About the Guest

Jason Morgan built his career developing and leading successful growth companies across various industries. As Chief Financial Officer of Zoës Kitchen from 2008 to 2015, Morgan was instrumental in the growth of the company, increasing store count from 20 to 150 and revenues from $18mm to $223mm. In April 2014, he led Zoës Kitchen IPO one of the most successful IPOs in the restaurant sector in the past decade. Prior to Zoës Kitchen, he held CFO positions at a private equity-backed start-up and a gaming technology company. He also held executive positions in strategic planning, investor relations, and treasury at Gaylord Entertainment Co. and Harrah’s Entertainment. Morgan began his career at Arthur Andersen, is a Certified Public Accountant, and received both his Bachelor’s and MBA degrees from Vanderbilt University.

Episode Summary

COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the restaurant industry. In this episode, we talk to Jason Morgan, CEO of bellagreen and Original ChopShop, about why they are training customers to order directly and creating incentives for them to do so, and why they are taking delivery in-house.

Episode Transcript

Zach Goldstein

(00:01):

From fake meat and robot chefs to ghost kitchens and delivery drones. The restaurant industry is rapidly evolving. Welcome to Food Fighters, bringing you interviews with the leading industry trailblazers. I’m your host, Zach Goldstein.

Zach Goldstein

(00:18):

Welcome back to Food Fighters. I’m your host, Zach Goldstein. Today I am here with Jason Morgan. Jason is the CEO of bellagreen and Original ChopShop. Jason previously served as Chief Financial Officer of Zoës Kitchen where he helped grow the concept to 150 stores and more than $200 million in revenue culminating in a 2014 IPO, one of the most successful restaurant public offerings in the last decade. Jason, thanks for joining me amid the crisis that we’re having industry-wide.

Jason Morgan

(00:48):

Thanks for having me.

Zach Goldstein

(00:51):

So we are recording this episode in late April. Restaurants are still very much adapting to a post Coronavirus world. You’re the CEO of not one but two restaurant concepts in bellagreen, a premium fast casual concept with nine locations and ChopShop a better-for-you fast casual restaurant with 14. Tell us about how the two concepts are adapting and how you and your team are managing through the coronavirus crisis.

Jason Morgan

(01:23):

Great. So first let me start with a little bit of background on each of the concepts cause they’re, they’re very different and they’re adapting differently because of their differences. Uh, Original ChopShop is, we bought that business in July of 2016 at three units all in the Phoenix area. We’ve since expanded it to 14 and moved to Dallas. We have eight stores in Phoenix, six stores in Dallas. Better-for-you fast casual, meaning that you order the food at the counter, we bring the food to the table. Uh, primarily protein bowls, salads, sandwiches. Uh, but the really key to the brand is we have a fresh juice component and we also do superfood bowls like acai, uh, and Petaja, uh, we’re able to do breakfast, lunch, dinner. We’re also able to get a snack component with the acai and parfaits that we have. And we also do catering.

Jason Morgan

(02:08):

So we, we’ve got five day parts in a 25 to 2,800 square foot fast casual box. So you can imagine we’re able to do some nice volumes out of that. Bellagreen a little bit different. We bought that in October of 2016. There were five units there all in Houston at the time. We’ve expanded to Dallas and we have nine total now, six in Houston, three in Dallas. The concept is also fast casual, better-for-you in that you order at the counter, we bring the food to the table, but it’s, it’s got a higher end feel to it. It’s essentially a casual dining restaurant in a fast casual box. Huge venue. Everything from appetizers to desserts, uh, probably 60 different items on the menu, but everything has a chef driven feel to it. And so it’s unique in that I haven’t seen really anything else like it in the restaurant space doing what we’re doing from a food quality standpoint. The other unique part of the brand – two unique parts of the brand – is that we are the greenest restaurants in Texas, meaning that we’re very ecofriendly in how we operate them, how we built them, and just how the day to day works. The second is one of the original founders of the brands wife, uh, was –had celiac. And so there’s a very heavy focus on dietary restrictions in the brand. We have over 30 gluten free items on the menu. Tasting them you would have no idea that they were gluten free. So that’s, that’s a key component to that brand. So I, we got started I guess mid-March with, uh, with the news that, uh, COVID-19 was here. And, uh, we found out about a week later that we were gonna have to shut our dining rooms down and go to a to go, uh, delivery model, uh, exclusively.

