SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Give and OVACI, the Restaurant Guest Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Zach Oates, and each week I get to chat with an industry expert to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five-star guest experience. This podcast is powered by Ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-user restaurants. Learn what is actually happening in your restaurant and exactly how to improve while driving revenue. Learn more at ovationup.com. And today we have a legend of the industry, Jeff Henry, with us today. He has spent almost a decade with a Coca-Cola company. He was president of Jumba Juice. He's the president of the Americas for a gong cha, which is just like a phenomenal drink brand doing such cool stuff. If you've never been into a gong cha, go. It's really cool, a lot of fun. Well, Jeff, thanks for taking some time away from your drinking career to have some sips with us here. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks so much, Zach. Great to be here. Now, I gotta say, you went to HBS. Was that before or after Coca-Cola?

SPEAKER_01: 1:06

Before, yeah. I basically did a few years in finance, then went back to HBS and then pivoted into brand marketing and strategy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:13

And it sounds like specifically, you have done quite a bit in the beverage industry. Like, what's drawn you to drinks? Coke, jamba, gong cha?

SPEAKER_01: 1:23

If you asked me that question 30 years ago, I'm not sure I would have ever scripted out kind of how it's all played out. But beverages are a lot of fun. Before I joined Coke, I worked for Colgate doing kind of toothpaste and personal care. Great company, but just not nearly as much fun once I got into the beverage world. I joined Coke back in 2006, and I joined working on brand Coca-Cola, kind of their flagship. And so just that kind of just pulled me into the whole beverage world. Got to see just so much great activity on the marketing side, on the innovation side. And yeah, so one from basically on the soft drink side of Coke after a few years, I moved over to more of the distilled beverages. So for about eight years, I was running their water, tea, and coffee businesses. And then that just kind of led into eventually Jamba Juice and then here at Gong Cho, which I can talk more about too.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11

So when you were there with Coke, just out of curiosity, did you get to work on other beverages in the Coke family, like Diet Coke or Coke Zero? Or were you only focused on full sugar, full throttle Coca-Cola?

SPEAKER_01: 2:27

I was on Coca-Cola. In fact, back in when I first started, we still called it Coca-Cola Classic because again, back in the 80s when Coke had the whole Coke, new Coke as an example. Well, after all that basically went down and Coke reintroduced Coke, that's when they added the word classic to Coca-Cola classic. And it stuck on, it stuck stayed on there for 20 years, basically. I was the brand manager there when we decided, all right, it's been long enough. Let's take the classic off of all the packaging and just call it Coke again.

SPEAKER_00: 2:59

Oh, wow. That's interesting. Anyway, well, as an avid soda drinker, I feel like it's part of the questions if you want to get your driver's license here in Utah. It's like you have to drink a minimum of 44 ounces of soda a day. Anyway, just grateful for all your hard work because I'm a much happier man in the afternoon after my lunch coke. So what drew you to Gongsha? What was it that got you interested there? And maybe for people who aren't familiar, if you want to explain a little bit about Gongsha.

SPEAKER_01: 3:29

Yeah, so Gongsha has been around for 20 years. We are the world's largest bubble tea brand. We started in Taiwan back in 2006, and we are a high-quality premium bubble tea. And Gongsha literally means tea served up to royalty. It's ceremonial tea grade. And we pride ourselves on the quality and consistency of the tea that we deliver around the world. We're now in 30 countries. We're in 2,200 locations. In the US, we have just shy of 250 locations. We're kind of in 22 different states. And then we have a good presence up in Canada, 100 stores, Mexico, 100 stores. So we're just rapidly growing the brand around the world and certainly hear it in the Americas. And uh it's just a lot of fun. I mean, the bubble tea category has been on fire in the US now for 10 plus years. And I first started to see it when I was at Coke because I was running the tea and coffee brands for the North American Coke business. And I started to see bubble tea. I was skeptical. I didn't know if it was going to stick around. I thought maybe be more of a fad. I left Coke to run jumba juice for five years, and I just continued to see bubble tea proliferate, shops opening up all over the country as the whole category moved from like heavily Asian communities into college and university towns. And then basically now every major metro in the U.S. has a number of bubble tea shops.

SPEAKER_00: 4:53

What what do you think it is about bubble tea that gets people so interested?

SPEAKER_01: 4:58

I mean, if if you've been to a bubble tea shop and you've had a bubble tea or some of the other beverages we offer, I mean, first off, they're just great to look at, right? Like visually, they're besting. So in this world of Instagram, and our core guests tend to be like 18 to 30 years old with their phone and Instagram basically always on, we're a perfect complement to that lifestyle. We're very much, it's a lifestyle category. And so I'd say for this Gen Z age group, like they see bubble tea as like the drink of their generation. The drink of maybe my generation was the latte from back in the 1990s. This is very much the drink of the younger generation, and you can personalize it however you want it. The tea type, the toppings, the sugar level. We've also got fruit drinks, we've got smoothies. So you can make the drink however you want it based on your mood in that day or at that moment. So I think that personalization, customization just lends itself to the rapid adoption of the category and our brand in particular.

