Why should all of us care if restaurants are adopting a big-picture strategy? Sure, Mcdonald's should have a strategy team, if not an entire department. But let's get real - say you've got 14 locations. How do you justify having someone as talented and expensive as Jared Cohen?
Jared and Zack explored this on the podcast this week and we learned how he's taken his experience as Senior Director of Global Strategy at Mcdonald's and turned it into real-world change as the COO of Protein Bar & Kitchen.
What stood out to us was the intelligent ways he uses customer data gathered by Ovation and Incentivio to provide a customized guest experience.
Today's Ovation goes to you, Jared!
Why should all of us care if restaurants are adopting a big-picture strategy? Sure, Mcdonald's should have a strategy team, if not an entire department. But let's get real - say you've got 14 locations. How do you justify having someone as talented and expensive as Jared Cohen?
Jared and Zack explored this on the podcast this week and we learned how he's taken his experience as Senior Director of Global Strategy at Mcdonald's and turned it into real-world change as the COO of Protein Bar & Kitchen.
What stood out to us was the intelligent ways he uses customer data gathered by Ovation and Incentivio to provide a customized guest experience.
Today's Ovation goes to you, Jared!
Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation, the restaurant guest experience podcast, where I talk to industry experts to get their strategies and tactics you can use to create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is sponsored by Ovation, an operations and guest recovery platform for multi-unit restaurants that gives all the answers without annoying guests with all the questions. Learn more at OvationUpcom. Today we have a friend. We've got someone who has done some incredible things in the restaurant industry, albeit he started off as an outsider Shocker, but he's the COO of Protein Bar and Kitchen and prior to that he was a senior director of global strategy for McDonald's. And then, prior to that, he was with Strategy and and we just found out that we didn't cross paths. But we may have missed each other by just a few months, as he was leaving StrategyAnd and I was coming into their acquiring company PwC. But, jared, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. Yeah, we've never met at a StrategyAnd alumni event. Maybe in the future future.
Speaker 1:I know he gets on for our listeners. He is wearing true to a consultant form. He is wearing a full button-down shirt, top collar undone, long sleeves rolled up. I mean he is just like in full friday consulting form right now.
Speaker 2:So you can't see my pants, so I'm not no piece for sure jared.
Speaker 1:For those who aren't familiar with Protein Bar and Kitchen, do you want to explain a little bit, kind of like, your model locations and what you're doing, because you're doing some really cool stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. We're Protein Bar and Kitchen delicious, nutritious and protein packed. We are a better for you, fast, casual concept based in Chicago. We've got 14 units in the brand, a combination of primarily owned, but also our first licensed location as well, and we are all about protein and making everyone feel and be a bit better in their health and wellness journey.
Speaker 2:Our menu consists of all day lunch menu that's quinoa bowls, salads, wraps, burritos, but also a large made to order beverage program. We're known for our protein shakes, but we also have smoothies, acai bowls as well, and then a pretty dynamic assortment of retail snacks and drinks that accompany your wellness journey and your journey to get more protein in your diet.
Speaker 1:I love that and you guys are in the one location I believe we talked about. That you said is not corporate-owned, is in the Salt Lake Airport.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, exactly. So airports and non-traditional venues are big for us. We're kind of unique in that we're not built down the line. It's not like a Chipotle or a Subway model, but we have chef-driven recipes. Everything at Protein Bar can be made in under 180 seconds and as a result, we see a lot of opportunity in non-traditional venues. So we have the Salt Lake City Airport, laguardia Airport's coming soon, and then we've got things like on-campus and hospital locations as well.
Speaker 1:And the thing about your Salt Lake location because, as anyone who listens to the show a lot will know is, I am always on a plane. I find myself in the Salt Lake Airport about once a week and I always see people eating protein bar and kitchen, but I never see the line right and it's because you guys are cranking through. You're really getting those people in and while, look, I love me some Panda Express as a fat kid in heart, like I love Panda Express. But, man, sometimes you just want something healthy, especially when you're traveling and you know you're going to eat a lot of junky food. Anyway, I appreciate you guys being there in the airport keeping us frequent travelers healthy.
Speaker 2:We're excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, You've done a lot with strategy in your career and I want to understand, because a lot of times strategy is looked at as a thing that the yucky yucks do. Right, Talk to me about strategy in restaurants. Where does strategy fit? Because typically at McDonald's makes sense, we could have a full-time position about strategy. You have strategy departments but at like a 14 location protein bar and kitchen how do you justify having someone as talented and expensive as Jared Cohen?