Jason Morgan

(03:44):

One of the first things we did as a team was we sat around the table and we said, all right, what good could come out of this? What, what can we, uh, have a silver lining? What, what, what can we move this business forward? Uh, we knew a lot of folks would, would just sort of entrench in what they were doing. Uh may slow down and we said, okay, what, what things can we shoot for to, to come out of this thing better than we were to start with? And here’s what we came up with. The first was we said this is a good chance to improve, uh, good will, not only through, uh, the employees that work for us, but also our customers. The second thing was we felt that we could use this as an opportunity to grow our internal delivery. Uh, use a lot of third party partners.

Jason Morgan

(04:29):

We have the ability to do our own delivery through, through Olo. And so we said, how can we, how can we leverage this to, as people – more people are out there ordering delivery, that they’re coming through us instead of coming directly to the third party. The third thing was we said, let’s look at innovation. You know, what, what is it that we can put in place that will make us better? So we rolled out curbside delivery, we rolled out groceries and bundles and kits. Like most restaurants did. And then we’re also looking at a software solution to internal drivers, having our staff drive the food for us. So, uh, we’ve been very, very focused on those items as we made decisions around different strategies. Uh, you know, post, uh, post that mid March date where all this started.

Zach Goldstein

(05:18):

That’s great. And where we are at the moment, uh, late April, Texas where both concepts operate is leading the nation in exploring reopening dining rooms. I’m wondering how you’re thinking about, do you reopen your dining rooms as soon as the local or state governments tell you it’s allowed or are there other factors that you’re weighing in terms of what kind of volume you’re expecting to see and how your staffing model works that are playing into the decision of when to reopen a dining room?

Jason Morgan

(05:50):

We are allowed to have 25% capacity as of Friday, May 1st. And so a couple of days away. Our plan is to open, uh, our dining rooms are open, our patios as well, likely be more uh social distancing on the patios with six feet apart instead of the 25%. It’s a little bit vague right now in Texas. Do you have to do both 25% inside and out? And so our plan is to open up. One of the things that we decided to do is, uh, we, we took an approach of let’s, let’s talk through the customer journey from the moment someone pulls the handle on the front door to the time they pull the handle to leave the restaurant. And we’ve attempted to walk that journey and, and say, okay, someone’s touching something here that maybe someone else has touched. Can we remove that touchpoint? Can we add a sanitizer? What are the cues that we can get the consumer that, uh, that, that we are cleaning, uh, as much as we are, uh, and, and make that experience a safe experience for them? I really have no idea what to expect. I don’t know if we’ll have people out the door waiting to come in and eat or if we’ll, uh, we’ll just continue doing the, the takeout business that we’ve been doing so far. It’s gonna be interesting to see how, uh, how our business reacts. I was at a different, uh, restaurant company this morning grabbing takeout and the owner was there and he said, I’m not reopening. Uh, it’s just 25 percent’s not enough to make it make a difference for us, uh, in terms of bringing servers back and bring, uh, more front of house staff back. Uh, but for us, our folks are already in the restaurant executing the to go delivery. And so adding, adding dine-in business is, uh, is not that hard to execute.

Zach Goldstein

(07:33):

So you’ve had a pretty hefty off-premise volume even before the crisis. I would imagine that number has, has grown quite considerably. One of the challenges that you’ve had to think through is what role do third-parties play in that, right? Are they friend? Are they fo, are they logistics? Are they demand generation? How much money can I actually afford to give them? And I would imagine the crisis has accelerated that, you know, those questions in your mind. How are you thinking about that today and what’s changed in the last month, especially as you talk about the possibility of running your own deliveries in certain places.

