About the Guest

Martha Hoover is the Founder and President of Patachou, a collective of 12 eateries in the Indianapolis area. She was nominated for Restaurateur of the Year by the James Beard Foundation six times, named “One of the Most Innovative Women in Food and Drink” by Food and Wine, and has even earned the accolade of “Empire Builder of the Year” by Eater. Martha is also known for her charitable efforts. She runs a foundation that addresses childhood hunger and food accessibility issues in Indianapolis.

Episode Summary

Season 4 of Food Fighters kicks off with Martha Hoover of Patachou Inc. In this episode, Martha shares why her brand has embraced company culture and generous employee benefits. Martha and Zach also discuss how technology can enhance the art of service. Learn more about Martha’s unique definition of sustainability for her restaurants and how that impacts every facet of her business in this latest episode of Food Fighters! 

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. Welcome back to food fighters. I’m excited to be back. And we have a fantastic group of guests for this upcoming season. Today, I’m with Martha Hoover. Martha Hoover is the founder and president of Patachou, a collective of 12 eateries in the Indianapolis area. Martha was nominated for restauranteur of the year by the James Beard foundation six times, has been named one of the most innovative women in food and drink by food and wine, and has even earned the accolade of empire builder of the year by Eater. And so with obvious reasons, I’m very excited to welcome you to the food fighters podcast, Martha.

Martha Hoover

(00:56):

Thank you, Zach, for having me. I’m so looking forward to our conversation today,

Zach Goldstein

(01:01):

We’re recording this for those that are listening a few weeks later, we’re recording this in late March. We’ve passed the one year anniversary since shutdown started across the country in response to COVID 19 and we’re optimistic for where things are going, but if we rewind a little bit Martha, tell us about how your restaurants adapted to the pandemic over the last 12 months and really what are some of the challenging changes that you had to make in order to make sure Patachou not only survived, but thrive is coming out the other side.

Martha Hoover

(01:35):

You know, I think everyone in the restaurant industry was blown blindsided by the mandated closures that happened almost universally in the United States around the same couple of days. So about a year ago exactly, in fact, I just posted this on Instagram today, and I thank you to our customers and our staff. About a year ago. Exactly at this moment, we were shuttering our restaurants and being our kitchens of food and furloughing, almost 400 people. Many of whom were not able to, we knew would not have the support of safety systems like unemployment. So, you know, we were just in a shock zone to be honest, unprepared immediately. We never shut down. I mean, my restaurant shut down, but our executive team never stopped. And in fact, we even kind of did one thing a little differently. We got together very early on by the first week of April, we got together a group of employees from around the company, all different levels.

Martha Hoover

(02:52):

We have people from back of the house, front of the house management. Part-Time people, full-time people, whatever. And we formed a resiliency committee and we began to really up end our assumptions that we had made for the really the last 31 years about restaurants. And we started to realize that if we were going to survive, not knowing of course in March, whether or not survival meant we’re going to be open in three weeks and things would be back to normal. We have no idea we would be closed for as many months as we were closed. We had no idea when we came back that we would have the mandated capacity limitations, but we decided that we would use whatever downtime we had to reinvent the company in an image that we could be really proud of. So we appended a bunch of assumptions.

Martha Hoover

(03:53):

The main assumption being that restaurants were brick and mortar places where people came for food. And once we started thinking around a variety of assumptions, another assumption, I think that fellow restaurant tours would, would understand so easily is what the assumption that restaurants just roll in the money. Even busy restaurants just make so much money, that there was nothing they needed to do, but just sit back and, and, you know, count coins. And these were all assumptions that we decided that we would address it internally and externally. And as a process, we created a list of agenda items, initiatives that the company would literally check off in a three to five year span of time. So that’s what we did during COVID.

Zach Goldstein

(04:53):

I want to talk about some of those initiatives including a, a first in the history of how to shoot really embrace of technology. But before I go there, your restaurant groups have been noted for phenomenal employee benefits, medical paid, leave, 401k. These are things well above industry standard. And so the shock to your business to have to close dining rooms and the challenge of thinking through how do I take care of these employees is even more severe for you than it is for the average restaurant, which was struggling mightily with those questions. How did you think about striking the balance between ensuring that the brand and the restaurants were ready to reopen and survive the pandemic while doing everything you could to take care of employees? What you have a long track record of doing.