Speaker 2:That's a really good question. I think strategy has the reputation of being very ivory tower, very like 30,000 foot view, like what are we going to do over the next three years, next five years? And that was always. It's free to buy decks. And then, yes, yes, truth be told, I'm still a pretty good slide deck maker but I haven't leveraged a lot of my PowerPoint expertise at Protein Bar. That's really because, while our strategy influences all the stuff that we do and we kind of have big strategic goals we're working towards, at an emerging brand like ours, the strategy is very much innately linked to the execution and what we're actually doing. The benefit of being a large company is you can kind of silo some really academically oriented folks around. What's the strategy going to be? But in a company as small as ours and one of the reasons I joined Protein Bar and Kitchen was to get that much closer to actually making an impact, actually making change happen- and I know that feeling man, because as a consultant, you are not on the field and you're not even the coach.
Speaker 1:You are up in the booth in like the earpiece of the coach. It's like by the time the play actually happens, your fingerprint is so watered down that it feels like you're not really contributing to much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know A hundred percent. And for me, while I was at McDonald's I did a fair amount of work. That was very big picture, looking out over the landscape and disconnected from actually making change happen in the restaurants. And then our team got pulled into making the global delivery partnership with Uber Eats happen back in 2015, 16. And that's where we were charged with actually making execution happen at the restaurant level. So launching a pilot program, scaling it and getting kind of all the different functions involved, I found that very exciting and energizing.
Speaker 2:I was like, oh my God, I want to do more of this and my role in strategy was not going to do more of that by mandate. I saw Protein Bar. I knew the brand, I knew the space is better for you, fast, casual. I thought it was well-positioned, I thought the concept was great and they had a new CEO who I reached out to kind of on a whim and said, hey, I've got this strategy toolkit. I know I'm not a typical person to work in an emerging restaurant company I'm not really a restaurant guy by background and by trade but I've got all this corporate toolkit, all this cool stuff I learned at Strategy and not just PowerPoint decks, and I can bring it to bear for bringing this emerging brand to the next level. We started talking and that's what transitioned me into a much smaller brand from the world's largest restaurant company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and don't feel like PowerPoint skills are the only thing that we learn in consulting. We also learn Excel shortcuts. Right, Jared, A lot of Excel shortcuts. That's right. That's right. I transitioned to a Mac, which took me a while to finally move over to the Mac, but when I transitioned to the Mac, I then lost my Excel shortcuts. I feel like I lost one of my superpowers. You know what I mean. It was like Superman lost his x-ray vision. I was like, oh well, but I could still fly. All of this, Jared, boils down to the guest experience. So I'd love to hear from your perspective what's the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays?
Speaker 2:I think for us at Protein Bar and Kitchen, the most important thing is taking the customers that we have and trying to do what we can to foster a one-to-one connection with them. I'd say that permeates every bit of the choices that we make in constructing our experience. I'd say, our menu, every diet needs protein, every body needs protein. Protein needs to be replenished every day and we want to facilitate the delivery of protein for our customers in a very delicious way but in how they like to receive it. So we've got a lot of vegan customers, a lot of vegetarian customers, keto customers, paleo customers. We facilitate modifications, we facilitate customizations, we facilitate healthy swaps, like that's what we bring to bear on the culinary side of the experience. But then on the engagement side of the experience, it's taking that same theme through and doing things like our team members knowing our regulars' names, but also our email messaging and how we segment our customers so that we know if you're a shake customer or a bowl customer. We're going to reach you with different communication, different offers, different understanding.
Speaker 2:A lot of the stuff we've done the last several years is leveraging our technology stack to improve our understanding of customers Because, at the end of the day. Everyone has a different way they want to interact with the brands that are in their lives and for us we want to make sure that a customer who's a shake-driven vegetarian introvert can get a personalized and unique experience versus someone who is an extreme extrovert who likes to get a biggie-sized buffalo bowl. And we try and orient our tech stack in a way that facilitates that communication, that engagement, and makes that person feel like they have a real, unique and personal connection to who Protein Bar and Kitchen is and how they can best leverage the brand for what they're trying to do.
Speaker 1:My question, though, jared, is that scalable? Is it reasonable to assume that that philosophy can scale as Protein Bar and Kitchen grows?