SPEAKER_00: 5:58

Yeah. And I actually used to live right by a gong cha in San Francisco. And it was a great place to just go and meet up for a business meeting when, you know, that afternoon business meeting where I'm not quite, I'm I'm not looking for like a soda. I'm not looking to sit down and like have a coffee with someone. It's a great alternative there. And also I feel like this generation uh is so much about textures. Uh and textures is such a critical thing. Like you look at all the candies that are coming out, uh, which again, Utah resident here, all the candies that are coming out, there's so much about interesting texture as opposed to just adding different flavors. It used to be uh, let's throw this flavor in and that flavor in, and now it's like, hey, let's throw this crunch in and this creamy in and this nougat in, like in layering this. And so I feel like that's another thing that bubble tea has up against some of the competitors is just that fun surprise with the either tapioca pearls or any of the other kind of bursting pearls. I mean, the texture is definitely a big part of it.

SPEAKER_01: 7:00

I think part of why bubble tea has done so well, particularly with the younger generation and in you know, college towns, is because people often consume it while they're studying, right? Like there's actually like psychological benefits that show that they're drinking the bubble tea, which gives them a little bit of caffeine from the tea, maybe a little bit of sugar boost and kind of carbohydrate energy. But it's also like the actual chewing of the tapioca pearls, it's actually soothing. Like so they're studying, they're getting the caffeine uplift, but then they're also kind of bringing their blood pressure down a little bit just through the actual chewing. So, to your point, like the whole the textures and all the different layers, I think just add to the whole experience and kind of have made it why it's uh it's been so successful.

SPEAKER_00: 7:43

So, what do you think is one of the most important aspects of guest experience nowadays?

SPEAKER_01: 7:50

Yeah, great question. I think it's changed a lot, largely dependent on like the store type and what the guest is wanting. In the case of bubble tea, we obviously want the guest to have a great experience. But in many cases, the guest is just coming in, getting the beverage, and leaving. Or in many cases, they're ordering in advance. I mean, we often have 40 or 50% of our orders coming through the mobile app or third-party delivery. So it's almost like we don't actually speak to the guest. And then even if they come into the store, we actually have self-order kiosks, and 90% of our transactions in the store go through the self-order kiosk because our guests would rather see the full menu. They want to take the time to peruse, like, hey, I want this tea with this topping, with this layer of milk foam. So that's all part of the experience. And the kiosk, I think, helps deliver that more comprehensively than even that probably a team member can do behind the counter. Now, if you're a first-time guest, we want you to go up to the counter, let the team member kind of take you through the menu, help you kind of understand maybe what you want to start and try first. But if you're a regular guest, like helping actually guide them to a kiosk and letting them get more familiar with other categories that we offer tends to work out well for the guest, and it tends to work out well for the operator because the guest gets the ultimately the drink that they want to try. And we tend to see actually a higher average ticket through the kiosk too, just because of the suggestive sell mechanism at the end.

SPEAKER_00: 9:12

Sometimes I go into there's a drink place, I don't want to throw them under the bus, but I went to this drink place and I hate ordering from the kiosk because I like my drink a specific way, and it doesn't allow for customizations on the kiosk. And so that's one of those things where I literally have not ordered from there and I have gone to someplace else because I'm like, uh, they always seem annoyed when I order from the register, and the kiosk doesn't let me do my customizations, you know?

SPEAKER_01: 9:39

Totally understand. Yeah. And for us, like customizations at the core of what we offer. Our kiosks have to be pretty robust. Like, we don't want to send somebody to the kiosk and then have them have a subpar experience. So for us, again, you might spend a minute and a half at the kiosk of making your drink. We tend to have two, if not three, kiosks in our locations, just because of how important it is for us and for the guests. So I think it just based on your question, part of it depends on like what type of transaction is it, right? Like if somebody basically just wants the great product and they want it with speed and convenience, then we got to make sure that that kiosk experience is great to your point. Like we're actually delivering all the customization that they need so that they can kind of do the transaction quickly. If it's somebody who's a first-time guest, we want them to feel like we're holding their hand. The team member behind the counter can kind of show them the few categories we offer, maybe the top 10 drinks that people tend to order, and kind of just take off some of the intimidation factor of entering a bubble tea shop for the first time.

SPEAKER_00: 10:39

Yeah, love that. Yeah, because it can be a bit intimidating when you go in there, especially when you guys really have that authentic vibe to it. It doesn't say like, this is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a drink. Like you keep it very authentic. And it's like some of this stuff, I was like, what is that? But it's fun to have that exploration because of it, but the familiarity. So when you're thinking about some tactics that you've used to improve the guest experience throughout your career, either CPG or in FB, what do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 11:10

Data is a great thing to have. We've done some customer surveys either through our loyalty platform, we do a kind of a quick survey at the end of our transactions. And so kind of getting an average pulse on you know how people are feeling is obviously critically important, obviously, an area of you and your firm's expertise. So for us, having the you know a firm grasp on how are the guests feeling about both the product quality, the service, the cleanliness of the store, would they come back, would they recommend us? Like those are kind of four key areas that we often look at and try and track over time. So I think that's our baseline is like making sure we get the data. And sometimes it's hard to get enough of that data to make it worthwhile, right? Like if you're only getting a few surveys per month, it's probably not succinctly significant. So, you know, we still kind of work through that as well.