Martha Hoover

(05:48):

Well, first off, we didn’t wait for the pandemic to know that what a restaurant ecosystem look like. We didn’t. In other words, we didn’t need a crisis to understand our own financial needs, and we didn’t need a crisis to make us determine whether or not we were sustainable. We did not need a crisis to tell us that restaurant employees lead vulnerable lives. These are things that we knew and we knew them innately and inherently. And so we spoke to those issues early and often in the 30 some year, you know, lifespan of cafe. Patachou one of the things that we had in place that was put in place seven years before anyone even knew what a pandemic was, was our publisher employee emergency relief fund. And that was exactly what it says. It was an employee emergency relief fund that employees didn’t matter if they worked for us for one day, one hour a week, or had worked for us for 10 years.

Martha Hoover

(07:01):

You know, full-time and management did not matter. It was a fund that was seeded by the company, paid into, by the company, created by the company, but administered by employees of the company, not me, but employees of the company and the Patachou employee emergency relief fund worked as the safety net that so many people in our industry do not have family insurance savings, whatever it is. And of course, until the pandemic, we were talking about people who needed help with dental bills or medical bills, people who needed help when their dogs needed to be put down and they couldn’t necessarily afford the very expensive vet bills, things like that. We immediately transitioned the pier fund in the early days of COVID and decided that we would take the money in the fund. The company would add that money to the fund. In fact, we took our for the first four weeks, we did carry out at one of our location.

Martha Hoover

(08:12):

We only had one location for the first open for the first four weeks. And we took a hundred percent of the money that was brought in by that location. And that all went to the peer fund. And we said to every person on our team if you need help with housing, medical food, we’re here for you. And within two months we were, we had gifted out over $135,000 of money to employees who had severely distressful things happening in their lives. So, so we were ready for that. It didn’t mean that we didn’t, it, you know, what we were ready for it, and we’re still ready for it, but what it really was, what it really showed us, what everything about COVID showed us was our internal and our external vulnerabilities and comorbidities. You know, we decided to adopt the language of the pandemic and to really embrace what we were learning from this experience and to turn it around and create a system coming out of the pandemic, whenever that is whenever that means whatever it means that we would come out stronger and that we would recommit to certain things, livable wages is kind of a non-starter for me, livable wages, benefits, safety nets that people don’t have in most positions working in the restaurant.

Martha Hoover

(09:59):

You know, my feeling has always been that restaurant work is, is it’s a sacred job. Being in the service industry is remarkable. I love it. I understand its challenges, but truly, I believe that COVID has given us this opportunity to come out stronger as an organization. I think I know a lot of restaurant tours who never have understood the economics of their four walls until they were forced into this horrible position. We understood the economics of our four walls and we determined years ago that we did not need to be making 20, 25, 30% profit, because what that means, if you’re doing that, it means you’re either really shorting your customer on food quality. And you’re probably also exploiting your staff and you, you know, it’s a numbers game. You have to figure out what your profit ratio needs to be to make your business sustainable, to make it long-term lasting, but also what it needs to be so that you can treat the people that create the business along with you the right way. And that’s just something that we started doing in 1989. And it’s part of our, I know this sounds very trite, but it’s very much part of our DNA. It’s part of our culture. I’ve said before publicly many times it is much easier to create a healthy organization than it is to correct a toxic one. And I stand by that right now.

Zach Goldstein

(11:46):

Absolutely. And, and a powerful quote that I’ve heard you say before is that restaurant owners and chefs have to give people other reasons to work for their company beyond a paycheck. Unfortunately, this has been an opportunity for you to prove just that. And it’s not the opportunity you wanted by any means, but to prove that that yours is an organization that cares deeply about those that have been working there. Where are you now? Now we’re in a moment where there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve got work ahead of us. We’ve got we’re in the middle of this vaccine rollout, but we finally seen some support from the federal government for the restaurant industry. And there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Are you back to the same staffing levels? Are you seeing a bounce back in some of your, your restaurants or is there still a lot more to go?

Martha Hoover

(12:36):

Well, we were not the first to open when we were allowed to reopen our brick and mortar locations. Truthfully I wouldn’t have bought it very slowly and very strategically, there was some initial resistance from staff. There were also some, we thought critical changes that needed to be made within our own enterprise. And so we took it slowly. I also didn’t, you know, I had a small amount of PPP eventually from the feds and I didn’t, we didn’t know once when that PPP was first awarded or given whatever it is granted, we had no idea how long this pandemic would last. And you know, that PPP was meant to last what, six weeks. And it ended up going into the month. So we needed to be extraordinarily careful with our resources. Luckily built into our cultural, the language are the language that everyone in our system is required to have some fluency in one of the things that, that motivates us as a saying that we use frequently, if not daily.