Speaker 2:I'd say maybe a decade or two ago this type of approach was not as scalable. But with the improvements that we're getting through all the various technology vendors increasingly available Ovation among them we can improve the automation behind such understanding. We can improve the segmentations that we use. We can improve the engagement that we do. Tools are increasingly available to facilitate that type of relationship, that type of connection. I'd say you're always going to need smart people in the restaurants who can actually deliver that, because at the end of the day they're going to walk into a restaurant and pick up their food. They may interact with a team member, so you'll need some people on the front line who are similarly persuaded. That's a very important attribute of what the brand is. But I think we can instill that culture and deliver it through the front lines.
Speaker 1:But then on the back end we've got a robust set of systems and infrastructure that can make yeah, what are some tactics you've used, because I think that's a great leveraging that technology, working on scaling that one-to-one. I love that philosophy. What are some tactics that you've used to improve the guest experience?
Speaker 2:no-transcript 30 or 45 days and we can start serving you. Hey, we want to get you back in the restaurant. What can we do? And we can look at your purchase history and say, hey, you bought only bowls from us, we're going to give you a 50% off your next bowl. Or someone who got shakes three times a week well, we know what shake they bought. We can offer them 50% off that shake to get them back in the door. I think tactically we've seen 3x, 4x improvement from a traditional lapsed guest campaign just in making that offer more personalized, more segmented and more directly linked to that person's experience with the Protein Bar and Kitchen brand. If you can retain your customers in that way more meaningfully, that has a significant positive impact on the trajectory of the business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that and maybe diving in a little selfishly. How has Ovation been helpful for you?
Speaker 2:Ovation's been a huge part of what we've been doing to understand the impacts our stores are having on people and the reactions that we're creating. I'd say we've gotten a long part of the way there and there's still more stuff I'm excited to do with the platform. But again, coming into an emerging brand as a former consultant, first question is like OK, have we been serving our customers? Do we understand what they think about us? How do they feel? Do we see any operational issues coming from it? And the answer was no, because we hadn't done it and tried to start taking steps to get there. So we were starting to do survey. Monkeys worked with creating a receipt link to try and get people to go to a website, which for our customer and active on the go customer, didn't really work. So then we're like okay, what's the next level?
Speaker 2:We started using other providers that provide surveys, found that the survey completion rates were really low and again it's like how do we get closer to the immediate reaction to a customer's experience?
Speaker 2:Started talking to you guys in the Ovation team and once we started surveying people with that very limited survey like short questions, very easy to complete, very actively served. That's where we started getting a much more robust sense of feedback and response from our customers and I'd say the way we're leveraging that one is just listening to those guests and responding to those guests quickly, in real time. I think that goes a long way to facilitating and fostering that one-to-one relationship, because now our customer relations team is interacting with them. They're addressing issues they may have. We just rolled out a new loyalty and ordering platform, so we're getting a fair amount of people who are making the transition and understanding how they want to use their offers, where their points go, and being able to do that communication almost in real time immediately after an experience is so much more powerful than other feedback mechanisms we used in the past.
Speaker 1:Have you found that to be especially with, like, the increase of volume and this one-to-one communication? Has Ovation helped you to scale that Like? Is that something that is taking up a lot of your time to do, or have we been able to help you to manage the time it takes to create that one-to-one relationship?
Speaker 2:I'd say it's been very manageable for our team, absolutely. We went from a world where we just had a general email box for feedback and those emails came in at all times in all forms, with all kinds of manifestos attached to it, and it was difficult to triage. Having it in one platform makes it much easier. I'd say the value you can get out of Ovation, we've found, is it can be linked to how much time you're spending in it. Just to build another example, it's very easy for us to get the quick wins of hey, I asked for double chicken, I only got one portion of chicken. Can you help me out? We can do those very easily, very quickly, and save that guess. That's great.
Speaker 2:The thing I want to take us into is start to leveraging more of the data that Ovation picks up from our toast point of sale to start looking at emerging issues before they become issues. And I'll give you an example. The platform contains information on what menu items people are purchasing and when people make negative or positive food comments. And I think that on menu rollouts, we very quickly can diagnose hey, you know what Our build chart isn't right for the new salad we've rolled out or our shake People are saying our shake is too sweet and we're seeing that emerge in comments. We can start to diagnose that by linking it to specific items and fix those problems before guests start churning. I think that's. I've bugged your product team a number of times to kind of like get some of that integration data, that skill level data, and work with it, and I think we found things that we can use it for and continue to expand the way it impacts our business in a positive way.
