Pioneering Poke: How Seth Cohen Built Sweetfin

Speaker 1: 0:00

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. And today I am so excited my new friend, seth Cohen, president and co-founder of Sweetfin, joins us. Welcome, seth, how are you man?

Speaker 2: 0:34

I'm good, I'm impressed by your radio voice and TV face, so you got the whole package here.

Speaker 1: 0:40

Oh man, I think I've got a TV shirt For those who can't see. I have my most Miami shirt on right now, mint green with flamingos on it. I wore it for you, seth. You're coming at us from sunny California yet somehow you're in a sweatshirt.

Speaker 2: 0:55

It's not so sunny today, actually. It's cold and it's actually freezing.

Speaker 1: 0:59

I don't know what's going on.

Speaker 2: 1:00

It's freezing 78 degrees 60, 61 and slightly overcast. Our whole team is out in the desert at Coachella. It's a little gloomy here.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Nice, nice. First of all, for those who aren't familiar with Sweet Fin, I had the privilege of trying it in LA and it was a great experience. Talk to me a little bit about Sweet Fin. How did you start it? Why did you start it?

Speaker 2: 1:24

Talk to me a little bit about Sweetfin, like how did you start it? Why did you start it? So we started Sweetfin. Our first day was April 15, 2015. So we're, believe it or not, very soon going to be approaching our nine-year anniversary, which is crazy.

Speaker 2: 1:41

And nine years ago, and even a little bit before nine years ago, no one had any idea what poke was, especially in Los Angeles, and it was kind of like this unique, rare dish that people would eat sometimes when they go to Hawaii, and it was a dish that I personally fell in love with. I grew up in LA. Sushi culture is just a big part of the way people in LA eat. Eating healthy is a big part of the way people in LA eat, and I thought there could be an interesting category to be created around this dish. That was super unique. It fit all of the kind of check boxes that I wanted in that category If I was going to start a fast casual. It was healthy, it was customizable, it was great for delivering takeout, it had Asian flavors, it was super innovative and fresh.

Speaker 2: 2:22

I met my co-founders, one of which at USC Brett, another, alan, through Brett, who's a family friend of Brett's, and together we put together this concept, which is now Sweet Fin. We just wanted to create something unique in the fast casual market. The market was just kind of really in its infancy, but starting to take off. You had amazing brands to look at, like Chipotle and Sweetgreen and Shake Shack, and we thought there's got to be another category that you can develop in this fast casual model. We fell into this poke category which literally, when we went to pitch landlords and investors, people were thinking that we were talking about a Facebook poke.

Speaker 1: 3:00

Yeah, I was going to say right, because back then that's what poke was all about. That was a Facebook thing.

Speaker 2: 3:04

Yeah, that's what it was. So we took a swing at something that was totally unique and new and it ended up working out well for us, 20 stores later and ready to grow even more. Did you start off by wanting to do franchise or all corporate owned? When I started Sweetfin with my partners, I didn't even really understand what franchising was. I had really no experience in restaurants, a little bit of experience in hospitality. I'd call it light adjacent. There wasn't really too much of a thought in terms of are we going to franchise? Are we going to build these corporate owned? I just thought you build stores and you raise money and you build stores and money because that's what Chipotle was doing, that's what Shake Shack was doing, that's what Sweetgreen was doing. So they were kind of our North star in terms of who we were looking at.

Speaker 2: 3:55

And a year into store one, things were going amazingly well. And someone brought up franchising and we spoke to some franchise attorneys and some people kind of in our network and sphere of influence and we just ultimately made the decision that franchising wasn't for us at the time and so we decided to go corporate-owned. It's a totally different business model, not to say it's the wrong business model. Maybe it would have been a little bit easier and faster for us to grow, but we wanted to protect our brand, we wanted to protect the quality of our food and we thought that until we really had the systems in place to go ahead and franchise. It just wasn't the right thing to do at such an early stage in our concept.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Yeah, and obviously I think that your emphasis on controlling the brand is all about the guest experience, and so what do you think is the most important aspect of guest experience nowadays? Yeah, that's a good question.