Martha Hoover

(13:54):

And that is the perception of abundance creates disdain for resources. And that really is a fancy way of saying when you think there’s always going to be customers knocking out your door, you’re not as worried about keeping customers happy when you, and the same with staff. When you think that you can get staffed at any moment, you may be don’t treat people very well. Well, you know what I mean? We started this using the phrase perception of abundance creates disdain for resources when it came to our green environmental initiatives that were put in place about 10 years ago with the hiring of our director of sustainability, luckily for us, and this truly is just a stroke of luck. This person, our director of sustainability happens to be a PhD student at a very fancy Ivy league school where she is getting a doctorate in resiliency with a specific, how lucky are we?

Martha Hoover

(14:58):

So when this happened, I literally gave her complete reign and said, make us the most sustainable and not just environmental I’m talking in terms of human resourcing, in terms of financial, in terms of environmental, we need to get ahead of this. And that has really been our charge. But to get back to your initial point, you can’t just start caring about customers and you can’t just start caring about your staff the day after there’s a pandemic. This has to be part of your language. It has to be part of your genetic code of your company, or it will come off as remarkably inauthentic and transactional. And I think that’s one advantage that we had is there was a great deal of trust in the leadership of my team, by the people who work for the company. So we also, besides doing the resiliency work that we did from day one in the pandemic, we also really, really ramped up the level of communication with every member of our team so that they knew what we were doing.

Martha Hoover

(16:20):

And fortunately, we’ve had a great history where they can rely on when we say what we’re doing that comes true. So we had a huge trust factor. And what I found in the middle of COVID in the middle of this pandemic was the insane difference between leaders and companies and restaurants, where there was a lot of trust with staff that also meant there was a lot of trust with customers and restaurants, where there wasn’t a lot of trust with staff. They didn’t have a lot of trust with customers. And we were fortunate that we fell on the right side of that equation.

Zach Goldstein

(17:01):

February, 2020 was the last month before these shutdowns happened, we just finished February 20, 21. How far off is business still today? And as you talk to your staff and frankly, as you communicate with your customers, what are, what expectations are you setting for when and how the brand quote unquote is totally back to normal

Martha Hoover

(17:27):

Our numbers. As of today, we are in an extremely fortunate position. And I will say a lot of it is because I believe we are managed incredibly well. We don’t have a real top-down way of managing. There’s not a hierarchy, obviously it’s not a democracy, but we have an incredibly collaborative way of things that really creates not just efficiencies and loyalty, but also creates a lot of buy-in from staff and from customers. And we communicate a lot and we communicate not in that fluffy way. I mean, we talk about very, very hard subjects to our staff. We tell them what they can expect and truthfully our numbers have shockingly improved since that February date that you’re talking about, we noticed a huge dip in numbers on February 15th of 2020 ahead of the mandated closures. We knew that things that literally was hitting the fan because people spoke with their feet and, you know, that’s, you just can’t argue with that.

Martha Hoover

(18:42):

And when we reopened, I had to look my staff in the eyes and say to them, you know, I don’t know, I cannot promise you that we are safe. I cannot, I don’t have enough information. No one does. We don’t know if they’ll ever be at vaccination. We don’t know how contagious or how deadly this, this is. I had to be very honest about that. I also had to say that to them. We don’t know if customers will respond and we don’t know what their willingness for risk is, and we’re going to find out. And what we found out is that, and I go back to this trust factor. Customers did respond, but this is what surprised us. We realized that I think you alluded to this in the introduction. We realized that one of our deficiencies was in the area of technology. One of the assumptions that we made early on you, one of the things that they said, what do we, what are the assumptions that we make about ourselves in our businesses that we need to examine?

Martha Hoover

(19:49):

And one of them was that our food was art. Our experience was art. And that technology would ruin that art. What we discovered was that was just a bunch of hooey. That’s I don’t know how else to say it. It was just a bunch of shit. What we discovered very early on that being behind in technology cost us a good month or more. And it cost us at a time when we could at least afford that paradigm. You know, that’s when we really needed cashflow and money. And we realized that customers had been telling us for a long time, but arrogance or, you know, having good numbers or what are being profitable, whatever it is made us believe that all we were doing was high art and that customers would only access us a certain way. What we realized in the very beginning of COVID is that we needed to give customers a way to access our product, the ways that they wanted to access our product.