Speaker 1:The other thing I find really impressive is, as I look at your backend system, innovation, because obviously one of the things that Ovation does is we aggregate all of those online reviews and the Ovation feedback and we create these 34 scores at every location and then we even provide. I don't know if you saw this. We recently launched a summary of here are the positive things that people are saying. Here are the things that need to get worked on. Do you mind if I just read the first sentence of the positive things that people have been saying about you for the last month?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know what it's going to say, so I'll be very surprised to hear.
Speaker 1:Here's what our AI picked up and again, this is like almost two years of development for this, but it says.
Speaker 1:The common themes of the feedback include positive comments about the flavor and quality of food, the friendliness, the helpfulness of the staff, the convenience of ordering options such as online ordering and rewards, the freshness of the ingredients and the overall pleasant atmosphere of establishment. Customers also appreciate the speed and accuracy of the orders, as well as the healthy and organic options available. What's really cool about that is you can see that the things that our system is picking up from all of the feedback that we're collecting, all of the third-party feedback that we're analyzing and the things that we've talked about about what your brand stands for, it's there. It's something that makes it really cool to see that what your goals are are coming out in the feedback, because the experience is happening. That shows you that the operations piece of it is connecting the dots, which is really cool to see, because I had this pulled up and it was just interesting to hear you talk about protein bar and kitchen and then boom, yeah, that's what people are saying about you.
Speaker 2:Great. I'm very happy to hear that customers agree with a lot of what we're doing and that they see the work that we're putting in. I think that's very validating to see, and when we get great ovation reviews, we share them with our teams because we obviously want everyone to know when they do a great job. That's great. I'm going to be excited to pass that along.
Speaker 1:Yeah, lastly, who's someone in the restaurant industry that deserves an ovation? Who's someone that we should be following?
Speaker 2:That's a really great question. As I mentioned, we recently recently, like four weeks ago we transitioned our mobile and web ordering infrastructure and our loyalty program over to a new provider, a company called Instantivio. They're great. A large portion of our business is digital. We're probably about 50% digital sales. A large portion of that is app web, so you can imagine approaching the transition of platforms to a new provider.
Speaker 2:It was just like a lot of panic nightmares, waking me up in the middle of the night being like, oh my God, what if everything breaks on day one? This is a major part of our business. It's a major part of who Protein Bar is and how people experience the brand. This has got to be a successful launch. I'd say Raj, the CEO at Instantivio and his team. We worked very closely with them over the last several months and they're a Series A company. They raised their first round in last year.
Speaker 2:They're emerging and I'd say it's reflective of an approach we have at Protein Bar and Kitchen where we're constantly looking for new and emerging providers that can make a material difference in the way our brand is experienced by customers and by team members. We were one of the first enterprise clients on Toast in 2016. We're one of the first companies to really get into third-party POS integration in 2017. We try to be leading edge for an emerging restaurant company and I think the relationship and experience we've had with the Instantivio team has been reflective of we view them as an emerging company that's doing a lot of cool stuff and the right solution for us and for the things we want to do with our customers. Awesome, love that.
Speaker 1:We love Raj. He's not just a great product but great people. We've had such a great relationship with them and they're awesome. So, Jared, where can people go to learn more about Protein Bar and Kitchen or if they want to follow you and some of your musings?
Speaker 2:Oh man, if you want to have Protein Bar and Kitchen, or if they want to follow you and some of your musings, oh man, If you want a Protein Bar and Kitchen, theproteinbarcom. Follow us on Instagram at the Protein Bar. So it's T-H-E Protein Bar. Honestly, if you're in an airport Salt Lake City, as you well know, O'Hare, we're going to be opening in LaGuardia in a couple months, so stay tuned for those locations, locations and now that we're franchising, you know anyone who's interested in the brand. We'd encourage you to check us out, because we're looking for operators and looking to start finding the people to bring Protein Bar and Kitchen beyond the Chicago market to their own communities.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, Jared, for being the only bar in Salt Lake City that I go to. Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Give an Ovation. Thanks for joining us today. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We're all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by Ovation, a two-question, SMS-based actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you'd like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at OvationUpcom.