Jason Morgan

(08:12):

Yeah. So we at our ChopShop brand, we had about 55% of the business pre-COVID that was off premise and that’s a combination of catering, to go, third party or just pick up in the store. And so we were already doing a pretty hefty volume. Of that, you know, close to probably 20% of the, of the hundred percent was third party delivery. And then we were doing another 10 or so, uh, through our own channels. Uh, we were very fortunate from a timing standpoint that we, we implemented Olo, uh, about a year ago at ChopShop and about six months ago at bellagreen. Uh, I wouldn’t know what to do at this point if I, if I didn’t have that system in place in order to, to drive internal sales through our own channels. So one of the things that we’ve done, it’s a slippery slope or for us, for the third party, uh, we went out and we said, let’s be aggressive in terms of marketing. Let’s, let’s tell our consumer, uh, that it’s better for you to order – it’s better for us – for you to order through us. Let’s share some stats on, uh, what it costs us uh daily, uh, what it would mean for us if you were to order directly through us. One of the stats we had early on was if last week, uh, all the orders from third party had come entirely through us, we could have employed 1200 more hours of our staff. When people see that they go, wow, that’s, that’s, I didn’t realize that we’ve had a lot of people will come up and respond back that I just didn’t realize that the cost was there. So we’ve been, we’ve been pushing pretty aggressively, uh, the order direct. Uh, we went out with free delivery offers to, to encourage that to sort of match what the, the third party guys we’re doing, we’ve made it so that you can only get the bundles and the specials and the kits and the groceries through our site.

Jason Morgan

(10:00):

And so try to try to give people an incentive to come through us. And then we found out something someone that it could be interesting. We, we’ve been working through an internal driver program and we’re working at ChopShop with a company that integrates with Olo that automates the process. So order would come in through the dispatch component, we would basically get first dibs of that order if we have a driver on duty, our drivers would have apps, it’d be employees. I mean if they weren’t available, roll over to the third party guys that are delivering. At bellagreen um, we wanted to test the app at ChopShop first before we roll it to both brands. And so for bellagreen we said, let’s just turn off the third party drivers that are driving the dispatch for us. And what was crazy was within, within a matter of two days, our internal deliveries went up four and five fold. And so we’re sort of scratching our heads at this point trying to understand what was happening behind the scenes. Were drivers not available for our internal orders? We don’t know yet.

Zach Goldstein

(11:03):

Let’s unpack that for a second. Just to make sure I’ve got the right interpretation there. You’re saying that orders originated through your site that were going through Olos Dispatch when they were being fulfilled by third parties. So whether that’s DoorDash or Postmates or whoever it is, when you turned that part off and you said, we’re going to fulfill all first party orders, so orders originated through your site for delivery, we’re going to fulfill them all with our own drivers. The volume went up?

Jason Morgan

(11:34):

Went up. We went from averaging three and four a day to, yesterday we did 14 a day for each of the two stores we’ve turned on internal delivering.

Zach Goldstein

(11:43):

So it makes you think that somehow consumer demand was being rejected. Is there any other way to interpret it?

Jason Morgan

(11:50):

That’s how I interpret it. I, I, I’m not sure if I should saying that, but when we went hard with the order direct message, we kept hearing from consumers, “we tried to order through your site, but delivery drivers weren’t available. And so I had to go order through DoorDash or had to go through or Uber Eats or Postmates.” And so after about two dozen of those responses on social media back to us, it all sort of makes sense now. Is that my guess? And again, the third party guys, you can’t fault them. They’re, they’re doing what’s right for their business. My guess is that their orders that come direct through them have priority over the orders that would come through me that I would auction off to them. And with more orders coming through, I probably have less of a chance of having a driver available. And so what happens on my side is if you order through bellagreen.com or originalchopshop.com you would get to the end of the order and it would be basically, it would fail and say there are no drivers available. That’s what’s happening. Again, we’ve got two stores. I may be completely off base and it may not just may be coincidence in the last couple of days of what’s happened. But, uh, the growth has been pretty phenomenal. And so that leads me to believe that I should be moving really fast to get internal drivers and drive all of these deliveries.