Martha Hoover

(21:04):

It was no longer, good enough to say, if you want us, you have to come to us. We’re in these brick and mortar locations, we’ve got 12 of them. You can walk in the door, you can place a carry out order, or you can sit in dine in. I mean, that all went away in a heartbeat. So we scrambled and that scrambling taught us a lot about, as I said about our vulnerabilities and our co-morbidities, we wish now it had been on the back burner of every one of our initiative agendas that we establish at the end of the year for the new year embracing technology had been on the back burner for years, we made a real mistake in not jumping on it earlier.

Zach Goldstein

(21:50):

A possible answer for that is that you didn’t need to, the reality was the food is art, but, but that’s undercutting the fact that, and the food was in and of itself, a phenomenal draw for your repeat customers back to your restaurant. But it sounds like the miss was on being able to react to that, which you couldn’t anticipate, which is where technology may, may have been helpful,

Martha Hoover

(22:14):

A hundred percent. You know, there’s this myth that restaurants are these, and I believe restaurants are sacred places. I believe restaurants are magical places. I believe that there is nothing that can replace that incredible experience that you get in a restaurant. But I mean, I guess I can’t argue that, but at a time right now in it didn’t take the pandemic to let us know that customers were begging for access points other than having to come into a restaurant. And had we been better prepared with our technology? We would not have had to have slow down shutter and not create jobs, not have people employed, not make money for a matter of months while we caught up. And also we realized that we were missing out on a great opportunity to mine data, to understand our customers better, to understand their needs and what they want. And after all, we’re in the area of hospitality, it’s all about customer needs and customer wants. And we kind of all looked at each other and just did that big V8 slap on the forehead. And what, what were we thinking?

Zach Goldstein

(23:43):

Food fighters stay on the edge. Technology is often viewed as a thing that you do. If you have to, you know, do I have to upgrade my point of sale? Do I have to, the list goes on and on. I think what we’ve learned here is that it actually can be a strength in and of itself if it equips you to be more nimble and to be more adaptable. And then the second thing that you said that I thought was, was so interesting is that it was back-burnered because you could, that changed with the pandemic, but in many ways, you, it sounds like you were getting signal from customers sooner that they wanted new ways to interact with your brands that was happening before the pandemic. But it’s, it’s easy to, to ignore maybe the wrong word, but it’s easy to overlook when you’re in the day-to-day of just running your business.

Martha Hoover

(24:41):

You know, the restaurants are incredibly, even an exceptionally well organized and well-run restaurant has goes through the ballet of you know, remarkable beauty and remarkable chaos. There are fine line between the two. And there was, there was insane resistance, even from my executive team to adding technology. And the excuse of course was the excuse I talked about, but truly it was just, as you said, we didn’t have to. So we didn’t. So what I learned is that whatever the category is of something that we could say we don’t have to, but we should. Those, all those things have been moved to the front burner up to I’ll tell you one of the things that about technology that we did not embrace early enough was the idea. And this goes to our sustainability initiatives, the way Patachou defined sustainability, environmental sustainability, and financial sustainability is much different than then how the term is used out there.

Martha Hoover

(25:57):

You know, most people look at sustainability as what do you do with waste that is created? And our view is sustainability is how do we not create waste in the first place? And once you start looking through that perspective, waste becomes, I mean, it becomes our Holy grail, almost. It becomes our, you know, our Mecca, our true North of how to not create waste and what technology has allowed us early right now. I mean, we’ve embraced it. We jumped on board. We are now advocates of it. One of the things that shocked me is technology has allowed us to understand our data, our numbers, our costs better than any profit loss sheet produced two or three weeks after the fact is going to show us and it’s worth the price, just so that we don’t create waste because after all waste is one of the most expensive things a restaurant has to deal with.