Speaker 2: 4:50

We were very big on training before COVID and, for example, we would hold like a three-day seminar every time we would open a new store in a classroom setting, and we made sure that all of our team members, of course, understood our menu. Our menu is very, in some ways, complex for a fast, casual concept because there's a lot of Japanese ingredients and Korean influence and so there's menu items that someone may not necessarily understand if they're not a sushi eater, for example. So we spent a lot of time educating our team members and making sure that if the guests were to come in and they were new to our concept, we were able to effectively communicate what the concept was and what really our menu items were, and hopefully we could speak to guests in a way where we could provide our recommendations and really help them build their own bowl based off of their flavor, what they like from a flavor standpoint. So I think training is something that is super important from a guest experience standpoint. Face-to-face interaction is important from guest experience standpoint as it relates to aface interaction is important from a guest experience standpoint as it relates to a company like yours.

Speaker 2: 5:56

Innovation when there are issues, especially since so many of our orders now are digital, like over 60%. We need to be quick to react to our guests, both in a positive and negative way. We built a really robust online ordering and loyalty platform in order to reward our guests for coming in and to try to incentivize certain behaviors. So I think consistency is key in guest experience, whether someone's ordering in person or online and digitally. And if there's an issue with an order, if there's an issue with the experience, how can we get in front of that issue before it escalates and how can we make sure that the relationship between the restaurant and the guests is not ruined based off one experience? Because, of course, as you know, mistakes happen. No one is perfect, but we try to rectify the situations as best we can, as quickly as possible.

Speaker 1: 6:46

I think that is so powerful because you were only as good as your last experience. I can think of a restaurant that I used to go to once a month for seven years. As good as your last experience. I can think of a restaurant that I used to go to once a month for seven years and then I went in one time and my favorite dipping sauce was really runny. It was like pretty gross and I didn't go back to that restaurant for two years. And it wasn't because, Seth, that I was like I'm going to like protest this restaurant. It was just kind of like oh, I haven't been to a lot of these restaurants that have opened up in the last few years, Let me try those places out. And it took me two years to put that restaurant back into the cycle. But if I had a way to communicate with them and to be like, hey, your dressing was really bad today and they could have been like oh, super bad batch, we're so sorry. They didn't even have to give me a coupon to come back, but they had an opportunity right then to get me to come back.

Speaker 1: 7:33

And data shows it's pretty crazy that a guest who has a service failure and proper service recovery is going to be more loyal than a guest who never has that service failure in the first place.

Speaker 1: 7:44

But if they don't have that proper service recovery, data shows that there's a 13% likelihood they'll come back. An average guest has a 30% likelihood to come back and yet a guest that had a bad experience that you can win back with the right kind of guest recovery has a 68% recovery rate, which means that when you look at how much they spend, they're 12 times more likely to leave a five-star review. They're going to spend more. They're going to come in four times more often. A unhappy recovered guest is worth 32 times more than the average guest. It is so critical to win back those guests and to have that safety net and I think that really understanding that and having those metrics there to measure that I think are so important and you guys obviously do a good job to care about that. I know you guys use thanks and they're a great platform to capture so many of those digital orders and create real profiles on who these guests are.

Speaker 2: 8:43

Yeah, sounds like we need to make some more mistakes and then quickly rectify them. That's the strategy, exactly.

Speaker 1: 8:49

Yeah, mess up three times a shift and win those guests back. So, speaking of some tactics, though, what are some tactics that you've used to improve the guest experience at Sweetfin?

Speaker 2: 8:59

Just little things, I mean from packaging. Again, we have a product that delivers unbelievably well. People take it to go. So, like, how can we create an experience with someone's taking their food to go where they have kind of the sweeping experience at home? So, just being very detailed about our packaging, we created this amazing little bento box called the squee box during COVID. That's on our menu. We try to put an insert card in all of our bags.

Speaker 2: 9:26

That, of course, talk about. It serves two purposes it talks about ordering first party, but there's also an educational component associated with it. When we talk about our sustainability initiatives, we just launched a fun collaboration with this TikTok content creator named Sad Poppy, who's this amazing chef, and we have custom packaging where there's a sticker on it and you scan the QR code and a video will pop up on YouTube and he's talking directly to you and he's explaining to you his inspiration behind the dish and how you should actually put the dish together when you're eating at home. So just being aware of that experience outside of the four walls of a restaurant, With Olo, who runs our online ordering, we can basically throttle online orders and really in a pretty clear way, understand how long it will take guests to come into the restaurant and how quickly we should prepare orders. So just ensuring that orders are ready to go on the pickup shelves when someone's there greeting our guests when they come in. I know that's like an obvious thing, but in the age of kind of these digital orders, you want to make sure that our restaurants didn't just turn into glorified pickup stations and there was a little bit of personality and just having educated team members that care and are willing to engage and speak to guests as they come in.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Because, as I said, our menu is not simple. It's a four-step process of building your bowl, but there's 94 million different ways in which you can build a sweet fin bowl. We did the math. Maybe there's more now with ingredients that are just different. It's not a burger concept. So there's a lot of cool stuff on the menu. There's a lot of education and even with our category now that we're nine years old, at the beginning nine years ago, as I said, no one knew what poke was. Now the market is kind of educating the consumer. But there's a lot of times when a customer will come in. They may be older or not, from LA or from a different part of the country where they have no idea what we're selling.