SPEAKER_00: 11:58

Yeah, I think that it's so critical that as you're looking at there's a phrase that we always say here at ovation, which is the value's in the volume. And there's wisdom to that because as you're able to get more people to give you feedback, if it's negative, then guess what? You can recover them. And if it's positive, then guess what? You can market to them. The more people that you get to take your survey, the get to give you feedback, uh, not only the better can you do as a brand, but then the more people you get to connect with. And I think that's something that we've seen, and especially with drinks, uh, we see uh other drink companies that we're with where the highest percentile of people will come into uh a restaurant more days than they are open in a given month. So it's like there are people that will come into these drink places twice a day sometimes, on like twice a day on Saturdays and once a day throughout the week. Uh it's nuts to see, but uh when you're able to get that kind of data and able to understand who the guest is, it helps push you in such a smarter direction. Speaking of smart directions, there's a lot of smart people that you know. I mean, you've had an incredible career, but who is someone that you think deserves innovation? Who's someone that we should be following?

SPEAKER_01: 13:12

Yeah, a great question. There's a lot of folks that I have a lot of respect for. A brand that I wasn't all that familiar with up until a couple years ago, because they just didn't have that much of a presence here. I live in Atlanta, so they didn't have much of a presence in the Southeast is Culver's and the whole Culver's family. I have been very impressed with just the quality and the consistency of how that brand shows up and the level of service and real appreciation that the team members in that's in those stores are showing to the guests. If you'd asked me that question three years ago, Culver's wouldn't have been on my short list, I think, based upon what I've experienced the past couple of years. And as I've learned more about the brand and had more interactions, they're definitely on my short list of brands that are doing it right. Now, again, they're very different in terms of their footprint compared to my experience in the beverage space, where I've got, you know, typically small stores. They've obviously got a much bigger menu. They got drive-throughs in almost all their locations. So they have to deal with different things as well. But and my experience has primarily been going into the store and ordering at the counter. But then ordering at the counter and then sitting down and then having somebody stop by a few minutes after I start in a fast casual like that, like and people asking how the meal's going up, it's like I've been blown away.

SPEAKER_00: 14:25

So I think they're doing a really good job. Well, speaking of personalizations and customizations, I have a good friend who worked at Culver's for a long time, all through high school. And do you want to know a drink that a milkshake that he said he would probably get asked to make once a day? Okay, you ready for this? Ready a vanilla milkshake, and and Culver's is famous for their really thick custard, and they do some great milkshakes. Uh he would order, or that he would get ordered and would have to make vanilla milkshake with hamburger patties ground up into it. That was a freak request that they were getting asked. And I was like, Oh, like once a year, did you make this like one day? He's like, No, probably like once a day, once every other day, someone would come in and order a milkshake with a hamburger patty ground up into it. I mean, it just seems so bizarre, but then you think about it and you're like, well, I dipped my fries and my frosty. Like, maybe that'll work. Anyway, I don't want to yuck someone's yum, but that seems a bit odd.

SPEAKER_01: 15:27

It's a new way to get your protein delivery, right?

SPEAKER_00: 15:29

Yeah, exactly. That's quite, but I do I love culvers. As someone who didn't grow up with culvers, I do have to say, when I moved to Utah and I saw the signs for culvers, for the first two years I lived here in Utah, I thought it was a furniture store. It's not a traditional restaurant of like you got the reds and the yellows. I mean, like, it's just more toned down. Yeah, it's very toned down, it's very blue. You've got carpeted interiors, it's a very different vibe, but they've got a great product. So good on them. I actually just had culverts this week driving uh on my road trip to Vegas. It was great. So oh, nice. Anyway, well, uh Jeff, how do people find and follow you and Gongshaw?

SPEAKER_01: 16:08

Yeah, so if you follow Gongshaw Instagram, yeah, Gongshaw T is where you can check us out, and would certainly encourage you to do so. And me, I'm not worth following. You can find LinkedIn, Jeff Henry on LinkedIn. Jeff with the G team. We're talking like Jeffrey Giraffe. Exactly. G-E-O-F-F, uh, and Henry Adling is still for you. But yeah, I think our Instagram handle, we've always got some fun stuff, and because we're a global brand, you'll often see stuff on there, not just from like the Americas, but from around the world. You know, we've got 800 stores in Korea, a couple hundred in Japan, a few hundred in Australia. So, again, the fun thing about Gongcha and this brand is it truly is global in nature. And we've got, even before we come into new markets here in the US, just because of the strength of the brand in Asia, you know, when we come in, we already have lines and people asking, what are we opening? There's just a lot of excitement for the brand.

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

Oh, well deserved as well. Well, Jeff, for spending two decades hydrating Americas, today's ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us on Given Ovation. Thanks so much, Zach. Great being with you. Thanks for joining us today. If you like 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 ovationup.com.