Martha Hoover

(27:04):

And if you’re, when you’re talking about an industry with historic low profit margins and something that I, I honestly, I know that you’ve addressed before is this whole game that menu pricing truly, I don’t care where it is in the United States. What kind of restaurant kind of concept who the ownership is? Whatever menu pricing does not accurately reflect what the pricing should be. Menu pricing is a sham. And when we take our technology and really dial down to what our costs are, what our waste factors are, what our labor costs are, what our facility costs are. When we put everything together, you cannot feed people, make the food, treat your community with respect and well take care of your staff if you are also trying to charge the least amount of money for the most amount of food. And that, you know, is kind of something that we really, we fight against every day, I was asked several weeks ago to do a charity event.

Martha Hoover

(28:23):

I was asked to be a keynote speaker, which of course I loved. And then they asked if I would provide dinner for free for 250 people. And my response to this very wealthy banker who was asking me to do this was, I don’t know if you’re aware, but right now is a horrible time to expect restaurants to donate anything. And his response was snarky and flippant and dismissive, which is how it could go, we could talk about a whole other topic there, but it also underscored to me, the fact that people do not the public truly does not understand restaurant finances any more than so many restauranteurs.

Zach Goldstein

(29:16):

And it creates such an awful dynamic, which was evidenced, frankly, by the length of time that it took federal government attention on, on the challenges of the restaurant community in the middle of COVID it’s that same lack of empathy.

Martha Hoover

(29:32):

Yeah, totally. It was a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding. You know, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about my business as being small business, it’s not because my ego needs it to be a big business, but I own 12 restaurants. We employed, you know, at the, before COVID 450 people. It’s a ton of people who depended on us for their livelihoods, for their home payments, their car payments, their children’s college educations, et cetera. We generate a lot of tax revenue for our city, our state and our country. So what I truly did not understand was the lack of understanding that restaurants, they’re so segmented. There’s so many restaurants, but taken together. We are a powerhouse industry. You know, somebody, it wasn’t me who came up with this analogy, but I’ve used it ever since I heard it is that you could easily name anyone in the United States could probably name the top eight airlines because basically there are eight major carriers, but you could never ever name every restaurant in the United States where there are over 600,000 of us. And when you take 600,000 restaurants and the 16 million people who comprise restaurant workers, that is a powerful, powerful industry. And the fact of the matter is, is our leaders and the public still see us as these mom and pop little small restaurants, as opposed to seeing us as this major force industry.

Zach Goldstein

(31:14):

You and I could spend a lot of time talking about the challenges of why the industry is so ineffective on the whole of making the exact point that you just so succinctly made, that this is a large, powerful, and impactful group of people that touch every part of the country economy and life. But it seems to not have been successfully made over the last 12 months.

Martha Hoover

(31:42):

Nothing gets me going right now. Other than when someone says, how was your small business reacting? And I’m like this isn’t a small business. We are the second largest private employer in the United States, the restaurant industry. We are a significant economic engine for communities. And I think I’m hoping we, we got the attention of our national leaders. I do think that we have to also start talking extremely openly with the public about the real price of food, you know, cheap menu pricing. There are so many hidden costs in cheap menu pricing. One of the hidden costs that is most distressing to me is if you don’t value the food, you also don’t value the people who produce it and serve it. And that’s huge.

Zach Goldstein

(32:40):

Well, this transparency with the public point is one that I’ve harped on in a completely different context, and we don’t need to necessarily go into it, but it’s the same problem with third party delivery, where the price of a delivery is massively underrepresented by the delivery companies who are trying to steal, share, and mind share from consumers, but it further erodes the value proposition that you’re talking about. And we need to be more transparent with consumers, that good quality food. And frankly, especially when it’s brought to you has real costs on people. And, and we have to be willing as a public to, to carry that cost if we want that service.

Martha Hoover

(33:26):

We want the convenience of high quality food brought to your door. Absolutely. You have to pay for the convenience, but we have gotten into the muscle memory part of consumer culture, where it’s the most food for the cheapest amount and that, you know, that’s the part of capitalism that is so ugly. You know, a lot of people don’t want to hear this, but capitalism is, is truly based on an economics major. I love making a profit. That’s the only way I can keep my business going. No one in business can work and not make a profit. So, but I really read a lot about economics and I read a lot about demographics and what’s happening in our country. I mean, we all know what’s happening, but truthfully, the bottom line is if you disrespect the producers of a product, the servers of a product, you allow yourself to also disrespect the level at which they live and what they get paid and food workers, restaurant workers farmers, factory workers, working in commodity food categories have all been impacted and restaurant owners too, by the way, have all been insanely undervalued and underpaid.