Speaker 1: 11:16

Well, I think one of the things you guys do really well is your brand. Everyone should look up Sweetfin. Like you go to the website, you go into a store and it's got such a fresh feel to it, I think, which is so important, especially when you're dealing with any sort of fish product. You want to make sure that you have that really fresh, healthy feel and you guys just nailed that. I mean, like you walk in and when you go to the website, like I said it, just you can feel it and you guys have done a really good job of being consistent with that, because I think the enticement, when you're looking at what you want to be doing, you have this urge to kind of tweak the brand to fit this style or tweak it to do this Like you guys have been really consistent in your 20 locations.

Speaker 1: 12:00

And talking about to-go, I grabbed Sweet Fin and took it to-go when I was flying out of LAX. I just grabbed it on my way because I wanted to get something light before I got on the plane and I think you do such a good job of packaging it and it travels so well and, granted, you're not serving French fries, so you have a little bit of a leg up there, but it's still not easy to do. Anyway, the team did a great job and my experience was awesome with it.

Speaker 2: 12:27

So if you're in LA. You did a beautiful mukbang video for us, thank you. We reposted. It was good. I don't think it was genuinely good.

Speaker 1: 12:34

That's always. One of my fears is, like, when I go to a friend's place, I'm like oh, please be good. Please be good, Because I don't post stuff on Instagram that I don't like, regardless of if I know the person or not. But speaking of which, I've heard you speak. You've been around the industry for a while now. Who's someone in the industry that you follow? Who's someone that you think deserves an ovation? Someone that's doing some cool stuff?

Speaker 2: 12:55

Oh man, I'm going to be so cliche here. First person that comes to mind, of course, is Danny Meyer. We were actually at the OLO.

Speaker 1: 13:03

Setting the table right back then.

Speaker 2: 13:05

Yeah, we were at the OLO conference last week and he's on the board, not this week, last month he's on the board there. We got the opportunity to meet him. One of his partners original partners and former CEO of Shake Shack, david Swinghammer, was an investor and sweetfin and really kind of mentored us and me as we developed the concept and building it.

Speaker 2: 13:24

I really appreciate just his ability to take the idea of hospitality and the word hospitality was for a long time just intertwined with the hospitality business. You talked about hospitality and it was just restaurants, but at the end of the day, business. You talked about hospitality and it was just restaurants, but at the end of the day, hospitality is related to every single interaction and business on the face of the earth. So I just think the way he communicates, that is just really impressive. And the way he's been able to be consistent throughout so many different form factors in his restaurants whether they're a three Michelin star or a bakery cafe or a Shake Shack that has hundreds of locations to be consistent and have those core values and tenants throughout is impressive. So just always look to him as kind of the North Star and who I'd love to give an ovation to Awesome Love.

Speaker 1: 14:14

Danny, I had the privilege of meeting him last year at NRA. His CTO is one of my lead advisors. We work with a lot of their brands. Ray, his CTO is one of my lead advisors. We work with a lot of their brands. Like such a cool concept, such a huge player in this industry who has just been so really shaped the way that we look at hospitality, like you said. Anyway, that's the reason his book sits on my shelf right behind me, cause I think it's so important for us to remember, even as a tech company, I tell our team all the time we are a hospitality company selling a technology. We're not a tech company. I tell our team all the time we are a hospitality company selling a technology. We're not a technology company selling into hospitality. I love that. So, seth, where can people go to learn more about Sweetfin? Or maybe, if they're so impressed by this podcast, they want to follow you, sure.

Speaker 2: 14:53

Don't follow me, I'll disappoint you. No, you can go to sweetfincom. We have locations basically all over LA, orange County, san Diego. Our Instagram handle is at Sweetfin I believe that's the handle of our TikTok as well and we'd love to have you at one of our restaurants and try the product.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Well, give it a try. I'll endorse that. So, seth, for building something so good that nine years ago I would have given you a Facebook poke. Today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Give an Ovation. Thank you for having me Awesome. 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.