Zach Goldstein

(13:07):

Yeah. And it’s obviously worth noting, Jason, that the pace of development right now in the middle of this crisis is fast. So these things are changing rapidly. You’re learning with real data as new information comes in, but that’s an early indicator of: there is demand. It sounds like a couple of things I heard you say, one, training customers to come to you and telling them why it’s better for the brand that they care about and having a relationship with that seems to work. Customers respond by wanting to order direct and two creating some form of incentive, whether those are unique products or the grocery offering, et cetera, that you can only get direct as opposed to the third party. That seems to be capturing volume or getting people to your direct channels.

Jason Morgan

(13:56):

I think that’s right. And I think the more of that, the incentives that you can layer on, the more appealing your internal channels become. And I believe that once you start marketing, you ha that your employees are delivering the food, I think that’s an even greater incentive. Anecdotally, you look out like what because I’ve searched DoorDash on my phone I get DoorDash ads popping up all day long on my social feeds and when you look at the comments that people are leaving, the majority of comments are pretty negative in terms of the experience of, of the driver experience. And so if I can control that driver experience going forward, it’s going to be at an added cost like no doubt. It’s going to cost me more money to do that in the in the short term. But I think I’m going to drive sales. And so I think it’s going to be something that builds on itself and and who knows, maybe maybe in time the third party guys are completely out of business or maybe they’re the initial, they’re going out and spending the dollars and driving people to us and then we’re capturing the lifetime value once we get ahold of them.

Zach Goldstein

(15:01):

Yeah. These, these lifetime value based arguments are tough to do in an industry that’s largely focused on, you know, the next day, the next week. But it feels like that’s exactly what the delivery companies have focused on. They’re making a land grab here to try to get direct customer relationships and what you’re describing is a little bit the same strategy. I need to own the customer relationship because it’s not about their next one visit. It’s about their lifetime value.

Jason Morgan

(15:29):

That’s right.

Zach Goldstein

(15:30):

Interesting.

Zach Goldstein

(15:30):

Food Fighters, stay on the cutting edge.

Zach Goldstein

(15:35):

As you think beyond your business and to what does this mean? The delivery landscape, obviously a huge volume of restaurant dining occasions have moved off premise and that trend was already happening, but it’s being accelerated by COVID. The delivery companies are offering free delivery to create even more demand and yet restaurants are hurting and the margins on delivery maybe only made sense if it was truly incremental, which it’s not if your dining rooms aren’t open. Do you think this shakes out with more of the restaurant experience moving to delivery? Do you see restaurants, quote unquote fighting back in some of the ways that you’ve described, like how is it going to work at an industry level?

Jason Morgan

(16:23):

I do expect more and more people to fight back or maybe fight back’s too strong, maybe co-exist is the, is the better language. I don’t have a huge social media presence. Uh, I rarely post here or there, but I made a post about this probably five, six weeks ago and it garnered almost 40,000 views. And my logic was it was interesting to see the third party guys come out with free delivery as their leading marketing message when COVID started. And again back to probably pretty smart for their business. That was the right thing for them to do, but they could have just as easily kept charging a delivery fee to the consumer and cut my commission and have the same dollars in their pocket. I think that’s what would have made more sense, would have been the right thing for a partner to do. Uh, but, uh, we haven’t seen them do that. I do think that that delivery is going to be a bigger part of the business and the new normal. And that’s why we’ve been trying to innovate in regards to delivery, uh, during this time so that when we’re ready to get going again, uh, we’re ahead of the curve.

Zach Goldstein

(17:28):

On some level you can test these theories right now because you have the staff capacity, right? You’ve preserved your staff, the dining rooms are closed and so you can start pushing that same workforce into actually delivering food and that that protects jobs, but it allows you to actually service service the off premise demands. So that works right now. Do you have any, any way of thinking through what the, what the economics look like at scale of doing this yourself? I mean, can you make it sustainable to maintain dining rooms at some percentage of capacity and do delivery?

