's, it's a complete, it's just a completely devolving, it's evolving, it's basic.
Two different jobs. Yeah. Yeah. They really are. And I mean, I dunno, for me, prep is just way more, way more fun. So it's funny 'cause I was gonna ask you, is the sentiment from, from the team. Like happier in these stores. Better, I think think it,
Chad Brauze: yeah. We, we do see that it's happier
Josh Sharkey: because it is very assembly line, you know, obviously to like, have to assemble all those things.
Yeah. And, and it's also somewhat transactional. It is a little Right. Because you're, you know, you're, you can't really look at somebody in the eye while should looking at the product Yeah. You, while you're looking at the product. So I think it's super smart. Otherwise, are there any other like, big learnings from the, from the, I'm gonna call it, but like you did the iks,
Chad Brauze: you have to be maybe a little bit more like your prep has to be real spot on 'cause like.
A [00:40:00] human picks something out with tongs. Mm-hmm. They might pick out three or four, they even figure that out. But, um, the ik, it's gonna kind of dump out a portion, so you gotta make sure everything's uniform. Like if you're trimming broccoli, like all the broccoli florets should be about the same. Yeah.
Stuff like that. Like your knife cuts have to be good. I. Nothing. You can't coach.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Alright. And is the machines, are they sort of iterative, almost like you would sort of, um, you know, prompt an ai? Are you able to like, improve the efficacy of how well they portion, how they Oh
Chad Brauze: yeah. Yeah. There's a couple different settings we can play with.
Like, I can't talk too much about 'em, but yeah, I can dial in like if I want 80 grams or if I want 85 grams. Yeah. It'll figure out for me. That's
Josh Sharkey: always reminds me, remember those games that you take your kids to where there's like a claw? Oh yeah. And you never win. Dude, my son and I took him to this thing like three weeks ago and he just didn't understand the premise and um, he just wouldn't, it was like we were there for two hours because I told him, just flown through credits.
I told him how many credit, like how much I gave, I gave him the money ahead of time, which is a dumb idea. And he's like, no, no, I just wanna play this. There was like a [00:41:00] thousand other games to do and he just. Claw, oh man. For like two hours. I take my
Chad Brauze: kids, I avoid the claw part. I go, let's, let's go do Jurassic part.
Shoot the dinosaurs.
Josh Sharkey: Never again. Never again. Am I doing that? Yeah. Um, well, we were talking about ai, but like what, how are you, how are you using or not using AI today? Do whether for yourself or we,
Chad Brauze: the easy answer is like, you can put in there and like, and be, okay, what would four cool false salads for sweet cream be?
I mean, that's pretty basic, but what I actually use it for is. I've got 250 stores, like two to three ovens per store, and they're all spitting out a lot of data to me. Mm-hmm. So they can tell me like anytime someone hits a button, like, okay, cook the blackened chicken. I know what the airspeed was, I know what the temperature is like every 10 seconds and I can track like how that whole cycle went.
Now picture that across 365 days, I can use like cloud AI or something like that to kind of ingest the data. Yeah. And look for trends. And I can be like, okay, I can ask. I can ask it. Like, okay. I. How many stores are, how many stores are cooking chicken? Like right at open. Yeah. Which is like what you want, right?
Like [00:42:00] you want, doors are open in 15 minutes, fire the chicken first guest comes in fresh, hot, ready to go. Yep. And I can use that to kind of troubleshoot like where problems are. And if I see like, well, there's a subset of stores, it starts cooking chicken at nine 30 in the morning, like an hour ahead. So it's already an hour old.
I can be like, okay, well what's causing that? Like what's, what's going on in the labor model? Or like the prep model where they have to do that to accommodate and we can kind of find problems that way.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Chad Brauze: It's like super. It's for me. To run data like that. It's really like, it's nice, like I'm a chef, like I don't know how to do that stuff.
But I dropped that CSV file in there and I cut it up a little bit with like basic terms and pretty soon, like I can, I can see some nice generalizations
Josh Sharkey: that makes it, I mean, it's so smart. I I, I have to imagine too, I mean, there's so many things going into that combi oven. At different temperature. Yeah.
And humidity and you know, and he's gonna cool down for this much time before this next program that if you plugged all that into ai, it could tell you some. Exactly. When to, you know, prep each thing. That's
Chad Brauze: the goal. Yeah. That's what we're kind of working on. That's cool.
Josh Sharkey: How has all of this, I mean, you, you were at Danielle, [00:43:00] you were a, you know, per se, you were in all these, you know, par Park Hyatt.
You obviously, like you were in the upper restaurant of fine dining, so you clearly were. Uh, you know, we never cook together, but I, I can tell you Yeah, we were clearly we're, we're, we're, we're, you know, a really great chef. And now you've sort of stepped into this whole sort of food at scale. H how has this made you a better chef?
Chad Brauze: Um, a lot more attention to like the backend detail, like where things come from, like how you process it, like waste, like what's someone's day gonna be like if they have to come in and clean 60 pounds of kale, like across two hours. Like, you start to think about that stuff. Like, fine Dine is just like everyone there like.
I mean, you work at per se, like there were people beating down the door from every country to work there.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Chad Brauze: So like anyone wants to go there now, you know, in a fast casual restaurant, like people aren't gonna put up with two hours of cleaning dirty kale. Like you gotta find a way to do it faster. So you start to think about, okay, well if I put this on the menu, like is it really gonna be what I want it to be?
Like, are they gonna put the same love that I'm gonna put into it? Or do I have to think of a better way to do it? So like 240 stores or 250 stores, like. Every cook that [00:44:00] comes in there is like excited to do it. It's not too much trouble, it's just like 30 minutes of labor and it's done. So I, I think a lot more about like how we can process things.
Because I realize like maybe if you got a job at Sweet Grant, like you might love food, but you're probably, maybe you're doing something else, maybe you're gonna college too. Something like that. Like this maybe isn't gonna be your long-term career aspect. So you just have to like kind of program things slightly different.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense. This is great. We should cook some food. Yeah, man. Let's go to the kitchen. Oh, I brought you something by the way. I forgot. Wow. I don't think I've given you these before. No. You guys always could use more digital scales. Oh yeah. Of course. These though, they could be used for drugs.
You shouldn't. A little, yeah. Little pocket scales, a little drug scales. Um, this is
Chad Brauze: cool, man. Thank you. Yeah, of course. You can never have enough of
Josh Sharkey: those things. Thank you. You ready to cook some food? Yeah, let's go. All right. Thanks for tuning into The meez Podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, fresh daily.
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