Zach Goldstein

(34:53):

Yep. Well, one of the really eloquent points that you’ve made and that I haven’t heard before is the connection between sustainability, which you’ve been talking about a well before. That was a buzzword, but going beyond environmental sustainability or ingredients, you go into economic, sustainability and others. And one of the things that I, that I heard you connect is the ability of using technology and great relationships with your staff to do in and of itself, drive sustainability by understanding what your customers want before you reflect on 12 months of financial performance. And that forward looking more proactive, strategic form of sustainability and less reactive is, is not a theme that I’d heard before so really interesting connection.

Martha Hoover

(35:49):

Well, and actually we, we truly define sustainability in our world as everything we do, we do with the intention of not creating waste. And that means that even HR has to totally understand what sustainability means to that department, because it’s not just the economics, it’s not just the environment, it’s also our people and it’s also our community. And I think that we have to get away from this very narrow definition. You know, you could ask, I bet you could ask 10 restaurant tours in your city. If they have environmental, you know what they’re sustained if they’re sustainable and they will go, yeah, of course we are. We use compostable coffee cups or whatever their example is that is the most superficial answer that anyone could give. Sustainability goes so much deeper. And I just, I happened to be very partial for our definition of it.

Martha Hoover

(36:57):

And I think it really has changed the mindset of people who work in our company and how they understand not only the product that they serve, how we serve it, where when we serve it, why we serve it, but also they understand how our sustainability initiatives impact their lives. It’s truly has been an evolution for us. We started out, I don’t know, 10 years ago or so when I hired our director of sustainability, really just looking at it from a green perspective. And then we had one of those light bulb moments where we realized that we weren’t doing it correctly enough. So we changed our view.

Zach Goldstein

(37:39):

Well, it’s, it’s quite impactful. It, it demonstrates frankly, why you received the recognition that I started this podcast with, with all those awards, because it is a different way of thinking about business. And the reality is it’s a much more proactive way of building your business. And one of the challenges across the restaurant industry is that it’s a very reactive by necessity because it is such a fast moving pace. It’s very reactive and very short-term focused. It sounds like you’ve had a long-term focused mentality for the duration of your business, and that is serving you well, as we come on the other side of this pandemic.

Martha Hoover

(38:22):

Well, I think it has, you know, having what I think, you know, I’ve been around for 31 years and in restaurant world that makes us a legacy heritage brand, which kind of makes me laugh because I, I don’t feel like we’re in that category. I feel like we’re remarkably relevant and innovative, but I think that that’s what it takes. I remember a restaurant mentor of mine saying that restaurants don’t get tired and closed. Restaurant owners get tired and close. And truthfully, I feel so passionate about this industry. And so passionate about my own company, especially now, you know, we we’ve had this over the last month or so we have seen such a burst of optimism. We know that this burst of optimism might be short-lived we’re, you know, we’ve been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs with the pandemic to really not trust information that’s coming our way.

Martha Hoover

(39:28):

But we do see, as you said, the light at the end of the tunnel, and I really believe that restaurants right now, the pandemic has created a moment of reckoning for the restaurant industry. And I hope that all restaurants really look at their systems and the impact that they are making on the people that their customers, their community, their stabs, the vendors that they work with and that they understand that their impact could be better. And I hoping that’s what happens. I also hope that we have a new appreciation part of the public to understand the importance of restaurants in our communities. They’re really social centers. They are agents of change. They give people opportunities who might not have other opportunities. And you know, the industry is ripe for change, but I don’t think it’s going away at all. In fact, I think that we’re going to see better smarter, stronger restaurants in the future.

Zach Goldstein

(40:32):

I agree with that. I share that optimism and Martha, I want to thank you for joining us on food fighters. This has been a great conversation, and I look forward to checking in with you once we are out of the tunnel, if you will and this is behind us.

Martha Hoover

(40:47):

Let’s do it Zach. Thank you. And thank you to your team. This has been a wonderful experience. Thank you. Bye-Bye.

Zach Goldstein

(35:43):

You’ve been listening to Food Fighters with me, Zach Goldstein. To subscribe to the podcast or to learn more about our featured guests visit Thanx.com/foodfighters. That’s Thanx, spelled T H A N X.com/foodfighters. This podcast is a production of Thanx, the leading CRM and digital engagement solution for restaurants. Until next time, keep fighting Food Fighters.