Jason Morgan

(18:02):

I don’t know yet. I hope so. I would never have gone down this route probably without being pretty much forced to do it. I don’t think we would have tested this. I think we would have, we’ve watched other restaurant companies, you know, also Panera and Jimmy John’s, we watch other restaurant companies try this, fail this or have, you know, multiple reasons why it doesn’t work. And so having the added bodies in the restaurant and having the ability to test it and then seeing the results of how much of the business shifted almost immediately gives me some confidence that maybe we can make this work. If there was a way to have a, an Uber style pool of drivers that can be shared between multiple restaurant companies or even just a pool within our restaurant business, uh, that people were, were consistently available and could come get the food. That’d probably be a perfect scenario.

Jason Morgan

(18:56):

The challenge for us is that people want to get paid. They want to be, you know, they want to have a shift of probably a minimum of three hours and if the deliveries aren’t coming in or have peaks and valleys and you probably have a lot more expense than you do without having internal delivery. I’m not sure we are going to play around with, if we’re not available, still having it roll over to the third party guys through Dispatch. That’s a nice feature from the, from the Olo product. But uh, ultimately, gosh, I really would like to have less staff delivering the food. The feedback has been so phenomenal. And the two stores that we’re doing it in right now that I just got imagined, it can only get better from here.

Zach Goldstein

(19:35):

The fact that you control the actual experience and they are, they are your staff members who are delivering the food certainly increases the quality of the consumer experience and the perception of safety. So that’s a, that’s a separate benefit that’s really hard to quantify, but it’s gotta play out in repeat purchasing.

Jason Morgan

(19:56):

Exactly. What are the things that we talked about internally when all this started was we asked the group like, okay, you’re, you’re still eating out. Where are you going? Like why are you making the decision to go to whichever restaurant you’re going to? And the key term or thought that kept coming up was trust. And I go to Chick-fil-A because I trust that they are going to have proper food handling and they’re going to do the right things and the food’s going to come out and be good. And then the second thing was the food’s good. So that’s how we, we thought about it. And you know, the internal driver piece of it is a big component of trust. And I think that coming out of COVID, the companies that have have won trust or increased trust in their, in their consumers, they’re going to be the winners.

Zach Goldstein

(20:39):

That’s one dimension where we’re very clearly still in early innings. I mean the reality here is the current economics of delivery are challenging for restaurants to sustain with third party delivery and frankly with owned delivery. And that’s part of the problem. It’s delivery companies are running a logistically complex business and they should get paid for it. The problem is consumers should also shouldn’t expect that an $8 salad can be delivered for free. That that doesn’t, that doesn’t make sense either.

Jason Morgan

(21:11):

That’s right.

Zach Goldstein

(21:11):

So I think that’s part of the challenge is that there has to be the economics that accrue to the delivery logistics and to the restaurant in a way that’s sustainable and I don’t think we’ve necessarily found that yet.

Jason Morgan

(21:25):

Right. Most restaurant companies today, their, their pricing that is on the third party sites is higher than their pricing internally. That’s set up that way in order to control at least part of the commissions being being funded. There’s still a world out there where even with the delivery companies charging no delivery fee, but having the higher price, restaurants could charge a delivery fee and still be the low cost provider. And getting that message out is I think is something that we’re focused on doing as well. We think we can still recoup some of the dollars for the internal delivery just cause we still will be less expensive than the, than the third party guns.

Zach Goldstein

(22:05):

Yeah. I’m hearing that strategy play out successfully – frankly in a pre crisis world, but I think it’s only accelerated now – of taking price to the third party marketplaces, ensuring that you’re not losing money on those, but they may not be massively profitable. They’re good customer acquisition, they’re good ways to get brand exposure and then working hard to capture the lifetime value of those customers through your own channels so that you can get repeat purchasing. And the reason consumers would do it is it’s low cost. You earn loyalty rewards, you get access to exclusive products. Those are good reasons to go direct to your favorite restaurant.

Jason Morgan

(22:42):

If I could add in the fact that, uh, I’ve vetted the driver that’s delivering your food, I think that’s just another perk and another reason to go direct.

Zach Goldstein

(22:51):

Beyond finding new ways to serve off premise. You’ve done a lot in the innovation of what you’re actually selling as well. You mentioned grocery, you mentioned meal kits, and so that’s blurring the line in what consumers are expecting from restaurants. And I think we’ve seen that innovation broadly with a lot of brands across the country. What’s going to stick? Which of these are temporary changes to make it through the crisis in which of these are the changing definition of what a restaurant looks like for a consumer?

Jason Morgan

(23:22):

For us, very little of it’s going to stick. We’re actually rolling some of it back as of Monday of next week. We’re going to take the groceries off the, off the menu. Uh, we’re taking some of the meal kits off the menu. We’re taking some of the heavy discounting that we did, removing that as well. And I think the only thing that’s going to survive for us is a few of the family meals that we’ve done, uh, cause it was a hole on the menu. And so you know, to order, you know, a meal for four to six people for 45 bucks is going to stay. But outside of that we, we think we’re, we’re taking everything else off.

Zach Goldstein

(23:56):

That suggests that these were adaptations out of necessity. This is a what we hope to be a once in a generation crisis and restaurants needed to find ways to survive and consumers needed ways to get access to food. But as your brand identity as who you want to be in the mind of the consumer, it actually isn’t changed by the crisis. Once demand returns, you want to get back to being the same ChopShop or bellagreen that you were before.

Jason Morgan

(24:23):

That’s correct. The reason that we put all of these things in to begin with was every dollar of sales was important. We had breakeven targets that we were attempting to get to from a sales standpoint and every, every dollar, no matter how we got it was, was important to the survival of the restaurant. And that was first four or five weeks post-COVID. And so as we’ve seen as week five finished up last week and week six starts this week, uh, the sales of those grocery type items is pretty much dwindled to very little. The extra effort in having that out there, uh, we had some different packaging for a couple of things that we were providing. Uh, it’s just not worth the effort. And, uh, grocery stores are a little more full than they used to be. And so we’re just gonna go back to to what the concept was before.

Zach Goldstein

(25:10):

As a former CFO, and I’m sure you still think through the CFO lens as you’re running these businesses, but as a former CFO, one of the things that I would imagine gives lots of comfort is having very good predictions and forecasts for how are sales, how are margins going to look over the next month, two months and longer if you can. I would imagine that type of forecasting over any medium or longer term feels very hard to do right now. And I’m wondering how you’re thinking about adapting the actual operations of running a restaurant.

Jason Morgan

(25:46):

We’ve been asked by, whether it’s bankers or landlords or uh, anybody, to provide like a re-forecast for 2020 for both the brands and like I can give you something but, but the number … It’s going to be garbage I mean it truly is going to be garbage. I’d rather give you a, this is what it looks like for the next eight weeks if, if it, if it stays basically the way it is and look more of a cash forecast and the ability to see what’s happening inside the business. One of the things that we did early, early on, like day one was we jumped in and said, how can we reduce our break even to a sales number that we can actually achieve? You know, you’re talking about the CFO mind of what we’re doing. Uh, I’m very fortunate that I have other folks on my team that are better, very good on the operation side.

Jason Morgan

(26:37):

So I do get to look at this a little more black and white than maybe most CEOs do. And so we put a breakeven model together, which included, you know, reduction of menu, which included reduction of hours, which shifted some of our salary managers. There were stores that we closed to other stores and we pretty quickly had a model that we said, if we run this, we can, we can get pretty close to breaking even before or for paying reds. And then the whole focus was run it. Run it from a sales standpoint, run it from a labor standpoint, control the food costs and hopefully get there. So we’re, we’re just getting through the first, first period, four weeks of of those results. Don’t have them completely done yet, but I think we’re going to be pretty close to what we projected. Looking out for the rest of the year. I’m hopeful that that we see a faster recovery than what I’m sort of planning. I think worst case scenario would be we’re back to somewhat normal early 2021 and it’s, it’s steadily gets back to there. Want to be more optimistic and hope it happens faster than that. But from a planning standpoint, that’s, that’s how we’ve modeled it out.

Zach Goldstein

(27:47):

I think that last question to focus on is reasons for optimism and I think it’s, it can be hard when focusing on how do I just survive right now? But once you turn from survival to start thinking about how do I thrive and how do I actually emerge on the other side, hopefully stronger, you start looking for those, those reasons for optimism. And what are the opportunities that you see coming out of this for your brands that you want to lean into or that want or need to lean into in order to really take advantage of fundamentally changed landscape?

Jason Morgan

(28:24):

One of the biggest I think wins for us through this is going to be how we treated our people. Essentially got everybody back employed in both brands and how we communicated with them, how we, how we brought them back to their hours. I think that’s gonna give us some loyalty from those books, which is going to help us through the rest of the rest of the year in terms of of turnover. One of the most important things in the restaurant industry, your businesses is making sure your staff stays, stays the same. And I think that that we’ve done so many of the right things that hopefully we built that good will with our employee base that they’re going to stick around and help us service our guests as this comes back. One of the positive things for me is that, uh, you know, we’re still down 60% versus the run rate that we were at.

Jason Morgan

(29:11):

But we’ve had five straight weeks of improving results. The results in the last week were a heck of a lot better than they were five weeks before. So every week seems to be getting a little bit better. Uh, and uh, hopefully that that trend will continue and maybe even accelerate a bit with, uh, with the dining rooms opening up at Texas and hopefully in the our marketers out there that we aren’t right in, in the near term. That will help us a lot. And just seeing that sales growth will help us be more optimistic. Where I think we can, we can win going forward is we talked a lot about delivery. I think that is a place that we can differentiate our brands in terms of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. And that’s going to be a big focus. I’m hopeful that we were on a pretty aggressive real estate opening schedule for ChopShop pre-COVID.

Jason Morgan

(30:01):

I’m hopeful that we can get back to that. We may have to raise additional money to, uh, to be able to, to support that growth. Cause we, we’ve had to, to spend some of those cash, some of the cash to survive, but there’s going to be opportunities in real estate going forward. And I haven’t seen a whole lot of people talk about that. I did see Chipotle, uh, in their, in their earnings release said something about it. Those are gonna be restaurants that are in very tight markets that don’t come back. And you know, places that we, we’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for openings and waiting for real estate to come available. I think it’s, uh, it may be available now and hopefully at a less expensive rate. I mean real estate pricing had gotten really out of control. We’re in major markets like Dallas or Houston or Atlanta or Phoenix. You were seeing, you know, rinse and triple bets approaching 55, 60 bucks a square foot, which makes sense if you could do 2 million a store in sales. But man, there’s only 5% of restaurants that probably hit that level of fast casual box. So hopefully a little bit of a correction on the real estate side will help us in terms of growth for ChopShop brand.

Zach Goldstein

(31:09):

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the good news is that means some, some brands in exactly your stage which have great concepts and are ready for the next level will have the opportunity to hopefully lock in some longterm structural advantage. I think the point of concern is that those with the most cash sitting on the sidelines may very well be the biggest of the big and the industry needs them to thrive but also needs those of your size. So I personally am rooting for you to find the opportunity to take advantage of that.

Jason Morgan

(31:41):

Yep. I appreciate that.

Zach Goldstein

(31:43):

This has been a great dialogue. Uh, and I appreciate you taking the time to – amid running two different restaurants with their own opportunities and challenges – to talk to me. You have double duty being CEO of one company is hard enough. So thank you for the time and for the great conversation and best of luck in the weeks and months to come. Sounds like you’re making some big decisions to position your brands for, for growth on the other side.

Jason Morgan

(32:07):

Thanks Zach, thanks for having me.

Zach Goldstein

(32:11):

You’ve been listening to Food Fighters with me, Zach Goldstein. To subscribe to the podcast or to learn more about our featured guest, visit thanx.com/food-fighters. That’s Thanx, spelled thanx.com/food-fighters. This podcast is a production of Thanx, the leading CRM and digital engagement solution for restaurants. Until next time, keep fighting food fighters.